My fingers shake as I fumble with the buttons of my coat, ripping it from my body and then yanking off my sweater and the shirt and tank beneath until there’s nothing covering my torso.
“Annah, what’s going on?” Catcher shouts as he jumps the last few stairs and runs into the weak ring of light.
As soon as he sees my nakedness he jerks away from me, throwing his good arm up over his eyes and twisting his head away from my pale bare skin. “Annah?” Concern threads through his voice. It’s clear he thinks I’ve gone insane.
Frantically I run my hands over my arms, prodding and poking at the flesh as I twist to get a better look. I don’t feel any breaks in the skin but I can’t be sure. I run to Catcher and thrust my arm in front of him.
“Is there a bite?” I demand, breathless.
“Annah, what’s—”
“Is. There. A. Bite!”
His eyes go wide and then he takes my arm lightly in his scalding fingers, running them along the contours of my muscles as goose bumps spring to life in the path of his touch.
“No, not that I see,” he says gently.
“What about here?” I ask, tilting my head so that my ear and neck are under his gaze. I feel each exhale of his breath as his touch flutters up along my hairline, tracing the curve of my ear, slowly. Methodically.
“No.” It’s a whisper, his lips almost—but not quite—pressed against the base of my skull the way I thrust myself at him.
I stand there a moment longer, the heat of him pulsing around me in the dim cold underground air. I turn, just slightly. Inch closer to the warmth. When he inhales, his chest brushes against my shoulder, his coat scratching my bare chest.
“You weren’t bitten,” he adds softly, breaking the silent tension between us.
Relief soars through me. I collapse, wrapping my arms around myself and rocking, my fingers clutching my naked shoulders. Tears course down my cheeks and drip, rosy red after trailing through blood, from my jaw to the cracked concrete of the platform.
I was dead. I was so sure of it. I’d felt the sear of Unconsecrated teeth. How is it possible I’m not infected?
I’m sobbing and shaking from the release of the terror that froze me deep within. Catcher kneels, pulling me to him, and I bury my face in his chest and let the sweet solace of life course through me.
“I’m not infected,” I say, still incredulous.
He runs his fingers over my hair, cupping my head so easily in his hand.
“I don’t understand.” I try to gather my emotions back inside myself, afraid of having let them run free for so long. I pull away from him and swipe at my eyes and that’s when I remember the bolt lodged in his arm.
Dried blood pools at the base of it, crusted black in the firelight. “Oh, Catcher,” I say, reaching a hand toward him, horrified at the sight of the angry wound.
He jerks his fingers around my wrist, stopping me. “Don’t touch it,” he says, his eyes turning hard and pleading and full of pain. My mouth opens to protest. “Please,” he adds before I can speak. Then he gently nudges me back into the darkness.
I try to pull my arm free of his grip, to move closer, but he’s too strong. I’m intensely aware of the fact that I’m not wearing any clothes from the waist up—all the scars and twisted skin visible—but his injury is more important. “You’re hurt.”
He still doesn’t let go and seems oblivious to my nakedness as he moves me away from his bleeding arm. “You know this feeling of being alive—those tears you just cried because you’re not infected?” When I don’t answer his grip tightens until I nod my head.
“That’s the feeling you need to hang on to,” he says adamantly. “Because that’s not a feeling I can guarantee you.”
I don’t like that I’m unable to escape from his grasp. I don’t like how vulnerable it makes me feel. “If you were dangerous you’d have killed me by now,” I tell him, still struggling. I almost believe what I’m saying.
His eyes narrow. “It’s not an if, Annah, it’s a reality. I am dangerous. I’m infected. This blood”—he holds his injured arm away from me—“it’s infected.”
We’ve already had this argument and so I just glare at him and say, “Fine. Keep the stupid bolt in your arm for all I care.”
