Burn by Monica Hesse Page B

same refrain:
She swallowed the spider to catch the fly. I don’t know why she swallowed the fly. I guess she’ll die.
A chain reaction of events set off by the actions of one crazy woman, taking poisons no one else understood.
    â€œWhat
is
it, Lona? Why are you visiting the man who ruined our lives? You’re a masochist? You miss the Path? You’re completely messed up?”
    His words bit. Weren’t they the questions she’d asked herself every time she came to visit Warren? Weren’t they her deepest fears? All along she’d been telling herself that she came to visit Warren in spite of his connection to her past, but what if she came
because
of it?
    She took a heavy step closer to Fenn, leaning her forehead against his chest. He didn’t push her away but his body was wooden and unyielding. She stared down at his shoes. Brown. Scuffed. It was always easier for her to be honest when she didn’t have to look at him. Back in the Path, their conversations happened side by side in the Calisthenics room, rather than face to face. She still preferred talking to Fenn this way, when what she had to say was difficult.
    Fenn sighed.
“Sometimes I wonder if it was fair, for us to be together so soon after.” He didn’t need to say what “after” meant. There was only one “after” in both of their lives. “I was Off Path for months before you,” he continued, “so I had plenty of time to figure out what I wanted. Or actually, to figure out that what I’d always wanted was you.”
    He didn’t blush when he said that. It was one of her favorite things about Fenn. He displayed his feelings like gifts. “But you didn’t have that, and maybe it’s harder for you to—” His voice was shaking.
    â€œFenn. That’s not it.” She finally found her voice. “At all. I
was
visiting the Architect. But I won’t need to come back again.”
    She told him. Everything. She told him about the first visit here, and the children’s books and the hatred she felt that had slowly melted, collapsing into itself until it had become pity. She told him about the way her body ripped itself out of the dream on the night before her birthday. About how, when she was in the dream and a man named Ned, she could feel the cold plastic of the syringe in her hand.
    She told him what sleep had become to her: something she dreaded and looked forward to, something she needed and feared, every night hoping that she would be allotted another few seconds of the vision, that she would spot some new clue.
    Telling him what had happened made what had happened seem real, finally. All of it was real. Her dream was real, and her fear was real, and the sweaty slip of paper she’d passed through the barricade to Rowena was real. The shoelaces were real. By the time she told him about the shoelaces, her face was wet with tears. The front of Fenn’s shirt was spattered from where she’d cried on him.
    â€œLona. Why would you do that?” She couldn’t tell if he was furious or terrified. At least he was talking. “I still don’t understand why you ever started visiting to begin with.”
    â€œBecause,” she tried. “Because I
need
something. I don’t know what it is. I don’t know if it’s because he’s the only connection to the whole life I had before, or because I’m completely messed up, or – I don’t know what I need, Fenn, but somehow I felt like he could give it to me.”
    â€œHe’s
dangerous
, Lona.”
    â€œHe wears diapers. He’s less dangerous than Gabriel.”
    â€œNo, he’s the one who created Gabriel. And me, and Ilyf, and Endl, and Byde – do I need to list every Pather who has ever died, gone crazy or barely escaped the system that this man in diapers invented? Do I need to remind you about Harm?”
    â€œYou don’t,” she said.