“How was your chat with Professor Crazy?”
Alex blinked against the glare of the sun. “You weren’t listening?”
“Nah.”
Her mind ached thinking of Duvall’s warnings about keeping one’s thoughts to one’s self. “I have a lot to tell you.”
Chase jumped off the picnic table. He slid his arm around her, leading her away from the shade of the towers and into the rays of the sun. “I have a feeling it won’t be a light conversation.”
“It may take a while.”
Chase let out a small laugh and pulled her in close. “Let’s save it for later. We have all the time in world.”
Alex nodded and curled her hand around the edges of a small note, the one she’d found in her pocket at the medical center. A scrawling of an hourglass. Had someone placed it there? Had her mind created it somehow? She wanted desperately to know, but she held her tongue and stuffed the note deeper into her pocket, saving it for another time. Chase was right. They did have time. A luxury she might never get used to.
She stepped away from him and stretched out her arms, opening her palms toward the heavens. And then, she did something she’d never done in life. She twirled. She threw back her head, absorbing the energy of the sunlight, and she spun and spun until her mind became the clouds and her vision became the whirling wind.
Alex had once believed that when she died everything that made her weak— her love, her sadness, her pain—would all spill out of her body and into the world. And maybe once she really truly died, whenever that might be, if ever that might be, her emotions would leave her, since there would be nothing to contain them. They would dissolve into the air until they were nothing, or perhaps even find the closest object to cling to. But not love. Love, she believed, would ride the wind until it found the sky, shining its beauty on the world below.
Perhaps that is the only thing truly immortal.