The Dark and Hollow Places

Ox throws his head back and laughs. I scowl. “That’s all you have to say about it?” He wipes at his eyes, damp with mirth-filled tears. “You know how I know Elias isn’t your brother? Because that would make Gabry his sister too, which would be pretty sick since he’s in love with her.”

My throat closes.

Of course I knew he cared for her. That was evident when he punched the wall when he found out the Recruiters had her. But I wasn’t willing to admit to myself it was love. I refused to even let it occur to me that it could be love.

It shouldn’t matter that he loves her. He left me three years ago. That alone should have made me realize that he didn’t love me and never would.

But I’d hoped. I close my eyes and force my shoulders to remain strong and straight. It’s one thing to know a truth in your head but another to understand it in your heart. I’ve known that Elias wasn’t mine to love and I would never be his. But my heart has always wanted to believe differently.

I think about Abigail when I saw her on the bridge. Her clean hair and smooth skin. Of course it would be her he loves: my sister. My twin. The girl who’s just like me in every way except that she’s soft where I’m hard and she’s hot where I’m cold and she’s pretty while I’m hideous.

She’s perfect. And I am not.

When I open my eyes Ox is staring at me with a knowing look, as if he can read my mind. It makes my stomach roil. I don’t like this stranger thinking he understands me.

I jut my chin out. “Where is Abi—” I swallow the name I was about to say. “Where is my sister?”

He raises an eyebrow at me as if this is a game and I’ve just stumbled right where he wants me. “She’s here,” he says, waving his hand in the air. “She’s fine. She caused a scene on the bridge from the mainland and Conall brought her back here knowing Elias would eventually figure it out and take care of the rest.”

I press my lips together and stare back over the river to the City, watching how the clouds are slowly eating away at the top stories of the tallest buildings. Soon the snow will fall, turning it all into one bright blank canvas.

How long until every inch of it’s stained with blood?

“You’re a fighter,” he says. There’s respect in his voice, and it warms my skin, but other than that I don’t respond.

He leans forward and braces his hands against the short wall ringing the roof. “You can’t have survived in this city without fighting.” He glances at me. “Especially as a woman alone.”

I ignore him, but he keeps talking as if trying to provoke a reaction from me.

“If there’s anything I know about fighters like you, it’s that you won’t give up. I know that even right now you’re thinking of ways to get out of this. To get the upper hand. Maybe figure a way off this island.”

He’s completely right but still I say nothing.

He shrugs. “If I were you I’d be doing the same thing.” Abruptly he stands back up, straightens his black Recruiter uniform.

“See, this is what you need to understand,” he says, stepping closer, using his bulk to intimidate me. “I know how you think because I’m just like you: a fighter and a survivor. This is why you need to understand something: this is your last chance at safety.”

As if to punctuate what he’s saying, he places a heavy hand on my shoulder, and I jerk back, brushing his touch away. “I’m just letting you know where reality stands so you can make the right decision.”

“You don’t scare me,” I lie to him.

He smiles, even chuckles, and considers me a moment before saying, “There’s something you should see.”

Warily, wishing the Recruiters hadn’t stripped us of our weapons when we landed, I allow Ox to steer me through cold gray corridors that twist and turn, taking us farther into the core of the mazelike structure. He never hesitates, just weaves around corners and down steep stairwells with me following and trying to memorize the pattern of turns.

He pauses in front of a plain door that looks no different from any of the others and pushes it open, stepping back for me to go in first.

The room’s pitch-black, no windows or light source of any kind that I can tell, and I hesitate in the entrance. Ox slides past me, letting the door slowly swing shut until it falls against my back, only a narrow sliver of illumination from the hall penetrating the darkness.

I swallow and try to breathe evenly, not wanting him to notice my fear that maybe I’ve gotten myself into worse trouble than I realize.

Next to me I hear him fumble, see the sparks from a flint and then a tiny warm glow. “Shut the door,” he says, cupping the flame in his hand. I hesitate, staring back into the empty hallway, watching my breath frost in the flat light. Wondering if I should make a run for it after all.

But then I glance around me at the room and my heart stills. Slowly, carefully, I reach out my fingers and nudge the door closed with a click.

Ox moves farther inside, lighting more lanterns scattered along tables of varying size as he goes. The flames fight against the dark, the room growing brighter, and as it does, what covers the walls becomes clearer: maps.

Maps of cities and countries—of the whole world. Maps of everywhere, and they all sparkle under the growing light as if live stars reside within. Mesmerized by the gleam, I walk over to the closest wall and find that the maps are peppered with pins, their metallic shafts glittering.

It’s amazing and beautiful and overwhelming all at once.

Chapter XV

Ox stays on the other side of the room, far away from me, and I take his distance as permission to explore. I run my fingers over the pins, entirely fascinated by what I’m looking at. There are countries I’ve never heard of, with lines crisscrossing and scratched out to show new borders.

“What is this place?” I ask, moving to the next map, inspecting the curve of a shore along some ocean, the pins sticking out like tiny metal trees.

“War room,” he says. “The Protectorate controlled it. Recruiters didn’t even know about it until we took the Sanctuary.” He leans against a table, his hands curled around the edge of it, one foot crossed over the other. He looks relaxed but I can tell by the way he holds himself, the tension in his shoulders, that he’s just trying to pretend he’s calm. To pretend that me being here doesn’t bother him.

I make a full circle, staring at each wall—the world spread flat for my eyes to travel. I end up in front of a magnified section of the map that shows the Dark City, the rivers surrounding it and the land stretching beyond that. To the west and south on the mainland there’s a huge barren section bordered by a thick black line. I trace my finger along it.

“That’s the edge of the Forest,” he says evenly, as if he doesn’t know what the significance of that is for me. I don’t bother to enlighten him.

