Carrion (The Darkly Dreaming Duet #1)

1. Chapter 1

Chapter one

I t is the eighth time in under two weeks I wake from the depths of sleep, only to find myself balancing precariously on the edge of the roof. My hot pink toenail polish winks in the dark as I blink down at the traffic rushing hundreds of feet below my outstretched foot. An icy wind snakes across the high-rise apartment tower, blowing my hair in tangled strands around my face and penetrating my thin night gown. I shiver against it, my heart lurching uncomfortably and my head swimming as I take in the sheer drop to the pock-marked pavement below.

With a slow breath through my teeth, I force myself to look out instead of down. To appreciate the way night has softened the crumbling edges of the city, shrouding the worst of its disrepair. I breathe in the stale air, willing my heartbeat to slow and cataloguing the details of my dying world until the terror of waking at its edge subsides enough that I’m able to move.

Once, this area was a hub of the thriving city night life. Music poured out from nightclubs and bars and spilled into the slick, paved streets, the sounds of spirited laughter and ribald jokes peppering the air as the evening stretched into morning.

But that was before the plague.

There hasn’t been music in these streets, or anywhere else in the world, in years. There is no one left to play the instruments or write the songs; no one who remembers how to feel a rhythm pulse through their veins and electrify their body.

I shake my head for even thinking of it, the fanciful thoughts surely the result of teetering somewhere between dreams and reality. Of once again waking from a nightmare only to find myself steps away from falling to my death.

The neighborhood is still busy after dark, but now it’s a sterile sort. There is no song or laughter, but there is rhythm—the distinct fall of military boots. Soldiers come and go at all hours, switching shifts or heading out on patrol. The product of my apartment building’s proximity to one of the government’s many Amelioration camps.

Even now, at nearly midnight, they move in a steady beat, fanning out to other parts of the city to keep watch for any signs of the plague.

None of them glance up at the woman poised to jump.

“What the hell, Willa?” Michael’s voice jolts me so violently from my thoughts, I wobble precariously far over the edge, before lurching backward to land hard on my ass.

The base of my spine smarts against the concrete. I glare up at him, waving his outstretched hand away in agitation. His face is pale in the moonlight, worry and alarm leeching his usual color as he shoves his hand in his pocket and watches me rub my ass with increasing concern.

“I thought we agreed you wouldn’t sleep here,” I mutter irritably, climbing to my feet.

Michael stares at me with his mouth ajar, and then scrunches his face with a harried sigh. “What was that? Were you—goddammit, Willa, were you about to jump?”

I resist the urge to roll my eyes. Instead, I brush past him and duck through the door leading to the residences below like it’s possible to outrun Michael’s good intentions. And indeed, they’ve increasingly begun to feel like prison bars to slip between.

“If I was, it wouldn’t be any of your business,” I reply lightly over my shoulder, descending the cold stairs on bare feet.

Michael follows me down from the roof, and to my infernal irritation, into my apartment. “This is serious,” he implores, the worry in his voice scratching at the back of my neck. “If you need help, I can—”

I spin around so abruptly Michael rears back, and when I set him with a sharp gaze, he visibly flinches beneath it. As handsome as he is, the man has always had a softness inside him that chafes my skin and sets my stomach roiling. I don’t do soft—other peoples’ or my own.

“If I need help you can what, exactly? Tell the military the woman you fuck occasionally is having self-harming thoughts? Get me locked up in one of those prisons with the rest of the unsound?” Michael blanches, and I laugh cruelly. “Only a family member can recommend a citizen for commitment,” I remind him with another laugh. “And as I have none of those, and fuck buddies don’t count, feel free to get the hell out.”

I turn on my heel and stalk into the kitchen, something acidic bubbling beneath the surface of my skin. I’ve allowed myself to become far too complacent lately, relaxing each well-set boundary slowly enough, I’d hardly noticed. Whether it was laziness or sentiment, it doesn’t matter—it ends now. If Michael cares enough about me to turn me in for amelioration, the tryst has long run its course.

Rolling my shoulders in an attempt to ease some of the gathered tension, I take a leveling breath through my nostrils and pour myself a generous measure of whiskey. Every muscle in my body is tight and achy, and my stomach has yet to settle from the shock of waking on the roof. Again. My eyelids feel like they’re coated with sandpaper, and I try to remember the last got a proper night’s sleep.

Perhaps it’s the lingering adrenaline fused with ever-present exhaustion that’s made me so reckless, even when I learned long ago, reckless is something I cannot afford to be.

