by Carrie Ryan
He explodes. “It’s not okay! This”—he gestures back and forth between us—“isn’t okay!”
Grabbing my head between his hands, he pulls me close, until our lips are almost but not quite together. His breathing is fierce and fast, matching my own. I can tell that he’s angry and scared and panicking.
“You could die,” he’s telling me. “That kiss, it could kill you.”
I smile. “Don’t you get it, Catcher? With the horde already consuming the Dark City? With the Recruiters and their death cages? I’m already going to die. This Sanctuary isn’t safe—nowhere’s safe. Even without the horde, one day I’m going to die. Just like one day you’re going to die—”
“But that’s the difference, Annah! I’m. Not. Going. To. Die. Ever.” He drops his hands from my head and paces away from me. I feel the chill of the morning air on every spot Catcher just touched. “One day something will happen to me. My heart will stop working, I’ll get stabbed by the wrong person, I’ll drown or fall from a bridge or a building will collapse on top of me. And then I’ll come back.”
He spins to face me. “I could die today right here in your room and I’d come back.”
“But it’s oka—”
“Don’t tell me it’s okay!” he shouts. He seems shocked at his own rage and he storms away from me, arms crossed tight over his chest. I approach him slowly.
“Don’t tell me it’s okay,” he repeats, this time more in control. “Because it’s not. When I come back, I’ll attack you if you’re anywhere nearby.” His voice is shaking now. “Don’t you realize how dangerous that is? Don’t you understand there’s already that monster inside me, waiting for my heart to hesitate for only a moment before it becomes unleashed?”
He whips around, grabs my upper arms. “I can’t do that to you, Annah. I can’t.”
He starts to pull away but I stop him. “You asked me what I’d do knowing I only had a few days left and that was it,” I tell him. “That’s what I’d do. I’d stop worrying and being afraid and living in the past. I’d stop trying to keep my emotions safe. You know as well as I do what the horde is doing to the City—how it will eventually come across the river. And if it doesn’t, Ox and his men will find a way to kill us anyway. You know my time is limited.”
He closes his eyes. “I’m not going to let anything happen to you,” he whispers. “I’m going to keep you safe.”
“And then what?” I ask him. “I’ll survive only to be alone again? To have you slink away? That’s not what I want. I want you. And I want you to understand that you’re not broken.”
Taking a deep breath, he presses his lips together until they disappear. I let the silence flow around us. “There’s something you need to understand about me,” he says. His voice is too even, too devoid of inflection or emotion.
“What?” I ask him, my heart starting to thud.
He reaches out his hand to me, cupping my cheek gently. “Do you think you could ever feel beautiful?” he asks.
I’m so taken aback by his words that I’m stunned speechless. I think about the night Elias made me feel beautiful, remember the touch of his fingers over my scars.
I remember how long I’ve waited for someone else to find me beautiful. How I push people away before they can see the ugliness. I’m too afraid of the pain that I know comes with losing love.
And I know he was right on the roof. I’ve been waiting for the validation to come from everyone else, hoping their words can heal the scars that rip through my skin and into my heart.
“I don’t know,” I answer him honestly. I don’t add that I hope so.
“Then how can you ask me to feel unbroken?” he says. I open my mouth to answer but nothing comes out. Because I don’t know what to say to him. He’s right, how can I ask him to heal himself when I don’t know if it’s even possible?
Elias and my sister don’t want me leaving the flat. I understand their fear—it’s not like the Recruiters don’t have enough reasons to cause me trouble. Under normal circumstances I might have listened but I’m not willing to sit around and hope that someone else finds a way off the island.
There has to be another place we can go because I don’t see the point of staying in the Sanctuary if it’s not ultimately going to keep us safe. And I certainly don’t feel safe here anymore.
For the day my sister and I do as Elias asks and stay in bed. My muscles still spasm from the memory of being frozen the night before and my hands and feet are painfully swollen. My head pounds and I have a hard time keeping food down, but Elias is persistent: he will make my sister and me healthy again.
Long after dark, when the flat is silent and I’m sure they’re asleep, I pull on clothes dried stiff by the woodstove and find Elias’s machete by the door. I slip it into my belt and sneak down the stairs, wincing until my body gets used to moving again and the ache in my joints subsides.
Outside the night sky’s clear and sharp, a million tiny lights exploding overhead—more stars than there ever could have been people in this world.
I think about how fascinated with space Elias always was growing up. How one year I saved every credit I had and traded them all over the months so that on the winter solstice I could present him with an old book mapping the stars. It was the longest night of the year and he spent the entire time on the roof, staring up at the sky and comparing what he saw to the little book in his lap.
It was freezing outside and I’d hauled every blanket we owned up to the roof. While I drifted in and out of dreams, he read to me stories of the stars, origins of their constellations. Over the years I’ve forgotten most of it, but there’s one detail I’ve always remembered: he told me how long it takes the light from stars to reach through space to us.
How most of the points of light we see actually no longer exist. We’re just seeing the remnants of what was—ghosts of what used to be.
