Chapter 11: Patrol Confessions
The bucket handle was biting into Jess’s palm. She stood frozen, watching Ellie’s retreating back until it disappeared behind the community workshop. The echo of her own words—That’s your department—reverberated in her skull, a toxic mantra. The cold dismissal had come so easily, a reflex honed over years. Now it left a vacuum, a silence that felt louder than any scream.
She emptied the wash water onto the gravel, the action mindless. The chill in the air seeped through her jacket. Maria thought she was a black hole. Ellie thought she was a coward. Maybe they were both right.
For two days, she became a ghost in Jackson. She took the most distant patrol shifts, volunteered for wood-chopping duty until her shoulders burned, and ate her meals in the corner of the hall, head down. She avoided the stable, the main square, any place Ellie might be. It was a pathetic imitation of her old life—self-contained, silent, safe. And it felt like shit.
On the third morning, Dina was waiting by the gate for the east ridge patrol. “You’re with me,” she said, her tone offering no argument.
Jess just nodded, falling into step beside her as they moved beyond the walls into the dense, quiet of the pine forest. The silence between them wasn’t comfortable. It was a held breath.
After twenty minutes of nothing but the crunch of boots on old snow and the distant cry of a hawk, Dina spoke. “You’re fucking this up, you know.”
“Noted,” Jess muttered, eyes on the terrain.
“No, I don’t think you get it.” Dina stopped, forcing Jess to halt and face her. “Ellie doesn’t do this. She doesn’t let people in. Not after Cat, and definitely not after…” Dina trailed off, chewing her lip. “After Joel.”
The name meant something. Jess had heard it in fragments—a deep-voiced man, a protector, a tragedy. A closed subject.
“What about Joel?”
Dina sighed, her breath a white cloud in the cold air. She started walking again, slower. “He was her… everything. The guy who got her here. He died a few years back. It was bad. Messy. It wasn’t just losing him. It was how. It broke something in her. Took her a long time to even look like herself again.”
Jess kept pace, listening. This was the history beneath Ellie’s sarcasm, the weight behind her fierce loyalty.
“Then there was Cat,” Dina continued. “First real girlfriend. All-consuming. And when that blew up, it confirmed every fear Ellie had—that getting close just ends in ruins. That she’s cursed or some shit.” Dina glanced at her. “Until you.”
Jess shook her head. “I’m not anything special.”
“You are to her. She fought Maria for you. Do you get that? Maria, who she respects more than anyone. She stood there and basically bet her place in this town on you.” Dina’s voice hardened. “And you handed her back the same isolation she’s been fighting her whole life. Told her her optimism was a liability. That’s cold, Jess.”
The truth of it, laid out so bluntly, was a physical blow. Jess’s throat tightened. “I don’t know how to do this. The… closeness. It’s a vulnerability. It gets people killed.”
“So does being alone,” Dina shot back. “Ellie knows that better than anyone. She’s not asking you for a fairy tale. She’s asking you to not be a fortress. To give her one goddamn brick from your wall.”
They reached a lookout point, a rocky clearing that offered a dizzying view of the valley below. Jackson looked like a toy model, smoke curling from chimneys into the vast, unforgiving sky. The scale of it, the fragility, made Jess feel impossibly small.
“My sister,” Jess said, the words torn from a place she kept sealed. She hadn’t planned to say it. It just came out, flat and quiet. “Her name was Liza. Two years younger.”
Dina stayed silent, just listening.
“We were in a Fedra school in Pittsburgh. Not a QZ, one of their ‘re-education’ facilities for orphans. It was… orderly. And brutal. You followed the schedule, you ate your gruel, you stayed in line.” Jess’s hand went to the inner pocket of her jacket, where the worn journal rested. “Liza had a cough. It got bad. Fever. In the old world, it would’ve been antibiotics, a week in bed. In Fedra school, it was a ‘contagion risk.’”
She could still smell the antiseptic and mildew of the infirmary isolation room. The cold terror.
“They took her. Said it was for quarantine. I heard her crying for me from down the hall. They wouldn’t let me in.” Jess stared at the distant mountains, her vision blurring. “Three days later, the head instructor told me she’d ‘succumbed to respiratory complications.’ They gave me her ident tag and a five-minute slot to collect her things from the dorm. That was it. No body. No goodbye. Just a statistical reduction in the population.”
The wind whipped across the clearing. It was the only sound for a long moment.
