“I got to run my hand along the edge of its wing,” he says, his voice full of energy. “I even got to climb inside it. Think about it. Being able to fly. To just float above everything.”
“What was it like?” I ask him, wanting to be there with him.
“Big,” he says. “Impossible that it could ever stay in the air. I spent the whole afternoon in that plane. Wishing with everything I had that it would just take off. Take me away from there.”
He’s silent for a moment and when I open my eyes he’s staring at me. Except that now his gaze is serious, intense. The laugh lines are gone from his face and his forehead scrunches up a little. I swallow. It feels as if with this one gaze he’s dismissed everything but me and him and the memory of a frozen plane.
“There was a part of me that really believed that if I truly wanted it enough …” His voice is almost hoarse, threaded with sadness.
“What happened?” I whisper. Suddenly I’m not sure if he’s talking about the airplane or about us.
He looks at me for a while, for so long that I want to glance away. I don’t know what to think or how to respond. I don’t even know if I want to hear his answer.
“Nothing,” he finally says. His voice cracks, just barely. “Nothing happened. I just sat there, the plane never moved. It began to snow and I was trapped in the town. I ran into the closest building, which turned out to be full of books—a library. The storm lasted for almost a week and then I left. I probably read everything in that library that had any mention of flying.”
My heart is pounding so hard that I’m sure he can feel it crushing the air between us. Though we’re not even touching I feel as though his body has been all over mine.
I press my lips together and draw a deep shaky breath. “Do you still believe that if you truly want something enough it can happen?” I ask. I think of all the times I wanted to stop the world from spinning, all the times I wanted to go back and start over again. All the things I’ve wanted to undo or take back. Did I not want them enough?
Elias shifts until he’s so close to me that I can feel the warmth of his lips hovering over mine. I can smell the sweetness of his skin, the tang of grapes we’ve both been eating. “Yes,” he says, barely making a sound.
I feel dazed and dizzy, afraid to move and his mouth almost touching mine but not quite. It’s impossible to breathe anything but him, to feel anything but him.
“How else would I be here now?” he murmurs, the vibration of his words tingling along my lips.
Cira coughs and shuffles on the other side of the fire, snapping me out of the moment. I push myself away from Elias, scrambling back until I’m standing in the darkness, the air suddenly cold so far from the flames. It’s like jumping into the ocean on a scorching afternoon, jarring me from the bubble of heat with him. Behind me the Mudo moan and the fence clanks.
“I’m sorry,” I say, and immediately I know that I’ve said the wrong thing again. That by apologizing I’ve made him think what we were doing—how close we were—was a mistake. That I regret it. And I don’t know if I do or not.
His face, so vulnerable before, shuts down into a scowl just as it did on the beach when I apologized for almost kissing him. “I don’t mean—” I start to say, reaching toward him.
He brushes a hand in the air, waving my words away. “It was stupid of me,” he says.
I’m surprised how much his words hurt. “Elias—” I say, trying to get him to understand that I’m not pushing him away, I just don’t know what I want anymore.
But he cuts me off again with the shake of his head. “Drop it,” he says.
My stomach lurches with embarrassment at how I can suddenly feel like nothing in his eyes when just a few moments before it seemed that I was everything. I still stand there, but he turns his back and lies down in front of the fire, closing his eyes.
I don’t understand what just happened. I don’t understand how I feel anymore. All I can think about is Catcher the night he was infected—but rather than the feel of his lips I remember him telling me that sometimes you can think you know someone and then they say something or do something and suddenly everything changes. You don’t think of them the same way. That’s how I feel about Elias except that I’m still so unsure of him. I don’t know where he fits in my life or where I want him to fit.
The skull sits surrounded by a mound of dying flowers. Elias, Catcher and Cira press against the gate at the end of the path, staring beyond it to where the fences stretch out in huge arcs, creating a wide open space. But I’m focused on the flowers. The tips of most are brown and dry around the edges, the petals limp and almost colorless, the stems peeling where they’ve been plucked from the ground.
It’s the end of another thick and humid day, the air heavy with unspent rain and heat. I swipe at the sweat on my forehead, my palm coming away slick and wet. I stare at the skull, tracing the fissures that crest its dome.
“What number is it?” I ask them.
Catcher reads the letters off to me. “Fourteen,” he says.
I think of the words carved on the door to my mother’s room: “Thy end is truth’s and beauty’s doom and date.” I always thought it a depressing line, never understood why she would want it in her room. Why she’d want to be reminded of death when it’s so constant on the beaches outside. But one thing is clear: We’re supposed to pass through this gate.
Because he’s immune Catcher is the first one to go, doing a sweep of what’s beyond to make sure it’s safe. I stare at the skull and the flowers. While the bones are faded and old, the flowers have to be recent. Someone else has been down this path not too long ago. And a feeling swells inside me, a recognition that it could have been my mother.
I reach down and trace my finger over the curve of the skull. It’s separated from the rest of the body, which usually indicates decapitation—which would mean that whoever this used to be was Mudo or infected. I shiver and stand back up but my eyes are still drawn to it. I wonder if in the past, before the Return, when the dead stayed dead, the world was littered with bones like this. What it must have been like to live back then.
