Under Zenith (19 page)

“What are you doing?” Hayden practically shouted. “Are you completely insane?”

“I don’t need to go backwards. Why on earth would I need that?” I asked, looking at the other colors in my hands and wondering which ones I could discard just as the sun went out.

“Crap,” I mumbled.

I hadn’t been looking ahead so I couldn’t be sure there wasn’t an acid pool only a few steps away. Bringing each vial to my nose in turn, I hoped the rest would smell how they looked and give me some indication of what they were, since it was far too dark to see what colors the containers held.

The first smelled like grape and I knew it was the jumping vial. Definitely didn’t need that at the moment. The next vial smelled like apples and for a moment I wondered how I could possibly still be holding the red liquid when I’d seen it smashed behind me.

“Green apples,” I clarified after a moment, leaving only one other color in my hand.

The lemony liquid hit my tongue with a vengeance, instantly igniting the sun once more and alerting me to the orange pool only a few steps ahead. Moving quickly I took a small sip of the green, followed almost immediately by the purple, giving me enough of a running jump to get past the final pool of acid before the podium jumping th
at lay ahead.

“Well done,” Hayden said, though I
couldn’t tell if he was being sarcastic or not.

It was always safer to assume he was defaulting into his normal habits.

“Now I just have to impossibly jump from podium to podium,” I responded.

Looking at the task ahead
, I tried to assess the whole thing like one of the video games my brother had always forced me to play with him in the arcade. The green liquid definitely lasted long enough to keep me running all the way to the safe house. Technically, I could drink the rest of the green liquid, throw it out, and only have to worry about the purple and yellow.

It would definitely simplify things to only have two vials to worry about.

“You look like you’re thinking, and that always worries me,” Hayden called.

“Just thinking of ways to get rid of even more vials,” I assured him, though he looked far from assured.

“You do realize what a stupid idea it is to get rid of vials as you go, right? There’s a reason you need each of those, and getting rid of them isn’t going to do you any favors.”

“I’m fine,” I replied, not listening to his advice for a second.
“Here we go!”

With that, I drank the rest of the green vial and threw it to the ground, loosely holding the yellow vial in my hand while the purple one was brought to my lips, ready for every gap that came my way.

I could only guess at what was on the ground between each podium, but if I was being logical, I’d say an orange pool of acid was the most likely option. Not a theory I really wanted to test out.

My legs carried me forward quickly, over the rocky terrai
n and up the steep slope toward the first podium. As soon as I neared the first gap, I drank a bit of the purple liquid, causing me to jump through the air and land gracefully on the second podium.

I repeated this pattern three time
s until I was on the last stretch of elevated land, just before safe house on the other side of my last gap.

“Piece of cake,” I called to Hayden who
now stood at the front door of the safe house.

“You’re a bit of a show off. Did you know that?”

“It’s not showing off if it’s pure skill,” I joked.

“Yeah it is.”

I grinned over at him happily, finding that this task was actually exciting rather than horrifying and it had lightened my mood considerably.

I still ran at full speed, though I could swear I was slowing down every second.
As long as I had enough speed to bridge the last gap, I didn’t care.

“Maybe you should stop gloating and pay attention so you time the jump
properly,” Hayden suggested.

“Yeah
, I’ll get right on that,” I shot back with a laugh just as the sun went out, casting me into complete darkness.

My feet continued to run and the final gap continued to loom ever closer, but suddenly, in my moment of panic I couldn’t remember which vial held the purple liquid.

“I need to turn the sun back on!” I shouted. “Also, I never thought I’d utter that sentence.”

“Isla, you’re getting really close to the edge. I suggest you figure it out quickly,” Hayden called, sounding surprisingly panicked.

I wasn’t sure how he could see that I was getting close to the edge in the pitch blackness, but I assumed it was some sort of perk for being a Guide.

I could sense my time running out as I continu
ed on my full out sprint toward the ledge and all I could think was, “Left hand or right hand? Which one is purple?”

“Isla!” Hayden called again, this time, sounding only two seconds away from really letting me have it.

I must have been getting close to the ledge.

“I don’t remember if the purple vial is in my right or left hand,” I yelled back, now completely frantic.

I brought both vials up to my nose, trying to distinguish between the two scents, but knew I was almost out of time.

“It’s in your left hand!” Hayden screamed at me.

Without questioning him, I quickly drank the liquid in my left hand and felt my feet leave the ground for a breathtaking moment. Both vials dropped from my grasp and I hoped I wouldn’t need them any longer once I made it to the safe house.

My feet hit the soft grass of the final podium and I immediately barreled right into a solid figure, sending us both sprawling onto the ground. The sun ignited itself once more and I looked up at Hayden who, for the second
time since meeting him, I was lying on top of. Our chins were touching and despite the confusing feelings that were suddenly coming to life within me, I simply breathed out a huge sigh of relief.

“Thanks,” I whispered to him.

“Don’t mention it,” he returned, equally as breathless.

For someone who was so bent on following the rules, it didn’t escape my notice just how many times Hayden had willingly broken them for me.

Chapter 18

There was something wrong with the safe house. Almost everything was identical to the rooms I had stayed in before this one, but one thing was missing that I couldn’t quite explain: Hayden’s rocking chair.