He actually smiles, which softens the moment between us. He holds me a minute longer and as if by instinct, his eyes sweep along my neck and across my collarbone, careening down my exposed body. It lasts only an instant, almost as if it were involuntary, and I tug my arm free from his relaxed grip, immediately missing the heat of his skin against mine.
I turn sharply and start pulling on my clothes, waiting for the sound of him to release the breath he’d held when he glanced at me.
“I’m sorry,” he says softly. I close my eyes. Is he apologizing for yelling at me or gaping at me? For my nakedness or the ugliness of my body?
I deflect his attention away. “You’d better figure out what to do about that thing in your arm,” I tell him. “You don’t want an infection.” Before he can say anything I hold up a hand to stop him. “I don’t mean Unconsecrated infection, I mean a blood infection. That arrow looks pretty dirty, and who knows what kind of bugs it got into your system.”
I finish buttoning my coat and turn to face him. He’s staring toward the dark mouth of the tunnel at the far end of the platform. His eyes glisten, but before I can ask him why, he shakes his head, grabs the bolt and jerks it free. His choked whimper echoes in my ears and I flinch at the pain. Then he groans and falls to his knees, the bloody arrow slipping from his fingers and landing on the broken concrete. I rip some cloth from my quilt and place my fingers over his shoulder, letting him lean on me as he ties the strip around the wound. This time I’m the strong one.
“What happened up there?” I ask after he’s tied off the bandage and pulled away from me. “I’ve never seen that many Unconsecrated before.” I walk closer to the stairs, wondering how long it will be before the pressure of so many dead against the metal doors at the top causes them to buckle and collapse.
“The horde.” He sounds indifferent as he sits and rubs a chunk of ice between his fingers to wash away the blood.
I move back to the tiny fire, huddling in close to chase away the damp cold, hoping the light will erase the terrors floating at the edge of my thoughts. “Horde?”
Water drips from the bony knob of his wrist, leaving a trail of pink across his skin. “The horde. The one from the valley in the Forest.” He’s speaking as if what he’s saying makes sense but it doesn’t.
“They didn’t warn you?” he asks, incredulous.
“Who warn us?” The air down here is frigid and each exhalation puffs like a cloud from my lips.
He pushes to his feet and starts to pace. “Millions of Mudo headed for the City. Already here apparently. How did the Recruiters not prepare you for this? They had to have known.” His eyes are wide, the ice forgotten in a puddle.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying,” I tell him, my chest fluttering with fear.
“Annah, those dead up there—that’s just the beginning. There are millions, more than you can even imagine could exist. That’s why Gabry and I were in such a hurry to get to the City and find you—so we could get you out before the horde hit.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.” I’m shaking my head. “I was just at the bridge to the mainland—we were just there and there weren’t Unconsecrated. How did they get across the river? How did they get over the walls? It’s only been a few hours.”
He crouches in front of me, rests two fingers on my knee, two bright points of heat seeping through the layers of my clothes. “You were knocked out for a long time, Annah—you slept even longer. It’s been more than a day since the bridge.”
I push away from him, an explosion of movement, and stalk to the edge of the platform. “Okay, fine. So it’s been a day. That’s still not enough time for what we saw up there. Those streets were almost overrun. That can’t happe
n that fast. It just can’t.”
He doesn’t say anything to contradict me. He doesn’t have to. His expression says everything and I spin to the darkness of the tunnels, reeling. There were so many dead. It was like walking into a swarm of gnats on a hot summer evening. They were everywhere.
Slowly Catcher walks over to me. “There are enough of them that they can almost fill the river—clamoring over each other before there’s time for them to sink. They’ve probably already overrun the bridges. They’ll overrun anything in their path.” His voice is gentle but his words are not. “They pile on top of each other against the walls—they’ll push any barriers down. A horde that big … it’s like pouring the ocean into a jar except the island is the jar. There’s nothing that can hold it back. It’s impossible to comprehend unless you’ve seen it.”
But what I don’t tell him is that I have seen a horde. I press my palms into my eyes until it hurts, trying to erase the memory, trying to push it down but still it comes.
