Eleven Inesa
Eleven
Inesa
The Angel topples over and I shove her limp body off of me, gasping for air. My throat is burning, and my breaths come in uneven, choking spurts. I push myself to my knees, palms sinking into the newly wet earth. Mud seeps from between my splayed fingers and water falls in freezing rivulets down my face.
I feel pressure on my back. Luka. He grabs me by the elbow and hauls me to my feet. My arms and legs are pricking with a thousand pins and needles and they feel as heavy as lead.
“Inesa,” he pants.
I blink droplets from my lashes and look around the clearing. It’s hard to see anything through the torrent of rainwater: tree branches sagging and swaying in the storm, the grass pressed flat to the muddy ground. And there’s the Angel’s body. She’s on her stomach, limbs starfished out around her. Her head is turned to the side, so I can only see her profile, so impossibly pale against the dark, damp earth.
I see the beginnings of a bruise on her temple, pale purple, where the butt of Luka’s rifle landed. A single brusque, brutal blow.
“Is she—” I try hoarsely, then clear my throat and try again. “Is she dead?”
“Who fucking cares?”
I shouldn’t. But my stomach clenches as I look down at her unmoving body. With her limbs spread out like that, her eyes closed in a peaceful way that belies the circumstances, she really does look like an angel. Obviously. And she’s beautiful. Obviously. All the Angels are supposed to be beautiful. Raindrops track down her face, clinging to her full, heart-shaped lips.
“Come on,” Luka urges.
I tear my gaze away.
He could have put a bullet through her brain, ending all this for good. He must have considered it. I look over at Luka. He’s breathing unevenly, and shivering, not just from the rain and the cold.
We’ve always done what we could to survive, and made no apologies for it. But the gulf between survival and murder isn’t an easy one to cross. Killing someone—even an Angel—is something that, deep down, his instincts protested. Just like mine would.
Maybe the viewers are typing their grievances furiously into the chat, castigating him for his hesitation, for his weakness. But I can’t call reluctance to murder someone weakness. And I don’t think I would be able to live with myself if I made my brother a murderer at just sixteen.
Luka drapes my arm around his neck and helps me stagger forward a few steps. I cough again, covering my mouth, and blood splatters my palm. That can’t be good.
The rain is still gushing down in heavy, translucent sheets. I bend over, with a bolt of excruciating pain, and pick up the Angel’s rifle. It’s sleek and black, so different from Luka’s, with its rusted barrel and wooden stock. I’ve never used a gun before. But I guess if I’m going to learn how, it’s now or never.
As I straighten up again, Luka says, “Come on, Inesa. The Wends won’t be far behind.”
I cast one look back at the Angel. She’s not moving, eyes closed, mouth open slightly. Rainwater slicks her white-blond hair to her cheek and the cold brings a blue marbling to her skin. I think I see her chest rising and falling faintly, but I’m not sure. I might have just imagined it.
If she’s not dead already, the Wends will tear her to pieces anyway, when they come across her unconscious body. Maybe, in some way, that still makes Luka and me murderers. But the slight uncertainty, that crucial maybe , transforms it into something I might be able to live with. If I survive, that is.
I let Luka help me stagger out of the clearing, as the rain pelts down, and the Angel lies still and silent in the dirt.
As it usually is with these sudden, soaking downpours, the rain stops almost as quickly as it started. In the aftermath of the storm, the forest is uncannily peaceful. The animals are still hidden in their dens and tree holes; the birds are too timid to sing. The only sound is that of water dripping from the leaves and onto the dirt. And, of course, of Luka and me stumbling through the dead, muddy leaves.
We try to be as quiet as possible, but it’s difficult when my limbs feel so unwieldy. My throat burns agonizingly with every breath. There must be bruises pulsing there already, in the shape of the Angel’s fingers.
Luka has Dad’s compass out and is staring down at it determinedly. But it just keeps spinning and spinning, the needle never resting at true north.
“Maybe it got damaged in the rainstorm?” I suggest meekly. My voice is so hoarse, it’s almost comical. Almost.
“Maybe,” Luka mutters. There’s a crease in his brow. No, not a crease. A crack. He’s close to breaking.
I stand up straight and gently remove my arm from his shoulders. “I can walk on my own now, I think.”
