He starts to jog but I refuse to let him go. I’m tired of not knowing what’s going on with him, what’s going on between us. I stumble over rocks and debris that he seems to skim right over and it’s not until he’s reached the fence that I catch him. He pushes his fingers through the links as if grabbing hold, as if preparing to climb.
“Wait,” I tell him, desperate to make him stop. I come up behind him. I press myself against him and wrap my arms around his chest. “Wait,” I say again, needing to have him listen to me even though I’m not sure yet what I want to say. His heat wavers over me, always that incessant reminder of his infection.
I press my lips to the base of his neck and I wonder if he can feel me trembling. I kiss the contours of his shoulder. Can he sense my fear? Does he know how miserable I’ve been? He sags slightly as his breath shudders through him.
“I can’t, Gabry,” he says, but he doesn’t stop me. I twine my fingers around his, gripping the fence with him, the barrier between our world and his world.
“You’re just like me,” I tell him. “We’re the same,” I add, but I’m not even sure I believe it. I don’t know what to do with him now. I don’t know how to talk to him. To this boy constantly on the edge of death. Everything I’ve ever known, everything I’ve ever learned tells me that he should be dead. Should have died days ago.
What do you say to someone who faces that?
I try not to think again about Elias and the Soulers and their beliefs about the Mudo and humans, how we’re intertwined. Instead I pull back the folds of his shirt and I press my lips against the edge of the red welt on his shoulder. The only visible remnant of the wound that infected him.
Just then a Mudo lunges against the other side of the fence and I pull back, Catcher’s heat leaping through the air between us. He turns and leans on the metal links. Behind him I can see the moon glinting off the cloudy Mudo eyes; I can see the outlines and edges of their broken teeth and hungry mouths.
I try to hide my horror but I know that Catcher can see it. “You’re not like them,” I tell him again, trying to convince us both, but I know he doesn’t believe me.
“I can’t take the risk, Gabry,” he says. “I’ll never know if I’d infect you.” And then he turns and climbs the fence and before I can reach for him he’s on the other side. He pauses and slides a finger through the links. I reach out and grab it. “This is part of me now,” he says. The Mudo around him push as if he’s not there, as if he’s one of them, and his grasp falls from mine.
I want to shout for him to come back but I press my lips together to keep silent. I want to tilt my head back and scream at the world for doing this. For making everything so complicated and unfair. I want to pound at the fences and kill all the Mudo, end their moaning that won’t ever stop.
But I don’t. I just stand there and stare at them. They were always nothing but monsters, nothing but animated death to me before; a scourge to be dealt with. Yet Elias’s questions still circle through me, making me wonder if anything of who these people were could be left behind, trapped inside.
Because if I’m alive and the Mudo are dead—what does that make Catcher?
I wake up the next morning to the sounds of screaming. I’m lost, struggling from the depths of sleep, cresting to the surface to find chaos. It takes me a moment to realize that it’s Catcher shouting and he’s yelling for his sister.
He sprints toward the fence, his hand raised. “Cira, wait!” he calls out. There’s panic in his voice, threading through the words.
My heart jumps and I’m instantly alert. I look to the ground next to me where Cira slept and find the spot empty. My mouth goes dry, a thousand possibilities spinning through my mind. I surge to my feet, my toes and fingers numb with sleep.
I catch movement out of the corner of my eye and see Cira at the fence line. She’s already climbed halfway to the top and for a moment I can’t make sense of it. Can’t figure out why she would be trying to get into the Forest. What she could be running from or to.
But she keeps pulling herself higher and I realize that she’s about to reach the top. Already the Mudo are shifting through the trees, shambling toward the promise of her with their arms outstretched.
Sweat coats my body. Elias is already chasing after her by the time I stumble up behind him.
“Cira!” I cry out in surprise and alarm at the same time Elias yells for her to stop. She pauses and looks over her shoulder at us. At her brother.
