Chapter 123: 123 Shed Your Skin, Part Three

They ate terrible junk from convenience stores in the car the whole way but as they got closer to their destination Angharad wanted more and more to sit in a real place and eat food with cutlery.

"Come on," she said, in a wheedling voice, "I can be totally unrecognisable if I wear the right makeup and you could wear a hat. That way you'll just look like one of those people who always wears a hat, even inside."

"I don't need to worry about disguises. Nobody here knows what I look like."

"Yet."

"Fine. I'll wear a hat if you're that obsessed with dressing up in a costume."

He had an ugly baseball hat they found while thrifting. It advertised some team or another, not that Angharad cared.

He jammed it on his head and raised his eyebrows. "Satisfied?"

"Oh, deeply."

The restaurant they went into was half full with people in jeans and t-shirts eating weird looking, vaguely Italian-inspired food. Huge plates, oozing with cheese and oil, and carbohydrates as far as the eye can see.

Angharad waited for someone to seat them before looking over the menu. Jin sent suspicious looks to everyone in the room the whole time.

"Is there anything here you can actually eat?" he asked.

"What, like, vegetarian food? There's a whole section of the menu. Unless you mean lacking in dairy, in which case, no, I'm pretty sure there's cheese in almost everything."

"I thought you weren't able to eat onion and garlic anymore."

She shrugged. "I'm not really. But if you're that worried, I can have desert and you can have a real meal and I'll just steal all your complimentary bread."

"Fine." He rolled his eyes and looked back at the menu. "Is this place really selling macaroni salad with chunks of garlic bread in it? Why is this food so weird?"

"Oh, you should get that. For the full American experience."

She only ended up eating one of his bread sticks and drinking a whole glass of raspberry lemonade. Still, she had a better time than Jin, who eyed his plate packed with spaghetti, lasagne and chicken parmigiana with trepidation and didn't even touch the complementary salad.

"This is an entire day's worth of calories," he said.

"Efficient," she said, trying not to grin.

His eyes grew heavy once they'd eaten, paid and gone, so they went back to the hotel room for a rest.

"Is it really okay to have the room for another night?" she asked.

Jin put the hat on a side table and wrapped himself up in the covers with a groan. "We're doing the thing tonight, anyway. I don't want to have an afternoon nap in the car."

*

She was tired, too, but she couldn't sleep. Instead she folded her hands over her body and stared up at the ceiling.

Jin wasn't loud while he slept, and he wasn't loud when he woke up, either. She only noticed he was awake when she turned to see if he was still face first in the pillow and saw him looking at her through half-open eyes. He groaned, a pitiful sound, and closed them again.

"Do you actually eat like that in America?" he asked.

"Oh, please, you know what I eat and you know it's not that."

He pushed his face really hard into the pillow then sat up. "What are you thinking about?"

"I was so excited by the idea of being myself and using my own name when we got back to civilisation. Like, I had all those fake identities and that was fun and all, but I wanted to just be Angharad Silver. And then James ruined it and now I'm just walking away from all my stuff, all those beautiful things entire generations of my family owned."

"Maybe someone could go back for them." He pulled at her shoulder. "Sit up."

She pushed herself upright. "It's just stuff. None of that is going to bring any of them back."

"I know, but we should have a right to have the things our loved ones left us."

She nodded, and looked at her knees. "I don't know why it's so easy to walk away from the person I was three months ago. Maybe there is no real me. It turns out even Angharad Silver is just an identity I can leave behind."

He bumped her shoulder with his. "You'll always be just Angharad to me."

*

He set his watch alarm for 4pm and then they went back to resting until it went off.

"Are you ready?" he asked, his voice still rough with sleep.

"I don't think I could ever be ready for this." But she got up and fixed her clothes in front of the bathroom mirror, anyway. She looked over at the bed, as Jin neatly made it, erasing any sign of their presence there. "Leave the hat behind. It's hideous."

"You never change."

*

The scenery passed by as he drove. Angharad had no idea where they were, but Jin looked forward, his face serious, so she had to trust that he really knew where they were going.

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"So how does this work?" she asked.

"Freya made all the plans. You can trust them," he said.

"I'd trust plans you made, too!"

He turned on the radio. The station struggled to reach them, mostly static.

"Here's how it goes," he said. "We go to this place. Either we get in or we don't. Either we find answers or we don't. Either we get out alive or we don't."

"And then?"

"And then we either fly out of here or we get shot down in airspace."

"Okay, and if we survive?"

"Then we try to get back to where I live without being shot down over Northern Constructed Territory airspace."

"So, I guess if we get the good information, then we try to figure out how to rescue everyone still in Zapville."

He nodded. "But Freya will make that plan, not me. She's responsible for me getting you away from that guy."

"Well, I trust her abilities to make rescue plans. And yours. Because I kind of feel like my rescue was a team effort."

*

They abandoned the car when they got close to their destination and took a bus part of the way.

"People keep looking at us," Jin hissed at her.

"Because you look super suspicious," she said.

"Fix it," he demanded, like she was some kind of wizard.

She looked at the crowd around them, then back at Jin's face, at the way the hair fell in his eyes.

"Do you trust me?" she whispered.

He nodded. So she shrugged, and then kissed him. He leaned into it immediately and let her grab at his neck and direct his face. He was so pliant, so pretty, her handsome rescuer that just wanted to be bossed around.

When she pulled back and looked around everyone else on the bus was conspicuously looking away. She smirked at Jin, triumphant.

"How did you know?" he asked.

"Nobody likes to watch people make out on public transport," Angharad said. "Except me."

She alighted from the bus when he told her to. From there they went on foot the rest of the way, until they reached the barbed wire fence surrounding the building they needed to break into.

"We're about to break into a government facility," he said. "This could go horribly wrong. Any last thoughts?"

"You're a good kisser."

He blushed bright red. "Freya will be happy you said that."

"My answer to the threesome is still no."

Jin did his action hero thing and then they were in. Getting into the building felt too easy. The patrolling guards were too easy to evade, the locks too easy to break.

They walked down a hallway to a well lit room that seemed to be waiting for them. Too easy. Jin looked at her, and she could see in his eyes that he was thinking it, too.

He pushed the door open and waited for her to step in first before he followed. There was a pale figure watching a bank of monitors. It turned around and revealed 1090's face.

*

Zapville, two months after the twelve left

They'd taken to talking in code.

Rod Spark handed a device to Irene Yeoh and said, "Here's your magic box for making walls."

"I'll use it to make a fence. Are you ready to find the centre of the world?"

He nodded, and walked away. He was less annoying when he was useful.

Irene Yeoh put the device in her pocket and found 1090 in the hospital.

"I think it's time we have tea again," Irene said.

1090 closed the door behind her.

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