I am all by myself / The trees are not trees / The birds are not birds / And I am not me / But something that has been walking for a very long time.
YELLOWJACKETS. Lottie Matthews
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Chapter Twenty-Five.
Black and bottomless. Tonight, it's the kind where the sky swallows everything, where the cold creeps into your lungs like an infection. Inside the cabin, the girls huddle together. Eating. Their breaths curl in the dim firelight. Hunger has set in deep, coiling around their bones, making their tempers sharp and their eyes hollow.
Sade sits by the warped window, where ice flowers bloom between the panes. Beside her, Travis is all silence and dried tears. The carved wolf in his hands is blunt now, dulled by touch. As if rubbing it enough might call Javi back from the grave like Lazarus. As if grief were a spell, not a noose.
Then the light splits open like a broken tooth. Van. Melted snow clings to her hair like ash. Her presence drips with a peculiar intensity, something halfway between friend and trespasser. Sade doesn't know what to feel—her body contracts like a wound. Something tells her to fight. It's gnawing at her—beyond the usual starvation. It's the walls, she's sure. Light bends oddly. The way they hold them in, the way the cabin itself has become a coffin.
"You should be ashamed." Travis's voice is the perfect example of a half-grown boy who was always one match away from ruin.
"Well, I'm not." Van plants herself down across from them, spine straight as judgment. Her smile is thin. Used to cruelty.
"Palmer." Sade's voice is a hiss pulled from the throat of something older than any of them. Her fists clench, white as the snow outside. The walls seem to swell.
"The fact that you could even say that—"
"I'm not ashamed, Travis. I'm glad I'm alive." Her cerulean irises curled into twinning russet ones. "Just like you are. I don't think any of us who are still here should feel ashamed of that. Ever."
Unlike Travis, Sade holds the red-head's gaze and watches Van's face. The high bones and wind-chapped lips. How they catch the bleeding of snow. An altar left to rot. Something divine turned desecrated. The cabin isn't just holding them. It's watching. Listening. Hunger here is a god, and they are its apostles.
And Sade, voice soft as blade-edge, cuts through the quiet.
"You know exactly what it feels like to be ashamed of yourself, Vanessa. To not be normal. The outside world hasn't changed much since the crash."
"I'm not," Van reiterates, and she smiles like a girl who grew up under hot glass and learned too late that mercy was a myth. "We're surviving. Some of us are just more honest about it."
She turns to Travis, fierce and burning. "Let your brother save you, Travis. After everything he went through out here. . . don't you owe him at least that?"
Miraculously, Sade doesn't lounge at Van. Her hands feel far too heavy, still skimming the cold flesh of Javi. She wants to preserve that sweet feeling.
