by Carrie Ryan
“It’s beached, not too far away. Big enough for us to live on for a while. For a lot of us—anyone else who can get off the Sanctuary and out of the Dark City. I think it belonged to the Protectorate. There were some Mudo on board, but …” He waves a hand in the air as if they’re no longer a problem.
“A ship?” I whisper. I let my eyes close and dream about it. Nothing but water surrounding us. Free of the Recruiters.
He smiles, a small lopsided grin. “I saw the curve of a roller coaster off in the distance when I was out scavenging.” He tilts his head toward me, his eyes glinting with joy. “I grew up next to an amusement park. That’s where …” He swallows, the smile dimming a bit before he shakes his head, clearing away whatever was bothering him.
“Anyway, it reminded me of home and so I decided to go check it out.” He laughs softly. “I climbed to the top of one of the coasters. It was the most amazing sensation being alone out there staring at the horizon.” His eyes lose their faraway look. “That was when I saw the ship. It was beached in the shallows down the shore a ways.”
He shrugs. “I just wish I knew how to get us there. I can stock it with food and water, but what good is that? I can’t get it up the river to the Sanctuary by myself, and I can’t figure out how to get you and the others there safely.”
I poke at the bag of herbs, letting it bob and sink in the water. Watching little dried pieces of leaves tremble along the surface. Floating. It makes me think of the other night when I heated the air in the fabric bag and sent it drifting away. How I haven’t told Catcher my thoughts on how to escape.
How maybe I can get us to his ship. “I think I have a way off the island,” I say hesitantly.
Catcher freezes, his breath held as if he isn’t sure he heard me correctly.
I pause, a bit uncertain about how to voice my thoughts. “The other night I was on the roof and I made a balloon out of a cloth bag and hot air from the fire. I was thinking about balloons from the before time—pictures I saw in a museum when I was a child—and I wondered if I could make it work. I think …”
I walk over to stand next to him by the window, staring at the darkness outside. “I think we could make them big enough to carry us off the island. It could be really dangerous and stupid but …” I look up at him, at the hope in his eyes. “But I think it might be worth the risk.”
Reaching out, I trace the shape of a balloon where my breath fogs the window. “We’ll need more supplies.” I draw the lines, the basket, a cauldron for the fire. “We can seal the seams with fat or oil. We need ropes and wires and light wood to make the basket. Something big to hold the fire.”
I look around the room, trying to take stock of what we already have. “Some of this stuff we can scrounge up here, but you might need to get the rest in the Dark City. And you have to tell the people over there how to make their own so they have a shot at escape as well. We’ll have to hurry.”
He stares at my crude diagram. “I can’t leave the three of you alone again. Not so soon with the Recruiters and Ox. Not after what I did to Conall. They’re going to want some kind of revenge.”
I thread my fingers through his. “You’re never going to be able to be here all the time,” I tell him. “Someone’s always going to need you somewhere else. There’s nothing either of us can do about it. You’re not a person who can ignore other people’s pain. I wouldn’t want you to be.”
“You don’t understand, Annah.” He grips me so tightly I can feel the tips of his fingers imprinting my skin. “I almost lost you.” He kneels, wrapping his arms around me. “I walked into the auditorium and I saw you in that cage and I died. All that blood—I thought you were infected.”
He looks up at me. “At that moment I realized I’d made the biggest mistake in my life. I realized that I’m nothing without you. That there’s no point in being alive if I can’t love you.”
I catch my breath but he’s not finished. “I love you, Annah. And if you’re willing to risk everything to be with me, then I’m willing to risk everything to be with you. I’m going to keep fighting for you, every day of my life. If you’ll have me.”
I sink to my knees until our foreheads are touching. Amazed at how in this tiny little room in this corner of a dark and forgotten world I can feel so alive.
“Yes,” I whisper against his lips. I kiss him and he kisses me back, fully and wholly and without reservation.
