What Blood Leaves Behind (The Poison Rose)

by Beaumont, Delany

  It’s just a wide, empty space below the bridge, strewn with trash. Nothing threatening, nothing to see.

  Dried mud stiffens my hair, the dirt on my face making my skin feel tight. There’s a patch of congealed blood on the palm of my right hand that both itches and burns. I take a few steps, working my bum leg. Stop when it hurts too much, then curse at how weak I am. Make myself keep walking, learn to ignore the pain. Get used to how it’s going to be for the rest of the day as I cross over the river, find my way back to the Orphanage.

  When I get to the edge of the area the bridge shelters, I’m disappointed at how gray the morning is, how dim. Why couldn’t the night simply vanish, replaced with a splash of dazzling sunlight?

  But it is the light of day. What I have to work with. Murky, cloudy but maybe too bright all the same for the Black Riders to move about in.

  It’s still so early but already the worry creeps up on me—what if it takes me more than a day to make it back? The Orphanage doesn’t seem that far away but what if I get lost? What if my leg keeps me from making good time?

  I need to get back before it gets dark out again. Need to get as much done as possible—or the Riders will be searching for me.

  They’ll never leave me alone at the Orphanage. They’ll never let me care for Aiden now unmolested. I should have forgone the medicine and kept washing his wounds, kept him warm. Admitted that there’s a limit to what I could do.

  Instead I spent an endless night going through so much for so little.

  Aisa pushing me out a window. Biting into Moira’s arm. Nearly killing myself on a motorcycle I barely knew how to ride.

  Hiding like a giant rat in a human-sized hole with scuttling rodents and human remains all around.

  All this—and I came away with nothing.

  I’ve left Stace by Aiden’s side but she’s so young and there’s a fragility to her. She’s always depended on me, on Emily. And Larkin. If Aiden gets worse, stops breathing—

  I don’t want her to see him die. I want to be the one by his side if that happens.

  Me alone. I will be the one to endure it.

  I move out into the street, make my way onto the onramp of the bridge. It seems lighter now that I’m out in the open. There’s no rain, no drizzle and the fog’s dissipated. My sore leg slows me down but the pain recedes from angry spasms to a dull ache that repeats with every step.

  The higher I climb up the onramp, the more I look around for any evidence of the Black Riders. I have no way of knowing for sure that they don’t move about during the day but I’ve only seen or heard them at night.

  The open air, the daylight feels good. The sun stays hidden behind a wall of ashy clouds but I can tell it’s there, to the east, where I’m heading. I pass a blue road sign dangling vertically from a gantry above my head. It has an arrow pointing downriver and the words Blackwell Bridge in white reflective block letters.

  The Blackwell is wide and open, four lanes in either direction, no cage of steel girders above its surface like the bridge we crossed the night before. As I make my way over the water, I pass two towers where operators high above the river once manned controls that raised and lowered the center spans of the bridge for passing ships.

  The doors to the towers are broken in and the roof of one has collapsed. I can’t help but imagine what might remain in the towers’ control rooms—a bridge keeper’s withered fingers still reaching for control panel buttons, dead eyes watching for ships that will never arrive.

  The Blackwell Bridge is remarkably clear of debris. I count only a handful of derelict vehicles. It looks like someone, at height of the plague, drove a huge earth mover across and cleared everything away. The railings along the walkways are almost all smashed apart, as if cars were simply swept off the deck of the bridge and into the river.

  The view of the city from up here keeps tugging at me, making me want to stop to take it all in. But you can’t slow down, must get back to the Orphanage. It’s the first panoramic daylight glimpse of Raintree I’ve had since the Riders brought me here. Trudging along, I look over my shoulder at the high-rises behind me, at the bridges spanning the length of the river in either direction, at the warehouses and riverside condos dotting the opposite shore.

  I have to keep talking to myself. Keep myself on track, my goal in mind.

  Look ahead. Concentrate. Pay no attention to the ache in your leg.

  You don’t have much time.

