Violet Eden Chapters 04 - Endless

the fact that more than a few sets of eyes were trained on everything I did, if Lincoln hadn’t taken to sneaking me dinner in my room, I wouldn’t have seen him at all. Or eaten.
    Luckily, we both knew spending too much time apart was not a good idea. Somehow we seemed to have found some kind of medium for our souls. It wasn’t perfect and although the physical pain – not to mention heartache – of being away from each other and around each other was constant – it was always intensified by extended periods of separation.
    Hence my nightly roomservice.
    ‘I’ll talk to her,’ he said, as we sat on my floor eating cold pasta. Well, Lincoln was eating it – I was basically inhaling it. I had missed lunch, again.
    I’d thought Lincoln had been a hard taskmaster, but Rainer took training to another level. When I wasn’t running laps in the enormous rooftop gym with its glass bubble ceiling – I was going through drills, lifting extreme weights, handling weapons or getting hit in the face. Repeatedly. By Rainer. She hit every other part of my body as well, but she focused on my face – reassuring me we’d always be able to gauge my progress by the amount of times I allowed her to smash it in.
    I tried to explain I wasn’t allowing anything.
    She disagreed.
    I shook my head at Lincoln. ‘No you will not.’ The last thing I wanted was him coming to my rescue. ‘Only one more week to go and I’m learning a lot.’
    Like what the ground looks like from close up.
    He nodded, but remained focused on the food I could tell he wasn’t enjoying. I might be fine with microwave dinners but Lincoln was a fresh-produce kind of guy.
    ‘Is Zoe ever in here?’ he asked, looking at her mess of a bed and opting for a subject change.
    I took another huge mouthful of spaghetti. ‘She’s usually hanging out with Spence and the other students.’ From her late-night stumbling around in our room, it was clear they got up to no good – aka … a lot of fun. But I was always too exhausted to tag along and find out what they really did.
    ‘I tried tocall Steph today, but I can never get through. Has Griff heard from them?’
    Lincoln nodded. ‘Today, briefly. Nothing new. Still on-track,’ he said discreetly, not wanting to go into any more detail while within Academy walls. ‘Griffin saw your parents today,’ he added, trying to sound casual.
    We’d had this conversation before. ‘I’ll go and see them soon. I haven’t exactly had a lot of free time.’
    ‘That’s not the reason and you know it.’
    True. It had more to do with still not knowing what to say to Dad and my inability to process the fact that I’d spent so long hating Evelyn – thinking she’d traded me off for her own advantage – that I couldn’t even look at her now. I’d treated her so badly and I didn’t know how to fix it. And … I had a feeling the two of them were growing … close, and I just didn’t know how to deal with that.
    ‘Is she still having fainting spells?’ I asked.
    ‘No. They gave her something to jumpstart her internal organs and it seems to have worked. They think it was something to do with her body readjusting to its earthly form.’
    Made sense. Griffin had said something like that, too.
    We sat in silence for a while. I finished off my pasta, cleaning the plate with a piece of bread. Lincoln had given up on his dinner.
    ‘What do you think it was like for her?’ I asked quietly.
    ‘I can’t imagine. According to her official debrief, she has no memory of being in Hell. Only that she was there.’
    But I knew better. She’d told me never to ask her and not because she didn’t remember – it was because she did. I suspected Lincoln knew that too.
    ‘She’syour mum, Vi. She gave up her first seventeen years with you, but she’s here now. I …’ He put his plate down on the tray beside him and stretched out his legs. ‘I was so mad with my mum after she died. I was mad at her for getting sick – thought she’d been too weak and made it easy for Nahilius to brainwash her.’
    ‘That’s not true.’
    He half smiled. ‘I know, but it was what I felt for a time. I guess it was my way of dealing with things until I was able to see the truth, that I just missed her.’
    I leaned my head back against the bed. ‘I’ll think about it.’
    He nodded and passed me a bowl of melted chocolate ice cream.
    Yum.
    I ate while he filled me in. More missing children. Phoenix had been spotted in a few places,