And for a moment there’s no death in the world, no pain or infection or despair. There’s only us and life and something between us so impossibly pure that it consumes us both.
Just as we feared, there’s a knock on the door that night as I’m helping my sister drink another cup of the herb tea. Already color flushes her cheeks and she’s able to stay awake for small stretches of time. She’s still weak—they both are—but they’re not on the edge of death any longer.
Someone pounds on the door again, insistent. Elias struggles to push himself from the bed but I nudge him back down under the quilts. “Catcher’s here, he’ll take care of it,” I tell him but he frowns, clearly wanting to stand between us and them—to protect us.
I tiptoe into the hallway, my back pressed against the wall so that I can watch as Catcher opens the door, machete clutched in his hand. Ox stands on the threshold, alone, and my entire body tenses.
That voice—the casual impassive tone. That allowed a man to hit me. That ordered me to be thrown over the wall. That told me my childhood village no longer existed. I ball up my hands in useless rage, wishing I could storm down the hall and punch him but knowing he’d only strike me to the ground.
“The men aren’t happy about what you did, Catcher,” Ox says. “Conall was a good friend to many of them, and the second in command.”
“I wasn’t too happy about what they were doing to the woman I love,” Catcher responds evenly.
“I’m not kidding around.” Ox’s voice is menacing, but also exhausted. “You don’t have any idea what it takes to keep so many people alive, do you? Any idea how much it takes to keep order? It takes rules, and to have meaningful rules you have to have consequences for breaking them.”
He leans against the doorframe, wiping a hand over his face. There are dark circles under his eyes. “Regardless of what you might think, I’m not evil, Catcher. But you can’t get away with what you did. And since we can’t punish you directly …” His voice trails off and he sighs. “They wanted to take the women.”
My stomach lurches. A storm of horrible images flashes through my mind and I shove them away, anger building inside me.
“You know you can’t allow that,” Catcher growls. “I won’t allow it.”
Ox throws up his hands in exasperation. “This whole thing’s gone too far. These men want blood.”
I close my eyes, press my hands to my temples. There has to be a way to fix this. To make it stop.
Catcher fires back, “They’re your men, Ox, control them. You’re in charge of them. You shouldn’t have allowed things to get to where they have.”
“Maybe so,” Ox counters. “But that doesn’t change where we are now. Someone has to pay for Conall’s death. They wanted both your women. I convinced them to take only one. You have to hand one of the girls over and I’m not going to stop them. What you did was wrong—”
And before I know what’s happening, Catcher slams his fist into Ox’s face and Ox staggers backward. I race down the hall, throwing myself between them with a hand pressed against each chest to keep them apart.
“Stop it!” I yell.
“What you did was wrong!” Catcher shouts over me. “What I did was justice.”
Ox stares at me a moment, an expression approaching pity in his eyes. He’s different from Conall in that way. Conall loved blood and fear. Ox is just trying to maintain some sort of order on the island—a way to keep his men alive.
“Conall would have found a way to get himself killed one way or another,” I tell Ox. “He went too far.” It’s clear he sees the
truth of my words but doesn’t care.
He raises a few fingers to his nose, wiping away blood. “What’s done is done,” he tells Catcher before looking at me, almost apologetically. “I’ve convinced them they can’t have both women. They don’t care which of them you hand over, they just want one. I’ll do my best to keep them from hurting her too badly.”
I stand there dazed, trying to let his words sink in. Catcher’s face pales and his hand clutching the machete trembles. “You allow that and I’ll never supply your men again.”
Ox takes a deep breath and I can hear the weariness in his voice. The same weariness we all feel. “You don’t have an option, Catcher. They patrol the walls and cable car—they know there’s no way to get your friends off the island. And they know that so long as your friends are still here, hurt or not, you have to supply the Recruiters as well.
