What Blood Leaves Behind (The Poison Rose) (16 page)

William lets his eyes drift shut. He deflates a little more, like a sagging balloon, takes some slow, lingering breaths but is otherwise perfectly still.

I remove my hand from his chin. My fingertips have scored his cheeks with angry red pock marks, four on the left side of his face and one on the right made by the edge of my thumb. I look at my fingernails, at how worn down and jagged they are.

“He’s got some deep cuts that need to be treated,” I tell William. “He has a fever. You’re going to have to ask whoever you have to ask.”

I wonder if he’s thinking this over, weighing the consequences of letting Aiden die or having to ask for permission to move him. What I’m saying is reasonable, hard to argue with. But he keeps his eyes closed, doesn’t respond. I start to worry that I’ve really hurt him. I put a hand on his shoulder and shake him a little.

“William, are you okay? Are you there?”

He eyes flutter open and he looks annoyed. “Yes, I’m fine. Just hoping you were a bad dream. Can you get off me now? My head hurts, my face hurts. What do you want from me anyway?”

“God. You know what I want. Don’t play dumb.” I’m feeling much calmer. I feel like I’ve made my point, am getting through to him. I sit up, lift myself off him so I’m squatting over him rather than pressing him down.

Then I bring up the other vital thing I want him to do. “Do you know of a drug store around here? Somewhere that’s still got some medical supplies?”

“I’m not getting him medical supplies. You’re out of your mind.”

“Antibiotics. Bandages and some ointment. Aspirin. Anything you can find. Come on.”

It takes a while but he finally says in a soft little voice, “Needle has those.”

“Needle. The one I saw by the bonfire? The one who touched…”

“Yeah. The one who stuck his finger in Gideon’s…” He starts tossing his head back and forth, breathing faster like he’s reliving a nightmare. I can see the fear in his eyes. But then his panic subsides and he quiets down again. “He’s like the doctor here. The drug keeper. He knows more than anybody else about stuff like that.”

“Well, ask him then. If they don’t want him to die just yet, they have to help you.”

“I’d have to… I can’t do that. We can’t leave here. We can’t talk to
them
.”

He pushes himself up from the cold, hard floor with his elbows, starts to scoot back, trying to get out from under me. I respond by jamming a knee back down hard into his stomach.

I grab him by the chin again and snarl into his face, “You
will
do it. You’re telling me that Needle keeps all the medicine you’ve found in the city?”

William grabs my knee and tries to push it away but can’t budge it. His face is contorted and he struggles for a few moments, trying to get loose, trying to sit up straight. When he stops struggling as much, I lessen the pressure on his belly until he finally lets himself go limp, slumps back flat on the floor. He wheezes, “He has… All the good stuff.”

I’m thinking fast. Trying to decide what to do.

“I won’t make you do that,” I tell him, deciding to bargain with him. And lie a little. What I should say is,
I won’t make you do that right now.

“I won’t make you talk to Needle. But I am going to make you help me get that boy upstairs.
Without asking for permission.
” I stare at him intently, letting my words sink in. “All right? Agreed?”

He looks so young, so defenseless. As lost and helpless as any of the sunlight deprived kids in the dormitory. I’m sure I can make him do anything I want. But all I want him to do is help me save the boy in the cellar. The idea of punishing him, getting back at him—I don’t feel like it’s in me to do that. Nothing done purely for revenge against these deluded, so-called Elders seems worthwhile. But I will make them do what I want if it helps me and my family.

William finally looks me right in the eye and nods his head. He just says, “When?”

“As soon as we can. Now would be a good time.”

He turns his head and looks out the windows at the morning light. Now that we’ve stopped struggling, the silence in the long school corridor stands out sharply. I can hear every breath we take. It’s overcast outside but the light floods the space around us, making this empty hall seem just a little less cold, less forbidding.

I wait for William to say something else but he doesn’t turn his head, doesn’t respond. I know how hard it is to for him to agree to what I’m asking of him. How frightened he is. But his fears mean far less to me than the life of another.

