“What do you have in your duffel?” He asked. “Bandages or any other supplies?”
“There’s not much, but you’re welcome to it.” I sat forward to pull the strap off over my head and instantly regretted the decision. That shot arm was really starting to hurt.
“I got it.” Quinten drew the strap over my head. I tried not to be a baby about how much it hurt when he jostled my arm, and bit my bottom lip to keep from making any sound.
“Thigh and arm?” he asked. “Anywhere else?”
“Hip? Unless it’s just sympathy pain.”
He frowned at the side of my hip. “Good news,” he said as he set my duffel on the floor and dug through it. “It’s not sympathy pain.”
In the bag was wool that used to be a scarf my grandmother had knit for me. That scarf had given me the spare seconds I needed to escape, literally, when I pulled the stitches out of it, since Grandma knit it from the wool the pocket sheep on our farm provide—wool that gathers up little bits of spare time.
Other than that, I thought the duffel had a couple spools of Filum Vitae—thread we’d almost used up patching Abraham—plus whatever was left of the scale jelly that helped wounded stitched people and critters, some needles, a shirt or two, and the remaining cloth and jewels from that dress I’d worn at the gathering.
“Oh.” He paused in his digging, something in his hand, but his hand was still in the duffel so I couldn’t see what he’d found.
“Need any help?” Gloria stood next to him.
Quinten didn’t seem to hear her.
“Hey, bro,” I said, nudging his bent knee with my good foot. “Something wrong?” I would have gotten more worked up and worried about his current nonreaction, but blood loss was making me sleepy. “Stab yourself on my pocketknife?”
“No,” he said. “No. It’s fine.”
I thought I heard the very soft chiming of bells as he removed his hand from the duffel. Maybe it was my imagination. Or that blood-loss thing that was going on.
“You need to get out of your pants,” Quinten said.
Well, that woke me up.
“And your jacket. Shirt too, if it’s long-sleeved.”
“Just how naked do you need me to be?”
“It’s not like I haven’t seen you before,” he said, threading the Filum Vitae through a hooked darning needle.
“Sure, when we were kids,” I said.
“You don’t have to be naked,” he said. Was he smiling? He’d better not be smiling. “I just need to get to your wounds. Drop your drawers.”
I gave him a look and a sigh, but neither had any effect on him. Gloria also wasn’t on my side. She was busy laying out what we had that they could use for mending. A scalpel, a bottle of powder, and a pair of needle-nose pliers.
Oh, this was going to be just a bucket of fun.
And I was going to do it mostly naked.
Neat.
The run-and-almost-die sweat I’d worked up was drying now, a salty, cool layer that made me shiver at any shift in the car’s stale air.
Or maybe it was just that my body was suddenly aware that I was shot and hurting.
“Want me to give you a hand?” Quinten asked. “With the buttons and . . . stuff?”
“No, I got it. Just give me some room.”
He moved the supplies out of the way, and Gloria stood on one side of me. I grabbed hold of the floor-to-ceiling metal pole with my good right hand, then hauled up onto my feet.
Pain shot through me. Everything went white for a second, and then hot razors flayed my thigh up to my butt, back, and shoulder.
Shit and shinola. I should never have sat down. Standing hurt.
My hands were shaking pretty hard and I was full-body sweating again. I worked the button on my pants with my functioning hand and tucked my thumb into my waistband, pushing my pants down. Well, pushing half of my pants down halfway. I reached across to do the same on my left hip.
But Gloria was in front of me now. I thought she might even be talking to me, though I wasn’t hearing anything but my own breathing and the thumping in my head.
How much blood was too much to lose?
She put her cool hand over the back of mine, and it was such a marvelous, comforting sensation. “Let me help. It will be quicker.”
Her pretty brown eyes crinkled at the corners with a smile. “Us girls have to stick together,” she said.
