by Carrie Ryan
“Annah,” Catcher shouts, lunging toward me. He wraps his arm over my shoulder and I fall against his strength, my legs losing all sensation, my fingers going numb.
I retch again, my back arching as I heave, my mouth filling with saliva that starts to choke me. I gasp for air, my body feeling like it’s floating. Bright spots flare in my vision, almost beautiful, like stars with darker voids swallowing them.
“Annah,” Catcher yells again, holding me close. I slip along him, falling to the ground as the world tilts and sways and I don’t know what’s up and what’s down. My head screams pain, my skull too small to hold it all in.
He lays me on my back and runs his hands up my body, over my arms and legs and finally along my neck until he’s cupping my cheeks in his palms. His pulse beats against my skin, hot. My eyes flutter, the heat so nice. Something to focus on. Something to curl up against as chills spike through the rest of my body.
“My blood,” he says. He’s leaning over me, close now. I can feel his breath, taste the desperation in his voice. “Did you touch it?” He holds my cheeks tighter in his hands, his fingers arching under my neck. “Annah, this is important. I need to know.”
My eyes roll back in my head but it doesn’t matter. They were useless anyway. I much prefer the colors dancing in my mind. A woolen fog seeps in around me, blurring the pain and tempting me to dream.
“Annah!” Catcher calls to me, his voice loud but so far away. It slides along my consciousness, fading into the sound of water rushing and the wind howling. I want to raise my hand to his cheek. I want to tell him it’s okay. That it’s pretty here in my head and it doesn’t hurt. But instead I just let the black wash of waves roll over me and drag me under.
When I wake up there’s light and the crackle of a fire. I open my eyes and stare at an intricately carved ceiling of interwoven bricks arching overhead. The flames flick oranges and yellows over them, shadows stretching and snapping. Smoke curls through a small vent, disappearing into the void above.
We’re still underground at an old subway station somewhere in the Neverlands. I’m lying on my back on the platform, the quilt from my bag spread over me, its smell familiar and comforting. I let my head fall to the side, wincing as a dull ache throbs along my spine.
The stranger, Catcher, sits on the other side of the fire, staring at nothing. He’s so lost in his own thoughts, his own world, that he doesn’t realize I’m awake. I let my gaze wander over his features: sharp jaw, blond hair, brown eyes so dark they seem almost fathomless. His knees are bent with his elbows draped over them, a strip of cloth wrapped around his lower arm from where I cut him when we fell. Bruises from our tumble down the stairs already bloom under his skin.
There’s something about him that seems familiar, and I search my mind trying to figure out why. Generally I don’t bother with other people, don’t care what they look like or who they are. Everyone around me’s always a stranger.
It’s safer that way.
And then I realize what it is. “You’re the one from the bridge.” Belatedly it hits me what that means: He’s infected. I scour his face with my gaze, trying to detect how far along he is—how close to turning. But his skin’s flushed with health, his eyes clear. He looks nothing like the woman on the roof, only heartbeats away from death.
His eyes flick to meet mine. “How’re you feeling?” he asks.
I push myself up until I’m sitting, the quilt falling from my shoulders and pooling in my lap. I shiver, feeling dizzy and sick, but I shove the sensations away. “You’re the one who climbed the wall and fell in the river. They thought you were dead. You should’ve drowned.”
He drops his head a little, rubs the back of his neck with his hand. It’s such a familiar gesture that I stop breathing for a second. It’s something Elias always used to do. To buy time, to think, to figure out a way to swim through the awkward moments.
“I didn’t,” he finally says, and I almost want to laugh at his non-answer. But before I can react, before I can say anything or ask him to explain, he’s moving around the fire until he’s crouched in front of me.
He reaches out a hand, places it along my cheeks, rests his wrist on my forehead. I feel each scar on my face under his probing fingers. I yank my head away, setting off a sharp throb down my neck and a pounding against my skull.
