Deception (35 page)

I just want to save Sylph.

Wiping my hand clean on the blanket beneath me, I lace my fingers through hers and squeeze gently.

She doesn’t squeeze back.

“Sylph. Please.” Smithson chokes on a sob and leans down to press his cheek against hers. “I love you.”

Her hand is cold in mine, and her body shakes as I stretch until I can rest my mouth next to her ear. “Thank you,” I say, and swallow against the suffocating grief that stuffs my throat with cotton, “for everything. You loved me when no one else my age would. You accepted me. You stood up for me. You’re brave and kind, and I will spend the rest of my life missing you.”

Her lips move, but no sound comes out. I don’t need to hear the words, though. I know Sylph would spend her dying breath telling us she loves us.

“I love you, too,” I say, and stay pressed against her. With every faint beat of her heart, my pulse pounds harder. Faster. It feels like a metal vise is slowly squeezing my chest until I have to fight for every breath.

She moans, and I whisper, “Shh, it’s all right,” but it isn’t. I’m a liar, and every tiny, shaky rise of her chest proves me wrong. Slowly, so slowly I almost believe she’s simply holding her breath, she sighs and goes still. Silent.

An anguished cry rips past Smithson’s lips, and he gathers her to his chest. The empty space beside me grows cool, and the blood soaks into the blanket. I sit up, shoving myself away from it.

“Rachel?” Quinn asks softly, but I can’t look at him. At any of them.

I only have eyes for Sylph.

Crawling across the wagon bed, I brush her hair from her face as Smithson rocks her back and forth. Her green eyes stare at nothing. Her skin looks like candle wax. The Sylph I knew is gone.

No spark in her eyes. No laugh hovering just behind her words. No love spilling out of a heart that refused to turn anyone away.

A bubble of panic swells inside me, pushing against my chest. My breath tears its way out of my lungs, and my head spins.

She’s gone.

Nothing I can do will bring her back.

The space in my heart reserved just for her is an aching void that threatens to slice into the silence and spill the blood of everyone I’ve lost, and I can’t let it hurt me. I can’t let it break me.

Scrambling away from Smithson, I slam into the wagon bench behind me.

“Rachel, wait.” Quinn holds a hand out to me, but I’m already up. Already moving. I grab the edge of the wagon’s entrance, rip the canvas aside, and leap for the ground.

The people walking behind the wagon shout as I roll across the forest floor, but I claw my way to my feet and start running. I shove the helping hands away from me, duck beneath the outstretched arm of the recruit guarding this edge of the line, and race into the trees.

Faster.

Stray branches whip my skin. Underbrush tangles around my ankles, threatening to bring me down. I dig my fingers into tree trunks for balance and push myself on.

Faster.

My breath burns my throat, my vision blurs, and something roars inside my head. The image of Sylph’s waxy skin and lifeless eyes slams into the wall of silence, and I shudder as a dark, terrible grief tries to rise to the surface.

Faster
.

I can outrun this. I can push myself hard enough to leave it all behind. If I no longer see it, it doesn’t have to be real. It isn’t real.

It isn’t.

My feet slam into the forest floor. A branch tangles in my hair, and I rip it free. I don’t need to cry. I don’t need to feel. I don’t need anything but to run until I leave behind the gaping wounds that carve my spirit into something I no longer recognize.

Something wraps around me from behind, and I tumble to the ground. Twisting, I punch and kick, but every move I make is easily parried until suddenly I find myself held close, tucked up under someone’s chin.

“Where are you running to?” Quinn asks quietly.

My breath sobs in and out of my lungs. The longer I sit still, the faster the grief will catch up to me. “Let me go.”

“And let you fall headlong into the river?”

I lift my head and see a sheer drop just six yards from us. I shrug.

“Do you want to die?” he asks as if he really wants to know.

