Twenty-Three Inesa
Twenty-Three
Inesa
Morning comes. Softly, slowly, like the sun has surprised itself by rising. Somehow, I have survived another night of my Gauntlet.
Somehow, too, it seems like Melino? has managed to stay awake all night. She’s exactly where I left her when I fell asleep, sitting on the floor, knees pulled up to her chest. Her head is bowed over, nestled in the crook of her knees. But the moment I shift in the bed, her head snaps up in response.
“Good morning,” I say. “You should rest now.”
With the effects of the withdrawal now gone, she looks a little less pale, but not by much. There are also bright violet circles beneath her eyes, and her lips are closer to blue than pink. She squares her shoulders and says, “I’m fine.”
I slide out of the bed and pull on my boots. “Just sleep. You’re no use if you’re too exhausted to hold a gun.”
“I’m not too exhausted.”
I tilt my head. “You’re not a very good liar, you know.”
Maybe that’s why she doesn’t talk much. When she’s not speaking, she’s excellent at keeping her expression neutral, cold. But speaking, she gives herself away.
Like she did last night. In the quiet darkness, she was more honest with me than I had any right to expect. Without being able to see her, I could only hear the faint tremor in her voice; it made her seem so vulnerable. Not like the mindless, unfeeling killer I once imagined her to be.
I’m convinced that you’re human now.
In the revealing light of day, maybe she’s changed her mind. Caked in days of dirt and sweat and blood, I probably look plenty like an animal. And now that I can see her clearly, too, with that impossibly pale and perfect skin, stretched taut over titanium-reinforced bones, my brain should switch back into survival mode, and I should think of her as more machine than girl.
I blink and blink, but I can’t manage to shift my vision. After last night’s conversation, she seems vulnerable in a way I never imagined an Angel could. And everything is even more tangled and dangerous than it should be, because now I’m convinced that she’s human, too.
Melino?’s jaw sets. There’s a spark of defiance in her eyes that somehow seems to even animate the prosthetic. My heart thumps unevenly.
“Fine.” I sigh. “I’m going to get us some water.”
Slowly, Melino? starts to push herself up from the floor. On instinct, I hold out a hand. Melino? hesitates for a moment, then slips her fingers through mine and lets me pull her to her feet.
My bandages stayed in place overnight, and all the blood has dried and scabbed, but my hands are still throbbing a little. The pressure of her palm is slightly painful, and I bite my lip. She notices that, of course, and drops my hand like it’s a burning coal.
“It’s okay,” I say. “Thank you—again. You didn’t have to.”
She just nods. Still not much for words, my Angel.
I wonder when I started thinking of her as mine .
Maybe it was even before we spoke last night in the dark. Maybe it started when she wrapped the gauze gently around my wounds. When she lifted my hand to her mouth. I can still feel it, if I focus on the memory—her lips grazing my skin. I have to clench my fists to stop thinking about it, stop feeling it, drag myself out of the past.
Melino? is watching me. I wonder if she can tell, somehow, that I’m remembering it, and the thought makes heat rise to my cheeks.
She’s probably just watching me because she’s still afraid I’m going to try to kill her. When I realize that, I feel enormously stupid and even more flushed in the face.
I could. When her guard is down, when her back is turned. The knife is still wedged in the shaft of my boot.
But we’re no closer to civilization than before, and four rickety wooden walls and a trip wire with some rusted cans are not going to stop the Wends. I’ll have to wait a little longer for salvation. Or rather, a little longer until I’m safe from the Wends and Melino? is my only enemy.
I’m convinced that you’re human now.
Such simple words, spoken in the safety of darkness, but they unbalance me. They make everything inside me muddle and spin. I have to turn away from her, because I find that when I’m looking into her eyes, there’s nothing I can do to make my heart keep a steady rhythm.
The dead man’s cabin comes equipped with a wooden bucket, which I clear of cobwebs and dust and then carry down to the stream. I take deliberate, inching steps, careful not to disturb the trip wire. On my way out, I notice something sticking up from the ground, something that wasn’t there when I went inside last night.
Warily, I bend over to examine it. It’s a piece of shale, driven into the earth like a stake—or maybe like a gravestone. I’m standing precisely where I dug the man’s grave. But I didn’t put the stone there.
Melino? must have done it.
Why? Some Outlier , she had called him, her tone contemptuous and remote. And that’s all he was, really. Not my brother, not my father. He has no one to mourn him. I stand up, my skin prickling.
Melino? marked his grave.
