The Seventh Hour

by Tracey Ward

“No, it’s done.” Crestin assures me. “Everything is taken care of.”

  “It’s not. Not yet.” I push the necklace back into the bag before handing it to Treasurer Crestin. “I want to sign this back into the coffers. I want to donate it to the city.”

  She blinks, holding the bag loosely in her hand. “We can’t keep this.”

  “Consider it a payment to the town for everything they did for me. For the kindness they showed me.”

  Crestin’s eyes dart to Captain Fuller uncomfortably. “I think in light of what’s happened recently, that would be an undeserved gift.”

  “I won’t judge an entire town by the hate of one person, just as I don’t appreciate being judged by the reputation of the Eventide.”

  “Liv, are you sure?”

  “I don’t want anything to do with that necklace or that life,” I tell her heatedly, the words, the truth, bursting out of me. My eyes have begun to burn, my breaths coming short and shallow. I touch the necklace I’m wearing, the starlit sky that Grayson gave to me, and I remind myself to be calm.

  The room shifts. It shakes and trembles violently. I’m thrown to the ground, a chair collapsing on top of me painfully. Out of the corner of my eye I see Captain Fuller stumble toward Crestin, shoving her under her desk.

  “Get down!” he shouts.

  The door pops open, Gav filling it instantly. He tosses the chair off of me before grabbing my arm. He pulls me up and over to the doorframe with him.

  “Are you hurt?!” he yells at me.

  I shake my head. “No. Are you?”

  “No.”

  The world continues to move under out feet. It’s going on too long. Longer than the other earthquakes I’ve felt. Glass breaks somewhere down the hall. Panicked shouts ring out from other offices.

  Finally it stops. Just like that. Like it never started, it ends.

  Gav steps into the room. “Are you okay under there?”

  Fuller helps Crestin stand slowly. “We’re alright,” he tells Gav crisply. “You?”

  “Yes.”

  Fuller’s radio lights up instantly. “Captain! Captain!”

  He grunts as he lifts it to his mouth. “All Forces to your emergency posts! All Forces to your emergency posts!” He looks up at Gav and I. “That means you too. Both of you. Get to the hospital. Now.”

  We nod simultaneously, turning to run from the room. As we’re running down the stairs an aftershock hits, sending us flying sideways. Gav grabs onto my arm to steady me. Once the world is stable again we sprint. We rush through the building, through the streets, up the hill, straight to the hospital.

  Dr. Kanden is in the lobby handing out triage bags when we get there.

  “Liv, thank God you’re here,” she breathes in relief. She hands me a black bag. “It’s going to get busy soon. I got a call from Ian only a minute ago. A shelving unit in the warehouse broke lose. It collapsed on three people. Others were hit by falling boxes and bottles.”

  “Dead or alive?” I ask briskly.

  “Alive. A lot of broken bones and abrasions, though. And there will be others. That’s only one section and that quake was a monster.”

  Brakes squeal outside the hospital. Two Forces uniforms jump out of the cab of a truck, running to the back to unload their wounded.

  Gav touches my arm. “I’m going to go help them unload.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I promise, waving him away. “Go do what you can.”

  “I won’t leave the hospital. Don’t you leave either.”

  “I won’t. I’ll be here or in one of the rooms.”

  He embarrasses me when he kisses me on the forehead, but that’s Gav. That’s having a brother who loves you, and embarrassing as it is, it’s not the worst thing in the world to be cursed with.

  Dr. Kanden wasn’t wrong; there are others. Lots of others. In the span of two hours the lobby is packed, every room is occupied, and we’re pulling emergency cots out of the basement to try to keep up. Everything is a blur. A rush of faces, names, bandages, blood, crying, screaming, whimpering. I’m sweating and running, pulled in every direction. Grayson shows up with Tae who smashed his hand under a dresser that tipped. Mason shows up with his dad who took a crack to the head from a crumbling piece of ceiling. Captain Fuller brings in Mayor Gustafson. He’s having trouble breathing. We get him to a cot, get him calm. We try to settle everyone just for a second so we can stop and take a breath, but there’s just no time. It’s chaos.

