The Dark and Hollow Places - Carrie Ryan [47]
I sweep my arm around the room at desks covered in paper. “Maybe they got information about somewhere that beat back the Unconsecrated—we just need to figure out what it is. Maybe it’s still in here.” Ox simply shakes his head as I start tearing through the desks looking for something, anything.
Finally, he puts a hand on my arm as I’m sifting through pages, tossing them onto the floor—some of them so old they crumble in my fingers. “It’s impossible in this world.” He says it gently, but there’s an undercurrent of anger, frustration and despair.
“We’re surviving,” I protest, not wanting to believe what he’s saying. Wanting him to be wrong.
He looks at me, so sad. “That’s what I brought you here to see,” he says. He walks over to the map where our island is clearly visible, a green pin stuck firmly in the lower end of it for the Dark City and another pin to the north for the Neverlands. A thick line bisects the two where the Palisade wall was built between them long ago.
He sorts through the pins scattered on the desk until he finds two black ones and sticks them both in the island. One for the Dark City and the other for the Neverlands. It’s such a final gesture that I can barely breathe. In a second he’s wiped out almost everything I’ve ever known.
He then collects a handful of silver-topped pins. “There’s one more color,” he says, pushing pin after pin into the map, all through the Neverlands and the river and across onto the mainland.
I don’t even have to ask. I know what he’s doing. “Silver means horde,” I say evenly. “It represents the horde.”
He smiles bitterly. “Not the horde,” he corrects me. “A horde.” He turns back to the wall, shoving in more pins. “This one’s from the beginning, right after the Return. They thought they could try to stop the infection if they led the huge hordes of dead into the Forest and closed them off. Contain them all. We’ve been fighting other ones for decades, slowly whittling them down. This one we just ignored. It was in the Forest, they were downed and there weren’t people around to waken it.…”
I press my cheek against the chilled wall, not even listening to him trace the route of the horde from the valley in the Forest toward the Dark City. Not telling him that I saw it as a child. My skin feels flushed, like a fever. This is all happening too fast—my mind can’t keep up anymore.
Finally, I realize Ox is silent. He shifts on his feet, coming to stand beside me. When I look up at him his expression is sympathetic, as if he understands my confusion and heartbreak. It’s hard to remember that he’s my captor now.
“It can’t all be gone,” I whisper, needing to believe this is some sort of complicated ruse designed to throw me off and make me docile.
He shakes his head, and I can tell that the maps are the truth. I can see in his own face the pain of this reality.
“That’s why I needed you to see this, Annah. You’re a fighter, like I am. But you need to know that there’s nowhere else for you to go even if you’re able to escape. If you want to survive, then you have to fight for this Sanctuary alongside us.”
He lets the final pins drop to the floor, silver flashing, as I try to catch my breath and stop the tears from clawing up my throat.
“We need Catcher,” he continues. “Our survival depends on his ability to go out into that world and bring back supplies and food. You and Gabry and Elias are here to make sure he comes back, because if he doesn’t, then we have no use for you anymore. You’ll just become a drain on our resources.”
He leans toward me. “I don’t like trouble—I don’t like dealing with it because it’s nothing more than a distraction.” The tendons along his neck strain. “And so there’s something you need to remember: we only have to keep around one person Catcher cares about to control him. And right now we have three.”
Slowly, deliberately, he reaches out a finger and trails a scar that runs along my jaw.