They were like pack animals, I thought, and the English kid was chosen to die first.
That’s just how things worked for kids like Ethan.
He must have been strong, or fast, or something the others underestimated, for him to have survived for as long as he had. And I thought if anyone was going to talk to me, maybe Ethan would. But then I realized trying to do that might just get him picked on even worse.
I was lonely, and I wanted to go home.
It scared me to think that home might not even exist at all anymore.
When it was my turn to drink, Frankie glanced in my direction and raised his dingy can. Then he called for Henry and I watched while the boy asked him to bring a drink share over to his friend, “the Ranger.”
I glared at him.
“Fuck you, kid.”
Frankie puffed up his chest and grabbed his basher from his back pocket. He came storming over to where I was sitting in the rocks. Henry just stood there, holding the water can, quietly watching us.
I hated being forced into doing the “guy thing,” but I couldn’t let Frankie start off this new day by labeling me as some kind of enemy outsider in front of the other boys, either.
That’s just how things were.
It meant there was going to be a fight, and neither one of us questioned or doubted the laws that dictated our nature.
So before he’d even taken three steps toward me, I launched myself up and ran straight for him. I wrapped my arms around his midsection and slammed him down into the ground.
Frankie managed to hit me one time on the back with his rock. It hurt. I could feel the point of the basher as it cut into the flesh above my shoulder blade. Then there was a general roar, and whatever kids weren’t on posts immediately formed a tight circle around us.
I kept wondering why someone didn’t do something. I was convinced that one of us was going to end up dead, but I wasn’t going to look around and plead for intervention, either.
I pinned Frankie’s hand beneath one of my knees. Hard. It felt like I was grinding dried chicken bones against a sidewalk, and I knew it had to hurt him. But Frankie refused to let go of his basher. I twisted my fingers into his greasy hair and pressed the back of his skull down into the gritty ash.
Frankie had his free hand up at my throat, clenching, trying to push me back, but he wasn’t really doing much. He squeezed, and I could feel his dirty fingernails cutting into my skin, but I didn’t even hit him or anything. And I knew I could have messed him up bad, but I just looked down at the kid and saw how his eyes started welling up with tears, and I realized right then how horribly foul Frankie smelled, so I was kind of disgusted. I loosened up on him.
I said, “Don’t fuck with me, kid. We all want the same thing here.”
And then I looked up at the circle of Odds who were watching us, right at the faces of the assholes—Alex, Fee, and Rum—and I let go of Frankie without so much as punching him even one time.
I stood up and wiped my hands on my legs.
That kid stunk like rotten meat.
Then Alex said, “You should have made him kiss your nutsack, kid,” and his followers shoved each other’s shoulders and laughed.
Frankie got up, stinging.
I wasn’t sure if he was going to come back at me again, so I watched him. He was wet with sweat, and gray ash like bone dust coated the back of his head. He still gripped the basher.
I took the water can from Henry and swallowed just one gulp. Then I handed it over to Frankie.
“Here. Fighting against each other in this heat is a sorry waste of our energy.”
Frankie tucked his rock back in his pocket and nodded. He looked at Henry, then at me, and he took the can from my outstretched hand. He drank.
Frankie licked his lips. He was thirsty, and I didn’t realize he’d been making everyone else drink first, even me.
* * *
“It may be some time before you get another sip of water.”
Henry sat down next to the place where I was trying to sleep beneath the crag of the rock. I’d been using my backpack as a pillow. It was dumb, though. It was just as hot beneath the rock as if I’d been staked down like a martyr in the middle of the ash field.
“I’ll last,” I said.
“I came to ask you about things,” Henry said.
“The last few days, I didn’t think anyone was talking to me. Even my friends.”
Henry shook his head and sighed. “I need to hear it. How did you get here?”
I scooted out from beneath the rock, attempted to brush the salt and ash away from my sweaty body, and sat next to Henry.
We leaned our backs against the rough surface of the boulder. From where we sat, I could see Ben and Griffin standing at the top of the ridge on the lookout post above the opposite side of the clearing the Odds had camped in.
“It was you,” I said. “You sent me here.”
So for more than an hour, Henry and I shared each other’s stories. In some ways, it was like meeting for the first time. But in other ways, it was like we’d known each other for our entire lives, too.
Henry had been there for ten years; since he was a kid. He told me that he’d lived in the settlement, next to my house when I was only five or six years old.
Of course.
That was always meant to be.
Henry and I know each other everywhere, don’t we?
All these strings keep connecting, over and over, knotted together—things inside of things inside of still bigger things—me, Henry, London, Glenbrook, Marbury.
Not-Marbury.
I am the worm and I am the hole.
It was why I’d run into the same people and places again and again; even if, now, everything was slightly off, altered. Tilting. The knots were all unwinding.
And all arrows point to the center.
Here and there blur into one.
And the gap is gone.
Henry told me he’d “been back home” a few times, and that he always swore to fight the urge to return to Marbury, but, in the end, it was entirely out of his control.
Just like Jack.
This last time, he said, he’d been here so long that he began to believe that there was no other world than this; that everything else had been a dream, or some kind of psychosis; maybe something all kids imagine when they pass through adolescence.
He believed it until Jack and his friends showed up five days ago, after we crawled out from the Under.
“You know what?” I pulled at the threads unraveling from the tear on my right knee.
He looked at me and I said, “I broke the lens.”
Henry didn’t say anything, didn’t react at all.
“I shattered it with a hammer. Then we ended up here. But something’s wrong. Everything’s off. Every time I turn around, there’s something that’s changed, like it’s broken, too. And every time I try to get out of here, I end up somewhere worse. It’s always the same: It starts out looking like things are fixed, like it’s going to be okay or, possibly, even better than before, and suddenly everything gets fucked.”
I shifted uncomfortably.
My back ached where Frankie hit me with the rock. Across the clearing, where the string of horses had been tied, I could see the boy with the missing finger.
He was watching us.
Frankie had to know something was up, that Henry and I shared some connection that went beyond just trying to get across the desert, to escape the Hunters pursuing us. I could tell just by looking at the kid’s eyes that Frankie was smarter than most.
My hands were sweating. I wiped my palms on my jeans and rested my arms across my bent knees. I slipped my hand out of the filthy and stinking pocket I’d been wearing as a glove for nearly a week and raised my right hand, like I was holding something for Henry to read, directly in front of him.
“The lens cut me,” I said.
Henry stared at the mark in my flesh. Then he looked up at the sky. He didn’t need to say anything. I knew he saw the connection.
More tangled strings.
“I want you to show me,” Henry whispered, like we were keeping some desperate and poisonous secret from the other boys.
I thought about it.
Here I was in this complete reversal of roles, finally capable of fucking with Henry Hewitt the way he fucked with me when I was just a paranoid and unsuspecting kid wandering around London alone. It would be easy enough, I thought: Just open up the backpack, unroll the filthy sock, and