“Your skin’s hot,” he says. His eyes are wary, his lips pressed thin.
“I’ve been lying in front of a fire,” I tell him testily, moving away and pulling the quilt up like a barrier between us. “Of course I’m hot. That happens with flames.”
He glances over my shoulder into the darkness with such intensity that I almost turn around. And then his chin drops to his chest. “Does it feel like …” He’s looking up at me as he struggles for the words. “Does it feel like fire in your veins?”
His question doesn’t make any sense to me. “What are you talking about?”
He focuses on his hands. “Inside,” he says. “Does it feel like you’re dying? Being eaten by heat?”
I push myself to my feet and stumble away from him. “What kind of question is that?” A wave of nausea hits me again and I press a hand to my stomach, the other to my head, trying to stop the world from spinning. I blink rapidly, Catcher and the light blurring and then sharpening.
“Annah—”
“No,” I cut him off. “I don’t know you and you don’t know me. Why are you asking me these things? What’s going on?”
He stands up, arms by his sides as if he’s trying to prove he’s not dangerous. I don’t fall for it. I scour the station, trying to figure out where I could run to get away. My stomach heaves again, throwing me off balance, and I stagger.
He steps forward to help me but I hold up my arms, warding him off. “Stay away from me,” I growl.
Something hardens in his eyes. “I need to know if you’re infected,” he says, his tone blunt.
It takes a moment for my mind to process the meaning of his words but they don’t make sense. “Why would I be infected?”
“Because you’re clearly sick—you can barely stay on your feet. There’s something wrong with you and you touched my blood when we fell,” he says matter-of-factly.
I frown. I’ve seen plenty of infected people—like the woman from last night. I know what it looks like and I know how it’s caused and there’s no way that’s what’s wrong with me. I haven’t been bitten; therefore, I can’t be infected. “Why would your blood have anything to do with it?”
He stares at me for a long time, his jaw clenching as if he’s frustrated at my lack of understanding. “Because I’m infected,” he finally says.
I nod slowly and cross my arms over my chest. “I know. I saw what happened on the bridge. But I’m fairly certain you can’t pass the infection until you’re dead, and as far as I can tell, that hasn’t happened to you yet.”
I realize suddenly how flippant I sound. While I’ve known he’s infected, I haven’t really thought about what that means to him. That he’s dying. The man standing in front of me, who looks strong and healthy and handsome, will be dead in a matter of days. I’m used to people becoming infected and dying and Returning—it happens all the time in the Neverlands and it’s contained pretty quickly. It’s something we’re used to seeing—something I’m used to seeing. Just not to people I know, since I make a point to know no one.
What a waste. And then a small voice whispers in my head that I’m trapped underground with an Infected. That this is serious—I don’t know exactly where I am, where he carried me when I blacked out. I don’t know where my knife is. Catcher’s infected and I don’t really know how much time he has, which makes him dangerous, and once he dies he’ll come for me. Like with the woman last night, I might be the one to have to kill him. He could even turn Breaker if there aren’t other plague rats around that he can sense, and I’m not sure my little knife would be a match for that kind of speed and ferocity.
Anxiety begins to burn under my skin
and I start feeling restless—my legs itching to run even though the rest of my body feels weak. “I’m not infected,” I assure him.
Something shifts in his eyes and he turns away but not before I see sadness flooding his face. “We can’t be sure yet. It could still be inside you,” he says.
I walk past him back to the fire and kneel next to my quilt and bag. I feel a little woozy and press my hand to the ground to steady myself. My fingers shake as I pretend to fold the quilt while I look for my knife.
I hear a clatter behind me and then metal sliding over concrete as Catcher drops my knife and kicks it over to me. I stare at it before glancing up at him.
“You’re not going to need it,” he says, still keeping his distance. “At least not against me. I’m not going to turn—I’m immune.”
I wrap my fingers around the handle, flicking my thumb over the blade. Fire shines along the metal without a trace of his blood. He cleaned it after I passed out. “You’re immune to being stabbed?” I ask.