I glance at the Dark City across the river, a few buildings still flickering with light as the handful of survivors huddle behind thin curtains slung across broken windows. All of them tiny little stars in their own constellations waiting to fall to infection and become ghosts of what they used to be.
It all seems so worthless. Such a waste of lives. We’ve spent hundreds of years since the Return buffering the Dark City and trying to maintain it—scraping out a life that will soon be wiped out.
And what of the rest of the world that’s already fallen? Stars blinking away, their light slowly fading? Somewhere out there a star’s just dying and we’ll never know about it. Somewhere another’s being born whose light we’ll never see.
The Earth will spin, the stars will rearrange themselves around one another and the world will crawl with the dead who one day will drop into nothingness: no humans left for them to scent, no flesh for them to crave. Everything—all of us—will simply cease to be.
They’ll finally find peace only when we’re all dead.
Once I’m inside the headquarters my footsteps echo down empty hallways, and at first I cringe with every noise, waiting for someone to turn a corner, spot me and cause trouble. But it’s a huge building with warrens of twisting corridors, and the ones I walk are dusty and unused.
In the map room I light a few lanterns, knocking the door closed behind me with my foot. It’s as I remember: walls covered with faded drawings of the world as it used to be. Pins scattered along the floor, desks piled with neglected stacks of papers and journals.
I flip through a few of the pages—notations from scouts returning from various outings, reporting on enclaves of survivors. There are columns with neatly ordered numbers counting men, women and children. Noting resources and defenses, listing quotas to be met in order to be considered under the Protectorate control.
All this information pulled together and sorted down to one small colored pin on a map. Most of those even gone by now. I wonder how many people mentioned in these pages are dead. I wonder if those who wrote these letters, the ones who traveled to all these places a
re dead as well.
The reality is that everyone dies. Whether safe in bed asleep or trapped in an alley facing a Returned friend or family member or lover. Whether shot by a Recruiter or just left to float in a boat in the middle of a snowstorm, your body slowly eating itself as resources run dry.
It will happen to me one day. I wonder why I fight so hard against the inevitability of it. What’s another day? What’s the day after that? Slowly, I walk around the room, trailing my fingers over the wall.
My thumb stops, resting at a green pin. “Vista,” I read aloud. My sister’s town by the sea. Where Catcher grew up, became infected. Where he survived, broken. There’s a thick black line etched along the map just to the west of Vista leading up the coast, and beyond the line there’s nothing, but I know it represents the Forest.
And somewhere in that void is the village where I was born, and raised for a few years. I press my hand over it, the scope of the Forest extending past my fingers.
“It’s not there anymore,” a deep voice says behind me. “Your village.”
I cringe, already knowing it’s Ox, and reach for the machete at my hip. He doesn’t make a move to stop me or even flinch when I pull it from my belt and hold the long blade between us.
“What do you mean, my village?” I ask, cold inside. “How do you know anything about where I’m from?”
Ox leans against the wall by the door, arms crossed casually over his chest. Other than his bulk he appears nonthreatening. But I know better.
He shrugs as if he’s not talking about a village. About people. About my father and neighbors. “It’s gone.”
My eyes go wide, the machete trembling between us. It shouldn’t matter, I think. Elias and I had tried to find the village before and we’d failed. We’d given up on it a long time ago. But I’d always preserved that tiny bit of hope that maybe someday we’d make our way back. Everyone we’d left behind would be there with arms outstretched to meet us.
Ox has to see the despair on my face. He has to see how unsettled I am, but he just stays where he is, breathing slowly in and out, face showing no emotion.
“Maybe there was something left of it—the fences were still up and a few buildings looked like they were being maintained. But your friends took care of all that—tearing down the fences to slow Conall and his men.” He shrugs again and I want to slap him. “Didn’t work,” he adds. “And of course they regretted it when they had to fight their way back through to get to Vista.”
He squats, riffling around on the floor until he finds a black pin. He stands, knees creaking a little, and walks past me to the map, shoving the pin into it.
I’m staring at the very tip of the machete shaking in the air in front of me. What would it feel like to swing it around, slice it through Ox’s neck? I’ve decapitated enough Unconsecrated by now to know how much force it takes—what it’s like trying to saw through the muscle and cartilage and bone.
A part of me would love to hear this man scream. To make him hurt. To see if there’s any emotion left inside. But it would be murder, pure and simple, and I’m not sure I’m ready to cross that line.
I’m not sure I’m ready to become a monster like him.
As if he knows what I’m thinking, he smirks but doesn’t move out of range of my knife. He just stands there, fingers still hovering over the black pin that represents my village.
“You know”—he smiles, predatory—“Catcher’s not the only Immune out there. They’re rare, but they exist. We’ve got people looking—men like Elias infiltrating the Soulers. They know more about Immunes than we do—they worship and protect them, collect them like gods. We bring the Soulers here and eventually one of the Immunes will come to beg for their release. Ask us to trade the lives of all the Soulers—set them free—in exchange for the Immune staying to supply us. It’s happened before.”
I grip the machete tighter but his glance doesn’t waver.
