The Dark and Hollow Places (27 page)

Next to me my sister’s wrapped an arm through the ladder and points the crossbow at the head of the nearest plague rat. Without any emotion or hesitation she pulls the trigger and it collapses, eyes falling slowly shut.

“Get him out of here,” Ox grunts.

It takes four men to drag a screaming and fighting Elias away. Through it all Ox stands above us, blocking the cable-car platform. My sister doesn’t bother looking at him. Instead she shoots another plague rat, clearing a path for us below.

I wait for Ox to pronounce some sort of sentence but instead he just stares at me, his hands buried in the pockets of his thick coat as if trying to figure out what it will take to
break me. I smile at him, cold and mean, thinking, Nothing. I will never break for you.

Ox narrows his eyes and nods his head before turning to the few Recruiters left standing guard by the cable car. “You can let them up at sunset,” he says. “Not before.”

I have no idea what any of this means, but it can’t be good, because one of the Recruiter’s eyes go wide and he glances at me, looking concerned. “There’s a snowstorm coming in over the horizon. Should be here by the afternoon. We weren’t even going to put the other Sweepers out tonight.”

Ox shrugs. “Maybe it will get cold enough to slow the rotters down.” And with that he walks off, leaving my sister and me clinging to the ladder.

The Recruiter, a slightly older man with gray at his temples, looks at us with a deep furrow between his eyebrows. He stares at my bare hands—I didn’t have time to find any gloves. He checks over his shoulder, and when he’s sure no one’s paying attention he unwinds his thick scarf and drops it to us, saying “Good luck” before turning away.

My sister responds by shooting a bolt into the forehead of the last Unconsecrated reaching for us on the shore. We slip to the ground, a thin sheen of ice crunching under our feet.

I loop the scarf around my sister’s neck. “You shouldn’t have done that,” I tell her, picking up the shovel and testing its weight.

She tugs the scarf tight and pulls a stray bolt from where it lodged in the ground. “I don’t particularly like killing them, but if we were going to get off that ladder they had to go.”

I try to force a smile—I know that’s what she wants. “I mean you shouldn’t have helped at all. You should’ve stayed on the platform where it’s safe.”

She shrugs but her lips tremble, her hands unsteady as they fit the bolt onto the string. “I’m your sister,” she says and her voice is uneven as she clarifies, “Your
older
sister. And it’s my job to take care of you.”

I want to tell her that I don’t need taking care of, that I’ve done just fine on my own. But that would clearly be a lie. I’d have likely died or gotten infected if she hadn’t stepped in.

The enormity of what she’s done—what she’s sacrificed for me—is overwhelming, and I have to turn away so that she doesn’t see my face.

I left her alone in the Forest. She had every right to abandon me as well, and she chose not to. That she didn’t means that maybe I can allow myself to rely on her. To actually believe she’ll be there for me when I need her.

This thought terrifies me. I’m not used to depending on someone.

That’s not true—I used to rely on Elias, but when he left me I promised I’d never trust again.

My sister places a hand on my shoulder, the tips of her fingers pressing lightly on my collarbone in reassurance. Beyond us, down the shore, the Unconsecrated shuffle toward us, slow and inevitable.

With a sigh she drops her hand and stands over the dead plague rats, bracing a foot against each one’s head so that she can tug at the bolts lodged in each skull. Her muscles strain until the arrows slide free with a loud
shlurk
of a sound.

We both cringe. I watch the way her tangled hair falls over her face and she absently brushes it away. I think how long it took me to learn not to brush my own hair back from my cheeks, to use it instead as a shield to hide my face.

I reach up to my neck, feeling the absence of my hair.
Wind blows off the river and I shiver, wrapping the scarf I took last night tighter around my head.

“Do you think we’ll make it through this?” I ask her, the rush from the scuffle on the platform draining out of me.

She doesn’t even look up, just says yes as she jerks free another bolt with a grunt. I hear the resolve in her voice. An unshakeable determination to stay alive. I wish I had her absolute belief in survival. I wish I didn’t know how hard it is to do—to struggle through each day only to wake up to a deeper struggle the next. I feel like falling asleep and letting it all consume me. Just letting the Unconsecrated take over.

They’re bound to anyway.

“I killed someone.” My sister’s confession shocks me out of my thoughts.

I jerk around to face her. She’s standing right where the ice clings to the shore, clutching the recovered bolts in her hands.

“What?” I choke out. Of all the things I expect her to say this isn’t it.

She squats and presses the points of the bolts to the thin frozen water, cracking it. I can’t see her face and so I walk over and kneel next to her, the icy shore seeping through my clothes, numbing my knees.

“In Vista. I killed someone. His name was Daniel and he was …” She swallows, her lips quivering. “He was going to blackmail me. He was going to make me
be
with him—marry him—or else he was going to get me in trouble and I panicked. He had me shoved up against the Barrier and I couldn’t breathe and I didn’t know what to do and …” She’s almost hyperventilating, the words stumbling over one another.

In the distance the Unconsecrated moan, their steps crunching as they slowly wend their way along the wall toward
us. I wrap my arm around her and pull her to me, tucking her face into my shoulder and resting my chin on her head. She squeezes me so hard that it hurts to breathe. “It’s okay,” I tell her but she shakes her head. I can feel her tears on my skin.

