“I hate him,” she says. “I hate hate hate hate him.”
Simon wears a fresh plaster cast that cuts off at the elbow. He has drawn on it a picture of a broken bone. The skin beneath itches as if socked by fire ants and he keeps an old wire coat hanger handy to creep inside the cast and scratch those hard-to-reach places. “What about the other one?”
On the bed lies the other letter, the one sealed and addressed to Danica Lancer. They crouch on either side of it, their faces propped in their hands, their cheeks bunched and their mouths fishy from the pressure. “Are we supposed to open it, you think?” he says.
“Is that your name?”
“You think that’s going to stop me? I’m a thief, remember?”
Ella tightens her lips into a pink button. “Go on, then.”
He fingers open the seal and he unfolds its many creases and reads, in a rush, the words scribbled there. “‘My darling Danica!’” His voice comes out as a flamboyant yell, as if he were a street performer. “‘With every mile I travel, my pulse seems to weaken, as if I am farther from its source, my heart.’”
She rips the letter from his hand. “Let me see that.”
“It’s just a stupid love letter.”
She reads silently at first, then aloud. “‘I didn’t realize how much you mattered until I left you. And now I feel sick. I’m fucking sick. I’m fucking sick sick sick. I want to eat rocks and puke blood and stab myself with sticks. I want to open that box you gave me and lick its center and let death come because that would be easier than this. We’re all going to die anyway. The world is eating us one by one. So we might as well die now.’”
Simon says, “Wow, I thought it started off bad.”
She goes quiet another few seconds before saying, “I can’t read anything in the last few lines — his handwriting is a mess — except the words death and love.”
A sound comes from the hallway. What could be a cough or a broom sweep or a boot scuffed across stone. Before Ella can process what has happened, before she can say, Hide or Someone’s coming—Simon has already snatched the letter from her hand, the owl from the bedside table, and darted out the open window, cat quick.
She turns to face the sound just as Slade darkens the doorway.
He leans against the doorframe. The last bit of sun flares from the window, reddening his face, which the very next instant goes to shadow. He is smiling. His teeth are too small for his mouth. “Who were you talking to?”
“You can’t just come in here.”
“Can’t I?” His eyebrows are only a suggestion, two fleshy creases above his eyes, but they raise now. “Who were you talking to?”
“No one.” She tries to say this casually but she is not a practiced liar.
“Really? I thought I heard voices.”
“Sometimes I like to recite Shakespeare. To pass the time.”
His voice takes on an affected timbre when he says, “‘And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles, to betray us in deepest consequence.’” He takes one sliding step into the room. “That was Shakespeare.”
“‘There’s daggers in men’s smiles.’ That’s Shakespeare too.”
“Clever girl.” He has kept one of his hands behind his back all this time. He lets it show now, a jug of water dangling from a finger crooked like a tusk. He gives it a sloshing shake. “I brought you something.”
“Why?”
“I thought you might want it. I thought you might be thirsty. The rations can be difficult for all of us.” He takes another step toward her and extends the jug. “Here. Take it.”
She considers denying him but knows that will only lead to more trouble. Slowly she raises her arms to accept the jug. What he carries with one finger weighs down both her arms. The jug sweats. She sets it on the floor between her legs and feels the cold coming off it, licking her skin. “Will you go now?”
“What’s the hurry? And should I be offended that you haven’t thanked me? That you’re not asking me to sit down? That you’re not bringing two glasses to fill so that I might have a taste?” He circles her twice, his footsteps heavy enough to send a trembling through her body, and then approaches the open window. He rests his hands on the sill and the wood complains. He looks out on the turbines spinning all across the city, their blades cutting the air like weapons wound and spun.
She does not know where Simon hides, maybe on the ledge just beyond the window, so she calls to Slade in a panic, “You’re right. Thank you. Thank you very much. You’re very kind.”
He turns. His body eclipses the window entirely, casting a shadow across the room. “That’s more like it.”
The jug dampens the floor, wets her ankle, sends a chill up her leg. When Slade approaches her, she does not move, willing her body to remain still. Even when he leans in, as if to plant a kiss on her cheek. His mouth pauses next to her ear. She can smell him: wool, onions. For a moment there is only his breathing. Then it pauses — and he takes a small bite of her. She feels her cheek slurp into his mouth, feels the teeth chew down, feels the flesh clip away. Still she does not move or cry out. She pinches shut her eyes and clenches her fists and waits and waits and waits until his footsteps retreat from her, into the hallway, down the stairs.
She does not dare to open her eyes, not until Simon climbs through the window and touches her cheek, where the flesh is bitten and the blood dries in a tacky trail, and says, “I’ll kill him before he touches you again.”
Chapter 27
FOR A LONG TIME they stand in a silent, wavering circle. No one needs to ask the question. They know their options. They can fight or they can run. They look first to each other — well rested, but bony and slumped, their bodies like a bunch of broken dolls — and then their stares settle on Reed. He keeps his face downcast, studying the ground, kicking a hole in it, as if the answer might be buried beneath him. “What are you all looking at me for?” he finally says and then, “This is on you, Clark.”
She does not hesitate. “We run.”
They have guns and they outnumber Colter, but they have been trained to fear him. With night as his ally and with wolves as his weapons, some of them will probably die. Lewis guesses him a few days away. They plan to continue forward and keep track of his progress with the owl and hope to lose him or find a more defensible position.
As they press on, the water steadily deepens, the river widens. They can wade past their knees. Houses dot the woods, choked with vines and set back on hillsides, sometimes with the gray, crooked remains of stairways leading to the water, where docks remain like bridges to nowhere. They pass many boats, overturned, spun around, mired in the mud. Birds nest in them. Fish rest in their shade.
Periodically, Lewis sends the owl skyward. Less and less time passes before it returns to them, ten hours, nine hours, eight. A horse cannot gallop as fast as the owl can fly, so Lewis can only guess his distance by studying landmarks in the footage, four days away, then two days away.
Reed wants to drop his gear and sit down and flop his hands apologetically and say, “This is the end.” The end of their journey, the end of their dream, the end of their lives. The end of the Sanctuary. And the human world, in whatever clusters it still exists, might not be far behind. He is gnashing his teeth and blinking back tears, ready to say, “Enough!” when they find the canoes.