The Dark and Hollow Places - Carrie Ryan [114]
“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.
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