A small smile flickers over his lips. It’s lopsided, one side of his mouth ticking higher than the other. It’s gone as fast as it came and it leaves me slightly off balance. He looked so different, so much younger and relaxed.
He looked almost normal.
“I’m immune to the infection,” he clarifies. “Or rather, the infection doesn’t kill me. I’ve been this way for months.” He spreads his hands out to either side as if to display how healthy he is.
I narrow my eyes at him. What he’s saying doesn’t make sense. “I’ve never heard about there being any immunity,” I tell him.
He shrugs. “It’s not that complicated—I got bitten late in the summer,” he says, almost nonchalantly. “It’s winter and I’m not dead yet. It never killed me. I’m infected but I’m immune, which means I’m basically like a living Mudo—you saw that yourself last night on the roof.”
His tone seems so casual, but there’s an undercurrent running beneath his words, an emotion I can’t pinpoint. It could be rage or desolation, but something tugs on each syllable, making his words heavy. He even holds his body rigid as he waits for my response.
It’s hard to believe that what he’s saying could be true, but at the same time he’s right: I saw him on the roof with the two Unconsecrated women. They didn’t seem to care about him at all and there are no visible bites on him from them.
I stare at my hand clutching the knife. Catcher might be immune—he could be telling the truth—but he’s still a stranger, and strangers are dangerous.
“Not many people use the word Mudo to describe them.” It marks him as an outsider the same way everyone knew Elias and I weren’t originally from the Dark City because we called them Unconsecrated instead of plague rats or one of the other terms.
“I’m from down the coast,” he says. “A place called Vista on the edge of the Forest.”
My skin breaks out in goose bumps at the mention of the Forest. It makes me think of Elias and then of my sister, Abigail. She helped Catcher escape on the bridge. Which means he knows her. Slowly, I raise my head and meet his eyes, trying to figure out how to ask the right questions.
“I just …” He pauses and licks his lips as if he’s nervous. “I just need to know that you’re okay. You had my blood all over you and I don’t know …” He lets the words trail off. “I don’t know if I can pass the infection. If being immune means that the infection inside me is somehow different and I could still infect others. I’ve been careful not to find out.” He holds himself steady, trying not to show the uncertainty and fear that threads through his voice.
I can remember the taste in my mouth at the bottom of the stairs: metallic and earthy. I remember the feel of my blade over his arm, the slickness of his blood on my hands. I remember pressing those fingers to my lips to stop from heaving.
There’s no trace of blood on them now, and I realize he must have washed me after I passed out. A strange sensation sparks in my stomach at the thought of it, at his tenderness and consideration.
But then my mind clears. I was asleep and he had his hands on me. I rub my free hand up my arm, not sure what to think about this information.
“I’d know if I was infected,” I say firmly enough to convince both of us. Though there’s a tiny bit of dread in my mind now—worry that what he’s saying might be true and even now the infection is taking hold.
I’ve never really allowed myself to think about what it would feel like. I’ve imagined being dead, being one of the Unconsecrated. But I’ve always avoided thinking about the time in between—the knowing part of it. I wonder what that must have been like for him: the feel of the dead teeth, the realization that everything was over.
Catcher’s still staring at me, almost as if he cares about me, which doesn’t make sense and makes me uncomfortable. He doesn’t know me and I don’t know him. I shouldn’t feel safe with him. I shouldn’t still be here. I should kick his knee out and run for the surface, but I don’t do any of these things because I still haven’t figured out who this guy is and how he knows both my sister and Elias.
“I’m fine,” I tell him, snapping the words.
Relief washes over his face and he turns away, trying to hide it. Trying not to show me how afraid he was. “Are you sure?” he asks, his voice weak.
I nod. “I hit my head when we fell. I’m dizzy and nauseated. But I’m not infected.”