Luka doesn’t respond. He watches the needle spin and spin.
Looking at him, a memory floats up. It was not long after Dad left, in those first hazy weeks when we were all quietly convincing ourselves that he’d just disappeared temporarily like he always did, that he’d be throwing back beers on the porch again soon enough.
Luka kept clenching his jaw and grinding his teeth. I assumed it was just stress—he had plenty of reasons to be stressed. But then one morning he coughed, and a tooth came out in a rush of blood.
We took him to Dr. Wessels, who pried open his mouth and peered into it with a tiny flashlight.
“There’s an abscess,” he said. “I’ll give you some medication to clear the infection. If you’d come in earlier, I might’ve been able to save the molar.”
“It’s fine,” Luka said, voice tight.
Dr. Wessels gave him some pills and a handful of gauze pads to stanch the bleeding. While Luka busied himself transferring credits for the visit, Dr. Wessels pulled me aside and said, “Why didn’t you come in here sooner? A tooth abscess is one of the most painful conditions I can think of. Didn’t he mention the pain?”
I lifted my head to glance at Luka. He was clenching his jaw again, moving his tongue around the inside of his mouth.
“No,” I said.
That was when I realized I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen him cry.
I blink, returning to the present. Luka puts a fist to his forehead, brow still furrowed as if he’s concentrating, but there’s an empty sheen in his eyes that tells me he’s not really seeing what’s in front of him. Very cautiously, I put a hand on his shoulder.
“Let’s stop for now,” I say. “Rest up a little.”
His head snaps up. “We don’t have time to rest. The Wends—”
“We have a better shot at outrunning them if we’re not absolutely exhausted. How long has it been since either of us slept?”
Luka’s mouth twitches, like it’s forming a protest, but instead of speaking, he looks down at the compass again. A moment passes in silence. Water drips down from the leaves and onto our shoulders, dampening our already soaked jackets.
“I should’ve known,” he says quietly. “I should’ve known all he’d leave us with is a worthless piece of junk.”
And then he hurls the compass across the clearing, hard. It hits a nearby tree trunk and drops to the ground.
Luka draws in shallow, shuddering breaths. His eyes are red with exhaustion and there’s just the faintest hint of tears in them, a bright, shining wetness.
It would be easy if I could hug him. If I felt like he would find any comfort in it. My arms seem locked at my sides.
I realize, though, in this moment of silence, that I don’t hear the cameras anymore. The soft, insistent buzzing is totally silent; there’s only the hum of my tracker. And while I’m not normally disposed to conspiracy theories, it occurs to me that Caerus wouldn’t want the audience to hear us talking about Dad, about the Drowned County. They must have cut the cameras, or sent them flitting away from us and back to Melino?.
A sensation of hope rises in me—or maybe it’s just the subtle, sudden absence of total despair. Stiffly and awkwardly, I walk over to where the compass landed and pick it up.
The impact and the fall have broken the hinge. Now it’s in two pieces: the tarnished and scuffed golden case, and the compass itself, glass cracked. The needle has stopped spinning entirely. I dig around through the leaf pulp to see if I’ve overlooked any crucial pieces.
And that’s when my fingers find a tiny, rolled-up scrap of paper. I would’ve missed it completely in the mud if it weren’t so white against the forest floor, curiously unstained. It’s tied with a thin, gossamer string that looks almost like dental floss (Dad was nothing if not resourceful).
I tear off the string and unroll the paper. In Dad’s familiar, barely decipherable scrawl is a series of numbers. I stare at them for a moment, squinting, trying to make sense of them. Luka strides over to peer over my shoulder, and of course he recognizes what we’re looking at immediately.
“They’re coordinates,” he says. There’s a breathy awed quality to his voice. “Dad did leave us a map.”
I wouldn’t exactly call it a map , but it’s something. Something we can use. And maybe more than that, it’s proof that he didn’t abandon us in the devastatingly complete manner I thought he had. A warm sensation brims in my chest, making my heart beat quickly. And I’m certain this time—it’s just the barest glimmer of hope.
“This must be where he is,” Luka says, in a heated rush. “We just need to get back to the car—get our tablets—and then we’ll know exactly where to go.”