“The second we find a new Immune, you become a whole lot less important. Catcher becomes less valuable and your life becomes about my mercy.” He tilts his head to the side. In the small room I can smell his sweat. “And you already know how merciful I can—”
Before he even finishes the statement I swing the machete, aiming for his throat, and then, just as I’m about to feel the blade slice through flesh I stop, letting it hover over his skin. “What about my mercy?” I ask through clenched teeth.
I’d wanted a reaction, wanted to see fear, but instead he laughs. “You and I are too much alike for that,” he says. “It’s that fire I admire in you. If we ever had to teach Catcher a lesson, I’d be sad to see you be the one to go.”
He places two fingers on the blade, pushing it away. I resist and the razor-sharp edge cuts into him, thin lines of blood appearing. I know exactly the feel of that pain. It makes my empty stomach turn but he doesn’t even flinch. Instead he smiles, hesitating long enough before pulling his hand away that he makes his point.
“We had another Immune once, a few years ago,” he says. “We controlled him with his mom—he was a mama’s boy, always coming back to her and bringing what we wanted.”
My heart begins to beat heavily, my grip on the machete slipping a little as my palms sweat. He pauses, forces me to ask: “What happened?”
This makes him smile as I knew it would. “He felt bad that it was his immunity that made his mom a prisoner, though I thought we treated her fairly well, all things considered.
“Then one day he threw himself off a seven-story building.” Slowly, he raises his hand between us, rubbing his thumb over the thin cuts on his fingers, smearing the blood. He considers it a moment before continuing.
“I guess he forgot that, being an Immune, he was still infected. And being infected, he Returned. He couldn’t really walk too well, but he could still infect others.”
It’s silent as Ox wipes his bloody hand over the maps, smearing red across the Forest. I drop my arm to my side, the flat of the machete resting against my knee.
My throat feels tight, making the air in the room that much harder to breathe. “What did you do to him?” My voice cracks.
Ox looks at me hard, his eyes slightly narrowed. “We scraped him up and tossed him in a cage. And then we put his dear old mother in with him.”
Even though my stomach lurches at his words, I only clench my teeth—I won’t give him the satisfaction of a response. He smiles all the same and then leaves me alone to stare at the bloody maps, trying to figure out what to do next.
The next morning I wake up to find a package sitting in the chair by the window. It’s wrapped in a worn woven cloth. I look around the room, wondering who was here. The air is freezing and I tug a quilt around me as I climb from bed and pull the bundle into my lap, unwrapping it.
Folded inside is a thick wool coat that looks like it’s never been worn before. An intricate pattern is stitched around the edges and I run my finger over it. There’s something else tucked inside and I pull free a brightly knit scarf and a matching knit hat. The material of both is so thick and soft that I can’t help pressing my face against them, feeling the soft woolen hairs brush my cheeks.
It’s too perfect a gift. I look up to find my sister nudging open the door to my room. She sees me clutching the bundle in my hands.
“Was this you?” I ask, wondering how she could have ever pulled it off. I never saw her knitting and don’t know where she could have found such amazing materials.
She smiles, eyes bright, and shakes her head. “It was Catcher. He came by in the night and said a woman in the Dark City begged for a way to repay him for bringing her food and keeping her alive. He thought you’d want something.” She waves toward my closely cropped hair.
I put on the hat, pulling it down over my ears and luxuriating in the sensation of soft warmth.
“He brought me something as well.” She holds out a thick book. I take it from her, running my fingers over the cracked plastic that once protected the cover. I flip through pages of d
iagrams of buildings and structures that make no sense.
“Architecture,” she says, unable to hide the excitement in her voice. “It’s about building things.” She takes the book from me and sits on the bed, feet tucked underneath her. “I’ve always wanted to build things and he remembered.”
I wrap the scarf around my arms, lift the edge of it to my nose as if I could still catch a trace of Catcher. “He’s thoughtful like that.” I wonder how he found these things. How long he must have searched. I wonder why he didn’t wake me up. Why he didn’t say anything to me. I think about him sneaking into my room in the night, of me asleep and never knowing.
He was right here, could have stood at the end of my bed, and he said nothing. It’s clear he’s avoiding me. I pull the coat on, huddling into the heavy folds as if they could protect me from these feelings.
“Well, what are you waiting for?” she says, swiping at my shoulder. “Finish getting dressed—meet me on the roof! We can see how warm that keeps you.”
I’d planned on exploring more of the buildings on this end of the island again, hoping that we missed something in one of the basements. That maybe there’s an entrance to the tunnels after all.
I slide from bed and walk to the window. As if she senses my hesitation my sister comes to stand next to me. Beyond the river the Neverlands smolder and the Dark City lies gray and dormant. Dead continue to spill through the streets. They flounder from the docks into the water and eventually will wash ashore on the Sanctuary island.
“Where do you think they’re housing the Soulers?” I ask, staring at the wall and wondering how many Sweepers were just on the other side last night, protecting us and getting nothing in return.
“I don’t know,” my sister whispers softly. “There were a lot of rooms in the basement of the headquarters,” she says. “That’s where they kept me.” She hasn’t talked about the time she was imprisoned before the rest of us got here. Even now her face is drawn thinking about it.
“There were others down there too. I knew there were, but …”
