The Dark and Hollow Places - Carrie Ryan [51]
I close my eyes against the twisted joy and pain and try to control my breathing and swallow my sobs but I can tell that she’s shaking too. I can feel her tears trailing over my skin.
Finally, she pulls away, her fingers tight around mine. She’s staring at my hands and she traces a thumb over my scars. I stay utterly still and hold my breath, waiting for her to say something. She finally looks up at me, her eyes following the fissures across my face. “Elias never mentioned …” She trails off and I look back at our hands. At how smooth and perfect her skin is. Especially against mine that’s so marred.
It’s strange to hear her say Elias’s name. To think about them talking about me. For so long it’s felt like he’s belonged only to me—a desire so intense and hot burns inside me to know what they said. To know how Elias spoke about me.
I want to know why he didn’t mention my scars. Is he just so used to them that he doesn’t see them anymore? Or is he ashamed? Suddenly I’m hyperaware of each line along my face and down my neck, trailing over my arms, hip and thigh. Twisting around my knee and ankle.
“What happened?” she asks softly. It’s a question I’ve gotten so many times before and I always brush it away. But with my sister, I don’t hear the horror in her voice. I hear only the sadness that something so painful could have happened to her twin.
I swallow a few times—I’m not used to anyone but Elias caring about me like that. Not sure how to handle it.
And then I tell her about Elias and me. About where we went after we left her on the path—how we got lost and couldn’t find our way back to the village and eventually discovered a way out of the Forest and to the Dark City. How I fell into a patch of barbed wire when I was exploring the tunnels for artifacts and how Elias refused to let me go down into them ever again.
But I don’t tell her why he left me. I don’t mention the night he made me feel so beautiful and so ugly at once. Because I feel like to voice those words is to make them belong to someone other than me. Is to let them go into the world and never have the chance to get them back again.
My sister’s eyes glisten as I talk, and sometimes she can’t hold back the tears. And when I’m done she’s silent and finally she says, “I’m so sorry. It’s my fault. If I hadn’t been so scared when we went on the path …” And then her face crumples and I pull her to me.
“We were children,” I tell her. “We were barely even five.” But I’m not trying to give her absolution, I’m trying to give it to myself. Because I’m the one who left her behind to almost die.
She shakes her head, pushing closer to me. “It’s my fault, Annah,” she says. “I forgot about all of it. I wandered for so long that I was almost dead and I forgot about it. I grew up never remembering—never knowing. Even when something did spark a memory my mother—Mary—she’d tell me it must have been a dream. I didn’t even know about you until I met Elias. All this time and I never knew.”
“It’s all right,” I tell her, testing the words in my mouth to feel if they’re true. I pull back and place my palms on her cheeks, staring at her face. At what mine would look like if I weren’t so scarred. I can’t help but wonder what it was like for Elias to see her for the first time.
To wonder if he saw me. And I wonder if that’s why he didn’t come home to me. Because he found something better.
The Unconsecrated moans and reaches for us, stumbling around and around in his little caged wheel. I stare at his legs that will never stop so long as he senses human flesh.
“Are you okay?” I ask my sister, dreading the answer. “I saw them take you on the bridge. I was afraid they’d hurt you.”
She shakes her head. “No, I’m fine. They just threw me in a room to …” She doesn’t add that she was the bait for Catcher, and I don’t press her.
“So, you and Elias, huh?” I try not to let the strain I’m feeling fill my voice.
The smile that stretches over her face is brighter than the lights lining the darkness. “I’m in love with him, Annah,” she says.
I smile. Inside