“After that, the only thing that mattered was the math. Calorie intake, safe routes, threat assessment. People… people were variables. Unpredictable. Liabilities. Love was just a pre-existing condition for grief.” She finally looked at Dina. Her face was grim. “That’s what I am. That’s what I brought here. That’s the black hole.”
Dina didn’t offer pity. She didn’t look away. Her eyes were fierce. “God, you’re both so fucking stupid.”
Jess blinked, thrown.
“That’s what Ellie needs to hear,” Dina said, stepping closer. “Not your fucking survival statistics. That. The name. Liza. The crying from down the hall. The five-minute slot.” Her voice cracked. “Don’t you see? That’s the brick. That’s the only thing that’s gonna make her understand you’re not just a machine. That you’re as terrified as she is.”
The realization hit Jess like a bucket of ice water. She had been trying to communicate her worth through competence, her damage through clinical facts. She’d offered the blueprint of her defenses, not the wreckage of what they were built upon.
Ellie had offered her a raw nerve, and Jess had handed her a field manual.
“Shit,” Jess whispered.
“Yeah,” Dina said. “Shit. Now, what are you gonna do about it?”
Jess turned from the vast view, her focus telescoping down to a single point: the cluster of buildings below, one particular house. The weight of the journal in her pocket was no longer just an anchor. It was a key, heavy and terrifying.
“I’m going to talk to her,” Jess said. The words felt alien, dangerous.
“Good,” Dina nodded. “And for the record? Your sister’s name was Liza. Say it. Keep saying it. So she doesn’t just become another one of your statistics.”
Jess felt a fracture in the ice around her chest, a painful, necessary thaw. She touched the journal through the fabric. Liza.
“Let’s finish the patrol,” she said, her voice firmer.
Dina gave a small, approving smile. “Alright. But hurry up. You’ve got a bigger mess to clean up back in town.”
They headed back down the trail, the pace quicker now, purposeful. The forest seemed less like a buffer and more like a pathway. With every step toward Jackson, Jess rehearsed the words, the confession, the name—scared out of her mind, but finally, for the first time, moving toward something instead of just away from everything else.
With every step toward Jackson, Jess rehearsed the words, the confession, the name—scared out of her mind, but finally, for the first time, moving toward something instead of just away from everything else. The afternoon had bled into a gray, cold evening by the time she stood across from Ellie’s small house, its windows glowing warm yellow against the deepening blue. She felt her lungs tighten, the old urge to turn and dissolve into the shadows almost overpowering the new, fragile need to knock.
Her boots were loud on the wooden steps. She knocked, three sharp raps that sounded far too confident for the chaos churning inside her.
There was a long pause, then the door opened just enough to frame Ellie’s face. Her expression was neutral, wiped clean of its usual sarcastic life. “Yeah?”
“Can I come in?” Jess’s voice came out rough.
Ellie studied her for a heartbeat that felt like a year, then pushed the door open wider without a word, stepping back. She didn’t smile. She just walked to the small wood stove and nudged a log with her boot, her back to Jess. The room was cluttered with sketches, a guitar in the corner, a lived-in mess that felt suddenly like a museum Jess wasn’t supposed to be in.
Jess shut the door, sealing herself in. The warmth was immediate, stifling. “Dina talked to me. On patrol.”
“Figured.” Ellie didn’t turn around. “She’s good at that.”
“She told me about Joel. And about Cat.” Jess forced the words out, watching the line of Ellie’s shoulders stiffen. “She said I handed you back your isolation. She was right.”
Ellie finally turned, leaning against the wall by the stove. Her arms were crossed. The coldness there was a deliberate wall, and it worked. It kept Jess at a distance. “So this is, what? An apology tour? Because you don’t owe me anything, Jess. You made your position clear. It’s all survival math. I get it.”
“It’s not.” The denial was sudden, forceful. Jess fumbled for the journal in her inner pocket, her fingers clumsy. “The math… it’s just what’s left. After. It’s the scaffolding you build around the hole so you don’t fall in.”
Ellie’s eyes flicked to the worn leather book but gave nothing away. She waited.
The air felt too thick to breathe. Jess looked down at the journal in her hands, its edges softened from years of handling. “I had a sister. Liza.” Saying the name aloud in this quiet room was like breaking a sacred, terrible silence. “She died in a Fedra school. From a cough. They called it a ‘contagion risk’ and took her. I could hear her crying for me from down this hallway that smelled like mildew and bleach. They wouldn’t let me in.”
Ellie had gone very still. The defensive angle of her body softened, just a fraction.
