The Dark and Hollow Places (6 page)

Cautiously I feel through the air with my toes until I find a step and then another. As I descend the air grows even thicker, wrapping me in its embrace.

“Annah, I know who you are,” he says, his voice closer.

I say nothing, just continue to grope my way down the stairs, putting distance between us so that I can think.

He releases a puff of air in what sounds like frustration. “I know who you are because Elias told me about you.”

I freeze, all words trapped in my chest. It’s odd to hear a stranger say his name and a little tremor of pain flutters through my chest at it. I clench my teeth, swallow the emotion back down.

It’s so quiet I can hear as he shifts in the darkness. “He told me to come find you,” he adds.

“How do you know Elias?” My voice trembles, making me sound weak. I bite my bottom lip, needing to regain control over my body, my thoughts.

“You can trust me,” he continues, taking another step forward. But he must not have realized that he was standing on the edge of a staircase. He must not have known that the ground drops away, because I hear the surprised gasp as he starts to fall. I hear him scramble to catch himself.

And then he tumbles into me, and our bodies tangle around each other as we careen down the rest of the steps. We land hard on a cracked concrete floor, lights exploding in my head as it smacks against the wall. Catcher falls on top of me and I feel the knife still clutched in my hand slice through his skin. Feel the wetness of blood on my fingers.

“Oh my G-God,” I stammer, choking in the darkness. Catcher grunts and slides off me and I drag myself out from underneath him, our legs still snarled.

I drop the knife, feeling the slick of blood coating my skin. “Oh my God,” I say again. “Are you okay?” There’s so much blood I’m terrified I’ve killed him and my stomach twists with a frantic dread.

I reach for him, grab him and run my hands over his body, searching for the wound. “Oh my God, I didn’t mean to. Are you okay? Catcher, are you okay?”

He doesn’t say anything and the realization that I may have murdered someone starts to make me dizzy. I don’t know whether I should leave him and go to the surface for help or stay here. I skim my hands up his legs and over his hips, trailing them along his chest that thankfully still rises and falls.

“Catcher,” I shout at him, needing him to be okay. His skin’s hot where I touch him and he winces as my hands slide over his forearm, blood dripping from his wrist. I fumble in my pack for the quilt, shredding a strip from it and pressing it to the wound.

He grunts and rolls away from me but I keep my hands locked on his arm. “You’re hurt,” I tell him, relief rushing through me that he can move.

He pushes at me but he’s still disoriented from the fall.

“You’re hurt,” I explain again. “Just hold still and let me stop the bleeding. I don’t know how deep the cut is. There’s too much blood.”

He jerks up and swings at me, throwing me back from him. “Get away from me,” he roars. My ears ring with the sound of his voice that still echoes up and down the staircase. I sit frozen, my hands grasping at the darkness.

My breath hitches. I’m confused and don’t know how to respond. I reach for him, just slightly, and I hear him back farther away. “Don’t touch me,” he growls.

His words sting and a low rage begins to build inside me. “I was only trying to help,” I lash out at him, any relief at his recovery now gone.

I grope in the darkness for my knife and when my fingers accidentally brush Catcher’s leg, he pulls away. “I said:
Don’t. Touch. Me
.” He grinds out the words, harsh and commanding.

Every one of my scars feels like it’s on fire, a scalding blush burning my body. Angrily, I fold the remnants of the quilt and shove it back into my bag, yanking it closed.

Without a word I stand, dizzy and disoriented, and feel my way forward along the wall until I find another set of stairs. My worthless eyes blur with tears at his sudden and unexpected censure but it doesn’t matter in this darkness. I fumble down the steps away from this stranger and his anger and heat. Away from the way he makes me feel.

“Annah,” he says, a tinge of apology and wariness in his voice.

I keep walking, my hip aching where I was kicked and my head throbbing from where I hit it during the fall. The pain becomes overwhelming and I stop and take a deep breath and then stagger away from the sound of Catcher.

