Read Online Torn (Cold Awakening) by Robin Wasserman - Free Book Online Page A

to.”
    I didn’t know what to say.
    “So when is this joyous reunion taking place?” I asked finally.
    “They say I can get out of here in another week.” She smiled. “You should go. I don’t want to fight. Not with you.”
    I stood up. “Fine. But I’m coming back.”
    “I’ll believe it when I see it,” she said, but she didn’t tell me not to, and that was at least a start.
    I was almost out the door when she called my name, so softly that I almost thought I’d imagined it.
    “I lied,” she said, louder. “Jude’s been texting. Once a day. I don’t write back.”
    “Oh.”
    “But I don’t delete them.”
    “Okay.”
    I waited.
    “One of the texts was for you,” she said. “If you ever showed up. I don’t know what made him think I would even read it.”
    Maybe because he knows you, as much as you know him.
    “It’s a zone,” she said, then scribbled something on a scrap of paper and gave it to me. It was nothing but a random scramble of letters and digits. “He says when you’re ready to see him, drop a text and he’ll meet you there.”
    “Where?”
    “‘Where the sky meets the sky.’ He said you’d understand.”
    Another riddle. Just as useless. “That’s it?”
    “That’s it,” Ani said. “Sorry.” She didn’t sound it. “If you ask me, you should forget the whole thing. Let him come to you. After what I saw …” She was talking about the kiss. I willed her not to make it real by saying it out loud. “… he will. Probably at the worst possible time.”
    It’s exactly what I was afraid of.
    Where the sky meets the sky.
    A mile past human sorrow.
    Where nature rises again.
    They meant something; they meant something to
me
. Jude wouldn’t have left a clue I didn’t know how to follow. I repeated the words, over and over, an unending litany, waiting for something to click. There was an echo of memory, enough to convince me that I had the answer, buried somewhere in my mind. But not enough to dig it up.
    Remember
, I willed myself, knowing that if I didn’t track him down soon, he would come for me again, at the worst possible time—or he would come for Riley, and I needed to get to him first.
    Remember.
    Remember.
    When I finally did, it wasn’t Jude’s clue—it was that word.
Remember.
    The place itself was a memory. The Windows of Memory, memorial to the fallen, windows that peered out on a sanitized corner of a flood zone, a shadowy city buried beneath the sea. I hadn’t been inside the museum since I was a kid—Riley and I always skirted its edge, walking the shore until we found ourselves alone with the water, its algae-slickened surface reflecting the clouds.
Where the sky meets the sky.
And always, on our way back to the car, dripping and content, we passed the sculpted glass antelope, memorial to the city’s forgotten victims. I’d paused to read the inscription only once, that first time, but the words must have etched themselves somewhere in my memory, and a network search confirmed my suspicions: “In the midst of our human sorrow, let us never lose sight of the greater tragedy:the death of millions, innocent victims of civilization. As cities fall, may nature rise again.”
    A mile past human sorrow, where nature rises again
; I knew where to find him.
    I wanted to be wrong. Because that was
our
place, Riley’s and mine. Riley had told me that he’d never brought anyone else there, not even Jude. He wasn’t supposed to know how much it meant to Riley, that it was the place he went to be alone—and now, the place he went to be with me.
    But that was the thing about Jude, as he so loved reminding us: He had a way of knowing things. Especially things he wasn’t supposed to know. Those were his favorites.
    I dropped a text at the anonymous zone.
I figured it out.
    The return message came a few seconds later, in the mouth of a cartoonish avatar, its sad puppy eyes and floppy puppy ears a mismatch with the lizardlike torso and dragon tail. It