“It’s the truth. Besides, holding on to that little girl’s anger would only hurt me now, wouldn’t it? Your father is beyond feeling remorse.”

“I’m not,” he reminds her.

“I can see that. This isn’t a place or the time for those feelings, Brio. We’re in the middle of a war. We’re trying to escape captors who look at us as little more than animals fit for slaughter. The past is the least of our problems. If we survive, then we can talk more about feelings.”

Brio is unconvinced. “I still want to know why you agreed to do this. If you’ve let go of the past, why are you willing to die to save it?”

“I have no plans to die,” Evie assures him. “And I said I’ve let go of my anger. I didn’t say I’ve let go of the past altogether.”

Brio wants to ask what that implies, particularly about her feelings for him now.

The desire to ask that brings thoughts of Lexi, and with those comes guilt.

“Go to sleep, Brio,” Evie urges him.

Exhaustion more than anything else puts an end to Brio’s questioning. Without the hungry quaking in his gut and the constant gnawing of his leg wound, not to mention feeling almost safe for the first time in three months, Brio soon drifts off to as peaceful a rest as he’s known outside the Capitol.

LATE-NIGHT CALLERS

EVIE REMAINS AWAKE UNTIL SHE’S sure her first love and current charge is out. She studies the lines of his face, or at least what she can discern of them in the darkness. He hasn’t changed all that much, at least to her mind. He still looks youthful, handsome, and kind, despite what he’s been put through recently.

She spent so much of her childhood thinking about how the two of them were different, and how it kept them apart. Their differences weren’t relegated to where each of them were born in the Capitol, and the social status attained (or, in Evie’s case, not attained) by their respective families. The two of them looked different, clearly descending from different ancestries. Brio and Lexi matched. Brio and Evie did not. Evie didn’t share the fine, sharp features of their families’ faces. Her features were far wider and more rounded. Neither did she share their straight, silken hair, though hers was just as black. Evie’s locks were far coarser and grew in springy curls.

Brown skin and coarse curls were not why Evie was ostracized from Gen Stalbraid, but she always knew they further set her apart.

Brio always seemed blissfully ignorant of those physical differences and their impact, but those not treated as the other in the room had that luxury.