The Keep: The Watchers (9 page)

T
he first thing I did was find out who Toby Engel was (using, of course, a good dose of that discretion Alcántara was so fond of). My “target” wasn’t exactly Mr. Sociability, and I had to ask around a bit before I found someone who knew who he was.

Now that I did know, it was hard to notice anybody else. The guy was huge. Strapping. A great, big, freckly corn-fed boy with a whiff of the American farmland to him. Burly shoulders suggested a youth spent tossing hay bales and plowing things. I sat in the dining hall, pretending not to watch him.

God help the guy, he was dumb as a post. Even if I hadn’t eavesdropped on snippets of his conversation, I could’ve seen it in the watery blankness of his blue eyes. Seriously, there were boxes of hammers sharper than this kid.

I tried not to panic. Because how was I supposed to kill
him
?

It wasn’t his obvious strength that put me off. Brute strength didn’t scare me—I was bright; I could outwit him blindfolded
and on no sleep. It was that he struck me as a total innocent. He was like a character in a Steinbeck novel, a Lennie, some dumb and tragic brute whose greatest crime might’ve been accidentally petting someone’s puppy to death.

This was Alcántara testing me. He wanted to challenge what little was left of my moral compass. He’d know I couldn’t kill a Lennie.

A distinctly male body slid into the chair next to mine. My skin prickled, on instant alert. This body smelled of fresh air and salt water, his dinner tray held by hands I’d recognize anywhere.

Ronan.
I didn’t need to look to know it was him. He kicked back, munching on an apple.

I stiffened. He was acting casual. He never acted casual. “What are you doing?”

He took a big bite and made me wait while he chewed. “Sitting down.”

“I can see that. I mean”—I flicked a glance right and left—“
why?
” There were Acari and Trainees all around. There were a couple Tracers, plus some Proctors and a handful of Watchers. Shouldn’t he be socializing with one of them instead? He only came to me when there was bad news, stuff involving wetsuits and trials in deep water.

“I’m here to eat a meal. You were alone. So I sat down.” He hooked his thumb along the edge of his tray, tugging it toward him like he might grab it and go. “Would you rather I left?”

“No. Of course not.” That was Ronan—putting a fine point on the matter. He had a way of defusing me, making my drama seem silly. I felt a burst of vulnerability…. How I missed a rowdy table full of friends. “It’s good to see you.” And it was.

“Are you well? You look…”

The statement hung, so I finished it for him. “I look like I lost my best friend?”

“Aye,” he said, instantly understanding. “So you do, and so you have.”

Again with Ronan and his not-beating-around-the-bush thing. I felt his eyes heavy on me, searching for something. I ripped my dinner roll in half, trying to play it cool. “So,” I asked stiffly, “are you here to drill me on what we learned in that wilderness workshop of yours?” I was in his Tuesday/Thursday elective, and he’d promised a semester of learning to live off the land, build fires, those sorts of things.

Emma
things.

I had to sip water to wash down my bread.

“It’s called a Primitive Skills Intensive,” he said, but his voice had been taut. Too taut.

I let my gaze rise, finally daring to meet his, uncertain what I’d find. Would there be amusement? A scold? But what I saw instead surprised me. There was unmistakable tenderness in those forest-green eyes.

Scorn, discipline, mockery…those I could deal with. But tenderness? I was
so
not equipped to deal with tenderness right now. I had a plan. That plan didn’t involve friends or kindness or vulnerability of any sort. I had to stay focused.
Resistance and revenge.

I turned my full attention to my dinner, using my fork to push around a pile of cold, limp green beans, desperately racking my brain to come up with some random topic to chat about.

Emma wasn’t the only thing bothering me. My eyes wandered back to Toby Engel. He sat at a table full of Trainees but was in his own world, busily shoveling food down his gullet like he might win a prize for it.

