Finn eyed me. After a moment, he sighed. "I know that look. What are you planning to do, Gin? And just how much is it going to wreck my wardrobe?"
I grinned.
Owen, Finn, Phillip, and I hashed out a strategy. Once we had everything nailed down, I called Bria and looped her in. Finn, Phillip, and Owen all went home for the night, but I decided to stay at cooper's. I didn't think that there was any way that Grimes could find Jo-Jo and Sophia there, but I wasn't going to take the chance.
cooper offered me his bed, but I refused and bunked down on the couch in the den instead. I'd managed to keep going for far longer than I should have, and as soon as I lay down, my exhaustion took hold of me once more.
This time, I didn't try to fight it and fell into a dark, dreamless sleep.
I woke late that night. At first, I wasn't sure what had roused me, since I usually slept for several hours straight after being healed, as my mind tried to play catch-up and realized that my body was in one piece again. But after a moment, a series of soft, rumbling snores filled my ears. I looked down. Rosco had sprawled out on the floor beside the couch, his fat, stubby legs twitching in his sleep.
I snuggled back down into the groove on the well-worn couch, but try as I might, I couldn't go back to sleep.
After I punched my pillow and failed to get comfortable for the fifth time, I got up, opened the patio door, and stepped outside.
It was a clear, cloudless night, the stars seeming almost close enough to touch, like glittering tiny apples hanging low on the black velvet tree of the sky. The full moon gave everything a pale silver tint, from the blades of grass in the yard to the tools hanging in cooper's forge to the leaves in the woods beyond. The river rocks of the patio under my feet were still warm from the heat of the day, and the stones grumbled sleepily of the blazing sun that had baked them for hours and would do the exact same thing again tomorrow.
Apparently, I wasn't the only one who couldn't sleep, because another figure stood farther out in the yard: Sophia.
She still had on her black jeans and T-shirt, which only made her skin seem that much paler. Her face glimmered like a ghost's in the moonlight - pale, ethereal, eternal.
Her feet were bare, just like Jo-Jo's always were.
I stepped off the patio and deliberately scuffed my own bare feet through the grass, letting her know that I was coming up behind her. Sophia looked over her shoulder and grunted.
"couldn't sleep?" I asked, moving over to stand beside her.
She shook her head.
"Me neither."
We stared out into the silvery woods. Somewhere hidden in the trees, an owl let out a series of haunting hoot-hoot-hoots, while a few crickets chirped in response.
A breeze gusted through the yard, bringing with it the sharp, tangy scent of the wild onions that had sprung up among the grass.
Sophia bent down and plucked a daisy, one of several that had sprouted in the yard. She slowly, carefully, quietly started pulling the petals off the flower, then the leaves, until she'd stripped the whole thing bare. She tossed the stem aside and grabbed another one.
We stayed like that for a while, with Sophia plucking and stripping down one daisy after another, until she'd gone through a whole patch of them. I didn't ask her what she was thinking about. It was easy to tell that she was remembering everything that had happened in the last few days - and all the horrors that Grimes had visited upon her and Jo-Jo once again.
When Sophia finished with her final daisy, she threw the stem away, although she remained hunkered down in the grass.
"Thank you," she finally rasped, her voice seeming more broken than ever before. "For saving Jo-Jo. For coming after me."
"No thanks needed," I said. "My only regret is that I didn't finish off Grimes while I was there. Hazel too."
Sophia didn't respond. I started to ask her if she wanted to talk about it, but I held my tongue. Despite all those old, wise sayings, talking didn't always help. Not really.
All it did was drag all of your dark, messy, turbulent emotions out into the light for someone else to see. Besides, raspy voice or not, Sophia had never been much for chatting. So I stood there beside her, still and quiet, letting her know that I was there for her and that I would stay out here with her as long as she wanted me to.
To my surprise, after a few minutes, she began to speak.
"The first time he took me, I was so scared," Sophia said. "Grimes had been making threats for weeks, trying to get Jo-Jo to let him court me, but we could both tell that there was something wrong with him. They say that animals can sniff out evil. Well, I could sense it in him.
But in the end, it didn't matter, because he took me and dragged me up to that damn mountain of his anyway.
You can imagine what happened next."
Torture, beatings, rape. Jo-Jo had told me some of it, like how Grimes had forced Sophia to breathe in elemental Fire, ruining her voice. No doubt, that had happened in the pit when he and Hazel had been torturing her. So I didn't need her to fill in the gruesome details. It had been horrible, more than any person should ever have to endure, but Sophia had.
"It was ironic, Grimes taking me out to the pit again,"
Sophia continued. "Because that's the only place that I ever got a moment's peace from him and Hazel. They would drag me out there and make me dig at the sides, making it larger and larger so they could dump more bodies in on top of the ones that were already there. But I didn't mind it. Because after they had their fun with me, they would go and do other things. All I had to do was keep digging, and the guards left me alone. All those bodies shifting and rolling and squishing under my feet, they reminded me that I was still alive, and they helped me to keep going, even when all I wanted to do was just give up, lie down, and die. But I'd seen what happened to the other women who begged Grimes for mercy, men too, and I knew that I couldn't do that.
Not if I wanted to live. I knew that I had to keep my mouth shut, endure it, and stay alive for myself - and for Jo-Jo too."
I could have told her how sorry I was for everything that she'd suffered back then and again these past few days too, but I kept quiet. Because this was Sophia's story to tell, and I had the sense that if I stopped her now, she'd never start it again. And I wanted to know all of it.
"I lost track of how long I'd been at Grimes's camp, and I'd almost given up any hope of ever escaping," Sophia said, her voice still low. "Until the day one of his men disappeared."
"When Fletcher came for you," I whispered.
She nodded, tugged a clover out of the grass, and started plucking the leaves off it. "Grimes didn't think too much of the guy's disappearance at first, just that he'd probably gotten drunk off the moonshine and fallen off a cliff or maybe even drowned in the river. But then another guy disappeared the very next day. Then another one the next day. And Grimes and his men started finding the bodies, all of them with their throats cut or stab wounds in their chests and all of them left right out in the open, almost like someone had declared war on them."