Tilting my head back, I swallow the liquor in one large gulp before finally turning back to Michael, who’s closed the door and frozen awkwardly in the middle of my living room. The whiskey burns pleasantly in the back of my throat, easing a bit of the frigid cold still lingering. I don’t know how long I was out in the elements before I woke, and the unmoored sensation of grasping at lost time settles beneath my skin like shards of glass.

“Like now, Michael. Get out now.”

He blinks slowly, and with his long lashes and soft mouth, I’m so forcibly reminded of a fawn, I wonder why I ever found him attractive. Neatly cut blonde hair, warm brown eyes, a well-kept body. I used all of it to soothe an ember of need, just as I’ve used so many before him. But in the end, none of them have ever been able to touch the burning hole inside me.

It hasn’t grown, nor extinguished. It’s only faithfully remained, flaming through my center until I became the hollow thing I am now. Bored. Numb. Empty.

“Willa,” he pleads softly. My lip curls in distaste, and when he steps toward me in earnest, I match his strides, keeping my distance.

“My sister was one of the unsound. I didn’t turn her in and look what happened.” Michael’s face twists in anguish. “I know that we’re not—that you don’t…” He shakes his head with a sigh. “I know I’m not your boyfriend, but please, Willa…let me help you.”

Michael reaches a hand toward me, but then seems to think better of it, curling his fingers into a fist midair before dropping it back to his side. But not before I see them tremble.

The tremble is enough to make me feel guilty for a fractional moment. But as he continues, the guilt is replaced with a familiar numbness, one that’s been my constant companion for years. It rarely abates, not even when a man pleads so sincerely to allow him the chance to save me.

Michael’s eyes shine, and for a terrifying beat, I think he might cry. Instead, he swallows roughly and says, “Being alive in one of their institutions is better than not being alive at all.”

If only he knew.

Knew that only death can sweeten life, just as only pain can sweeten beauty. Without it, everything becomes meaningless—an endless trek across time, mired in mud and monotony.

If only Michael knew what it feels like to look at the ceiling of those camps day after day—to examine the way the cracks spread and wish for your heart to fracture the same way. To pray, over and over, for the cool relief of death.

I don’t say any of this even as Michael grows melancholy and desperate before me, his face silently begging me to let him in. His pleading is useless, for as comfortable as I’ve become in my numbness, I’ve also discovered it is only bearable alone. Knowing my true thoughts would do nothing to assuage his worry. It’d probably only get me committed that much faster.

“This was…fun.” I settle on the word lightly, though I couldn’t say if it truly fits. I don’t think I remember the true meaning of fun, though that isn’t an affliction that’s solely mine. Since the arrival of the plague, fun is something of a legend. “And now it’s over. Have a nice life.”

Michael opens his mouth before promptly closing it, like he’s decided I’m not worth the argument. And truly, I’m not.

He gathers his coat with one last simpering look and turns to the door, just as something heavy crashes in the hallway. His gaze snaps to mine and his hand freezes on the doorknob, as the crash is followed by the unmistakable thud of heavy, military grade boots. It’s clear from his alarm, Michael hadn’t actually followed through on reporting me to the military.

I usher him quietly away from the door and grab the revolver I keep stashed in my shoe rack. Michael stares at the gun, mouthing an incredulous, what the fuck, Willa, but I’ve already prowled silently to the door. Pressing my ear to the wood, I hear nothing but the roughshod beat of my own heart, pounding so hard against my ribs, it feels like they’ll crack.

They can’t have found me, I assure myself. I’ve been too careful.

I let my guard down too far with Michael, but I’ve been meticulous with everything else. Panic begins to burrow its way beneath my skin, hot and suffocating, as I filter through every decision I’ve made in the few months I’ve been here.

Another crash, closer this time, and oxygen floods my lungs once more as I realize the commotion is coming from across the hall. The soldiers aren’t here for me. But the cool wave of my relief is just as quickly overcome by consuming horror as I realize who they must be here for.

Zenni, my ten-year-old neighbor.

I came to this city with the same intentions I always have: keep to myself and don’t get attached. People are like plants: they dig their roots into the soil of you, snare them around your heart and bones. So quietly, you don’t realize it until, one day, you wake up and realize you’re mired permanently in place.

For me, being free to leave isn’t a matter of preference, but of life and death. I have to be able to run at a moment’s notice, so I never allow myself a reason to hesitate.

