The Dead-Tossed Waves (26 page)

“’S okay, Gabry,” she murmurs, her lips barely moving. “It’ll be me and Catcher now. You go.”

I squeeze her wrists tighter in my fingers and she doesn’t wince.

“No,” I tell her. I gulp back tears and terror. “No, Catcher’s here. He’s okay, I was wrong.”

Her eyes open wide before drooping shut. “But you said …” Her breathing’s shallow.

“Hold her arms above her head,” Elias says. “Keep the pressure on.”

“Where’s Catcher?” Cira asks. I can see her struggling to understand, fighting the energy leaking from her body.

“He’s here,” I tell her but her eyes slip shut and I’m not sure she heard.

A shadow falls across me and I look up. Blane stands in the opening to the cell, hesitating before following the others out.
It reminds me of the night in the amusement park, the moment I chose to leave them all and run. She looks afraid; she looks ashamed. As if she’s waiting for my permission to abandon her friend. “How did you let this happen?” I ask her.

She looks at me a long moment, her eyes bright and her mouth opening and closing on a hundred excuses. “I couldn’t stop her,” she finally says. “I tried.” Her voice is thin and hitches with regret. “I’m sorry,” she whispers. She stands in front of me, as if I could tell her anything to make it okay. She reaches out her fingers and brushes them against my own and then she turns and runs up the stairs.

I look across Cira at Elias. I want him to say that she’ll be okay. That she’s going to be fine. But I can tell in the way he glances at the door that he’s worried. That he’s more than worried.

“What do we do?” I ask. I think about the little sailboat, about dragging her through town.

“We should leave her,” he says, his voice barely a whisper. “She needs rest, she needs someone who knows what they’re doing. She shouldn’t be moved.”

I look at her. At her pale cheeks and white lips. All the blood. He’s right. I know he’s right. Any chance we would have of escaping is at risk with her. She’ll slow us down.

I press my forehead against hers. “Cira,” I whisper. I can hear the tears in my voice. I want to ask her why but I already know.
Inevitable
, she would tell me.

For the space between heartbeats it feels as though it’s all my fault. If I hadn’t run that night but stayed with her. If I’d allowed myself to be caught, to be caged with her and sent to the Recruiters. I could have been there with her. I could have given her someone to lean on. Someone to hold on to.

I could have stopped her. We could have made it together.

“I’m not leaving her,” I say.

I lean back and look at Elias. He searches my face with his eyes but he doesn’t question me. He just nods and takes her arms and wraps them tight with the strips of cloth.

“There’s not a lot of time left,” he says. “They’ll realize the breach is by the Souler Mudo—that they pose no threat but terror.” He looks across the room to the dark stairway where everyone else ran. And I realize that he could have run with them. That he should be with them, out looking for his sister.

“You can go,” I tell him. “She’s not your responsibility.” The words are harder to say than I thought they would be and I realize that I’ve grown to trust him. “Neither am I,” I add.

He turns to look at me, his body still, and he squints. “I’m going with you, Gabry.”

I stare at him too long. I should tell him to leave. I should tell him that I have nothing to give him and that he’s better off with the Soulers looking for his sister. But before I can say any of that he slings his pack onto his back and puts his arm under Cira’s shoulder, helping her to her feet. My throat feels raw and tight when I see him so tender and gentle.

He turns toward the stairs and I slip under Cira’s other arm. “Thank you,” I tell him, though those words will never be enough to express my gratitude. He grunts under Cira’s weight as she slumps against him trying to walk.

Together we get her out of the Council House and into the confused streets beyond. The buildings around us are shuttered and reinforced, most families tucked inside. And yet people, mostly boys and men, still stream through the streets shouting and waving weapons. They race to the Barrier to help defend the town.

A few people run to us, offer to help, but Elias just murmurs “Infected,” and they eye the blood-soaked bandages before stumbling away and leaving us alone. As we near the edge of the buildings and start on the path leading to the beach a figure bursts out of the darkness.

