by Rory Power
I can’t move. I can’t breathe. The blood is about to touch the toes of my boots. Maybe if I stand here long enough, it will sneak through the seams and my socks and touch my skin too. This stain I will never wash out.
“Come unlock the door,” Reese says.
Reese.
My boot makes a squelching sound as I lift it out of the blood and step across Taylor’s legs. Reese is saying my name again, steadily, covering up the sounds, covering up the sputter and the burble of blood rolling out of Taylor’s mouth.
At the door it takes a few tries to get each of the deadbolts undone, and my shoulder is aching, but I lift the latch and swing it open.
The cot is bare, mattress stained with streaks of blood. On the stool sits a walkie and a shortwave radio, and next to them a knife gleams in the sun coming through the window. Its edge is dulled down with blood, and I almost don’t want to look, because what more could anybody do to her? But there she is, waiting off to the side. Reese, with her moonglow hair and torn-up shoulder, a bruise starting to wake across her cheek.
“Okay,” she says, and cups my cheek with her silver hand, her thumb pressed to the corner of my mouth. “Okay.”
“I didn’t mean—” I start, but it’s all I can get out.
“You had to,” she says. It’s supposed to make me feel better, I know it is, but bile stings the back of my throat. “Right now we have to go.”
“And do what?” There’s no way out of any of this.
“Step by step, okay? For now, we just gotta get downstairs. That’s it. And then we’ll figure this all out.”
“Yeah,” I say. And then because she’s still looking at me, still waiting, I try again, stronger. “Yeah.”
* * *
—
She lets me close my eye on the way out, to keep from seeing Taylor’s body, and she tells me to hold on to her, leads me into the hallway.
“What did they do to you?” I ask. I can’t stop seeing that knife.
“Nothing,” she says, and she almost sounds calm, but she can’t keep the tremble out of her voice. I feel a sick churning in my gut.
“What did they do after they did nothing?”
Reese doesn’t answer. But when I open my eye I can see blood leaking through the rips in her boots. And every step she takes is tentative, like she’s favoring one leg and trying not to let it show. Like they took the knife to the soles of her feet.
I push it out of my head. If I let this burrow too deep, it’ll wreck me from the inside out.
We hesitate at the top of the stairs, noise from below drifting up to us. Down on the main floor the girls are back to barricading the door. Headmistress tried to end it, but they won’t let her. And we’re not saying it, but I know we’re both wondering where she is. Have the girls found her? Or will she catch us and lock Reese up again? She won’t care about me, but Reese knows the island like she’s Raxter turned to blood and bone. Headmistress will never let her go if she can help it.
Somewhere down in the main hall there’s a crash, and somebody yells. A rising clamor of panic echoing up to us. Another horrible slam. It’s a heavy sound, like something hitting hard against the door. Suddenly, that pulsing moan ricochets through.
The bear, battering its way in. With the Tox inside it, it won’t stop until it gets what it’s after.
“Come on,” Reese says. We jog down the stairs, and I try not to think of the footprints I’m leaving behind, the treads in Taylor’s blood. My pulse is pounding in my ears as we burst out onto the mezzanine. The main hall laid out under us, girls yelling, Julia barking orders. Somebody crying in soft, airy gasps.
It’s chaos as we hurry down the main staircase. The front doors shudder as the bear throws its weight against them, battering its way in. Two girls follow us down from the second floor, carrying a filing cabinet between them. A handful of girls are crouched where the couches have been pushed across the doors, bracing them to keep them from giving way.
“Hetty,” Julia calls when she spots us. She’s standing near the barricade, overseeing the whole thing. “You found her.”
We join her, step hastily out of the way as the girls with the filing cabinet barrel by.
“What’s going on?” Reese asks. “It wasn’t doing this before.”
Julia nods. “It must’ve caught the scent. Hetty’s blood in the music room.”
My bandage stained red, but that’s nothing compared to all that blood upstairs, I think.
