“That was the plan.”

“What went wrong?”

His face jerks toward me. “Plans change. Why do you think something went wrong?”

“Because you were in Detroit. And I was already team leader by that point. You should have been out.”

“I asked to go on one last run.”

“Why would you—”

The way he looks at me stops my question cold. He asked to go because of me. To protect me.

“You almost died,” I whisper.

“I knew the risks going in.”

“Just like you knew the rules? You know . . . the ones you broke?”

“Which rule would that be?”

“Drawing my life force.”

“It was either break the rules or die.” His smile is self-deprecating. “Regrets, Miki?”

“No.” I shudder at the thought that he might have died there.

“Then why are you so pissed?”

He’s goading me. I can feel it. I won’t give him the win. I force my tone to stay calm and even as I say, “I’m angry with you for bringing me into the game and then not getting out, not being safe, away from all of this. For wasting your chance. And I’m angry with you for not telling me the truth, for not warning me about the consequences of what we did.” I would still have made the exact same choice, but I wouldn’t have gone in blind. “You knew you’re not allowed. They told you that after . . .” My words trail away. I don’t need to remind him how his sister died.

But he says it for me, repeating a fragment of the story he told me once before, his tone hard and liquid-nitrogen cold. “You can say it, Miki. After I killed my sister. After I made like a Drau and sucked the life out of her, changing my con from red to yellow and hers from yellow to red. I traded her life for mine.”

There’s the Jackson I know: moody, bossy, cocky, a little scary, and chock-full of self-hate. And even though I haven’t forgiven him for what he did to me, I can’t bear to see him suffering.

It’s one thing for me to be pissed at him, something else entirely for him to be so angry with himself.

“You were twelve years old, Jackson. It was your first mission. You were dying, terrified. She told you to do it, that it would be okay. She was your big sister. You were used to believing her, to doing what she said. Why would that time be any different?”

“You think that excuses me? Cuz I sure don’t. I killed my sister and then I got hauled in front of the Committee, warned that if I ever did the Drau thing again it would be game over. Then next chance I get, I do the same damn thing and almost kill you.”

“But you didn’t do it willingly. I made you. I forced you. I—”

“You offered it, Miki. Dangled the hope of survival in front of me, but I’m the one who grabbed hold and hung on. None of this is your fault. It’s on me. It’s all on me. And the worst thing? I fed off you like fricking Dracula, knowing that you might end up just like Lizzie.” He snaps a half-rotten apple off the tree and lobs it hard against the patio. It splatters, leaving bits of white and brown and red dotting the stones. “I keep telling you I’m far from good, and you keep ignoring the message.”

“I think my therapist would say you have a really bad case of survivor’s guilt,” I say.

Jackson barks a laugh, then stares at me, shaking his head. “How do you do that? Make me laugh even when I feel like total shit?” He pauses, then says, “You’re like my personal dose of happy.”

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

WE SIT ON THE BRANCH FACING EACH OTHER, QUIET. THE leaves rustle in the breeze.

“I heard you screaming,” I say. I can’t interpret the look Jackson shoots me. “Tell me what happened when you didn’t respawn at the pizza place with me and Luka.”

He reaches over to tuck a stray wisp of my hair back behind my ear. “After Detroit, the Committee pulled me directly to meet with them. They said I was done with the game. Finished. Out.”

“Happy news.”

“Yeah, for all of about a second. But with the Committee, there’s always a catch. Turned out, the catch was that if I go free of the game, the price is you.” He holds up a hand when I start to point out that he knew that already; he knew all along he was trading me for his freedom. That was the whole point. “I don’t mean that you’d have to take my place as leader,” he says. “I mean I’d have to give you up entirely. I wouldn’t get to remember anything about you.”

“Oh . . .” The Committee already told me that, but the fierce expression on his face as he says it puts a different spin on things.

He strokes the backs of his fingers along my cheek, my jaw, my lips, like he needs to touch me. “And if that didn’t suck hard enough,” he continues softly, “they were going to arrange it so my family would move again. You’d be excised from my mind and I’d just . . . disappear from your life.” He huffs a dark laugh. “Guess they didn’t want to risk me seeing you, maybe triggering some memory . . .”

“You think that would be possible? That you could recover memories they took?”

He lifts his brows and turns his hands palms-up in a who-can-say gesture.

“But even if they took you out of my life, I would have remembered you,” I say slowly.

I would have missed him and mourned his loss.

Would my world have gone gray again, or am I stronger than that now?