Believe Me (Shatter Me Book 6.5)

At first, I hear only Ella’s laughter, the effortless joy of a carefree moment. Her hair whips around her as she runs, streaming in the sun. I enjoy this sight more than I know how to explain; she runs through the several remaining feet of undeveloped land into the center of an abandoned street, all with the uninhibitedness of a child. I’m so entranced by this scene that it’s a moment before I register the distant scream of an ungreased hinge: the repetition of steel abrading itself. My feet finally hit pavement as I follow her down the neglected road, the impact of my boots on the ground signifying the sudden change in place with hard, definitive thuds. The sun bears down on me as I run, surprising me with its severity, the light undiminished by cloud or tree cover. I slow down as the distant whine grows louder, and when the source of this keening finally comes into view, I skid to a sudden stop.

A playground.

Rusted and abandoned, a set of swings screeching as the wind pushes around their empty seats.

I’ve seen such things before; playgrounds were common in a time before The Reestablishment; I saw a great deal of them on my tours of old unregulated territory. They were built most often in areas where there existed large groupings of homes. Neighborhoods.

Playgrounds were not known to be found at random near densely forested areas like the Sanctuary, nor were they built for no reason in the middle of nowhere.

Not for the first time, I’m desperate to understand where we are.

I wander closer to the rusting structure, surprised to feel a distinct lack of resistance when I step onto the haunted play area. The playground is built atop material that gives a bit when I walk; it seems to be made from something like rubber, surrounded otherwise by concrete pavers anchored by metal benches, paint peeling in sharp ribbons. There are long stretches of dirt beyond the borders, where no doubt grass and trees once thrived.

I frown.

This couldn’t possibly be any part of the Sanctuary—and yet there’s no question at all that we’re still within Nouria’s jurisdiction.

I look around then, searching for Ella.

I catch a glimpse of her before she disappears down yet another poorly paved road—the asphalt ancient and cracked—and silently berate myself for falling behind. I’m about to cross what appears to be the remains of an intersection when suddenly she’s back, her distant figure rushing into view before coming to a halt.

She noticed I was gone.

It’s a small gesture—I realize this even as I react to it—but it makes me smile nonetheless. I watch her as she spins around, searching the street for me, and I lift a hand to let her know where I am. When our eyes finally meet she jumps up and down, waving me forward.

“Hurry,” she cries, cupping her mouth with her hands.

I clear the distance between us, analyzing my surroundings as I do. The old street signs have been vandalized so completely they’re now rendered meaningless, but there remain a few traffic lights still hung at intervals. Relics of the old speaker system installed in the early days of The Reestablishment have survived as well, the ominous black boxes still affixed to lampposts.

People used to live here, then.

When I finally reach Ella, I take her hand, and she immediately tugs me forward, even as she’s slightly out of breath. Running has always been harder for Ella than it is for me. Still, I resist her effort to drag me along.

“Love,” I say. “Where are we?”

“I’m not going to tell you,” she says, beaming. “Even though I have a feeling you’ve already figured it out.”

“This is unregulated territory.”

“Yes.” She smiles brighter, then dims. “Well, sort of.”

“But how—”

She shakes her head before attempting to pull me forward again, now with greater difficulty. “No explanations yet! Come on, we’re almost there!”

Her energy is so effervescent it makes me laugh. I watch her a moment as she struggles to move me, her effort not unlike that of a cartoon character. I imagine it must frustrate her not to be able to use her powers on me, but then I remind myself that Ella would never do something like that even if she could; she’d never overpower me just to get what she wanted. That’s not who she is.

She is, and always has been, a better person than I will ever be.

I take her in then, her eyes glinting in the sun, the wind tousling her hair. She is a vision of loveliness, her cheeks flushed with feeling and exertion.

“Aaron,” she says, pretending to be mad. I don’t think it productive to tell her, but I find this adorable. When she finally lets go of my hand, she throws up her arms in defeat.

