Her wings gave a listless shuffle, protesting their restraints.
Oh, be still. They thought they could just swoop in and take over her free will like she was a puppet on a string, but they were wrong. She couldn't help but arrive at the discomforting theory that they'd sought her as a host because they could identify with the animal she was becoming – who was anyone to say a baby dragon shouldn't fancy feathered wings? – and she was determined not to let the transformation have its way with her.
I am Shiloh. Daughter of...
Unexpectedly, the name evaded her. She struggled a moment to recall it, and the empty space in her mind where it should be stilled her where she stood.
There beneath the sinuous, ancient trees creaking with the Tribal Queen's weight, Shiloh might as well have stood in the waves on the Coast of Hope, five years old, muffled screams of 'Daddy! DADDY!' echoing in the chamber of her small gas mask. They had gone down to the beach to scavenge for crabs same as every other day, but this time as Shiloh set to work, her father just stood there and stared at the waves. Shiloh didn't notice, and would not have been able to read his expression behind those soulless, wasp eyes anyway, and so as he took his first zombie-like steps toward the water no one tried to stop him.
Forever afterwards, Shiloh would wonder what he saw in the water. What made him long for oblivion so much that he would abandon her in that moment, there on the beach. Was it the spell cast by the stories of Paradise, luring him toward visions of Atlantis? Was it the promise of a quiet way to go, the way he would slip silently beneath the water almost like nothing had happened, so Shiloh would never have to witness the trauma of a more violent fate?
It had not been quiet once Shiloh noticed, however. Her father was shoulder-deep by the time she looked up, and it was so out of place to find him in the water at all when they always stayed on the sand, and especially so deep in the water without any clear objective, that the shock took hold almost immediately. She had called after him, but to no avail, and very quickly he was neck-deep, and then swallowed completely by a swell, and along with the onset of her screaming his name, terror roared in her head and rang in her ears.
Fear was deafening. It numbed her to everything as she ran in after him. To the crash of the waves, to the cold as they swallowed her legs. There was only the silent scream of the world, echoing in her mind, as she splashed around the shallows fishing for some sign of his body.
She was pummeled by the swells, tangled and tackled by seaweed, until she was too exhausted to fight the tide as it swept her inland and deposited her uselessly back on the sand.
She felt like that now. Like she was watching a piece of herself going under, slipping away, disappearing to a sick ringing in her head while she floundered and thrashed against uncontrollable elements herding her where they willed.
She could not let another piece of her soul be swept away; could not let another part of herself drown in the madness.
And so she climbed. Painfully careful not to alert any howler-spider-apes to her intruding. A voice of dangerous logic argued, If you freed your wings, you could swoop right up to the web, easy as pie. Avoid all this painstaking, tedious nonsense.
But that was the animal being a stealthy opportunist, trying to convince her to let it in without even noticing.
I will do this my way. So be it if that's the hard way. I will use my own two hands and feeble strength, and I will do it with the weight of these confounded wings weighing me down.
No doubt that was part of their elaborate scheme – that even if she resisted, she would eventually tire of their weight until she couldn't bear it any longer, and had little choice but to let down the feathers and allow them to help her along.
But if that was to be her fate, it wouldn't be today.
When she was level with one of the central strands of web, she slickened up her hands with serum to make the transition from tree to web. Just shy of committing to the transition, she questioned the wisdom of so little protection against the sticky snare. Thinking better of it, she smeared a coat all over her body, and then she swung aloft.
Out across the rungs of web she climbed, the sticky net straining slightly under her weight. The serum worked well enough as she started out. She could only hope it didn't rub off too much as she went.
She glanced once at her target while she maneuvered, but it gave her the creepy-crawlies eyeing the lifeless, dangling mummy she was inching toward. After that she avoided checking her progress, lest she psyche herself out.
There was no avoiding the freakish form once she reached it, however. Suddenly she was face to face with the spider-ape's ghoulish handiwork, and she froze, ill-prepared to find herself in the presence of the Tribal Queen again, and so intimately cloistered.
Staring into the mummy's bound eyes as if it might spring to life any moment, Shiloh dragged a thin membrane of composure around herself. Pull yourself together. She's been hanging here for days – she's not suddenly going to reanimate.
Once she had quieted the pounding of her own heart in her head, she eased her hand forward, watching Mother Eve all the while, and touched her trembling fingers to the space where the woman's throat should be.
Would she even be able to feel the flutter of a pulse, beneath all that web?
This is madness. She's dead. She's been dead all this time. Get down and get out of here before the spider apes leave you strung up without a pulse as well–
But there it was. The softest vibration of a thud. Like the tap of a baby bird trying to hatch from its egg.
Recoiling as if stung, Shiloh stared in horror at the white-bound face in front of her. There she was, practically kissing the corpse of her arch-nemesis, who was very much alive beneath a layer of ghostly fibers.
Oh hell.
Determining the status of the Tribal Queen's livelihood left her no more certain which outcome she had hoped for. What was worse, discovering her alive left Shiloh with two conflicting options that could no longer be ignored.
Finish the job once and for all.
Or cut her down to spare the child.
