Melancholy: Episode 2

by Charlotte McConaghy

  The gate opens and shuts below us, and a figure stumbles out into the beyond, straight towards the waiting crowd of monsters.

  But it is not Luke.

  It is Hal.

  I feel everything in my body go numb with a different kind of horror, and to my shame, a deep measure of relief.

  Beside me Pace goes rigid and a strangled, almost inhuman sound tears from her mouth. I catch her as she falls and hold her upright. Her legs have utterly given out and her breathing is ragged like a dying person’s.

  “Oh god,” she whispers. “Oh no.”

  Hal is desperately hammering on the gate as the Furies move in. “I didn’t do it!” he screams. “It wasn’t me, I swear!”

  “He didn’t do it!” I shout to Raven and Quinn, but they are stony-faced and they don’t even glance at me. I don’t understand what’s going on. Luke and I haven’t found any indication that Hal had anything to do with the murder.

  There are dozens of the ferocious creatures descending on Hal as he sobs to be let back in. But the gates don’t open, and he is forced to face them.

  “Let him back in!” I scream desperately. My mind knows there will be no letting him in, but my heart can’t stop shouting. “Please, Quinn – he’s innocent!”

  “Hal!” Pace shouts suddenly. “Hal! Hal!” And she keeps shouting his name, over and over again, her throat hoarse.

  Below, Hal is fighting for his life with a horrible urgency, an image I will carry with me to my grave.

  I motion for Will to take hold of Pace as she is catatonic with shock, and then I sprint to the nearest guard and wrench his bow from him. I don’t know how to shoot a bow. I can’t even get to his arrows. But I try anyway, try to at least kill one of the beasts attacking Hal, pointless as it may be.

  The guard shoves me away, reclaiming his bow.

  “Help him,” I implore.

  The man is as full of despair as I am, but he doesn’t fire any arrows.

  We watch as Hal is overcome by Furies who tear at him, devouring him alive. The sick tear and rip of flesh reaches us, along with Hal’s screams that seem to go on for so much longer than they should.

  “Hal! Hal! Hal!” Pace keeps shouting, over and over.

  And then a shot does fire. A single arrow.

  It sinks straight into Hal’s head, killing him instantly and cutting off his horrible shrieks.

  I look to my right and see Luke lowering his bow. His hands tremble. But his expression is cold, brutally cold.

  There is a woozy horror in my head, but also an overwhelming gratitude for what he did. The Furies keep eating Hal’s dead body. It’s so gruesome I don’t know how any of us can witness this and still remain human.

  I stumble back to Pace, who is frozen like a corpse herself. I don’t know what to do. I don’t know how to help her.

  Will is curled into a ball, sobbing violently. I don’t have enough arms to try to hold them both. Luke comes to us, lifting Pace and carrying her down the steps. She curls into him, burying her face in his neck. I try to support Will beneath the arms, and several people reach to help me before Shadow pushes through them and lifts the small boy, carrying him after Luke.

  I stop a moment. Everyone is flooding down the wall to the ground. They have seen enough, witnessed enough. Some cry, most are silent. But I turn, dazed, to see that several yards along the wall stands Eric.

  He is so straight it’s as though there is iron around his spine. I go to his side and stand with him, and he doesn’t look at me once. He simply gazes at the mess on the ground, something completely empty in his face.

  The monsters keep at it for hours. And we stay for hours, the two of us alone on the wall except for the guards, who have all turned their backs on the horror.

  We’re very good at caring for each other, too.

  Oh, god, the waste of it. He was such a gentle, kind young man.

  I need to be with Pace and Will now. But I can’t leave Eric. And I can’t leave Hal. Some twisted part of me can’t leave him.

  Eric moves at long last, sees me as though only just realizing I’m here. “Dual,” he says.

  “Eric.” My voice aches.

  He walks, dazed, from the wall.