What was his story? Did he have a family who loved him? A mom who’d baked pies and cooked him breakfasts of eggs and bacon and biscuits and a dad who greeted every dawn from the back of an old tractor? Had they posted
Missing
signs? Was Toby’s face at some post office, pinned up with thumbtacks, or on utility poles, shining from beneath layers of clear packing tape?

Then I realized the person to ask was sitting right next to me. Ronan would know Toby’s story—hell, Ronan might even have been the Tracer who’d brought him in. “Is that Toby?” I asked, hoping against hope he’d divulge that the kid was actually a closet serial killer.

Ronan followed my line of sight, then looked back at me. I could see the cogs turning. Did he wonder why I was asking about some random new Trainee? Or maybe he already knew. Maybe Alcántara’s “secret project” was actually part of the general curriculum.

Finally, he nodded. “Yes.” The sudden stoicism in that single word said he understood a little something about my assignment.

I frowned, studying Toby, watching in awe as he polished off a dinner roll in two bites.

Alcántara wanted me to kill that boy
poetically
.

Poetic—what did that even mean? Like, was I supposed to go ironic with it? Maybe find some farm tool and get him good?
Farm Boy Trainee Slain! Rototiller-Wielding Initiate Reaped What He Sowed.

I bit the inside of my cheek. Anything to keep myself from losing it. “He looks out of place.”

“True.”

I swung my gaze back to Ronan. “Then why is he even here?”

The question had been rhetorical. I hadn’t expected him to
answer. But he surprised me, offering, “Perhaps the vampires believe he will be tractable.”

Tractable.
They’d bend this poor, dim boy to their will. And then they’d use his outsized physical strength against the rest of us.

Either I could do as I was assigned and kill Toby Engel now, while he was still an innocent, or I could kill him later, after he’d invariably gone bad, joining the other guys on this island who’d discovered just how fun it was to torment the girls.

My vision wavered. I had to flee. That Ronan could see how upset I was made my urge to escape all the more intense. I needed to bus my dishes and get the hell out of there. “Gotta go,” I blurted, scooping up my tray and standing.

But Ronan wasn’t going to let me go that easily. He snarfed down a last bite of his apple and hopped up to follow me to the dish cart, the majority of his dinner left untouched. “See you at
wilderness workshop
,” he said, mimicking my earlier words.

Damned if it didn’t bring a smile to my face.

In my time on the island, I’d known varying degrees of trust for him, but I guessed he really was a friend. I guessed I needed that.

The prospect of making my way through the sea of bodies back to the main entrance was too nightmarish to consider, so I headed to the service exit near the kitchens instead. I shoved open the metal door, leaving the cocoon of warmth and noise that was the dining hall, and was plunged into the cold, quiet air of the back hallway.

Alone again.

Until I heard the clip of shoes behind me.

I sped up a little, fighting the urge to turn around. If my follower
were friendly, they’d call ahead to me. But they didn’t speak. I told myself the person just happened to be using this same back exit at the same time as me, which meant I could speed up and their pace wouldn’t change at all. To test the theory, I walked just the teensiest bit faster.

Their pace increased to match mine.

Crap
. They
were
following. It was a menacing
clip-clip
, right behind me.

I burst into a little race walk, around the storage area, the outside door in sight. But they walked faster, and faster still until that
clip-clipping
burst into a jog. It definitely wasn’t a benign, let-me-catch-up-so-we-can-chat sound.

I felt the person at my back—sensed it was a guy—and I began to turn, but before I could get into position, he’d pinned me from behind, my throat trapped in the crook of his arm. My body instinctively exploded to action, wriggling and bucking. “Get…off.” My voice was a rasp as he choked the air from me.

I recognized the arm now. Long and leanly muscled, I’d seen it thousands of times, slung over the shoulders of my best friend. It was Yasuo.
Yasuo
was the person strangling me from behind. I clawed frantically at his forearm, but it was a steel band around my neck. “Enough,” I croaked. “Stop.”

