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He isn’t happy to see me. He doesn’t want me here. Something’s changed. Something’s wrong.

Emotion overload. I can’t deal with this after the roller coaster I’ve been riding since Detroit. I need to get away.

My instinct is to shimmy down the tree and run. Get away. Leave him far, far behind.

My hands won’t obey my thoughts. Instead of letting go, they curl tighter around the branch.

He told me he loved me.

But he doesn’t.

He’s back to being the boy I can’t read, the one who acts like an asshole, a wall ten feet thick between him and everyone else. Including me.

Jackson ducks through the window, clambering out onto another branch, the red and gold autumn leaves shaking free and fluttering down, down. I watch them go because I can’t bear to watch him. Can’t bear to look at his flat expression.

“What are you doing here?” he asks, sounding anything but welcoming.

“Sitting in a tree.” My chin kicks up a notch. “I knocked and rang the bell. No one answered.”

“So you climbed a tree?” His brows lift above the frame of his glasses. “I didn’t hear your knock or the bell. I was in the shower. Answer the question.”

“Yeah, I climbed a tree.”

“Not that question,” he says. One corner of his mouth quirks in the barest hint of the smile. He once told me,
There hasn’t been much that makes me smile in a very long time. But you do. So thank you for that.

Where’s that boy now?

I look at the ground, wondering if I can make it in a single leap without breaking a bone. “Back to being an asshole, Jackson?”

“I never stopped. I told you, Miki. I’m not a good guy.”

No shit. He’s the guy who sold me into the game.

And saved my life.

And held me when I needed him.

My feelings for him aren’t confused: I told him I love him, and that’s the truth.

It’s the certainty that loving him is good for me that I’m not sold on.

The branch I’m on dips as his weight adds to mine. I don’t look at him but I know he’s there, right in front of me, way too close. I smell a hint of citrus shaving cream and freshly showered, warm male skin. It makes me want to bury my face in his neck and just breathe. But we’re as far from that as Rochester is from Australia.

He sits there, saying nothing, the inches between us stretching like miles.

This is not the reunion I imagined.

“Look at me.” An order. Typical Jackson.

I raise my chin and glare at him, seeing little reflections of myself in the dark lenses that hide his eyes. He leans closer and the little reflections distort. I refuse to back away. I won’t give him that.

“What did you do, Miki?” He sounds frustrated and torn. “What did you do?” A muscle in his jaw clenches as he reaches out and runs his thumb along my cheek. “You’re crying.”

Perfect. I’m crying. I rub away the tears with the heel of my palm. “I hate you,” I whisper, wishing it were true.

“Do you now?” His smile is hard and dangerous, and I can feel something coiled tight between us. Anger? Yeah . . . but something else, too.

Then he shifts even closer, his palms cupping my cheeks. I should slap his hands away. I should scoot back on the branch. But I don’t. I close my fingers around his wrists and just hold on.

Every cell in my body reacts to him. My lips part. My breath comes too fast.

He lowers his mouth to mine, his kiss both hard and soft, tasting like mint.

He drinks me in, a boy parched, and I am the deep, cool well. I’m falling, lost in him, lost in this, the wonder of his kiss, lips and tongue and the scrape of his teeth.

I want to lean in closer, tangle my fingers in his hair, and kiss him deeper, harder.

Then I remember that he’s kissing me after telling me I shouldn’t be here.

He doesn’t want me here.

I’m about to bite him when he pulls away.

“My being here is so terrible that you just had to kiss me?” Glaring at him, I drag the back of my hand across my mouth. I don’t get it. Don’t get him. His touch, his kiss, tell me I’m the most important thing in his world. His words tell me I don’t matter at all.

Seconds tick past before he clips out, “Yes.”

His answer releases a flood of anger and resentment and, yeah, embarrassment, icy and razor bright. I scoot away, ready to swing down. “Fine. I’ll leave.”

“No, you won’t.” Last word. Some things don’t change.

He catches my wrists and pulls my hands from the branch, sandwiching them between his larger ones. “You were supposed to forget,” he says, sounding like every word is ripped from him, all the emotion that was missing from his voice earlier there now.

I freeze. “Forget what?”

