My heart climbs its way up my throat. My attention flashes to her body.
Carrie is dead.
That is a fact that I cannot change. But it hurts, nonetheless.
She didn’t deserve this. None of us do. I want to go to Carrie, to wrap her in my warmth, to shake her awake.
But I don’t. I need to focus on us. On the future. Need to figure out how Luna and I are going to make it out of here.
“We have to escape.” The crashes I heard before are gone now. “How long has it been? Has anyone come?”
Luna rolls her lips between her teeth, she bites down. “Half an hour, maybe. I was afraid you weren’t going to wake up at all. That this was all going to restart again.”
I can taste her terror. It suffuses into the air, it mixes with her pain and trauma. It crawls its way into my mouth, scurries along my tongue, slithers down my throat.
I gulp.
This poor fucking girl has been in this disgusting place for too long.
All because I was a stupid child.
All because I kept following the wrong strands of fate to my demise.
All because of a wish I made.
A wish with a horrible intent. I knew exactly what my desire meant. Knew exactly what I was longing for.
I had never admitted out loud, at least not in this timeline, but the truth of it is…
The wish I made?
It was to die.
And because of my own selfishness, because of that single wish, I had changed the course of all our lives.
Of Luna’s.
Of Axel’s.
Of Darius’s.
Of Grayson’s.
Of Julia’s.
Of Carrie’s.
Of Veronica’s.
Of mine.
The guilt swallows me whole. My vision darkens at the edges again as my anxiety and panic consume me.
I am a vacuum taking in all that Luna expels. I owe it to her. This is my fault.
All of this.
“Snap out of it!”
