Seven Inesa
Seven
Inesa
The Wesselses are the only people in Esopus Creek who own a car. I’ve never been inside one until now. It’s boxy, with two rows of seats and no doors, so you can fall right out on a sharp turn if you aren’t buckled in. There’s mud caked over the hubcaps and so much dirt splattered up the sides that I can’t tell what color the paint beneath is supposed to be. It looks nothing like the cars I’ve seen on TV. Dr. Wessels says that’s because it runs on gas, not electricity. Luka is loading red gasoline canisters into the trunk.
“Practically a fossil,” Jacob says, slapping the hood. “But it still runs fine.”
He urges me to get in and try driving. I turn the key in the ignition and the engine growls to life so furiously that it shakes the entire car. My stomach lurches.
“I don’t know if I’m cut out for this,” I say, feeling nauseous for too many reasons to count.
“You’ll be okay,” says Jacob, buckling himself into the passenger seat. “Just take it slowly at first.”
At his direction, I drive three jerky circles around their house. The whole time, my knuckles are white around the steering wheel. Dr. Wessels is standing on the porch, his arms crossed over his chest, clearly not impressed with my driving. He probably thinks I’m going to crash his car and die in a fiery explosion before the Angel even gets her hands on me. There’s at least a 30 percent chance.
“Good job,” Jacob says, overgenerously. “Now try going a little faster.”
The speedometer ticks from fifteen to twenty.
After a few more circles, my stomach is too upset to continue. Bile clogs my throat—just bile, because I haven’t eaten anything, even though Luka tried to force bread and soup into my mouth earlier. “Don’t be stupid,” he said, “you need the energy.” But whenever I think about eating, I just hear the hum of the tracker and my gorge rises again.
I get out of the car and walk over to Luka. “I think this might be hopeless.”
“You’re doing fine,” he says, but his teeth are gritted. “Let’s just get out of here.”
It’s not just that he wants to get as big a head start as possible. He’s uncomfortable with the whole situation. He doesn’t trust the Wesselses’ generosity; help never comes without strings attached. And we all know the danger of being in debt.
There’s also the fact that we’re being very blatantly watched. A small crowd has gathered around the Wesselses’ yard, craning their necks over the fence. Lucky for them it’s not electrified. I can pick out a few faces—including, to my shock, Floris Dekker’s. This must be the first time he’s left his house in weeks. In any other circumstance, he’d probably be harassed and heckled back inside. But no one is thinking about Sanne anymore. The voyeuristic anticipation of a new Gauntlet eclipses everything else.
Floris’s eyes betray no empathy, even after what I did for him. In fact, there’s a subtle shimmer of glee in his stare. He’s just here for the show. And in just a few hours, the show will be live streamed to an audience of millions.
I don’t want to look at the crowd, and I figure it’s best to try to get in at least one more test ride before we go, anyway. I walk back over to Jacob, my boots sinking slightly into the mud with each step. It’s a warm morning for the season and his T-shirt sticks to his skin, slightly translucent with sweat, so I can see the muscles in his back. The sight of those muscles takes me a little by surprise. I mostly think of him as the kid I played video games with in his living room—the kid who didn’t mope when he lost and never gloated when he won—but he’s grown up. So have I.
“Hey,” I say. Jacob turns. “I don’t really know how to say thank you. For all of this.”
Jacob smiles, showing the dimples in his cheeks. “It’s nothing, really. Just don’t total my dad’s car.”
“I’ll do my best.”
Luka is giving me an impatient glare, so maybe it’s better to just get out of here as soon as possible. But before I can turn away, Jacob grabs my wrist.
“Listen, Inesa,” he says softly. “When you come back, I want things to be... different.”
“Different how?” He’s looking at me so intently that my skin prickles.
Abruptly, he leans forward and kisses me. I’m so shocked I can’t react—I don’t even know how to react. It’s quick, over before I have enough time to be embarrassed that I’m not sure what to do with my lips. Jacob pulls away, cheeks flushed.