“It’s all clear,” Catcher says, opening the gate and startling me. “But it’s a little strange,” he adds. “It’s not really a path. I mean, the path continues on the other side but there’s a huge open space in between that’s fenced off. I think”—he looks back over his shoulder into the emptiness behind him—“I think it might have been a village at some point but now there’s nothing left.”
He steps back and we file past him. The fences stretch out to either side of us, arcing around almost out of sight in the distance. In front of us is nothing: scrub trees, tangles of vines and bushes heaped over mounds of something that used to be.
“We should camp here,” Catcher says behind me. “There’s enough space and I want to try to circle back through the Forest—see if the Recruiters have started after us and how much time we have. Maybe throw them off at some of the gates and splits.”
Cira tries to talk him out of it but I know she won’t be able to. I want to tell him to be careful but he brushes my concerns off as well. He and Elias clear a spot for a fire while I wander around and explore.
I feel exposed here. The sky above is too wide after days under the canopy of the Forest. I’m used to keeping my arms tucked in, my steps even, because of the fences so close. Here I can fling myself about—run if I want to.
But I don’t. It’s just too open. It’s unsettling.
I stumble over a pile of rocks and pull aside the weeds and vines to find what looks like remnants of an old stone wall. Shadows of scorch marks still smudge along the edges of it. Except for the ruins beyond the amusement park, I’ve never seen another village or city and I wander through it, trying to figure out how it was laid out. I find random objects: a few knives, a pot, the heel of a leather shoe.
I stroll down what I think must have been a wide street. Thick tangles of vegetation choke walls and spill out of c
ollapsed doorways, making it almost impossible to pass.
Something crunches under my foot and I yelp, jumping aside. It’s an old bone, now shattered and jaggedly sharp. I take a step back but there’s another crunch. I twist around and realize that there are bones—skeletons of every size—everywhere. Some of them have holes in their heads with steel arrowheads that rattle inside. I take another step back but my ankle turns when my foot slips on a skull.
My breath comes in pants now. I reach out to try to grab something to hold on to, to keep me standing, but there’s nothing there and I collapse in the sea of bones. They’re everywhere: skulls, ribs, femurs. My stomach lurches as my hands scatter them, trying to push myself to my feet.
I scramble over them all, horror choking me. How many people were there? How many bodies are scattered throughout this place? I think about my mother, about her living in a village in the Forest. Is this where she grew up? Is this where I was born? I can’t help but wonder what happened to this village and the people who used to live here. Are there ruins like this all over the world? Villages that were? Is this what Vista will be someday?
It makes me think of a picture that the teacher who taught us about gravity once showed me. It was a photograph taken from space, probably from one of the satellites that Elias pointed out to me. The teacher told us it was the pre-Return world at night and all I remember is a sea of darkness with more lights than stars in the sky. All of them cities and towns and villages and houses.
I wonder what would happen if you took that picture now, how the darkness would have grown. And I think about what all those satellites have seen: villages like this one winking out one by one until there’s nothing left.
I wrap my arms around my chest as the sunlight leaches from the sky. Is that all we have left? Is that all we are? Lights on a map that are slowly dying, hanging on for nothing?
That night I’m left alone with Cira by a bare ember fire. I feel full of all the things I haven’t told her, of all the secrets between us.
“Something’s different with you and Catcher,” she says. She’s pulling the bands of cloth off her arms and using the hem of her shirt to clean the edges of her wounds. I look into the blackness of the Forest, into the sweep of stars across the sky, anything but at her and her cuts.
“I can’t figure out what’s changed about him,” she continues. “I thought he’d be happier to’ve survived the bite, but …” Her voice trails off and I know she expects me to say something to fill the gap but I don’t have anything except questions. Once I thought I understood Catcher, or at least was starting to. Now I feel as if he’s more of a stranger to me than Elias.
I stare at the ground watching a beetle navigate a blade of grass. The air tonight is still and hums with mosquitoes and cicadas. And moans. Always the moans of the Mudo. They writhe against the fence, even more animated than usual with the scent of Cira’s dried blood in the air.
“Remember that time when we saw Mellie kissing Daniel behind the Council House on a dare?” she asks. She’s still wiping gently at her arms. I nod, staring into what’s left of the fire. I try not to think of Mellie as I last saw her. Or of Daniel and the blood.
“I used to think that the worst thing back then would be to get caught doing something like that. That the worst problems we’d face were who we’d end up with. Not stuff like this. Not death and infection.” She cringes as she pulls a bandage stuck to the wounds on her right arm. “I just can’t believe they’re gone now. I don’t know how to handle any of it. Don’t know what to do to help Catcher. Or you. Or anyone.”
I pull my braid over my shoulder and tug on it. “We always knew it was a possibility,” I say. “We were always told what happened outside the Barriers. We’ve known about the Mudo.” I sigh. “We shouldn’t have gone that night,” I add softly.