Zenni was different. I moved into the building in the middle of the night hoping to hide from prying neighborly eyes, but Zenni, whose parents both worked night shift at the nearest camp, had been roaming the halls. She took one look at my pitiful duffle bag stuffed full of the only things I actually owned, and immediately homed in on the most precious of them: three books filled with fairytales.

She’d followed me into my apartment, not seeming to mind the fact that I had no idea how to speak to children. Or anyone, really. And I’d let her in—maybe because her big brown eyes reminded me so acutely of my little sister’s it made my chest ache, or maybe because it had simply been nice to have someone to talk to after spending so long alone.

Zenni asked a thousand questions about the books, each one embedding under my skin and cracking the glass I’d armored myself in. After over two centuries of the plague, children are rare, especially one of Zenni’s age. They all either succumb to the mysterious sickness or are swooped up into the Amelioration camps before it can take hold.

None of them have the luxury of caring about stories anymore. No one does.

So when she asked to hear one, I’d obliged her. That night, and every night after, when darkness fell and her parents left for their shift, she’d appear at my doorstep, eager for another fairy tale. I’d begun to think of Zenni, with her wild ringlets and even wilder mouth, as invincible to the plague’s effects in a way a million other children weren’t—in a way I still bitterly wish my sister was.

I must have been wrong.

There’s a scuffle followed by a lone scream, and I frantically try to remember the last time Zenni asked for a story—or the last time I even saw her—and come up blank. Have I been so caught up in my own selfish shit that I missed her struggling? It isn’t like I have a ton of friends to keep up with. There’s always only been the kid across the hall, and somehow, I failed to see the plague slowly destroying her from the inside out.

Zenni screams again, the muffled sound reverberating through the hollows in my heart as I grip the cool metal of the gun tighter.

“Willa, what are you doing?” Michael hisses desperately from behind me. “You can’t shoot the soldiers! They’re helping her!”

Zenni’s mother pleads for more, her voice teary and panic-laden. And I understand it—those committed to the camps rarely come back out.

If they do, they’re heavily drugged. Hollow. Never the same.

Zenni screams again, louder this time. Then everything goes eerily silent, and I know they’ve injected her with a sedative. Blood roars in my ears as I stare down at the gun, the gray metal contrasting against the warm olive-tone of my palm. My breaths come in rapid wheezes, and the quiet of the hallway rings against my ears as I listen to the soft rustle of Zenni being carried away.

Head swimming, I stash the gun back in the shoe rack and attempt to gulp down the nausea climbing my throat. Pressure mounts behind my eyes and I press my fingers into them, trying not to imagine the soldiers loading her unconscious form into the back of a military vehicle.

I try to be just like the unsound—the plague-ridden survivors—and not imagine anything at all.

But no matter how aptly I focus, the visions flood me anyway, as clear as if I’ve painted them on my eyelids. Of bright, happy Zenni being locked in a padded cell. Wrists and ankles bound. Injected with a pharmacy of drugs. All to stave off the hopelessness of the plague.

And I let them take her. My only friend.

“Get out,” I bark at Michael without looking at him, whipping open the door and squeezing my eyes shut against the barrage of images before I drown in them. Images borne not only of the horrors of my imagination, but from personal experience.

Suddenly, I can’t see my apartment at all; only the paneled ceiling of an Amelioration camp. No, no, no. I’m free now. I repeat the words in my mind, but they’re feeble against the frantic beat of my heart, and the haze of panic beginning to squeeze my ribs like a vise.

Whatever Michael sees on my face has him quickly gathering his things and sliding out of my apartment without another word. Maybe it’s because he finally understands how deep my self-preservation runs. I’m not capable of being selfless or kind. I’m only capable of survival—even when it means sacrificing an innocent child to keep myself out of the camps. Even if it means hating myself so fully, I can hardly breathe.

When the door closes behind Michael, I finally open my eyes. My apartment is no emptier without him, as he’s never been vibrant enough to leave behind an imprint. A transient visitor in an insignificant life.

I collapse onto my bed feeling like someone’s taken a chisel to the inside of my ribs. Hollowed them out and left them too frail to hold anything inside. When I finally fall asleep, it’s to the imagined rhythm of Zenni’s words, the cadence of her rare laughter. Her clever brown eyes swim through my mind, before blurring so fully into my sister’s, I can no longer distinguish them. Their pain, their shadows. Where the plague has stained them in shades of both.

And when I wake again, hours later, on the edge of the building, this time, it’s too late to catch myself.