“Cira,” I say sharply. I try to keep from panicking, try to keep my tone even. But I know what the streaks and heat mean; I know she’s got a blood infection and she’s had it for a while. “Why didn’t you say something?” I rack my brain, trying to remember what plants and herbs to use to bring down the swelling. My mother used to make it and the recipe is just on the edge of my mind.
She pulls away from me. “There’s nothing we can do out here, I didn’t want anyone to worry,” she says, rewrapping the wounds.
I shake my head. “We could have done something,” I say. “Does Catcher know?”
“No.”
“Cira, you can’t keep this from him,” I tell her, my voice low. We both know he’ll be insane with worry but he should be aware of what’s going on.
She purses her lips, her way of telling me to stop arguing. But she’s my best friend and she’s hurt and I’m angry that she hasn’t told me about this, that she hasn’t allowed me to help her. This isn’t like us, keeping secrets.
She edges closer and leans against me. “It’s going to be okay, Gabry,” she says. She’s still the same girl who waded into the river while I stayed on the bank and cried. She’s still the one to hold my hand and tell me it will be okay.
“Maybe we should go back to Vista,” I tell her, my voice thick with memories and longing for that time before everything changed. “We can find something for your arms.”
She shakes her head and raises a hand to smooth my hair off my face, pulling it loose from my braid and then combing the tangles with her fingers. How many times did she do this when we were growing up? How often did we sit around gossiping and sharing dreams?
But what is there to gossip about now? The people we knew—Mellie and Daniel and Blane—are dead or joining the Recruiters. The dreams we used to have seem so far away now, like the faded satellites circling in the night with no purpose, no way to call them back.
In my dream I’m running down the path through the Forest. It’s lined with intricately woven metal fences and I’m chasing a girl but I don’t know who she is. She’s young and lithe, her long blond hair blowing behind her in the wind. The fence is crowded with Mudo, all of them wearing the white tunics of the Soulers, and they pull and yank at the delicate metal, causing it to sway and rattle.
My lungs sear with the icy cold pain of having run beyond my limits, but I’m afraid that if I stop my legs will no longer hold me and I’ll collapse. I’m not fast enough, I can’t reach the girl, and somehow I sense that she knows this but she won’t slow down.
And then I see her reach for something and she grabs the photograph of Mary and me in the ocean—the picture of us laughing in the waves—and she tosses it high over her shoulder. I try to catch it but it floats through the air, morphing and twisting until it’s a bloodred bird that flies off into the night, scarlet feathers from its wings drifting around me.
The girl turns to face me then, and instantly I recognize her. It’s me—I’ve been chasing myself.
I stop and fall on the ground and while the Mudo tear down the fences and crush around me, I stare at the bird as it drifts higher and higher, letting its feathers float around me and bury me. I watch satellites whirl through the sky, blinking a message I’ll never understand, as the girl who was me runs away into the the dark Forest.
And then I feel a hand around my wrist, a familiar hand, and it pulls me out of my dream. I wake up gasping and find Catcher kneeling next to me in the darkness. The fire’s nothing but shifting embers and I can hear the even breaths of Elias and Cira sleeping.
“It’s okay,” Catcher says. “It was a dream.” But I’m still struggling to breathe, my heart beating so hard it shakes me. He pulls me against him and I curl into his heat. I feel the pound of his pulse echo through my body. It’s so strong that it’s hard to believe it carries infection. It’s easy to pretend that nothing’s changed. To imagine we’re back in the darkness of the amusement park, the summer stretching out endless and full of possibilities around us.
I look up at his face, reach up with a finger and map out his jaw in the night. I can feel his muscles move under my touch. I let my hand drift to the back of his neck and I push my fingers into his hair. I lean my head toward him, tugging him to me.
In the darkness it’s easy to believe that tonight’s like any other night in our town, just the two of us in the amusement park flirting with our futures.
But this time he doesn’t allow his lips to brush mine—he tilts his head away.