He riffles around on a table behind him and picks up a small jar of pins. He pours out a handful and I see they all have colored heads on them: red and green and yellow and blue.

“The Protectorate spent a lot of time sending scouts all over the world to figure out what and where was still alive, and this is where they kept all that information. When we took over we found their records.” His expression is unreadable in the dim light—sad? Resigned? Angry?

“There’s a key to the map.” He fumbles through the pins and holds up one with a green head. “Green means Protectorate-controlled. Red is infected and blue means they lost contact and don’t know the status.”

Ox turns his hand, letting the rest of the colorful pins fall back into the jar, some cascading to the floor below and scattering along the water-stained concrete.

Like everyone else, I knew the Protectorate sent Recruiters out to fight the hordes, trying to reconquer land. But I had no idea they had so much information about the entire world. I feel like I’ve been starving and someone just set out a buffet in front of me. I start to spin back to the map, to take it all in, when Ox grabs my arm.

For the first time I realize how haggard his face is, how bruised the skin under his eyes. “This is what you need to know, Annah.” He physically turns me until I’m staring at the map, his grip tight.

“A black pin means there’s nothing. Overrun by the dead. Gone. Never heard from again.”

I stare at the wall, eyes traveling from pin to pin. Almost all of them are black. “That can’t be right,” I say. The entire country—the entire world—is covered with black pins.

Ox drops his arms, moves away from me, every gesture screaming exhaustion. He knows what this means—has known. It’s what keeps him from sleeping and eating.

It means most of the world is gone.

I struggle to focus as I step closer to the map, searching for evidence that I’m somehow wrong. That not everything is gone. I scan the walls from pin to pin, trying to find some color in the emptiness of the black. And then I see it: a tiny green pin down the coast from the Dark City, on a peninsula jutting out between the Forest and the ocean. I reach a finger toward it but then hesitate, eventually letting my hand drop.

“What’s going on?” I ask him. “What is this?” My voice is shaking, my entire body trembling.

He says nothing and I turn on him. “Why did you show this to me? I don’t understand.” I want to fight, to prove this man and this map wrong. I’m not willing to believe any of what Ox is telling me.

“This is the world, Annah. This is where we are now.” He shoves himself from the desk and I notice he winces at the effort of it. Slowly, he walks to the wall and pulls out a pin from the middle of the country. “This was a city. At the Return it had a population of five hundred thousand. After the Return they tried to hold on. They were overrun fifty years ago.”

He drops the pin and pulls out three more nearby. “These were tiny suburbs around it, little enclaves that were holding on and then the walls gave out.”

Running his hand over the map, he dislodges the pins, and they scatter to the floor with tiny metallic plinks. “All these places—these were survivors. These were people trying to make it and eventually failing.

“This one.” He holds another underneath my chin. “This fell only a year ago. And this one”—he takes another—“barely lasted the Return.”

“How do you know these things?” I whisper.

He slams a hand against the wall. “This is what the Protectorate did. It was their job to keep it all together. To know where the safe zones were—to figure out how to survive. We have their books and their notes. We have their maps and letters. We know everything they knew about trying to make this world work so we could live in it.”

I back away from him slowly, putting the heft of a table between us. “Maybe there’s some place out there that’s not on the map.” I scramble for some ledge of hope to hold on to—some proof that we’re not all slowly disappearing. “Maybe there’s still somewhere safe the Protectorate kept secret. They had to go somewhere after the Rebellion.”

I sweep my arm around the room at desks covered in paper. “Maybe they got information about somewhere that beat back the Unconsecrated—we just need to figure out what it is. Maybe it’s still in here.” Ox simply shakes his head as I start tearing through the desks looking for something, anything.

Finally, he puts a hand on my arm as I’m sifting through pages, tossing them onto the floor—some of them so old they crumble in my fingers. “It’s impossible in this world.” He says it gently, but there’s an undercurrent of anger, frustration and despair.

“We’re surviving,” I protest, not wanting to believe what he’s saying. Wanting him to be wrong.

He looks at me, so sad. “That’s what I brought you here to see,” he says. He walks over to the map where our island is clearly visible, a green pin stuck firmly in the lower end of it for the Dark City and another pin to the north for the Neverlands. A thick line bisects the two where the Palisade wall was built between them long ago.

He sorts through the pins scattered on the desk until he finds two black ones and sticks them both in the island. One for the Dark City and the other for the Neverlands. It’s such a final gesture that I can barely breathe. In a second he’s wiped out almost everything I’ve ever known.

He then collects a handful of silver-topped pins. “There’s one more color,” he says, pushing pin after pin into the map, all through the Neverlands and the river and across onto the mainland.

I don’t even have to ask. I know what he’s doing. “Silver means horde,” I say evenly. “It represents the horde.”

He smiles bitterly. “Not the horde,” he corrects me. “A horde.” He turns back to the wall, shoving in more pins. “This one’s from the beginning, right after the Return. They thought they could try to stop the infection if they led the huge hordes of dead into the Forest and closed them off. Contain them all. We’ve been fighting other ones for decades, slowly whittling them down. This one we just ignored. It was in the Forest, they were downed and there weren’t people around to waken it.…”

I press my cheek against the chilled wall, not even listening to him trace the route of the horde from the valley in the Forest toward the Dark City. Not telling him that I saw it as a child. My skin feels flushed, like a fever. This is all happening too fast—my mind can’t keep up anymore.

Finally, I realize Ox is silent. He shifts on his feet, coming to stand beside me. When I look up at him his expression is sympathetic, as if he understands my confusion and heartbreak. It’s hard to remember that he’s my captor now. ns class="adsbygoogle" style="display:block" data-ad-client="ca-pub-7451196230453695" data-ad-slot="9930101810" data-ad-format="auto" data-full-width-responsive="true">