I was ready to snap.
TWENTY-TWO
I paced around my room. It was late on a Thursday, maybe. It was hard to tell day or time so far underground. My watch and phone were melted somewhere underneath the remains of our house, so any time I wanted to find out the time, I had to ask someone. It didn’t really matter down here, so I didn’t bother much.
The silence and stillness were beating me around the head, and I couldn’t take much more. I had to do something.
Rachel’s room was opposite mine, so I gently creaked open her door to see if she was still awake. She was lying on her side in bed, facing the wall, and as she turned towards me, her eyes were raw and red. It looked like she was crying, but when I moved forward to ask about it, she waved me away. I felt like that too sometimes, that I just wanted to be left alone with my sadness, so I didn’t push it. She would talk when she was ready.
After a few moments, though, I started to resent her for it. It was my family who were missing, not hers. It was me who had lost everything. It was me who had watched Noah die. She might have walked that journey before, but it was my turn now. The least she could do was pull herself together.
I shook my head as if to flick the anger out of my brain. My insides had been growing darker every day, like a sponge absorbing a bottle of ink. I heard somewhere that when you sleep, fluid drains out of your brain through your ears or something. My thoughts had been so dark I was half expecting to wake up one morning and find my pillow had turned a murky black. It was hard to remember what it felt like to be okay.
“I’m sorry,” Rachel mumbled.
“For what?” I had the horrible feeling she could read my thoughts. After everything I’d seen, it wouldn’t surprise me.
She sat up and hugged her knees. “For everything that’s happened to you.”
“It’s not your fault, Rachel.”
“It’s all our fault, in a way. I mean, if the Kindred weren’t here, if it weren’t for the Unseen and the war and everything, your life would still be normal.”
“So would yours, right?” I attempted a reassuring tone. Sure, I was selfishly mad at Rachel, but I didn’t want her shouldering this kind of responsibility. No amount of blame would bring back my old life.
“You had no choice to be here. I did.”
I sensed an opening. “Then what made you join?”
“We used to live in the city. My parents and me, and my older brother, Ben.”
She’d never mentioned a brother before. I tried to picture her with a big brother. Sometimes I wished I had one, someone to look out for me, someone to pester, someone to stick up for me when kids at school were jerks. It was hard to imagine Rachel needing much protection. I hadn’t seen her cry before today.
“When I was ten, my mum died in a crash way out west,” she said quietly. “Dad was driving, and he spun off the road into the side of a tree. He told us she died quick, but I overheard someone at her funeral say she was in heaps of pain, and that Dad held her hand for hours until she died. Someone drove past the next day and found them. He went to hospital, but he never really recovered, if you know what I mean. To lie there, listening to someone you love dying, knowing it’s your fault … No one should ever have to do that.”
My mind went to Noah. If nothing else, at least it had been quick.
“Anyway,” she sniffled, “two years after that, Dad killed himself, I guess from the guilt. Ben found him, and he was never the same after that.”
I couldn’t believe how calm she was, how she could talk about this with such cold language. Maybe this was how she survived. She switched off the pain somehow, retreating inside herself. I was doing the same thing more and more lately.
“We got bounced around a few foster homes, but none of them really worked out. They tried splitting us up, but that made things worse. Eventually, I bailed and ran away from my last placement when I was fifteen. Ben had already turned eighteen and gone to live on the west coast. I didn’t have enough money to go find him, and I didn’t get the feeling he wanted to be found anyway. I spent a year on the street, living off other people’s rubbish and scabbing money where I could. I would spend hours lying somewhere, in an alley or a park. Sometimes, I was coming down; other times, I was high as.