“Why won’t you kiss me?” I ask.
Chapter 32
Catcher’s voice is like a hiss of raindrops hitting a smoldering fire. “Because I’m infected.”
“But you’re still alive. The infection means nothing,” I tell him, feeling desperate to believe that nothing is different. I push the image of him standing among the Mudo at the amphitheater from my mind. I concentrate on how solid he feels under my fingers. On how infinitely human he is.
“It means everything, Gabrielle,” he says.
“How?” I sound petulant but I don’t care.
He squeezes his eyes shut. “Because what if it means I can infect you?” he whispers.
I suck in a quick breath. It’s something I haven’t considered, and sitting here now in his lap I feel instantly vulnerable. I swallow, my throat straining as I push down the sudden fear that leaps around me. What if he’s right? There’s no way to find out without taking too big a risk.
I don’t know what to tell him. I don’t know how to challenge what he’s saying. And my silence tells him everything. He sets me from his lap and stands and starts to walk away from the fire.
I scramble after him. “Catcher,” I call out softly, trying not to wake the others.
He starts to jog but I refuse to let him go. I’m tired of not knowing what’s going on with him, what’s going on between us. I stumble over rocks and debris that he seems to skim right over and it’s not until he’s reached the fence that I catch him. He pushes his fingers through the links as if grabbing hold, as if preparing to climb.
“Wait,” I tell him, desperate to make him stop. I come up behind him. I press myself against him and wrap my arms around his chest. “Wait,” I say again, needing to have him listen to me even though I’m not sure yet what I want to say. His heat wavers over me, always that incessant reminder of his infection.I press my lips to the base of his neck and I wonder if he can feel me trembling. I kiss the contours of his shoulder. Can he sense my fear? Does he know how miserable I’ve been? He sags slightly as his breath shudders through him.
“I can’t, Gabry,” he says, but he doesn’t stop me. I twine my fingers around his, gripping the fence with him, the barrier between our world and his world.
“You’re just like me,” I tell him. “We’re the same,” I add, but I’m not even sure I believe it. I don’t know what to do with him now. I don’t know how to talk to him. To this boy constantly on the edge of death. Everything I’ve ever known, everything I’ve ever learned tells me that he should be dead. Should have died days ago.
What do you say to someone who faces that?
I try not to think again about Elias and the Soulers and their beliefs about the Mudo and humans, how we’re intertwined. Instead I pull back the folds of his shirt and I press my lips against the edge of the red welt on his shoulder. The only visible remnant of the wound that infected him.
Just then a Mudo lunges against the other side of the fence and I pull back, Catcher’s heat leaping through the air between us. He turns and leans on the metal links. Behind him I can see the moon glinting off the cloudy Mudo eyes; I can see the outlines and edges of their broken teeth and hungry mouths.
I try to hide my horror but I know that Catcher can see it. “You’re not like them,” I tell him again, trying to convince us both, but I know he doesn’t believe me.
“I can’t take the risk, Gabry,” he says. “I’ll never know if I’d infect you.” And then he turns and climbs the fence and before I can reach for him he’s on the other side. He pauses and slides a finger through the links. I reach out and grab it. “This is part of me now,” he says. The Mudo around him push as if he’s not there, as if he’s one of them, and his grasp falls from mine.
I want to shout for him to come back but I press my lips together to keep silent. I want to tilt my head back and scream at the world for doing this. For making everything so complicated and unfair. I want to pound at the fences and kill all the Mudo, end their moaning that won’t ever stop.
But I don’t. I just stand there and stare at them. They were always nothing but monsters, nothing but animated death to me before; a scourge to be dealt with. Yet Elias’s questions still circle through me, making me wonder if anything of who these people were could be left behind, trapped inside.
Because if I’m alive and the Mudo are dead—what does that make Catcher?