Somehow, she had thought she'd know the right course of action when she got there. She had been so quick to scheme her escape from the Dauntless, so certain about jumping into action, no question about the need to get back here...
But she'd been as good as stalling, appeasing herself with the illusion that just by putting herself in motion she was doing something to solve the problem. Now, she actually had to follow through.
Well, both options started with a blade.
Twined for security through a few strands of web, Shiloh groped at her belt and unsheathed her knife. She held it up, preparing to strike – through web or flesh was anyone's guess. It felt like years that she hesitated, agonizing over the fateful alternatives, hovering on the edge of two very different outcomes.
Death to the Tribal Queen.
Life to the child.
Too many voices, vying to be heard over the roar of adrenaline in her ears.
Shut up.
She tried to imagine the two alternate futures, unspooling from this moment. In one, she let Mother Eve live in order to salvage the child and her own humanity, and the Tribal Queen went on to scheme her escape and return to power, continuing to cultivate her deadly circus of intelligently orchestrated savages. Without her death, the Crossers didn't stand a chance against her feral troops.
In the second option, Shiloh finished what she had started, casualties be damned, to initiate the shift in power that would ultimately save the lives of many more Crossers. But in the process, she sacrificed that one thing that was crucial to preserve intermingled with the integrity of Utopia. In order for Paradise to become the civilized place they all sought. What good was a place for humanity to start over, if humanity was sacrificed on the read to staking claim on that hallowed shore?
She saw herself, returning to the Crossers with the blood of children dripping from her hands. “I did it,” she said, a giddy look
of triumph twisted onto her face. But they saw the crazed twinkle lurking in her eye, and of course the blood on her hands, smeared in different locations across her body as well because her denial of the atrocious deed she had done caused a blindness to the elicited gore, and as one without blood on their hands is wont to do, she had casually touched her face, her arms, her lips...
They saw the ripple of feathers across her back that may have been just the wings' desire to stretch free of their bonds, or may have been a shiver of animal excitement at the savagery that had just been committed. It would be hard to say which it really was, for any of the onlookers or for Shiloh herself, but her recent episode under the influence of predatory instinct, and the wings' presence to begin with, alluded to an inevitable pattern: an animal had been unleashed inside her.
It was only a matter of time before they would have to cage her, too. Some would side with her. Some would lobby against her. Loyalties would be challenged. They would start to turn against one another. Lines would be blurred until at long last, far past the fateful first stroke of that butterfly effect, someone would stop to question their own downward spiral into lawlessness. “What have we done?” they would whisper in morbid reflection. “What have we become?”
Once you crossed some lines, you could never go back. The filth of the other side stuck to your boots. You tracked the taint between whichever boundaries you decided to tread.
Utopia could not be built on the blood of children. It couldn't. Once they started down that path, any Paradise they had envisioned would be cursed. Those who inherited Utopia would be haunted. By the price and the ghosts and the memory of those who had degraded themselves with desperate measures fighting for a lost cause.
By one cause or another, they would all find their animal nature taking over eventually. Whether because they would all chip away at their own humanity to win this war, or because there were a thousand venomous traps waiting to turn them into the same creatures as the Tribal. Once upon a time, they had all been cut from the same cloth. One by one, they would all be woven back together into the same tapestry, infected by the anarchy of the apocalypse.
In either future, it was the only end result Shiloh could see.
There with her knife raised to decide the future in the deep of the twilit woods, she was faced with a third paradox: the futility of her actions. The humbling reality that whatever she chose, it wouldn't make a difference.
It helped in a way, though. If the apocalypse was to win either way, if she was really powerless to make a difference, more than ever it reinforced the notion that she could at least do what was right.
The apocalypse would not make a monster out of her. And in that, she would find triumph, sweet and defiant.
And if Paradise wasn't the end-all, be-all, if there was an afterlife with gardens untainted by evil, maybe she would find herself welcome there.
“I don't suppose they'd let me into Paradise as a child-murderer,” she had admitted to Zack during their voyage across the ocean, when she'd threatened to throw him overboard so her ticket-for-one wouldn't be challenged upon their arrival to Paradise. It seemed to be the theme of her redemption.
Utopia will never be gained through the blood of children. It echoed through every tunnel of her being. And in that surety, an inspired thought came to her. A whisper that followed the echo.
What if the child inside Mother Eve could be different? Its upbringing intercepted to become the very bridge between the Tribal and the Crossers? For all she knew, this child could be the key to everything.
Maybe there was hope hidden within the right choice of a difficult conflict. Maybe everything shifted when you reminded the devil he could only sit on one shoulder, whispering in one ear.
Sure of her decision, Shiloh plunged her knife through a spidery cluster of fibers, beginning the process of cutting the Tribal Queen down from the snare. She was strategic about it, severing strands that connected the web to the trees, until the whole thing began to sag. When it strained to a halt, she cut one more strand, gradually pruning the anchoring threads until the ground loomed close beneath them, and the next slice was too much for the snare to withstand.
With a silken snap, they crashed into the ferns. A bruising 'oof' escaped Shiloh's lips, and she coughed to regain her wind, pushing a tangle of web and limbs off of her. She'd landed on her side, an instinctive twist in midair sparing her wings from the fall, and pushed herself gingerly onto all fours.