“Anyway, this one night in summer—I remember it ‘cause it was warm and a storm was starting to roll in—I was lying under this huge oak tree watching the stars get swallowed up by the clouds. It felt so amazing, and I felt so alive that night, like I hadn’t felt ever since Mum died. I wanted to be absorbed into the air, just disappear and stay in that feeling for eternity. Not in a dark way, or a death way, but in a kind of alive way, like I had become the air and the tree and the stars and the storm. I thought about it for long enough, and I started to hear a sound. It grew, and pretty soon it enveloped me. I got scared and snapped out of it. That was the first time I tuned.
“A few days later, I got up a bit of courage and tried again. I got pretty good at it after a few months. That was when I realised I could change things. I managed to blow apart a few rocks and stuff in the huge park in the middle of town. Then it clicked: I could use this to get whatever I wanted. I started vaping shop windows to grab food. It was basically silent and really quick to get in and out.
“Eventually, I tried a jewellery store, but I hadn’t counted on the interference from so many security cameras. I didn’t even know what interference was at that point. I got stuck inside the automatic security bars, and the cops got me. I’d never really thought about the risks until then, and I’d been too desperate to care. But then, sitting inside a cell at the station with two drunks and a carjacker, I saw what I was. It was a shock, like the first time you see yourself on video. I’d become this awful, selfish person. The cops told me the shops I was hitting were family businesses, struggling shopkeepers; even the jewellery store was owned by a little old man who could barely pay his bills. My life was hard, but that was no reason to make it hard for others.
“The Kindred had caught wind of a girl running around town vaping storefronts, and they put the pieces together pretty quick. The next morning, a high-flying lawyer turned up to negotiate my release, and the cops mysteriously turned a blind eye to all the stuff I’d been doing. The Kindred really are everywhere.
“They took me in, fed me, helped me get a cover job, gave me a place to belong. Above everything else, they gave me just about the most important thing anyone anywhere can have: a reason to keep going. Purpose.”
She stopped, apparently having run out of words. It was true, though. Purpose is probably the single most important thing that keeps any of us going. I think purpose is what keeps us alive. It’s what keeps our hearts beating and our lungs moving and our brains sending those little electrical signals that do whatever it is they’re meant to be doing—I wasn’t really listening that week in science when we studied the brain. I never really liked science that much, not biology, anyway. I didn’t like the part that reduces our lives down to animal impulse, our feelings and emotions down to physics and genetics and biological programming. I always felt like we were so much more than that, so much more than computers made of skin and blood and chemistry. Maybe that “more” I was thinking of was purpose. What keeps us alive, gives us the will to live. We need it, and that’s how we’re different from the animals. If you run out of purpose, you run out of life, like Rachel’s dad. Without purpose, you stop.
Rachel had found her purpose in the Kindred, and I’d always found mine in protecting Skye—and now in getting her back. That was why I was here, and to be honest, I wasn’t sure what I would do when I had them back. The drive to find them, the need to recover Mum and Skye, was all I could think about lately. It had taken over, and now it was what kept me breathing. Once I had them back, maybe I would stop, just run out of steam and keel over on the spot, or maybe revenge would replace it. Maybe I’d be kept alive by my hatred of the Unseen and everything they’d done to me.
“I’m sorry,” I murm
ured, but my attempt at sympathy felt like putting a Band-Aid on an amputee. How could I possibly begin to understand the weight of what Rachel had gone through? My family were missing, but they weren’t dead. Not yet.
My dad had left, but he was still out there, still alive. I always thought I had it the hardest, that my life was the worst around, that my parents’ split and Mum’s work and my constant feeling of disconnection was the worst life could possibly get. But Rachel’s life, that was a whole new kind of suffering. Mine seemed trivial by comparison. I could be thankful for what I did have, even though it wasn’t perfect. I still had a mum, and a dad, and a sister, and until recently, I’d had a home. A slow creep slithered up the back of my neck and grabbed hold around my skull. If I didn’t get my family back, if I couldn’t rescue Skye and Mum, my life would start to look a lot like Rachel’s.