I wake up the next morning to the sounds of screaming. I’m lost, struggling from the depths of sleep, cresting to the surface to find chaos. It takes me a moment to realize that it’s Catcher shouting and he’s yelling for his sister.
He sprints toward the fence, his hand raised. “Cira, wait!” he calls out. There’s panic in his voice, threading through the words.
My heart jumps and I’m instantly alert. I look to the ground next to me where Cira slept and find the spot empty. My mouth goes dry, a thousand possibilities spinning through my mind. I surge to my feet, my toes and fingers numb with sleep.
I catch movement out of the corner of my eye and see Cira at the fence line. She’s already climbed halfway to the top and for a moment I can’t make sense of it. Can’t figure out why she would be trying to get into the Forest. What she could be running from or to.
But she keeps pulling herself higher and I realize that she’s about to reach the top. Already the Mudo are shifting through the trees, shambling toward the promise of her with their arms outstretched.
Sweat coats my body. Elias is already chasing after her by the time I stumble up behind him.
“Cira!” I cry out in surprise and alarm at the same time Elias yells for her to stop. She pauses and looks over her shoulder at us. At her brother.
For a moment I think she’ll stop. I think she must be delirious or asleep. That she’ll hear us and slip back down to the ground and the safety inside the fences. But she just turns and keeps climbing.
“Stop! What are you doing?” I yell. She doesn’t listen. Doesn’t look at me again. It’s as if I’m not even here, as if none of us is. I push harder, trying to make it to her before it’s too late.
Elias is almost to the fence. He reaches for her but she swings her legs over and jumps to the other side. We’re both too late.
“Cira!” My throat is almost raw. “Come back!” Too many thoughts hit me and tangle at once: that she’s in the Forest, that it’s not safe, that she doesn’t have a weapon, that if I only scream louder she’ll hear me and understand.
Horrified, I watch as Mudo shuffle toward her. She runs past them into the trees, stumbling through the thick underbrush.
I reach the fence and beat it with my fists. “Cira!” I shout. I twist my fingers around the rusty links and scream louder. I don’t understand what she’s doing, what she can be thinking. The metal of the links digs into my fingers but I don’t care—I just pound harder.
Catcher hits the fence next to me and doesn’t hesitate before launching himself over it. He lands on the other side and sprints after his sister. The Mudo don’t even turn toward him. Don’t even notice he’s there.
I feel the sobs beginning to build. Beginning to suffocate me. “Please come back, Cira,” I try to scream, but my voice catches and breaks.
I can only watch as Catcher cuts toward his sister and the Mudo close in on her, block her from view. They choke off the distance between her and the fence and they begin to stumble in from either side as well. The blood dotting the bandages on her arms intensifies their need, their craving, and they lurch closer.
“We have to help her.” I start trying to climb. “We have weapons, we can keep them from her,” I say, desperate to do something other than stand here and watch.
But Elias pulls me back, wraps his arms around my body. “We can’t,” he says. “There are too many. They’d get to all of us.”
I shake my head, my mind screaming to protect Cira even though I know that Elias is right. We stand there, me choking on sobs and Elias holding me as we watch Catcher close in on his sister, and I have to turn my head away. I can’t watch my best friend get bitten.
I realize then that Elias is pressing his lips to my temple. “Shhh,” he keeps saying, but I can’t stop the keening wail that echoes from deep inside me. I press my face into his shoulder, my lips trying to remember a prayer, trying to entreat anything, anybody to save my best friend.
Elias cups his hand over my head, holding me tight against him. “He’s got her,” he says. His body is tense. I feel his heart beat wildly beneath my cheek.
“He’s carrying her out.” He tries to sound calm but I can hear the tension in his voice. I turn my head and peek back through the fence and I see Catcher running away from us at an angle, carrying Cira deeper into the Forest.
“Wh—what is he d-doing?” I stammer, grabbing the metal links. I shake the fence, clinks and reverberations radiating out to either side. He’s taking Cira away from us, away from the safety.