The Dark and Hollow Places - Carrie Ryan [3]
But a dark thought seeps into my mind, one that’s been curling around the edges of my consciousness for months: Elias left my sister alone in the Forest of Hands and Teeth when we were kids. Why would I ever think that he wouldn’t leave me?
The woman stands and I whirl to face her, pulling the knife back between us, ready to end it. She doesn’t come closer or threaten me in any way. She just flips her pipe over and knocks it against one of the chimneys, spirals of embers twirling and fading around her legs and feet.
“Did you ever think about what you really wanted your life to be like? Like when you were a little girl?” She moves toward the edge of the roof. The darkness seems to stretch forever.
I think about the village where I was born. Where I had a sister and a father and a community of people who loved and took care of me.
That. That’s what I want my life to be like. Not this city. Not these scars. Not this loneliness. I remember the moment in the Forest when my sister fell and scratched her knee and how bright the blood looked. How desperately the dead clawed at the fences while Elias and I walked away from her.
But I tell this woman none of those things. Instead I shake my head. “No.”
Her face falls a little as if she was expecting a different answer. “Ever wonder what you’d do if you knew you were going to die?”
“We’re all going to die eventually,” I tell her.
She smiles, more like a wince. “I mean if you knew when,” she clarifies. “If you only had a few days.” She inhales, sharp, and adds, “A few moments.”
I shake my head. It’s a lie, but I don’t want this woman to know me any better than she already does. Being here for her death—that’s already more intimacy than I’ve shared with anyone in years. I don’t want to like this woman—I don’t want to care about her—because then this moment and the one that’s coming next will hurt too much.
I refuse to have feelings about someone when I know they’re going to leave me. I feel sorry that I can’t offer this woman something different, but I have to protect myself more than I have to protect her.
Her eyes begin to glisten and her shoulders shift as she pretends to laugh. “Oh well,” she says, waving her dirty pipe in the air as if it could clear it all away. “Oh well,” she says again, barely a whisper.
She begins to shake. I’ve seen it before, the infection taking a firmer grasp, burrowing in deep for the kill. Any moment she’ll collapse, her body giving out and dying. And then she’ll Return, clawing for my flesh.
I move toward her, knife tight in my hand, but she jerks her head, waves me away with a fling of her arm. She’s standing on the ledge of the roof. Below us the plague rats moan.
“I just…,” she says, raising a hand to her head, patting her hair into place. She presses her lips together, her nostrils quivering as she takes a deep breath. “I just wanted someone to remember,” she says then. “I just wanted to be beautiful to someone, just for a little while.”
And before I can ask “Remember what?” or “Remember who?” she tips forward and jumps. The rushing air pulls her hair from her face, and her body twists like a ribbon caught in a breeze for a moment before she tumbles into the darkness.
She doesn’t even scream.
I don’t have to run toward the ledge to know what happened to her. I hear the thump of her body hitting the concrete below. The sound of bones breaking, of her skull shattering.
I drop the knife and press my face into my hands, dig my fingers against my forehead, as if that will hold me together. I shouldn’t have been the person here at her death. I don’t even know the woman’s name or who to tell that she’s gone.
And suddenly I realize just how much her situation echoes my own. How no one would know or care if the same thing happened to me. How unlikely it is that any of the few neighbors remaining in my corner of the Dark City could even recall my name, much less notice if I went missing one day.
I’ve never felt so alone in my life. Sure, I’ve spent the last three years on my own but I’ve always focused on surviving and waiting for