by Carrie Ryan
I don’t like others knowing my business, especially strangers—I like to be the one who controls what people get to know about me and when.
My stomach growls. “We should go,” I tell him. “Start figuring out a way to find my sister.” It’s well known the underground tunnels aren’t safe. When the Unconsecrated don’t sense a living human nearby they collapse, almost like an insect going dormant, waiting for food and the ability to infect. Everyone knows there are pockets of plague rats down here waiting for someone to stumble upon them.
For as long as I’ve lived in the City I’ve heard the rumors of tunnels so deep that the dead lie asleep, waiting for the barest scent of living flesh to wake them and cause a surge to the surface.
Every few years there’s a fresh outbreak in the Dark City, half the time rumored to have started in the Neverlands and the other half begun underground. I’m not one to test the theories. It might not be too safe up on the streets but at least there’s light and air—not walls curling around you like a coffin.
“These the same stairs we came down?” I ask, moving toward them. Catcher nods but doesn’t follow. I turn; he can only see my profile of clean smooth skin. I think about him on the bridge with Abigail—the way she saved his life.
“Do I look like her?” I ask, the words slipping out before I can stop them. My fingers clench around the ragged hem of my coat. I can’t resist knowing. “Like my sister,” I add, as if he didn’t understand.
Catcher approaches me, each step a distinct echo in the dim chamber. The firelight jumps over his skin, shadows flickering around his eyes. He stops just out of reach. For a moment he stands there and breathes as the muscles along my neck tighten.
I blush. What do I care if I look like her or not? “Never mind,” I mumble, turning back to the darkness and the stairs.
“Yes and no,” he says.
“Let me guess,” I snort, spinning toward him. I raise one finger and press it to the smooth side of my face. “Yes.” I raise my eyebrows as I move my finger over to the scars. “And no.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he says, inching in closer.
I back away. There’s still too much I don’t know in order for me to trust him. To allow him this near.
“You’re just different people,” he says, trying to explain. “Different personalities. It’s reflected in what you look like.”
“Whatever,” I say, waving my hand in the air as I start up the stairs. It was a stupid question for me to ask.
His footfalls follow me in the darkness and I feel calmer and more in control now that I’m invisible. Our breaths fall into a rhythm with each step, our hands gliding up the rusty railing bolted into the wall. Soon the movement chases away the chill of the tunnels, a clammy sweat trickling down my back.
“I think it’s time you told me what’s going on,” I say as we near the top.
He hesitates, breaking stride. “What do you want to know?”
I stop and he stumbles against me, his hands sliding along my arms to steady himself. His touch is warm, almost to the point of hot. He jerks back and mumbles an apology. I ignore it.
There’s so little light that I can barely even see his outline. He’s become nothing more than the sound of his breathing, the rustle of his clothes and slide of each footstep. It feels almost intimate, being so aware of the noises he makes, and I become uncomfortable.
I pull farther away from him, the heat radiating from his body fading with distance and the cold taking its place. “I want to know why you act like you know me. I want to know why my bro—Why Elias told you to find me. I want to know what’s going on with my sister and what you’re doing here. With me.”
He shuffles, shifts his weight from foot to foot and then sighs. “I know Elias because he came to kill me when I was infected. And when I didn’t turn, he was the one who told me about the immunity.”
I start to say something but he cuts me off. “And I know your sister because I grew up with her.”
This is too much too fast and I sit, my feet propped on the step below. His fingers brush against my hair and cheek and then along my shoulders as he moves his hands through the air to find me. He sits next to me, the heat of him wavering around us. I touch my hand to the stairs, needing to ground myself, to stop the spinning.
“You grew up with Abigail?” My voice is nothing but a puff of air in the dark. “But … you’re not from the village.” I try to think about what he would’ve looked like when we were younger. When Elias and Abigail and I played tag in the fields. I don’t remember anyone our age named Catcher and it makes me feel uneasy. How could he know my sister otherwise?