  My stomach gurgles and yowls but I’ve grown used to ignoring the pangs. The sandpaper scratch in my throat is harder to get past and I stare at the steel-gray, white-capped water below, imagining how it tastes. A pontoon walkway that once went along the river’s east embankment is in tatters. I see no easy way of getting down to the water’s edge. Maybe if I had a bucket and a rope I could lower them down and bring up a sip.

  Then I forget about hunger, thirst. My sore leg.

  Reaching the middle of the bridge, its highest point, I see someone. Small, girl-like, standing perfectly still just where the far end of the bridge meets the street beyond.

  The figure is far enough away that to my eyes she’s hazy, wavering in the distance like a mirage in desert heat.

  I keep moving, never slow my pace. Refuse to take time to process this strange apparition, work out what I should do.

  It doesn’t matter. Going back and trying to find another way over the river is pointless. There could be somebody waiting at the end of every bridge I tried to cross.

  If this creature isn’t a Black Rider, it must be an Elder. And the closer I get the more familiar it looks.

  Emily.

  Suddenly I know this hazy figure in the distance is Emily.

  The blond hair, a face growing more familiar with each step I take. I pick up my pace now, the certainty it’s her overcoming the pain in my leg.

  It’s when I’m closer that I do stop for a moment. In that instant she reminds me so much of someone else—Jendra. Not Emily. It has to be—

  But that’s impossible. I shake my head, squeeze my eyes shut, open them and see only Emily. Her face is rounded, well-fed, very Jendra-like. She looks immaculate and smartly dressed. She’s wearing thick black tights, a long khaki coat with a leopard fur collar, suede boots that reach her knees.

  As far as I can tell, she’s alone. I scan the streets beyond her for anybody else. I squint hard but can’t quite make out the expression on her face. She’s wearing makeup, that I can tell. Lots of makeup. Like a little girl playing grownup in her big sister’s clothes.

  It’s hard to square this Emily with the memory of the first time I saw her, desperately needy, reaching out to me despite the danger.

  I was about to fire into the darkness, try to scare whatever it was away, when I heard a voice. “Don’t.” It was a small voice, the word so fragile it hardly seemed to have been spoken.

  “If you don’t want me to shoot, come out where I can see you,” I shouted.

  I heard the scrape of a chair again and the soft shuffle of feet. Then I saw the shape of a small girl younger than me emerge from the shadows. She looked filthy and emaciated, her hair a wild tangle of blond straw, the cast-off clothes she wore rags. “Don’t hurt me,” she said.

  I’ve never hurt her. Or I’ve never intended to.

  I start hurrying toward her again but feel like I’m trudging through sand.

  Surely she’ll warm up when I reach her. We’ll hug each other and all will be forgiven. She’ll be the one to help me when she sees just how filthy, hungry, tired I am.

  She raises a hand and beckons to me with all the emotion of the next available cashier in a crowded store. Otherwise she doesn’t move, not rushing to meet me, not venturing beyond the lower lip of the bridge. Making me come to her.

  When I’m near enough to make out the expression on her face, she’s definitely not smiling, does not appear happy to see me. Her face is pinched, like a sour apple. A heavily made-up sour apple.

  I’m maybe twenty feet away from
her when she turns and begins marching down the middle of Blackwell Street, a wide thoroughfare that leads deep into the east side of the city.

  She walks briskly along, never slowing, not waiting for me to catch up. Never looking over her shoulder to make sure I’m behind her.

  I follow where she leads me, the khaki coat with its faux fur collar, the neatly styled blonde hair. I have to trust her. I have to talk to her.

  While trying to keep up, I search for an explanation for her behavior. She might be leading me to someplace safe, a place where we can be alone. Maybe we’re being observed here. Maybe it’s not safe out in the open.

  But that sour expression—uncaring, nearly hateful—it gets to me. Eats away any attempt of mine to put a positive spin on her behavior, to shrug it away.

  As with Blackwell Bridge, Blackwell Street is also almost entirely clear of cars. This must have been an emergency route, kept passable for ambulances, fire trucks, military convoys.