“Three days later, they told me she’d ‘succumbed.’ They gave me five minutes to get her stuff.” Jess’s thumb rubbed over the journal’s cover. “That’s the… the variable. That’s the statistical reduction. That’s what all the math is for. To make sure that never happens again, to me or to anyone I’m… responsible for. So when you ask me to fight for something that isn’t just staying alive, my whole system screams that it’s a trapdoor. That opening it means hearing someone cry for you down a hall and not being able to get to them. Ever again.”
She was shaking now. She hated it. “You asked for a brick. That’s… that’s not a brick. That’s the whole fucking foundation. And it’s rotten.”
The silence that followed was different from the one that greeted her at the door. This one was full, heavy with shared understanding. Ellie uncrossed her arms, letting them hang at her sides. Her gaze traveled from Jess’s face to the journal and back again. The coldness in her eyes had melted into something far more weary and complex.
“Show me,” Ellie said, her voice quiet.
Jess blinked. “What?”
“The journal. You carry it everywhere. Show me something in it.”
It was the last thing Jess expected. A test, but not a cruel one. An asking. Hesitantly, she opened the book, its pages rustling. She bypassed the maps, the notes on filter techniques and fungal growth patterns. She stopped on a page near the middle, worn smoother than the others.
There were no words on it. Just a small, careful pencil drawing of a rabbit, its lines shaky and childish. Underneath, in a different, messier ink, was a single word: Liza.
She held the book out, her arm trembling slightly.
Ellie stepped forward and took it. She didn’t grab it; her fingers were careful, almost reverent. She looked at the drawing for a long time, her brow furrowed not in anger, but in a deep, painful empathy. She traced the edge of the page with her thumb, a gesture so tender it made Jess’s chest ache.
“You’re wrong, you know,” Ellie said, her voice husky. She didn’t look up. “The foundation isn’t rotten. It’s just… it’s load-bearing. It’s holding up a lot of goddamn weight.” Finally, she met Jess’s eyes. The hurt was still there, but it was no longer a barrier. It was a bridge. “You don’t have to carry it by yourself.”
Ellie closed the journal gently and held it back out to her. Jess took it, their fingers brushing. The contact was electric, a current of pure, undiluted feeling in the quiet room.
“Maria was wrong, too,” Ellie murmured, looking down at the space between them. “You’re not a black hole. You’re just someone who got stuck in the dark. I know the way out sucks. It’s fucking terrifying. But… you don’t have to walk it alone.”
Jess had no words left. The rehearsed speech was ash. All she could do was stand there, the journal clasped to her chest, and feel the terrifying, glorious dismantling of her own defenses. Ellie watched her, waiting, her own walls now lying in pieces around them both.
Then, very slowly, Ellie reached out. Not for the journal. Her hand came up and her knuckles just barely grazed Jess’s cheek, wiping away a wetness Jess hadn’t even realized was there. The gesture was so simple, so devastatingly kind, it undid her completely.
Jess let out a shaky breath, her eyes closing for a second. When she opened them, Ellie’s hand had dropped back to her side, but the connection remained, fragile and luminous in the firelight.
“Stay,” Ellie said. It wasn’t a demand. It was an offering, just one word, filled with every difficult, dangerous promise of the future.
Jess stared at her, the single word echoing in the quiet. Stay. It wasn’t a challenge or a demand. It was a question she had to answer with more than words. She gave a faint, almost imperceptible nod.
Ellie’s shoulders dropped a fraction, a release of held breath. She turned and walked toward the worn sofa, its cushions dented from use. She sat, leaving space. An invitation. Jess followed, each step across the creaking floorboards feeling monumental. She perched on the edge of the couch, putting the journal on the low table, her body rigid. The warmth from the wood stove baked her right side.
The silence pooled around them again, but this time it was a different creature. It wasn’t the hostile quiet of the vegetable garden or the hollow silence of her own guilt. This was thick, patient, waiting to be shaped by whoever was brave enough to speak first. Outside, the wind picked up, rattling the window in its frame. The fire popped.
Ellie didn’t push. She just sat, her hands resting on her knees, staring at the glowing coals behind the stove’s isinglass door. Her profile was lit in orange and shadow.
“You asked for a brick,” Jess finally said, her voice sandpaper-rough. The memory of Dina’s words on the ridge—That’s the brick—clashed with the deeper truth now rising in her throat. “But the foundation… it’s worse than I said. It’s not just loss. It’s what I had to do to survive it.”