Catcher shifts. “I’m from Vista, remember? Not your village.” His voice reverberates from the wall as if he’s looking away from me, staring into the void below. “Her name’s Gabrielle now—Gabry.”
The floor’s grimy under my fingertips, thick with dirt and dust. The air down here tastes stale and old like we’ve disturbed the past. I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to put all these pieces together. “I don’t understand.”
“Her mother found her in the Forest when she was young. She couldn’t speak—couldn’t remember her name. So her mother called her Gabrielle and raised her in Vista, on the ocean down the coast. Gabry didn’t even know anything about it—didn’t remember the Forest at all until her mother told her a few months ago.”
I try not to think about leaving Abigail behind when she skinned her knee, but hearing about the Forest, about her being lost, all I can see is the blood trailing down her leg, the way she begged Elias and me not to leave her behind. She was so scared and I just left her there. Alone in the middle of the path.
I’ve spent my entire life with that moment crowding my nightmares. Remembering the sound of the Unconsecrated thrashing at the fence for her. The smell of Elias’s fear and determination.
It’s haunted me. Tormented me. It’s who I am: the girl who left her sister behind in the Forest of Hands and Teeth.
I never knew if she died because of me. Or if she found a way back. Day after day and week after week, I’ve agonized over her fate—I even welcomed the slash of barbed wire over my skin when the accident happened because it made me not look like her anymore.
I clutch the back of my head with my hands, fingers digging into my scalp as I bury my face in my knees. It never occurred to me that while all I could do was remember, my sister could forget it all. That she could have found a way out of the Forest like Elias and I did, but end up with a life so different from mine.
She grew up next to the ocean safe and loved by a mother. That was why she could keep her head raised high when she crossed the bridge. That was why she didn’t hunch when I saw her, why she didn’t recognize me.
I could see in her everything that I ever wanted to be. I saw what I’d lost, what I could never have. She didn’t recognize herself in me because she could never imagine what it would be like to have lived my kind of life.
Knowing this makes me feel empty. This other half that’s walked like a shadow through my life never knew I existed.
“Does she know I’m here too? Does she remember anything about me?” I hold my breath, waiting for the answer.
My lungs start to ache.
“She knows you’re here,” he finally says. “Elias told her,” he adds softly. “But she doesn’t remember anything from when you were kids together.”
My own sister doesn’t remember me. I’ve spent my life trying to atone for what I did to her and she doesn’t even remember.
“I have to find her,” I whisper. “They said she might be at the Sanctuary. I have to find a way to get there.”
Catcher shifts next to me, his hand bumping against my knee and then sliding up my arm to tug at me until I let him wrap his fingers around mine. “We have to find her,” he says gently.
I’m startled by the quiet strength of his grip. By the resolve in his voice. It terrifies me because it makes me want to lean on him and let him prop me
up. Let someone else be strong and in charge.
For a moment, I indulge in this thought; indulge in the feel of his hand holding mine. Then I jerk away and stand up.
I’ve let myself believe in someone else’s strength before. When Elias left, I promised I’d never put myself in that position again.
“Let’s go, then,” I say, racing up the stairs fast enough that he can only follow one step behind.
It’s daytime aboveground, and when I throw open the doors and we reel out of the darkness, the bright glare of snow sears my eyes. Catcher stumbles after me, both of us holding arms in front of our faces against the blinding light of the morning. A stinging cold wind roars down the alley between two buildings behind us, instantly penetrating my layers of clothes and causing me to shiver violently.
Pulling my coat tight and wrapping my arms over my chest, I let the wind shove me toward the mouth of the alley. The tips of my hair whip around my face and force me to close my eyes as the howling fills my ears, blocking out any other sound: the crunch of ice underfoot, Catcher’s footsteps behind me. Every movement is an effort. The storm rushes at us until we finally stumble around a corner and into a crowded intersection of one of the main Neverlands roads.