For a moment I think she’ll stop. I think she must be delirious or asleep. That she’ll hear us and slip back down to the ground and the safety inside the fences. But she just turns and keeps climbing.
“Stop! What are you doing?” I yell. She doesn’t listen. Doesn’t look at me again. It’s as if I’m not even here, as if none of us is. I push harder, trying to make it to her before it’s too late.
Elias is almost to the fence. He reaches for her but she swings her legs over and jumps to the other side. We’re both too late.
“Cira!” My throat is almost raw. “Come back!” Too many thoughts hit me and tangle at once: that she’s in the Forest, that it’s not safe, that she doesn’t have a weapon, that if I only scream louder she’ll hear me and understand.
Horrified, I watch as Mudo shuffle toward her. She runs past them into the trees, stumbling through the thick underbrush.
I reach the fence and beat it with my fists. “Cira!” I shout. I twist my fingers around the rusty links and scream louder. I don’t understand what she’s doing, what she can be thinking. The metal of the links digs into my fingers but I don’t care—I just pound harder.
Catcher hits the fence next to me and doesn’t hesitate before launching himself over it. He lands on the other side and sprints after his sister. The Mudo don’t even turn toward him. Don’t even notice he’s there.
I feel the sobs beginning to build. Beginning to suffocate me. “Please come back, Cira,” I try to scream, but my voice catches and breaks.
I can only watch as Catcher cuts toward his sister and the Mudo close in on her, block her from view. They choke off the distance between her and the fence and they begin to stumble in from either side as well. The blood dotting the bandages on her arms intensifies their need, their craving, and they lurch closer.
“We have to help her.” I start trying to climb. “We have weapons, we can keep them from her,” I say, desperate to do something other than stand here and watch.
But Elias pulls me back, wraps his arms around my body. “We can’t,” he says. “There are too many. They’d get to all of us.”
I shake my head, my mind screaming to protect Cira even though I know that Elias is right. We stand there, me choking on sobs and Elias holding me as we watch Catcher close in on his sister, and I have to turn my head away. I can’t watch my best friend get bitten.
I realize then that Elias is pressing his lips to my temple. “Shhh,” he keeps saying, but I can’t stop the keening wail that echoes from deep inside me. I press my face into his shoulder, my lips trying to remember a prayer, trying to entreat anything, anybody to save my best friend.
Elias cups his hand over my head, holding me tight against him. “He’s got her,” he says. His body is tense. I feel his heart beat wildly beneath my cheek.
“He’s carrying her out.” He tries to sound calm but I can hear the tension in his voice. I turn my head and peek back through the fence and I see Catcher running away from us at an angle, carrying Cira deeper into the Forest.
“Wh—what is he d-doing?” I stammer, grabbing the metal links. I shake the fence, clinks and reverberations radiating out to either side. He’s taking Cira away from us, away from the safety.
And then I understand. “The paths,” I say, my voice jumping with hope. I turn back to Elias. “He said it before about how you can cut through the Forest to the paths. Maybe he’s taking her to another one.”
I step away from him, everything in my mind a whirl at once. “We have to try to find them
,” I say, my hands shaking as I wipe sweat away from my upper lip.
Elias opens his mouth as if to protest and I stare at him. He looks into the Forest where Catcher and Cira are dodging trees. “Grab the packs,” he says. “We’ll have to run to catch up.”
I jump at his words, relieved to have a plan—something to focus on and occupy my thoughts so that I don’t think about Cira being in the Forest. Cira with blood on her arms. Cira, who isn’t immune to the Mudo. Who’s still weak from the blood loss and now infection.
I grab what I can, shoving the full canteens into the packs and throwing what I can’t carry at Elias. We run through the empty village to the gate at the other end, opposite where we entered.
Elias shoves it open and starts running down the path, jumping over brambles and dodging fallen tree limbs. My chest is searing but I push myself forward as the full pack sways and bumps against my back. We have to find them. She has to be okay.
