Enclave (17 page)

Eventually, I located the right object. I slid it in and heard a click. When I lifted the lid, I found the most marvelous thing. A book. Not
part
of one, not loose pages
. A whole book.
And it wasn’t flimsy like the ones I’d found down in the tunnel. Still, I was almost afraid to touch it.

The beige front had raised letters and green paint, outlining a fanciful design with a girl in strange clothes, a winged brat, and a bird. With some effort, I read the letters: “
The Day Boy and the Night Girl.
Fairy tales by George MacDonald.” Though I understood most of the words, others escaped me. Enthralled and breathless, I opened it. The book made a little popping sound, as if nobody had touched it in a long time. That was probably true. Using my finger to mark my place, I put more letters together slowly, and other words leaped out at me. “London: Arthur C. Fifield, 1904. Ed. by Greville MacDonald; printed by S. Clarke, Manchester.”

With great care, I turned the page, and my breath caught. Someone had
written
in the book. The Wordkeeper would be livid. In faded ink, it read: “with love to Gracie from Mary.” Those were names, I thought, and it implied this book had been a gift. Other hands had touched this, people who lived in the lost world. They’d known dreams like mine, and I’d never know how those stories ended. A marvelous sense of connection thrummed through me.

I forgot my worries. I forgot the danger. Using only my fingertips, I flipped to the next page, lightheaded with wonder.

There was once a witch who desired to know everything. But the wiser a witch is, the harder she knocks her head against the wall when she comes to it. Her name was Watho, and she had a wolf in her mind. She cared for nothing in itself—only for knowing it. She was not naturally cruel, but the wolf had made her cruel.

She was tall and graceful, with a white skin, red hair, and black eyes, which had a red fire in them. She was straight and strong, but now and then would fall bent together, shudder, and sit for a moment with her head turned over her shoulder, as if the wolf had got out of her mind onto her back.

“What do you have there?” Fade asked.

I almost hid it from him, and then with a burst of shocking relief, I remembered I didn’t have to. Wordless, I held the book out to him. He looked at it, and his hands were as reverent as mine had been. He read faster than me, and when he finished that first page, his gaze met mine, glazed with awe.

“We’ll take it,” I said. “It doesn’t weigh much.”

He slipped the book into my bag and went back to work. By dark, we had enough clean water to last us a few days. Secretly, I feared leaving this place because I’d gotten used to these two rooms. Inside didn’t scare me. Outside, that enormous, monstrous sky hung over everything, and the size of it made me want to hide.

But there was something different about the dark this time. I took off my glasses and stared up. A curve of silver hung amid the brighter specks; it looked to me like a curved dagger, pretty but deadly, as if it might slice the sky in two.

I didn’t let him see how terrified I was. Instead I geared up as if this were nothing more than a routine patrol. I checked my weapons and our supplies; I shouldered my bag with the resolve of a Huntress. I could handle night.

But you’re not a Huntress. You’re just a girl with six scars.

At least Fade had them too. Maybe I’d been cast out of my tribe, but I wasn’t alone. That made all the difference. If I’d been sent Topside on my own, I’d have already given up. It was simply too different from what I knew. But his calm resolve made me believe we might someday see the green land promised in his father’s stories. If we didn’t, it would be because it didn’t exist, not because we hadn’t tried.

As I stepped outside, a boom sounded, practically shaking the ground itself. I flattened myself against the building. While I cowered, water spilled down, like the pipes in the enclave, but a hundred times more powerful. It soaked me to the bone in no time, and I stood frozen in it, face upturned.

“Don’t worry. It’s rain.” Fade stood close enough for me to feel his heated breath against my ear. A shiver rolled through me, echoed in distant crashes that shook the ground beneath my feet. He lifted his face as well, drinking it in, and I gazed at him through that silver curtain, watching as it glazed his features, all pallor and prettiness. Droplets spiked his lashes, so that I wanted to—

I shouldn’t want that.
Rain.
Instead I focused on the other part of what I felt.

“It doesn’t burn,” I whispered.

In fact, it felt amazing. I hadn’t bathed recently, and this was the next best thing. I started to smile. I turned slowly, admiring the flashes of light. Rain pounded against the ground until it sounded like a chorus of running feet combined with shushing whispers. I’d never heard anything so lovely. I didn’t even mind we had to walk in it; I only hoped the book was safe and dry. At the first chance, I wanted to read more of it.

“No. They had that wrong too.”

Along with so many things.
For the first time, I felt sorry for the people trapped by the enclave rules, who would never break free, who would never see any of this. Who would live and die in the dark.

“I want to go back,” I said. “The elders need to know the truth.”

Fade put his hands on my shoulders. “They won’t listen, Deuce. They’ll kill us on sight. Besides … don’t you think I told them?”

Sickness boiled up inside me. They didn’t share the knowledge with us. Not even a whisper got out, after Fade’s arrival. None of us ever knew where he came from, nothing he’d seen or done. I’d thought his silence meant he didn’t
want
to talk, but now I realized the truth.

“They threatened you.”

“Not a threat, so much. I could fight for them or I could die.” He repeated what he’d said before, and only then, the enormity sank in for me.

All along, they’d known, and they’d chosen to keep us all in the dark. Literally, figuratively. I felt lost, as if I had nothing left to believe in.

“That’s why you never tried to fit in. Why you didn’t talk to anyone much.”

Besides Banner, the girl he’d said was his only friend—and maybe only because she shared his belief that things needed to change. If I’d helped instead of running away, maybe she wouldn’t have died. For the first time I accepted that the elders’ spies might’ve overheard our conversation. If they’d suspected her, my exchange with her had caused her death.

