Forgetting about my neck, I shake my head and then freeze in pain.

“You’re still running, throwing up your walls,” he accuses. He takes my face between his hands, his thumb grazing my cheeks in small, roving circles. “You’re grabbing on to this because it’s the excuse you need to run. I love you, Davy. Nothing about that scares me. Nothing, you hear me?”

But it scares me.

And it’s not just an excuse. What would I do the day he wakes up, regretting sentencing himself to the life of a carrier? He has a choice. He doesn’t have to live this way. He has a mother and sister out there waiting for him. He can embrace normal. College. Marriage. Kids of his own someday. What happens when he realizes that being with me is just too hard? What happens when he turns his back on me? I won’t survive that.

I moisten my lips. “Your traitor is dead. No reason you can’t let me go now.”

He shakes his head, his expression bleak, and something shudders inside me at the sight of it. “You’re not going to listen to me, are you?” He inhales, his chest swelling.

“This isn’t my world here.” I brush a hand over his cheek. “It’s not my life to live.” It’s yours. Your lie you’re living. At least until you decide not to live the life of a carrier anymore. I don’t say the words, but he hears them nonetheless.

“You want me to go out there and tell everyone the truth? Is that what you want? I’ll do it. Right now.” His voice softens. “For you, I’ll do it, Davy.”

I shake my head. “No. It doesn’t matter what any of them know. I know.” I’m the broken one. Not you. You deserve more. Everything.

Moisture brims in his eyes. “You can’t go. I won’t let you, Davy.”

“Yes. You will. Because it’s the right thing to do. And you always do the right thing.”

He stares at me for a long moment, silent. Some of Phelps’s equipment hums in the corner, but that’s the only sound.

In the quiet, there’s just his searching eyes and the steady pain thrumming through my body. The pain will fade. My body will heal like it always has. My heart is another matter.

* * *

It is with a heavy heart that I address you today. Recent events have proven to me that this country needs me more than ever now. I firmly believe that things will not improve. And yet I stand before you no longer with the support of this administration . . . the Wainwright Agency is closing its doors. God help us all.

—Dr. Louis Wainwright in a press conference

upon the termination of the Wainwright Agency

TWENTY-FOUR

IT TAKES A WEEK AND A HALF FOR PHELPS TO PRONOUNCE me well enough to travel, and four more days for Caden to make all the arrangements for the crossing.

Caden didn’t ask any of the other scouts to escort me to the border. He did it himself.

It would have been easier in the company of Boyce or someone else. Anyone. No tension. No uncomfortable silences. No staring at the hard, strong back moving in front of me, leading me away from the compound and his life, remembering the texture of his skin beneath my fingers. No stopping heart and seizing breath when he accidentally brushes against me. And the worst is when we actually look at each other. When my eyes meet his and the connection sparks between us. When that thing that’s been there from the start flares up, reminding me that what I feel for him isn’t something that’s going to be forgotten or replaced in a month.

But he isn’t interested in making it easy for me. Our final good-bye is torture. Misery in a way I could not have anticipated. I made my choice. My decision. It shouldn’t hurt so much.

The dark pull of his eyes, the deep velvet of his voice is my new ghost. I know he’ll haunt me. “Stay, Davy,” he asks so simply, his gaze stark. “Come back with me. You don’t have to go.”

He doesn’t give up easily. Anger radiates off him. He wants to shake me. I can tell, can feel the urge seeping from him. I moisten my chapped lips.

“If I could force you to stay,” he adds, “I would, but I know you’d hate me.”

I nod even though it’s not true. I could never hate him, but it’s better he doesn’t know that. No sense revealing the power he has over me.

My feelings for him, the love I feel . . . it terrifies me. It’s not something I can trust.

It’s more than him lying to me. He’s not a carrier. Such a simple distinction, and yet it weighs heavily. I’m scared enough. Almost every waking moment for so long now I can’t remember any other feeling. I can’t choose a fate where that fear has no hope of fading. With him, each day, there would be fear. Fear of disappointing him. Losing him. Fear of just being who I am—what I am—around him.

So I smile at him and stamp down on the impulse to touch him, caress his face. “You’ll be glad someday—”

“Stop telling me what I feel. You have no idea. If you understood how I felt, you wouldn’t go. You’d believe in us.”

I stop talking for good then, sealing my lips tightly shut. Our farewells are done.

There’s nothing left to say.

My guide in Mexico is an old man not much taller than me. If he speaks English, he keeps that fact to himself. All communication is conducted in nods and gestures. No sound passes his withered lips. Not even a grunt rises up from his frail-looking chest. His face is as weathered and lined as the brown earth taking each hit of my boots. His cheeks are sunken like the many ravines and gullies rutting the broken landscape. His black eyes remind me of an animal, staring out with some manner of prescience.