12. The List

Sia’s POV

I couldn’t feel a thing.

That was the problem. We were bedded down in the loft of an abandoned barn, with hay for mattresses and a cracked window for a view, and my chill had turned to static. Instead of a clean thread of cold, I got a fuzzy hum, like a radio between stations.

It had been getting worse all night, and I knew exactly why.

Skyler was sitting four feet away with his back against a post, his notebook open on his knee, a stub of pencil between his fingers. He was writing something very slowly. He looked tired and grim and about a hundred years old, and every time I looked at him, the static got louder.

So I stopped looking. Then I looked again.

“Don’t.”

Lena was lying on the hay beside me, eyes closed, voice low enough that nobody else would hear.

“Don’t what?”

“That.” One eye cracked open. “The way you’re looking at him. I’ve watched you do it for four years, and I thought the end of the world might have cured you.”

My stomach dropped.

“Same sad little face,” Lena murmured, with a sneer that had no energy left in it. “He’s never looked back, and he never will. Save yourself the trouble.” She rolled over and went back to sleep.

I lay there with my heart thudding and thought, great. Not only was I in trouble, I was in trouble with the exact same expression that had gotten the villainess strangled. I had to be careful. I had to be so careful. I rolled onto my side and stared at the wall and told myself, very firmly, to think about literally anything else.

It was a plan with one flaw. When I finally closed my eyes, the static kept humming, and under it, very faint, something else started.

It took me about three seconds to understand what it was.

I sat bolt upright. “Fire.”

“What?” Marcus mumbled.

“Fire! There’s a—”

The barn door exploded.

It blew inward in a burst of orange light, and a figure stepped through it, tall and bent, with flames licking up both forearms like sleeves. He didn’t seem to see us. His eyes were wide and vacant and his mouth hung open, and every step he took set a new patch of floor alight.

The hay caught in about two seconds.

“Get up!” Skyler was already on his feet. “Everyone out! The back, the back!”

Smoke rolled across the rafters. Somebody screamed. I grabbed Nora by the wrist, because she was the nearest, and hauled her toward the loft ladder while sparks rained down over our heads. Marcus had Jun over one shoulder like a sack of flour. Eli threw himself down the ladder with the tablet clutched to his chest. Lena shoved me from behind and snarled something I didn’t catch.

And I was still thinking, how did I miss it?

I had been feeling the static, and I had mistaken it for peace. For ten crucial seconds, I had sat in a dark barn with a fire-type walking up the road, and I hadn’t felt him coming because I’d been too busy feeling Skyler.

We burst out the back into the cold air, and the whole barn went up behind us with a roar.

The truck was fifty yards away. We ran for it. Behind us, the fire-type had stopped at the door of the burning barn and was staring at his own hands, as though he’d never seen them before. I couldn’t feel anything from him. Not fear, not anger. He was just lost.

Marcus threw the engine into gear before the last of us had piled in. We tore out onto the road in a spray of gravel, and the barn dwindled to a pillar of orange in the rear window.

Nobody spoke.

I counted heads. Marcus, Jun, Eli, Lena, Nora. Skyler. All of us. Singed and coughing, but all of us.

Then I patted my coat, and my stomach dropped through the floor.

The diary.

I had dropped it in the hay.

“Looking for this?”

Skyler was sitting across from me. His coat was scorched at the shoulder, and there was soot across one cheekbone. In his hand was a small pink book with a brass lock.

My mouth went dry.

“You grabbed it.”

“It was on the floor.” His voice was flat. “It’s always the first thing you grab. I figured it mattered.”

“Skyler, give it—”

He opened it.

I couldn’t stop him. I had one second to think, the first pages, the coffee, the soup, and my skin went cold, because he wasn’t going to the first pages. He turned straight to the back, where the ink was new and my handwriting was shaky and I’d written everything down, because every good strategist keeps notes.

He read it aloud.

“Number one. Coffee. Failed. Minus five.”

The truck went very still.

“Number two. Be useful. Worked. Zero points. Apparently, saving everyone’s life was just a baseline expectation.” His voice never rose. “Number three. Be charming. It’s crossed out.”

In the driver’s seat, Marcus had gone rigid.

“Number four,” Skyler said. “Apologize to Marcus. Properly. Later, when nothing is trying to kill us.”

“It’s not what it looks like,” I said, very fast.

“Properly,” Marcus said, to the windshield.

The word dropped into the cab like a stone.

“I meant it.” I couldn’t breathe properly. “The apology. I meant every word. Some of this, I wrote down to organize my thoughts, but the apology was real.”

“How would I know the difference?”

He wasn’t angry. It would have been easier if he were. He looked, if anything, very tired, and very quiet, as if a door he had half opened had just closed gently in his face.

“I got a cup of coffee,” he said, “that was made exactly right by a woman who has never once asked how I felt. I got a handkerchief, washed and folded. I got an apology to my friend. I got a rescue in the middle of a flood.” He closed the book. “I was starting to think I had misjudged you. I was starting to wonder if the girl I’d hated had never existed. And all the time, there was a list.”

“Skyler—”

“What do the numbers mean? Minus five. Zero points.”

I opened my mouth. The system. The meter. The thirty days. I could not say a single word of it. If I did, he would think I was insane.

“I keep track,” I whispered.

“Of what? Me?”

I couldn’t answer.

He set the diary on the bench between us, very gently, as though it might go off.

“I’m not asking you to stop,” he said. “I’m just going to know, from now on, that everything is a number.”

He turned away and looked out the empty rear opening at the dark road.

[Affection: -170%.]

[Note: the target discovered the host’s strategy list. The target feels managed.]

Thirty-five points. Gone, in one page, for the crime of keeping notes.

The diary lay between us like a bomb that had already gone off. Nobody else moved. Nora had her eyes pressed shut. Eli was staring very hard at his tablet. Lena’s face was unreadable, though I thought, just for a moment, that I saw something in it that looked like pity.

Marcus drove on. His knuckles on the wheel had gone white again.

I picked up the diary.

It was warm from the fire. I held it against my chest, and I did not cry, because there was no point. I just sat in the dark with the road unrolling behind us, and for the first time since I had woken up in that pink bedroom, I understood what the villainess had spent four years learning.

It wasn’t that he couldn’t be won.

It was that every honest thing you did could be turned, with one page, into proof that you hadn’t been honest at all.