“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.
“You need to know that I’m broken,” he says.
It’s not at all what I’m expecting. I frown, showing him I don’t understand what he’s saying.
“I just …” He seems to struggle with the words. “I need you to know that I’ll help you find Gabry. I’ll make sure you’re both fine and safe but that’s all. After that I’m gone. I can’t …” He runs his hand through his hair, making it spike up like a halo. “I can’t be or do anything more.”
His pronouncement makes me feel cold and ugly. Unwanted. And this infuriates me because I promised myself that I’d never put myself in this position again—a place where I could hurt because of someone else’s decision.
Not after Elias joined the Recruiters and abandoned me.
I stare at him, to the point where he seems to become uncomfortable. I want to ask him why he thinks that would matter to me. I want to tell him that we’re all broken, that I’m broken. But instead I shrug like I don’t care and say, “Okay.”
I realize as the word falls from my lips that it’s a lie, which only fuels my irritation at both him and myself. I stomp past him, brushing his shoulder with mine as I take off down the tunnel. His steps echo behind me when he follows, the feeble light from the torch he carries just barely tempering the black emptiness in front of me.
I’ve always liked the darkness anyway.
The longer we’re underground, the more heightened my senses become. When we near an abandoned platform at a station the pressure of air whispering over my exposed face changes, lightens. In the depths of the tunnels the air is a searing cold, the forgotten warmth of fall leaching from the walls, heating everything just enough to keep water trickling around us, not yet frozen solid into ice.
Even so, I press as close to Catcher as I dare because of his radiating warmth and the meager glow from his torch. When the flame threatens to sputter out I rip lengths of material from my skirt—the extra layer of clothes a nice defense against the cold but not as important as light.
Sound down here is also tricky. Sometimes there’s a shuffle that could be feet sliding over old concrete and other times there’s the hurried chirping of animals that have made their home in the dark passages.
Every noise makes me jump, turn my head. My heart beats louder than any of it and I have to constantly tell myself that we’re okay. That we’ll be to the surface soon enough. That I’ve survived in this city alone for three years and I’ll make it through this as well.
But all that does is keep the panic from taking over completely—it still itches around the perimeter of my mind.
“Think this is far enough?” Catcher asks as the ceiling thrusts up, curving into the blackness of a gaping station.
I shake my head, my arms wrapped tight around my chest from the cold, my teeth chattering. I imagine the island above, the warren of twisty Neverlands streets crowded with buildings trailing toward the broad bare expanse of the Palisade wall. It doesn’t feel like we’ve walked far enough to have crossed fully underneath it.
“One more, I think. Just to be safe.”
Catcher nods and keeps pushing forward. Out of the corner of my eye I think I see something shifting deep on the platform, uncurling and stretching toward us. I tighten my grip on the machete. Running would only drain our strength—as long as we keep walking we can outpace the dangers down here.
We just have to keep going.
As we continue, the sound of dripping grows louder, more insistent, like a tripping heartbeat. Murky water starts to splash under our feet, cresting over our shoes and eventually up to our shins. Our steps become loud sloshing sounds that drown out everything else.
My skin tightens into goose bumps, the heavy weight of sodden pants dragging at my hips. On the surface thin slivers of ice fracture and disappear like eggshells cracking as we pass. The water keeps rising—it’s up along my thighs and then I’m standing on my tiptoes to keep it from brimming over my waist, my body jerking with the cold.
“Wait,” I call out to Catcher, my breath whispery and shaking through chattering teeth. He stops a few paces in front of me and turns, the low burn of his torch throwing an orange glow over his cheekbones.
I gesture at the water, a darkness swallowing my lower body. “What if there’s Unconsecrated in there?”
He holds the light closer to the surface as if it could illuminate what’s below. “They’d be downed,” he says. “You should be okay.”
“Should?” my voice squeaks. After the close call from before, I’m not willing to take the chance of being bitten by some plague rat floating underwater.
“They can’t smell or sense the living in the water,” he says but I’m shaking my head.
“Unless I bump into one of them,” I protest. “That’s not a risk I really want to take. Even if you brush them they won’t …” I wave my hand at him, thinking about earlier when he stood in the midst of the crowd of dead as if he were one of them.
He looks at me for a moment, his forehead furrowed, and then he frowns as he realizes what I mean.
It’s freezing and my muscles won’t stop cramping. Ripples bloom in the water around me as I shift and jolt to keep the blood moving through my body.
“Carrying you won’t be easy with my arm,” he says. “You could float but in this cold and with your hair being so long …”
I cringe at the thought of Unconsecrated hands twisting through my hair, winding it around their fingers until they’d pulled me under to feast.
Catcher sloshes closer, his movement kicking up waves that pulse around my hips. He turns away from me and leans over slightly, gesturing toward his back. “Can you climb on?”
I stare at him a moment, the expanse of shirt pulled tight over skin. I hate that I need his help like this, but I’m not stupid enough to shrug off his offer. The best chance I have of making it through the water is to rely on him.
Inhaling a sharp cold breath, I bend my knees, sending the frigid water level cresting up to my waist. Then I jump, my momentum so slowed by the sludge that I sort of fall and slide against Catcher’s back, scrambling to grip his shoulders and wrap my legs around his waist.
He stumbles a little, my extra weight throwing him off balance, and then tucks his hand under my thigh to help settle me into place. I sink into him, laying my cheek on the smooth spot between his shoulder blades. His body is so warm it causes me to shudder, the heat spreading along my legs and up my stomach and chest.