Someone in the crowd blunders against my shoulder, knocking me off balance, and I stumble sideways. Hands grab at me, and at first I think it’s Catcher trying to help me regain my footing, but the tugging becomes insistent like an aggressive beggar, causing my feet to slide over a patch of ice coating the ground.
I jerk my arm free, my elbow connecting with the beggar as I fall. The impact with the ground makes me bite my cheek, filling my mouth with the taste of hot metal. “Get off me!” I shout with a gurgle just as the beggar lands on me, pushing me back until my head smacks the ground.
There’s a sharp pinch along my arm and I struggle to draw a breath, fighting the lump of sour-smelling clothes twisting on top of me.
“Stop!” I shout, feeling blood from my shredded cheek leak from my lips and down along my jaw. The person on top of me becomes frantic, elbows punching my chest as he lifts his head from my arm and lunges toward my face, desperate for something he must think I have.
My mind’s a moment behind. As his teeth veer toward my cheek I’m belatedly aware of two things. First, the man is Unconsecrated, and second, he just bit me. That’s what the pinch on my arm was.
Horror floods me. It incites a panic I’ve never felt before. I lash out, retribution in the face of death, punching at his face and kicking at his torso.
Even so, he’s heavier than I am, and gravity pulls him closer. I twist my head away, trying to scramble from underneath him. “Catcher!” I scream, desperate for help. The frozen ground numbs the back of my arms. It’s impossible to find traction. I can’t dig my feet in, I can’t buck the plague rat off.
I push my fingers into his eyes, trying to keep his lips from my flesh, but nothing stops him.
My arm throbs where he’s already attacked me and useless grunts slip from my mouth. I’m choking. This isn’t the way I’m supposed to die. I’ve fought too hard. I’ve resisted the Unconsecrated for too long for this to happen now.
I growl and sob as his mouth brushes my ear, tongue trying to fold me between his teeth. To bite. To infect. That is all that matters to this monster. I’m nothing to him but the absence of infection—something clean that must be sullied.
His teeth scrape my skin, once more and then again.
I twine my fingers through the Unconsecrated man’s hair, trying to pull him away, but it’s too short and I can’t get a decent grip. Just then, his head shudders in my grasp and he collapses on top of me, immobile.
For one moment I wonder if this absence of feeling is what it means to be Unconsecrated. If this is death. And then the body on top of me shudders again and I scramble from underneath him, pushing myself as far away as possible across the ice-slicked ground.
My back hits a wall and I shove myself standing. The storming wind pauses and its absence is filled with moaning everywhere at once, ripped from mouths and carried away as the howling wind rises again. Bodies and bodies and bodies stumble down the street, a trickle around me, a river several blocks away and a flood in the distance. They push against rotted doors and crumbling walls that keep the living sequestered, and start to pile beneath windows, fingers reaching up and up.
At first it doesn’t make sense—I can’t comprehend it. I’ve seen outbreaks before but nothing like this. There are too many of them.
To the north a building roars with fire while people run over trembling bridges to safety. The air’s thick with panic—the sound of it all whipped together by the rising storm so that the only noise is a screeching wind.
The true tidal wave of dead is blocks away, but rivulets of Unconsecrated have already pooled through the streets around us, stumbling and straining for the living.
A line of crumbled bodies arcs around me like a barrier. I stare back at the man who attacked me and there’s a wooden bolt jutting from his head. Another flies through the air, catching an Unconsecrated child midstride. It collapses only a few feet away, and I follow the trajectory of the arrow up to a narrow window high in a building several doors away, where I can just see the tip of a crossbow.
I raise my hand in thanks just as Catcher emerges from the growing tide of Unconsecrated, reaching for my hand. A bolt slams into his upper arm, throwing him against me. I open my mouth in horror as blood splatters from the wound, frosting the snowy ground red.
