Oren only shrugged, the movement causing more ripples, and then ducked his head under again.
I walked to the water’s edge while he swam and bathed. Leaning over its surface, at first I didn’t recognize my own reflection. Tangled hair so dirty it looked black rather than brown; thin, hollow cheeks; skin stained with blood. I remembered the hot spray over my face when Oren had been fighting, and scrambled to splash water onto my skin to wash it away. I looked as animal and as warlike as Oren.
Pulling off my shoes, I rolled up the legs of my pants and stepped into the lake’s edge. The throbbing of my feet, still unused to so much walking after two weeks of it, eased in the cool water.
For a moment, I forgot where we were. That is, until I heard a voice behind me.
“Mummy,” it said, piping and tiny.
I splashed noisily in my haste to turn around.
A woman stood there with a child, who could be no more than five or six. I couldn’t tell how old the woman was, her face was so lined with dirt and weather. Their clothes were more tattered than Oren’s, their hair and fingernails broken and caked with dirt. They were, however, quite human.
“Mummy,” the child said again, half-hidden behind its mother’s leg. “Lookit the mmbows.” The child was speaking half-nonsense, muffled by the woman’s body.
The woman didn’t reply, gazing around with clear confusion, eyes wide and staring. The child—it looked like a girl, but I could not be certain—tugged at her leg.
I stared at them, unable to speak for shock. Behind me, Oren resurfaced with a splash. I glanced over in time to see a glimpse of bare, muscled skin, and a ragged red wound on his thigh before I wrenched my gaze back to the newcomers. The roar of the falls, muted though it was falling through the barrier, covered the sounds of his getting dressed again.
The woman hardly spared us a glance. She stared at the water, gripping the child by the shoulders, knuckles white. The child squirmed in her grip, making noises of protest.
“Are you okay?” My voice was hoarse with shock.
The woman’s gaze snapped to me, so intense and desperate that I took a step back. There was a wildness there that reminded me of Oren. Perhaps all people living out here developed that same bestial desperation. Perhaps I would, too.
“Need—” she said, licking cracked lips. “Hungry,” she said. “Food for the child.”
I took another step backward, and found that Oren had crept up behind me without a word. I glanced at him, and saw his knife clenched in his hand. “What’re you doing?” I hissed, taking hold of his arm. Even through the worn cloth of his shirt I felt a dull echo of the same electric tingle that always leapt between us when we touched. Muffled by fabric, it was not quite as intensely unpleasant as it had been.
“Don’t talk to them,” he said, without taking his eyes off the pair.
“They’re hungry,” I protested. “And confused. We can surely spare—”
“Nothing.” Moving slowly, he stepped around me, pulling his arm from my grasp easily. When he had placed himself between me and the pair of newcomers, he stopped.
“Remain still,” he said in a low voice, enunciating every word as though he were speaking to a child. “We have nothing for you.”
The mother rolled her eyes at him, confusion and fear plain in them. Oren waited a moment and then moved toward them cautiously. It wasn’t until he shifted his grip on his knife, flipping it blade-down—I’d seen him hold it that way before, after all—that realization dawned on me.
“Oren!” I cried. “No!”
He stopped, every line of muscle telling of his irritation. He didn’t take his eyes away from them to look at me. “They’re monsters, Lark.”
The child’s face peeped from behind its mother to stare first at Oren and then at me. The mother stood wringing her hands and mumbling, too low for me to hear. But their skin, if dirty, was pink and fair, and their eyes a deep brown. They stood upright, walked without crouching. Their teeth, what I could see of them, were as flat and unthreatening as my own.
“They’re people!” I hissed. “How can you—”
“In here they are,” Oren said quietly. The pair gave no sign that they heard us, much less understood us. “You call these places magical—well, inside, they change. Turn back into shadows of what they used to be. Confused, senseless shadows. But make no mistake, the second they set foot back outside, they’ll hunt you until you’re dead.”