Neither of us says a word. My mouth feels completely dry. Luckily, he speaks first.
“I’m moving to the City,” he says. “I want you to come, too.”
And then I really don’t know what to say. Luka approaches us and Jacob steps away, rubbing the back of his neck. My cheeks are blazing. Now I’m mostly just embarrassed that Luka saw what happened. The whole situation seems more transactional than it did before.
“We’ll pay you back for everything,” Luka says tersely, as if reading my mind.
“Don’t worry about it,” says Jacob. His face is still faintly pink. “Just focus on making it out the other side. It’s just thirteen days.”
Thirteen days. An unlucky number. I can’t help but feel Caerus did that on purpose. Although I’m sure they beta tested and focus grouped the time limit to make sure it was long enough to keep people engaged but not so long that they lost interest. Everything about the Gauntlet is precisely, shrewdly arranged. I feel nauseous again, for a whole host of new reasons.
“I’ll try,” I say uneasily.
It’s time. I climb into the car and buckle my seat belt. Luka gets into the passenger side and rests his hunting rifle between his knees. Neither of us speak as I carefully put the car into drive and inch out of the Wesselses’ yard. From the porch, Dr. Wessels waves, but it’s a stiff, self-conscious motion. His lips are pressed into a thin line.
The crowd backs up as we drive through the gate, parting to let us onto the road. Faces blur past. Neighbors and clients and people I’ve watched grow from toddlers to lanky preteens, adults to old-timers. With each face I pass, I wonder if it’s the last time I’ll ever see them. I know they’re all wondering the same thing.
“Wait!”
I slam down on the brake pedal and the car shudders to a halt.
It’s Mrs. Prinslew, pushing her way through the crowd. The sea of bodies parts for her, but by the time she reaches us, there’s a dew of sweat on her brow. Or maybe it’s rain. The sky has started sprinkling and I barely even noticed.
She stops at the driver’s-side door and looks up at me, her eyes glazed with unshed tears. Wordlessly, she holds out a satchel. Her arms tremble as she lifts it, and when I take it from her, I’m shocked by its heaviness. Peering inside, I see dozens of cans. They’re unlabeled, like all black-market goods, but she’s written their contents on the side in black marker: peaches, carrots, cream of mushroom soup. Spaghetti, spinach, Spam.
Abruptly my throat clogs. It’s the equivalent of a hundred credits, at least. I look down at Mrs. Prinslew’s face, open and waiting, but I’m too stunned to speak.
“For you,” she says quietly.
No one has ever given me a gift before. Offered me something without the expectation of repayment. She must read my befuddled expression, because she goes on. “It’s a shame we’ve started believing that credits are worth more than a life.”
Regret and grief pile down on me. I remember how I poled past her as she piled sandbags on her porch. I could have— should have—stopped to help. I thought I’d been doing her a kindness, by moving along without a word. Who would want to be in more debt?
All I can manage is a nod. My feelings are so tangled up inside me. The words thank you feel as foreign to me as Damish. I wonder what the Damish word for thank you is. They must have one. They’re not afraid of owing.
Mrs. Prinslew steps back, and slowly I press down on the gas, letting the car roll forward, through the gate. Luka takes the bag of cans off my lap in silence and chucks it into the back seat. His mouth twitches, and I can tell he’s thinking that this is another debt we can’t afford. He’s probably wishing he could castigate me for not refusing the gift. But he does me the courtesy of keeping quiet.
Esopus Creek vanishes in the rearview mirror. Mrs. Prinslew’s words echo. For you. For you. And then Jacob’s words return to me. I want you to come, too. The seeds of an imagined future bloom up, layering over my vision. A future where I survive this, where I leave Esopus and move to the City with Jacob. It’s what most people in the outlying Counties dream of. Getting out of here. Except when I try to pull the images together, they keep slipping away. I don’t know if it’s because I can’t focus on anything except surviving the Gauntlet, or because that future, Jacob’s future, isn’t really what I want.