I can’t stop thinking about it, as I walk to the stream. She told me last night that City folk think of us Outliers as no better than animals. So why go to the trouble? Burying a total stranger and marking their grave is more than a lot of Outliers would do for each other, in truth.
Beneath the bandages, my skin pulses with the memory of Melino?’s touch. Her hands were warmer than I thought they would be. Gentler. She only looks cold from a distance. But up close—
I stop that train of thought in its tracks. I’m being sentimental, reckless. Because even a wolf can be gentle if it wants, but you should never forget its teeth.
It takes the better part of an hour to fill the bucket. I’m grateful for the distraction. I fix my mind on the task at hand and try not to think about my Angel or her hands or how Luka would roll his eyes at me in disgust. He would tell me to run and leave her for dead. Or maybe he’s overcome his inhibitions. Maybe he’d tell me to stick a knife in her back and be done with it.
My clean, bandaged hands make it apparent how filthy the rest of my body is. There’s a stark white line on my wrist where clean skin gives way to the dirt that’s ground into my arm, the accumulated grime of these past miserable days. It’s on all my limbs, my face, even my hair. Normally I can go a day or two without bathing, especially when we don’t have electricity to heat the water, but it’s been far longer than that, and I feel absolutely gamy. My clothes are so textured with dirt that they’ve all turned a drab shade of gray.
When I return to the cabin, lugging the heavy bucket and splashing a not insignificant amount of water on the floor, Melino? is curled up on the bed. I’m relieved to see her resting—even with the rifle propped against the wall within arm’s reach.
There’s something shudder-inducing about wearing a dead man’s clothes, but my urgent need to be clean overpowers those qualms. I find a thick pair of cargo pants and a long flannel shirt unfolded in a trunk.
Melino? stays asleep as I undress, quickly. I scrub at my skin until it turns pink. Beads of dirt roll off the crevices of my elbows and knees. I even manage to dip my hair into the bucket and comb through the knots with my fingers.
Goose bumps are rising along my limbs by the time I finish. The cabin doesn’t offer much heat on its own, and I haven’t gotten around to fiddling with the stove. But the pants and shirt are made of durable, moisture-wicking material, even if both are comically large on me. The shirt reaches almost to my knees, and when I stand up, I have to hold the waistband of the pants to keep them from falling down.
I’m holding up the pants with one hand and trying to wring out my hair with the other when Melino? stirs.
“ What are you doing?” she demands.
“Bathing,” I reply.
She looks at me as if I’ve grown a third eye and fins.
“I’m going to wash my clothes,” I say. “I’ll wash yours, too.”
“No.” Her cheeks fill with color. It’s a strange color, more purple than red, and maybe I didn’t recognize it before—but now she’s definitely blushing.
I have to bite my lip to keep from smiling. “Okay. Suit yourself.”
Melino? sits up in bed. Very tensely, she watches me, fists clenched at her sides. I try to focus on scrubbing the clothes, but now I’m all too aware of her unblinking gaze. Water sloshes over the edge of the bucket and soaks the floor.
“Are you accustomed to doing this?” she asks.
“I’m a lot better at it... usually.”
“I didn’t think anyone washed clothes by hand anymore.” Her eyes flick from my face to my arms as I twist and swirl the fabric of my shirt.
“Most people can’t afford washing machines in Esopus Creek.” Or, in our case, can’t even afford the electricity to turn them on. The Wesselses have a washing machine. Sometimes, when it’s so cold that a layer of ice coats all our drinking water and I’m afraid I could lose a finger to frostbite, I’ll pole down to their house and Jacob will let me use it. For days afterward, I’ll find myself sniffing the sleeves of my shirts, relishing in the floral, faintly artificial scent of their detergent.
“It’s a useful skill to have,” Melino? says.
I snort. “Yeah. Laundry. Cleaning animal carcasses. My illustrious claims to fame. Hard to believe my mother chose me for the Gauntlet over Luka.”
Unfortunately, I fail to keep my voice even, and the attempt at humor drifts to the ground between us. The wound is still too fresh.
Silence falls over the cabin, and Melino?’s gaze fixes firmly on mine. Her lips are pressed into a thin, white line, and for the first time I see their faint twitching, betraying the effort that it takes to maintain such a stoic face.
“You know, don’t you?” My throat tightens over the words. “Why she put me up for the Gauntlet?”
Slowly, Melino? nods. “Her file said she’s sick.”