I stared over her shoulder at the others in the car. Neds had his back turned, his arms crossed over his chest as he leaned one hip and shoulder against the side of the car. Abraham sat on the cot, his head against the crates behind him, his eyes burning red. He was staring at me with unspoken anger. Or at least I thought it was anger. It was certainly pointed and hot.
He blinked his eyes slowly, watching me, intense with a different kind of heat.
Okay, maybe not anger.
Quinten stood near Gloria and me, the jar of scale jelly already open in his hand. I knew how much that jelly would numb the wounds, and suddenly couldn’t get out of my clothes fast enough.
“Here.” Gloria took my hand and placed it back on the pole. “Hold on.”
I held on. She shucked my pants down around my ankles, leaving me in my panties and boots. I groaned as the material ripped away from the bullet wounds. It hurt more on the back of my thigh than the front because the exit wound was a bigger mess.
I stared straight ahead, which meant I was looking at Abraham. Neither of us broke eye contact for several heartbeats. There was a lot we had to say to each other in that gaze. Some of it was along the lines of Why the hell did you run into the gunfire for me? And the answer, from both of us, was, I’d do it again.
When I thought I could actually breathe evenly, Abraham’s gaze slid down to my bust, my stomach, my thighs, and my boots, then slowly retraced the path. When he looked back up at my eyes, he raised his eyebrow in a “you look good out of your pants” sort of expression.
Much to my surprise, low on blood and hurting like a brawler, I could still blush.
“. . . going to take off your jacket now,” Gloria said. “I’ll do it quick, but it’s going to hurt.”
I just locked the knee that was working best and held on to the pole.
Pain rattled through me, and I was not quiet about it. A whimper ripped out of my throat and I squeezed my eyes tight, trying to get my breathing under control as Quinten worked to clean and stitch my wounds.
I wasn’t usually so noisy about being hurt, but these wounds hurt. What was taking Quinten so long? It felt like he had been poking and prodding for hours.
Hands reached out from behind me, wide and hot. Heated arms wrapped around my ribs, and that same heat pressed against my back, anchoring me, holding me. Strong.
“It’s almost over,” Abraham said. “They’re almost done. Just breathe.”
Abraham’s voice in my ear. Low and soft like a lover reading poetry. His words held me up, becoming air for my lungs, peace for my mind. A lifeline I could hold on to while the pain of Quinten digging in my wounds, cleaning and sewing and binding, rolled over me.
I was aware of the pain. But I was also aware of Abraham’s arms around me, steady and unyielding. The pushing beat of his heart on my back, his words soothing. I didn’t want him to let go of me, and had to fight the desire to just turn in his arms and hold him.
It had been a really bad past few days. He’d almost died. More than once.
I hadn’t had a chance to tell him I’d thought I was going to lose him, and what that had done to me.
“That’s it,” Quinten said. “Let’s get her to the cot.”
Cot? I’d be happy if they let me sit.
“Do you need help?” Quinten asked.
“I’ve got her,” Abraham said.
“Me,” I said, but it came out a whisper. I cleared my throat. “I’ve got me,” I said, only marginally louder.
They weren’t listening.
“Just lean if you need to,” Abraham said. Funny, hadn’t I been
the one telling him that just a few . . . what was it . . . hours ago?
He shifted his grip, hands replacing his arms, and I made a small, disappointed sound when he pulled his body fully away from me, letting the cold wash between us.
I didn’t dare let go of the pole to wipe the sweat out of my eyes. I was in bad enough shape, the entire room seemed to be rocking.
Abraham took a step and I did too, but the floor wasn’t where I expected it to be and my foot came down wrong.
Abraham caught me up before I stumbled. I opted to take him up on the leaning offer and pressed the side of my face into his chest, inhaling the copper and smoke and leather scent of him. We walked the rest of the way to the cot, and then he helped lower me onto it. I didn’t moan or cry, because the worst of the pain was gone.
My cot was rocking too. Just how bad a shape did a couple of bullets leave me in?