  I stand alone now, and don’t know what to do. The sun sets and through the dead trees it looks golden. Someone moves behind me and I see Raven appear from the steps. She stares expressionlessly down at the macabre execution.

  “How could you do this?” I manage to whisper. “You know he didn’t do it.”

  “I don’t know any such thing.”

  “But even a quick death,” I sigh, tears spilling down my face. I never used to cry. Never. Now I have more tears than I can fit in my body.

  “He was not sentenced to death,” she tells me. “But exile.”

  “Exile?” I exclaim. “Exile into the arms of dozens of waiting Furies?”

  “We gave him a chance at survival,” she says, and that’s when I hear it. The abrupt vulnerability in her voice. She’s upset.

  “There was never a chance,” I tell her. “Don’t lie to yourself.”

  “Do you know who did it?” she asks softly.

  I turn to look at her dark, dark eyes. The red of her hair is glinting in the sunset. I can’t speak, I am so angry.

  “He would have died, no matter what.”

  “Why?”

  “He slept with Pace.”

  It makes me stop. “So?”

  “So it’s forbidden, unless we sanction it. I made sure he took with him the fear that permeates this settlement.”

  I am too dazed to understand it. It is too absurd. I feel as though I am back in the city, abuse of power and invasion of privacy running rampant. There is so much space here. Infinite space. We need more people. We should be growing our numbers, not murdering them. But I can’t speak, can’t argue. I am too shell-shocked, too weary by far.

  “You could have stopped it from happening like this, though,” Raven tells me. “It could have been quick and silent and private. An overdose of something in his sleep. If only you had been honest about who really murdered Batch.”

  Then she leaves me to anxiously worry that she knows the truth.

  What if I did kill him?

  Then we will make sure no one ever knows.

  Yes, I could have changed this. I could have stopped it, if I had spoken out. But I wouldn’t have. And I wouldn’t speak now, given the chance.

  I would stay quiet through the nightmare, over and over again, no matter how many times I had to witness it. Because to speak meant condemning Luke, who I know deep down is the real killer, and I will never be capable of such words. I woner if this makes me as corrupt as Raven. I wonder if it makes me as dishonest.

  Chapter 19

  March 3rd, 2066

  Raven

  I leave Dual and walk around the wall until I am on the opposite side of the compound, staring out at the sea beyond. The Furies have all gone to Hal, so the sand of the beach is empty.

  My skin feels unclean.

  I thought this would feel the opposite. That it would be like tying up loose ends, like a baptism of fire for The Inferno. A way to move forward with a scorched-clear slate. But actually it feels like dirtying my very soul.

  I come here most nights. To watch the ocean.

  It is the only thing, without exception, that gives me peace. The counterweight to the hatred, which is what sustains me.

  I decided many years ago that I would like to drown. One day, when I am ready.

  *

  Luke

  Pace and Will have become mad creatures. She is raging around the house breaking things, while Will is curled on the couch sobbing like a maniac. Shadow is sitting on a chair, watching. Meanwhile I say stupid things designed to comfort that don’t.

  “Where the fuck is Josi?” I hiss, panicked.

  I am not equipped to handle this. I don’t understand grief. I am not good with it. I couldn’t deal with my mother’s grief, or my father’s,
so I left them and didn’t go back. I cannot deal with my own, so I put it in a very small, locked box. I don’t know how to fix this. I don’t know how to make it stop.

  The pain in the room feels magnificent and throbbing. It feels too big to fit within the walls.

  Will eventually cries himself to sleep but Pace keeps moving. She breaks more stuff, and cries and kicks the couch. She even punches through a window, and I can’t make her stop for long enough to bandage her hand. It seems so strange to me that her feelings should be so … overt. I have only ever known dark things to exist within, in tight little corners, but this is like a pantomime. I think it’s her unselfconscious expression of her grief that is making me so uncomfortable.