“
You
didn’t stop,” he growled, and it was a feral sound, like he’d already made the full transformation from teenaged boy into something monstrous. He flexed his arm tighter. “Not when you fought
her
. This is for Emma.”

My movements grew weaker, slower. I needed to think this through, but it was so hard. He’d choked off blood flow to my brain, and I was fading fast. If I didn’t stop him, he would kill me.

No
!
a voice shrieked in my head. My own panic would be the
thing that killed me. The first order of business was to calm the hell down. I’d held my breath for far longer than this. I grew utterly still, envisioning a self that didn’t require oxygen to survive.

We’d practiced choke holds in Priti’s class. I knew the move I had to do. Pictured the mechanics of my escape. I wasn’t strong enough to pry my way out, but I could use leverage against Yasuo. The right twist, the right flex and angle…It was all physics.

Power, not strength.

The thing about grappling, it was counterintuitive. To get away, first you had to get closer.

I grabbed Yasuo’s wrist and wrenched myself even more snugly into the crook of his elbow. The move opened the tiniest gap for me to shift, and I twisted in to him. Hugged him tightly around the waist. I ducked, bowed, and then was free.

I shoved off him at once and began to jog back and away, under no illusions that I could beat him if the fight got ugly. “Don’t…say…” I coughed and clutched at my aching throat, catching my breath. “Don’t talk…about Emma.”

When he didn’t pounce on me, I slowed. Stopped. And then I stared.

He was simply standing there, quaking, looking like a shell of the Yas he’d been. He was off his game. So much so, I wondered if I actually
might
have been able to beat him in a fight.

It gave me the courage to risk saying more. “This is the last thing…” My throat spasmed, coughs racking me, but I managed to catch my breath and swallow. “She wouldn’t want this.”

I paused to give my words meaning beyond this one tussle in this particular hallway. She wouldn’t have wanted us to fight here, and more than that, she wouldn’t have wanted this distance between us. We were becoming exactly what the vampires
wanted us to become: scared, estranged, suspicious—things that made us need them.

“We don’t have to do this,” I said. It was a simple statement, and yet to believe it stole just the tiniest bit of power from them. I’d find ways to steal even more.

I’d convince Yasuo that I wasn’t the enemy. Convince him that I wasn’t the one to attack. If he channeled his anger at the real culprits instead, if we sided together against the vampires, we’d be stronger. Power could be ours for the taking.

Power, not strength…my new motto.

I
was shivering in the bitter January night, trembling, race-walking back to the dorm. Yas had profoundly freaked me out. He was increasingly unstable, and I worried he was losing it, like in a fundamental about-to-snap sort of way.

I understood his anguish. His anger. But his fury went beyond grief or blame to something deeper. He felt horror, and he blamed me. If I found out what happened to Emma, maybe I could convince him that her death wasn’t my fault. Maybe then he’d forgive me.

Carden had sensed my distress, and this time, he hadn’t waited. He came right to me, catching up with me on the way back from dinner—right after my tussle with Yasuo. Like,
right
after.

He simply appeared beside me on the path, startling me. “Who hurt you?”

I put a hand to my chest, gasping a breathy half laugh. “Don’t do that.”

“I caught you unawares.” His eyes hardened. “You must
always be on guard. It is a lesson you must learn if you are to survive.” He softened, putting a fingertip beneath my chin. “And I’d prefer it if you survived, aye?”

“My guard is just fine.” I couldn’t help it—the fight with Yas had been too disturbing—and there was an edge to my voice that didn’t usually come out when I was with Carden. “In case you haven’t noticed, you vampires are a little on the stealthy side.”

Vampires, and Yasuo was becoming one of them. I put a hand to my throat, feeling the ghost of his arm constricting around my neck. It was like he was still choking me. All those fragile bones ready to snap. And even worse than the physical sensation was the betrayal. That was what strangled me now. My loneliness, suffocating me.