“We’ll stay the night,” Koi says. “Find a place to hide, in case there are Needles or Cams or other tribes. You’ll be able to rest. You’ll be okay once you switch back, and then we’ll keep hunting for Peri.”
“Where exactly are we going to hide?” I ask. Blood drips from my nose.
Koi looks away, like he can’t bear to see me like this.
“We could go there,” he says. He points behind me with his good arm.
There’s a tiny cave opening, up against the rock wall.
Together, broken and bruised, we make our way inside.
CHAPTER 96
ZEPHYR
We make it back to the cave wounded, but alive.
Meadow and Koi are nowhere to be found.
I can’t believe we ran, left them behind like that. But I figured, with her brother . . .
“Woodson is fine,” Sketch tells me. “It’s her dad who’s not going to be, once he sees us come back without his kids.”
“I forgot about him,” I growl, as I knock on the door. Abram opens it, and we step inside.
Meadow’s dad is watching, waiting.
He sees Sketch and me enter, alone.
His eyes might be bloody, but they’re still able to see. And the look he gives me could kill.
I know right here and now that he’d beat me senseless, until I was dead.
We wait for hours.
They don’t come back. I keep myself busy by watching Tox carve.
He still has that long walking stick in his hands, and a sharp black rock. He leans over, carving and carving. Never stopping.
There’s dried blood on his hands. Like he hasn’t quit for days. The number on his cuff still reads high.
“What’s he doing?” Sketch asks.
That’s when Doc comes up behind us. “He never stops,” he says. He hands Tox a leaf full of rations.
Tox doesn’t look up. He keeps carving.
“You have to eat, old man.” Doc sighs, then reaches out to take the stick from Tox’s hands. He reacts, faster than I thought possible, slicing the top of Doc’s hand with the rock.
“No rest,” Tox says. “Paddle for days and days.”
“Damnit! Forget you!” Doc curses, holding his cut hand to his chest. “Sad sack of bones, you are.”
Sketch follows Doc back to the fire.
But I stay behind, staring at Tox’s symbols. Crude representations of mountains. Strange waves that could be the sea. Twisting, turning patterns that go around the stick, and all sorts of numbers, jagged lines, strange shapes I’ve never seen before. The wings of an eagle, spreading outward. A sketched letter X.
“Is the Green real?” I ask him. “Is there a safe place, in our world?”
He doesn’t answer. There’s just the scratching of his rock on the smooth, old wood.
“The Green,” I say again. “I need to know how to get to the Green.”
He looks up, only for a second. “Green?” he asks, and I swear he understands, knows exactly what I’m talking about. “Outside. With the eagle.”
The eagle. Is he talking about the New Militia?
I don’t think so. If he was, they’d have told us about a place without Initiative control, without fear. Wouldn’t they have?
“Yes. The Green,” I say. “Is it real?”
Tox stares at me, and I can almost see the pieces sliding together in his mind. Clarity in his eyes. “Green,” he says. He holds up his cuff. “Red.”
He goes back to carving, and my hope fades away. I settle down across from everyone, alone, and wait for Meadow to come back.
CHAPTER 97
MEADOW
The cave is bigger than I thought it would be.
We crawl inside, slowly at first, our stomachs sliding on sharp rocks. But soon it opens up, and our ragged breaths echo into the darkness.
I lean up against cool, smooth stone, gasping.
Koi slides in next to me, and we sit like that for a while.
At some point, I think I hear something somewhere else in the cave. The pitter-patter of feet. I freeze, listen as best I can, but I think it is only a small animal. Or more bats.
“She tried to apologize,” I say, suddenly, when the screams have faded. “Before she died.”
I can’t see Koi, but I can feel him shift next to me. “Our mother?”
“Yes,” I whisper. “Do you think . . . ?” I can’t find the right words to say. “Did she really . . . ?”
“Do I think she meant that she was sorry?” Koi asks. He finds my hand in the darkness and grabs a hold. “Dad told me once, that she didn’t want to have children. She didn’t think she could handle the pressure. But then it happened, and she had all of us, and she loved being a mother. You know she loved it, right? Loved us?”
I think back to the good times. The laughter, the tickle fights in our apartment, the way she’d try in vain to smooth my relentless curls back into a braid, because she knew how much I hated it when the wind blew my hair into my eyes. “She loved us,” I say. “A long time ago.”
“Love doesn’t die, Meadow. It starts out small at first, and then it grows, and it keeps growing, until it takes over our entire heart. I think some people are born to love. Others fall into it, and when it becomes too much, sometimes, they’re afraid. Mom was afraid. She knew what she was doing to the world wasn’t love. It was . . . something entirely its own. She knew what we’d think of her, how it would break us, once we found out about her work. So she left.” He sighs, squeezes my hand. “She probably didn’t think she’d ever see any of us again, Meadow. You were with her as she died. And I think, in that moment, she meant every word.”
We sit side by side like that for hours, until I switch back again.
When I’m strong enough, I pop Koi’s arm back into the socket.
“It’s time to move,” I say. “I’m ready. We’ve wasted enough time.”
He nods, grins so big it lights up his face. He looks so much like my father. “Time spent with my little sister is never wasted.”
I peer out the cave, into the ravine. “Race you to the top?”
“I don’t know, Meadow,” he says.
But before I can argue, he sprints past me, starts to climb the rock wall. I charge after him, laughing, and in this moment we are children again, climbing higher and higher and higher, desperate to get away from a world that begs to hold us down.
It is only when I reach the top that I turn around and stare out at the world below. We had fallen into a giant hole in the ground, like an open mouth. All around it, there is a ring of land and trees. A hill sinks down, leading to lower ground that seems to stretch on forever. There is a field of yellow flowers. Bright as day, beautiful as the sun. Peri would have loved to see this. I would have taken her there, and we would have danced in the blooms, stretched out on our backs in the middle of a sunshine sea.
Beyond it, the forest picks back up. It looks never-ending from here.
The morning is foggy.
Or maybe it isn’t fog. It’s smoke.
I skirt around the ravine, to the edge of the hill, and look past the meadow. I see a flickering fire in the distant trees. Another camp.
Koi climbs up next to me, breathing hard. “You beat me,” he says. “How did that happen?”
“What tribe lives over there?” I ask, pointing.