I’m smiling as I tuck a windblown hair behind her ear; her pretend anger dissipates quickly.

“You really don’t want to tell me anything about where we’re going?” I ask. “Not a single thing? I’m not allowed to ask even one clarifying question?”

She shakes her head.

“I see. And is there any particular reason why our destination is such a highly guarded secret?”

“That was a question!”

“Right.” I frown, squinting into the distance. “Yes.”

Ella puts her hands on her hips. “You’re going to ask me another question, aren’t you?”

“I just want to know how Nouria managed to draw unregulated territory into her protection. I’d also like to know why no one told me she had plans to do such a thing. And why—”

“No, no, I can’t answer those questions without spoiling the surprise.” Ella blows out a breath, thinking. “What if I promise to explain everything when we get there?”

“How much longer until we get there?”

“Aaron.”

“Okay,” I say, fighting back a laugh. “Okay. No more questions.”

“You swear?”

“I swear.”

She makes an exclamation of delight before kissing me quickly on the cheek, and then takes my hand again. This time, I let her drag me forward, following her, without another word, onto an unmarked road.

The street curves as we go, unwilling even now to reveal our destination. We ignore the sidewalks, as cars aren’t to be expected here, but it still feels strange to be walking down the center of a street, our feet following the faded yellow lines of another world, avoiding potholes as we go.

There are more trees here than I expected, more green leaves and patches of living grass than I thought we’d find. These are vestiges of another time, still managing to survive, somehow, despite everything. The limp greenery seems to multiply the farther we walk, the half-bare trees planted on either side of the pockmarked road clasping branches overhead to form an eerie tunnel around us. Sunlight shatters through the wooden webbing above, casting a kaleidoscope of light and shadow across our bodies.

I know we must be getting close to our destination when Ella’s energy changes, her emotions a jumble of joy and nerves. It’s not long before the dead road finally opens up onto an expansive view—and I come to a violent halt.

This is a residential street.

Just under a dozen houses, each several feet apart, separated by dead, square lawns. My heart pounds wildly in my chest, but this is nothing I haven’t seen before. It’s a vision of a bygone era; these homes, like so many others on unregulated turf, are in various states of decay, succumbing to time and weather and neglect. Roofs collapsing, walls boarded up, windows broken, front doors hanging from their hinges, all of them half-destroyed. It’s like so many other neighborhoods around the continent, save one extraordinary difference.

In the center is a home.

Not a house—not a building—but a home, salvaged from the wreckage. It’s been painted a simple, tasteful shade of white—not too white—its walls and roof repaired, the front door and shutters a pale sage green. The sight gives me déjà vu; I’m reminded at once of another house of a different vintage, in a different place. Robin’s-egg blue.

The difference between them, however, is somehow palpable.

My parents’ old house was little more than a graveyard, a museum of darkness. This house is bright with possibility, the windows big and brilliant, and beyond them: people. Familiar faces and bodies, crowding together in the front room. If I strain, I can hear their muted voices.

This must be some kind of dream.

The lawn is in desperate need of water, the single tree in the front yard withering slowly in the sun. There’s a duo of rusty garbage bins visible in a side alley, where a surprise street cat languishes in a streak of sunlight. I can’t recall the last time I saw a cat. I feel as if I’ve stepped into a time machine, into a vision of a future I was told I’d never have.

“Ella,” I whisper. “What did you do?”

She squeezes my hand; I hear her laugh.

I turn slowly to face her, a wealth of feeling rising up inside me with a force so great it scares me.

“What is this?” I ask, hardly able to speak. “What am I looking at?”

Ella takes a deep breath, exhaling as she clasps her hands together. She’s nervous, I realize.

This astonishes me.

“I had the idea a long time ago,” she says, “but it wasn’t workable back then. I always wanted us to be able to reclaim these old neighborhoods; it always seemed like such a waste to lose them altogether. We’re still going to have to demolish most of them, because the majority are too far gone for repair, but that means we can redesign better, too—and it means we can tie it all into the new infrastructure package, creating jobs for people.