As I watch him stare out the windows, those cracked and broken and crudely patched windows, I’m sure I know what he’s thinking. “You really think they’re watching us all the time?” I say. “William, I don’t think they really care what we do. The Riders. As long as we don’t run away.”

He doesn’t respond, keeps staring out the windows.

I let out a deep sigh and get to my feet so that I’m standing over him. He looks up at me now. “I’ll give you a little time to think it over. To pull yourself together. Meanwhile, I’ll start looking for a cot and the other things.
You just need to help me get him upstairs. Soon.
All right?”

He nods his head a little and it’s enough for now. My gaze flits from his eyes to that moon-shaped scar, looming larger than any other feature on his face. The flesh there is fish-belly white and I imagine it must be cool to the touch, like the colorless flesh of the Black Riders.

“What’s he like?”
Stace is asking me. She’s burning with curiosity. She keeps following me around, asking question after question.

“I don’t know. He can’t talk so he can’t tell me anything.”

“I
know
he can’t talk,” she says. “You just told me he’s still sleeping.”

“You’re getting to be like Emily,” I say, irritated. “Criticizing me. You’re taking over for her, huh?”

She gives me a sour look. “I’m not like Emily. I won’t leave the rest of you behind like she did.”

Then I feel bad. I don’t want to badmouth Emily in front of the others. I keep trying to think of excuses for her, like maybe she was forced into doing what she did. “Maybe it’s not her fault,” I say. “Maybe she’s…”

“Sick?” Stace says, finishing my sentence.

“No, not yet. She can’t be getting sick yet. She’s not old enough. But let’s talk about something else.”

I’ve stopped by the dorm to check on them, the remnants of my little family, to let them know I’m all right, that I’m still around. I’m around but I’m not with them completely.

I can’t concentrate on even the simplest game I try to play with CJ and Terry. And Stace ends up crabbing at me, maybe because I’m unable to give her my full attention. Nothing can distract me from the thought of that boy lying helpless two floors below us.

There’s another boy at the Orphanage, I guess to be about twelve or thirteen years old, who calls himself Finch. He has freckled skin and green eyes, a mop of shaggy blond hair. Just today he’s decided that it’s okay to approach us, to talk to us. Well, talk to me. He doesn’t seem interested in Stace or the boys. Maybe because I’m older but not like the other Elders, I get the feeling he likes me. He acts like he trusts me.

He’s the first of these children to try to talk to me. He answers some of my questions and asks me some in turn. I don’t know if I can trust
him
entirely but he has told me a little about the boy in the cellar, the runaway.

“He’s called Aiden,” he says not long after Stace takes a break from peppering me with questions and decides to wander out into the hall so she can take a look outside. “He lived here for a while but he got old enough to go with the Elders. He’d be gone all day with them. They do all this stuff that we can’t do because we aren’t allowed outside. They think we’ll run away.”

“But
he
ran away,” I say.

Finch shrugs his shoulders, wipes a runny nose on the sleeve of the dirty blue parka he wears constantly, even while he sleeps. “The Elders don’t do that. They like being Elders.
I’d
like it, to be one of them. To be able to go outside.”

“So why did Aiden run away?”

Finch looks bored, like he’s said enough. None of the children here has much of an attention span. They play absentmindedly with each other for a while, then wander off. We’re sitting on the edge of my cot and he begins to stare dreamily at two other kids across the room playing with a set of building blocks. I want to grab his shoulders and shake him, make him pay attention to me. But I know I need to go easy, not scare him away.

I wait for him to say something more, twitching with impatience. He starts to get up, as if he’s going to investigate what the kids with the blocks are doing but then sits back down and sighs, as if he doesn’t have enough energy to walk across the room. “He’s run away before,” he says at last, not looking at me, as if it’s not really important.

“He has? He doesn’t like it, being an Elder?”

“He doesn’t like the, you know… The ones who come at night. The ones who ride the…bikes.” He mumbles into his sleeve, his last word almost inaudible. I watch him hunch his shoulders, pull into himself.

“Why doesn’t he like them?” My question sounds stupid, far too obvious. Just the thought of the Black Riders frightens Finch, as it does everyone else here.