  I study my surroundings, marking odd buildings, street signs where they’re still standing, trying to orient myself. We’re many blocks from the Orphanage, from the bridge I crossed with William and Tetch the night before—the bridge I dangled from in a cage.

  Emily turns down a side street and heads south for a few blocks, then down another street leading into an industrial area nearer to the river’s embankment.

  Unlike the wide open pavement of Blackwell Street, the streets here are choked with refuse, the entire contents of four and five story warehouses spilled out across the pavement. There are automotive parts, home remodeling supplies, office furniture, medical equipment, toys.

  We start weaving through all this—around a dumpster, past a delivery truck on its side, over a morass of sodden schoolbooks—and I have to keep a close watch on Emily, look for that little blond head bobbing above and around all this junk, so that she doesn’t simply disappear, lose me in this maze.

  I’m so intent on not losing sight of her, I fail to notice the streetcar rails embedded along this block until my right foot slips into a groove between pavement and steel. Immediately I yank it loose—my only thought to keep up with Emily—then drop to the ground in agony. Pain sears the entire length of my leg, nausea makes my head spin.

  Emily—I start to yell it out to make her stop but snap my mouth shut, swallow her name. If it’s a safe place she’s leading me to, secret and out of sight, I can’t spoil it by blaring to the world our location.

  Don’t let her disappear. I struggle back to my feet and start walking again, limping badly.

  But Emily comes to a full stop only half a block farther on. She’s in front of a warehouse four stories high, staring up at tiers of empty windows. As I approach, I see a row of loading bays where trucks pulled in and unloaded their cargo. The bays line the building’s ground floor, almost all of their steel rollup doors wrenched open, crates and boxes and clothing racks from a dark interior tumbled out onto the pavement.

  Emily finally turns toward me, her face still sour, locked in a frown so deep it’s like she’s wearing a sad clown’s makeup, and waits for me to catch up to her. But she makes no sign, doesn’t beckon me to her side.

  Not able to walk fast in any event, I take it even slower, now that she’s waiting for me. I scan the area, staring up as she did at the open windows above me. Was she looking up at something specific—someone’s face looking down?

  I’m eager to catch up to her but also worried. Her coldness seems even more unnatural. Why doesn’t she let her guard down now that we’ve reached this place? She should be waving to me, pointing the way inside.

  Is it possible Emily has changed so much? This feels more like a trap than the prelude to a warm reunion. My skin prickles with the tension, my hands clench, the instinctive part of my brain broadcasts urgent warnings as it has so many times before. Never let yourself become trapped. Stay in the open. Don’t go indoors unless you’re sure you can get out again.

  I’ve stopped in my tracks, staring at her, struggling with my instinct for self-preservation.

  But it’s Emily and we’ve been together so long.

  I have to trust her.

  There has to be something remaining between us, a remnant of that bond we shared, that feeling that we were family, as close as any family could be.

  A few more steps and I’m at her side.

  Up close, she doesn’t look as fresh, as well-fed as I thought she did. The makeup she’s slathered on only covers the pastiness of her skin. It was an illusion. She looks thinner than I expected. She doesn’t have that Jendra-like glow, the ease and self-assurance Jendra radiated when I first encountered her at the motel on the outskirts of Raintree.

  I try to read her expression. She also doesn’t have Jendra’s obvious contempt for me. I can see the worry in her sour face. My heartbeat quickens—maybe she is holding herself back, not responding to me like she used to for some reason involving our safety. But maybe that’s what I want to believe she’s doing.

  I try to put a hand on her shoulder but she jerks away, takes a quick step back. “What’s wrong?” I ask but my voice quavers—I’m not the mothering one now. I wonder how I must look to her, filthy, bruised and bloodied, stinking of whatever surrounded me in that crawlspace below the bridge.

  “Look what the cat dragged in.”

  “We have to keep watch over that?”

  “I wouldn’t want to touch her.”