“Me. You aren’t supposed to be here because you’re supposed to have no memories of me.” His lips thin. “I was trying to be the good guy. Not exactly my forte, Miki.”

“Why would I have no memories of . . . ?” I don’t understand.
Trying to be the good . . .
“No,” I whisper, finally getting it. “What did you do, Jackson?”

“Wasn’t that just my line?” He tips his head back, face to the sky. “What did I do? I think I got played.” He faces me once more. “And here I thought I was being so smart. Not to mention the whole self-sacrificing, nobility thing I was aiming for. I didn’t even give in to the urge to stand up the street and watch your window last night. Didn’t want to jeopardize the Committee’s good will.”

“Watch my window? You were going to do that?”

“Nothing I haven’t done before.”

“Stalker much?” I ask without heat.

“Funny accusation from the girl who climbed a tree to peek in my window.”

His answers are flip, but there’s an undercurrent to every word.

“Why would standing on my street jeopardize the Committee’s good will?”

I reach for his glasses. He catches my wrist, but doesn’t stop me as I push them up onto his forehead.

We stare at each other. His eyes are Drau gray, foreign and beautiful, framed by long, incongruously dark, spiky lashes—Carly would say girl lashes. They’re the only remotely girly thing about him.

“Do you know how I felt when I looked up and saw you sitting out here?” he rasps, ignoring my question.

“Tell me,” I whisper. My chest is tight. I can’t draw a full breath.

His lashes sweeping down, hiding his eyes. “It was one of the best and worst seconds of my life.”

“Best?”

His lashes sweep up and he stares into my eyes. “Because there you were, right outside my window.”

My heart does this crazy little dance in my chest. These were the words I wanted, the ones I was hoping for when I came here.

“Worst?”

He takes a long time to answer, then finally says, “Because there you were, right outside my window.” He turns my hand palm up, traces the tip of his index finger along my lifeline. “You were supposed to forget. But you didn’t. You remember me. And you remember the game.”

“Why wouldn’t I remember?”

Why am I asking? I know the answer even before he says, “When you’re out of the game, you don’t remember the game.” He turns his face away and stares off into the distance. “But you aren’t out of the game, are you, Miki? It was all for nothing.”

He sounds so bleak. I remember him screaming inside my head, his pain and anguish. A chill crawls up my spine.

“I think you have this backward.” I start to pull my hand from his, but he tightens his fingers, refusing to let me sever the connection. “You’re supposed to be the one who’s out of the game, Jackson. That’s why you brought me into it. So you could be free.”

I can’t help the tinge of venom that colors those last words. Now that he’s here, in front of me, safe and healthy and whole, the recollection that he betrayed me in the first place resurfaces. And it hurts.

In that second, I’m furious with myself for fixating on that, holding on to the hurt. How many times has Dr. Andrews told me that one of the roads to happiness is letting go of grudges? Forgiving. Moving on.

“That was the plan.”

“What went wrong?”

His face jerks toward me. “Plans change. Why do you think something went wrong?”

“Because you were in Detroit. And I was already team leader by that point. You should have been out.”

“I asked to go on one last run.”

“Why would you—”

The way he looks at me stops my question cold. He asked to go because of me. To protect me.

“You almost died,” I whisper.

“I knew the risks going in.”

“Just like you knew the rules? You know . . . the ones you broke?”

“Which rule would that be?”

“Drawing my life force.”

“It was either break the rules or die.” His smile is self-deprecating. “Regrets, Miki?”

“No.” I shudder at the thought that he might have died there.

“Then why are you so pissed?”

He’s goading me. I can feel it. I won’t give him the win. I force my tone to stay calm and even as I say, “I’m angry with you for bringing me into the game and then not getting out, not being safe, away from all of this. For wasting your chance. And I’m angry with you for not telling me the truth, for not warning me about the consequences of what we did.” I would still have made the exact same choice, but I wouldn’t have gone in blind. “You knew you’re not allowed. They told you that after . . .” My words trail away. I don’t need to remind him how his sister died.

But he says it for me, repeating a fragment of the story he told me once before, his tone hard and liquid-nitrogen cold. “You can say it, Miki. After I killed my sister. After I made like a Drau and sucked the life out of her, changing my con from red to yellow and hers from yellow to red. I traded her life for mine.”

