The Dead-Tossed Waves

by Carrie Ryan

  “Which way?” I ask.

  Catcher considers the two paths. “We could scout,” he says, but Cira’s already shaking her head.

  “We need to keep going,” she says. “It looks like that one goes back to where we came from.” She points a finger toward the path that branches out to the right. “I say we take the other one so we make sure not to double back.”

  Her eyes are still bruised and sunken but her skin looks healthier. I haven’t talked to her about what happened, about what she did to herself. I resist the urge to reach up and clutch the superhero I still wear around my neck. I wonder for a moment if she would have cut herself if I hadn’t taken it from her. If I hadn’t left her alone or if I’d been able to give her some sort of hope.

  I want to tell her I’m sorry, but I’m too scared to talk to her. I let Catcher be the one to walk with her, Elias the one to check in on her. Even now I start to walk ahead down the path, hoping to avoid her, but she calls out my name and I stop, my nerves bristling.

  She doesn’t say anything more and I slowly turn toward her. She holds out a hand to me and I help her up. Catcher and Elias go forward and when I try to join them Cira pulls me back, tucks her arm in mine. I don’t miss the grimace as her bandaged forearm brushes against me.

  “You’ll have to stop avoiding me at some point,” she says. I try to smile, try to brush off her words, but she just pulls me tighter to her side as we start following the others, winding through the moans drifting in the humid afternoon.

  I struggle to think of something to say, something to talk about that isn’t Catcher and immunity and death and the path and her arms. But the more I search for a safe topic, the more my mind screams at me to ask her why, why, why.

  “Just ask,” she says, and I have to laugh, remembering how it is we’ve always been best friends. Even now, with everything else around us falling apart, we can still be the same.

  I squeeze my eyes shut. I think of the blood dripping from her fingers. “Why?” I whisper.

  She watches our feet as we walk, the blur of step after step after step and for a moment I think she’s not going to answer. “Do you ever wonder about the Mudo?” she asks.

  I shake my head but I’m lying. I’d never thought anything of them before I met Elias. Before I learned about the Soulers. Before Catcher became infected.

  She laughs a little, just a puff of air against the side of my neck. “Me neither. They were just these things out there beyond the Barrier. They were what kept me from trying to go to the Dark City, what kept us all locked in and isolated. I never really cared about how they came to be. Who they once were. And then that night with Mellie and Catcher and everything at the coaster. When that girl came at her like that. I don’t know ….”

  I hear her draw a deep breath, as if to steady herself. “I fell apart,” she says. “That Breaker came running at us and I panicked. If I’d been able to do something … anything but just sit there and scream … maybe none of this would have happened. I didn’t want to have to go to the Recruiters and face the Mudo again. I didn’t want to fail again.”

  I stop and turn her to face me. “You didn’t fail, Cira,” I tell her, shocked to hear her saying the same words I’ve felt. “We were all afraid. I still am. You can’t blame yourself for what happened.”

  She puts a hand on my arm. “Neither can you,” she whispers. I suck in my breath and she smiles. “I know you, Gabry. I know how your mind works. I’ll stop blaming myself when you stop blaming yourself.” She cocks an eyebrow at me. It’s such a Cira expression that I laugh, feeling how easy it is to slide back into our friendship.

  She turns back to the path, swinging our arms between us. “Now let’s stop talking about the sad stuff and get back to the good stuff. I see the way Catcher watches you. Especially the way he looks when you and Elias are talking. So let’s hear the whole story.”

  I blush, embarrassed that Cira’s noticed but also flushing warm inside. I didn’t realize that Catcher still looked at me the way he used to; I thought he’d given up on me. I want to spill everything and ask her to help me sort through the confusion but I’m not ready to talk to her about it.

  “I won’t kiss and tell,” I say to her in a singsong voice and she throws her head back laughing. This is what life is about, I think. And I can almost forget where we are as we continue down the path together giggling and sharing stories.

  It’s dusk when we come to the next break in the path. Storm clouds are creeping in overhead, the sky rumbling. This time there’s a large square with paths leading off in each direction, a gate at each intersection. Cira and I have trailed behind the other two and when we catch up, Catcher has already scouted down each path a little ways.

  “They’re marked,” he says when we join him in the center. There’s space here for us to spread out a bit and I help Cira to the ground. Her breathing is shallow and her cheeks a vivid red but she refuses to rest whenever I ask her.

  I walk around to each gate and squat, looking at the markers: IX, XXX, and XIV. I turn the numbers over in my head, trying to find some sort of meaning.

  “It doesn’t make sense,” I tell no one in particular. “I thought the numbers were going up, that they were just increasing, but … I don’t see the pattern.” Sweat drips down my back and chest and along my cheeks. The air is unbelievably close and heavy with the impending storm.

  “It wouldn’t help anyway. Not unless we know what we’re looking for,” Cira says, still trying to catch her breath. I worry she’s pushing herself too hard.

  “Maybe we should stop here where there’s space to spread out,” I suggest. Catcher frowns but I tilt my chin toward where Cira can barely hold her head up. I know we want to put as much distance between us and Vista as we can, but we can’t do so at the risk of pushing her over the edge.