Hopefully the spider apes didn't hear that.
As she regained her bearings in the underbrush, she didn't think to worry that it could be something else lurking in the vegetation.
On hands and knees, Shiloh went rigid at the sound of hot breath directly in front of her. It was so close, loose locks of hair shifted across her face in its draft. She smelled meat and rain, a disconcerting mix of pungent and fresh.
As slowly as a flower opening its petals in the morning light, Shiloh craned her eyes up from the ground. She saw its paws first. Claws embedded in the tattered clover nestled beneath the ferns. Legs; wiry silver fur matted with the blood of some recent kill. Chest – vibrating with an inaudible growl. Face, huge and wolfish, staring right back at her.
She could see herself in its yellow eyes. Could see the terror in her own gaze. Too close.
A huge pair of wings spanned outward from the wolf's shoulders, shifting with a daunting, graceful power.
Shiloh swallowed the whimper that rose in her throat; it went back to cowering in her gut. She felt a rustle pull on the muscles between her shoulder blades – her own pair of wings, itching to be unleashed so she might stand a chance fleeing from the double-threat of this beast-of-ground-and-sky.
The wolf was bigger than Shiloh had imagined – on hands and knees she came about to the bottom of its snout. She could only pray the blood on its fur was fresh, and that the beast wasn't hungry for more.
She held stock still as the wolf regarded her. A feral wisdom gazed back at her, and Shiloh tried to take comfort in the fact that it wasn't pure, carnal viciousness that she saw there.
Its ebony nose twitching slightly as it caught her scent, the wolf extended its snout a hair's breadth closer to test what it smelled.
Nice doggie...
Would she smell like human, or animal? The feathers cascading down her back were not unlike the rustling extensions gliding out from the wolf's own shoulder blades. Was there a chance that might work in her favor?
It could go either way. After all, who was to say if the wolf would be more threatened by a human, or the smell of some new creature treading on its turf?
A soft snap sounded somewhere in the branches above, and the wolf's attention carved upwards. Shiloh saw its hackles rise, wondered briefly who would win in a fight between a winged wolf and a spider ape.
Then there came a muffled howl in the distance, and, perking its ears toward the canine echo, the beast in front of her tightened the fold of its wings and shifted off into the woods.
Shiloh was left untouched.
She didn't even realize she'd been holding her breath until it rushed out of her. Her gaze followed the wolf, wondering over its lack of animosity. Predators didn't always strike just because they could, but the ones in Paradise had proven their reputation as a special kind of unhinged. She couldn't help but feel shocked at her first interaction without incident. So caught up in the unexpectedness of it, she almost forgot Mother Eve lay crumpled in the ferns beside her.
Crumpled and free.
A quick premonition of the mummified Tribal Queen rising like a zombie from the underbrush to overtake her ricocheted through her mental hiatus, jolting her back to the matter at hand. Pulse racing, she eyed her fallen ward.
A tangled nest of web and fern met her gaze. No miraculous reanimation as of yet.
For the second time, Shiloh was faced with a debilitating case of what now? If it had been difficult deciding between cutting the Tribal Queen's throat and cutting her bonds, what to do with her
now that she was freed into Shiloh's care was an even more impossible conundrum. The responsibility slammed into Shiloh like a cold tidal wave, leaving her suddenly very frightened at the result of her own actions.
Where was she supposed to take her? The Crossers would have one hell of an argument about what to do with the woman if Shiloh took her back to the Dauntless. If she could even get her there. But if Mother Eve came to – either on Shiloh’s way back to the eastern shore or anywhere else she might take her – Shiloh could not trust herself to handle the woman alone. She did not doubt the Tribal Queen would jump at the first chance she got to turn the tables and finish was she had started, even if Shiloh had gone all soft and mushy in her favor.
Panic gripped at all of Shiloh's edges as she blinked at the white-bound lump sprawled on the ground beside her. What had she done now? She wasn't cut out for this. The responsibility was too much. Conscience was all good and well, but it didn't exactly come with directions for how to handle the aftermath of a fateful decision.
This is madness. Her mind raced trying to throw together a quick solution. Chaos terrorized her innards, screaming how stupid a thing she'd just done, how many terrible outcomes could crop up from this picture.
Torn between pouncing on Mother Eve before anything could happen and running off into the woods like a scared little child, Shiloh stared in horror at the unconscious tyrant. She sat back slowly, wrangling the turmoil running rampant in her mind.
It wasn't too late to change her game, and slit the Tribal Queen's throat.
“Shiloh,” a low whisper hissed from the surrounding jungle. On edge, Shiloh jumped at the sound of her name. She searched the trees, trying to make out who had spoken. Her gaze swept right past Jayx before back-pedaling, landing on his stealthily-nestled form. It was scary how well he could blend in.
What was he doing here?
“Jayx?” She tried to whisper it back in the same hushed cadence, but it came out sounding strangled in the wake of her budding hysteria. Way to go, Shiloh. Great start to playing it off like you have everything under control.
Wonderland (Deadly Lush Book 2) Page 17
