Thirteen Inesa
Thirteen
Inesa
The Angel’s hand is as cold as naked bone. There’s no warmth at all radiating through her black gloves. As soon as she has the rifle, she lets go of me and slings the gun over her shoulder. But her movements are jerky, sluggish. Nothing like the fluid way she threw her knife, pinning Luka to the tree, or the way she landed on the car like a mountain cat dropping onto its prey.
She could be pretending. Playing at weakness so that when I turn my back, she can put a bullet through my heart. The possibility doesn’t escape me. But I’ve weighed the risks. Run through it all in my mind. Without Luka, I don’t stand a chance against the Wends. I can’t allow myself to imagine him dead. If I do, I’ll crumble.
The Angel staggers forward, legs trembling under her own weight. Her steps are uneven. If she is pretending, she’s very committed to the performance. I notice the bruising on her temple where Luka hit her. It’s a slow-spreading purple, almost black.
If Luka’s blow had landed with just a little more force, it might have killed her. All of this would have been over. But if Luka couldn’t bring himself to do it, I don’t know if I’ll ever find the strength.
Helplessness turns my stomach hollow. Because now, with Luka gone, I know this is what it will take. The Gauntlet will only end with a death—hers or mine. And I’ll have to be the one to strike the blow.
“Where are they coming from?” the Angel asks, voice low. “The... Wends?”
I gesture behind me, to the unmoving brush. “They were chasing me. I only lost them because I fell down a ravine.”
She looks at me with her lips pursed. When I say it out loud, I’m embarrassed. But why bother trying to pretend I’m strong or competent? She knows I’m weak, ill-equipped for any of this, helpless and hopeless without Luka. After all, she’s almost killed me. Twice.
Almost. I remember the odd way her expression shifted when she leaned over me, pressing down hard on my throat. There was fear on her face, surfacing like a silver-backed fish from the water. She had let go. I know I didn’t imagine it. The sudden relief of pressure on my throat. The widening of her eye—her real eye—in horror.
Even so, I wouldn’t be alive without Luka. Thinking of him makes a flash of tears well up.
You might never see him again. The Wends might have already ripped him limb from limb.
I try to push the thought out of my mind. If I’m going to make it through the Gauntlet, I have to believe that Luka is okay. He’s stronger than me. He can survive.
“Then let’s get as far away as we can,” the Angel says. “Quickly.”
But she doesn’t move. She just stands there, trembling slightly. I notice again how pale her face is, impossibly pale. A reminder that no matter how fragile she seems, the stories are true: The Angels are more machine than human, designed only to kill.
I start off in the opposite direction I ran from—my best guess at north. The Angel follows, her footsteps dragging in the dirt. Hearing them, I grind to a halt.
“I’m not going to walk in front of you,” I say. “I’m not that stupid.”
Her eyes flash. Well, one of them. The left one, the one that’s black from end to end, just throws my reflection back at me.
“Fine,” she says. “Then tell me where to go.”
I try to imbue my voice with confidence. “This way.”
She walks forward with agonizing sluggishness. I keep my gaze fixed on the rifle slung over her back. Her narrow shoulders are pinched together, and under her skintight black suit, I can see the outline of every bone. Her painful-looking thinness didn’t occur to me when I was pressed to the ground beneath her, her cold hands around my throat.
“What happened to you?” I ask. The question just spills out before I can stop it.
The Angel turns, her eyes narrowed. “You tried to kill me.”
“That wasn’t me,” I protest. “That was Luka. And you tried to kill me first.”
She just stares back balefully. I feel five inches tall.
“Well, you’re still alive,” I say.
“So are you.”
We lapse back into silence, but the air between us crackles. I shouldn’t waste time with conversation. I should be focused on not getting eaten alive.
Just make it through. Get back to Luka. Then you can—
I squeeze my eyes shut briefly, as if to banish the thought. I don’t want to imagine it. Killing her. It makes my stomach turn. I just have to hope that when the time comes, I’ll find the strength to plunge the knife in.
