I peer out the window, gazing in the direction of the Wall. I imagine Emma twisting a bit of hair around her finger—she always does that when she’s anxious. I wonder for a split second if Sammy is thinking about her too, and the idea makes my stomach tighten.
“What are ya doin’ in here?”
There’s a figure in the doorway. I squint and recognize him as the boy who brushed by Bruno earlier, complaining about working two jobs. His hands are stained with blood.
“I could ask you the same. Aren’t you supposed to be hunting?”
He snorts. “Puck and I already took down a deer. I gutted it. He went back fer smaller game.”
“But not you?”
The boy shrugs and moves silently past me, procuring a small book from a gap between the windowsill and wall.
“It’s a little dark for reading, don’t you think?”
“I’ll read when I can, and now is the only time I get. It ain’t like it’s allowed below.”
“Titus doesn’t—”
“No. My ma taught me, cus her ma taught her, and on and on cus someone once knew how, only that person is long gone.” He runs a hand over the cover. “I don’t really need to read it anymore—I got the whole thing mem’rized—but I like comin’ here on nights I catch game early just to hold it. So I don’t forget.”
“How to read?” I ask, because I don’t think it’s a skill a person can lose when they fail to exercise it.
“No,” he says, glancing up at me. “I don’t want to forget what it says. It’s a journal. Some girl’s. She talks ’bout what she sees each night when she’s dreamin’: a world bigger than Burg, with mountains and oceans and peace. Where there ain’t no fightin’. Where the sleepin’ are buried in graveyards and the livin’ walk together and their children chase their heels. She sees this all when she climbs the Wall. She dreams it e’ery night.” He looks down at the journal in his hands. “I wish I could thank her. She keeps me sane. E’ery time I have to go back under I ’member that this journal is here, that I can return and relive her dream.”
“Why are you telling me all this?”
He screws his face up for a moment. “Reaper or not, yer from out there. Her dreams are real in a way, ain’t they? Ya’ve seen ’em.”
“Yes,” I say, even though the world beyond Burg’s Wall is nowhere near as peaceful as the one in the dream journal. “You can see it, too. If you climb.”
“I tried makin’ a ladder once,” he says, shaking his head, “but Titus caught wind of it and beat my ma senseless. So I made somethin’ smaller, easier to hide. Sawed off the handle to a busted hayfork—its prongs are bent so badly they’d be more useful fer hookin’ somethin’ than movin’ hay—and I tied a rope to it. With a good throw I could pro’ly hook the top of the Wall and scale the thing, but I . . . I keep losin’ my nerve.”
“We might be leaving soon,” I tell him. “You could come with us.”
“Yeah. Maybe.” But he doesn’t sound convinced.
“We also might be staying, depending on what we find in the Room of Whistles and Whirs. I guess what I’m saying is either way, you could stick by our side. You don’t owe Titus anything.”
He runs a hand over the spine of the journal absentmindedly. Sighing, I grab the cloth bag at my feet and move for the door. I’ve wasted too much time.
“What’s yer name?” he calls after me.
“Gray.”
“I’m Blake, but e’erybody calls me Bleak.”
“Why’s that?”
“Cus I’m so negative all the time. Cus I hate Burg and those tunnels and our jobs and my life.” I’m thinking how the name does indeed fit him when he adds, “But I don’t see what’s so bleak ’bout wantin’ something better. ’Bout hopin’ for more.”
I shoot him a quick smile and duck outside, then skirt back up the alley. Before pulling the cellar door open, I take a deep breath. The wind is whipping over the ground, picking up the snow, twisting it, throwing it. It dances until the wind tires and then the town is as still as a tombstone. Just moonlight and clouds and skeleton buildings.
I think about Bleak and his journal, how those small words recorded by a complete stranger are the things that have kept him hopeful when everyone else sees nothing but his negativity. So much power in those words. So much in dreams.
I drop down the stairwell, shutting out the world.
TWENTY-SIX
BRUNO AND KAZ EMPTY THE cloth bag onto Titus’s table to root through my supplies. They grunt and point and mumble questions to each other. Titus eventually nods at his men and they stuff the contents back into the bag. Bruno turns to me and starts patting at my shirt, my pants. He checks each and every pocket, but never removes my boots.
“The boy starts workin’ on the door first thing tomorrow,” Titus says. “Now, Bruno, get this Reaper outta my sight.”
“Hang on. I want to see Bree first.”
“Yer here, and ya weren’t slow. She ain’t been touched.”
“I’d still like to confirm that.”
“Ah,” Titus says, his lips curling playfully. “So that ya can touch her yerself, maybe?”
My jaw tightens. “Bring me to her or Clipper doesn’t open the door.”
“Perhaps I should give ya some blankets, too,” Titus jeers. “So ya can have yer moment in luxury.”
“Now!”
He bursts out laughing. “Yer so easy to rile, Reaper.”
I hate being called that, being associated with Frank and his Order, with the people who have ruined my entire life. I wonder if this is what Jackson felt like when we called him Forgery.
“Give him another five with the girl,” Titus says to Bruno. Fingers clamp down on my elbow and I’m tugged from the room. When we arrive at Bree’s door, Bruno smiles. “Have fun. I’ll try not to listen.”
I shoulder past him. Bree is sitting in the far corner but the door is slammed behind me and she is immediately swallowed by darkness. I might as well be blind for how much I can see.
“Bree?”
“Here,” she says. “I’m here.” And she repeats herself, calling out to me as I crawl through the darkness toward her voice. My hands find her knees and I sit next to her, back against the wall. She is right beside me, and I still can’t see her. We are lost in a sea of black, floating.
“Why don’t you have the candle lit?” I ask.
“It burned out. They haven’t brought another.”
“Have they been feeding you?”
“Yes.”
“And the washroom. They let you out to visit it?”
“Twice a day, after meals.”
A pause. Silence except for my pulse beating in my ears.
“And a few nurses visited once,” she adds. “Stripped me of my clothes and examined me.”
“Did they hurt you?”
Another pause.
“Bree, did they hurt you?”
“No,” she snaps. “They just prodded me like livestock and left.”
“And now?”
“And now nothing, Gray. This is it. Me and these walls. The darkness. My eyes burn every time they open that door. How did this happen? How did we get stuck down here?”
“I’m fixing it.”
I tell her about the Room of Whistles and Whirs, and Titus’s belief that his people can escape Burg through it. About the deal I struck and how Titus agreed to free us so long as Clipper opens the door.