I’m almost as relieved to see the spark back in Luka as I am at finding the note. Dad’s trail. I roll up the scrap of paper again and hold it in my fist, clenched tight enough that my fingernails bite into my palm. I wish that I could feel something radiating from it, some kind of love, but to my surprise I feel a spark of anger instead.
You left us with a scrap of paper, and we’re supposed to be grateful?
When I look at Luka, his eyes blazing, I can’t bring myself to say it. Instead, I hold out the pieces of the broken compass to him.
“Here,” I say. “These are still yours.”
Luka looks down at my open palm for a long moment. Then he shakes his head.
“You keep half,” he says. He points to the golden case, the part without the compass inside. “This part. Maybe you can trap rainwater inside it.”
“No, you take it. You’re better with this survival stuff than I am.”
“ You take it. You need all the help you can get.”
A smile tugs at the corner of my lips, and I slip the case into my pocket. Luka takes the compass itself. Standing there in the muggy aftermath of the storm, the air both cold and dense at once, and so familiar, because we’ve lived in this drowning world all our lives, I realize that we have to make our own hope. And I think maybe we can.
Without our tablets, I don’t know what time it is, or how much time has elapsed since the start of my Gauntlet. All I can hear is the incessant humming of the tracker, reminding me that every single breath is a stolen one. Oddly enough, I still can’t pick up the buzzing of the cameras.
Luka and I are actually pretty good at finding our way. We spent enough time in the woods with Dad when we were kids, back when his mood swings were more fun than scary and we still believed everything he said, even after four or five beers. He taught us which plants were safe to eat and to boil our water before drinking it—and, most important, how to tell when something was too irradiated to do either. We both know the difference between real deer tracks and the webbed prints of the deer mutations. We can mostly figure out which direction is north by looking at which way the moss grows on trees and rocks, though Dad warned us that this method wasn’t always reliable.
Still, it’s the best we have to go on at the moment. We trek through the forest, mostly in silence, the mud sucking at our boots. And in the silence, my mind keeps drifting back to the Angel—her face hovering over mine, flashing white like a strike of lightning. And her eyes. One dark brown, the other black from end to end, throwing my terrified reflection back at me.
The Angels have a number of unnatural features, cyborg traits that Caerus has imbued them with to craft the deadliest killers. Even though I’ve never watched any of the Gauntlets all the way through, it’s impossible to escape the viral clips, usually only a few seconds long. The moment of the kill—a bullet through the heart, a knife to the throat. I remember a red-haired Angel driving her knife right between a teenage boy’s legs. The comments from the live chat were divisive.
user193848697: so f*cking badass
user04955866850: it’s not really. I hate these types of gauntlets tbh. like it’s not even a fair fight
user559506032: lol why don’t you volunteer then
Another memory keeps rising in my mind, just as persistent as the first. The Angel lying face down in the dirt, as still as a corpse, mouth open in arrested protest. The echo of Luka’s voice: Who fucking cares?
I shouldn’t. I should be cheering for what he did. I’m sure everyone watching the Gauntlet cheered. If the Angel really is dead, Luka will be famous. I can imagine the chat’s comments so easily.
user099485437: inesa is so pathetic. like really b*tch you can’t even get up to help? brother doing all the heavy lifting lol
I lose myself in these self-pitying and fairly embarrassing thoughts until Luka says suddenly, “Wait. Stop.”
I skid to a halt. “What?”
Lowering his voice, Luka asks, “Can you smell that?”
I draw in a breath. The rain has brought out all the scents of the forest, the earthiness of the moss and the bark. But under it, just barely detectable, is the bitter, curling smell of rot.
Luka and I press close together, our gazes snapping wildly around the clearing. There are no bones—animal or human—strung up in the trees, no strips of cloth, but the scent of decay is familiar and unmistakable. We got away quickly enough last time that we didn’t even get a good look at the Wends. This time—
“We have to run,” I whisper.
A throaty, inhuman growling sound seems to come from everywhere at once.
Luka lifts his rifle. I fumble with mine—the one I stole from the Angel—but it’s heavier than I expect it to be, and difficult to heft up to my shoulder. My eyes blur as I try to look into the scope, and my hands are shaking so hard, I’m not sure I’ll have the strength to pull the trigger.