Do I? It would be easier. I could fade into silence and all the broken pieces in me wouldn’t matter anymore. I wouldn’t have to grieve, or think, or desperately stuff everything I can’t stand to face into the silence.

But Logan would grieve. And if Dad, Oliver, and Sylph are waiting for me on the other side, they’d be disappointed in me. I’d be disappointed in me. I’m not a quitter.

I slowly shake my head. No, I don’t want to die.

“Why aren’t you crying for Sylph?”

“Tears don’t bring people back.” Pain stabs from my chest to my fingertips.

“Tears aren’t for the people we’ve lost. They’re for us. So we can remember, and celebrate, and miss them, and feel human,” he says.

Feel human. I push away from him, and he lets me go. If allowing everything that wants to hurt me to rise to the surface and destroy me is what it takes to feel human again, then I’d rather feel nothing at all.

The silence greedily absorbs the shock of Sylph’s death until the dark, fathomless void consumes me—a stranger pressing against my skin from the inside out. I don’t feel human. I don’t feel grief, or pain, or fear.

I don’t feel anything at all.

Slowly, I climb to my feet and find Logan standing behind us. His eyes flicker from Quinn to me, and then he walks forward and opens his arms. I step into his embrace, but his touch is only skin deep. Inside me, the Rachel I once knew is gone.

Chapter Forty-One

LOGAN

I
t’s been ten days since Thom blew up the bridge, and we left the Commander and his borrowed army on the western side of the river. Black oaks, shagbark hickories, and the occasional cluster of pine trees mingle with the cypress and maple. Long slabs of gray-white rock rise out of the ground for yards at a time before submerging themselves in the soil once more. Every now and then we come across the sagging, ivy-covered hulk of a long-forgotten house perched at the edge of the river’s steep embankment.

Why anyone would want to live near the constant musty-dirt smell of the water and the swarms of mosquitoes and gnats that fill the air at twilight is a mystery to me.

Most of my time has been spent working with Jeremiah to flesh out the map so that it includes the other three northern city-states in case Lankenshire won’t reach an alliance with me, and perfecting my understanding of the Rowansmark tech so that I can replicate it once I have the right wire and metal at my disposal.

Using supplies I found in the highwaymen’s wagons, I’ve nearly completed the device I can use to track and kill the Commander. We’ll see which of us manages to put the other one down like a dog.

I like my odds.

I’ve also held two more funerals to bury those who were poisoned. Of the nineteen names on my list, ten are dead, including Sylph. Thom was poisoned as well, though he wasn’t on my list. I don’t know why the killer would go after Thom without marking his room, but Thom seems to be the only victim who didn’t wake up with a bloody X on his door. The other nine who were in marked rooms show no signs of sickness. The killer deliberately separated families and friends by poisoning only one person per shelter. Knowing they aren’t about to die, however, does nothing to comfort those who remain.

It does nothing to comfort me, either. I’m grateful I won’t be losing any more of my people to poison, but I feel like I’m walking with the blade of an axe poised at the back of my neck. It’s not a matter of
if
it will fall, but when.

When
the killer will strike again.

When
the Commander will catch up with us.

I skirt the wide trunk of a black oak tree and take a long look at myself. I’ve never had an easy life. I understood loss and fear before I was old enough to learn how to read. I knew what it felt like to fight for survival because survival was all I had left. I accepted that any respect I might earn from others, I must first earn from myself. And I overcame it all by refusing to allow my circumstances to dictate my intelligence, my courage, or my choices.

Those are valuable lessons to remember now. I might be walking with an axe against my neck, but I’m not going to fall to my knees and make it easy to take me down. To take any of us down.

The faint outline of a plan is taking shape in my head as the sun melts across the western tree line, and I start looking for a place to make camp. We’re still a day’s journey from Lankenshire. The path we’ve followed along the river is narrow, but fairly defined—worn down by regular trade missions or courier visits.

Drake walks beside me. “What’s the plan?” he asks.