I sigh, threading my arm up over his shoulder to pull myself closer. He still smells like the outside, like the Forest. As he trudges through the darkness the water sloshes around us both and his body rocks. I squeeze my legs around him tighter, linking my feet together just below his abdomen.
“This okay?” I ask and my mouth hovers next to his ear. I sense more than feel the hairs along his neck prickling, almost brushing against my cheek. He grunts an answer and keeps walking, the slushing sound of his legs cutting through the water echoing around us.
I feel the twitch of his muscles and the beat of his pulse thrumming just under his skin. He rests his arm on my knee, the wound from the bolt tied tight and the blood washed away. I can’t stop my mind from being hyperattuned to every detail of this moment. Wondering if he’s aware that his fingers trail along the narrow band of skin between the bottom of my pants and top of my sock. They drum lightly against me like drops of water falling to the ground.
I feel like I should say something. The silence is too familiar. I’m not used to touching people, to having them touch me. But anything I could say would be either too mundane or too personal. And so I let my cheek rest in the crook of his shoulder blade and allow my body to mold to his as he plows forward.
I close my eyes and imagine the sun. I imagine a field of flowers and no sounds on the breeze other than the call of birds and hum of insects. No death. No running and hiding. No fear. And then I imagine Catcher next to me, the steady drum of his touch around my ankles, moving up toward my knee.
I draw a sharp breath, startled at the direction of my thoughts. My neck flushes, the heat of it creeping up over my jaw and along my cheeks. I’m glad Catcher can’t see me.
He tightens his grip. “Stop squirming,” he says, which mortifies me even more. “It’s getting shallower,” he adds as he stumbles from the water up toward the higher and drier ground of a station.
He lets go of me just as the surface clears his knees and I wriggle down, splashing when I land. I scramble toward the platform and hoist myself up, keeping my back turned the whole time so he can’t see my blushing face.
Suddenly, I feel awkward. As if I should say something about what just happened, but I’m not used to talking to people so all I can muster is “Thanks.”
Out of the corner of my eye I see him grimace as he uses his injured arm to help lift himself up. “Whatever it takes to survive,” he says, pulling himself to his feet.
It’s stupid of me to want him to say something more, to acknowledge the intimacy of the last few moments, and I realize he’s right: we do what it takes to survive. His carrying me wasn’t a tender moment, it was simply what needed to be done.
I should know better than anyone that this life isn’t about feelings; it’s about making it through alive.
I wrap my arms around myself again, digging my fingers into my shoulders to conserve what heat is left from his body. My pants are sodden and heavy, my feet almost numb. “This should be far enough into the City,” I say, and nod my chin toward the stairs ascending into the darkness.
He starts walking toward them, the light still gripped tight in his hand.
I follow, pulling the machete from my belt. “When we get outside we’ll need to find the closest fire escape and climb up to the bridges,” I tell him. “Judging from what we saw in the Neverlands it might not be long until they breach the Palisade wall if they haven’t already.”
He says nothing, just nods again and takes the steps two at a time, so I have to scramble after him to keep within the meager light. My thighs quickly start to burn, my body exhausted and starving as I struggle against my heavy waterlogged clothes.
But at least the physical strain is almost enough to overpower the thoughts spiraling through my head, the remnants of what it felt like to press against his back and the smell of the crook of his neck and the fact that he’s barely said five words to me since he let me go.
Finally, by the time we reach the metal door barring the street, I’m ready to leave all that behind and face whatever lies outside. I have to be.
Chapter XI
Catcher eases through the door first, and I can see around him that there’s panic in the streets. He pauses and I dash past him to the closest fire escape, jumping for the ladder that’s just out of reach. He nudges me aside and pulls it down before shoving me up it.
Around us I hear the City in uproar: people shouting and bells ringing. The wind smells like smoke, and I’m almost terrified by what I’ll see when we reach the roof and can take in the full scope of what’s going on around us.
Fetid water trails down my legs with each rung I climb, and I’m pretty sure it’s dripping on Catcher as he follows me up to the landing. I pause to readjust my grip on the machete and start up the stairs before Catcher pushes me aside, taking the lead.
“I can take care of myself, you know,” I snap at his back as I follow him up, our steps reverberating through the rusty metal stairs.
His shoulders tighten in response but he keeps going. At the top he hesitates, peering over a once-elaborate but now-broken stone cornice circling the building. “It’s clear,” he says, struggling only slightly this time as he uses both his arms to haul himself up and over onto the roof.
I follow, landing beside him with a squelch as water leaches from my shoes. That’s when I get a clear view of the Dark City around us and the Neverlands beyond. Or rather, what’s left of them.
At night when I couldn’t sleep I used to imagine what this city was like before the Return. There are a few artifacts left over from the before time. The Protectorate once used an old building as a museum of sorts, as if seeing what life was like before would be an incentive for us to work harder toward a similar future.
One year for my birthday Elias gave me a pass to the museum. I remember taking care the night before to wash my hair and braid it so that it would frizz around my head like a golden crown when I awoke and unwound it. I was nervous going into the museum—I was alone since Elias wasn’t going to spend the credits for two tickets, and I remember tugging the ends of my hair while I waited in line.
I still believed in the Protectorate back then. Believed what they told us about what was best for us and our way of life. Recruiters stood at the doors to the building, their black uniforms so clean and crisp against the grime of the City. This was well before the Rebellion so they were our regal protectors then—respected and trusted.