Vaguely nauseated, I follow the Angel out of the clearing. It feels like we’re wading through swamp water. If I had any doubt she was faking her frailty, it’s gone now. She’s practically dragging herself forward, one aching step at a time. I can hear her labored breathing, even the gritting of her teeth.
This has to be something worse than a head injury. Not that I’m an expert, and not that I think she would tell me the truth, if I did ask. So I just follow, with the same brutal slowness.
We’re barely more than a hundred yards from the clearing when she falls. It happens so suddenly that I nearly trip over her as she crumples to her knees in the dirt.
The Angel gives a small, pained exhale. Her hair, loose from its high, neat ponytail, falls over her shoulders in tangled strands. I don’t know what comes over me— instinct , I tell myself, nothing more —but I drop to my knees beside her.
“Here,” I say. I drape one of her thin arms over my shoulders. “Come on.”
Even now, her real eye flickers with suspicion. I half expect her to shove me off. But instead she just hangs on to me limply as I haul us both back to our feet.
As her grip on my neck tightens, I’m aware of how easy it would be for her to start squeezing. My throat is still an unending pulse of pain, garishly purple. But I only feel a faint fluttering of fear. It’s not that I trust her, not really. If she were strong enough, she’d probably try.
Her body feels as limp as a cut sapling. I realize, very abruptly, that if it came to blows, I could win.
She knows it, too. That’s why she tenses around me, jaw clenched, muscles tightening in her throat.
After we’ve hobbled a few steps, I blurt out, “This isn’t just because of Luka, is it?”
Her gaze clips to me, cold as quicksilver. “No.”
“Then what happened?”
She lets out a breath. “Withdrawal. From stimulants.” When I stare back at her blankly, she adds, “Drugs.”
“I know that.” My mother has taken every medication in Caerus’s arsenal, including the little white mood-elevating pills we call lifters. They didn’t make her happy, though. Just paranoid. She kept scratching at her skin, accusing me of stealing food from her, accusing Luka of planning to leave her.
There’s also a fairly active black market trade for drugs in the outlying Counties. It’s not so bad in Esopus, but in Schuyler, the town across the reservoir, the pills move like flotsam down the flooded streets. I’ve seen the twitchy, glassy-eyed, cold-sweat withdrawals. I just never imagined people in the City abused them, too, much less the Angels.
It makes sense, though. The lifters give powerful but temporary bursts of energy. Enough energy for the Angels to execute their quick and ruthless kills.
“I guess I just assumed you were powered by batteries, not pills.”
She blinks at me. “Is that really what you Outliers think?”
Oddly, there’s no judgment in her voice, just curiosity. Still, my face flushes. “To us you seem like machines.”
“You haven’t seen real Caerus machines.”
Again, her tone isn’t harsh. It’s flat. Observational. She has a heavy City accent, suggesting that she grew up speaking Damish as a first language. Only the most elite City dwellers do. She’s probably thinking that I have a thick Outlier accent, coarse and provincial.
“What do they look like?” I ask.
Her real eye fixes somewhere in the distance, over my left shoulder. “Nothing like people.”
It feels surreal that I’m having a conversation with an Angel and she’s not actively trying to slit my throat. We stumble on a bit farther. I can tell, sort of, from the moss and the position of the sun, that we are heading vaguely north. I don’t exactly have a plan except to put as much distance between us and the Wends as possible.
But I’m very aware of the fact that the farther I get from the Wends, the farther I am from where I last saw Luka. A lump invades my throat. It’s hard not to feel like I’ve made a stupid and traitorous choice: the Angel over my own brother.
Just survive. Then you can find him.
I repeat the words in a steady rhythm in my mind as I shuffle through the mud and the dead leaves, the Angel’s arm braced over my shoulders. But we don’t even make it another ten yards before the wind picks up, feathering the Angel’s pale hair across my face and carrying the smell of rot, thick and pungent as smoke.