Chapter 3 Heart #2
The force behind her words surprises me. “Do you have such parts?” I ask sincerely, lifting my head to look her in the eyes.
“I think we all do to an extent,” she says.
“I just told you a little of the war I waged. Do you think it left no scars on me? Do you think everything it brought out of me was good and wholesome? Mancella is right not to feed those parts and make them all of her. But she is not right to suppress them. It can be just as harmful.”
I bow my head again, guilt a weight in my chest. “I will . . . consider your words.”
“See that you do.”
Swallowing, I tuck a loose strand of hair behind my ear. She rises and so I rise with her. We clasp arms, and then I watch her disappear into the crowd, back toward the towering cliffs.
Feeling like the dogs inside me are worrying at my very bones with their teeth, I return to my plot, ready to pick up the sieve and throw myself back into my task. Hoping to work through some of these complicated feelings as I do. But just as I’m about to kneel, something catches my eye.
It’s a girl, about my age, with a long ponytail of hair so blond it’s almost white. She’s weaved leaves into it, and I can’t tell if she means for them to be decoration or camouflage. They are both, turning her into a stunning creature that blends into the trees as though she is a part of them.
I don’t know her, but that isn’t what claims my attention. After all, I can’t know everyone in my realm. But the way she’s hunched over her square, almost as though she’s trying to hide it, gives me an odd feeling.
Cautiously, I step closer, craning to see what she’s covering with her arms.
To my surprise, it’s a hole. A few feet deep.
At first, I think perhaps she’s trying to dig up some particularly stubborn roots, but she has no bucket for glass shards, and she seems to have little regard for the ones in the dirt, plunging her arms in up to the elbows, even though they are already peppered with red scrapes.
“Excuse me,” I start, intending to offer her medical care, but before I can even finish the sentence she’s on her feet, a knife drawn.
A moment of silence passes between us as she seems to realize who I am.
Only instead of being chagrined and apologetic, she grips the knife harder, her brown eyes darkening. My pulse starts hammering in my ears.
“I guess it’s deep enough,” she says.
It takes me a second to realize what she means, and then I glance behind her at the pit she’s made. “Deep enough for what?” I ask.
She doesn’t answer, only tosses something behind her into the hole. I barely get a glimpse before she kicks dirt over it, but it looks like a scroll, with some writing on it. Perhaps . . . names?
“May I ask—” I start.
“No time,” she says. “You should probably run.”
Then she leaps upward with impressive dexterity, grabbing onto one of the overhanging branches and—moving so fast I can hardly keep track of her—pulls herself up and springs from one tree to the next until she’s out of sight, her long white ponytail streaming in the air behind her.
I remain rooted in place, thoroughly confused.
What did she mean run?
When she disappears completely, I let my gaze drift to the loose earth in front of me, trying to decide whether to dig up whatever she’s buried.
But before I can even begin to debate it, the ground below my feet bucks.
I lose my footing, stumbling hard to the left.
My first thought is that it’s an earthquake, but the ground isn’t exactly shaking. It’s more like I’m standing on a lake instead of solid land, and something just caused a ripple at my feet. It spreads outward, the circle becoming wider and wider.
People nearby cry out, startled, as they trip over ground that used to be flat.
But it doesn’t end there.
If the dirt is a lake, then whatever was in that scroll has caused a small whirlpool, spinning and churning faster than solid ground has any right to.
My heart speeds up and my creatures squirm, recognizing before my brain does that things are about to get very, very bad.
And then something shoots upward, right in the middle of the swirling dirt, suddenly enough to make me stumble backward in surprise.
Because it’s . . . a hand.
A groping, clawing hand.
And then an arm.
And then another.
In the time it takes for my stomach to roil in horror, a multitude of human-looking arms burst forth from the ground, like wasps exploding from a nest. I gape at them, panicked, as they grab for anything in their vicinity, clenching and pulling and tearing down.
One manages to latch on to the woman next to me, dragging her viciously into the dirt.
The woman screams, scrambling to pry at the fingers, but soon more hands emerge and snatch at her until she is wrenched out of the air and into the earth, her shrieks muffled by the fresh soil that fills her mouth.
I run for her, but she’s buried before I even make it halfway, and several more hands shoot up between us, forcing me to dance back.
The scroll. Whatever it is, it must be doing this.
I have to get it.