As if hearing my thoughts Elias says, “She’ll be all right.”
I nod because I don’t have the strength or the energy for anything else and because I need to believe him. All I can do is force one foot in front of the other and try to stay between the fences as I stare out into the trees, desperate for a glimpse of Catcher or Cira.
We come to a branch in the path and Elias doesn’t hesitate before veering right. At some point they should cross this path; they have to. As my feet pound against the ground I can only think: They will make it. They will make it.
Elias begins to pull away from me and I wave for him to go ahead. My legs are burning, my lungs screaming. He turns a corner and then freezes. I slow down, stumbling to a walk. He doesn’t draw his knife and so I know that it’s not Mudo he sees; it’s not danger.
He has to have found Catcher and Cira. I don’t want to but I force myself forward, my arms and legs shaking. I can tell from the set of his jaw, from the way he holds his body, that there’s something around the bend I don’t want to see.
He holds out a hand for me to stop but I don’t. I can’t. I have to know what happened. I suck in as much air as I can, pressing my fingers to my lips and steeling myself for whatever lies ahead.
Before I can see anything I hear the whimpering and I change my mind. I stop in the middle of the path, one foot hovering above the ground. I don’t want to see it. I don’t want to face whatever it is Elias is watching, whatever it is that’s around the bend.
I realize that this is the way the world works. If I could stop the spin, stop the rotation, I would have done so long ago. I would have stopped it the first moment that Catcher’s lips met mine under the moon in the amusement park. I would have held us in that eternity forever.
But of course everything presses forward, even as we dig our feet against the reality of it all. One event tumbles from the next out of our control and we are dragged along, helpless.
That’s why I force myself to raise my eyes, to take that step and to face what’s happened. Even though I know more clearly than I’ve known anything else that what I’m about to see will break me.
Catcher sits in the middle of the path. His sister, my best friend, Cira, is laid across his legs. He bends over her, his head against her chest. The sound coming out of his mouth is like the moans of the Mudo. It penetrates me and carries me down into myself so that it’s almost impossible to stand.
I look over at Elias, at the way he stands there staring. His face is white, his lips like a ghost. His eyes are wide and his chin trembles. And I realize then that he doesn’t think of himself as an outsider—as a stranger. He’s one of us. I reach for his hand but I’m too late. He walks down the path to Catcher.
Elias kneels on the other side of Cira. He places a few fingers against her cheek. And then he reaches across her to Catcher and grips his hand. I swallow, barely able to catch my breath as I watch them, my own grief storming all around me.
“Did they …? Is she …?” I can’t say it. I take a step forward until I can see her face. See the way she stares into the Forest as if the rest of us aren’t here.
Catcher shakes his head no and I sag against the fence with relief until I feel the trace of Mudo fingers along my arm and I pull away.
“But why?” I ask, trying to understand what drove Cira into the Forest. Trying to figure out why she would do something like that. No one answers me. I think about the cuts on her arms. I think about how she’d already tried to give up once before. I wrap my arms around myself, shaking.
I don’t know how to fix her. I don’t know how to make it better. I don’t know what to say or do to help her. Except tell her that we can survive this. That we will survive.
And I realize that maybe this is the one thing that will always pull the people of my world together. The more we lose, the more we become the survivors.
“Maybe we should go back to Vista,” I say softly to Catcher and Elias. Cira sits in the middle of the path staring into the Forest, lost in her own mind. Bandages circle her arms, rusty with dried blood from where her wounds pulled open when she climbed the fence. She hasn’t said anything, hasn’t explained anything, and my relief that she’s okay is starting to simmer into anger and frustration.
The blood infection still rages through her, red streaks radiating up her arms, her skin flush with fever. I’m afraid that if we continue out here in the Forest she’ll just get worse. That we’ll be too late to do anything about the infection and it’ll kill her.
“We can’t,” Catcher says, looking down at his feet. His voice is despondent, his eyes ringed with deep bruises from pushing too hard and not sleeping enough.
