E (19 page)

He's not even going to deny it.  I turn away before I can say
something that'll end up with me and Sarah hanging out together.  I never
liked her.  I cross my arms and clamp my jaw.

"Don't pretend you didn't know she was flirting with
death," he says, casually.  I'm not looking at him, but I'm sure he's
studying his nails.

As I turn back, I see he is.  "She was desperate,"
I say, trying to hold back the confrontation in my voice.  My words come
out carefully, even though I'm fuming inside.  "This whole Outpost is
desperate."

He looks me up and down.  "That so?"

Try as I might to hold it back, my fingers squeeze into
fists.  A hot rush colors my cheeks, darkening like the sky.

He shifts, turning toward me.  "What I meant," he
says, his voice soothing, "is that if you need help..."

"These people need help," I snap, before he can finish
his offer.  "How long are you going to let them--"

"Not very long," he says, straightening suddenly and
closing the distance between us.  He puts his hands on my hips and looks
down into my eyes, murmuring to me like he's saying something entirely
different.  "It takes a while to put together an attack," he
says, in a low voice as smooth as cream.  "A few more days and things
will be better.  You'll see."

I blink up at him, start to shake my head.  He responds by
moving his hands to my face, brushing his thumbs along my cheekbones, smoothing
my hair back with his fingers. 

"What will you do?" I whisper.

He tilts his head in the tiniest shrug-like gesture, then gazes
down at me with half-closed eyes.  "Take back what's ours," he
murmurs.  "I'm sending armed escorts for the supply shipments. 
After that, we'll deal with Grey himself."

The feeling of panic is worming its way out again.  I
consider telling him that Grey has been plotting this for years.  That his
armed escorts will probably be slaughtered.  But instead, I say,
"Grey?"  He can't know that I know anything.  I can't trust
him with that.  I can't end up like Sarah.

He dismisses my question with a little shake of his head, and
leans toward me.

I close my eyes.

A shout from the door makes him pull away.  I look past him
toward one of his men, who has stepped in from outside.  I'm not sure what
he's said, but Matt moves suddenly away from me, toward the table.  He's
putting his back toward the wall.  Heavy footsteps trample outside the
front door.  I jump onto a barstool and hoist the untouched drink that
Arthur left for me, spilling a little of it down my front.  I hunch over
the bar and let my hair hang into my face.  The footsteps slow as they
come inside.  I don't look toward the door, but in my peripheral vision, I
count at least fifteen large bodies passing through the opening. 

"What the hell is this?" says a voice behind me. 
It belongs to Colton, Matt's right-hand-man. 

"The answer to your negotiations," says a voice that has
stopped right beside me. 

"And?" says Matt impatiently. 

It makes me wonder how he's survived so long.  I close my
eyes and make myself breathe.  Be very still, and get out of here alive, I
think.  Just be still.  Pretend to be some drunk.  This is not
your business.

"Grey doesn't negotiate," the voice next to me
says.  At first, the clicking sound is foreign, then I recognize it as a
hammer being cocked. 

Don't.  Don't.  Don't.  I fall drunkenly off of my
stool.  All hell breaks loose.

My fall comes close enough to distract the guy next to me-- the
one with the gun.  He sidesteps to avoid me.  A bullet hits him in
the shoulder, sending him stumbling.  I recover myself and kick the gun
out of his hands.  Gunshots explode around the room, making my head hurt,
my ears ring.  Blood spatters in every direction. 

Two men behind me, locked in battle over a knife, knock into
me.  I almost lose my footing.  Almost, because the guy who had the
gun is on his feet, grabbing me, and slamming me into the bar.  My ribs
crunch against the wood.  This time, there is a definite crack, and a
sharp, throbbing pain.  I can't breathe.  My head is an overinflated
balloon.  Spots swirl around in my vision.  He presses me up against
the bar and reaches around my belt for my knife.

The pressure eases up.  He gurgles.  I manage to spin
around to see the blood dripping out of his mouth, splattering onto my
jacket.  He clings to me as he falls, and more blood, like a fountain
springing from his stomach, rains onto me, until my whole front is slippery and
red.

Matt kicks him away, wet knife in hand, and says, as the light
goes out of the man's eyes, "Don't touch her."

The last of the bodies are falling around the room.  Four of
Matthew's men are still standing.  Blood runs freely between the
floorboards.  Grey matter peppers one wall.   We all wear a
uniform of sticky, dark liquid.  And we are far from safe.