His grip on his knife was white-knuckled, his jaw clenched around each word he spoke.
I shifted my gaze back to the child. I saw the filth around its mouth. I had taken it for dirt, but the more I looked, the more I realized it was a familiar, brownish-red color, caked on with little dribbles down the chin—
I shut my eyes, stomach rebelling. “Why?”
“The magical void did this to them,” said Nix, stirring on my shoulder. It was the first time I’d heard it speak in Oren’s presence. “It makes sense that a magical surplus would turn them back, however temporarily.”
“So—so those creatures you killed last night,” I managed, gazing at Oren’s back, “were people? All it would have taken was a bit of magic to cure them?”
Oren shook his head. “They’re not cured. They’re still monsters. That one,” and he gestured with the point of his knife at the child, “would kill you in a heartbeat outside. And then come back without the slightest hint of a memory of what it had done. All the magic does is disarm them for a time.”
“You can’t kill them,” I said, gritting my teeth.
“But—”
“No!”
Oren was silent for a moment, and then turned to face me, finally taking his eyes off the bedraggled pair. “If we leave them, they’ll just pick up our trail again.” He looked so suddenly weary that I had to restrain the impulse to go to him, knife and all. “With any luck they’ll stay here for as long as a day, but they will leave, and when they do, they will come after us. And they can move twice as quickly as we can, and they don’t have to stop to rest.”
“It’s a child and a mother, Oren,” I said, unmoving.
He watched me, the pale, fierce eyes so blank I had no hope of reading what took place behind them. Instead of answering me, he turned around and spoke to the woman. “You,” he said, gesturing with the point of his knife, “go over there. If you come near us, I’ll kill you. And if you leave, I’ll kill you. Understand?”
The woman rolled her eyes at him, the whites showing in the violet half-light of the dome. She nodded, cradling the child in against her legs as she shuffled over to the spot he’d indicated.
Oren headed back over toward his pack of supplies. I watched the mother and child go, my heart thrumming, and then turned to follow Oren. He set about unpacking food for dinner, although it was still only mid-afternoon. His movements were jerky and quick.
I wanted to speak but could think of nothing I hadn’t already said.
“I’ve lived out here for years on my own,” he said finally, his voice low and urgent. “This is how you do it. This is how you survive.”
There was a rawness to his voice that cut me more than any anger would have. “I know,” I said, keeping my gaze ahead of me, on the fractured surface of the water. “I’m sorry.”
There was a gritty, metallic sound; in my mind’s eye I saw him stab his knife into the earth, as he’d done countless times in the past. This time there was an undeniable frustration in the sound. “You can’t come crashing into the wilderness, halfstarved and wholly incompetent, and imply I’m some kind of monster for keeping your skin intact.”
“I wasn’t,” I insisted. My voice shook, despite my conviction. “I wasn’t,” I repeated, more steadily.
“You were.” The crunch of sand and dirt and pebbles told me he had gotten to his feet again. “There’s food here. Stay put and try not to drown while I’m gone.”
By the time I turned around, he was halfway to the edge of the barrier, and left without another word. He�
��d left his knife, standing blade-down in the sand not three feet from me. I wanted to run after him and give him the knife—he needed it out there, surely.
But then, the monsters weren’t out there, were they? They were inside. Here. With me.
The mother and child sat a fair distance around the edge of the lake. The child sat between its mother’s knees, and she had both arms wrapped loosely around it. I heard snatches of melody over the roar of the falls, carried over the water to me. She was singing to it.
“He’s certainly a joy,” said Nix, the words fairly dripping sarcasm. The dry tone interrupted my contemplation.
“I hurt him,” I said, rubbing a hand across my eyes. “And I have no idea why. He’s only ever helped me.”
“By being a murderer,” reminded the pixie, flitting from my shoulder to the lake, dipping low and flirting with the water’s surface.