“It’s not.” Her voice is muffled, hard to understand. “It’s not okay. His blood was all over me and he was looking at me as he was dying. I just left him there. If I’d told someone … If I hadn’t let him see me in the first place … There are so many ways I could have done something so that he didn’t have to die.”

She draws in a shuddering breath. “I’m not a horrible person, Annah, I promise I’m not. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t know what else to do.”

I hold her tight. “I know you’re not a horrible person, I’d never think that of you.”

She sniffs and lifts her head from my shoulder. Her cheeks are streaked with tears and her eyes puffy. “I told you I wasn’t perfect,” she says as I brush wisps of hair from her face.

“It’s okay,” I tell her. “None of us is,” I add. She smiles just a little and her resolve rubs off on me. I stare at the way the tracks of her tears break across her jaw and along her neck, at how it looks like her face, once shattered, has been carefully put back together. And I wonder if that’s what my scars really are: proof that I’ve put myself back together again.

I
t’s a frigid day. The snowstorm hits in the late afternoon and makes it next to impossible to see across the river as gusts leave us almost blind and quaking with cold. My sister and I huddle against each other in a nook in the wall, pushing our hands under our clothes to try to keep our blood moving.

“You shouldn’t be down here,” I tell her for the hundredth time. “Catcher won’t come back for Elias. You have to tell Conall that. If both of us die, they’ll lose Catcher.”

My sister shakes her head, the Recruiter’s scarf wound tight around her neck and covering her hair. “I’m not leaving you.” It’s hard to hear her over the whipping wind.

“You can’t stay here,” I tell her. “Both of us can’t freeze to death.”

She sets her jaw. “I’d prefer to think that
neither
of us will freeze to death out here.” She raises one eyebrow. I know too well how stubborn the blood that runs through our veins is.

I grab her shoulders, the freezing air biting my unprotected
fingertips. I propel her toward the platform. “There will be other Sweepers out here later—I met one last night. I’ll find them and I’ll be fine. I promise.”

She shakes her head, digging her feet in. “You won’t be fine,” she argues.

“You’re right, I won’t be fine. But I’ll survive. I know how to do that.”

She ducks under my arms, doubling back until she’s facing me. “I don’t want to lose you again,” she says, her voice cracking.

I pull her closer to me. Moans float through the air, more dead washing onto the frozen shore.

I take a deep breath. “Sometimes you have to leave. Sometimes that’s the smartest thing to do.” I press my bare fingers to her cheek and she returns the gesture.

“Maybe so,” she says. “But you’re still not convincing me to leave you alone in the middle of a snowstorm when Mudo are washing ashore around you.”

I glare at her. “You’re stubborn—anyone ever tell you that before?”

She smiles wide. “I take that as a compliment.”

We stand side by side, watching the darkness shroud the black slushy river, white pummeling everywhere. Unconsecrated struggle from the half-frozen water, their bodies tossing over ice that cuts dead skin. Where they’re not too deep I wade out and use the shovel, digging it into their necks, pushing down and grunting with the effort of slicing through skin and severing bone. The heads roll a little and it’s hard to avoid their eyes.

I wonder if I’m somehow giving them peace.

My sister stares down at one of the empty bodies. “What
would you do if you knew you had only a few days left to live?” she says. Water laps around dead arms and legs, tempting the deep.

A gust of wind rips through my coat and I steel myself against it. I think about the woman on the roof asking the same question. How terrified I was that I’d die like her: alone, no one to mourn my absence. I think about how quickly that’s changed. “I’d find a way to survive,” I tell her, my teeth chattering.

She tilts her head. “And that’s all you want? To survive?”

I shrug, jumping up and down a bit to push the blood through my body. “Seems like a good idea right now,” I say, jerking my chin at our surroundings.

She’s silent, dancing from foot to foot to stay warm.

“What about you? What would you do?” I tuck my hands up in my sleeves.

Raising one eyebrow, she says, “Nope. I’m not telling you my dreams until you tell me yours.” She crooks a smile. “It’ll give you incentive to make sure we both survive this mess.”

I laugh and lean against her. “We’ll survive,” I tell her. “I promise you that.”

The storm intensifies, making it hard to stay standing and difficult to hear the moans of the Unconsecrated or see if any have washed ashore. My sister and I continue to huddle together in the nook of the wall, arms wrapped around each other as we try to stay out of the wind.

My breath comes out in pants, and each inhalation is like ice, its sharpness stinging my lungs. “We need to go back,” I shout at my sister. “They can’t keep us out here like this.”

She nods, her face buried in her thick coat. We struggle down the wall, letting the storm push us against it. I try to hold the shovel out in front of me in case any of the dead are still moving in this weather, but my muscles are so exhausted they shake, trying to wring out what little warmth they can. I’m barely able to keep myself upright. Everything’s just so cold. So cold and so hard.

Inside I feel empty. I can’t even remember the last time I ate. The last time I slept I cycled through nightmares, feeling my hair being torn from my body over and over again.

A figure stumbles toward me from the direction of the water and it takes me a moment to remember where I am. What I’m supposed to be doing. I swing. Sloppy and uneven, the motion throws me off balance. I take two steps. Three. Fall to one knee and use the shovel to pick myself back up again.

The body lurches, slow and jerky. I can just barely hear the moan. Out of the darkness hair whips through the night, tangled around a woman’s face so that it’s hard to see anything but her mouth.

She’s barely walking—barely moving—but still she almost grabs me. I kick her back, which makes my own footing unstable. I fall, the shovel skittering out of my grasp.