The tracker pulses, reminding me that not even my next breath is guaranteed. But this part of the Gauntlet I’m prepared for. It’s how I’ve lived my entire life: as if at any moment, the ground under my feet could crumble.
I steal a glance at Luka. Now he’s staring straight ahead, eyes narrowed. I wonder if he’s thinking about Jacob kissing me. I still feel embarrassed by it, like I’ve unknowingly exchanged something I didn’t want to exchange in return for a car and some canisters of gasoline. But Luka and I have never judged each other for what we do in order to survive. I don’t want to believe he’d start now.
We drive on for a while in silence. Then Luka reaches over and covers my hand on the steering wheel, just for a moment, and gives it the faintest squeeze.
Five minutes until the Gauntlet. My tablet won’t stop vibrating. Dusk is settling in an uneven, hazy way, shadows long and sunlight still beaming through gaps between the tree branches. After a few moments of ceaseless rumbling from my tablet, Luka picks it up and shoves it into the glove compartment.
The first part of our plan is just to get as far away from Esopus Creek as possible. According to the Gauntlet’s rules, the Angel has to start at my legal residence. So at least we have a head start.
But just running away is easier imagined than done. To say that the roads in the outlying Counties are treacherous is an understatement. The ones that were once paved are now pocked with low, deep potholes. The dirt roads are so uneven that sometimes I have to slow to a ten-mile-per-hour crawl just to make it through in one piece. Some of the lanes we try to turn down are completely flooded, or lead to dead ends, which means I have to make creaky, perilous U-turns to get out. My driving is still liable to get us killed before the Gauntlet even starts.
We’re not completely directionless, though. Luka’s tablet is propped up on the dash, giving me, at the very least, the vague sense that we’re heading north. North and north and north.
One thing Dad believed—one thing he never stopped talking about—was that there was a place completely off Caerus’s grid. A place where even the feed from my tracker would go dead. I could never really make myself believe it, since Dad mostly brought it up when he was a few beers deep, but we don’t have a solid plan otherwise, and it’s worth exploring.
I know Luka believes it. And I know he believes Dad made it there.
“It would have to be somewhere around the contested territory,” Luka murmurs. He scrolls up on the map, zooming in and then out again.
The contested territory he’s talking about is in the far northwest of New Amsterdam, where it shares a border with the Dominion of New England. Historically, the border was the lake that we call Lake Renssaeler and New England calls Lake Burlington—a lake that, a long time ago, everyone called Lake Champlain. But then there were the storms, and the lake overflowed its banks, drowning nearly the entire county on New Amsterdam’s side.
New England seized the moment and invaded. The marshy remains were occupied by the Dominion, its residents placed under martial law. New Amsterdam fought back. New England fought back harder. Then came the Era of Atomics, and once both sides got their hands on nuclear weapons, every border skirmish instantly exploded—for one terrifying moment—and then turned cold. Mutual assured destruction granted the contested territory a reprieve, but I wouldn’t quite call it peace.
Because both sides are afraid of igniting that powder keg again, Drowned County, as it’s been nicknamed, exists in a sort of limbo. New Amsterdam’s government won’t officially confirm anything, of course, but there are rumors that it’s a blackout zone. The residents aren’t even wired to a power grid, so electricity is scant, and of course there are no Caerus helicopters airlifting rations to its residents, which might be construed as taking sides. It does seem like the sort of place Dad would go.
Unfortunately, even if you do believe Drowned County is some kind of rebel’s paradise, there’s still about two hundred miles between it and Catskill County. Miles occupied by half-sunken roads, impassable mountains, and dark, swampy forests, where things even worse than Angels lurk.
In the back seat, my tablet suddenly stops vibrating. There’s a single, almost musical ding , and then it goes totally silent. We’re driving through an impenetrable canopy of trees, so I can’t see any projections in the sky, but with cold-blooded certainty, I know that my Gauntlet has begun.
Luka looks over at me, like he’s expecting me to break down, to start hyperventilating or sobbing. Strangely, I feel almost nothing at all. It’s just my body that reacts, not my mind, bile churning in my empty stomach and adrenaline spiking through my veins. But it’s fair enough for him to wonder. Mom always mocks me, saying that I cry over every little thing.