The very word was enough to make me dizzy, want to curl up away from it all. He wasn’t a murderer, he was trying to survive. Trying to keep me safe. There hadn’t been a murder in the city since the Wall went up over a hundred years before—to murder a fellow citizen was to break part of the machine. It only hurt ourselves.
But for Oren, out here—did he even have a choice?
“I should go after him.” I didn’t sound convinced even to my own ears. I wasn’t sure I wanted to venture out into the world where the shadow people existed again.
“Better let him alone for a while. Rest up, have some food.” Nix landed on a boulder, tipping its head up at me. “Such an emotional boy.”
At that, I laughed. “He’s the least emotional person I’ve ever met. You have more emotions than he does.”
Nix rubbed a leg over one eye, its azure surface blinking briefly. It was so like a wink that I found myself staring at the creature in confusion. “If you say so.”
I decided to take the pixie’s advice and nibbled at the food Oren had left. Though I was hungry, I had managed to grow so tired of nuts and roots that it was increasingly difficult to eat them. I reminded myself that days ago I’d been on the verge of starvation and forced myself to eat.
The rocks by the falls were warm, as if heated by the sun, and I curled up there, trailing my fingers through the water, making patterns with the ripples. Lulled by the white noise of the water, my interrupted, sleepless night caught up to me. I drifted off.
When I woke it was still daylight, although far darker than it had been. Either the sun was on its way down behind the mountains, or the sky had grown overcast. I glanced toward the camp, hoping to see Oren had returned—instead, there was a figure standing there, watching me.
I jolted upright, throwing myself back against the rocks. The woman stared at me, arms hanging loosely at her sides, eyes empty. She stood between me and the knife.
“Have you seen my baby?” she whispered, her voice sighing from between her lips.
“What?”
“She was just here. My baby. She was so hungry. Have you seen my baby?”
The child was gone. My gaze fell to the knife, which Oren had left behind. Had he another hidden somewhere?
Doubt seared my mind, followed by the briefest flash of an image of something tiny and black creeping up behind Oren, who stalked angrily along the slope, unnoticing, mind preoccupied with the stubborn burden that was me.
I pushed past the woman and snatched the knife, whirling to point it at her. “You, go back to where you were sitting. Now.” She stared at me, as if failing to comprehend. I remembered Oren’s tone and tried as much as I could to emulate it. “You stay there, and don’t move, or I’ll—I’ll kill you.”
The woman drifted away, still whispering to herself about her baby, heading toward the spot where she’d been sitting with her child. I sprinted for the place where Oren had left the pocket.
The sun had just dipped below the mountain ridge at my back when I burst into the world outside. I ignored the cold as I stared around, trying to find any sign of Oren’s path. There weren’t many options that didn’t involve a sheer, steep cliff— back down the way we’d come, or up around along the mountain’s side, away from the barrier. I scanned for footprints, but the only prints I could find had clearly been left by us as we entered the pocket earlier.
I closed my eyes. Anything is possible, Nix’s voice came to mind. I’d been able to sense the shadow people the night they attacked me. I tried to calm the racing of my heart, sense any tingle that might tell me where to go.
Please, I thought, desperately.
I heard something in the distance. It wasn’t much, only the slightest rattle of pebbles—but in a world with so few creatures in it, I couldn’t ignore the sound. Whether it was a sound my ears detected, or something I sensed through my magic, I could not tell.
It had come from around the curve of the mountain. I set out, trying not to think of what I was going to do if I found the child before I found Oren.
The path, such as it was, was narrow and the deepening twilight was treacherous. To the left the drop was long, the mountain falling sheer away for at least a hundred feet before curving into the distance. I kept my hand against the rock wall to my right and my eyes on my feet, picking my way slowly.
I occasionally thought that I heard something, but I could never be quite sure that my ears weren’t playing tricks on me.
I had been walking for perhaps a quarter of an hour when I heard something that I knew wasn’t a product of my frightened imagination. A low cry, the sound of something soft striking stone, and then—so close my blood froze in my veins—a tiny, piercing howl of triumph.