She pauses, her fingers hovering over a pile of fresh cloth strips to use as bandages. I glance at her and that’s when I see the puffiness of the wounds. The streaks of angry red radiating out from the cuts. She sees me staring and tries to hide them but I grab her wrists and pull them toward the light. Her skin is hot, almost as hot as Catcher’s.
“Cira,” I say sharply. I try to keep from panicking, try to keep my tone even. But I know what the streaks and heat mean; I know she’s got a blood infection and she’s had it for a while. “Why didn’t you say something?” I rack my brain, trying to remember what plants and herbs to use to bring down the swelling. My mother used to make it and the recipe is just on the edge of my mind.
She pulls away from me. “There’s nothing we can do out here, I didn’t want anyone to worry,” she says, rewrapping the wounds.
I shake my head. “We could have done something,” I say. “Does Catcher know?”
“No.”
“Cira, you can’t keep this from him,” I tell her, my voice low. We both know he’ll be insane with worry but he should be aware of what’s going on.
She purses her lips, her way of telling me to stop arguing. But she’s my best friend and she’s hurt and I’m angry that she hasn’t told me about this, that she hasn’t allowed me to help her. This isn’t like us, keeping secrets.
She edges closer and leans against me. “It’s going to be okay, Gabry,” she says. She’s still the same girl who waded into the river while I stayed on the bank and cried. She’s still the one to hold my hand and tell me it will be okay.
“Maybe we should go back to Vista,” I tell her, my voice thick with memories and longing for that time before everything changed. “We can find something for your arms.”
She shakes her head and raises a hand to smooth my hair off my face, pulling it loose from my braid and then combing the tangles with her fingers. How many times did she do this when we were growing up? How often did we sit around gossiping and sharing dreams?
But what is there to gossip about now? The people we knew—Mellie and Daniel and Blane—are dead or joining the Recruiters. The dreams we used to have seem so far away now, like the faded satellites circling in the night with no purpose, no way to call them back.
In my dream I’m running down the path through the Forest. It’s lined with intricately woven metal fences and I’m chasing a girl but I don’t know who she is. She’s young and lithe, her long blond hair blowing behind her in the wind. The fence is crowded with Mudo, all of them wearing the white tunics of the Soulers, and they pull and yank at the delicate metal, causing it to sway and rattle.
My lungs sear with the icy cold pain of having run beyond my limits, but I’m afraid that if I stop my legs will no longer hold me and I’ll collapse. I’m not fast enough, I can’t reach the girl, and somehow I sense that she knows this but she won’t slow down.
And then I see her reach for something and she grabs the photograph of Mary and me in the ocean—the picture of us laughing in the waves—and she tosses it high over her shoulder. I try to catch it but it floats through the air, morphing and twisting until it’s a bloodred bird that flies off into the night, scarlet feathers from its wings drifting around me.
The girl turns to face me then, and instantly I recognize her. It’s me—I’ve been chasing myself.
I stop and fall on the ground and while the Mudo tear down the fences and crush around me, I stare at the bird as it drifts higher and higher, letting its feathers float around me and bury me. I watch satellites whirl through the sky, blinking a message I’ll never understand, as the girl who was me runs away into the the dark Forest.
And then I feel a hand around my wrist, a familiar hand, and it pulls me out of my dream. I wake up gasping and find Catcher kneeling next to me in the darkness. The fire’s nothing but shifting embers and I can hear the even breaths of Elias and Cira sleeping.
“It’s okay,” Catcher says. “It was a dream.” But I’m still struggling to breathe, my heart beating so hard it shakes me. He pulls me against him and I curl into his heat. I feel the pound of his pulse echo through my body. It’s so strong that it’s hard to believe it carri
es infection. It’s easy to pretend that nothing’s changed. To imagine we’re back in the darkness of the amusement park, the summer stretching out endless and full of possibilities around us.
I look up at his face, reach up with a finger and map out his jaw in the night. I can feel his muscles move under my touch. I let my hand drift to the back of his neck and I push my fingers into his hair. I lean my head toward him, tugging him to me.
In the darkness it’s easy to believe that tonight’s like any other night in our town, just the two of us in the amusement park flirting with our futures.
But this time he doesn’t allow his lips to brush mine—he tilts his head away.
“Why won’t you kiss me?” I ask.
Catcher’s voice is like a hiss of raindrops hitting a smoldering fire. “Because I’m infected.”
“But you’re still alive. The infection means nothing,” I tell him, feeling desperate to believe that nothing is different. I push the image of him standing among the Mudo at the amphitheater from my mind. I concentrate on how solid he feels under my fingers. On how infinitely human he is.
“It means everything, Gabrielle,” he says.
“How?” I sound petulant but I don’t care.
He squeezes his eyes shut. “Because what if it means I can infect you?” he whispers.
I suck in a quick breath. It’s something I haven’t considered, and sitting here now in his lap I feel instantly vulnerable. I swallow, my throat straining as I push down the sudden fear that leaps around me. What if he’s right? There’s no way to find out without taking too big a risk.
I don’t know what to tell him. I don’t know how to challenge what he’s saying. And my silence tells him everything. He sets me from his lap and stands and starts to walk away from the fire.
I scramble after him. “Catcher,” I call out softly, trying not to wake the others.