His weight pushes me against the wall with a thud and Unconsecrated ooze around us. There’s a sound like the scraping of metal and I realize Catcher has dropped a machete at my feet. Blood runs across his elbow and over his empty fingers from the bolt still lodged in his upper arm.
“Let me help—” I try to tell him, reaching to pull it free, but he shakes his head and twists the wound away from me.
“The machete,” he pants, and I shift my weight underneath him, reaching for the large blade. Catcher’s eyes are bleary, wide with pain and shock. He blinks rapidly, trying to focus on me. “The tunnels.” His teeth are clenched and the words come out clipped and harsh. “We can get back to the tunnels.”
He breaks off the length of bolt, tossing the spiked chunk of wood to the ground before lurching toward the Unconsecrated lumbering our way. I press against the wall and lash out with my machete as he shoves the dead back, grunting from the impacts that jar the remnants of the bolt still protruding from his arm.
There are so many of them creeping around us, all I can do is swing the machete indiscriminately. I scream, fight raging through me, as I take off fingers, slice through flesh, kick at knees. Anything to keep them away from me. We make it back into the alley just as the current threatens to overwhelm us and we find that it’s still clear, no living around to draw the dead in. Catcher pushes me toward the tunnel entrance and I sprint, feet skidding through frozen slush as the wind tries to throw me back.
I fight the buffeting air, clutching building walls for traction until I get to the dead end. I throw open the doors leading down into darkness and hesitate. “Come on, Catcher!” I shout at him. I can barely see the top of his head in the throng of Unconsecrated pooling around the intersection of the alley and the main road. At first I think the Unconsecrated have him. That they won’t let him go.
“Catcher!” I yell. The Unconsecrated are already stumbling toward me, following the trail of blood from my lips. I swipe my hand over my mouth, smearing red on my palm. My heart screams in my body, my muscles straining with the instinct to defend myself.
Slowly pushing against the storm, the dead advance as if they’ve never known urgency. And they don’t need to. They’ll just keep coming. They’ll always press forward. I can kill the first few, but it won’t take long for them to overwhelm.
They come at me with teeth bared, some with bloody lips where they’ve already found a living person to bite and infect. Catcher threads his way through as if he’s one of
them.
My heart lurches at the sight of it: him there among them. Them not even noticing. It’s jarring: He’s alive, they should be scrambling for him, and yet they don’t. He walks through the throng as though he’s used to being surrounded by their moaning death, and it makes me realize that this is his reality.
He’s the line between the living and the dead. He is both and neither at once. He belongs nowhere, and now I understand his hesitation when we were down in the tunnels. I recognize the way he holds walls between him and other people because I’m the same way.
“Faster!” I shout at him, afraid that he’ll be too late. He starts to jog, arms up against the biting wind, fighting to cover the distance between us and leaving the dead to stumble after.
My hand’s curled tight around the sharp edge of the metal door guarding the stairway. One side of it’s scarred and dented while the other’s still smooth and shiny. As I turn to the darkness I catch my reflection: wide eyes, blood smeared around my mouth. I grip the machete tighter, instinct screaming that it’s an Unconsecrated staring back at me.
I can’t catch my breath, startled terror zinging through my body. What if I am one of them? I relive the pinch of the Unconsecrated biting my arm, the feel of the edge of his teeth against my ear.
Catcher finally makes it to the entrance, grasping his arm where the shaft of the bolt still protrudes. Blood trickles over his fingers as he gently nudges me to the stairs and closes the doors, throwing us back into the pitch-black. Cutting the vision of myself as one of the dead away.
“Annah,” he says. I feel his hand wave through the air, seeking me, but I ignore it. Instead I race down the steps, gripping the railing to find my way back to the fire and the light.
Catcher calls after me but I don’t slow. My heart’s roaring in my chest, my thighs aching, but none of that matters.
Back on the platform the fire’s nothing but embers, and I blow shaky breaths over them until one of the half-burned bits of wood catches and sparks.