“I’m sorry about this, I really am. I’d hoped …” He pauses and for a moment he looks lost in thought. Then he shakes his head and turns away. “Look, I can keep them in check for a day, maybe two. Give you a little time to sort it out, decide. But I can’t make any promises, Catcher,” he calls out over his shoulder as he disappears down the hallway.
I just stand there, one hand on Catcher’s chest and the other touching emptiness.
Catcher slams the door and then he punches it again and again until I pull him back, his knuckles raw and bleeding. He doesn’t stop me as I tug him out of our flat toward the stairwell. He lets me lead him to the roof, where my sister and Elias can’t hear us and where I can press snow to his bloody fingers.
He stares at where the ice melts to pink water trailing down his arm. “I don’t know what to do anymore,” he says. “I don’t know how to protect you.”
“It’s not your job to protect me,” I tell him, ignoring the frozen air that envelops us.
He reaches out with his uninjured hand and runs a finger along my lips. “I can’t let anything happen to you,” he says. “It will kill me.”
I try to hold his gaze but I can’t and end up looking over his shoulder at the dark clouds on the horizon pulling close to the City. I can hear the sound of ice freezing along the ground, the small quiet groans of the water forcing itself into cracks and expanding. Tearing our world apart degree by degree.
“I should just smuggle Mudo onto the island and infect all the Recruiters. It wouldn’t be hard for me to take care of them right after they turn.”
I shake my head. It would be a brutal and cruel way to kill them all and I’m not sure it’s what they deserve. “The Recruiters would probably kill you and the rest of us if anything went wrong—if they caught you trying to smuggle Unconsecrated onto the Sanctuary. It’d be a risk.” I stare at my hands for a moment. “Besides, that makes us as bad as they are. We can’t kill them like that.”
“But they don’t deserve to live,” Catcher says in frustration. “Didn’t you hear what Ox said?”
I bite the inside of my cheek. In my mind I see Catcher’s blade slicing through Conall’s neck, hear his last breath, the gurgling of blood in his lungs.
“What you did …” I hesitate, trying to figure out what I’m feeling and how to put it into words. “Conall was a monster,” I say. Catcher’s back stiffens.
“I’m not saying your killing him was wrong, I just …” I take a deep breath and lean my hips against the low wall circling the roof. “I don’t think we can be so indifferent to life,” I finally finish. “I’m not sure we should be the ones judging.”
Catcher opens his mouth to defend himself, his jaw tightening, and I rest my hand over his to cut him off. I press my lips together, knowing I have to say this but afraid of how he’ll respond. I push forward anyway.
“You terrified me back there, Catcher. You’ve talked before about how you feel caught in between the living and the dead because of being immune, but you’re going to have to choose which side you want to be on. It’s the Unconsecrated who take life indiscriminately. It’s the living who strive to preserve it—even for the worst among us.”
He lets his chin drop to his chest, his hand snaking to the back of his neck and pulling at the taut muscles lining his shoulders. “He was about to kill you, Annah. I couldn’t let that happen. He wouldn’t have stopped coming after you.”
I tug on his arm until he lets go and I can press his fingers against my chest, over the thumping of my heart. “I’m still alive,” I remind him. “You’re not an evil person, Catcher. But that doesn’t make it okay to kill the rest of the Recruiters. Maybe it’s not fair—but we have to be better than they are. We can’t sink to the worst of them.”
I lay my other hand on his face, tilting it back until the light of the night splays across his cheekbones, his eyes. “Killing them would make us monsters. What’s the point of working so hard to get off this island if we’re going to turn into monsters anyway?”
Catcher pulls me to him and together we stand there staring up at the sky, the heat of him keeping me warm against the winter chill.
“We have a little time to figure something else out,” I tell him. “I’ve already made progress quilting together material for the balloon. You just need to make sure the people left in the Dark City will have what they need and be ready on time as well.” I turn and face him.
“We can make this work. I know we can.” I wonder whether if I say it often enough, with enough force, I can make it true.