  As night falls, Josephine finally comes. She takes one look at the absolute chaos that Shadow and I have been unable to prevent, and she deals with it. She crosses to Pace and grabs her, shoving her against the wall to get her to pause long enough to look into Josi’s eyes. She takes Pace’s face and says, “You will survive this. Soon it will ease, and you’ll come out the other side of it, and you’ll still be alive, and you’ll still be you. You’re strong enough to bear it. You just have to make space in yourself for it.”

  “I can’t,” Pace sobs.

  “You can. You can.”

  “It hurts.”

  “I know.” Josi moves her gently into the bedroom and lays her down, holding her tightly. “Sleep. When you wake it will feel a little better. I promise.”

  In the living room I feel sick to my stomach.

  “I tried to get there in time,” I tell Shadow. It feels pathetic to speak, but I can’t stop myself. He is silent as always, but he’s listening to me. “I didn’t know it was happening. I was in the lab. I ran. I fucking ran, when I heard. But he was already being eaten.”

  “You couldn’t have stopped it.”

  But I could have. I could have, and would have. That boy died for me. And I’ll carry it always.

  *

  We wait. I sit with my hand on Will’s back, rubbing it gently while he sleeps. I can feel his heartbeat and it calms me. Shadow doesn’t say anything, but he leaves briefly and returns with a flask of home-brew whisky, which we make our way through. When Josephine finally emerges, looking ghostly, I pour her a glass and she drinks the whole thing before reaching for a refill.

  “She’s asleep.” She stands behind the couch, looking down at Will. I don’t tell her happy birthday. Of course I don’t. It would be like a nasty joke.

  “You should sleep too, love,” Shadow tells her.

  Josi nods. Looks at him for a long moment. “Did you know this was what it was like here?”

  Shadow nods.

  “It’s not right.” And it’s such a helpless, obvious statement that somehow it manages to fill the room with an aching kind of innocence, a certain awareness – long since forgotten – of what life is meant to be like.

  There are so many meants and shoulds and if onlys that they take up all the air and I can hardly breathe.

  All I know to say is, “We can’t take it back, but we’ll make sure it never happens again.”

  If I have to take control of this entire settlement to do it, I will. I will do it so that no more innocent people are slaughtered like beasts. So that a life that is meant to be lived in freedom is, truly, lived in freedom.

  *

  Josephine

  They leave and I sit in the living room with Will for a long time. Hours pass. I feel wrung out to dry. Every inch of me has been squeezed of its hope.

  But now I am filled with something else.

  Certainty.

  I am not a good enough person to just exist. Too much violence lies in my past. I have to earn my life. Earn the beats of my heart, and be worthy of them.

  To do that, I will give my life new purpose.

  I will find a way to change the rules of The Inferno so that Quinn’s power is not absolute and people cannot be wrongly condemned for crimes they didn’t commit.

  I will find a way to stop the sadness cures and save the poor, destitute drones from a fate they had no choice in.

  I will make sure that Luke is rid of the virus I caused him to contract.

  And I will make sure that Raven is punished for what she’s done, even if I have to do it myself.

  Chapter 20

  March 4th, 2066

  Josephine

  As I make these decisions the moon in the sky reaches its apex and a new kind of power comes into my veins. Something entirely other. Something undeniable. I am twenty-one years old and I feel a thousand.

  I rise from the couch and I walk from the house, through the dark, dusty street to another house, and I knock on its door.

  Quinn answers, looking surprised to see me. He rubs his eyes as though he has been peacefully sleeping. How nice for him. “Dual. What brings you here at this hour – ”

  “I have something to say. Where’s Raven? She should hear this too.”

  He blinks, but Raven appears behind him in a long t-shirt, her legs bare. “I’m here.”

  I look at them both in turn. I say, “My name is Josephine Luquet. I was injected with a drug that would later evolve into what we know as the cure. It has made me immune to most other drugs, including the immunization against anger. I was given an antidote, which means I may have in my veins the answer to stopping the sadness cures. I may even have the answer to reversing the anger cure. I tell you this freely, but the study and research of my blood will be entirely dictated by me. Neither of you will have any say in it, because I am a free person. You can disagree with this, but you should know that there’s enough blood on my hands to drown the ocean. And after what I saw today – after the appalling misuse of power you displayed – you’ve woken a creature inside me that I thought was dead, and she’s hungry for the two of you.”