Matthew grabs me by the arm and hauls me around the end of the
bar.  I stumble to keep up with him, but I can barely breathe or
think.  Our survival will only last seconds.  Sentries will burst
through the door soon.  But Arthur Adner is hiding around the other side of
the bar.  He jerks a dirty rug out of the way and opens a trap door into
the floor.  Matt shoves me ahead of him into the darkness below.

I roll as I hit the bottom and scramble to my feet.  It's
dark and cold.  I can't see.  Everything that has happened so far is
nothing compared to this.  I scream.

Matt grabs me from behind and clamps his hand over my mouth. 
I bite down, making him swear.  I kick and thrash, trying to get away from
him.  Trying to get away from the darkness.  He manages to hang onto
me and drags me deeper into the tunnel.  I strain against him, clawing,
scratching him, hurting myself.  My nails dig into his arms, making long,
warm gashes.  Parts of me twist in haphazard directions as he restrains
and drags me.  My lungs and head will burst any second.  I know
it.  I will die.  I can't wait to die.  I only care about
getting away from this-- from him-- because he has become the darkness
itself.  He has become the box.

"Somebody get a fucking light," Matt grunts.  It's
something far away that has nothing to do with me.  I've returned to
primal instinct.  To chemical fear.  He slams me up against the
wall-- hard-- and the light comes on.

I stare at it, small and flickering, and freeze.

Matt lets out a long, frustrated sigh.  He looks into my
eyes, eyebrows quivering with restrained rage.  His hand slides away from
my mouth.  He glances down at it as if he might be missing some fingers.

All of that happens in my peripheral vision.  I'm looking at
the light.  One of Matt's men holds up a small flashlight.  Its blue
aether glow, instead of illuminating, makes everything else seem to fade away
to nothingness.

Matt releases me entirely now, and jerks the light out of the
man's hand.  He places it in my palm and holds my whole arm out so I can
see.  "Go that way," he says.  "There's a door at the
end."

I start running into the darkness.  I don't care that I might
trip, twist an ankle, or break a leg.  I don't care about the things that
rustle away from my oncoming footsteps.  There is a door.  I will get
to it.  My whole body shakes as I run, bouncing the blue light around on
the rough-hewn corridor.  My knees are not enough to hold me up.  I
have to get out of here before I collapse.  I run faster.  My chest
aches all the way from the bottom of my ribcage up into my throat.  I can
barely hold the light, but I cling to it as if there's nothing else to keep me
in this world.

The corridor stretches on, and I begin to think that it's a
trick.  I'll never get out.  I have run into my own grave where no
one will ever find my body.  I have run the passage to my own hell. 
If I ever find a door, it will only lead into a box.  The blue light grows
dimmer, it's color thickening like a dying star.  I am lost.  I slow
to a stop, and sob, even though the motion of it makes my chest feel like it
will break apart.  I hold out the light in my palm and watch it
fade.  This is what death looks like.

I'm standing in black.  I want to scream.  It's building
in me.  But there's no energy left to release it, so the anguish turns
itself inward.  The scream works itself noiselessly into my soul, teeth
biting down, squeezing, crushing, tearing.  I'm falling inward. 
Turning to dust.

My shoulders slump.  I hang my head, stare at the toe of my
boot.  I stare.  I study the way the line of it curves around. 
Like it exists in another dimension, away from here.  A thin ribbon of
brown lies across it.  My boots aren't brown.  I narrow my
eyes.  It takes bending down.  Touching it.  Trying to feel a
difference between the brown and black.  Trying to decipher it like a
code.

Light.  A narrow band of light.  Now, surrounded in this
strange calm, I look up.  The door.  I feel the wall and find a
ladder.  I climb it.  The pain is now so far away from me.  Am I
really in pain?  Or was it someone else?  I push the door open. 
It makes a deep creaking noise, heavy until I get it past halfway. Then it
crashes open with a bang.  It bounces and splinters break off of its
half-rotted frame.  The sound, though, is far away.  Everything is
far away.

I emerge into a shed made of wavy metal panels fastened together
at the corners.  Gaps of lights leak through the edges.  I look out
and see no one.  A quiet yard with weeds cracking through the pavement. 
I close the trap door, and open the one to outside.  In the street, I
recognize this place.  I'm only a block from home. 

My hands are shaking as I push our door open.  I stand on the
threshold.  Everyone gapes at me.

"Blood," Miranda shrieks, and leaps toward me.  She
yanks me inside and slams the door behind me. 

Jonas is at her side.  "Where are you hurt?" he's
asking, his voice dead calm.

I shake my head.  It's all I can do.  Tears start to
spill down my face.

Apollon, struggling to sit up, grunts, "the fire."