“I was afraid they’d hurt anyone I cared about. As an object lesson.”

“So you didn’t feel safe, the whole time you were there.”

He shrugged. “I had a place to sleep and food to eat. The work wasn’t that bad once I was trained, and people left me alone, mostly. It would’ve been worse up here.”

“I’m sorry. I had no idea.”

His silence said he didn’t want to talk about it anymore. I understood. There was no point in discussing things that couldn’t be changed.

We set off in the direction Fade said was north. Gradually hope sprang up within me, replacing the sick disillusionment. I hated walking off and leaving Thimble, Stone, and the brats, but I had to accept there was nothing I could do.

If a better place existed, we’d find it.

As we walked, I lost myself in the cool air and lashing water. It silvered the buildings, blurring them as if through a veil of tears. Fade watched the dark street and eyed the markings on the doors. The red and white paint hinted at hidden dangers.

“You’re in our territory,” a hard voice said.

The rush of the rain must have masked their footsteps because I hadn’t heard them. They came from behind and were just suddenly there, surrounding us in a full circle—all male, most younger than us, and they all carried weapons. But I couldn’t mistake their youth for weakness. In their eyes I saw a feral anger I’d never noticed in the enclave. I knew then Fade had spoken the truth. I understood why he’d chosen the more obvious risk of the Freaks and the darkness below.

Fade stepped forward, putting himself in front of me. It was pointless, as they’d come at us from all sides. So I turned, facing the gangers behind him. We’d fight back-to-back. He had made it clear what would happen if they took me. I’d die first.

Falling back on my training, I counted them.
Eight.
They all handled their weapons like they knew what to do with them, and they looked stronger than the average Freak, rested and well fed. This would be the toughest fight we’d ever faced. The prospect made me smile.

“We don’t want trouble,” Fade said. “We’re just passing through.”

The big one shook his head. “No, you’re not.”

Clearly he was in charge; the others looked to him for leadership, and they might scatter if he fell. I’d go after him first. In a smooth motion, I drew my daggers.

I grinned over my shoulder at Fade. “Let’s see how many we can kill.”

Resistance

I brought my knives up into a fighting stance. The weight of my club comforted me; even if I couldn’t use it and stay close enough to Fade to guard his back, I liked knowing I had it. The gangers eyed us as if wondering whether we could be as good as we claimed. I guessed we were about to find out.

The headman rushed me and I met his swing with a dagger in the wrist. Quick in and out, I didn’t want to lose my weapon. He danced back with a cry of pain, his eyes wide with disbelief. Soon I had three on me, but I hadn’t been running in the tunnels all day. I had meat in my belly and a night’s sleep behind me.

I blocked their movements with graceful speed; I never felt beautiful unless I was fighting, and even then it was something that went beyond skin and bone into the kinetic joy of successive movements. Kick, thrust, slash. I never doubted Fade at my back. I never faltered.

The big ganger went down first. I took another one before they broke and ran. Their footsteps pounded away through the rain, leaving me staring at a couple of bodies, and blood thinning away to pink trickles. I turned to Fade and found him smiling down at me, his lashes tangled and damp.

“I don’t think we need to worry about them,” I said.

“Not unless they bring more. And they will, next time.”

“Then what’re we standing here for?”

He answered by setting the pace. We walked through the night. Fade guided us. He used the compass on his watch. I’d noticed it underground, but I didn’t know what it meant until I saw him using it. I’d always navigated by counting steps; that was how small my world was before.

“It tells me which way is north,” he explained.

“Did your sire ever say how far north you’d have to go?” The distance and space aboveground still bothered me. If I watched my feet as I walked and didn’t think about it, I could manage to function. But it was all so vast, and I felt tinier than ever.

“No. He didn’t say a lot of things.”

“At least you remember him. Sires and dams never played much part in the enclave. I mean, some Breeder looked after us, but we never knew…” I trailed off, wondering why I was telling him. It didn’t matter.

According to Fade’s watch, we had been walking for two hours when the rain stopped. It left everything clean, though I was wet and cold. The buildings climbed to insane, unimaginable heights—and yet they were obviously dead, relics of the old days. I had the impression of immense solitude laden with expectation, like when we dragged our dead out into the tunnels and left them for the Freaks. We were alone … but not wholly. Eyes weighed on me from unseen hiding places and left me uneasy.

Birds swooped after the small, furry creatures that scampered in the shadows. A fat, brave one paused some distance away, gnawing on a seed. This thing, I recognized; relief surged through me. I knew how to snare one, if we needed to eat. It made me feel more settled—not
everything
had changed.

Fade followed my gaze and nodded. “Rats live up here too.”

Other animals prowled the dark along with us, different than any I’d seen before. Herds of something with horns clattered down the streets.
Deer
, Fade said. The word meant nothing to me, except he promised they made good eating. They were fast, though, and too big for a simple snare. More cries split the silence: growls and rumbles and yowls. I couldn’t imagine what made those noises.

“Where is everyone?” I whispered.

The Wordkeeper had taught us enough that I knew these cities used to be filled with people, teeming crowds of them. Of course, he’d also taught us that the sky blazed fire and the rain would burn our skin from our meat and leave nothing but bones. So I couldn’t count on anything I’d learned before.

Fade hesitated, looking young and unsure. “My dad said they left the city a long time ago. That people went north and west to get away.”

“From what?”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe we can find out,” I said. “We found one book and we weren’t even looking for it. There might be more.”