I abandoned caution and flung myself ahead on the ledge, sending stone fragments careening off the edge. I rounded the corner ahead of me and nearly slid off the ledge when the scene unfolding in front of me registered.
Oren was facedown on the ground; a shadow crouched on his back, tearing at his clothes. He was alive—stirring feebly.
I screamed and ran. I flew at the thing, brandishing the knife. I caught it with the edge of the blade, causing a spatter of blood on the stone and a scream of rage from the child-thing. It lurched sideways, out over the edge of the cliff. Sinking its ragged fingernails into Oren’s arm, it dangled, dragging his body toward the edge. I threw the knife away and lunged for him as he began to sag over the drop. Throwing myself on top of him, I summoned every ounce of energy I had before flinging it up around us. I heard the magic connect with a crunch, the force of it launching us up and back. Oren landed on top of me, knocking the breath from my lungs, and the monster fell away. I saw its face for a frozen instant, shifting from shadow to light, my magic illuminating its humanity like a light.
Magic cures them. However temporarily.
The child’s scream echoed up at me as it fell, down, down—into silence.
I lay gasping for breath under Oren’s weight. I wanted to feel for his pulse, but my arms wouldn’t move, frozen with dread. I heard my magic humming around us, could see it overhead glimmering faintly, a barrier of protection.
When he finally groaned, I muttered a muffled something, and he rolled off me and onto his back. We lay on the ledge, panting.
“I thought I told you to stay put,” he mumbled, lifting himself on one elbow so he could look down at me.
A semi-hysterical laugh forced its way out of me. He raised a hand, fingertips just brushing my cheek, and then without warning, the backlash from the power I’d used hit me, and everything went black.
• • •
When I came to, I was by the waterfall again. There was still some light, telling me that I could not have been out for very long.
Supplies were strewn about the clearing, some of the packets torn to shreds, and there was no sign of the mother—or of Nix. Oren was crouched with his back to me, one hand steadying himself on the ground while the other sorted through my pack.
“What did she leave us?” My voice emerged as a dry croak. Oren glanced over his shoulder at me. “Most of it is still here,” he s
aid. “I don’t think she recognizes the nuts and berries as food.”
“Is your head okay?” I asked. The blow to Oren’s head didn’t look too serious.
“I’m fine,” he countered, moving closer to me and dropping into a crouch. There was a small gash at his hairline, but it had already stopped bleeding. He gazed at me, his eyes as clear and as unreadable as ever in the twilight.
“You don’t look like you have a concussion,” I said, clearing my throat and looking away as I struggled to sit up.
“My parents could do that.” Oren was still watching me, making no effort to help me up.
“What?”
“What you did back there. Knocking the dark one away without touching it. My parents could do it.”
“Your parents were Renewables.”
I stared at him, trying to ignore the thumping of my heart. There were others like me. “Did they—were they from the Iron Wood?”
Oren’s face tightened, and he shook his head. “No. That’s a bad place. They were—” He paused, the tight expression softening into one of uncertainty, gaze clouded with confusion. “I don’t know. I was very young. But they could do that.”
“But you can’t?”
He shook his head. “I remember they kept trying to teach me. I can’t do it.”
“But maybe if you just tried again—”
He cut me off with another shake of his head, quiet. “I’m not like you, Lark.”
Before the resulting silence could grow too thick, Nix whirred in from beyond the barrier. “I chased her off the food,” it announced. “I tried to keep her from leaving the barrier.” There was a note of apology in its voice.
“You did right,” Oren said, without bothering to lift his head. As far as I was aware, it was the first thing he’d ever said to the pixie.
Somewhere in the roar of the falls, I could hear the echoes of the child-thing’s cry as it fell. Despite the summer warmth, my body felt colder than it had before Oren taught me to make a fire. I put my forehead down on my knees, cradling my limbs in close with a shiver.
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