Miranda has her knife out.  She slashes into my jacket, my
shirt, and starts pulling my clothes off.  Jonas helps her.  The
humiliation is a thin and distant thing behind the horror of what's
happened.  Oscar runs to the wood stove and throws the door open. 
They form a line, passing my clothes from hand to hand, until they end as food
for the flames.  I stand there sobbing, and let them.

"Get the pump going," Miranda barks at Oscar. 
Apollon has made it off the couch and to the stove.  He takes over there,
poking everything down into the embers.  As he closes the stove door,
Miranda pulls me toward the bathroom.

I climb into the tub and she hoses me down with water so wintry it
should be in solid form.  I hunch over in the tub, teeth chattering, as
she blasts me with coma-inducing coldness, and watch the water run red, then
blush, then clear.  It's clear for a long time before she stops.  I
think I actually have frozen there because I can't seem to get my body to
move.  She throws the towel over my back and half-pulls me out of the
tub.  I manage to make my legs go along with her plan.

I'm still dripping and shivering when we stumble together into the
main room.  Jonas takes one look at me and pulls the quilt off the bed,
wrapping it around me.  I'm not sure if it's the quilt, or the warmth of
his arms, but I start to feel, in the tiniest bit, alive.  He leads me to
the bed and sits me down, tucks the blanket around my feet to seal out the
air.  I close my eyes, and try to breathe.  It takes too much effort,
so I give up, and fall over sideways, thinking I'll pass out.

It is then that the Sentry throws open the front door.

The dark, inhuman face regards us.  We stare back, statues chiseled
out of fear.  The low hum of its internal motors is the smothered screams
of a thousand voices.  It looks downward.  Waves of aether heat
distortion slither into our home.  My eyes-- the only part of me that is
not frozen-- move to the floor.  I must have dripped blood there.  I
must have dripped blood all the way from the street to our house.  I
brought it here.  Will it know to only kill me, or will it take my whole
family?

Neveah is gone, I think.  A small concession.  Tears
fill my eyes and run sideways onto the bed, crossing the bridge of my
nose.    I want to drown in my own tears now.  I want
everything to be done.  I'm tired of catching what Fate throws at me.

As suddenly as it comes, it goes.  The door flaps in the
wind.  Squeaking.  Banging.  A spastic percussion of fading
metal footsteps and the hanging mouth of our house.  Miranda stands up
quietly and closes the door.  She slides the lock into place, and stands
there with her hand on the knob, staring at the floor.

"We cleaned it," Oscar says softly.  "Me and
Jonas.  We cleaned it."

I blink tears away and look at the floor where Miranda's
standing.  A large black scorch mark gouges into the floorboards. 
Whatever they did, it could have burned the whole house down.  But it
worked.  The tears return suddenly in a sob that makes me squeal and
clutch my chest.  Jonas looks at me, but it's Miranda that moves to my
side.  She leans against the bed next to me and strokes my hair. 
"You're safe now," she says.  But I'm not.  There is
nowhere safe in this world.

She orders Jonas out to fetch Neveah.  He complies.  I'm
grinding my teeth and squeezing my eyes shut against the pain for what seems
like hours before they finally return.  Wanting to gouge my eyes out
slowly to distract myself from the pain.  Then Neveah is back, and mixes
up one of her teas, and manages to get some of it in me.  I'm certain I'm
going to throw it up before I have it even halfway swallowed, but then,
suddenly, I'm drifting.  My body relaxes, and only then do I realize how tightly
clamped every muscle in my body was.  It's like a sigh that happens in
each fiber, each cord of my flesh.  All at once I breathe out.  I'm
floating.  I'm gone. 

I sleep for what feels like the better part of a lifetime,
half-aware, sometimes, of voices, conversations.  I think the others go to
bed and get up again.  Maybe more than once.  Oscar's voice, and
Apollon's, filter through the fog.  They're talking about something that
happened in the marketplace.  And the cost of rice.  I want to add
something important.  I attempt to raise eyelids made of lead.  I
mumble something about collecting feathers. 

"Feathers?" says Apollon, making me realize that I sound
like a lunatic.

I grunt and fall back asleep.

It probably happens more than once.  My drugged sleep is
filled with strange dreams and half-dreams.  Every once in a while I catch
a glimpse of my white spire, but it never holds.  Everything is a wash of
impermanence, changing like colors swirling together in a bucket.  One
thing becomes the next, and the next, and the next.  They mix together
until they're indistinguishable.  By the time I really regain
consciousness, I don't remember any of it.