  “Fine, I’ll gather wood for a fire,” Elias says, starting down one of the paths with Catcher trailing along to help.

  Cira’s fallen asleep and I sit with her for a while, staring at my hands, tracing the edge of the cut across my palm from the night I first took the boat past the Barrier. Thunder ripples overhead, the concussion of it whispering around me.

  I wonder where my mother is out there. And that makes me think about my other mother—my first mother. I close my eyes and breathe in the sweet scent of almost-rain. I try to remember. The sound of the wind through the trees so similar to the crash of waves. So that for just a moment, just this one minute, I can believe I’m back at the beach. That my mother will come to me soon.

  Why didn’t I go with her? Why did I let her go back into the Forest alone? It seems so stupid now, so silly for me to have stayed behind. Especially now that I ended up following her after all.

  I reach into my little pack and pull out her book of Shakespeare’s sonnets. Rubbing my hand over the cover, I think of all the times she read it to me. I think of the hours she spent carving lines of the poems into the doorjambs of our house, something I never understood and that she promised to explain to me at some point when I was older but never did.

  There are too many things I don’t understand about her, I realize. So much that I missed.

  Flipping it open, I turn to the first page and begin to read Sonnet I. At the line “Thyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel,” I think of the way my mother would press her fingers against these words every time she left the front door to the lighthouse, the engravings softening over time at her constant touch.

  I read Sonnets II and III, not recognizing any of the lines from the doors of our house. But I do remember the line from Sonnet IV—“Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive”—from the door to a sparsely used closet on the lowest floor, and from Sonnet VI—“Then what could death do, if thou shouldst depart”—from the curve in the wall at the bottom of the stairs.

  My head starts to swim a bit, my stomach rumbling, and I glance down the paths wondering where Catcher and Elias are. Lightning shatters the sky, illuminating the world around me
in stark brightness. I tense, waiting for the thunder. Cira doesn’t even move, her breathing steady and deep.

  But something has caught my eye and I find myself staring at the little bars with the Roman numerals on the gates. As a game I flip to the corresponding poems to read. Sonnet XXX, “I summon up remembrance of things past, / I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,” was carved into the landing at the top of the first flight of stairs. Sonnet XI’s lines were gouged into the back hallway.

  And then I start to wonder—what if there’s a pattern to the way my mother chose what to carve where? My heart starts to beat faster and I close my eyes, mentally walking through the lighthouse and reading the words on the doors.

  I gasp as everything starts to fall into place. The first gate, with the Roman numeral I, matches up with the line carved into our front door. The next gate we walked through, number six, has the words from the base of the stairs. At this crossroads there are three gates for us to choose from. Two of them have lines from the poems carved into closet doors but one of them is on the stairs. It’s as though the words are leading me somewhere.

  With shaking hands I flip back through the book. At the top of the stairs in the house there’s another quote and I scan the pages, searching. I want to shout with excitement as I trace my fingers over the lines of Sonnet XV. I flip through the book for the words carved into the door of my mother’s bedroom.

  Everything around me fades away: the moans, the feel of the wind tugging on the pages. All I care about is piecing together this puzzle, figuring out what clues my mother left. Did she do this for me? Or was it her own way of remembering? Her own way to find her way back through the Forest?

  And then I remember what she told me the day she left—that to find her I just had to follow the light. I’d always thought she meant that the lighthouse would always be my home, that so long as it stood it would be her home as well. But now I remember the words she’d carved into the lantern room before leaving.

  It’s as if my heart doesn’t beat as I flutter through the pages, the lines playing through my mind again and again: “Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade, / When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st: / So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

  And then I find it: Sonnet XVIII. My eyes blur, not even reading the letters. My mother wasn’t telling me to follow the light to go home, she was telling me how to find her in the Forest. There’s no other reason she’d have left this book behind for me. No other reason she’d have carved the words and told me to follow them.

  I smile, feeling so close to my mother in this moment, as if she’s been playing this little game with me my whole life and I’ve finally figured out the pieces.

  When Catcher and Elias get back from gathering wood I’m about to burst from excitement. I can barely contain myself as I tell them about what I’ve figured out—the tie between the book and the paths and the words carved into the lighthouse. While I’m not sure I’ve totally convinced them that I’m right, at least we know what to look for and that there’s really no other reason for us to choose which path to follow.

  After we eat some of the food that’s left, Catcher doubles back through the woods again trying to see if the Recruiters have entered the Forest and how far behind us they are. Elias builds a small fire and Cira continues to sleep through it all, her body still recovering.

  I sit next to her, staring into the flames as the storm still threatening in the darkness and the silence between Elias and me stretches around us. He has the sleeves of Roger’s shirt rolled up over his elbows, and the light from the fire flickers over his skin. In the way he sits with his back straight and muscles tight it’s clear that he’s always aware of everything around him.

  Even though I try not to I think about the moment on the beach when he almost kissed me, my face flushes and my body thrums from the memory. I want to ask him why he did that but I’m too embarrassed.