“Into the trees!” I scream to the others, because the arms don’t seem to have any bodies attached, so their range is limited. My voice serves to wake up those who have frozen in fear, and soon there is a mad dash for any trees that look like they might bear a load.
Meanwhile, I sprint back toward the scroll. It wasn’t buried too deep, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to dig up. In theory. But the hands are clustered most densely directly on top of it, which means that to get to it I will have to go through them.
I dodge one groping hand, and then another, only to skid to a stop directly in front of the heart of the horde.
Asset makes me wear a knife, and today I’m grateful for it. I draw the small blade from its sheath and fling myself into the center of the writhing flesh, aiming for the spot where the scroll was buried.
The hands grab onto me immediately. They rip at my hair, tug at my clothes, scratch at my skin, all working together to drag me deeper into their strange, squirming mass.
One goes for my throat and, wincing, I plunge my knife into the soft bones of its wrist, hoping to wound the limb enough to make it back off, or at least loosen its grip.
It doesn’t seem to notice or care. It doesn’t relent, and there isn’t even any blood welling around the gash. It’s like I’ve sliced into the meat of a corpse.
With dread, I realize I will have to actually cut it off me. My wince becomes a grimace, but when the bruising fingers start pulling me down, into the earth, pressing hard enough to cut off my air supply, I get over my hesitation and start sawing, the creatures within me going wild.
I hack away with hot desperation, cutting through tendons and scraping against bone, the sound of severing flesh making me sick to my stomach.
But it’s not enough. The other arms are wrapping around me now, drawing me down into a bruising embrace.
I slice my way through about a quarter of the wrist at my throat before I realize it’s no use.
Even if I were to free myself from its grip, there are dozens of hands ready to replace it. I can’t cut them all.
Black spots enter my vision, but even so I switch tactics, slashing blindly in front of me. My only goal now is to maneuver my body toward where the scroll was buried and destroy it. I don’t have long, but it was close. If I could just get there . . .
But the arms shift, enveloping me completely, and suddenly I’m not sure which way is up. Which way is the scroll. Which way is my next gasp of air. In the span of a few seconds, they have wound around me so completely that all I can see is flesh on every side.
I twist, panting and searching for a gap, only to find one and be shocked by dirt filling my mouth instead of air.
The feeling of it is so wrong, so revolting, so terrifying that I buck backward.
In a sudden burst of horror that makes my creatures frenetic within me, I realize that I may not actually succeed.
That I may die, and for nothing. It doesn’t seem possible, but the sludge in my mouth tastes like the grave.
There’s a small corner of my mind that frantically tries to figure out what that would mean. No part of me has ever died before. No part of Alect, either. Would it kill Mance? Somewhere in the castle, will she just cease to live because of my mistake?
Or would it only kill me? Would she go on without me, forced to live with no Heart? For the rest of her life, would she be unable to summon up compassion for anyone, unable to see the good in anything?
What would that do to her?
At the thought, my body is possessed by a desperate, violent need to survive, and I lash out everywhere at once. The knife gets lost hilt-deep in the crook of an elbow, but I keep going, digging my nails into bloodless skin, kicking at anything that touches me, whipping my head from side to side.
They only press in tighter.
I open my mouth in a frustrated scream, but that was a mistake. More dense, sludgy dirt pours into my throat, so thickly that my jaw feels unhinged. I try to spit it out, but a hand attaches to my face, locking the muck in. Sealing off my air for good.
I’m choking, spluttering, thrashing, panicking, crying. My creatures feel like they’re trying to claw their way right out of my body.
But the fingers only dig deeper into my flesh. The dirt only piles higher on top of me. And there’s no air.
No air at all.
My chest explodes in pain as my lungs scream for oxygen.
My heart pounds so hard it feels like the inside of my rib cage is bruised.
I feel the wave of nausea that precedes unconsciousness, but I fight it.
I fight everything. The arms, the way my body is shutting down, the oppressive darkness around me, the crushing weight that presses in from all sides.
I fight it with an animal desperation that burns, all while my creatures fight, too, ripping at the underside of my skin.
But we can’t fight forever.
All too soon, dizziness causes my movements to slow. My mind gets fuzzy. I feel . . . hopeless.
And then I can’t delay the blackout any longer.
My muscles go slack and my brain goes numb, as bitter tears soak the dirt near my face.
Unconsciousness closes in, and I only have time for one last, wretchedly anguished thought.
That perhaps everyone was right about me.
Perhaps . . . I was naive, after all.