He squeezes his eyes shut, pressing his fingers to them. I feel like I’m watching something I shouldn’t, seeing a part of him that’s too personal for a stranger like me.
I glance away and clear my throat, needing to break the silence and desperately wanting to figure out what’s going on. “Why were you on the roof last night?”
He raises his hand to his neck again and I almost scream at him to stop it, stop reminding me of Elias. I even take a deep breath, ready to say something when he runs his fingers over his head, through his hair.
“You looked like you needed help,” he says. I scowl. It’s another non-answer, and I’m starting to realize he’s good at those.
“How did you know who I was? Or do you make it a habit to rescue any damsel in distress when you come to a new city and almost drown?” My words echo slightly, tracing up and over the soaring arches above us.
I want him to admit he knows my sister. That he sees past my scars to the similarities between us.
He walks over to the little fire, keeping distance between us when he sees me tense my hand around the knife. It’s clear I still don’t trust him.
He crouches and I watch him through the flames. “I saw you when I was running from the Recruiters and I followed you.”
Chills ease over my skin again and my breath comes a little shallow. I’m glad there’s a fire between us. “Why?”
He hesitates and I can tell he’s weighing what to say next and I wonder if it’s all going to be carefully crafted lies. “Because I promised Elias I’d find you,” he finally says.
This is all too strange and convoluted. It doesn’t make sense. “You mentioned Elias earlier.” I pause, hoping he’ll fill the silence.
When he doesn’t I press, “Where is he? How do you know him?” The words come so fast I trip over them, frustrated at not knowing what to ask. “I don’t understand. How did you even know it was me you were looking for?”
He stares at me then, his gaze even more intense than the flames. His eyes trace over my face, down my body. There’s something in his look I don’t understand, something painful and awkward. I see him follow the lines of my scars.
I’m used to it, so used to the gaping stares, that I don’t notice them sometimes. It’s just a part of my life. But this man, here in this moment, makes me remember every line on my body. Makes me feel every scar as if it’s a fresh wound, festering and raw.
I wanted him to recognize me because I look like my sister but I realize that’s not how he knew who I was. “Oh.” I mouth the word, unable to put sound behind it. I cross my arms. “The scars.
” The walls I use to protect myself inside falter and I close my eyes and try to build them back up higher than before. But some of the pain and ugliness seep through.
Sometimes—rarely—I’m able to forget what I look like and it’s embarrassing to realize that this is how Elias would describe me. Of course it is—“Look for the angry girl with the scars down the left side of her body” is easier than “Look for the girl with the dirty-blond hair who never lifts her eyes from the ground.”
I rub my chin against my shoulder as if I could scratch the vulnerability from the moment. I then shift until the tip of my knife scrapes against the ground—a reminder to both of us that I still have a weapon. I still have some control.
Catcher looks like he wants to say something but he presses his lips together until they burn white. I clear the awkward silence between us by asking the obvious question. “So why’d my brother tell you to find me?”
He looks down at me. “I know he’s not your brother, Annah.”
I jump to my feet and start walking toward the darkness swallowing the tunnel at the end of the subway platform. No one’s supposed to know Elias isn’t my brother. No one could know that unless they were from our village or one of us told them. And we vowed to never tell. It’s just easier to let people believe what they want and it makes his protection of me more secure.
I clear my throat but the words feel trapped. How does he know he’s not my brother? What has Elias told him about me? What else does he know? What was he doing with my sister? Where’s Elias and why hasn’t he come back? I feel like Catcher’s playing some sort of game with me and I have no idea what the rules are.
Frustration makes my shoulders tense and my head throb. I stop at the edge of the platform, staring out into the dark that eats the light from the fire behind me. It’s colder away from the flames, the last trace of warmth leaching quickly from my clothes as the chill attacks my skin through seams and holes. I pull my coat tighter around me. It’s easier to talk when I don’t have to see Catcher’s face. When I don’t have to keep him from seeing the uncertainty in mine.