  Voices come from right above me, only a few feet away. I was staring at Emily so intently that I never noticed a dozen or more bodies fan out from the open loading bay doors.

  I look up sharply, eyes wide. Elders—more Elders than I can count.

  They were waiting for me. Emily brought me right to them.

  They don’t give me time to react. Several take off sprinting to either end of the loading ramp, leap down steps that end at street level and rush toward us. I spin around but behind me is another group of Elders approaching from across the street.

  It’s pointless to imagine I might outrun them. There’s only Emily—she must have a plan, she must have had something else in mind than this.

  I turn back to her, trying to decipher what’s in her face, uncover some sign that she still has at least a little feeling for me. I notice that she squeezes her eyes closed for a few seconds, as if not wanting to watch a terrible thing that’s about to happen. But she opens her eyes again and says nothing—no warning.

  The Elders surround me.

  Two

  “I brought you water.”

  A light, girlish voice, a little hesitant but trying to be confident.

  I raise my head and Emily is standing in front of me. She’s still wearing the khaki coat, still dressed in the tights and the boots. But her hair is mussed, strands of it coming loose from a shiny black clip she’s using to pin back the wings of her bangs. That hair I combed so many times—straw-colored, sun-bleached, always long and wild. And her makeup is smudged, mostly around the eyes as if she’s been rubbing them.

  I like this. I like her disarray. It makes her look like the old Emily, reachable.

  She holds out a mug, one of those oversized plastic containers people used to take to convenience stores for refills of soda and coffee.

  My throat aches but I resist snatching the mug from her hands.

  “Aren’t you going to take it?”

  She sounds disappointed. She takes a step closer, holding the mug up higher, thrusting it at my face.

  We’re in an office inside the warehouse where the Elders took me, a mostly glassed-in room at back end of the main floor. Probably once the office of a supervisor, a floor manager, and I’ve been forced to sit at his dusty metal desk, in his creaky rolling chair, for hours. Sitting where that manager once sat. I can still see his coffee stains, a pad where he doodled.

  “Emily, how did you find me?”

  She looks puzzled.

  “How did you know I would be walking across that bridge?”

  She shrugs, looks awa
y.

  By now I’ve had plenty of time to think over how coincidental it was for her to be on that bridge at that time of the morning, there at just the right moment to beckon to me, to begin leading me here.

  It’s so obvious I can’t believe I didn’t think of it until the Elders brought me into this warehouse. The Riders found me last night but for some reason they let me be—

  —high headlight beams darting into far corners, flashing momentarily across the crate that hides me.

  They, the Riders, told Emily exactly where to position herself in the morning. Or told other Elders who told Emily. There were probably Elders watching me from the moment I emerged from that crawlspace at daybreak.

  Any freedom I have is an illusion. I have to get that through my head. But Emily—I wanted so badly to trust her, to believe she wouldn’t betray me.

  Why are the Riders toying with me? Why are they stringing me along like this?

  “Please take the water,” Emily says. Her hand is trembling. The cup is heavy.

  I take it from her, smell it, take a tiny sip, decide it’s good and swig it down. It’s cool and clean and begins washing away the tight ache in my throat like a tiny miracle.

  “I’ll get you some food, too.”

  “Did someone tell you to bring me water?”

  My voice is smoother. It’s easier to talk.

  She shakes her head. I don’t believe her at all, that she’s acting on her own.

  But I smile at her. “Then you still care about me a little, huh?”

  “I just don’t want to see you get hurt.”

  I push myself to my feet. Sway a little, unsteady, lightheaded.

  I take a long look outside this office’s glass partitions. It’s obvious the Elders have been playing dress up for a long time in a garment warehouse that still holds a ton of clothes.

  There’s enough light streaming in through the open loading bay doors to see rows of metal shelving disappearing down the length of the space, jumbled cartons lining individual shelves, sheets of frayed cardboard and spectral heaps of plastic wrap littering the floor. Discarded clothes—maybe too big, maybe not nice enough—are tossed everywhere.