I was a kid, lost in the Forest with Elias after leaving my sister. I remember how much my feet hurt, how sore my legs were and how proud Elias kept saying he was of me because I was still walking, because I was trying so hard to be a big girl. I remember him holding my hand, helping me up the mountain path, and the fences on either side, always the fences that went on and on and on.
I remember when we got to the top. How Elias froze, holding me behind him. It made me angry. He’d told me I was a big girl so I peeked my head around him until I saw what he did. It was beautiful, mountains stretching out in front of us for as far as you could see.
But that wasn’t why Elias stopped. He was looking down. Into the valley. I followed his gaze and saw the path winding into the trees, the hint of a road wrapping around the mountain partway down. He tried to turn me away before I saw the rest. He even grabbed me, pushing his hand over my eyes, but it was too late. I’d seen them in the valley. The people strewn like wilted flowers. There were so many that a line from a song we’d been taught came to mind, about the lilies in the valley.
“How are there so many?” I’d asked Elias. I’d never known that such a massive number of people could have ever existed in the world.
His face was white, his fingers cold and shaking. “We have to turn around, Annah. We have to go back. Now.” His voice was low.
I swallow as I remember that feeling, that shock as I realized the scope of the Unconsecrated. Until that moment I’d never comprehended that many in one place. I’d seen them against the fences, pawing against the metal links trying to get into the village. They’d followed us along the path, always moaning and reaching.
But never had there been so many. There were more bodies in that valley than stars in the night sky.
Elias had grabbed my hand, but to comfort me or him I still don’t know. “They’re downed. We can’t let them sense us or they’ll wake up and then I don’t know if we’ll be able to get away.”
I sat, refusing to move. “We can’t go back, Elias,” I had whined. I was tired and hungry and sad and upset. So disappointed. I’d felt like we were close but here was another obstacle that meant we’d be trapped in the Forest forever. My lip began to shake. “We already tried all those other paths. They were locked and you said this was the only way.” I began crying, I couldn’t help it.
Elias sat down next to me. Pulled me to his side, tucking my head to his chest, where I could hear his heart pounding and the way his breathing hitched, so I knew he was crying too.
It was afternoon and dark clouds pushed around the horizon. He sighed. “If it rains hard enough, maybe we can make it without them sensing us and waking up,” he finally said. “We’ll just have to wait here for a few days and see.”
So we’d spent two days on the top of that mountain, trying not to stare down into the sleeping horde. Then on the third evening a storm gathered and started out small but by morning was so furious that we could hear the crack of trees falling and the groan of the metal fences shifting.
The mountain edge was crumbling beneath us as we climbed down to the road. When we got to the bottom, we ran along a brick wall and then sprinted over the bridge that bucked and swayed from the wind howling down the valley. Thunder and lightning raged around us, the rain so heavy we could barely breathe. It felt like the entire world was tearing apart.
The last I’d seen of the horde had been when a crack of lightning struck the bridge, buckling it just as we reached the other side. Cars exploded in sparks and fell into the valley, illuminating the slumbering bodies below before crashing to the ground.
I drop my hands and square my shoulders—shoving the memory from my mind. I’d escaped them once before and now I would have to do it again. “We’re trapped in the tunnels.” Already I can hear the moans filtering down the stairs. “It won’t be long until they’re everywhere.”
“You said you knew where Gabry is and we can’t leave her. We have to make sure she’s okay,” Catcher says, as if he thinks I’m on the verge of giving up.
It takes a heartbeat for me to remember, again, that Gabry is my sister. That she’s no longer Abigail. Thinking about her being out there somewhere with the dead flooding the streets causes my throat to close up. I’ve left her defenseless once before and I won’t do it again.
My mind whirs over what to do next. I pace along the edge of the platform, the fire behind shifting and sending sparks into the air. “Even if we surfaced here we’d still be in the Neverlands, and the bridges don’t connect the entire island anymore,” I think out loud. “We’d have to cross the Palisade wall on foot, and I don’t trust the Recruiters to let us through or for it not to be overrun already.”
