“Lila, please,” said Noelle in that same broken voice. “I don’t want you to die, too.”
A choking sob escaped me. “I’m sorry,” I managed. “I’m so sorry.”
“It’s okay,” she said again. “This is as good a way out as any. At least now we’ll be together.”
Elliott held her tighter and turned away from me, and I forgot how to breathe. The defeat in Noelle’s eyes—she didn’t deserve this. She hadn’t done anything wrong.
“This is your only warning,” boomed Mercer from the rooftop, and I stared at the pair inside the cage, unable to look away. Noelle whispered something I couldn’t hear in Elliott’s ear, and he shook his head, his arms tightening around her.
It wasn’t hard to imagine what she had asked and what he had refused to do. Elliott looked uninjured, and with his physical strength, he could have easily snapped her neck. It would be painless—a mercy kill, and he would have another chance at survival. Maybe not as a guard, but he would still be alive. And by this time tomorrow, we’d all be free or dead anyway.
But if it had been Benjy and I inside that cage, I knew without a doubt that neither of us would make a move no matter how close to death the other was. I’d already had a taste of what life would be like without him, and there was nothing in the world that could make me go back there.
No matter how much sense it made for Elliott to kill her to save himself, he wasn’t going to do it. He loved Noelle more than his own life. And in that moment, I hated Scotia more than I thought I could ever hate anyone, even Knox.
“I’m sorry,” I sobbed as Mercer raised his rifle. “I’m so sorry.”
Noelle wasn’t listening to me anymore. Instead she focused on Elliott, her fingers tangled in his hair, her lips brushing against his ear, and her entire body molding against his, as if she were trying to be as close to him as possible. This was how she wanted to spend her last moments, and I had no place in it.
I turned away. Two shots cracked through the streets, one right after the other, and then—
Silence.
It was over.
There were no more fights that evening. Guards cleared Noelle’s and Elliott’s bodies away as the crowd dispersed, and the two men holding me set me down on the other side of the railing with a stern warning to get to my bunkhouse. I stood there for a long moment, as numb as ever as the world seemed to cave in on me all over again.
“You shouldn’t have told her about the Blackcoats.”
I turned slowly. If I moved too fast, everything would shatter, and my grip on the here and now was fragile enough already. Scotia stood two long strides away, her arms crossed loosely over her chest. Nothing about her blank expression or relaxed shoulders indicated she had just watched two innocent people die because of her.
It was her apathy that made something snap inside me, and before I realized what I was doing, I crossed the distance between us and grabbed her jacket, shoving her as hard as my wrung-out body could manage.
“I was trying to help her!” My voice rang through the empty streets. “She needed hope—she needed to know things were going to be okay, and instead you killed her.”
Scotia tried to grab my hands, but I pulled back against her thumbs, releasing her grip. For several seconds we grappled for control, me trying to shove her again while she tried to subdue me. She lurched, and suddenly my feet disappeared out from under me.
I hit the ground hard, and the air whooshed out of my lungs, leaving me breathless. I struggled to inhale, the pain and pressure in my chest making it impossible, and Scotia knelt beside me. She pinned my arms to the ground, and when I tried to kick, she sat on my thighs, pressing my legs into the freezing dirt. Her movements were labored, but she was still strong, and I went limp underneath her.
“Noelle was the snitch,” she said, hovering over me. “She’s been snitching to Williams ever since she moved into the section. She was the one who ratted out Chelsea, and she’s responsible for another sixteen deaths in the past year.”
My lungs burned, and I struggled to speak. “But—”
“In this place, you’ve got to look out for yourself, and that’s what Noelle was doing. I’m not saying she didn’t have her good side, and I’m not saying I’m any better than her. But I am saying if she’d told Williams about the Blackcoats, Williams would have gone to Mercer, and everything would have been ruined.”
My vision blurred, and I stared at Scotia as her words sunk in. “She wouldn’t have said anything.” I had to believe that as much as I needed air. “She—she wouldn’t have told anyone.”
“And you know that for sure?” Scotia leveled her stare at me. “You’re willing to risk the entire rebellion on your opinion of someone you’ve known for a day?”
“I—” I faltered, and although I hated myself for it, my eyes welled up. “She wouldn’t have done that to me.”
“Yes, she would have,” said Scotia. “And she would have skipped all the way to Mercer Manor. You were her big fish. The moment she spotted you doing something out of line, you would have been in that cage, and she would have been putting on a crisp new guard uniform. The sooner you accept that, the easier this will be for you.”
Hot tears rolled down my cheeks as a battle waged inside me. The rational part of me that could step back and see the situation for what it was knew Scotia was almost certainly right. Noelle herself had admitted that she wanted to be a guard, and she’d even told me exactly what she had to do to become one. I’d been naive to trust her as much as I had—it wasn’t a coincidence she’d befriended me, and as I ran through the past day in my mind, I couldn’t remember a single instance of her having a conversation with someone else. Everyone had known she was the snitch, and they’d steered clear of her. I hadn’t been so lucky.
But the part of me that understood her—that looked at her and saw the person I would have been if I hadn’t been lucky enough to wind up in society despite being an Extra—that part of me had just witnessed my own death, mine and Benjy’s, and I couldn’t process it. Noelle hadn’t been a bad person to me. She’d been the only friend I had in this place—and even if her friendship had been a charade, it had felt real to me. It still did, and the pain of watching her die wasn’t lessened by learning the real story behind her warmth. If anything, it only made me feel worse for mourning someone who had caused so many others to die.