He pulls my head to his chest and I listen to the beat of his heart. “Do I still scare you?” he asks and I can sense the fear and uncertainty in his voice.
“Always,” I tell him. He catches his breath and I lean away until I can see his eyes. “I’m scared of losing my heart to you. But I think it’s a risk I’m willing to take.”
I’m kneeling on the floor, sifting through the scraps of quilts my sister’s already sewn together, when she shuffles into the room. Her hair’s greasy, hanging around her face limply, but her eyes are no longer dull, her cheeks no longer fever-flushed.
“What’s going on?” she asks, a little out of breath from walking down the hallway. She’s weak from the illness and slides down to perch on the edge of a nearby chair, her muscles trembling slightly.
“I had no idea you’d quilted this much,” I say, organizing the fabric into different piles: what looks strong enough to bear our weight and what doesn’t.
She shrugs, picking up one of the strips of intricately pieced cloth. “It gave me something to do. I like putting things together—making something out of nothing.”
Another detail I didn’t know about my sister. There’s still so much for us to learn about each other. “We’re trying to sew a big fabric bag—sort of like a balloon—in less than two days,” I tell her.
She looks at me, eyebrows raised. “You figured out how to fly?”
I blush a little, wondering if Catcher’s getting the same reaction from the survivors in the Dark City—he went to tell them about our plan this morning. “Maybe. It might not work but …” I shrug. “Catcher’s found a ship not too far away. We just have to make it off the island and down the mainland a bit.”
She presses a finger against her lips, thinking. “Any idea how to steer it once it’s up there?”
Cringing, I shake my head. “That’s a detail I hadn’t gotten to yet.” I twist my fingers in the fabric spread around me, suddenly wondering if this is a stupid idea after all. I clearly haven’t thought through how it all works. What if I end up killing us?
“Elias!” my sister calls out. We hear him grumble in the other room as he pulls himself out of bed and comes to stand in the doorway.
I can’t help but see my sister’s playful grin as her eyes slide down his body. It’s evident they’re feeling much better after being so ill. I glance away, the moment too intimate for me to watch.
“Annah’s making a balloon to carry us to a ship Catcher found,” my sister says as if it’s old news. “She needs a way to steer it. You’re good with flying things—think you can co
me up with something?”
His eyes light up. “How big a balloon?” he asks.
I shrug, gesturing at all the fabric. “That big.”
He walks to the window and looks out over the river. “How far?”
I shrug again. “Down the coast. That’s what Catcher says.”
“I’ll draw up plans.” Excitement laces through his words. “You know, I was in a plane once.”
My sister rolls her eyes at me. “We know,” she says, giggling.
He shoots her a mock-stern look. “But after that, when I needed a place to spend the night, I slept in an old library. They had books about flying and I read everything I could. I never thought about a balloon, but it could work.”
He’s almost jumping with energy. He begins to pace and mumble, calculating surface area and lift, and my sister and I go back to the piles of fabric.
I push the sewing box toward her. “Think you have enough strength to tackle all this?”
Grinning, she settles back into the chair, pulling out a tarnished thimble and slipping it on her finger. She picks up haphazardly sewn rags. “Who stitched these?” she asks, looking at one of the crude seams.
I glare at her and she laughs, obviously enjoying making fun of me. We get back to work, me struggling to keep pace with her speed and Elias muttering as he sketches designs for some sort of propeller.
Later, after Elias goes off to search through the building for some gears and soft metal he can bend into blades, my sister stands and stretches, then sets a kettle on the wood-burning stove.
“When you were in the Forest with Elias when we were kids,” she says, staring out the window into the darkness, “did you think you were going to die?”
I’m so startled by her question that I don’t know what to say. I think back on that time, remembering each moment.
“Yes,” I tell her. “Every day.”
She nods, seeming lost in her own thoughts. “But you kept pushing?”
“We didn’t have a choice.”