  “Liv!” Dr. Kanden shouts from the lobby, over the sea of bodies that separates us. “We need more blankets!”

  “There are no more!”

  “In the basement!”

  I nod to her, turning on my heel to hurry through the throng. I make my way to the back of the building, turning hard to the left to head down the stone stairs that lead into the basement. It’s identical to the one below the Forces building, except with less guns. Less weaponry. More blankets, towels, cots, pillows, and, for some reason, a small piano. I don’t know what to make of that when I run past it, heading back upstairs with my arms full of blankets. I can barely see over the stack. I bump into the wall along the stairs. Into the doorframe at the top. Into a man in the hall.

  “I’m sorry, I—“

  He grabs hold of me, jerking me back into the doorway with him. I try to scream but his hand comes over my mouth, cottony soft and wet. It smells horrible. Acrid and sickly. I claw at his hand, at the hold he has on my throat, but my strength is starting to leave me. My vision goes with it, fading fast. Going dark on the edges. There’s stuffing in my ears. On my mouth and in my ears and over my eyes. I’m slipping. I’m slumping down.

  I’m gone.

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Liv

  Sulfur. I smell sulfur. I feel hot, wet, and I smell sulfur.

  Even before I drag my reluctant eyes open, I know where I am.

  The hot springs.

  A hand slaps my face hard, knocking my head sideways. My skin explodes in a sunburst across my cheek, flashing sharp and fading dull. Aching. I try to open my eyes, even for a second, but they won’t listen. My brain is pudding. It’s mush. Nothing is connecting.

  “Wake up,” a man barks at me. He slaps me again, same cheek. “Wake up!”

  I blink rapidly, my eyelids finally listening. Everything is underwater. It’s blurred and strange. I make out torches in the corners. The ground is shimmering black, the water steaming, haunting the way I remember it. The ceiling is low. It hangs heavy over the shadow in front of me.

  I squint to make him out, desperate to understand. He steps closer, his face coming into super sharp focus for a split second before pulling away again.

  “Fuller?” I mumble dumbly.

  My lip is starting to swell. It’s either from the slaps he’s given me or I took some damage while I was unconscious.

  “Good, you’re awake,” he growls, his voice barely recognizable. It sounds deeper than it should.

  I shake my head, trying to clear it.

  His hand lashes out, his fingers snaking into my hair. He pulls hard, dragging me by my scalp across the rough, slick ground.

  I scream, my skull on fire. Instinctively I reach for his hand, holding onto his wrist and pulling up, taking some of my weight off his hold on my hair.

  “Help me!” I scream as loud as I can. “Help me!”

  “No one can hear you down here,” he reminds me. “We’re down too deep. This tunnel runs for miles.”

  He tosses me down at the edge of the water. I hit my elbow hard, the pain racing up my arm into my shoulder.

  “What are you doing?” I whimper, holding onto my screaming arm. I look up at him, my eyes desperate and pleading. “Why are you—“

  This man is not Captain Fuller.

  “Jason,” I whisper. “You’re Mason’s father.”

  “You shouldn’t have touched my boy,” he scolds me.

  “I was helping him. I’m a nurse at the hospital.”

  “You’re an E
ventide. You’re a curse.” He stares down at me, loathing in his eyes. “You brought the storm, didn’t you? Three storms colliding on the same day your ships are sailing past. That’s not a coincidence.”

  “No, it’s science,” I reply slowly. “Warm fronts from the Sixth and cold fronts from the Eighth. We see storms a lot in the Seventh. It’s not a curse, it’s nature.”

  “There’s nothing natural about you. You made those storms so you could crash your ship. You wanted to land on our beach. To get inside the cave.”

  “I can’t make a storm. I swear. I’m just a girl. A regular girl.”

  “And once you were inside we were all doomed,” he continues, getting warmed up. Getting angry. “They warned me back home in Bale, they said not to come to Gaia because it was too close to the ocean. It was too close to you and your people. You poison us through the water with the waves. In the fish. I won’t eat them. Who knows what you’ve done to them?”