“Shit,” Reese says, “look.” I follow her gaze to the front doors, where they’ve started to buckle. The industrial lock, restored and secure, giving way as the bear crashes into it again and again. The noise coming like a heartbeat, and the doors quiver, strain against their deadbolt.
“Get back,” Julia says. And then, yelling as the doors rattle against their hinges, “Everybody get back.”
The lock breaks and the doors blast open. Cold sun, wind whipping in. Bone jaws snapping. The couch, the desk, they split, scatter like shrapnel, and the doors rip off their hinges, come crashing down and bury girls underneath. Screaming, I hear screaming, and there, the colossal silhouette, the growl shaking the sky as the bear advances.
“South wing!” Julia yells. “Get to the south wing!” Anybody still on their feet makes a break for it. I’m rooted to the ground, watching the bear watch little Emmy crawl out from the ruins on bloody hands and knees.
This, at least, I can do.
“Hetty,” Reese says. “Don’t.”
But I’m running, pushing past Cat and vaulting over what’s left of one of the couches.
“Emmy,” I call.
The bear looks up, fixes its rotting stare on me, and Emmy scrambles toward me, her elbow cracking hard against my shin. I throw my good arm around her waist, haul her up.
“Go,” I say, “go. I’m right behind you.”
“Hurry!” I hear Reese yell. I take a slow step backward, keep myself between the bear and Emmy as she breaks for safety, but the bear snaps its jaws, and instinct sparks to life. I turn, sprint for the south wing, adrenaline clear and cool, and I feel like more than myself. Moving fast, Reese waiting at the mouth of the hallway. They kept the doors open.
“Get in, get in,” she says, and I chance one look over my shoulder as I take my last few steps. The bear is nosing at the body of some girl who took a spear of wreckage through the eye.
Reese ushers me farther down the corridor, into the waiting crowd as Julia and Cat shut the double doors, closing the south wing off from the rest of the house. Already girls are tearing through the classrooms and offices, shoving desks out into the hallway to build another barricade.
How much longer can we do this? How long until the next set of doors breaks open? What then?
The hallway doors don’t do much to muffle the sound as the bear huffs out a quick breath and moans, calling to us. Emmy’s crouched by the wall, nursing a split lip and pinching her ripped palm shut. And around her, more girls hurting, more girls hungry and alone and dying. This is my fault. I made this world for us.
“Is there a way out?” I say. “You didn’t tell Headmistress, but tell me, Reese. Can we leave here?”
She looks at me for a long moment, and then she sighs. “I think so, yeah.”
Is she serious? I pull her even farther away from the others. “Why the hell wouldn’t you use it before now?”
“At first I didn’t think I could get past the fence,” she says, avoiding my gaze. “And then I could, but this place is my whole life.”
I swallow hard, blink back a flicker of Mr. Harker’s face in the dark, empty eyes and blackened teeth. “And now?”
She shrugs. “You asked me to.”
CHAPTER 23
Nobody notices as we ease away from the others, down the hallway toward the corner where it turns toward the kitchen. T
here’s a door there, an emergency exit that nobody uses, just in case the alarms still work, but there’s no sense in worrying about that anymore.
We’re passing Headmistress’s corner office when I stop dead in my tracks. The door was open before, but now it’s mostly shut. Through the gap, I can see a box of food, and then somebody moves past, blocking my sight. It has to be Headmistress. And she’s hoarding supplies, supplies we’ll need if we’re leaving Raxter.
The door isn’t locked, but as I try to push it open, it hits up against something inside and stops.“Excuse me,” someone says inside, sounding indignant. Definitely Headmistress. “You’re not allowed in here.”
I almost laugh. Like that matters anymore.
I try again, give the door a shove with my shoulder, and slowly it scrapes open. I blink, adjust to the sun flooding through the tall office windows, and there’s Headmistress outlined against them, her shoulders slumped, her chignon coming undone.