“Now,” Quinten said, easing past Abraham so he could pull a chair up by my cot. He settled into the chair just like he had for months when I’d been little and dying. “I need you to listen to me, Til. The bullets went all the way through, which is better than being lodged in there. We cauterized the wounds and slathered them with jelly. I’ve sewn them up and wrapped your thigh and dressed your hip. Your arm is in worse shape than your leg. It’s in a sling for now. That sparkly gray dress of yours is really coming in handy.”
“The room’s rocking,” I said.
“We’re on a train,” he said. “A moving train. We have about three hours before our first stop. I want you to sleep. I’ll be right here if you need anything.”
I wanted water, but I knew we didn’t have any. Quinten brushed stray strands of hair away from my face, a familiar gesture.
Maybe it wasn’t the best sibling bond, him tending to me when I was wounded, but it was comforting. I knew if there was anything at all that could be done to make me feel better, Quinten would do it. And if he said sleep was the best idea right now, then I believed him.
Abraham had been coaxed over to the other cot, where Gloria convinced him to lie back so she could finish looking over his wounds.
Looked like we were both going to get some sleep.
I stared at the curved ceiling, where old fluorescent tubes shone hard white light against patches of paint that may have once held color but had been scraped and scuffed so that only squares of different sorts of dirt were left behind.
The rocking of the train should be soothing, but it kept me awake. Awake meant I started thinking through what we were going to do.
No matter how I stacked it, we had too little on our side. I still needed to find Grandma’s journal. At the next stop I’d get off the train and see if I could patch into a secure line. If there was any luck left to me at all, my crawlers would have found information on where and how Robert Twelfth’s information was stored, and hopefully her journal would be there.
We had a handful of medical supplies, almost no valuables to hock, maybe one head of one House looking out for us. The train would get us only halfway across the distance we needed to travel.
Against us was the world and every ticking minute. So, yeah, things didn’t look all that great.
Still, if I had to spend my last days with anyone on this planet, Quinten would be the top of my list. So would Abraham and Neds, but for different reasons. I thought if I had enough time, I might get to really like Gloria. She had been nice so far, and plenty levelheaded under some pretty extreme stress. Plus, she liked my brother, which was nice.
Since I’d sort of been the reason that she’d just lost her home, I wished I had a chance to make things up to her before I . . .
Well, before whatever was going to happen happened to me.
The only other person I wished I could be with before I died was Grandma. Just thinking of her wandering our old house, unaware that Boston Sue, our neighbor and spy for House Silver, wasn’t watching after her out of the goodness of her heart made me angry.
I had trusted Bo to keep my grandma safe when I left to the city. But instead of keeping her safe, Bo was just another kind of danger. I didn’t know what Reeves Silver might want Bo to do with Grandma, but it wouldn’t be good.
A hand reached out and rested on my ankle. Abraham’s hand.
I knew I wasn’t the only one who had made mistakes. I knew I wasn’t the only one who wished things could be different.
But right now, in this speeding train, there wasn’t anything more any of us could do to fix any of it.
15
We’ve helped House Brown where we can. Quinten doesn’t want me to leave the farm.
—from the diary of E. N. D.
I heard Quinten’s and Gloria’s voices over the low rumble of the tracks passing beneath us. Neds were sleeping in a chair. I would have thought Abraham was sleeping too, except he moved on the cot where he was resting often enough that I knew he was just as uncomfortable as I was.
The scale jelly did its work and cut my pain in half; I’m sure it had helped him too. I was healing, but neither of us would be better for days.
“What did he say?” I asked.
Only Abraham was close enough to hear me, since Quinten was sitting with Gloria a ways off.
“Who?” he asked.
“Welton.”
Abraham paused, maybe thinking about what he should tell me, maybe thinking there might be a camera on us here too.
I heard him shift, boots scraping across the hard floor, then grunt as he pushed up and took a couple steps, his hand catching hold of the bars above his head. He stood above me, looking down, one arm up, the other crossed over his stomach as if moving had fired the pain in him.
