Page 223 of Immune
“He’s injured.”
“So am I, yet I didn’t hear anyone clap for me.”
A small, strangled sound comes from somewhere in front of me. Ewan, likely. Not laughing. Not really, at least. Probably trying not to fall apart into whatever hell this room has rapidly turned into.
The man under me shifts his face by half an inch, and my knife follows. His breath catches, and then his eyes open.
Gray.
Not just gray.
Storm gray. Rain over cracked sidewalks. Clouds over asphalt. The kind of gray that once looked at me from across the kitchen table while black polish dried on my nails. The kind of gray that would stare and tell me to stop fidgeting or else he would paint my fingertips too.
My hand locks.
The room disappears.
No.
No, it doesn’t. It can’t.
The man’s eyes focus slowly, clouded with pain at first. Then they sharpen, confusion splitting through them at first.
Then something worse.
Recognition.
His lips part, but nothing comes out.
Once more, my lungs forget to do the only job they’re designed to do.
His gaze drops to my eyes, then jerks up to the brim of the faded hat on top of my head. The hat sitting low on my head. The hat that is still too big for me. The hat that still smells like smoke and old cloth and every single prayer I’ve muttered even if I refused to call them prayers.
His face changes then.
Not soft and not happy.
Absolutely destroyed.
“Kota?”
One word. Barely a sound. Barely even a breath.
And it hits far harder than a bullet would.
My knife doesn’t move.
My body doesn't move.
Nothing inside me moves other than the single crack splitting open from my chest to my throat.
No.
No, no, no.
Absolutely not.
That voice is wrong. It’s all wrong. It’s rougher. It’s older. It’s scraped by years I didn’t even get to witness. But under it, buried somewhere under all the blood and pain and time, something familiar peers its head out of the sand.
