The Dark and Hollow Places - Carrie Ryan [90]
How most of the points of light we see actually no longer exist. We’re just seeing the remnants of what was—ghosts of what used to be.
I glance at the Dark City across the river, a few buildings still flickering with light as the handful of survivors huddle behind thin curtains slung across broken windows. All of them tiny little stars in their own constellations waiting to fall to infection and become ghosts of what they used to be.
It all seems so worthless. Such a waste of lives. We’ve spent hundreds of years since the Return buffering the Dark City and trying to maintain it—scraping out a life that will soon be wiped out.
And what of the rest of the world that’s already fallen? Stars blinking away, their light slowly fading? Somewhere out there a star’s just dying and we’ll never know about it. Somewhere another’s being born whose light we’ll never see.
The Earth will spin, the stars will rearrange themselves around one another and the world will crawl with the dead who one day will drop into nothingness: no humans left for them to scent, no flesh for them to crave. Everything—all of us—will simply cease to be.
They’ll finally find peace only when we’re all dead.
Once I’m inside the headquarters my footsteps echo down empty hallways, and at first I cringe with every noise, waiting for someone to turn a corner, spot me and cause trouble. But it’s a huge building with warrens of twisting corridors, and the ones I walk are dusty and unused.
In the map room I light a few lanterns, knocking the door closed behind me with my foot. It’s as I remember: walls covered with faded drawings of the world as it used to be. Pins scattered along the floor, desks piled with neglected stacks of papers and journals.
I flip through a few of the pages—notations from scouts returning from various outings, reporting on enclaves of survivors. There are columns with neatly ordered numbers counting men, women and children. Noting resources and defenses, listing quotas to be met in order to be considered under the Protectorate control.
All this information pulled together and sorted down to one small colored pin on a map. Most of those even gone by now. I wonder how many people mentioned in these pages are dead. I wonder if those who wrote these letters, the ones who traveled to all these places are dead as well.
The reality is that everyone dies. Whether safe in bed asleep or trapped in an alley facing a Returned friend or family member or lover. Whether shot by a Recruiter or just left to float in a boat in the middle of a snowstorm, your body slowly eating itself as resources run dry.
It will happen to me one day. I wonder why I fight so hard against the inevitability of it. What’s another day? What’s the day after that? Slowly, I walk around the room, trailing my fingers over the wall.
My thumb stops, resting at a green pin. “Vista,” I read aloud. My sister’s town by the sea. Where Catcher grew up, became infected. Where he survived, broken. There’s a thick black line etched along the map just to the west of Vista leading up the coast, and beyond the line there’s nothing, but I know it represents the Forest.
And somewhere in that void is the village where I was born, and raised for a few years. I press my hand over it, the scope of the Forest extending past my fingers.
“It’s not there anymore,” a deep voice says behind me. “Your village.”
I cringe, already knowing it’s Ox, and reach for the machete at my hip. He doesn’t make a move to stop me or even flinch when I pull it from my belt and hold the long blade between us.
“What do you mean, my village?” I ask, cold inside. “How do you know anything about where I’m from?”
Ox leans against the wall by the door, arms crossed casually over his chest. Other than his bulk he appears nonthreatening. But I know better.
He shrugs as if he’s not talking about a village. About people. About my father and neighbors. “It’s gone.”
My eyes go wide,