The Dark and Hollow Places

Page 7

“I’m fine,” I tell him, snapping the words.
Relief washes over his face and he turns away, trying to hide it. Trying not to show me how afraid he was. “Are you sure?” he asks, his voice weak.
I nod. “I hit my head when we fell. I’m dizzy and nauseated. But I’m not infected.”
He squeezes his eyes shut, pressing his fingers to them. I feel like I’m watching something I shouldn’t, seeing a part of him that’s too personal for a stranger like me.
I glance away and clear my throat, needing to break the silence and desperately wanting to figure out what’s going on. “Why were you on the roof last night?”
He raises his hand to his neck again and I almost scream at him to stop it, stop reminding me of Elias. I even take a deep breath, ready to say something when he runs his fingers over his head, through his hair.
“You looked like you needed help,” he says. I scowl. It’s another non-answer, and I’m starting to realize he’s good at those.
“How did you know who I was? Or do you make it a habit to rescue any damsel in distress when you come to a new city and almost drown?” My words echo slightly, tracing up and over the soaring arches above us.
I want him to admit he knows my sister. That he sees past my scars to the similarities between us.
He walks over to the little fire, keeping distance between us when he sees me tense my hand around the knife. It’s clear I still don’t trust him.
He crouches and I watch him through the flames. “I saw you when I was running from the Recruiters and I followed you.”
Chills ease over my skin again and my breath comes a little shallow. I’m glad there’s a fire between us. “Why?”
He hesitates and I can tell he’s weighing what to say next and I wonder if it’s all going to be carefully crafted lies. “Because I promised Elias I’d find you,” he finally says.
This is all too strange and convoluted. It doesn’t make sense. “You mentioned Elias earlier.” I pause, hoping he’ll fill the silence.
When he doesn’t I press, “Where is he? How do you know him?” The words come so fast I trip over them, frustrated at not knowing what to ask. “I don’t understand. How did you even know it was me you were looking for?”
He stares at me then, his gaze even more intense than the flames. His eyes trace over my face, down my body. There’s something in his look I don’t understand, something painful and awkward. I see him follow the lines of my scars.
I’m used to it, so used to the gaping stares, that I don’t notice them sometimes. It’s just a part of my life. But this man, here in this moment, makes me remember every line on my body. Makes me feel every scar as if it’s a fresh wound, festering and raw.
I wanted him to recognize me because I look like my sister but I realize that’s not how he knew who I was. “Oh.” I mouth the word, unable to put sound behind it. I cross my arms. “The scars.” The walls I use to protect myself inside falter and I close my eyes and try to build them back up higher than before. But some of the pain and ugliness seep through.
Sometimes—rarely—I’m able to forget what I look like and it’s embarrassing to realize that this is how Elias would describe me. Of course it is—“Look for the angry girl with the scars down the left side of her body” is easier than “Look for the girl with the dirty-blond hair who never lifts her eyes from the ground.”
I rub my chin against my shoulder as if I could scratch the vulnerability from the moment. I then shift until the tip of my knife scrapes against the ground—a reminder to both of us that I still have a weapon. I still have some control.
Catcher looks like he wants to say something but he presses his lips together until they burn white. I clear the awkward silence between us by asking the obvious question. “So why’d my brother tell you to find me?”
He looks down at me. “I know he’s not your brother, Annah.”
Chapter VII
I jump to my feet and start walking toward the darkness swallowing the tunnel at the end of the subway platform. No one’s supposed to know Elias isn’t my brother. No one could know that unless they were from our village or one of us told them. And we vowed to never tell. It’s just easier to let people believe what they want and it makes his protection of me more secure.
I clear my throat but the words feel trapped. How does he know he’s not my brother? What has Elias told him about me? What else does he know? What was he doing with my sister? Where’s Elias and why hasn’t he come back? I feel like Catcher’s playing some sort of game with me and I have no idea what the rules are.
Frustration makes my shoulders tense and my head throb. I stop at the edge of the platform, staring out into the dark that eats the light from the fire behind me. It’s colder away from the flames, the last trace of warmth leaching quickly from my clothes as the chill attacks my skin through seams and holes. I pull my coat tighter around me. It’s easier to talk when I don’t have to see Catcher’s face. When I don’t have to keep him from seeing the uncertainty in mine.
I don’t like others knowing my business, especially strangers—I like to be the one who controls what people get to know about me and when.
My stomach growls. “We should go,” I tell him. “Start figuring out a way to find my sister.” It’s well known the underground tunnels aren’t safe. When the Unconsecrated don’t sense a living human nearby they collapse, almost like an insect going dormant, waiting for food and the ability to infect. Everyone knows there are pockets of plague rats down here waiting for someone to stumble upon them.
For as long as I’ve lived in the City I’ve heard the rumors of tunnels so deep that the dead lie asleep, waiting for the barest scent of living flesh to wake them and cause a surge to the surface.
Every few years there’s a fresh outbreak in the Dark City, half the time rumored to have started in the Neverlands and the other half begun underground. I’m not one to test the theories. It might not be too safe up on the streets but at least there’s light and air—not walls curling around you like a coffin.
“These the same stairs we came down?” I ask, moving toward them. Catcher nods but doesn’t follow. I turn; he can only see my profile of clean smooth skin. I think about him on the bridge with Abigail—the way she saved his life.
“Do I look like her?” I ask, the words slipping out before I can stop them. My fingers clench around the ragged hem of my coat. I can’t resist knowing. “Like my sister,” I add, as if he didn’t understand.
Catcher approaches me, each step a distinct echo in the dim chamber. The firelight jumps over his skin, shadows flickering around his eyes. He stops just out of reach. For a moment he stands there and breathes as the muscles along my neck tighten.
