The Dark and Hollow Places

“I’m not saying your killing him was wrong, I just …” I take a deep breath and lean my hips against the low wall circling the roof. “I don’t think we can be so indifferent to life,” I finally finish. “I’m not sure we should be the ones judging.”



Catcher opens his mouth to defend himself, his jaw tightening, and I rest my hand over his to cut him off. I press my lips together, knowing I have to say this but afraid of how he’ll respond. I push forward anyway.



“You terrified me back there, Catcher. You’ve talked before about how you feel caught in between the living and the dead because of being immune, but you’re going to have to choose which side you want to be on. It’s the Unconsecrated who take life indiscriminately. It’s the living who strive to preserve it—even for the worst among us.”



He lets his chin drop to his chest, his hand snaking to the back of his neck and pulling at the taut muscles lining his shoulders. “He was about to kill you, Annah. I couldn’t let that happen. He wouldn’t have stopped coming after you.”



I tug on his arm until he lets go and I can press his fingers against my chest, over the thumping of my heart. “I’m still alive,” I remind him. “You’re not an evil person, Catcher. But that doesn’t make it okay to kill the rest of the Recruiters. Maybe it’s not fair—but we have to be better than they are. We can’t sink to the worst of them.”



I lay my other hand on his face, tilting it back until the light of the night splays across his cheekbones, his eyes. “Killing them would make us monsters. What’s the point of working so hard to get off this island if we’re going to turn into monsters anyway?”



Catcher pulls me to him and together we stand there staring up at the sky, the heat of him keeping me warm against the winter chill.



“We have a little time to figure something else out,” I tell him. “I’ve already made progress quilting together material for the balloon. You just need to make sure the people left in the Dark City will have what they need and be ready on time as well.” I turn and face him.



“We can make this work. I know we can.” I wonder whether if I say it often enough, with enough force, I can make it true.



He pulls my head to his chest and I listen to the beat of his heart. “Do I still scare you?” he asks and I can sense the fear and uncertainty in his voice.



“Always,” I tell him. He catches his breath and I lean away until I can see his eyes. “I’m scared of losing my heart to you. But I think it’s a risk I’m willing to take.”



I’m kneeling on the floor, sifting through the scraps of quilts my sister’s already sewn together, when she shuffles into the room. Her hair’s greasy, hanging around her face limply, but her eyes are no longer dull, her cheeks no longer fever-flushed.



“What’s going on?” she asks, a little out of breath from walking down the hallway. She’s weak from the illness and slides down to perch on the edge of a nearby chair, her muscles trembling slightly.



“I had no idea you’d quilted this much,” I say, organizing the fabric into different piles: what looks strong enough to bear our weight and what doesn’t.



She shrugs, picking up one of the strips of intricately pieced cloth. “It gave me something to do. I like putting things together—making something out of nothing.”



Another detail I didn’t know about my sister. There’s still so much for us to learn about each other. “We’re trying to sew a big fabric bag—sort of like a balloon—in less than two days,” I tell her.



She looks at me, eyebrows raised. “You figured out how to fly?”



I blush a little, wondering if Catcher’s getting the same reaction from the survivors in the Dark City—he went to tell them about our plan this morning. “Maybe. It might not work but …” I shrug. “Catcher’s found a ship not too far away. We just have to make it off the island and down the mainland a bit.”



She presses a finger against her lips, thinking. “Any idea how to steer it once it’s up there?”



Cringing, I shake my head. “That’s a detail I hadn’t gotten to yet.” I twist my fingers in the fabric spread around me, suddenly wondering if this is a stupid idea after all. I clearly haven’t thought through how it all works. What if I end up killing us?



“Elias!” my sister calls out. We hear him grumble in the other room as he pulls himself out of bed and comes to stand in the doorway.



I can’t help but see my sister’s playful grin as her eyes slide down his body. It’s evident they’re feeling much better after being so ill. I glance away, the moment too intimate for me to watch.



“Annah’s making a balloon to carry us to a ship Catcher found,” my sister says as if it’s old news. “She needs a way to steer it. You’re good with flying things—think you can come up with something?”



His eyes light up. “How big a balloon?” he asks.



I shrug, gesturing at all the fabric. “That big.”



He walks to the window and looks out over the river. “How far?”



I shrug again. “Down the coast. That’s what Catcher says.”



“I’ll draw up plans.” Excitement laces through his words. “You know, I was in a plane once.”



My sister rolls her eyes at me. “We know,” she says, giggling.



He shoots her a mock-stern look. “But after that, when I needed a place to spend the night, I slept in an old library. They had books about flying and I read everything I could. I never thought about a balloon, but it could work.”



He’s almost jumping with energy. He begins to pace and mumble, calculating surface area and lift, and my sister and I go back to the piles of fabric.



I push the sewing box toward her. “Think you have enough strength to tackle all this?”



Grinning, she settles back into the chair, pulling out a tarnished thimble and slipping it on her finger. She picks up haphazardly sewn rags. “Who stitched these?” she asks, looking at one of the crude seams.



I glare at her and she laughs, obviously enjoying making fun of me. We get back to work, me struggling to keep pace with her speed and Elias muttering as he sketches designs for some sort of propeller.



Chapter XL



Later, after Elias goes off to search through the building for some gears and soft metal he can bend into blades, my sister stands and stretches, then sets a kettle on the wood-burning stove.



“When you were in the Forest with Elias when we were kids,” she says, staring out the window into the darkness, “did you think you were going to die?”



I’m so startled by her question that I don’t know what to say. I think back on that time, remembering each moment.



“Yes,” I tell her. “Every day.”