“She’s sick, Catcher,” I tell him. He grimaces. “I don’t just mean from the cuts. I mean …” I think about the determination on her face when she climbed the fence this morning. “I just don’t know if we can take care of her,” I finish weakly.
Birds explode from a bush past the fence, causing us all to wince with their tangle of cries. The Mudo continue to moan.
“The Recruiters are already in the Forest,” he says. He’s still looking at the ground as if what he’s saying isn’t a big deal.
I push my fingers against my forehead, tension pulling at the muscles of my shoulders and neck. We’re trapped now, no way to go back. I try to keep my breathing steady.
“How far away are they?” Elias asks.
Catcher shakes his head. “They made it to the path the other morning. They’re moving pretty fast. But I still thought …”
“Yesterday.” I can’t even put sound behind the word, can only move my lips. The Recruiters have been running through the paths for a day already. I feel sick, my stomach twisting around nothing since we’ve been slowly running out of food.
“What do we do?” I ask, my voice breaking.
Catcher shrugs. It’s as if he’s given up the way his sister has and I want to slap him. I’ve fought too hard for him and for Cira. I’ve given up everything for them—every chance I could have had for a normal life.
It’s not fair for them to stop fighting now. I turn and pace down the path a bit, needing distance. I can’t be the only one who stays strong while everyone else gets to fall apart; it’s not a role I’m used to or even know how to handle.
Something rustles behind me. I know it’s Elias—I’ve already memorized the sound of his steps on the overgrown earth.
“Gabry,” he says softly, the way you’d approach an injured animal. He sets a hand on my shoulder, his touch light, barely even discernible.
I shake my head. Afraid something inside me will explode and I’ll either lash out in rage or despair. I want so badly to be like Cira. To collapse on the path and have someone else make the decisions. Someone else fight for me. It doesn’t seem fair that I’m not allowed to give up too.
Elias steps closer behind me. I want to lean back against his chest and let him hold me. Let him be the one to keep me standing. But instead I turn to face him. He keeps his hand on my shoulder and now barely anything separates us. Behind hi
m, out of the corner of my eye, I see Catcher still staring at the ground. Cira still lost in her own mind.
Elias’s face is a mirror of mine: pain and doubt. He’s usually so calm and in control, and seeing him like this makes me wonder what in his life has led him to this moment. His thumb barely traces the edge of my throat, so softly that I think I might only be imagining the touch.
It’s supposed to be Catcher standing here with me, not Elias. It’s supposed to be Catcher who holds me and comforts me and gives me strength. He’s the one I’ve always known and trusted and dreamed about. But now all these lines are blurred and confused.
I part my lips. I’m about to tell Elias everything about me. That I was born in the Forest. That I’ve been on these paths and survived and that I hope I can do it again. That somewhere out there is my mother and my past. And somehow, before I even have to say the words, before I utter any of it, I know he’ll understand.
“We should keep walking,” Catcher says.
It’s as if his voice jerks me out of a trance; as if I’ve been staring at Elias for a hundred years. I shake my head and step away from him. My cheeks begin that slow embarrassed burn and I glance at Catcher, wondering if he notices. But he’s silent. His face betrays nothing at all.
We trudge down the paths in the thick summer air, choosing which branches to take and which gates to pass through based on the code I figured out in my mother’s book of sonnets. Always walking toward the light—following the paths that will lead us to Sonnet XVIII, the lines written in the lantern room of the lighthouse. The afternoon threatens us with thunder, the sky closing in around us, yet it barely rains and our canteens start to run dry. But Catcher doesn’t want to leave Cira to forage in the Forest for a stream and with the threat of the Recruiters behind us, we keep walking.
At first I feel uncomfortable being near Cira. Catcher hovers around her, helping her when she can’t keep up. She seems to stumble along the path not seeing anything, and I wonder if she really has given up or if it’s the blood infection taking over, making her lose touch.