There’s the Jackson I know: moody, bossy, cocky, a little scary, and chock-full of self-hate. And even though I haven’t forgiven him for what he did to me, I can’t bear to see him suffering.

It’s one thing for me to be pissed at him, something else entirely for him to be so angry with himself.

“You were twelve years old, Jackson. It was your first mission. You were dying, terrified. She told you to do it, that it would be okay. She was your big sister. You were used to believing her, to doing what she said. Why would that time be any different?”

“You think that excuses me? Cuz I sure don’t. I killed my sister and then I got hauled in front of the Committee, warned that if I ever did the Drau thing again it would be game over. Then next chance I get, I do the same damn thing and almost kill you.”

“But you didn’t do it willingly. I made you. I forced you. I—”

“You offered it, Miki. Dangled the hope of survival in front of me, but I’m the one who grabbed hold and hung on. None of this is your fault. It’s on me. It’s all on me. And the worst thing? I fed off you like fricking Dracula, knowing that you might end up just like Lizzie.” He snaps a half-rotten apple off the tree and lobs it hard against the patio. It splatters, leaving bits of white and brown and red dotting the stones. “I keep telling you I’m far from good, and you keep ignoring the message.”

“I think my therapist would say you have a really bad case of survivor’s guilt,” I say.

Jackson barks a laugh, then stares at me, shaking his head. “How do you do that? Make me laugh even when I feel like total shit?” He pauses, then says, “You’re like my personal dose of happy.”

WE SIT ON THE BRANCH FACING EACH OTHER, QUIET. THE leaves rustle in the breeze.

“I heard you screaming,” I say. I can’t interpret the look Jackson shoots me. “Tell me what happened when you didn’t respawn at the pizza place with me and Luka.”

He reaches over to tuck a stray wisp of my hair back behind my ear. “After Detroit, the Committee pulled me directly to meet with them. They said I was done with the game. Finished. Out.”

“Happy news.”

“Yeah, for all of about a second. But with the Committee, there’s always a catch. Turned out, the catch was that if I go free of the game, the price is you.” He holds up a hand when I start to point out that he knew that already; he knew all along he was trading me for his freedom. That was the whole point. “I don’t mean that you’d have to take my place as leader,” he says. “I mean I’d have to give you up entirely. I wouldn’t get to remember anything about you.”

“Oh . . .” The Committee already told me that, but the fierce expression on his face as he says it puts a different spin on things.

He strokes the backs of his fingers along my cheek, my jaw, my lips, like he needs to touch me. “And if that didn’t suck hard enough,” he continues softly, “they were going to arrange it so my family would move again. You’d be excised from my mind and I’d just . . . disappear from your life.” He huffs a dark laugh. “Guess they didn’t want to risk me seeing you, maybe triggering some memory . . .”

“You think that would be possible? That you could recover memories they took?”

He lifts his brows and turns his hands palms-up in a
who-can-say
gesture.

“But even if they took you out of my life, I would have remembered you,” I say slowly.

I would have missed him and mourned his loss.

Would my world have gone gray again, or am I stronger than that now?

My gaze locks on his and I get the feeling he knows everything I’m thinking.

“I told them it wasn’t a trade I was willing to make.” His mouth shapes a tight, close-lipped smile. “They told me I didn’t get a choice. Consequences of breaking the rules. Their decision, not mine.”

“That must have gone over well. You being such a complacent, easygoing kind of guy.” I pause. “Then what?”

“Then they pushed into my head. I went a little crazy. Pushed them back out. I think that freaked them out. They pushed harder. I pushed back. It wasn’t pretty.”

“I felt it.” I shiver chases through me as I remember his screams.

His eyes widen. “I didn’t know that would happen. I would never want you to go through that, not even secondhand.” He pauses. “I was thinking about you, holding on to an image of you with everything I am, refusing to let them take that away. That must have made me project my thoughts without intending to.”

Thoughts. Emotions. Agony.

He’d done that before when he dreamed of the car accident that he was in with Lizzie, the one that brought him into the game. He somehow projected it to me so I dreamed it right along with him.