“I’ve been in talks with our newly contracted city planner, by the way.” She smiles tightly. “I never got to tell you about that yesterday. We’re hoping to rebuild these areas in phases, prioritizing the transplantation of the disabled and the elderly and those with special needs. The Reestablishment did everything it could to throw anyone they deemed unfit into the asylums, which means none of the compounds they built made provisions for the old or infirm or all the orphans—which, I mean—of course, you already know all this.” She looks sharply away at that, hugging herself tightly. When she looks up again I’m struck by the potency of her grief and gratitude.

“I really don’t think I’ve said thank you enough for all that you’ve done,” she says, her voice breaking as she speaks. “You have no idea how much it meant to me. Thank you. So much.”

She throws herself into my arms, and I hold her tight, still stunned into silence. I feel all her emotions at once, love and pain and fear, I realize, for the future. My heart is jackhammering in my chest.

Ella has always been deeply concerned with the well-being of the asylum inmates. After reclaiming Sector 45, she and I would talk late into the night about her dreams for change; she often said the first thing she’d do after the fall of The Reestablishment would be to find a way to reopen and staff the old hospitals—in anticipation of the immediate transfer of asylum residents.

While Ella was in recovery, I launched this initiative personally.

We’ve begun staffing the newly open hospitals not only with reclaimed doctors and nurses from the compounds but with supplies and soldiers from local sector headquarters all across the continent. The plan is to assess each asylum victim before deciding whether they need continued medical treatment and/or physical rehabilitation. Any healthy and able among them will be released back into the care of their living relatives, or else found safe accommodations.

Ella has thanked me for doing this a thousand times, and each time I’ve assured her that my efforts were nominal at best.

Still, she refuses to believe me.

“There’s no one in the whole world like you,” she says, and I can practically feel her heart beating between us. “I’m so grateful for you.”

These words cause me an acute pain, a kind of pleasure that makes it hard to breathe. “I am nothing,” I say to her. “If I manage to be anything, it is only because of you.”

“Don’t say that,” she says, hugging me tighter. “Don’t talk about yourself like that.”

“It’s true.”

I never would’ve been able to get things done so quickly for her if Ella hadn’t already won over the military contingent, a feat managed almost entirely through rumor and gossip regarding her treatment of the soldiers from my old sector.

During her brief tenure in 45, Ella gave soldiers leave to reunite with their families, allocated those with children larger rations, and removed execution as a punishment for any infraction, minor or major. She regularly shrugs off these changes as if they were nothing. To her, they were casual declarations made over a meal, a young woman waving a fork around as she raged against the fundamental dignities denied our soldiers.

But these changes were radical.

Her effortless compassion toward even the lowest foot soldiers gained Ella loyalty across the continent. It took little work, in the end, to convince our North American infantrymen and -women to take orders from Juliette Ferrars; they moved quickly when I bade them to do so on her behalf.

Their superiors, however, have proven an altogether different struggle.

Even so, Ella doesn’t see yet just how much power she wields, or how significantly her point of view changes the lives of so many. She refuses herself, as a result, any claim to credit; attributing her decisions to what she calls “a basic grasp of human decency.” I tell her, over and over again, how rare it is to find any among us who’ve retained such decency. Even fewer remain who can look beyond their own struggles long enough to bear witness to the suffering of others; fewer still, who would do anything about it.

That Juliette Ferrars is incapable of seeing herself as an exception is part of what makes her extraordinary.

I take a deep, steadying breath as I hold her, still studying the house in the distance. I hear the muted sound of laughter, the bustle of movement. A door opens somewhere, then slams shut, unleashing sound and clamor, voices growing louder.

“Where do you want these chairs?” I hear someone shout, the proceeding answer too quiet to be intelligible.

