I slam my hands against my ears, claw at them with my fingernails. I cry out, and suddenly Zephyr and Sketch are rushing for me, trying to calm me down.
They hold my arms to my sides. I thrash and fight, but I’m exhausted.
I can’t get free.
Zephyr kneels in front of me, looks into my eyes.
“It’s not real,” he says. “I’m real. Look at me, Meadow. Right here.”
I see two pools of endless green, hear a voice that’s calm and gentle and safe.
My breathing slows.
Peri’s screams fade, but the looks on Zephyr’s and Sketch’s faces do not.
They think I am insane.
And I realize, as I swallow back tears and force myself to focus . . . they are right.
CHAPTER 40
ZEPHYR
It’s halfway through the day, and Meadow’s losing her mind.
We force her to rest, for five minutes. Because with every step, she’s getting worse. I tell myself she’s hungry, thirsty, tired. I tell myself this isn’t Meadow.
I wish I believed that.
She sits beside me on the sand, in the shadow of a mossy tree. She’s running her fingertips across the cuts on her legs, whispering the numbers of the days she’s been without her family.
“Too long,” Meadow says.
I look sideways at her. “What?”
She doesn’t move, just keeps staring down at her scars. “They’re been gone for too long.”
I can’t sit here any longer. “I’ll go find you some water,” I say. “Stay here.”
I stand up and cross the sand. Sketch is sitting by the water’s edge, tossing trash into the waves.
She tenses when she hears me coming. “What do you want, Zero?”
“The truth,” I say. I sit down beside her in the hot sand. “What happened back there?”
“Woodson lost herself for a second,” Sketch says with a shrug. The wind blows onshore, but her dreadlocks stay motionless, heavy as hell.
“I don’t mean today,” I say. “I’m asking what happened in the Leech building? What did they do to her?”
It’s a long time before Sketch answers. She sighs, leans back on her elbows. “I didn’t know Meadow before the torture, not like you did. They tried like hell to hurt us, Zero, and they did. Cutting us. Burning us. Beating us until we blacked out, and then doing it all over again. But Meadow didn’t break, not from any of that. She laughed in their faces. She killed one of them.”
I shut out images that come from Sketch’s words. Meadow, bleeding, screaming, but never begging.
“Then what?” I ask. “The Meadow I know would never act this way. The Meadow I know is too strong.”
Sketch nods. “She’s strong, yeah. We were strong together, until they took her away. Because Woodson has a weakness that I don’t have.”
I look at her, raise my eyebrows. “What weakness is that?”
“Love,” Sketch says.
Love makes us weak.
Meadow said that to me, once, in the Shallows. She didn’t realize she was a victim to that already.
“She whispered her sister’s name in her sleep,” Sketch says. “Every night. The Leeches might be bastards, but they aren’t idiots.” She turns to me, and I notice for the first time that she has amber eyes. Like a sunset. “The Initiative saw someone strong, someone willing to fight back. They took what means the most to her in this world. They used it against her.”
She stands up, brushes sand from her thighs. “Meadow is broken from the inside out. And until she finds her family again, no one in this world will be able to put her back together. Not even you.”
“And if they’re dead?” I ask. “If we make it there, and they’re already gone?”
Sketch’s voice is barely a whisper. “Then we can say good-bye to Meadow. Because she won’t live in a world where her family no longer exists.”
She leaves me.
I sit alone by the shore, watching piles of trash drown in the waves.
Wondering, for the first time, if following Meadow is really worth it.
CHAPTER 41
MEADOW
Y ou’re strong enough, my father’s voice says to me. Don’t give up. Not now, Meadow. Not ever.
I cling to him. Beg him to keep speaking to me, because I am tired. I need him to lend me his strength, so that I can feel whole again.
We move on. I tell myself that soon, I will be able to hear my father’s real voice. I will be able to lean against him and let him scold me for falling apart.
I will grit my teeth and nod, and I will be the daughter he trained me to be.
Not now.
Now I know that to be the Meadow I once was, I have to find my father alive. All of them, alive.
“Thirty-seven miles,” Sketch says from behind me, when the sun is high in the sky. “We’ve been walking all day and there’s nothing.”
It’s empty. The train hasn’t passed by yet on the tracks, and we haven’t seen anyone. Where are the survivors from the Fall? Where are all the people my father talked about? The millions . . . billions? The reason for the Cure? He said it made us live forever, that there were too many people out here. That the world was being crushed under our weight.
“Smoke,” Zephyr says. He points into the distance, a few miles away, where the shore breaks up into a pile of rocks. “You think there’re people over there?”
He’s right.
A trail of smoke rises from the other side of the rocks. And as we get closer, walking in silence, we hear voices, people laughing.
I tighten my hand over my dagger.
We are not alone.
No one can be trusted, Meadow. My father’s voice. And he is right. This is not the Shallows, where people are weak, and starved, and fight with the sloppy moves of a child.
This is the Outside.
I know nothing about the people here.
“We should avoid them,” I say. Sweat drips down my neck, and I wipe it away.
“We could kill them all and take what they’ve got,” Sketch adds, grinning like the madwoman she is.
“We’re not killing anyone,” Zephyr says, putting his hand on Sketch’s scarred arm.
She shrugs him off, then kicks up a spray of sand. “Relax, Zero. I didn’t say we had to kill them. I said maybe we could.”
“We could scout them out. Figure out who they are, what they’re up to. If there’s a fire, they’re at least surviving,” I say. “Maybe we’ll figure out what they’re eating, how they’re staying alive out here.”
Zephyr puts a hand on my arm. “Are you okay? Can you . . .”
“Can I what?” I ask. “Can I handle this? Is that what you’re going to ask me?”
He takes a half-step back.
“I can handle anything,” I say, my voice rising. It feels good to say it, because I need it to be true.
My mother’s secret is toying with me, tugging at the back of my mind, a constant whisper that begs me to be weak.
“I’m fine,” I say.
Sketch and Zephyr nod, but then we hear a crack. We whirl around, and there are two men, walking across the sand toward us. They are tall and bony, with sunken cheeks and eyes. The one on the right twitches every few seconds, as they get closer. “Maybe,” he says, pointing a sharp three-pronged weapon at us, “you three should just shut the crack up and come with us.”