19. Open-and-Shut Casket
Ben
When Mina let me go, I crumpled into the flowerbed with a hoarse cry.
“They got Haley… they got Haley,” I repeated to myself, trying to make it sink in, trying to keep it from sinking in, even as her body swung from the amphitheater roof in front of us, her blonde ponytail blowing in the breeze, next to the shop teacher who’d kept me alive through the worst semester of my life and the psychotic, hook-handed, implacable warrior I’d never been above turning to for help.
The last moments from before the pod were clearer now than ever, the taste of blood and dirt erasing the mint and strawberry of my first kiss. Erasing Haley.
We’d saved Haley. I’d cut her free from her pod and carried her to safety myself. That was the memory I’d held on to every time I’d que
