The Long Way Down

[Maraoone]

((June Madison continues from Color In Your Cheeks))

Jezzie and Kitty were dead.

That was what the announcements said. Yesterday, or day before that, that would've been a victory for June. It was something she thought she'd wanted badly, the defeat of evil, if not exactly the triumph of good over it. She had proposed it to Dick and Darryl with such fervor, with such feeling, that they kill them. But they were dead now, announcements said just earlier, and June felt nothing.

Why?

June's mind had a knack for stealing defeat from the jaws of victory. When it came to following current events, the dread from hearing about a bad election or some terrible flood or the outbreak of a new war, the dread from that would last for days. The happiness at hearing about a good election, or some new, exciting scientific discovery, it lasted an hour, fleeting, like it barely ever existed, before dissipating in the face of the next bad thing.

Her goals had changed since yesterday, the day before that. From avenging all her dead friends to, hopefully, quixotically, keeping anyone else from dying. So, to root for someone else's death kinda flew in the face of that high ideal, as much as her stomach churned at the sound of Matthew's name.

Jezzie was dead, killed by Kitty, even, the other person whose death she'd wanted, and yet it felt like nothing to June. Jezzie was dead, and Medea was still dead, that was how June felt. And that was so, so frustrating to June. It made her want to sink her nails into the flesh of her thigh, it made her want to tear and rip and gash and unravel apart, that she felt nothing at that, that there was no relief from all this.

But there wasn't. And she wasn't sure whether it was because her goals had become better, whether she'd become a better person somehow in just twenty-four hours, or if it was because there was never any relief to be found in the first place. Because it never would've made her feel good. Or, a third, worse option.

Maybe she just couldn't feel good anymore. Maybe the deaths of Mr. Ramos and Medea and K and Iris and Dick and Darryl and California had completely scrubbed and sanded the parts of her brain that dictated how she felt, that allowed her to be anything other than this anxious, high-strung, numbed version of herself.

That wasn't true. June had felt something like hope yesterday, when Kai said the danger zones didn't work. She knew she had, that was why she was here, listening to the announcements with him and Marshall. Even despite the news coming literally right as California was dying, June had felt hope.

But that was just a fact, not a feeling. The feeling felt so, so gone now that it was like it had never existed, like the memory was some figment from some long-forgotten dream dragged from the dregs of her sleep. The announcements had come, more people were dead, and everything felt terrible and horrible again.

The announcements, in and of themselves, were a defeat. She'd been hoping, expecting even, that there'd be nothing to greet them this morning, or even more optimistically, that the army would finally get its shit together, storm the beaches and free them all. And then she'd be whisked away on a helicopter with Kai and Marshall, still hurt, still bleeding, still grieving, but alive.

That was what she'd expected.

Still here, monitoring your work, the terrorists said a couple minutes earlier. June had wanted to race into the danger zones Kai had come from the very minute he'd spread the news, he told them to wait till the beach, that was yesterday. One day later was how long it'd taken them to descend the mountain, what with the deep snow, the slick rocky surfaces, Kai's bleeding leg and Marshall's missing fingers and June's broken arm, it'd taken them one whole day to reach the beach, and now there was another announcement.

Had they missed their window of opportunity? Was yesterday the only chance they'd had at escaping, and they blew it?

The terrorists had had something go wrong for them yesterday. They themselves even acknowledged it, as much as they tried to brush over it as 'technical difficulties,' she knew and they knew something had gone wrong. That much hadn't changed.

But why was it so hard to keep in mind? Her mind knew that there was still a chance to fix things, her mind knew that she had allies here, her mind knew the goal, yet there was a static, and it was increasing, and it was going to overwhelm her.

Not yet. She trudged through the snow, past the iced-over lake with Kai and Marshall, their goal finally in sight, next step in their low-odds, high-risk plan. She couldn't fall because Kai and Marshall couldn't fall with her. That much kept her going.

But, as they neared the beach, the static kept growing and growing.

((June Madison continues in Trespasser))