Ellie turned her head to look at her, her eyes catching the firelight. She said nothing.
Jess focused on a water stain on the ceiling, her mind cycling back to a stretch of broken highway three winters ago. The words began to spill, low and monotone, as if reciting a report. “A year after Liza. I was trying to get west. I fell in with a group. Three men and a woman. Smugglers. They seemed solid. Efficient. I was fifteen and I thought efficiency was the same as safety.”
She swallowed, the memory of their faces—not their names, she never learned their names—flashing behind her eyes. “They had a truck that ran on siphoned ethanol. We were clearing a roadblock outside of Lincoln. It was going fine. Then the leader, a guy with a shaved head and a tattoo of a snake on his neck, looked at me. Really looked. He said, ‘You’re small. You’ll be good for trading at the next station. FEDRA leftovers are always popular.’ The woman laughed. It wasn’t a joke.”
The room grew colder despite the stove. Jess’s hands were fists in her lap, knuckles white.
“They didn’t even tie me up. They were that confident. That arrogant. They just shoved me in the back of the truck with the crates and told me to be quiet. The woman sat with a rifle pointed at me, not even watching the road. She was chewing on a piece of jerky.” Jess’s voice hitched, the detail visceral and ugly. “I could smell it. Gamey and salty. I was so hungry. And I knew what ‘trading’ meant. I’d heard the stories from other kids in the school. It wasn’t for labor.”
Ellie had gone perfectly still, a statue beside her.
“We stopped for the night in a half-collapsed gas station. They were drinking. The woman fell asleep on watch. The snake tattoo guy, he came to check on me. Just to look.” Jess’s breath shortened. She could still smell the gasoline and rot. “He unlocked the truck’s back door. Just slid it open. He was grinning. He said, ‘Might as well get an early start on the merchandise.’ He reached for me.”
Jess stopped. The next part lived in her muscles, in the phantom weight of the tire iron her fingers had closed around in the dark. It wasn’t heroism. It was a silent, animal scramble in the pitch black of that truck bed.
“I killed him with a tire iron I’d hidden under a sack. The sound was… wet. The woman woke up. I shot her with her own rifle. The other two came running.” The sentences were short, clinical, brutal. “I used the pump island for cover. It was target practice. They were drunk and surprised. I wasn’t. I’d been planning it since the highway. Since the word ‘merchandise.’ I shot the second man in the throat. The last one tried to run. I shot him in the back. Then I walked over and shot him again in the head. To be sure.”
The echo of the gunshots seemed to hang in Ellie’s quiet living room. Jess was trembling now, a full-body quake she couldn’t suppress. She was back there, standing in the freezing dark, the coppery smell of blood mixing with gasoline, surrounded by four bodies, the silence afterward more deafening than the gunfire.
“I sat on the curb until the sun came up,” she whispered, the clinical tone gone, replaced by a hollow, broken sound. “I checked all their pockets. Took their ammo, their water, a pair of socks that didn’t have holes. I siphoned the fuel from their truck into cans. I did the math. I survived. And I… I felt nothing. Not relief. Not horror. Just cold. An empty, frozen cold that hasn’t really left since. That’s the real foundation. That silence inside after the noise. That’s what I bring here.”
A choked sob escaped her, sharp and involuntary. She clamped a hand over her mouth, as if to shove it back in. The shame was a hot flood, burning through the cold. She had never told anyone. The story had festered inside her, a private rot.
Then, movement. Ellie shifted on the couch. She didn’t speak. She simply closed the space between them, her body warm and solid against Jess’s shaking frame. An arm slid around Jess’s shoulders, pulling her in. Jess stiffened for a second, every instinct screaming to bolt, to flee the comfort as if it were a threat.
But Ellie just held her. Firm, steady, unflinching. Her other hand came up and rested in Jess’s short, choppy hair, fingers gently carding through it. No words of pity. No empty assurances. Just an anchor in the storm of memory.
Jess collapsed into the touch. She turned her face into Ellie’s shoulder, and the tears came then, not the silent tracks from before but deep, wrenching sobs that tore from a place she thought had died in that gas station lot. She cried for Liza, for the fifteen-year-old girl covered in blood, for the years of carrying that frozen silence alone. Ellie held her through it all, her cheek resting against Jess’s temple, her own breathing a slow, even counter-rhythm to Jess’s wreckage.
The fire crackled. The wind moaned outside. And in the dim light, Jess held onto the solid reality of Ellie’s arms, the first real warmth she’d felt in years, beginning, finally, to thaw.