I didn’t speak to her again after last night. I know I should try to erase her from my mind. Yet even now I feel a petulant hint of pride that I’m not being weak the way she thinks I am.
But then of course there’s the sneaking doubt that follows. The small voice that tells me Mom was right to do what she did. That between the two of us, Luka is always the one worth saving.
I bite down on my lip, hard. Because I feel like I have to break the horrible silence, I ask, “How long have we been driving?”
“About three hours now.” Luka’s voice is tense.
That doesn’t mean much—I’ve only reached a peak speed of forty miles per hour, and every thirty minutes or so we’ve come upon a flooded road and had to backtrack. I steal a glance at Luka’s tablet. We’ve only managed to put about twenty miles between us and Esopus Creek.
I wonder if the cameras have flickered on to start the live stream. They’re microscopic, flitting through the air like the ever-present mosquitoes, and I can’t hear them over the growling engine and the clatter of the wheels on the uneven terrain. I try to tell myself it doesn’t matter, that the only thing I should focus on is surviving. But it’s hard when I know there are millions of people tuned in, watching and analyzing my every move.
“Do you really think this will work?” I whisper—because I’m self-conscious about the cameras, and afraid of speaking my fears aloud, as if that will make them more real. “Do you really think Dad is... alive?”
Luka is silent for a long moment.
“I do,” he says at last. “Dad is a survivor.”
“Yeah. Like a cockroach.”
Luka lets out a breath that’s almost a laugh. “A cockroach that couldn’t stay off the booze.”
“A cockroach that thought it was stronger than the shoe about to squish it.”
Luka’s laugh is genuine and unmistakable this time. “Yeah.”
This is probably the most we’ve talked about Dad since he left, and probably the closest we’ve come to discussing our feelings. Mom, on the other hand, is a topic that feels impossible to broach at the moment. Somewhere in the lowest, darkest parts of my mind, I wonder if Luka agrees with her. If he thinks I’m the weak, expendable one between the two of us. He criticizes me all the time for being overly charitable with our clients, for still getting woozy at the sight of blood. For not believing the worst in people after they’ve proven, over and over, that they’re as much our enemies as the water lapping at our door.
Night falls, and the world becomes eerie.
It’s not just the darkness. It’s dark enough at night in Esopus, where only about half the town can regularly afford electricity. But here, miles away from anything that could reasonably be called civilization , it’s the silence that’s terrifying. There are the perfunctory noises of the mosquitoes, of the animals moving through the brush that lines the road, but there are no human sounds. No generators being pulled, no parents shouting for their children to come in for dinner, no punters poling furiously against the churning water. I start to wonder about those animals in the brush. Some of the noises are too loud to just be scurrying rabbits and squirrels.
My suspicions are proven right when something darts out into the road, a brown-and-white streak in my headlights. I yelp and slam on the brakes. The creature freezes.
The deer stares me down with two sets of eyes. There are webbed feet where its hooves should be. Its fur is matted with a wetness that makes it look sleek, and dangerous. Even from the safety of the car, a shudder of fear goes through me.
Luka bangs his hand against the dashboard, hard, and the sudden sound spooks the creature. It flicks its antlered head and then vanishes into the woods again.
“Those things are hideous,” Luka mutters.
I press slowly on the gas again, skin still prickling. Despite my line of work, I don’t find the mutations as repulsive as most people do.
“They’re just surviving,” I say. “Four eyes are better than two at spotting predators. Webbed feet are better for swimming.”
“They’re not just surviving—they’re overpopulating. They’re driving the real deer to extinction. I’d shoot them all, but it would be a waste of bullets.” Luka’s rifle is still wedged carefully between his knees.
I can’t really refute that, so we just lapse back into silence. The car rattles on down the dirt road. My driving slows to little more than a crawl, because the headlight beams only illuminate about ten feet in front of us, barely able to penetrate the muggy darkness.
