Chapter 6: I didn’t want this

549’s POV

“What’re you doing?” I whispered.

She didn’t respond, just kept the gun pointed at me with steady hand.

Her eyes were fixed on me, cold and calculating.

“Answer me!” I snapped, my throat feeling raw, my head starting to pound.

“You can’t leave this place.” She finally responded, her voice detached.

No.

No.

This has to be some sick joke, some twisted dream I was stuck in.

There was no way—

A sob tore out of my throat.

“Turn around five forty nine,” she ordered.

Five forty nine.

Not five.

Not her nickname born from years of friendship and shared meals and whispered fears in the dark.

Five forty nine.

My number.

Like I was nothing more than ink on the back of a neck.

Like I had always been nothing more than that to her.

“Fifty nine,” my voice broke on her name. “Please.”

Her jaw tightened. Something flickered across her face, it was so brief I almost missed it.

I didn’t know what it was, but I almost convinced myself it was guilt.

“Don’t make this harder than it has to be,” she said quietly.

“How long?” The words tasted like ash on my tongue. “How long have you been—”

“Turn around.”

“How long!” I screamed.

The alarm was still blaring somewhere behind us.

Twelve was still on the ground. And Fifty nine—my friend, my friend—stood with a gun leveled at my chest like it was nothing, like I was nothing.

“Since the beginning,” she finally answered. “I was placed in your unit to watch you specifically. Your blood—” she hesitated, “they’ve known what you are for a long time five. They weren’t going to let you walk out of here.”

The ground shifted beneath my feet.

“What blood?” I whispered.

“It’s nothing for you to worry about,” she shook her head. “Turn around five forty nine. There’s no human pack. Only wastelands and rogue wolves.”

If that was the truth, why was she trying to convince me?

Why not leave me—us.

My gaze drifted to Twelve who had gone completely pale, still.

My throat clogged.

They had known this day would come, this whole time, someone had known what Twelve was doing while we had lived in ignorance, while we had cried over fertility examinations and white dresses and a fate we thought was ordinary.

Nothing about our life had been ordinary.

Nothing had been real.

“The note,” I whispered. “You sent it.”

Something crossed her face again. It was harder to dismiss this time.

“Turn around,” she repeated, but her voice had changed, it wavered slightly.

“You sent it,” I pressed, taking one step toward her. “You warned me. Why would you warn me if you were going to—”

“Stop moving.”

“Why, fifty nine?” My voice cracked completely. “If you were always going to do this, why did you warn me? Why did you let me feel safe? Why did you laugh at my jokes and sit at my table and hold my hand when I cried and—”

“Stop.”

“You were my friend!” The sob ripped out of me like something being torn free. “You were my friend and I loved you and you were never—you were never—”

“I said stop!” Her voice broke on the last word.

The gun trembled.

Just slightly, but it was enough.

I moved.

I didn’t think.

Thinking would have made me hesitate and hesitation would have gotten me killed.

I lunged at her, my two hands aiming for the gun, my fingers wrapping around her wrist as the weapon slid out of her hand.

But she was stronger than she looked, she always had been.

She slammed me sideways and I hit the ground hard, the impact rattled through my bones, the air punched out of my lungs.

I could taste the sharp metal of blood where my teeth had caught the inside of my cheek.

She was on me in seconds, her knee driving into my stomach, her hand going for my throat.

She wrapped her around it tightlt.

I clawed at her fingers, gasping for air, my vision blurring.

“I didn’t want this,” she gritted out above me, her voice raw and strangled. “I didn’t want any of this.”

“Then stop,” I wheezed.

She didn’t dtop. Instead, her grip tightened.

“I can’t.”

My vidion started to swim.

No.

I couldn’t go back, couldn’t accept defeat. Not after Twelve’s sacrifice.

I stopped fighting her hands. Instead, I drove my palm up hard into her nose.

The crack was sickening.

She reeled back with a cry, her grip on my throat disappearing, and I rolled out from under her, taking greedy gulps of air, my lungs screamed.

I shot up to my feet despite the fatigue in my bones, and the unevenness in my breath. She got up too.

We faced each other in the dark, both breathing in ragged bursts, both bleeding.

I didn’t recognize her face anymore.

Or maybe I was finally seeing it clearly for the first time.

She lunged.

I sidestepped but she caught my arm, spinning me till we went down together in a tangle of limbs and desperation.

The gun had skittered somewhere in the dark.

Neither of us could reach it. So we fought with hands and elbows and knees, fought like two people with nothing left to lose, because that was exactly what we were.

Two girls desperate to survive.

At some point I stopped knowing whose blood was whose.

At some point the only thing left in me was that deep primal survival. It was raw and animal, completely stripped of everything else.

Then my hand found a rock.

I didn’t make the decision. My body made it for me.

The sound it made stopped the world.

Fifty nine went still.

Then slowly, horrifyingly, she crumpled.

I scrambled back, my chest heaving, the rock falling from my fingers.

“No,” I breathed. “No, I didn’t — I wasn’t trying to—”

She lay on her side, her eyes half open, her breathing coming out shallow at first, and then slower and then—

Gone.

The silence that followed was the loudest thing I had ever heard.

I knelt there in the dirt and the dark, covered in blood that wasn’t only mine, staring at the girl who had been my friend and my betrayer and somehow, in the end, my warning.

‘Trust no one.’

She had told me. She had looked me in the eye every single day for months and laughed with me and eaten with me and then she had told me, in the only way she could.

I would never know if it was guilt or affection or something that had no name.

I would never get to ask her.

Somewhere behind me, Twelve was still on the ground.

Somewhere beyond the bare land, voices were getting closer.

I looked at Fifty nine’s face one last time.

Then I ran like a coward.