The Dark and Hollow Places (30 page)

“The second we find a new Immune, you become a whole lot less important. Catcher becomes less valuable and your life becomes about my mercy.” He tilts his head to the side. In the small room I can smell his sweat. “And you already know how merciful I can—”

Before he even finishes the statement I swing the machete, aiming for his throat, and then, just as I’m about to feel the blade slice through flesh I stop, letting it hover over his skin. “What about
my
mercy?” I ask through clenched teeth.

I’d wanted a reaction, wanted to see fear, but instead he laughs. “You and I are too much alike for that,” he says. “It’s that fire I admire in you. If we ever had to teach Catcher a lesson, I’d be sad to see you be the one to go.”

He places two fingers on the blade, pushing it away. I resist and the razor-sharp edge cuts into him, thin lines of blood appearing. I know exactly the feel of that pain. It makes my empty stomach turn but he doesn’t even flinch. Instead he smiles, hesitating long enough before pulling his hand away that he makes his point.

“We had another Immune once, a few years ago,” he says. “We controlled him with his mom—he was a mama’s boy, always coming back to her and bringing what we wanted.”

My heart begins to beat heavily, my grip on the machete slipping a little as my palms sweat. He pauses, forces me to ask: “What happened?”

This makes him smile as I knew it would. “He felt bad that it was his immunity that made his mom a prisoner, though I thought we treated her fairly well, all things considered.

“Then one day he threw himself off a seven-story building.” Slowly, he raises his hand between us, rubbing his thumb over the thin cuts on his fingers, smearing the blood. He considers it a moment before continuing.

“I guess he forgot that, being an Immune, he was still infected. And being infected, he Returned. He couldn’t really walk too well, but he could still infect others.”

It’s silent as Ox wipes his bloody hand over the maps, smearing red across the Forest. I drop my arm to my side, the flat of the machete resting against my knee.

My throat feels tight, making the air in the room that much harder to breathe. “What did you do to him?” My voice cracks.

Ox looks at me hard, his eyes slightly narrowed. “We scraped him up and tossed him in a cage. And then we put his dear old mother in with him.”

Even though my stomach lurches at his words, I only clench my teeth—I won’t give him the satisfaction of a response. He smiles all the same and then leaves me alone to stare at the bloody maps, trying to figure out what to do next.

T
he next morning I wake up to find a package sitting in the chair by the window. It’s wrapped in a worn woven cloth. I look around the room, wondering who was here. The air is freezing and I tug a quilt around me as I climb from bed and pull the bundle into my lap, unwrapping it.

Folded inside is a thick wool coat that looks like it’s never been worn before. An intricate pattern is stitched around the edges and I run my finger over it. There’s something else tucked inside and I pull free a brightly knit scarf and a matching knit hat. The material of both is so thick and soft that I can’t help pressing my face against them, feeling the soft woolen hairs brush my cheeks.

It’s too perfect a gift. I look up to find my sister nudging open the door to my room. She sees me clutching the bundle in my hands.

“Was this you?” I ask, wondering how she could have ever pulled it off. I never saw her knitting and don’t know where she could have found such amazing materials.

She smiles, eyes bright, and shakes her head. “It was Catcher. He came by in the night and said a woman in the Dark City begged for a way to repay him for bringing her food and keeping her alive. He thought you’d want something.” She waves toward my closely cropped hair.

I put on the hat, pulling it down over my ears and luxuriating in the sensation of soft warmth.

“He brought me something as well.” She holds out a thick book. I take it from her, running my fingers over the cracked plastic that once protected the cover. I flip through pages of diagrams of buildings and structures that make no sense.

“Architecture,” she says, unable to hide the excitement in her voice. “It’s about building things.” She takes the book from me and sits on the bed, feet tucked underneath her. “I’ve always wanted to build things and he remembered.”

I wrap the scarf around my arms, lift the edge of it to my nose as if I could still catch a trace of Catcher. “He’s thoughtful like that.” I wonder how he found these things. How long he must have searched. I wonder why he didn’t wake me up. Why he didn’t say anything to me. I think about him sneaking into my room in the night, of me asleep and never knowing.

He was right here, could have stood at the end of my bed, and he said nothing. It’s clear he’s avoiding me. I pull the coat on, huddling into the heavy folds as if they could protect me from these feelings.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” she says, swiping at my shoulder. “Finish getting dressed—meet me on the roof! We can see how warm that keeps you.”

I’d planned on exploring more of the buildings on this end of the island again, hoping that we missed something in one of the basements. That maybe there’s an entrance to the tunnels after all.

I slide from bed and walk to the window. As if she senses my hesitation my sister comes to stand next to me. Beyond the river the Neverlands smolder and the Dark City lies gray and dormant. Dead continue to spill through the streets. They flounder from the docks into the water and eventually will wash ashore on the Sanctuary island.

“Where do you think they’re housing the Soulers?” I ask, staring at the wall and wondering how many Sweepers were just on the other side last night, protecting us and getting nothing in return.

“I don’t know,” my sister whispers softly. “There were a lot of rooms in the basement of the headquarters,” she says. “That’s where they kept me.” She hasn’t talked about the time she was imprisoned before the rest of us got here. Even now her face is drawn thinking about it.

“There were others down there too. I knew there were, but …”

“But what?” I prod.

“Sometimes they took them away and never brought them back,” she finishes. She crosses her arms, shivering at the memory. “I never asked what they were doing with all those people. I didn’t want to know.”

I think back to the death cages I’d seen my first night here. The frightened man they’d thrown to the Unconsecrated. “Catcher’s the one bringing them over,” I admit to her.