  Sap pops in the fire, the logs shifting and tossing sparks into the sky, and Elias looks over and catches me watching him. I’m sitting with my knees pulled up to my chest, my arms crossed and my chin resting on my hands. I want to bury my head in my arms but I don’t. I hold his gaze, in that moment feeling more bold and confident than I have since the night I first skimmed over the Barrier with Catcher.

  I’m so energized from figuring out my mother’s clues that I can’t sleep. Wind brushes through the tops of the trees, reminding me of the sound of waves, and I close my eyes pretending I’m back on the beach with Elias.

  “Tell me something about you I don’t know,” I say. It’s easier to find the words in the darkness, easier to forget he’s a stranger.

  Elias smiles just a little and the heat creeps into my face even more. “What don’t you know?” he asks, and I can’t keep myself from grinning.

  I raise an eyebrow. “Everything,” I tell him, my voice breathier than usual.

  He laughs then, a small and quiet laugh that lifts his shoulders and causes his eyes to crinkle. It reverberates in the night and I realize that I haven’t heard him laugh before. I also realize that I like it, especially how warm it makes me feel.

  He glances down at the empty space next to him on the other side of the fire and I hesitate. I’m still stung by his earlier rebuff, still angry at him. But it’s tiring to stay so mad, especially when we’re the only two awake. I scoot around next to him. We’re close enough that the light plays gently over our skin but distant enough that I can’t read every expression.

  He thinks for a moment. “Do you know what a Skinner is?” he asks. I shake my head. He leans back and his shoulder brushes mine. My first instinct is to pull away but I feel daring tonight so I leave it be, the hairs on his arm whispering against my skin.

  “It’s a name for people who go into the Forest looking for things,” he explains. “Sometimes they’re looking for something specific—maybe someone has put a price on some kind of gear needed for a machine. But usually it’s just for anything that can sell or be traded.”

  I knew that people scavenged the ruins but not that people would actually risk going into the Forest to search. I feel bumps break out on my skin just thinking about what it would take to push someone past the fences. I’ve never realized that people could become that desperate and it makes me understand more and more how much I don’t know about the world outside Vista.

  “Why are they called Skinners?” I ask.

  He looks up into the sky as if gathering his thoughts. “After the Return, for a while, when people thought things would go back to normal eventually, some people would hunt the Unconsecrated just for whatever valuables they might have on them. Usually it was things like jewelry, money. Anything they might have died with. But then, when supplies started running out, they would take whatever they could.” He shrugs. “A lot of times that meant taking everything, including clothes and shoes. Everything but the skin.”

  I shudder. “That’s awful.”

  Elias shrugs again. “It’s not a job that anyone would really want. But if you’re smart and fast you can find enough skinning to survive.”

  He leans forward and rests his elbows on his knees. His shoulders are hunched and he rubs the back of one hand against the palm of the other slowly. “See, my sister …” He hesitates just a little but presses on. “We were orphans at an early age. We didn’t have anything—no one to really look out for us.”

  My chest constricts at his words, an ache for the little boy he’d once been. I lean forward and watch the side of his face as he keeps talking.

  “The thing is, I’m not that scared of the Forest. I knew there were some safe spots. I knew how to get to places no one else could go. I was actually a pretty good Skinner for a while. Enough that we were allowed into the Dark City to trade and even had a place to live there.”

  The fire catches a piece of dry wood and the flames jump a bit, illuminating his expression. He keeps rubbing one hand over the othe
r and staring at them but I’m pretty sure his mind is in the past, in some moment I can’t touch. I almost hold my breath, afraid that breathing too deeply will pull him out of where he is, and I’m eager to know more of this memory.

  “There was this one winter,” he continues. “It was worse than any of the others. Cold enough that most of the Un-consecrated were downed and enough snow that they were covered—the Forest was nothing but pure white.

  “Most Skinners would give up. Too dangerous to go into the Forest when you could accidentally step on Unconsecrated. But I didn’t have a choice. Not with my little sister and needing to trade to stay in the city. It was a bright blue day when I went into the Forest and I could smell the snow coming but I kept pressing deeper.”

  He stops and glances at me, his eyes bright. “Have you ever heard silence?” he finally asks. “Like real silence. Not the ocean, not the Unconsecrated. Not even the humming of insects or chirping of birds.”

  I’m mesmerized by him. By the feel of him so close and the way his voice trails along the curves of my ear. I shake my head.

  “It’s the most beautiful thing in the world,” he says. “I just …” He pauses and looks back into the fire. “I just kept walking. Wrapped in this white nothingness. I ended up in this town. Not a town like the others in the Forest, fenced off and protected. But a real town that had been hit by the Return and just left to die. It was so still, nothing moved. I could walk down the streets and imagine what it might have been like to live in the before time.

  “The thing is … there was this monument in the town. It had a plaque attached to it that talked about some great world war that the town had sent soldiers to fight in.” He smiles. “It was an airplane,” he says. “An actual airplane that they’d mounted on this rock in the middle of town.”

  I close my eyes and try to imagine it but I can’t. I’ve only ever seen old pictures in books and even then it’s hard to fathom machines spinning people through the air.