I blink against the filtered light that seeps into the
house.  It must be daylight.  My head feels full, and moving makes it
throb.  I lie very still.  Eventually, I focus on Jonas'
face.  

He's sitting beside me on the bed, watching me quietly. 
"Hey," he says, like he knows that if he speaks any louder my head
will actually explode.

I breathe in.  Pain detonates in multiple charges throughout
my chest.  After that, my breaths are shallower.  "We have to
leave," I say, using as little air as possible.  The words barely
make it out, but he seems to understand me.

He nods.  "I know."

"Matt..." I begin to explain.

He nods again.  "I know," he says.  "We
heard what happened at the Rustler."

"No," I insist impotently.  "You can't work
for him."  I try to breathe enough to continue. 
"He..."

"Hung Sarah?  Yeah, I know."  He frowns and
touches my cheek.  "I couldn't," he says.  He looks
away.  "When I saw that, I...  I mean, it's not like I didn't
know.  It was just... like a sign or something.  Like Fate was
saying, 'don't do it'." 

That's when I realize that we're alone.  Jonas doesn't talk
like that when the others are around.  I listen, and hear Apollon
breathing softly on the couch... asleep.  Neveah must be at the
marketplace.  "Where are Miranda and Oscar?"

He looks at me like the question surprises him.  His eyes
scan my face, then he looks away again.  "Uh... rats, I think,"
he says.  And he stands up.  He gets some water, then helps me sit
up-- which hurts like hell-- to drink.  The cold is so soothing on my
cracked lips that I almost forget to bother swallowing.  When I'm done
drinking, I lie down flat again.  I let my head stop swimming, and try to
continue this conversation.

"Matt's men are going to die," I whisper to Jonas. 
"He's sending an armed escort for the shipments, but he doesn't
know."  I don't explain better, because it takes too much effort, and
I know that Jonas understands what I mean.

He frowns at me for a moment, then says, "So?"

Talking takes so much work.  "I have to tell him,"
I say, my lips forming the words with very little voice behind them.

His frown deepens.  "Do you
want
to die?" he
asks.  "Because if not, maybe you're just stupid.  So which is
it, Eden?"

I close my eyes against my anger, which I have no energy
for.  I say very calmly, "Then tell me about this plan to
leave."

He doesn't exactly have a plan.  But he has plenty of
desperation.  I can hear it in his voice, even though he tries to keep it
level.  Jonas needs to leave, and his reasons go beyond mere
survival.  He wants to leave here the way I want to run and keep running
until I find my white tower.  He has something he's looking for,
too.  Something that calls to him even when he shuts his ears. 
Something that won't leave him alone.

So the plan is full of holes, at best.  Sell what we
can.  Get as much of the right supplies as we can.  Make a litter to
drag Apollon.  Make a litter to drag me.  I stop him there.  I
can walk.  I can ignore the pain, and I can walk.  Apollon says he
can, too.

Both of us blink, realizing that Apollon is listening to this
conversation.  How long has he been awake?

"How you feeling?" I finally ask, staring at the
ceiling.

"Great," comes the voice from the sofa. 
"How's that rib?"

"Great," I say.

He makes a noise.

Well, we're both great.  Jonas rolls his eyes.

"So we're walking," I say, not ready to let our planning
die down to inaction.

"Matthew has locked the Outpost down after what
happened," Jonas informs me reluctantly.  "No one in or
out.  We'll have to leave at night.  Try to slip out."  He
purses his lips for a moment, then adds, "We won't be ready to leave right
away.  If things go sour here, we'll just have to hang on.  It
doesn't matter what happens to Matthew's people, so long as we can stay out of
it."

I don't like the sound of this-- of hanging on.  I'm ready to
leave now.  I'm ready to climb out of this bed and march straight out the
door.  I try to sit up, and groan, and fall back to the bed.  Maybe
not.  Maybe just a day or so.

That day or so adds up and adds up.  I find myself unable to
get out of bed.  This is only partly because of the pain.  I'm
tired-- tired deep into my soul.  I want to close my eyes and sleep the
rest of my life away.  But when Neveah weans me off of the drugs, I have
trouble sleeping at all.  When I do, my nightmares return.  If it's
not the box, bodies and blood pile up.  I flail, which wakes me, and then
I can't return to sleep for long periods of time because I'm in pain. 
Jonas rests his hand on my hip at nights, instead of putting his arm over me,
where it could press on my ribs.  His fingers rub lightly over the
blanket, soothing in their steady rhythm.  They're like a lullaby sung in
touch, and the only reason I go back to sleep at all.  If he wasn't there,
I might never sleep again.  I want to tell him thank you, but somehow, in
the daylight I can't say it.  I look in his face and can see nothing of
the tenderness I remember.  Have I imagined it?  But every night,
when I can't sleep, his touch soothes me until I can.