There must be hundreds of stories like that. Thousands. It’s an age-old narrative: the child sacrificed for their ailing parent. Giving back the life their mother or father gave to them. It’s tragic on all sides, and I can’t imagine it’s ever failed to evoke an emotional response from the audience. I wish it were so simple.
Or maybe it never is. Melino? said that Azrael crafts his narratives carefully. Maybe he’s adept at eliding the nuances, the ugly little truths behind all the stories of valiant sacrifice and long-suffering martyrdom. If I were smart, I’d stick to that straightforward, reliable fiction.
But the cameras are off. There’s no one to hear the truth except Melino?.
“Kind of,” I say at last. “It’s complicated.”
“I’m smart,” she says—in a bald, unassuming way that makes me bite my tongue on a smile. A fact, not a boast.
“I know.” My mouth quivers. “It’s just difficult to understand, if you haven’t lived the way we have.”
“Try.”
There’s an earnestness in her voice, a faint gleam of curiosity in her eyes. I’m not sure if she’s even aware of them herself, these tiny, almost imperceptible cracks in her facade. But I know I’m not imagining them. In the light of day, with my senses sharpened by a night of sleep, it’s so clear to me.
“Well,” I begin, “my mother isn’t from the outlying Counties originally. Her family is from the City. She fell in love with my dad and moved to Esopus to be with him. I don’t think she was much older than I am. But by the time they had Luka and me, my parents couldn’t stand each other. They were just too different. I guess they weren’t ever in love.”
“They could have been.” Melino?’s tone is light, but her gaze is intent. “Sometimes love isn’t enough.”
“I think it is. I think it has to be. Otherwise, it’s not really love. If the world can break it...” I trail off, cowed by the unexpected intensity of Melino?’s stare. And the fact that I’m not even sure where I stand on the subject. I’ve never been in love before.
Has she?
“The world can break anything,” she says.
“Then maybe no one has ever really been in love,” I suggest dryly.
“Maybe you have too much faith in people.”
“Luka is always telling me the same thing.”
Bringing up Luka shifts something in the air. Melino?’s eyes lose that earnest gleam, and her face seems to shrink into itself, becoming icy and remote again. I stare down at my hands, at the now damp bandages that have been dyed pale pink with my blood. Even her cold stare can’t erase the memory of her touch. The brush of her lips against my palm.
“Anyway,” I say, lifting my gaze, “staying in Esopus made my mother miserable.”
“Why didn’t she leave?”
It’s an unexpectedly hard question to answer. “She didn’t have any family left in the City by then. And we didn’t have any money, because Dad refused to take on Caerus debt and Luka wasn’t old enough to hunt. People just get stuck. Sometimes you don’t even realize that you’re drowning until the water closes over your head.”
Melino?’s expression doesn’t shift. “So then what?”
“Mom started to... deteriorate, I guess.” I pick at the bandages, just for something to do, somewhere to look. “It started with this one cold. Just a cold. It passed in a few days, but she still refused to leave her bed. She started snapping at me, and Dad, and even Luka. Ordering us to bring her things. I mean, I understood, at first. We all thought there might be something deeper going on. We even had Dr. Wessels come up to examine her, but he said there was nothing wrong with her. Physically, at least. And then... and then there was the year of silence, where we couldn’t even be in the house unless we whispered, and if we did so much as close the door too loudly, she’d fly into a rage...”
Once the words start coming, I can’t stop them. I’ve never spoken about this before, to anyone. Luka and I don’t talk about it, because we’ve lived it, and what is there to say? But there’s an odd relief in being able to piece it all together into a story. A weight lifts from my chest. It’s like the first breath after surfacing from the water.
“Luka was always her favorite,” I go on. “She never yelled at him the way she yelled at me. He always seemed to know how to do the right thing. And if she was angry, he could shake it off. He never complained. Never cried. Not even when Dad left, even though I know how much it hurt. I suppose...”
I trail off, a lump hardening in my throat. Melino? is still watching me steadily.
“I suppose,” I say, voice thick, “that if I were my mother, I’d have chosen to keep Luka, too. He’s the strong one. He’s the one worth saving.”
A little bit of fresh blood seeps through the bandages. I fold my fingers shut over my palms.
“I’ve never heard you complain,” Melino? says quietly. “And I’ve never seen you cry.”
I can’t help but give a short laugh, because my eyes are almost watering as we speak. “Maybe you haven’t been paying attention.”
Moments drip by, like water through a crack in the wall. Then, in the same low tone, she says, “I’ve been paying attention.”