Emotional tremors continue to wreck me.

They are setting up for our wedding, I realize.

In our house.

“No,” Ella whispers against my chest. “It’s not true. You deserve every good thing in the world, Aaron. I love you more every single day, and I didn’t even think that was possible.”

This declaration nearly kills me.

Ella pulls back to look me in the eye, now fighting tears, and I can hardly look at her for fear I might do the same.

“You never complain when I want to eat every meal with everyone. You never complain when we spend hours in the Q in the evening. You never complain about sleeping on the floor of our hospital room, which you’ve done every single night for the last fourteen nights. But I know you. I know it must be killing you.” She takes a sharp breath, and suddenly she can’t meet my eyes.

“You need quiet,” she says. “You need space, and privacy. I want you to know that I know that—that I see you. I appreciate everything you do for me, and I see it, I see it every single time you sacrifice your comfort for mine. But I want to take care of you, too. I want to give you peace. I want to give you a home. With me.”

There’s a terrifying heat behind my eyes, a feeling I force myself always to kill at all costs, and which today I am unable to defeat entirely. It’s too much; I feel too full; I am too many things. I look away and take a sharp breath, but my exhalation is unsteady, my body unsteady, my heart wild.

Ella looks up, slowly at first, her expression softening at the sight of my face.

I wonder what she sees in me then. I wonder whether she’s able to see right through me even now, and then I surprise myself for wondering. Ella is the only one who’s ever bothered to wonder whether I’m more than I appear.

Still, I can only shake my head, not trusting myself to speak.

Ella experiences a sharp stab of fear in the intervening silence, and bites her lip before asking: “Was I wrong? Do you hate it?”

“Hate it?” I break away from her entirely at that, finding my voice only as a strange panic seizes me, making it hard for me to breathe. “Ella, I don’t . . . I’ve done nothing to deserve you. The way you make me feel—the things you say to me— It’s terrifying. I keep thinking the world will realize, any second now, how completely unworthy I am. I keep waiting for something horrible to happen, something to reset the scales and return me to hell, where I belong, and then all of this will just disappear. You’ll just disappear. God, just thinking about it—”

Ella is shaking her head. “You and I— Aaron, people like us think good things will disappear because that’s how it’s always been. Good things have never lasted in our lives; happiness has never lasted. And somehow we can only expect what we’ve experienced.”

I’m sustaining full-blown anxiety now, my traitorous body shutting down, and Ella takes my hands, anchoring me.

I look into her eyes even as my heart races.

“But do you know what I’ve realized?” she says. “I’ve realized that we have the power to break these cycles. We can choose happiness for ourselves and for each other, and if we do it often enough, it’ll become our new normal, displacing the past. Happiness will stop feeling strange if we see it every day.”

“Ella—”

“I love you,” she says. “I’ve always loved you. I’m not going anywhere.”

I take her into my arms then, pulling her tightly against me, breathing in the familiar scent of her. When she’s here, right here, it’s so much easier to breathe. She’s real when she’s in my arms.

“I don’t even know how to thank you for this,” I whisper into her hair, closing my eyes against the heat in my head, in my chest. “You have no idea what it means to me, love. It’s the greatest gift anyone has ever given me.”

She laughs then, soft and gentle.

“Don’t thank me yet,” she says, peering up. “The house still needs a lot of work. The exterior is in pretty good shape now, but the inside is still kind of a disaster. We were only able to get one of the rooms ready in time, but it was—”

“We?” I lean back, frowning.

Ella laughs out loud at the look on my face. “Of course we,” she says. “Did you think I did this all on my own? Everyone helped. They all gave up so much of their time to make this happen for you.”

I shake my head. “If people helped, they did it for you,” I point out. “Not me.”

“They care about you, too, Aaron.”

“That is a very generous lie,” I say, smiling now.

“It’s not a lie.”

“It’s possibly the biggest lie you’ve ever told.”