“We didn’t talk.” He dropped down into the chair by the head of the bed that Quinten had left empty.
“Do you think he’s hunting us down?”
“Welton? Undoubtedly.”
I tried to imagine what Welton Yellow would do with us once he found us. Help us again or turn us over to House Black? I didn’t know.
“It was nice of him to blow out the cameras,” I said. “Wish he would have done something more about Domek.”
“If I’d known . . .” he said.
I rolled my head to the side and looked at him. Gods, he was a handsome man. “Yes?”
He folded his hands together, unfolded them, placed them on his knees, then drew them back together. Every movement was discomfort, uncertainty. I’d never seen him like this, so unsure. But, then, his entire world had gone inside out recently; he had every right to be a little off his footing.
I held my good hand out to him. He tipped his head, then took my hand. “If you knew what?” I asked.
“If I knew that finding you on your farm and bringing you into House Gray would have meant this—Oscar dead, you injured, running from all the Houses, no credit to our names, riding the black market—I wouldn’t have come to find you.”
I thought that over. “Someone else would have. That message my mom sent was meant to be found. Someone wanted me to be found. And even if no one had come out to my farm, I would have walked into the cities on my own eventually. I had a brother to rescue, remember?”
“You would have ended up in such a mess if you’d tried to find him on your own.”
“As opposed to this sweet situation?” I smiled slightly. “Someone was bound to screw up my life. I’m just glad it was you.”
He exhaled on a soft laugh. “Thank you?”
“You’re welcome,” I said.
He gently rubbed his thumb over the back of my hand, thoughtful.
“How bad is it?” I asked. “Feeling?”
“The pain isn’t more than I can endure. But it’s foreign.” His gaze took in the crates behind my cot, the walls, floor. “It’s like I’ve been a blind man. And now I can see. Even pleasant sensations are strange. Jarring.”
“Maybe you just haven’t had the right pleasant sensations yet,” I said.
His gaze snapped back to my face. He raised one eyebrow and
studied the innocent look I was probably not pulling off.
“What, exactly, are you suggesting, Matilda Case?” he asked.
I wasn’t expecting the man to take me in a passionate embrace. As a matter of fact, I’d stab him if he jostled me too hard right now.
But a little tenderness didn’t seem like too much to ask. “Maybe a kiss before the end of the world? Seems like we’ve both earned it.”
His wide shoulders and chest pulled up, but he tipped his head down so he could better study me. I liked the look in his eyes. It was steady and intense, but there was a hesitance, a question there.
“I want to kiss you,” I said clearly, just in case he hadn’t gotten the hint.
His breathing shortened for several breaths before he seemed to notice and get his lungs back to normal.
“In front of your brother?”
I glanced past him. Quinten was leaning toward Gloria, lost in conversation. “I think I’m the least of his concerns at the moment. Neds are sleeping. And also?” I added. “It’s just a kiss. I’m not nearly well enough for anything more than that. Although now that I think about it, maybe it’s you we should worry about.”
“Why?”
“The one other time you kissed me, you drove off and got yourself shot and framed for murder.”
He took a moment to survey the train car. “Might be a little more difficult to do either of those things here.”
“Don’t bet on it.” I grinned. “My brother you’ve been arguing with? Very short temper and lots of capacity for revenge.”
“Noted,” he said, one arm braced above my head, the other still holding my hand. “But I’m not worried about your brother. I’m worried about you.”
Now it was my turn to breathe a little funny. He rested his forehead briefly on mine. “You make me want so many things,” he said, pulling back, his gaze lingering on my lips before slipping back up to my eyes.
“We could start a list,” I said, uncertain of what to do with the sudden heat his words caught in me. “Just to make sure we remember to cover all the bases.”
“Do you have a pen?” he asked.
“Not on me. Think we should probably just move on to the kissing.”