“I don’t want to hit a deer,” I say, and then, before Luka can roll his eyes at my sentimentality, I add, “It might damage the car.”
“Yeah,” Luka says tensely. “Be careful.”
And then—something. It bolts out of the tarry blackness. There’s a thud, and the whole car shakes. My instinct is to slam on the brakes immediately, but I don’t even have time to lift my foot. There are several more thuds—louder, closer—and then she drops onto the hood of the car.
I try to scream. The sound just lodges in my throat.
The Angel’s hair is practically white, streaming out behind her. In the shuddery gleam of the headlights, her skin is almost translucent, purple veins showing like a leaf held up to the sun. Her eyes lock on mine and pin me into place. They’re so dark I can see my reflection in them, warped and tiny, terrified.
The empty quality of her stare was something the cameras didn’t pick up, that I didn’t notice, during the few minutes I watched of her last Gauntlet. There’s nothing behind her eyes at all, not even cruelty. They’re as cold and bleak as the river on a winter night.
“Inesa, go !” Luka shouts.
I slam the gas pedal all the way to the floor.
Somehow, even as the car crashes down the dirt road, juddery enough to make my teeth rattle in my skull, it doesn’t dislodge her. The Angel crouches on all fours, lithe and agile as a spider in her skintight black suit. The metal of the hood crumples under her hands. Sharp, glinting claws emerge from the fabric of her gloves, extending her fingers to a gruesome-looking length.
With one hand braced on the hood, she reaches for the rifle strapped to her back.
Instinctively, I raise an arm to shield myself, squeezing my eyes shut—but the blow I’m expecting doesn’t come. Instead, the glass of the windshield cracks. The Angel thrusts the butt of her rifle against it, over and over, tiny fissures spiderwebbing outward from the point of impact.
I think I catch some expression of anger flit across her impassive face as the windshield holds—maybe just the flaring of her nostrils—but in another half a heartbeat, it’s gone. And then she is, too.
I still have the gas pedal pressed to the floor, so I think maybe I’ve jostled her loose at last. But the relief doesn’t even have a chance to settle. Quick as a strike of lightning, the Angel appears on my left, clinging to the roof of the car, limbs splayed to wedge herself in the empty doorway. Her face is ghostly white, a bright, spectral shock in the darkness. And now she does look angry, teeth flashing, predator-sharp.
This time, I scream.
I raise my arm again, the other still braced on the steering wheel. I don’t know if it’s some sort of Caerus technology, but when she locks eyes with me, I find that I can’t look away. I can’t even blink. Hypnotized into total stillness, all I can do is stare into her empty gaze, her black prosthetic whirring and clicking.
She reaches for her rifle. I can see that, even as I’m frozen. Another scream gets caught in my throat, and only a pitiful, choking sound comes out. My tracker throbs in time with my racing heart. I’m going to die , I think, and the realization is like a kick between the shoulder blades, the tinny taste of blood in my mouth—
Bang .
The Angel’s face crumples, brow furrowing in shock, mouth twitching with bewildered, bridled rage. There’s blood in the air. But it’s not mine.
Behind me, Luka is drawn up almost to his full height, rifle held aloft and aimed over my head, through the empty door. Smoke curls from the barrel into the air. A slow, dark stain spreads across the Angel’s shoulder, turning the fabric of her suit somehow blacker. Her body spasms, her long, thin arms shuddering, knees buckling. Those unnatural claws retract into her gloves and her fingers slip from the roof of the car.
And then she’s gone.
I can’t tell if she leapt away or just fell, inertia dragging her to the ground. I can’t hear anything over my panicked, sputtering pulse.
“Inesa,” Luka snarls, “ drive !”
Without noticing, I’ve let up on the gas. I slam the pedal back to the floor. Luka spins frantically in all directions, rifle cocked, as if he’s expecting her to drop onto the car again. My vision warps and blurs with what I think are tears. I can’t connect them to any emotion. My heart is just beating so fast, I think it’s going to crack through my chest.