  They stare at me, utterly stunned.

  “The walls around us are for protection. But you remake them a prison.” And I turn and leave, because for my whole life I have been weak and afraid, and I’m tired of it.

  Trained Bloods haven’t been able to kill me. A deadly virus that killed all its other test subjects was not able to kill me. So let Quinn and Raven kill me – let them try.

  *

  My footsteps lead me to a second doorway that isn’t mine. Because I’ve realized something else. The trauma of Hal’s death has shed light on so many things, and now I understand.

  Forgiveness isn’t shameful. Selfishly, I made what Luke did about me. I was arrogant enough to be humiliated. But it isn’t about me. It’s about a mistake – and who am I to ever judge someone for a mistake? For making an impossible choice in the only way he – a brave, generous man – knew how?

  To hold onto a stupid grudge seems incredibly childish to me in this moment, given what else I know about Luke Townsend, and what I know about myself.

  I hesitate before knocking and instead skirt around the small house to the window. Rapping on the glass with my knuckles, I hear the thump of footfalls from within.

  The curtain is thrown aside and I am looking up at Luke.

  He’s not wearing a shirt, only boxers, and he has white scars on his sun-browned chest. They are nothing compared to the terrible scars he bears on his back, the ones he endured for me. He gazes down at me, startled by my presence.

  My heart is trembling in my chest. It’s beating its wings to get free. I am so frightened, but I must be brave. I reach up, placing my palm flat against the glass. Our eyes meet.

  The moment stretches out indefinitely. And I feel in this moment the presence of our children. Once upon a time, Luke Townsend told me in a supermarket that he imagined us living on a houseboat with three children. I don’t think he has any idea how much that moment and those words changed my life. I don’t think he understands that by doing that – by giving me the idea of a family – he was indelibly scarring himself on my insides. He is a brand on my heart. A tattoo on my bones. And the children are here now, in my mind, an impossible p
ossibility.

  I say, “I love you.” And even though he can’t hear me through the glass, he can see the words on my lips, and he lets his eyes fall shut. A great ache is in his shoulders as he opens the window and helps me to climb in. His gaze looks incredibly green.

  “Luke.”

  “Josi.” He reaches to touch my cheek and his hand is so warm.

  “I wanted to punish you for hurting me,” I say softly, and there are tears slipping from my eyes. “I just wanted to hurt you, and I’m so sorry. I don’t want to do that anymore.”

  Both his hands take my face and he leans close.

  “Luke. I thought it was you. I thought you were being executed.”

  “I’m sorry,” he whispers.

  “It doesn’t matter. It made everything so obvious. Forgiveness is the easiest thing in the world. We’re supposed to take care of each other, and we can’t do that by lying, and I don’t want to lie anymore, and I don’t want to hold onto the lies. They mean nothing, less than nothing because I know you never lied about anything that mattered, I know you love me – I feel it, I feel the truth of it.”

  His hands are trembling. My heart is flying away.

  “I love you so much,” I whisper.

  And he kisses me. And it is our first kiss.

  It is being reborn.

  It is an aching, trembling thing.

  It’s the whole future.

  It is my life in a kiss, the meaning of it.

  It is truth.

  That’s when the door bursts open and several men aim guns straight at our heads.

  “Easy,” Luke says.

  “Luke. We gotta take her,” one of them says.

  “It’s okay, I’ll go.” I was expecting this.

  “What’s the order?” Luke asks.

  “To take her to the holding room.”

  “Do you want me to stop this?” he asks me as I’m being taken hold of.

  “No. I did this. It might get bad, but I can handle it.” And then I smile at him. “I make them nervous.”