  He reaches for his back pocket, pulling out a glinting piece of steel. I slip backwards on the rocks, being careful not to fall into the pool but desperate to get away from the shine on his blade and in his eyes.

  “The first night you were here do you know what I did?” he asks me quietly.

  I shake my head, tears streaming down my face. “No.”

  “I helped a cow give birth. Middle of the night. Right around midnight. She had a horrible time. She was in a lot of pain. We almost lost her. That calf, though, he didn’t make it. He was stillborn. The cow wouldn’t give milk after that. I couldn’t figure out why. They sent her to slaughter. You probably tasted her.” He kneels down in front of me. “You killed both of them. Maybe not on purpose, but it was you. You people, you might not be magic, but you sure as hell are unlucky and this town can’t take any more bad luck. Not this year. Not any time. That’s why you and your brother, you’ve gotta go.”

  “We’re leaving,” I explain desperately. “When the doors open, we’re leaving.”

  “Too late.”

  “We’ll leave tonight! We’ll go to Porton! We’ll leave Gaia and we’ll never come back.”

  He lowers his head, shaking it heavily. “I wish I could believe that. I’ve been trying to get rid of you quietly for months now, but you just won’t budge. Tried to scare you with the paint on your door, tried to kill you in your sleep like a gentleman, but you wouldn’t listen. You refused to disappear.”

  “How’d you get in my room?” I ask, trying to keep him talking. Desperate for more time, for a chance to think. To escape.

  “I lifted the master key off my cousin’s ring. Took it to the locksmith, told him it was the key to my apartment and I wanted to make a copy for Mason. He didn’t hesitate. He’s a good man.”

  “That’s how you got Fuller’s gun, isn’t it?”

  “It was easy. He keeps it on the kitchen counter. The case wasn’t even locked when I found it.”

  I inch to the left, easing myself away from the water. Putting myself between Jason and the door. “But, why try to shoot me? The poison you could have gotten away with, but shooting was risky. You could have been caught.”

  “I wasn’t, though, was I?” he asks proudly.

  I shake my head. “No. No, you weren’t. But you will be for this.”

  “No, I don’t think I will. I snuck you out the back, carrying you in my arms through the crowd around the hospital like you were hurt in the earthquake. Walked you right past every guard in Gaia. No one looked twice.”

  “Did you go there to find me?”

  “I went there ‘cause I got hurt. Then I saw you running around, touching people. Infecting people. We’ll have a plague by the end of the day with how much you spread yourself around. You’re going to bring a lot of death to this town. I knew I had to stop it while I could.”

  He slides closer to me, the blade in his hand reflecting firelight as though it’s burning, the steam rising behind him rolling like smoke.

  “You went into the supply closet,” I choke out, scooting farther away. “You got a rag and chloroform.”

  “Where are you going?”

  I freeze, my heart clenching painfully in my chest. “Nowhere. I’m listening.”

  “You’re running,” he snarls.

  Jason grabs hold of my ankle, yanking me toward him. I scream, kicking with my free foot as my back scrapes painfully across the uneven stone. He tries to grab that foot as well, but he only gets my shoe. It flies off in his hand and I’m kicking again. His blade catches me, slicing the bottom of my foot. I keep kicking, keep screaming, but he’s bigger than I am. He gets ahold of my throat, lifting me up easily, like I weigh nothing. He hovers me over the water, my foot dripping blood into the dark, steaming pool.

  “No! No, no, no! I can’t swim!”

  I know it’s stupid the second I say it, but it was instinct. I couldn’t fight it.

  Jason grins. “That will make this a lot easier for me.”

  He tries to toss me into the water, but I refuse to be let go. I hold onto him, onto his arm, like my life depends on it because it does. My fingers dig into his flesh until I’m drawing blood, until he’s screaming at me to let him go. He tries again to toss me, but he can’t.

  “Let go, you bitch!” he curses.

  He raises his knife. He’s going to stab me.

  I kick at him as hard as I can, scissor kicking the way Grayson taught me in the water when he was showing me how to swim. I use it now to save my life in another way, and when I make contact with his crotch he groans, doubling over. I drop with him, my feet landing in the water. My shin cracks painfully against the stone lip, but I keep treading. I keep running in the water and in the air until I find my footing.