I didn’t bring this fact to his attention, though I knew he was aware of it. My imagination had created each task and each safe house
, and up until this point, I had always created a space for myself, and a space for my Guide. But for some unknown reason, today my mind hadn’t given Hayden his own space and I didn’t know if it was because somewhere deep inside of me I wanted him out of the safe house, or if, by some miracle, I wanted him to be forced to sit beside me.

Either way, we both soon found ourselves sit
ting side by side on the wooden bed of the cabin-like safe house, staring at the crackling fire and not saying a word.

Hayden’s knee rested against mine and it felt like there was an electric charge between us, though looking over at my Guide, he looked as if he could care less where he sat. He continued to stare at the fire, looking dark and misguided and just generally unpleasant.

It was a safe bet that he wasn’t feeling whatever electricity I was making up between us.

“Why did you help me? Again,” I asked quietly, looking down at my hands, which I was wringing in my lap.

“I didn’t want you to get hurt,” he replied.

It was a simple enough answer. Uncomplicated. But the fact that it was Hayden saying he didn’t want me to get hurt gave it a whole new meaning. He wasn’t exactly the type of person to care about the
well-being of others and he took pride in revealing that little detail. It would have been all too easy for him to say he didn’t want to fail at getting another dead girl to her Destination, but he hadn’t. And suddenly, my brain was in full on ‘over analyze everything’ mode.

“Won’t you get in trouble for breaking the rules?”

“The way I figure it, it was a strategy test,” he reasoned. “You already figured out the strategy and knew what you wanted to do. Knowing which vial was in which hand wasn’t really part of the strategy aspect.”

I turned this over in my mind for a moment, wondering if this really was a legitimate way around the rules.
It seemed fair enough and if anyone would be aware of the rules it was Hayden. He was a rule follower if nothing else.

“Well either way, I appreciate it,” I told him, still not looking over at him.

It was odd how only a few hours ago I’d wanted to kill him.
Most
of the time I wanted to kill him actually. He was completely rude, self-centered, and just plain mean. But the longer he and I had been forced to be together, the more he had let his gruff exterior slip. He kept accidentally showing me that he could be nice deep down.

The funny thing was, he was always at his nicest when he was completely panicked and had to make a split second decision. My daddy had always said you’d truly know a man when he was desperate. That’s when he’d let his true colors show.

So was Hayden a nice guy pretending to be mean? Or was he a mean guy who would do the right thing when it came down to the wire?

“Stop doing that, it’s annoying,” Hayden finally said, acting like his usual self.

“Doing what?”

“Stop thinking so loudly.”

“Oh, what? You can hear my thoughts?” I asked skeptically.

I had no doubt Hayden had some sort of power here, but I highly doubted his power spanned that great a distance.

“Of course I can’t read your thoughts, but you’re wringing your hands and biting your lip. That’s what you do right before you say something
you
think is clever.”

“But it’s not really clever?” I asked, trying not to laugh at just how mad I seemed to make him.

“Not really, no.”

“It must be hard for you here, Hayden,” I said, my voice dripping with mock sympathy.

“Why?”

“Being forced to be stuck with someone so beneath you.”

“Most people are beneath me. You get used to it after a while,” he responded and for a moment, I thought he was being serious.

Then he turned and looked at me with a hint of a smile on his face.

“Relax, Isla. I was joking.”

“You’re not really much of a comedian. You should stick to what you know.”

“Which would be…what? Making you so mad that you try to jump off a cliff?” he asked with a raised eyebrow.

“You are quite amazing at that actually,” I conceded.

“And what are you good at? Besides annoying me to no end.”

“I’m a good singer,” I offered. “And no I won’t demonstrate.”

“Thank goodness.”

I gave him an icy look at his statement
, but it quickly broke across my face into a smile. “My parents always made fun of me for majoring in vocal performance. They said I was paying a bunch of money to get a degree in something you didn’t need a degree for.”

“They were kind of right,” Hayden pointed out with a fake wince.

“Maybe. But I got to have the full college experience and I learned the theories behind vocal performance that I wouldn’t know otherwise.”

“I’m sure that’s helped you out a lot,” he responded sarcastically.

“Maybe if I hadn’t tried to break the windshield with my forehead it would have worked out well,” I joked back, though joking about my death put a bad taste in my mouth so I quickly went on. “My parents were always really supportive though, no matter how much they made fun of me. They were proud that I’d be the first person in our family to graduate from a university.”

“What can you even do with a vocal performance degree?” Hayden asked, not sounding very impressed by my artsy major.

“I can be a singer or I can teach voice lessons. There’s a lot I can do with it…could do,” I amended. “I’d sing at weddings sometimes or at the fair. Once I sang the national anthem at a baseball game. That was fun.”

I hadn’t exactly had much time to use my degree
, but I suddenly felt a sense of loss over the dreams I’d wanted to fulfill that were now out of reach.

“I wrote my own music,” I said proudly, looking over at Hayden with a smile and trying to turn this conversation into a happy one, rather than the pity party it was turning into.

“Congratulations?” he asked.

“Hey, that’s really hard to do,” I
exclaimed, hitting him playfully on the shoulder.

My boots were discarded on the wooden floor and I lifted my feet up onto the bed, tucking them underneath me so that my bare kn
ees rested next to Hayden’s hip and I could get a better look at him.

“I have about a dozen songs hidden under my bed. Music and lyrics all done and ready to be recorded,” I told Hayden, grinning as I recounted my little secret. “As a graduation present to myself
, I was going to rent a recording booth and put all of my songs on a CD to send out to local record labels.”