I blush. What do I care if I look like her or not? “Never mind,” I mumble, turning back to the darkness and the stairs.
“Yes and no,” he says.
“Let me guess,” I snort, spinning toward him. I raise one finger and press it to the smooth side of my face. “Yes.” I raise my eyebrows as I move my finger over to the scars. “And no.”
“That’s not what I meant,” he says, inching in closer.
I back away. There’s still too much I don’t know in order for me to trust him. To allow him this near.
“You’re just different people,” he says, trying to explain. “Different personalities. It’s reflected in what you look like.”
“Whatever,” I say, waving my hand in the air as I start up the stairs. It was a stupid question for me to ask.
His footfalls follow me in the darkness and I feel calmer and more in control now that I’m invisible. Our breaths fall into a rhythm with each step, our hands gliding up the rusty railing bolted into the wall. Soon the movement chases away the chill of the tunnels, a clammy sweat trickling down my back.
“I think it’s time you told me what’s going on,” I say as we near the top.
He hesitates, breaking stride. “What do you want to know?”
I stop and he stumbles against me, his hands sliding along my arms to steady himself. His touch is warm, almost to the point of hot. He jerks back and mumbles an apology. I ignore it.
There’s so little light that I can barely even see his outline. He’s become nothing more than the sound of his breathing, the rustle of his clothes and slide of each footstep. It feels almost intimate, being so aware of the noises he makes, and I become uncomfortable.
I pull farther away from him, the heat radiating from his body fading with distance and the cold taking its place. “I want to know why you act like you know me. I want to know why my bro—Why Elias told you to find me. I want to know what’s going on with my sister and what you’re doing here. With me.”
He shuffles, shifts his weight from foot to foot and then sighs. “I know Elias because he came to kill me when I was infected. And when I didn’t turn, he was the one who told me about the immunity.”
I start to say something but he cuts me off. “And I know your sister because I grew up with her.”
This is too much too fast and I sit, my feet propped on the step below. His fingers brush against my hair and cheek and then along my shoulders as he moves his hands through the air to find me. He sits next to me, the heat of him wavering around us. I touch my hand to the stairs, needing to ground myself, to stop the spinning.
“You grew up with Abigail?” My voice is nothing but a puff of air in the dark. “But … you’re not from the village.” I try to think about what he would’ve looked like when we were younger. When Elias and Abigail and I played tag in the fields. I don’t remember anyone our age named Catcher and it makes me feel uneasy. How could he know my sister otherwise?
Catcher shifts. “I’m from Vista, remember? Not your village.” His voice reverberates from the wall as if he’s looking away from me, staring into the void below. “Her name’s Gabrielle now—Gabry.”
The floor’s grimy under my fingertips, thick with dirt and dust. The air down here tastes stale and old like we’ve disturbed the past. I squeeze my eyes shut, trying to put all these pieces together. “I don’t understand.”
“Her mother found her in the Forest when she was young. She couldn’t speak—couldn’t remember her name. So her mother called her Gabrielle and raised her in Vista, on the ocean down the coast. Gabry didn’t even know anything about it—didn’t remember the Forest at all until her mother told her a few months ago.”
I try not to think about leaving Abigail behind when she skinned her knee, but hearing about the Forest, about her being lost, all I can see is the blood trailing down her leg, the way she begged Elias and me not to leave her behind. She was so scared and I just left her there. Alone in the middle of the path.
I’ve spent my entire life with that moment crowding my nightmares. Remembering the sound of the Unconsecrated thrashing at the fence for her. The smell of Elias’s fear and determination.
It’s haunted me. Tormented me. It’s who I am: the girl who left her sister behind in the Forest of Hands and Teeth.
I never knew if she died because of me. Or if she found a way back. Day after day and week after week, I’ve agonized over her fate—I even welcomed the slash of barbed wire over my skin when the accident happened because it made me not look like her anymore.
I clutch the back of my head with my hands, fingers digging into my scalp as I bury my face in my knees. It never occurred to me that while all I could do was remember, my sister could forget it all. That she could have found a way out of the Forest like Elias and I did, but end up with a life so different from mine.
She grew up next to the ocean safe and loved by a mother. That was why she could keep her head raised high when she crossed the bridge. That was why she didn’t hunch when I saw her, why she didn’t recognize me.
I could see in her everything that I ever wanted to be. I saw what I’d lost, what I could never have. She didn’t recognize herself in me because she could never imagine what it would be like to have lived my kind of life.
Knowing this makes me feel empty. This other half that’s walked like a shadow through my life never knew I existed.
“Does she know I’m here too? Does she remember anything about me?” I hold my breath, waiting for the answer.
My lungs start to ache.
“She knows you’re here,” he finally says. “Elias told her,” he adds softly. “But she doesn’t remember anything from when you were kids together.”
My own sister doesn’t remember me. I’ve spent my life trying to atone for what I did to her and she doesn’t even remember.
“I have to find her,” I whisper. “They said she might be at the Sanctuary. I have to find a way to get there.”
Catcher shifts next to me, his hand bumping against my knee and then sliding up my arm to tug at me until I let him wrap his fingers around mine. “We have to find her,” he says gently.
I’m startled by the quiet strength of his grip. By the resolve in his voice. It terrifies me because it makes me want to lean on him and let him prop me up. Let someone else be strong and in charge.
For a moment, I indulge in this thought; indulge in the feel of his hand holding mine. Then I jerk away and stand up.
I’ve let myself believe in someone else’s strength before. When Elias left, I promised I’d never put myself in that position again.
“Let’s go, then,” I say, racing up the stairs fast enough that he can only follow one step behind.