  I claw my way up his arm, reaching for his face. He tries to slash at me with his blade, but I manage to block it with one hand just as my other finds purchase on his face. I scurry my fingers up his cheek, digging my fingernails in deep, and I ram my thumb into his eye.

  His hold on me slackens.

  I push as hard as I can, showing no mercy because mercy will get me killed. Pity will be my epitaph, so I grind my thumb into the soft tissue of his eyeball with everything I have.

  Finally he lets me go, reaching for my hand with both of his. I pull it back, taking advantage of his temporary blindness to kick at his knee, sending it the wrong way. He shouts again as he crumbles to the ground.

  As he kneels before me.

  I open my hands, exposing my palms, and I smack them down hard on the sides of his head. Right over his ears, just like Grayson taught me. It destroys his equilibrium, maybe even his eardrums.

  In the span of seven seconds I’ve taken his sight, his hearing, and his legs.

  It’s time to run.

  My feet slip on the wet floor, my body falling forward, stumbling. Tumbling. I catch myself at the last second, taking off at a sprint into the dim cave leading up. Up and out of this hell.

  Jason roars behind me. He’s cursing me. Screaming at me. He’s going to catch me.

  If you want to outrun anyone with those tiny little legs you have to be fast…

  I run through the tunnel as fast as I can, giving it everything I have. I picture the basement in the dormitory. I picture the pillars and the boxes. I see them whizzing by. I hear my feet hitting the ground. Running. Running. Running. Grayson is relentless, telling me to go again and again. Conditioning me.

  … and to be fast you have to be strong.

  Strengthening me.

  Saving me.

  I run the way he taught me to. I run with purpose and endurance and so much strength I feel like I’m flying. Air rushes past my ears, drowning out Jason’s voice. His footfalls behind me. He’s gone. He’s nothing.

  I blow through the last corner. I sprint toward the light that’s beckoning me home. That’s burning like the sun.

  I’m in the air, in the sky, and I’m untouchable. Uncatchable.

  I’m free.

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Gray


  I don’t make it to Jason’s hearing. I don’t even know if I want to go, and when Liv asks me to stay with her, when she tells me that she can’t make it through it, I immediately agree. We stay in my apartment above the carpentry building, the smell of pine and cedar on my clothes and in the air around us. We don’t talk much. We’ve already exhausted the subject of what happened to her. She isn’t willing to discuss it again, and I don’t know if I can hear it. It’s been two weeks and she’s still healing. She still has trouble sleeping. She’s back to waking up at four-thirty in the morning, only now I’m not in the room next to her. She has Gav, though, and for that I’m grateful.

  Gav goes to the hearing. He speaks against Jason on his sister’s behalf, and he doesn’t have to be the charmer he is to get them on his side. No one condones what Jason did. Even so, Jason gets fifteen years and a lifetime banishment from Gaia. That’s it. That’s the going rate for putting poison in Liv’s mouth and a bullet in my back.

  I was there when Captain Fuller marched Jason out of town and into the tunnels in handcuffs, taking him to Porton to be jailed. To be used as slave labor in the city as he served out his time. He looked like hell. Liv really did a number on him, blackening his eyes, scratching up his face. I hear he’s deaf in one ear. Tough break. It’s hard to watch your back in prison with a handicap like that.

  The town was surprised but not shocked to hear that he was behind the attacks. Jason is from Bale, born and raised. His blood runs deep and dark with superstition and hate. Mason, however, was stunned when he found out. He couldn’t believe his own dad tried to kill someone. He left town only days after Jason was arrested. He transferred out to Damask where he won’t have to live with the shame of his dad’s legacy. I can’t say I blame him.

  The rest of us have to try to do the same – move on. Gav and I try to bury our hate. Liv tries to overcome her fear. She’s scared to go to work, but she does. She’s afraid to be alone, but sometimes she asks to be. It’s hard to stand by and watch her struggle, but love isn’t always hands on. Sometimes you do it from a distance, letting a person fight their own battles because they’ll never feel their own strength if they’re always using yours.