The Dark and Hollow Places - Carrie Ryan [79]
“That’s absurd,” I tell him. “They can’t do that to you. Come on, I’ll take you home with me.” I curl my hand, beckoning him.
I know he wants nothing more than for me to pull him up and take him away. To tuck him into a bed piled with blankets and fill his stomach with warm food and hot tea. And so I know how amazingly difficult it is for him to turn me down. “I can’t,” he whispers. “I can’t leave the others. It wouldn’t be fair.”
“You can’t trust the Recruiters,” I implore, but he stands firm, refusing my offer.
I’m afraid to know the answer but I have to ask: “Is Amalia with you?”
A brief movement of pain flashes across his face. “She’s already gone,” he says. Before I can ask more he walks out into the shallow water where the Recruiter lies still, floating among the shards of ice. I hadn’t even noticed him die. He’d been utterly alone in the last moments, not that he deserved anything better.
The dead sometimes scream when they Return, a horrid eerie cry. That’s what happens now, a plaintive wail that’s cut short as the boy’s blade slices through the Recruiter’s neck and severs his spinal cord. His head tumbles into the shallows while his body bobs in the gentle waves.
In the distance someone shouts, the sound of the Recruiter’s cry still echoing. One last time I try to convince the boy to come with me, but he just turns back along the shore after the others, and I push myself away down the platform and run for home.
Once I’m there the events of the night hit me. There’s no way I can sleep, and the air inside feels stale, like a cell. Leaving the scarf wrapped around my head, I retreat to the roof.
The storm from earlier’s blown past, wisps of clouds still stuck to the stars. The rising moon’s almost full and its glow sets everything around me into an eerie bright stillness.
The muscles along my jaw feel tight, as if I’ve been trying to hold back a scream, and I remember the infected woman on the roof that night that seems like several lifetimes ago. I think of what it felt like to dip my fingers in the colored stains she’d left behind—the feel of release without words, screaming in images.
I grab a few chunks of wood from a long-ago fire and use them for charcoal, long black streaks crumbling under my touch. I shut everything else off but the feel of my body moving, the joy and need of it. Leaving the smallest part of me to listen for anyone approaching, the rest of me indulging in the release of creating.
I draw out lines, shade in contours. Sore muscles along my arms and shoulders protest and I push them harder. Underneath my fingers shapes begin to form, faces and bodies straining against the wall. Sweat breaks out on my neck and down my back and I lose all track of time and place. I forget the pain along my scalp, the way the cold air seeps against the back of my ears.
It’s just me and the wood and the wall. Images that flash in my mind and are translated by my fingers before I can see them and piece them together. It’s like I’m not even involved, just a conversation between hand and subconscious. I sweep lines out and then smudge them with my wrist: a woman’s hair tangling in the breeze. I sketch a child’s lips around a crack: a perpetual scream.
As I step back, I realize what I’ve been drawing. Etched along the length of the wall is an army of people, stretching from side to side and deep into the distance. They shuffle toward me, fingers outstretched and pleading.
The moonlight makes them look almost real. Spirits of people from long ago breaking through the crumbling bricks, needing what’s left of our world.
I’ve drawn myself in there, the shadow of scars along my left side, my hair in angry spikes. My sister next to me, perfect and free, her fingers entwined with Elias’s. Recruiters tangled with the Soulers in their tunics. Everyone I’ve ever known—all