Lena looked away. “Spontaneous combustion is a little more than unpredictable.”
I knew she was right. Gatlin was teetering dangerously on the edge of an invisible cliff, and we had no idea what was at the bottom. But I couldn’t say that to her—not when she was the one responsible for putting it there. “We’ll figure out what’s going on.”
“I’m not so sure.” She held one hand up to the sky, and I thought back to the first time I followed her into the garden at Greenbrier. I had watched her tracing clouds with her fingertips, making shapes in the sky. I hadn’t known then what I was getting myself into, but it wouldn’t have mattered.
Everything had changed, even the sky. This time there wasn’t a cloud to trace. There was nothing but the threatening blue heat.
Lena raised her other hand and looked over at me. “This isn’t going to stop. Things are going to keep getting worse. We have to be ready.” She pulled on the sky with her hands absentmindedly, twisting the air slowly, like taffy between her fingers. “Sarafine and Abraham aren’t going to just walk away.”
I’m ready.
She looped her finger through the air. “Ethan, I want you to know that I’m not afraid of anything, anymore.”
I’m not either. Not as long as we’re together.
“That’s the thing. If something happens, it will be because of me. And I’ll have to be the one to fix it. Do you understand what I’m saying?” She didn’t take her eyes off her fingers.
No. I don’t.
“You don’t? Or you don’t want to?”
I can’t.
“You remember when Amma used to tell you not to pick a hole in the sky or the universe would fall through?”
I smiled. “C. O. N. C. O. M. I. T. A. N. T. Eleven down. As in, you go ahead and pull on that thread and watch the whole world unravel like a sweater, Ethan Wate.”
Lena should’ve been laughing, but she wasn’t. “I pulled on the thread when I used The Book of Moons.”
“Because of me.” I thought about it all the time. She wasn’t the only one of us who had pulled on the one piece of yarn that tied up all of Gatlin County, above and below the surface.
“I Claimed myself.”
“You had to. You should be proud of that.”
“I am.” She hesitated.
“But?” I watched her carefully.
“But I’m going to have to pay a price, and I’m ready to.”
I closed my eyes. “Don’t talk like that.”
“I’m being realistic.”
“You’re waiting for something bad to happen.” I didn’t want to think about it.
Lena played with the charms on her necklace. “It’s not really a question of if but when.”
I’m waiting. That’s what the notebook said.
What notebook?
I didn’t want her to know, but now I couldn’t stop it. And I couldn’t pretend we could go back to the way things were.
The wrongness of everything came crashing down on me. The summer. Macon’s death. Lena acting like a stranger. Running away with John Breed, and away from me. And then the rest of it, the part that happened before I met Lena—my mom not coming home, her shoes sitting where she’d left them, her towel still damp from the morning. Her side of the bed not slept in, the smell of her hair still on her pillow.
The mail that still came addressed in her name.