This was the first time I truly felt connected to her. She had always been nice to me, but it had never felt as genuine as right now. She had been putting on a front, and I was just now breaking through her shell, just by being in the right place at the right time. Perhaps now I could get some real answers.
“Your purpose is the Kindred,” I ventured, “I get that. But I’m still not clear on what the Kindred’s purpose is. I know it’s about making sure things work or something, like there’s some grand master plan to make the world a better place, but—”
“I need some air,” Rachel said, standing. “Want to walk?”
I nodded. She’d changed suddenly, but I wasn’t sure why. We made our way out of the room, down to the end of the corridor, and out onto the landing. Our section was mostly quiet, but I could hear faint bubbles of activity from other wings, mostly from the west, where the live-ins were. It was past midnight by my guess, but they seemed to operate on their own strange schedule down here, body clocks confused by the constant darkness. After only a week, I was having trouble getting to sleep. I could only imagine how much stronger the effect would be after months or even years spent here.
There were two security patrols, one on either side of the Apex, and they were just changing guard for the overnight shift. Security had been ultra-tight since the school attack. There were three people in each patrol, and they walked in a point formation.
As we watched, one patrol stopped right at the highest level, five storeys up. They spread out; from there, they could see the entire Apex. The other continued through where we’d entered, to the east wing.
We quietly made our way to the lower north-wing entrance, through the doors that led to the training ground. They swung silently open. Rachel closed them gently behind us and led me out across the floor.
We veered to the left, cutting through the cubicles set up across the giant cave. They were covered in scorch marks and debris. We reached the side of the cavern, a huge rock wall dotted with boulders and dark fissures. Rachel walked back and forth for a while, searching in the rocks, and then disappeared into one of the fissures. Her head popped back out. “Coming?”
I made my way over and squeezed through the claustrophobic opening. I had to turn sideways and suck in my stomach to get past some of the thinner sections. How had she even found this spot? It wasn’t exactly a tunnel—more like a long crack in the rock caused by an earthquake or maybe just the slow shifting of the earth. It was a far longer fissure than I expected, full of twists and turns, and I had to feel my way through as it was now completely dark. The ground was wet, and the atmosphere dull and musty. Often my fingers came up against a damp rock wall that seemed impassable, until Rachel’s hand thrust through some previously undiscovered crevice and grabbed me. It was probably twenty minutes before I got a glimmer of fresh air and the tunnel opened up to about an arm’s width across. I could smell trees, sweet green syrup in the air, and then there was moonlight edging its way past the rocks and jagged edges to play at my feet.
The tunnel opened even farther, and the soft patter of water rippled in from outside, a nearby creek stepping over pebbles and twigs as it wandered off to join the larger Murrugal River.
We stepped out of the mouth of the tunnel and through a brisk shower of water. It had clearly been raining. Droplets fell across the mouth of the passage and collected in a puddle before heading down the tunnel into the cave system. We were on a moon-drenched outcrop that was only a few steps across, high up above the tree line, a rocky outlook jutting from the side of the cliff face.
We were close to the top of the cliff, which meant we had actually been moving slowly up as we sidestepped through the tunnel. I breathed in. A thick, leafy mist steamed into my chest. The night was warm, and for a moment, I almost forgot Rachel standing next to me.
“Nice, huh? I found this place a while ago, by accident. I was in the training ground and noticed a trickle of water coming down through the crack. The walls in there are always wet, so I wouldn’t have noticed it otherwise, and that’s probably why no one else has. I came back at night with a torch and found my way through. It was confusing at first, but you get used to the turns pretty quick. I ended up out here. If we’re on high security and I need some space, I sneak out here for some fresh air. There’s something special about this place. I think it’s just the fact that I’m not meant to be here.”