She’s standing over a carton of water bottles, and next to her, piled alongside her ancient, mammoth desk, are stacks of boxes I recognize—food, supplies, all stolen from the pantry, all stolen from us. Mixed among them are packets of medical tools, the kind the Navy used to send us. Small first aid kits, stacks of paper, records from the infirmary, and coolers, too, like the one I found in the woods.
How long has she been hoarding all of this? How long has she been only looking out for herself?
I move in front of Reese, because I’m not letting her go again, I’m not, but she bats me away, and after another look at Headmistress it’s clear why. Bloodshot eyes, trembling fingers. A crumpling, nervous laugh as she fusses with the hem of her shirt.
“Girls, I’m going to have to ask you to leave,” she says, and I can hear the fractures in her voice. She’s afraid. Afraid of us.
“What’s going on?” I ask. “What are you doing with this stuff? This belongs to us.”
She brushes her hands off on her slacks, picks at a fleck of dried blood under her nails like she doesn’t have glossy pink pus spilling out of her mouth. “Nothing. Just taking inventory.”
The anger comes back in a flood, rushing over me until I’m drowning in it. “Nothing?” I say. “Like what you did in the music room?”
Reese reaches for me, but I shrug her hand off, surge forward. Headmistress reels back against the wall, and it takes everything in me to keep myself in check, to keep from going after her.
“You locked us up!” I yell. “You tried to kill us.”
“No,” Headmistress says, eyes darting back and forth, “no, no. That’s not it. I was just trying to help you.” She smiles weakly at me. “That’s what this is all for.”
Behind me Reese lets out a bark of laughter. “Don’t lie. If you wanted to help us, you would’ve started a long time ago.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh, come on.” I step back, let Reese ease in front of me, her face lit with a cold kind of thrill. “It’s just us girls here. You can be honest.” When Headmistress doesn’t answer, Reese nods. “I’ll tell you what I think, then. I think you were always planning to get out. I think you had your escape set from the start. Just in case they couldn’t cure us, right? But they left you behind, and that’s why you needed me.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“Explain it, then.”
“We knew something was happening years ago,” Headmistress says, babbling now. “It was staying so warm in the winters, and the irises kept growing, and they asked—the people from Camp Nash, the Navy, and the CDC—but it was only access they wanted. Just to test a few things here and there. But we weren’t expecting something like the Tox. I promise you: we never thought, I never thought, that would happen.”
It’s a lie and we can both tell. She knew. She knew something was wrong, before the Tox started. And she kept us here anyway.
“You mean you never thought it would put you in danger,” Reese says. “But the rest of us, we were a risk worth taking, right? My father always said you wanted the wrong things, he always said not to trust you, and now I know why.”
Person after person collapsing under the weight of this place, lie after lie, and I’ve had enough of this. Enough of these confrontations, of secrets spilling out of us like blood. I reach out, grab hold of Reese’s jacket, and tug until she looks back at me.
“Come on,” I say. At first I’m not sure she’s heard, and then something changes in her face, softens, like she’s coming back from somewhere else. “Let’s leave her with the mess she made.”
Reese shakes her head. “She could’ve saved us. She could’ve tossed that gas into the fucking ocean.”
Yeah, I know. I could’ve too.
I take a deep breath, ignore the sick turn of my stomach. “But right now we can save ourselves. Please, Reese. Let’s go.”
She glances at Headmistress, who’s quivering, watching me with wide, helpless eyes. “If she moves a goddamn muscle, I swear—”
“She won’t,” I cut in. “Right?”
“I won’t,” Headmistress says, nodding frantically.
Reese sighs, and some of the tension drains out of her. Shoulders slumping, head tipping forward. “Look for some food,” she says softly. “I’ll grab water.”
“Thank you,” I say. “We’ll be quick, I promise.”