“Can we take the tunnels?” Catcher asks, and of course it’s the obvious question.
I stop and stare at him for a moment. The tunnels connect the entire island like underground rivers. The Protectorate used to keep them patrolled and used wheel walkers to keep the pumps running so they didn’t flood. The tunnels have always been off-limits and dangerous but have only gotten worse since the Rebellion: aside from the caved-in sections I’ve heard that some areas are underwater. It’s a labyrinth that might just swallow us whole.
I remember the last time I came underground and feel my scars tighten—each one a reminder of just how dangerous these tunnels can be.
“It would be a risk,” I finally say. “A huge one. I’d be guessing which way to go. There could also be Unconsecrated down here, and unless smugglers still use this tunnel a lot, the dead could be downed and we won’t even know until we stumble onto them.”
Catcher winces and I realize belatedly that the Unconsecrated wouldn’t sense him. They’d only sense me. I open my mouth to apologize but he waves his hand to brush it away.
“Would there be fewer in the tunnels than up in the streets?” he asks.
I stare into the darkness and then back over my shoulder to the stairs. Already the moans are sounding louder, as if they’ve breached the outer door. “It’s impossible to know,” I tell him honestly.
“Are you willing to take the risk?” I can tell that Catcher doesn’t know how I’ll answer the question and it reminds me that we’re strangers to each other. I wonder how much of my personality he thinks he understands because of my sister.
I wonder if when he sees the smooth side of my face he forgets that I’m not her.
“I’ll do anything to save my sister,” I tell him. And when I say it out loud I know it’s true. It’s the only way I can think to finally forgive myself.
Catcher breaks off a thick shaft of wood from one of the subway ties and wraps the remnants of my quilt around it. He lights the tattered cloth from the fire, creating a makeshift torch. It glows a warm red, not giving much light but enough for us to see our feet and avoid the debris scattered along the old tracks.
I hold the machete Catcher found aboveground tight in my chapped hand as wind swallowed by the tunnels moans like the dead. I huddle deeper in my clothes, bracing against the
cold, almost positive the Unconsecrated have broken down the door to the stairs and are shambling after us, their footsteps lost in the echo of our own.
With every step I think about the bodies that could be strewn about in the darkness. The forgotten dead, now in a quasi-hibernation, just waiting to sense me and wake up. Chills chase each other up the back of my neck and along my arms. It’s better down here than out there, I remind myself, to stop the fear paralyzing my mind.
“What’s she like?” I ask Catcher, trying to distract myself from the way the tunnel furls tightly around us, forcing us to move forward into the possibility of more danger than what we’re leaving behind. “My sister,” I add.
Catcher walks slightly ahead, torch held high. “Gabry’s …” He trails off for several steps and I glance at the way his shoulders tense as he concentrates. “She’s strong. Dedicated and loyal.”
There’s admiration in his tone but also an underlying current of melancholy.
“Were you good friends with her?” My voice trembles through my chattering teeth.
He stumbles and because I’m following so close behind I press my hands against his lower back to keep from careening into him. His heated skin blazes through his clothes—so delicious in this freezing darkness. Before I can stop myself I press my palms harder against him, curling my fingertips into the warmth and smiling.
“You okay?” I ask when he doesn’t resume walking. There’s an odd expression on his face and he looks away from me before I can figure out what it is.
“There’s something you need to know,” he says.
I realize I’ve pushed tighter against him. It’s like leaning toward a fire on a frozen day—the way it eases through you, unwinding muscles and loosening joints.
I’m surprised at how comfortable I am with him already, how he doesn’t quite feel like a stranger anymore. “What?”
And then he twists away from me, taking his heat and the glowing ember of the torch with him. The meager light glistens from rivulets of water wandering along the old tracks on the ground.