I almost drop Cira in my fright and before I can even reach for my weapon Elias has his knife brandished in his free hand.

“Cira,” the person gasps, and I realize with relief that it’s Catcher. He steps toward us, then races to his sister hanging limp between us. “What’s going on? What happened to her?” He grabs her face. “Cira,” he calls to her, “Cira, look at me!”

Her eyes droop open and a small smile barely touches her lips. “Catcher,” she says, her voice exhausted and dry.

He looks at us. “What happened?” he asks again.

I don’t want to tell him what she did and so I brush aside the question. “She’ll be okay,” I say. “What are you doing here? Why aren’t you at the boat?”

He shakes his head. “Militiamen are all over the lighthouse and beach,” he says. His eyes cut to me in the darkness. “They’re looking for you, Gabry. I overheard them talking about Daniel.” He pauses a moment. “He wasn’t dead when you left him, Gabry. They found him before he died. He told them it was you.”

I feel like I’ve been punched, all the air sucking from my lungs at once. I stumble under Cira’s weight and Catcher takes her arm from me. Behind me I hear Catcher and Elias talking rapidly, trying to figure out what to do. Where to go. But all I can think about is Daniel.

I knew I killed him and yet hearing it from someone else—knowing it for sure—makes it somehow different. I
realize then that there’s a difference between the possibility of hope—the idea of things that we can never know—and the starkness of reality. The weight of knowledge.

Elias and Catcher debate whether to go back to the ruins, to try to make a run for the boat. Around me I can still hear the echoes of town, the ringing of bells and shouts of men. I realize again that there is no escape. That everything is catching up to me, the end.

Gravity pulls me and I think about giving in. I think about my mother and how horrified she would be if she knew what was going on.

And she’s what makes me realize where we can go. Where we can run that they might not follow us. “The Forest,” I say flatly. I feel a crazy urge to laugh at my own words. Just a few days ago I was too terrified to even think about going into the Forest with my mother and now I’m suggesting that we follow in her footsteps.

Catcher and Elias don’t hear me and I turn around to face them. “The Forest,” I say louder. They both stare at me, their mouths open in midsentence.

“That’s crazy,” Catcher says. “There’s nothing in there—we’d be killed as soon as we crossed the fence.” And then his face blanches. “I mean, you would all …” His voice trails off and it hits me again just how much his immunity has changed him.

Elias stands there quietly and then he says, “She’s right.” He starts to nod his head. “She’s right, it’s the best place for us to go.”

Catcher pulls Cira away from us. “This is absurd,” he says.

“No,” I tell him, wanting to stop the words from coming. “My mother’s from the Forest. There are paths—a village.” Even as I’m explaining I want them to talk me out of it.

“There aren’t paths,” Catcher scoffs. His cheeks burn red, his eyes narrow. “We’d know about them if there were any. There’s a bridge across the waterfall and then a gate to nothing.”

“But if there are paths,” Elias says, looking straight at Catcher, “you’d be able to find them. You can go into the Forest and look.”

I nod my head. Catcher opens his mouth to protest but Elias cuts him off. “Look, we need to go somewhere else,” he says, his voice low. “We’re not safe standing here.”

Catcher glances between Elias and me and then at his sister. He purses his lips and then he wraps his hand around her waist. “You promise there are paths? That we’ll be able to escape?” he asks. “That we’ll be safe?”

I want to tell him no, that the Forest terrifies me. But at this point I think it’s our only hope and so I nod and we start running.

A
s we wind through town toward the bridge over the waterfall we begin to hear murmurs that the breach was a hoax, a drill of some sort. People begin to throw open the shutters on their houses and we hear shouts from the direction of the Barrier to our right. We work our way to the left, weaving through the streets northward until we reach a band of woods separating the town from the river.