I know he means the plan for making camp, but I have another answer for him. I’m not used to talking through my plans with anyone except Rachel. But in the aftermath of Sylph’s death, Rachel is a pale, silent shadow of herself, and while I’m not exactly sure how to fix it, I’m positive discussing worst case scenarios with her isn’t the answer.

“I need solutions to our problems.” The ground begins to rise, and ahead of us the path disappears down the other side of the hill we’re climbing. “To do that, I need to see every problem clearly.”

“Finding a permanent shelter, whether it’s with Lankenshire or somewhere else, seems like it should be a priority,” he says, huffing a little as the incline strains our legs. Behind us, the rest of the survivors climb in weary silence. Only the creak and groan of the wagon wheels and the faint shuffle of boots against the forest floor gives away their presence.

Even though Drake and I are at least ten yards ahead of the rest, I pitch my voice low. “Yes, that’s a priority. But the real reason we need shelter so badly is because we have human threats after us. Remove the threats, and finding a place to live isn’t as urgent.”

A crisp breeze tangles in the leaves above us, and Drake pulls his cloak close. “How’re you planning on removing the threats?”

“I’m nearly finished designing a piece of tech that will wipe out the Commander. If I take him out of the equation, the army will stop chasing us. The more immediate problem is that we still don’t know which one of us poisoned our people, and we have no idea how or when he’ll strike again.”

“We’ve checked everyone’s wristmarks and searched through every scrap of personal belongings. We didn’t find any evidence linking anyone in camp to Rowansmark.”

“I know.” My fingers skim the rough skin of a branch as I push it out of my way. “But someone who is skilled enough to kill like a professional isn’t going to be stupid enough to leave obvious clues lying around for us to find.”

Drake skirts a half-submerged rock. “Willow could question everyone. One at a time. I’m willing to bet it wouldn’t take her long to figure out every single secret any of us have to hide.”

I shake my head. “I’m not going to torture one hundred thirty-two innocent people on the slim hope that I can catch one man. Or woman. Whichever. Besides, even though I know Willow would be willing to interrogate everyone, what would that cost her?”

“So what will you do?”

“I’ll give the killer what he wants.” My voice is as hard as the stone peeking out of the ground beneath our feet. “I’ll publicly offer to exchange the device for his promise to leave the rest of us alone.”

Drake tugs on his beard. “If you do that and then don’t keep your word, more of us will die.”

“Oh, I’ll keep my word. I’ll give him the device. And I’ll make sure that the instant he takes it from me, he’s dead.”

“How will you manage that? He’ll be expecting a trap.”

“Then I’ll have to make sure to devise something that takes him completely by surprise.”

We reach the crest of the hill and stop.

Far in the distance, the white-gray stone of Lankenshire gleams in the fiery light of the setting sun. We’ve nearly made it. One more night of making camp. Building a perimeter. Watching for threats both without and within. One more night and then hopefully I can convince Lankenshire to help us.

Being so close to my goal lifts a bit of the pressure from my chest. I stare at the distant city-state and take a deep breath. Just one more day and I can deliver on my promise to get us to Lankenshire. I’m afraid to let the relief creep in yet, but it hovers at the edge of my mind, offering a small sense of peace.

Behind us, people shuffle to a stop. Some of them approach the top of the hill and gape at the sight of Lankenshire perched in the distance like a beacon of salvation.

“One more night,” I say, raising my voice so that those around me can hear. “We’ll arrive at Lankenshire tomorrow. Tonight, we’ll camp there.” I gesture to my left.

The patch of land I’m pointing to is twice the size of the meadow we camped in before. Once upon a time, it may have been a farm or a dairy. Now it’s a huge expanse of high grass and collapsing barns. It gives us enough space to establish a perimeter so that we’ll see any threats from the forest long before they reach us. I have no doubt that the Commander worked quickly to find another way across the river. At some point, he’ll catch up to us again. I just pray it isn’t tonight.