Headmistress is pressed against the wall, her palms splayed open and empty, so I turn my back to her, leave Reese to keep watch if she likes. There’s a canvas backpack by the bookshelves that line the wall, already half packed with a pistol and a few boxes of ammo. I grab the pistol, check the safety, and hand it to Reese. Her shoulder might be injured, but I’ve never fired a pistol before, and she’ll be the better shot. With any luck she remembers what I taught her about switching her stance.
She sticks the pistol in the waistband of her jeans and crouches by the carton of water bottles. The plastic wrap has been slashed open, and a few bottles have toppled onto the floor.
“You take those,” she says, nodding at the box next to me full of jerky and packets of crackers. “I’ll take a few marine flares. And one of those first aid kits too.”
I load as much of the food as I can into the backpack. It’s strange—at the bottom of the box, there’s a layer of paper, like Headmistress has packed some of the school records. I pull them out and skim through them, Reese looking over my shoulder, but the print is small and my eye is aching, desperate for some rest, so I just shove them deep into the backpack. We’ll get to them later.
Reese goes back to the water, but a few moments later she says my name, and I squint up at her. She has one of the bottles in her hand, the cap undone.
“What?” I ask.
“It’s already been opened. The seal’s broken.”
I picture Headmistress as we came in, how she was standing over this case. There was something in her hands. I look up at her now, try to catch her eye, but she’s staring straight ahead.
“Is it just that one?” I ask.
Reese takes another from the carton, twists the cap off. “This one too.” I scramble over to her, and we pick through them. Every bottle, the cap opening easily, the seal already snapped.
“Shit,” I say, but Reese is already on her feet, advancing on Headmistress.
“What,” she says softly, “did you do?”
Under my knees the floor is damp, seeping up into my jeans. Headmistress must have tampered with them somehow. But what for?
I hold one of the bottles up to the light. At first I don’t see it, but then…there. Grains of fine black powder, collecting at the bottom.
Reese breaks off as I push past her. Headmistress shies away, but I hook my fingers in the pocket of her slacks and drag her toward me. I’m right, I know I am, and I wish I were surprised, but this is just the same thing over and over. Everything
is the same thing over and over.
“Hetty,” Reese says, “what is it?”
Headmistress is struggling away from me, but I wedge my shoulder in against her chest, pin her as flat as I can.
“Check the bullets,” I say to Reese. “You’ll see.”
“I didn’t mean to hurt anybody,” Headmistress pleads. “It was only to help.”
“Oh,” Reese says behind me, and I know without looking what she’s found. Some of the bullets already cracked open, emptied of gunpowder the way the older Gun Shift girls taught us to do. I never knew how we first found out what a little powder could do to a body with the Tox. Nobody would ever tell me when I asked. But I know it’s a slow death, like sleep if sleep lit you up with pain.
“You put it in the water, didn’t you?” I say, leaning so close my spit flecks across Headmistress’s cheek.
She takes my face in her hands before I can back away and looks down at me, her expression soft even as her grip tightens. “You have to listen to me,” she says. “This is the best thing for you right now.”
“Let her go,” Reese says, but Headmistress ignores her.
“They’re on their way, Hetty. Jets off an aircraft carrier.” Her voice drops, hoarse and barely more than a whisper. “You know what they can do.”
I do. It’s not that I heard things when I was living on-base. It’s that I didn’t. And that said more than anything.
I push her hands off me and step back. “Why now? They’ve had a year and a half. What’s changed?”
“There was a contagion on the research team,” Headmistress says, “and then one of you girls broke the quarantine.”
It takes everything I have to stay standing, the guilt pressing down on me, and it’s like drowning except I can’t show it. I can’t let Headmistress know it was us.
“Too great a risk for too small a payoff,” she continues. “They can’t cure this. Maybe if they’d been able to do a broader range of testing—”
“A broader range?” It’s knocking at some memory I can’t quite find, and I shut my eye, filter through the last few days until it comes burning back. Welch, on the pier that day, right before she died. They wanted to test all of us, to experiment on the food, she said, but she wouldn’t let them.
