[This post is from Marin’s point of view.]
A sigh escaped my lips. There was a part of me that wanted to be angry at him, but mostly, I was just relieved—relieved that he believed, relieved that I wasn’t alone, that what we thought was true, that he’d finally accepted it.
The fact that he remembered, too, made me feel a little less alone, a little less like Thom and J.T. and I were outliers and more like what we’d experienced was closer to normal. Perhaps it was a new normal, but it was still a kind of normal.
“It’s okay,” I said, and Matt relaxed a fraction, though only for a moment.
We skirted the edge of the ravine on our way to the bridge. Matt’s eyes were in constant motion, as if he were scanning for threats, expecting something to jump out of the verdant boughs and tangled brambles that lined its edges. It seemed to have come back wilder this spring—this early summer—than it had in years past. It was yet another sign that things were far different than they had been a year ago, before the world ended on an August Sunday. I began to wonder if he knew something I didn’t, suspected something I didn’t.
Had I missed something?
“What’s wrong?”
He shook his head, his lips pressed together in a thin line. “Nothing, I hope. I hope I’m just being paranoid.”
Aren’t those famous last words by now? I winced. “What do you think could be wrong?”
“I just want to check the barrow,” he said as our feet hit the bridge. “With everything that’s just happened, I think that would be a smart idea, don’t you?”
A shiver shot down my spine as the possibilities of what could have gone wrong at the spot where we’d consecrated the ground and buried our dead. It was far enough from where we’d started to build our village that if something happened there, it wouldn’t be immediately noticed, not unless it was very large and very loud.
And with the battle two days ago, we were distracted. Something could have happened in the midst of all of that chaos and we wouldn’t have realized it was happening.
“Do you think they—”
“You said yourself that we tangled with a god of death,” he said quietly. “Who knows what could have happened, or why?”
Another shiver shot through me.
“I think we should run,” I said.
For a long moment, my brother stared at me, but at length he nodded.
He broke into a run and I followed hard on his heels.
