Seventeen Inesa
Seventeen
Inesa
In sleep, it’s hard to think of her as dangerous. Hard to recall how painfully her hands circled my throat. Hard to remind myself to be afraid.
Even with the bruise darkening her temple and the bloodless pall of her face, she’s beautiful. I know that the Angels are supposed to be, but it’s still impossible not to notice. The perfect bow of her mouth, the high, taut cheekbones, the brows and lashes surprisingly dark for someone with such pale hair. It falls nearly to her waist, a blond more silver than gold.
My fingers inch across the ground. I want to touch just the ends of it, to see if it’s as soft as it looks, but I stop myself. Exhaustion is clearly doing strange things to my brain.
I rub my face with my cold hands, trying to enliven my muscles. My thoughts are racing. I should look for dry wood to start a fire. Who knows if there are more Wends out there. I should take her rifle while she’s sleeping and run. Find Luka. I should look for the car with all our gear. I should at least look for clean water, because my throat is as dry as sandpaper and my tongue feels huge and heavy in my mouth.
I should kill her.
The thought slips into my mind so easily, like a key into its lock. The rifle lies beside Melino?’s sleeping body, mere inches from my fingertips. Now that I’ve watched her use it, I know how easy it is. Brace. Aim. Fire. I could do it.
There’s also the knife. Her knife, which Luka passed to me and I slipped inside my boot. I withdraw it now, turning it over in trembling hands. It’s lighter than the knives I use in the shop and narrower than Dad’s buck knife, the one that Luka carries with him when he hunts. The blade is sharpened to a fine and deadly point. Knives I know intimately, and this one looks both sleek and brutal. Like her.
I grip the handle and shift my body slightly so I’m crouching over her. The blade hovers above her throat. I imagine the cut, the gush of blood. If people bleed as much as animals do, the ground would be soaked with it, my hands covered, her black suit turned blacker. I imagine her eyelids flying open in shock. Her body writhing in the dirt. Her stare glassy as the blood drains into the earth.
The thought turns my stomach into an icy pit. I hurl the knife away from me. It skids across the ground and lands at the very edge of the cave mouth, blade glinting cruelly.
I’m not a murderer. I’m certainly not an executioner. Because that’s what it would be—an execution, cold and detached. They say the Angels aren’t human, but she looks perfectly human to me now. And I can’t force myself to believe that slitting someone’s throat in their sleep is an act of survival. I’d like to think even Dad would balk at that. Luka did. He could have shot her or stabbed her, guaranteeing her death. But he’s not a murderer, either.
I curl my fingers into fists. I wonder whether the Angel would hesitate, if I was the one sleeping defenselessly beside her. When she was fighting the Wends, she had a thousand chances to turn her gun on me. Or she could have let them kill me. It would have been easier than saving my life.
My head is throbbing. My exhaustion is like black water closing over my head. In the end, the choice is really no choice at all, because my body overrides my brain. I slump over onto the ground, my vision filmy and gray.
The one thing I make sure to do before sleep overcomes me is to lie down facing Melino?. I place my hand gently against her arm, so that if she wakes up, her movement will jostle me awake, too. That’s all I can manage before my eyelids slide shut and I drown.