He shuffles around on the landing, muttering curses, and I hear him start after me. But I push deeper into the darkness. The stairs end and I stumble on solid ground, not knowing where to turn, where to go next. It’s disorienting having no idea where the walls are or where the platform ends—where the tracks are. I’m lost in a sea of black nothingness that crawls along my skin. Catcher trails after me, his footsteps never far behind.

“You said Elias sent you. Where is he?” I hate asking but I have to know. I cross my arms, needing something to hold on to. The darkness makes me dizzy. My head throbs, pounding from where I hit it. I shake it, trying to stop the spinning, but it just makes my brain hit against my skull with an agonizing thud.

Catcher comes near but doesn’t touch me. I hear his breathing, feel his heat. His earlier words echo in my mind, making me feel stupid and worthless, and I dig my fingers into my arms, fighting against the unwanted emotions.

“He’s still with the Recruiters,” Catcher says. My heart jolts, a fluttering pain. My chin trembles.

“He’s okay?” I can only whisper the words. If I say them out loud, I might scare the hope away.

“He promised he was on his way to the Dark City,” Catcher answers, and I squeeze my eyes shut and press my palm to my mouth, trying not to let this stranger hear the way my body shakes with relief.

I don’t say anything in response, wondering if I can trust
him. If Elias trusted him. The floor seems to tilt under me and I can’t tell if it’s because of the sparks in my vision or that the ground beneath us is uneven. My stomach starts to roil, my head throbbing harder.

“I’m sorry, Annah,” he finally says, his voice softer. He moves closer to me but keeps some distance. Still, his warmth makes me shiver. My body starts to tip and I throw out an arm to stay steady and balanced.

“It’s just …” He hesitates. I hear what sounds like him running his hands through his hair. I try to remember what he looks like from the brief glimpses on the roof. The gleam of the moon on his neck when he threw his head back to laugh. He’s taller than I am, I know that. I can picture his broad shoulders, long fingers that he cupped around the Unconsecrated women’s arms.

Nausea inside me grows too full, the blackness spinning around me faster and faster. My stomach heaves and I swallow, press my palm harder against my mouth, trying to keep from throwing up. The dark is too heavy. I feel as though I’m drowning.

I can smell his blood on my hand, feel it drying and cracking on my skin. It’s like a metallic sheen on the back of my tongue. I double over, retching.

“Annah,” Catcher shouts, lunging toward me. He wraps his arm over my shoulder and I fall against his strength, my legs losing all sensation, my fingers going numb.

I retch again, my back arching as I heave, my mouth filling with saliva that starts to choke me. I gasp for air, my body feeling like it’s floating. Bright spots flare in my vision, almost beautiful, like stars with darker voids swallowing them.

“Annah,” Catcher yells again, holding me close. I slip along
him, falling to the ground as the world tilts and sways and I don’t know what’s up and what’s down. My head screams pain, my skull too small to hold it all in.

He lays me on my back and runs his hands up my body, over my arms and legs and finally along my neck until he’s cupping my cheeks in his palms. His pulse beats against my skin, hot. My eyes flutter, the heat so nice. Something to focus on. Something to curl up against as chills spike through the rest of my body.

“My blood,” he says. He’s leaning over me, close now. I can feel his breath, taste the desperation in his voice. “Did you touch it?” He holds my cheeks tighter in his hands, his fingers arching under my neck. “Annah, this is important. I need to know.”

My eyes roll back in my head but it doesn’t matter. They were useless anyway. I much prefer the colors dancing in my mind. A woolen fog seeps in around me, blurring the pain and tempting me to dream.

“Annah!” Catcher calls to me, his voice loud but so far away. It slides along my consciousness, fading into the sound of water rushing and the wind howling. I want to raise my hand to his cheek. I want to tell him it’s okay. That it’s pretty here in my head and it doesn’t hurt. But instead I just let the black wash of waves roll over me and drag me under.