The last of the summer storms crackled over the distant mountains, but otherwise the sky was clear. Far away, I could see the glow of streetlights in Ettney. There was a huge patchwork dotted with farmhouse lights, and then the trees started at the edge of the national park. I hadn’t realised how deep into the forest we were until I saw just how much canopy stood between me and civilisation. Rolling mounds of brushy foliage and wiry branches bumped up against each other, blurring into a thick blanket. It looked like broccoli, and the comparison made me smile.
“You asked about the Kindred,” Rachel said.
I nodded, turning to face her. She was striking in the moonlight, her dark skin shimmering beneath eyes that shone emerald when caught at just the right angle in the half light. It was like she didn’t quite belong here, like she was slightly out of place in the world.
She took a deep breath, about to speak, but stopped, looking over the side of the cliff. The undergrowth below had gone silent, and I looked down through the canopy, trying to see what she was staring at.
Through branches, sticks, and leaves, there on the ground was nothing. Less than nothing. A void surrounded by swirling tendrils of night. A shadow was here.
TWENTY-THREE
I dropped to the ground. It was a clear night; if the shadow was looking our direction, it would see us for sure.
This one looked different from the thing in my bedroom or the figure at the park. It was more like the one that had held Skye in the air—an ethereal, swirling darkness, like a fire burning black.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Rachel gesture, and I turned my head, but hair got in the way, falling in my eyes and mouth. I desperately brushed it away to see she was signalling for me to stay low and crawl back to the tunnel. There was no space on the platform for us to turn around, so I inched backwards, staying as flat as I could. Raising my head for a moment, I peeked over the edge. I had no rational reason to do so, and it was a pretty dumb idea, but there’s something in humans that really wants to see whatever’s about to kill us. The shadow was still there, motionless.
Ducking my head again I reversed toward the tunnel, my shirt riding up as I slid backwards. The moist rock made my stomach slimy, but there was no time to care about that.
Rachel was already inside waiting for me, having ducked in as soon as we saw the shadow. Now I was on the ground, though, the base of the tunnel was too thin to slide through. It was wider at waist height, and the only way I could get inside was to stand. When I did, I would be exposed again, but there was no way around it. I had no idea if it could even reach us up here, but Rachel was scared and that said a lot.
We needed a distraction. If I could get the shadow to look the other way for a few seconds I might be all right.
&n
bsp; I crawled forward, and Rachel figured out my plan. “Ari, no!” she hissed. I didn’t care. If the shadow saw us here, the Unseen would know our location. I wouldn’t be responsible for that.
There was a big, sturdy tree just beyond the shadow. Time to start a bushfire. If I got lucky, the whole place would be burning in a matter of minutes. The shadow would be forced away, and it would seem like a natural event. Focusing on the tree, I took a deep breath and tuned in to it. Flames shot out of the trunk, lighting up the forest.
The shadow didn’t leave, like I’d planned. It moved towards the fire, gliding silently across the ground. A tendril reached out and wrapped itself around the tree. I felt sick—the tendril looked like an oesophagus. I’d seen one at a museum once, taken from a body for an exhibit on the digestive system. This looked like someone had reached inside the shadow and ripped its throat out, attaching the entrails to the outside like limbs. It pulsed, rhythmic striations flowing from the fire to the shadow. It was feeding.
The flame died, and the shadow swelled with pleasure. So much for a bushfire.
But the thing was still distracted, so I took a deep breath and positioned my arms on either side of my body, ready to push up and duck in through the mouth of the tunnel. I counted to three and jumped to my feet, leaping towards the entrance. Rachel beckoned frantically, and I looked back just in time to see the shadow turn towards me.
My shoe caught a rock, knocking it over the side of the cliff. It skipped off other rocks, slowly but surely bouncing towards the shadow on the ground. Click. Click. Click.
Thud.
A scream. A scream like nothing I had ever heard before. Inhuman, like a wolf being tortured. It knew I was here. It was coming.
Rachel pulled at my arm, and I jumped into the cave. The screech echoed off the tunnel walls, deep into the fissure. It came from everywhere.
The Fire Unseen Page 14
