Page 225 of Immune

Maine is on the floor in front of me.

Maine is alive.

Maine is alive.

Maine is alive.

That sentence doesn’t even make sense to me. It doesn’t. It’s all wrong. The letters are all in the wrong order. It’s like a door where a wall should be. A body where a ghost has lived for six whole fucking years.

“Kota,” Maine says again, only softer this time. Afraid of me. Wait, no. Afraid for me. No. Both? I don’t know.

I look at him. Really look. He’s older, because of course he is. Six years doesn’t pass by with a simple nod of its head or a crisp thumbs-up. They carve into your bones, they hollow out everything good, and they take what they want only to leave nothing but teeth and claw marks on everything they leave behind.

His face is thinner than it was. It’s harder now. The soft roundness of my brother’s younger face is long gone, now replaced with sharp cheekbones, a rough jaw, and scars I’ve never seen before. There’s an exhaustion on his face now that looks so deep it seems like a permanent fixture. His pale hair is longer than he used to wear it, too, chopped unevenly as if he didn’t like it and decided to cut it himself with a knife and shitty lighting.

There’s blood on him. Too much of it, too.

There are bruises at his throat.

A split through his lip.

A bandage half-fastened around his ribs where he tore away from the people trying to help him.

He’s not the brother who left.

He’s not the boy who promised only two days.

Three max.

This is what came back when the world was finally done chewing him up before spitting him back out. And I don’t know what the hell to do with that.

My hands are empty, and that feels especially dangerous.

Maine’s gaze drops to them, then to my nails.

Black.

Chipped.

Half-ruined from blood, dirt, and violence.

His face falls, but not fully. Only enough that the first tear slips free before he can stop it.

And that’s what does it.

Not the name.

Not the eyes.

And not the smell of fresh-cut grass under the blood and antiseptic.

It’s the tear.

Maine cries, and something inside me suddenly stops pretending it’s made of razor blades and spikes.

I make a sound.

A small sound.