W
hen I wake up there’s light and the crackle of a fire. I open my eyes and stare at an intricately carved ceiling of interwoven bricks arching overhead. The flames flick oranges and yellows over them, shadows stretching and snapping. Smoke curls through a small vent, disappearing into the void above.

We’re still underground at an old subway station somewhere in the Neverlands. I’m lying on my back on the platform, the quilt from my bag spread over me, its smell familiar and comforting. I let my head fall to the side, wincing as a dull ache throbs along my spine.

The stranger, Catcher, sits on the other side of the fire, staring at nothing. He’s so lost in his own thoughts, his own world, that he doesn’t realize I’m awake. I let my gaze wander over his features: sharp jaw, blond hair, brown eyes so dark they seem almost fathomless. His knees are bent with his elbows draped over them, a strip of cloth wrapped around his
lower arm from where I cut him when we fell. Bruises from our tumble down the stairs already bloom under his skin.

There’s something about him that seems familiar, and I search my mind trying to figure out why. Generally I don’t bother with other people, don’t care what they look like or who they are. Everyone around me’s always a stranger.

It’s safer that way.

And then I realize what it is. “You’re the one from the bridge.” Belatedly it hits me what that means: He’s infected. I scour his face with my gaze, trying to detect how far along he is—how close to turning. But his skin’s flushed with health, his eyes clear. He looks nothing like the woman on the roof, only heartbeats away from death.

His eyes flick to meet mine. “How’re you feeling?” he asks.

I push myself up until I’m sitting, the quilt falling from my shoulders and pooling in my lap. I shiver, feeling dizzy and sick, but I shove the sensations away. “You’re the one who climbed the wall and fell in the river. They thought you were dead. You should’ve drowned.”

He drops his head a little, rubs the back of his neck with his hand. It’s such a familiar gesture that I stop breathing for a second. It’s something Elias always used to do. To buy time, to think, to figure out a way to swim through the awkward moments.

“I didn’t,” he finally says, and I almost want to laugh at his non-answer. But before I can react, before I can say anything or ask him to explain, he’s moving around the fire until he’s crouched in front of me.

He reaches out a hand, places it along my cheeks, rests his wrist on my forehead. I feel each scar on my face under
his probing fingers. I yank my head away, setting off a sharp throb down my neck and a pounding against my skull.

“Your skin’s hot,” he says. His eyes are wary, his lips pressed thin.

“I’ve been lying in front of a fire,” I tell him testily, moving away and pulling the quilt up like a barrier between us. “Of course I’m hot. That happens with flames.”

He glances over my shoulder into the darkness with such intensity that I almost turn around. And then his chin drops to his chest. “Does it feel like …” He’s looking up at me as he struggles for the words. “Does it feel like fire in your veins?”

His question doesn’t make any sense to me. “What are you talking about?”

He focuses on his hands. “Inside,” he says. “Does it feel like you’re dying? Being eaten by heat?”

I push myself to my feet and stumble away from him. “What kind of question is that?” A wave of nausea hits me again and I press a hand to my stomach, the other to my head, trying to stop the world from spinning. I blink rapidly, Catcher and the light blurring and then sharpening.

“Annah—”

“No,” I cut him off. “I don’t know you and you don’t know me. Why are you asking me these things? What’s going on?”

He stands up, arms by his sides as if he’s trying to prove he’s not dangerous. I don’t fall for it. I scour the station, trying to figure out where I could run to get away. My stomach heaves again, throwing me off balance, and I stagger.

He steps forward to help me but I hold up my arms, warding him off. “Stay away from me,” I growl.

Something hardens in his eyes. “I need to know if you’re infected,” he says, his tone blunt.

It takes a moment for my mind to process the meaning of his words but they don’t make sense. “Why would I be infected?”

“Because you’re clearly sick—you can barely stay on your feet. There’s something wrong with you and you touched my blood when we fell,” he says matter-of-factly.