She winces. “I wondered.” She doesn’t elaborate.

Which only frustrates me. “I don’t understand how he can do it. How he can bring those people here knowing they’ll likely die.” I push away from the window, walk back over to the bed and stare down at the scarf draped over my pillow.

How can Catcher be both the thoughtful person I care about and the person who gives people a false hope?

“He’s doing what he has to.” She sounds almost resigned.

“Yeah, but what about
their
survival? Why are we allowed on this side of the wall and they aren’t?”

She shrugs. “I guess we’re lucky.”

Nothing in my life’s ever seemed lucky before, but then again, here I am standing inside with food down the hall while Soulers are out there in the cold keeping me safe. “It’s not fair,” I say, wishing there were something I could do.

My sister crosses the room, takes my shoulders and turns me to her. “It’s not fair at all. We’re going to find a way off this island and we’re going to take them with us.” She tilts her head, meeting my eyes, and I nod.

“Now,” she says, her voice lighter. “Catcher left books about the Dark City from before the Return. I want to see if we can match up the landmarks and figure out if maybe there’s something in there that will help us get off the island and find someplace safe.”

“Good idea,” I tell her. “I’ll meet you up there.”

She smiles and bounds from the room.

It takes me a while before I follow, and when I climb to the roof I find my sister standing by the wall at the edge. She’s holding up a photograph at arm’s length, looking between it and the Dark City spread out before her across the river. Books lie scattered on a blanket at her feet, pages fluttering in the morning breeze.

“What’s that?” I ask, pulling my new coat tight around me and retying the soft scarf wrapped around my neck. It’s a bright morning, the kind that reflects off the ice and snow and burns the eyes.

She turns back to me, a flush across her cheeks. A small breeze teases the hair along her temples as she holds the little card out to me.

Surrounded by a yellow border is a photograph of a city. Gleaming buildings stretch to the sky, an impossible monstrosity of steel bones. Written across the top in thick yellow letters are the words
New York City
.

There’s something about it that tickles in my mind, like I’ve lived this moment before somewhere else. A flash of a memory when I feel as if I’m in two places and two times at once. “This was …” I’m trying to find the words and my sister finds them for me.

“It was our father’s,” she says. “In our cottage growing up. Don’t you remember?” She seems so hopeful but when I try to picture that home all I can see is the crumbling village. All I can hear is the echo of voices hazy around the edges. I shake my head.

“I didn’t either,” she says. “Until I went back. It was still on the wall. My mother—Mary, who raised me—told me it was hers. Something she’d found a long time ago when she’d fled to the ocean. It was the first real proof that there was an outside world, and she’d given it to our father so he could have something to hold on to. To give him hope.”

I close my eyes, desperate to remember. But all I can see are the photos in the makeshift museum I saw when I was younger—similar snapshots of a bright world now dim.

“Anyway,” my sister says, a forced brightness to her voice. “I’m trying to line up the landmarks.” She pulls me next to her. “See here”—she points at one of the tallest buildings in the picture—“I think that’s what that over there used to be.” She motions to the stump of a skyscraper in the middle of the Dark City that fell years before either of us was born. Crooked spikes of metal twist from a debris pile, rust turning everything a russet red like dried blood.

“And this,” she says, pointing at another set of low buildings in the photo, “is over there.” She sweeps her hand back along the island. “In the middle you can see how this green-roofed building lines up along that row where there’s the shell of an old glassed one.”

She kneels, grabbing one of her books. “And then you can look them up in here and see what they used to be like. Some of them have pretty crazy histories of hidden bars and secret entrances to the underground tunnels, like that green—”

My frown cuts her off as I take the picture from her, twisting it and turning it, squinting and trying to see the city that used to be. “I’m not sure,” I tell her. “I don’t think it’s the same at all.” I examine the photo. “What about this one?” I ask, pointing out a slender tower with a dagger-sharp tip. “This has never been there.”

She looks up and shrugs. “Maybe it was an old picture even when the Return hit,” she argues. “But the river matches up along the side there,” she says. “And it just feels right. Don’t you get the same feeling looking at this picture as you do looking at the City?”

I can’t help it, I laugh. “This?” I ask, flicking the picture against her nose before handing it back to her. “There’s nothing the same between them. One’s new and bright and shiny and the other’s old and dead and forgotten.”

She frowns. “Not forgotten,” she says.

My breath catches a little at how serious she sounds when she says that. “No, not forgotten,” I say, even though I don’t believe my words. We forget too fast. Sometimes it’s probably a gift, though—we forget the pain also.

She shakes her head, her eyes glistening. “It wasn’t supposed to last this long, you know.”

“Us?” I ask, confused.

“No, this city. One of the books Catcher brought me talks about what would happen if everything shut down. It says the city would crumble in a few months. Maybe last it out for a few years—a decade or two perhaps. But no one thought it would ever last this long.” She’s staring at the remains of the city. The steel and glass and concrete still struggling to hold on.

“It’s been decades,” she whispers. “Over a century and then some. It’s stayed alive.” She stands to face me. “Don’t you see? Don’t you understand that if this city that no one had any hope for can do it, then we can too? Look at this,” she says, grabbing my hand and pressing it against the photo.

“We’ve been looking at what’s not in this picture. At everything that’s fallen. But what about what’s still there? What about what’s made it through? What about the ones that survived?”

I want to tell her that buildings aren’t as fragile as people are. They can’t get infected. They don’t need to eat and breathe and sleep and love.

“After we’re gone this city will still be here, and maybe …” She takes in a deep breath. “You know, maybe they can build something we didn’t. Maybe they can find a way to make it work that we couldn’t.”