When I'm finally able to climb out of bed, still clutching my
crumpled towel, there's a pile of new clothes waiting for me.  They're
from Matt, Oscar explains.  Because my others were ruined with
blood.  I scowl and Oscar admits to answering Matthew's questions about my
wellbeing. 

"You need clothes," Oscar shrugs innocently, as though
he doesn't understand the harm of accepting a gift from Matt.  But then he
adds, "It was his fault your clothes got ruined, right?"  Maybe
he does understand.

There's a shirt, pants, a jacket, socks, undergarments, and boots,
all better than what was burned.  The cloth is like a whisper against my
skin.  The leather is supple, thick, and sweet-smelling.  Everything
fits perfectly.  The jacket is not too tight around my ribs, as if Matt
thought of this, too.  As if he thought of everything.

Jonas gives me a dark look when he first sees me wearing it. 
He says nothing, but I can see him think it.  I'm stupid.  I'm going
to get myself killed.

I turn away from him and pretend I don't notice.

During the days, Jonas slips out to make preparations.  He
takes a few items to sell or trade, and comes back, stashing new things in
bundles under the table.  One day, he shows me a compass, its arrow
steadily pointing northward.

"But don't we just follow the road?" I say, wondering if
he thought of this.  Wondering if there wasn't something more necessary he
could have traded for.

He shakes his head, kneeling at the packs to tuck it away. 
"There's one road for a while," he says.  "And then there
are others.  We'll need to find our way, once we get past Outpost
Four."

Past it.  That's when I realize.  We're not just going
to Outpost Four.  We're going south, where Jonas' arrow is pointing. 
Once we start that direction, he's not going to stop.  Our journey
suddenly gets much bigger in my head.  Following that comes the thrill of
excitement.  The image of the white spire looms in my mind, clear as in my
dreams.  "Do you think we'll find the white tower?" I mumble,
before I realize what I'm saying.

Miranda, sitting at the table, looks up.  "White
tower?" she says.  She snorts.  "We'll find twenty if we
keep going long enough."  Then she frowns.  A deep frown. 
She doesn't want to go, and she's made this clear again and again.  I
think she's starting to come around now, but then, looking at that frown, maybe
not.

Jonas has tucked the compass into the pack and is still squatting,
but he's turned his head to look at her.

"Twenty?" I say, raising my eyebrows.  I'm aware
that my exterior must seem very calm, though inside I am chaos.

Miranda looks at me blankly, then grows a small smile.  She
realizes she knows something I don't and she's enjoying it.  "There's
one in every city."

I close my mouth.  I breathe.  "There's a white
tower in every city?" I ask calmly, curiously.  I catch Jonas
glancing at me over his shoulder, but I don't look at him.  My eyes are
fixed on Miranda.

"Sure," she says, shrugging it off, looking back at the
nails she was picking before the topic came up.  She doesn't add anything
for a while, and I hold my breath, wondering if I should ask.  Wondering
if I should leap up and shake it out of her. 

Jonas rises slowly to his feet and stands looking at her, and
me.  Her, and me. 

Miranda glances at me and I raise my eyebrows higher.

"Oh," she says.  "Well, they built one in
every city back at the Turn.  They were supposed to be meeting
places.  You know.  For everyone.  Back when they thought we'd
all be having picnics or something."

I blink slowly and look at my hands in my lap, fiddling with my
fingers.  Jonas sits beside me on the bed, and looks at my fingers,
too.  A long silence passes between us.

"Huh," I say, finally.  "Meeting
halls."  I stand up, put on my jacket, and walk out the door.

***

We're finally on the brink of departure, and everyone is running last-minute
errands.  Oscar and I roast rats over the coals in the stove, carefully
wrapping and packing some meat for the journey.  It won't last long, but
we'll want a meal of some sort, and food costs more than we have.  Jonas
has spent the last of our money on other things we'll need, and traded off our
bigger items for smaller, more usable ones.  Our frying pan has turned
into a spare knife.  Our dishes have become an old leather pack with
shoulder straps.  We cannot trade our larger items without revealing what
we intend to do, so we'll be abandoning some hard-to-get things like the
mattress, and rain barrels, and our shack with running water.  This was
one of Miranda's complaints.  How can we leave all this behind? 
Apollon insisted we'll replace it, and do even better somewhere else.  He
reminded her that they rigged up the pipes and the pump.  Why can't they
do it again?