“It’s not! Even Ian helped. He taught me how to frame a wall—and he was so patient—and you know how he feels about me. Even Nouria helped. Well, especially Nouria. We couldn’t have done any of this without Nouria.”

I find this especially surprising, given her undisguised loathing of my existence. “She pulled this area into her protection? Just for me?”

Ella nods, then frowns. “Well. Yes. I mean, sort of. It’s also part of a larger plan.”

I smile wider at that. “Really,” I say.

Nouria’s involvement—and the involvement of the others—makes a great deal more sense if this project is in fact one small part of a broader initiative, though I keep this to myself. Ella seems incapable of believing how much everyone here hates me, and I don’t relish disabusing her of this notion.

“We’re going to build a campus for the Sanctuary,” she explains, “and this is the first phase. We had scouts do a ton of site visits beforehand; these are the best and most functional homes in the surrounding area, because some of them were used in various capacities by the local sector CCR and her subordinates.”

I raise my eyebrows, fascinated.

Ella never told me about this. She’s clearly been hiding this project from me for days—which is both concerning and not. Part of me is relieved to finally understand the distance I’ve felt between us, while the other part of me wishes I’d been involved.

“So, yeah, we’ve reclaimed several dozen acres of unregulated territory here,” she says. “All of which, up until a couple of weeks ago, were under military control. I figured that, as long as we need absolute security—which might be a while—we can’t live like we’re in prison. We’re going to need to expand the Sanctuary, and give our people here a real, viable life.

“It’s going to be a long road to recovery,” Ella adds with a sigh. “The work is going to be brutal. The least I can do is give proper shelter, privacy, and amenities to those dedicating their lives to its reconstruction. I want to rebuild all the houses in this area first. Then I want to build schools, and a proper hospital. We can safeguard some of the original undeveloped land, turning it into parks. I’m hoping it’ll one day become a private campus—a new capital—as we rebuild the world. And then, maybe one day when things are safer, we can let down our walls and reunite with the general public.”

“Wow.”

I detach from her a moment to look up and down the street, then into the distance. What she’s describing is an enormous undertaking. I can’t believe how much space they were already able to reclaim. “This is a remarkable idea, Ella. Truly. It’s brilliant.” I look back at her, forcing a smile. “I only wish I could’ve helped.”

“I really, really wanted to tell you about it,” she says, her brows knitting together. “But I couldn’t say anything because I knew you’d want to come see the area, and then you would’ve noticed all the building materials, and then you would’ve wanted to know why so many people were working so hard on this one house, and then you would’ve wanted to know who was going to live in it—”

“I wouldn’t have asked that many questions.”

She shoots me a hard look.

“No, you’re right.” I nod. “I would’ve ruined the surprise.”

“HEY!”

I spin around at the sound of the familiar voice. Kenji is coming around the side yard of the house. He’s holding a folding chair in one hand, and waving what appears to be a sprig of some kind of flower in the other. “You two coming in or what? Brendan is complaining about losing the light or some shit—he says the sun will be directly overhead in a couple of hours, which is apparently really bad for photos? Anyway, Nazeera is getting impatient, too; she says J needs to start getting ready soon.”

I stare at Kenji, then Ella, dumbfounded. She already looks perfect. “Get ready how?”

“I have to put on my dress,” she says, and laughs.

“And makeup,” Kenji shouts from across the street. “Nazeera and Alia say they need to do her makeup. And something about her hair.”

I stiffen. “You have a dress? But I thought—”

Ella kisses me on the cheek, cutting me off. “Okay, there might be a few more surprises left in the day.”

“I’m not sure my heart can handle any more surprises, love.”

“How’s this for a surprise?” Kenji says, leaning against the folding chair. “This beautiful piece of shit right here?” He gestures at the dilapidated house next door. “This one’s mine.”

That wipes the smile off my face.

“That’s right, buddy.” Kenji is grinning now. “We’re going to be neighbors.”