The sound of rushing water begins to drown out everything, even our breathing. We stop at the near side of the bridge and lower Cira to the ground. She stares up at us with deep eyes but says nothing. Elias continues to sweep the area with his gaze, constantly looking over his shoulder. Everything’s dark, shadows hiding shadows, the trees overhead blocking out any hint of the moon or stars. The sound of the waterfall pounds around us.

Every outline of a tree or flash of leaves makes my heart leap. My eyes play tricks on me, conjuring figures in the shadows that never materialize.

Catcher crosses the bridge over the waterfall and hesitates only a moment at the gate on the other side before pushing through into the Forest. I stand on the near side of the river, my fingers laced through the fence that borders the water before it plummets over the falls.

When I can no longer see Catcher moving through the trees anymore I turn and face Elias, the sharp metal links of the fence cool against my back. I feel uncomfortable around him after this evening, after we almost kissed. Just thinking about it causes my skin to burn.

The silence between us, touched only by the pounding of the waterfall, seems full, like a cloud about to burst. Part of me wants to apologize again but part of me is still angry at the way he seemed to brush it off so easily. Finally I decide upon the safest thing to say. “Thank you,” I tell him, gesturing toward Cira leaning against the tree with her eyes closed. He slices a hand through the air, cutting me off.

I wish I could pull the words back into myself, pull back every instant I’d ever trusted Elias or thought about him. I start to walk away from him but he grabs me, holding me still. I open my mouth but he puts his hand over it.

“Shhh,” he whispers into my ear. And even though the night is hot I shiver at the touch of his breath.

He cocks his head to the side, listening. I think I hear something, the barest hint of a noise I can’t quite put my finger on, but he stiffens. I feel him move, his hand ever so slowly lowering to his knife.

I do the same as I become instantly aware of everything in the night around us. Before it was just darkness, the pounding of the waterfall and Elias’s touch but now I find the subtleties underneath: the shallow rise and fall of Cira’s breath, the slight tang of her blood in the air. The feel of
a soft breeze over my cheeks, the weight of the knife in my hand.

A bush rustles down the path and I tense. Elias steps forward and I pace behind him so that I’m guarding Cira. There’s a hint of movement and then a long low moan. I drop to a crouch, my heart thudding and erasing every other thought or feeling. I grab for Cira’s arm, trying to pull her around my shoulder, trying to help her stand.

Just then a Mudo stumbles into view, her steps jerky, one foot crooked and a gleam of white bone jutting from her ankle. Her hair is long and blond, lanky in her face, and her shoulders are bare. In the moonlight I can just see a spray of freckles over her chest, see that the nails of her right hand have been torn free and that her pinky is hanging by nothing but tendons and strips of skin.

She moans again, reaching for us as she shambles closer. Panic rings through my veins. I have to get Cira, I have to get across the bridge. But she’s dead weight; I can’t rouse her. I want to call for help, to scream but I choke back the urge.

“Cira, honey, come on, we have to go,” I plead, grabbing her face in my hands, trying to wake her.

“No,” she mumbles, “sleep.”

“Cira!” I can hear the panic in my voice, the tone rising shrilly.

“It’s okay,” Elias says calmly. He’s walking toward the Mudo, his steps slow and careful. “She’s one of ours.”

I swallow back bile as he gets closer to the woman. “Just kill it, Elias,” I tell him, but he circles her. She turns and reaches for him, stumbling and tripping and then pushing herself back to her feet, her ankle crunching as it ratchets at an even more severe angle.

I step away from Cira, holding my knife in front of me. “What are you doing?” I yell at Elias. “Kill it!”

But he doesn’t. He lets the thing touch him, pull at him. Just like the others her lower jaw is missing, her teeth gone as well. Her moan is pitiful and hollow.

“Her name was Kyra,” he says. “She thought this would be eternal life.” He pushes her away from him, his touch almost gentle. I want to throw up.

“What are you doing, Elias, just kill it,” I tell him again. Seeing him like this terrifies me. “You said you’re not a Souler. I thought you didn’t believe what they did.” I inch closer, preparing myself to kill the thing if he won’t.