I reach out, take his hand, give it a squeeze. He looks surprised, turns and studies my face. He has a yearning, questioning look in his eyes like he’s silently asking how much he can trust me. I wonder how long it’s been since someone has touched him with warmth or kindness. He lets his hand lie limp in mine like a dead pigeon.

“He told us they hurt somebody, a friend of his,” he says slowly. “A boy he traveled with before he got to Raintree.”

“So now they beat him to a pulp every time he runs away?”

Finch looks down at his feet. He’s found or has been given some tennis shoes which are far too big for him. Maybe he’ll grow into them but for now he flops around like he’s auditioning to be a clown in a three-ring circus. “You
can’t
leave. They won’t let you.”

“Leave here? The Orphanage? But I thought you said he was gone a lot of the time with the Elders.”

“Not
here
but the city.” He holds his arms out, gesturing to a large area far beyond the walls of the school. “Raintree.”

“Why don’t they let the Elders leave Raintree?”

“I don’t know.” Now he
is
annoyed, wants our conversation to end. “They just don’t.”

I know it’s useless to ask him anything else.

But I have a name.
Aiden.

I catch sight
of Tetch as I pass by the girls’ restroom on the first floor of the school.

I’ve been wandering through the old school building for hours. I can’t keep still, feel ready to jump out of my skin. I couldn’t stay a minute longer with the kids in the dorm. Pretending to be interested in what they’re doing, watching them go through the same sleepy-slow routines, engage in the same aimless bickering.

The only thing I’m sure of now is that William has disappeared. I’ve searched for him everywhere, pacing up and down the halls, combing through long-abandoned offices and classrooms, all the while keeping my eye out for anything useful, salvageable for the boy downstairs.

Catching a glimpse of Tetch through the open door of the girls’ room, I jump back, startled. I was almost convinced that both of our resident Elders had deserted us, despite having express orders not to.

But there she is, Tetch in the flesh, standing in front of the girls’ room mirror, bathed in the murky half-light that illuminates the sink, the toilets, all the plumbing fixtures that no longer function.

I stop to watch her. She’s applying makeup, squinting at her small white face. She rubs at the smeared surface of the mirror with her sleeve. For just a few seconds—for just a fleeting few seconds—I feel a little sorry for her. Who is she trying to beautify herself for? Who is she trying to impress with what little beauty she has? To me, she’s ugly inside and out with no one to care for and no one who truly cares about her.

I cough a loud, fake cough and smile innocently as I watch her cringe and whip around to face the open door, eyes wide. I stroll calmly into the restroom, just as she had when I was trying to clean myself up in the girls’ room on the second floor. “You can’t come in here,” she says, voice sulky, girlish. “You use the one upstairs, with the kids.”

“This one’s not much better,” I say casually, looking around at the grime smeared everywhere, taking in the smell. She shrugs and turns back to the mirror, already done trying to assert her authority over me. She studies her face sadly.

“It’s not that bad,” I say. “I’ve seen worse.”

I see her sneer at me in the mirror. “Can you leave me alone? Please?” It’s not really an order but more of a request. It’s then that I start to think that I shouldn’t continue to provoke her, that I’m going to need her help.

While I’m trying to decide on the best way to talk to her, the best way of bringing up my plans for the boy in the basement, she suddenly turns to me and says in a fragile, little girl way, “How’s he doing?”

The bashful, pleading way she asks surprises me even more than the question does.

The edges of the sink she’s been leaning over while staring at herself in the mirror are littered with painstakingly harvested beauty products—half-empty containers of blush and eye shadow, lotions, slim tubes of lipstick that remind me of fancy rifle cartridges with soft red mush where the point of the bullet would be. Like I used to collect containers of food, she’s collected these useless things.

“He’s not good.”

“Not good.” She repeats this with a voice so low I can barely hear her. I’m not close enough to be sure but it looks like she’s trembling.

It’s then that I’m suddenly aware of something that surprises me greatly. Tetch
cares
about the boy lying wounded and feverish below us. This amazes me because I was sure that Tetch cared for nothing but herself.
William and Jendra. Tetch and Aiden.
There are ties between the Elders I might be able to build on, use to my advantage.