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“Sorry,” I gasp over the rattling of the wheels, leaning my cheek against his hand as he clutches the rungs in front of my face. My cheek feels wet, but not from tears, even though I feel like crying. “You’re bleeding!” I say, startled. I want to inspect the wound, but it’s impossible to move because I can’t go forward or backward.
Bren growls impatiently. “It’s only a scratch. I had to jump off and landed clumsily.” He lets go of his hand, wipes it on his pants, then grips the rung again. “The next time I say something during a dangerous situation, just do it! We’re lucky Grey didn’t jump after me or we’d have lost him.” At that moment, we hear him bark and Bren answers with a deceptively real wolf howl.
If I weren’t so scared, I would laugh. My legs are still shaking. “I wanted you to be safe.”
“And I wanted you to jump first because I run faster. I wanted you to be safe!”
I snuggle my face against his forearm, exhausted. “Bren.”
“Lou?”
“I hope we don’t kill each other one day, trying to protect the other. Is it possible to love each other too much?”
Bren rests his forehead on the top of my head, breathing into my hair. “There is no such thing as too much love. Not with us.”
The lights of Vancouver pass by, but we only glimpse them because we’re facing the container. At one point we enter a tunnel, but it is wide with several tracks and flickering neon lights on the concrete ceiling.
Shortly after we’re out of town, Bren awkwardly pulls my backpack off.
“We have to toss it,” he says behind me. “If there’s a tunnel in the mountains, we must occupy as little space as possible.”
I want to protest but swallow my words. According to Bren, there are mountain tunnels in Canada that are so narrow you can hardly fit a piece of paper between the train and the rock face on either side. “Do you know the contents by heart?” I ask bravely. After all, our predicament is my fault. Still, I hope it doesn’t hold our sleeping bags or anything necessary for survival. Or my favorite clothes that Bren packed at the last second to make me happy.
“I’m afraid it’s medicine and some of our clothes. A sleeping bag. I had divided them up.”
Panic wells up in me. Losing the meds is bad. And in the next moment, Bren lets go of the backpack, the loud rattling drowning out the sound of it hitting the ground.
Will anyone find it and put two and two together? Bren wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t absolutely necessary. I don’t even know if my cell phone was in it. Or I might have put it in Bren’s backpack this morning. We charged both cell phones with the solar power bank in case there is an emergency. I hope it’s with Grey in Bren’s luggage. All my photos are on the phone, photos of Jay, Liam, and Avy, and of course Ethan. A lump forms in my throat at the thought of the images. If I don’t get to see my brothers for a long time, I must at least be able to look at them.
Tired, I close my eyes. Well, it was my fault. Everything. Why didn’t I just do what was asked of me?
For a while, Bren and I stand back to front as the train rushes through the night. The wind is loud and tears at my hair, making every word difficult. Eventually, my hands grow numb and my legs burn from the day’s exertion of standing motionlessly on the ladder. Bren hooks his arms with his elbows on the rung, pushing me even closer to the car. His fingers are probably as numb as mine. I don’t know how long you can stand on a ladder like that without running out of strength. I probably would have fallen off by now, but Bren is Bren. He rappelled down ravines and hiked twenty-five miles a day with me on his back. He’s never lost a fight—he’ll definitely last several hours.
Nevertheless, I have a guilty conscience. His body also shields me from the night chill and headwind while he’s at its mercy. And all this time, I’m trying so hard not to think about what he said about this type of car. About the tunnels. We can’t let go because the night is pitch black and we can’t see what’s coming, it could be an abyss, a bridge, rocks, or water. I have no idea where we would end up and the train is going much too fast.
I don’t know how much time passes. My ankle is throbbing despite the painkiller, but other than that, I can no longer feel my feet. Earlier, Bren even considered climbing on top of the container, but that’s next to impossible; besides, we have no idea when a tunnel might appear and if there is enough space between the top of the train and the ceiling. My eyes are now constantly closed and Bren keeps waking me up because my feet are in danger of slipping off the rungs.
“Hey, Lou, don’t fall asleep,” he warns me for the umpteenth time. “Tell me something to keep you awake.”
My stomach is growling, and oddly enough, I smell roasted turkey and sweet potato casserole. What I wouldn’t give to sit at a festively set table, preferably in a room with a fireplace. “You tell me something,” I mumble wearily.
“Okay, what do you want to know?”
The chance to learn more about him wakes me up a little. Of course, he knows that, it’s just a tactic. “May I ask anything?”
“Anything that keeps you awake.”
I decide on something I’ve been interested in for a while that doesn’t refer to his past—I wouldn’t want him to have another seizure. “In your dream of the future, why a farm and wheat fields?”
Bren stays relaxed or rather his body doesn’t get any stiffer than it already is. “It’s a childhood memory that I had forgotten for a long time,” he says. “India Lee helped me recall it.”
“So, what happened in that memory?”
“My mom played with me. I had a toy farm made out of wood with colorful figures, cattle, chickens, and such. And I also had a family, a husband, a wife, and two children. A boy and a girl.” I hear the smile in his voice. “It was a good memory—so good that the little boy in me couldn’t bear it in his new life. He locked it away and forgot about it.”
I picture Bren as a kid suddenly alone in a strange house with a devilish man. How he believes his mom just left him. How he is chained and locked up all alone. I wonder if it’s the right moment to tell him about his mom, but maybe he’ll let go in shock or have an episode. Oh God, I’m screwed if the chili peppers were in my backpack!
“You know what my brothers told me after they dragged me out of the hotel? That they want to sell our house and invest the money in a farm. They wanted to take me there so you’d never…”