She nods, seeming lost in her own thoughts. “But you kept pushing?”



“We didn’t have a choice.”



She pauses for a moment, shifting so that she can see our reflections in the window, her head tilted to the side as if she’s trying to figure something out about me. Her eyes trace over my scars but I don’t feel judgment and pity—it’s more like a sculptor trying to fit the pieces of a puzzle together.



“You and Catcher?” she asks, one eyebrow raised suggestively.



I feel myself turn a bright red and she smiles, that being all the confirmation she needed. “I thought so. He’s a really good person.” She says it almost wistfully.



“I know.” I stare at the strips of fabric in my lap. All these different pieces of cloth ripped apart from clothes and blankets that became worn and useless but now have a new purpose. I run my hand over one of the uneven seams, feeling the bumps of stitches.



Broken things can be made whole again. Perhaps not as they were before, but maybe stronger this time.



“You asked me on the shore what I’d do if I had only a few days left?” I venture.



My sister nods and pours herbs into the hot water, suffusing the room with an earthy scent.



“I decided that I’d live,” I tell her. “I decided I’m tired of being scared and waiting for other people to make up their minds about what they want—I’m going after what I want.” I pull another pile of fabric toward me. “And what I want right now is off this stupid island.”



My sister laughs, bringing me a mug of tea. She curls back on her chair, legs tucked underneath her. “I want to build something,” she says, getting a faraway look in her eyes. “Recently I’ve had this idea of a village.” She sounds hesitant, as if waiting for me to make fun of her. But I hold myself still, barely breathing, wanting to hear more.



After a while she goes on. “There would be these beautiful buildings all connected with bridges—everything would be off the ground. It would be a part of nature—not trying to change it but to meld with it.” She smiles. “It would be safe. We wouldn’t ever have to worry again.”



It’s silent in the room when she’s done. Down the hall we hear Elias throw open the door, a clanking of metal as he drags in supplies for his steering contraption. My sister and I glance at each other, dreams of possibilities still floating in the air around us.



She pulls the lantern closer to her lap and picks up where she left off, focusing on her hands guiding the needle in and out, in and out. Everything about this moment feels so content, so right.



“I think they’re ready across the river,” Catcher says. We’re standing on the roof in the darkness before sunrise, the clear air frozen around us. Catcher came back from the Dark City a little while ago after helping the remaining survivors put together the necessary materials. He stands beside me, gripping my hand as Elias buzzes around a crudely constructed box he built from wood from the walls of one of the abandoned flats. It’s open on the top, a thin metal cauldron in the center to hold the fire and bags of fat-soaked wood strung around the sides.



It’s tiny—we’ll have to squeeze together inside—but it looks sturdy enough. Lying next to it is a simple-looking propeller attached to a hand crank that can be shifted to any side of the box to steer us.



My sister flutters around attaching thickly braided ropes reinforced with wires to the box and making sure they’re secured to the fabric of the balloon, which is folded at the edge of the roof.



Once we start the fire and direct the smoke into the balloon there’s no turning back. If the Recruiters see us before we can get it inflated enough, we’re in trouble.



I stand by the wall around the roof with Catcher, watching the Sanctuary below to make sure no one sees us. It’s frigid outside and I lean against his body for warmth as he goes over the last-minute details.



“The survivors I found were able to pull everything together pretty quickly. They’ll be looking for the signal just before first light. There’s also a group of Soulers at the other end of the Sanctuary—they’ve been working on one too. It’s going to be harder for them: I’ve been smuggling supplies to the shore but they said the Recruiters might have found them and confiscated everything.”



I press my lips together, rocking back and forth on my feet to keep the blood pumping through my body as dread boils in my stomach. “Is this going to work?” I ask, probably for the hundredth time.



Catcher squeezes my hand in his but doesn’t answer because the reality is we don’t know. “Did I tell you about the night I climbed the roller coaster back in Vista?” he asks, trying to distract me from all the ways I imagine this whole thing failing.



I frown at him, trying to remember, and shake my head.



“It was after I’d been infected. I was alone, living out by that amusement park. I’d always been afraid of heights and I sat there and stared at the roller coaster and I realized that I was going to die. In a few days, I’d be dead.”



It hurts to hear him talk about what that time was like. How alone he must have felt.



“And so I climbed it. If I was going to die, let me die doing that—something interesting.”



I raise an eyebrow. “Are you trying to tell me that if all this fails, at least it will be interesting?”



He grins, pressing a finger to my lips to quiet me. “No, I’m telling you that it was this amazing feeling.” The light from the fire dances over his face. “I’d accepted that it was the end and I just sat there, staring out toward the darkness of the ocean and the starlight flashing off the crests of waves and knew that we were all part of this bigger whole. That somehow I mattered in the course of things and a part of me would always have left its mark on this world.”



He stares at me for a long while. “The funny thing is, once I realized I was immune and wasn’t going to die in a few days, I became scared of heights again. Scared of life and losing it. But for just that moment when I thought the infection would take me, I realized that life isn’t something to be scared of. That you don’t have to hold on so tightly that you can’t breathe.”



He leans his forehead against mine. “Don’t be scared. This is going to work—you’ll make it,” he whispers.



I squeeze his hand, never wanting to let go of him.



Eventually, my sister and Elias finish their prepping and we stand, the four of us, staring out into the darkness. I know what happens next: Catcher will leave to go light the fire in the big empty field not too far from the ship so that the smoke will guide us where to steer when we’re airborne after first light.



“It’s getting close to dawn,” he murmurs.



I grip him tighter. What if something goes wrong and this is the last time I see him? I close my eyes, willing the sun not to rise. Just this once.