They burst from the bushes, three at once. Their skin is the mottled gray of meat gone bad and their clothes hang off them in filthy rags. Their flesh has peeled away in places to reveal the bloody sinew and muscle beneath. Their lipless mouths are open, exposing yellow teeth sharpened to jagged points.
Worst of all are their eyes. The pupils are dilated, whites cracked through with red, but there’s no emotion in them. No hatred, no anger, no wrath. There’s only hunger. A desperate need that animates their spindly limbs and slouching bodies, so when they launch themselves at us, I’m too shocked to shoot.
Wham. My back is against the earth, stars blinking across my darkening vision. The Wend is on top of me, panting, slobbering, arms flailing. Spittle drips down toward my face. The smell of decay is so strong that my stomach heaves. With all the strength I can muster, I let the rifle slip and then shove my hands against the Wend’s bony chest.
It falls over, yowling like a cat. I scramble to my feet, clumsily grabbing the rifle again. Across the clearing, Luka is fending off the other two Wends at once. He swings his rifle and knocks one of them in the head. There’s a garbled wail of pain as its frail skin folds inward, and I can hear the crushing of bone as its skull splinters.
I try to swing my own rifle, but I’m clumsier than Luka, and the barrel whistles through empty air. The Wend lunges at me again. This time, it manages to grab my jacket in its gnarled hands. There’s soft, webbed skin growing between its fingers.
The Wend’s grip tightens and its razor-sharp nails slice through the fabric, into the skin of my arm. I suck in a breath at the sharp, sudden bolt of pain. I find myself locked in a terrible and furious game of tug-of-war, where the Wend tries to reel me in closer and I desperately try to yank my jacket out of its grasp.
“Inesa!” Luka shouts. “Look out—there’s more!”
They break through the bushes and lurch across the clearing. Three, four—too many to count, their grayish bodies all blurring together into one snarling, lumbering mass.
I manage to pull free of the Wend, but the momentum sends me stumbling backward, and I collide with another. This Wend has a third eye, still milky as an infant’s, budding on its forehead.
They howl like wolves and hiss like snakes. One of them tangles its claws in my hair. Another digs its teeth into my shoulder—not quite hard enough to break the skin, but with enough force to make me cry out. I jerk away, and end up falling to the ground.
On my hands and knees, I crawl through the crush of limbs and claws and teeth. I can’t even see Luka anymore; I can just hear him breathing hard with exertion. A shot rings out. There are more yowls, and one of the Wends crumples.
Its blood is black, like tar. I know it’s not really human, not anymore, but I still feel a lump in my throat as I watch its eyes lose their gleam and its chest rise and fall unevenly with its very last breaths. I try to tell myself it’s more like an animal, and Luka has killed hundreds of those before.
Still. Once upon a time, this was someone’s brother or sister, son or daughter, neighbor or friend.
My vision blurs. I don’t have time for this strange, mangled sort of grief. The Wends scramble backward, making too-human whimpering sounds. Luka struggles through the mass of them, but he can’t reach me. There’s blood running from his nose.
Luka manages to break through the crowd of clawing, snarling Wends. “Inesa, run !”
It takes me a moment to force my legs to move. Luka and I skid through the mud and leaf pulp, the Wends loping after us. Tree roots make each step perilous and rocks jut up menacingly from the ground. We come along the edge of a ravine; a sheer, steep drop on the other side.
Luka stops suddenly and turns, readying his rifle. I try to lift mine, too, but I’m shaking all over with adrenaline and terror. I don’t know why I think this will stop them. They aren’t human enough to remember how to be afraid. They just hurtle forward, and even Luka isn’t fast enough to fell them all.
They’re almost on us. I stagger back, and my ankle curls inward with a jolt of pain. I skid along the very edge of the ravine. One of my legs slips out from under me, and I claw at the leaves and the dirt to try to pull myself up again.
“Luka!” I cry.
He turns, but it’s too late. In that moment of hesitation, the Wends are on him. Their gray limbs pull and grasp.
“Inesa!” he yells back. The blanched look of horror on his face is more terrifying than anything else. I’ve never seen him so afraid.
My fingers scrabble against the earth, but they can’t find purchase. My heart drops into my stomach.
Please—
And then I fall.