The Dark and Hollow Places (The Forest of Hands and Teeth #3)

He sits with his back to me, staring out past the beach at the ocean.

It takes me a moment to find my voice. “What are you looking for out there?” I call up. And then I start to climb, a fresh energy sweeping through me.

Catcher jerks and reaches out to steady himself. He looks around and I know the instant he sees me. His body goes still, his eyes wide open and his mouth caught on a sound he can’t force out.

Before I even reach the top he’s grabbing and pulling me up. He runs his hands over my body, along my arms and legs and then over my shoulders and up my neck until he’s cupping my head.

I pull his face to mine and I kiss him, tasting his heat and fire and need.

“You’re alive,” he says.

“You’re here,” I say.

“You’re not hurt or infected?” I see the terror in his eyes.

I shake my head. “Well, not infected anyway,” I say, smiling.

This breaks the tension of the moment. We’re laughing and crying and he crushes me to him, burying his head in my neck, and I tilt my head back as the morning sky swirls around us in a hundred million colors, brighter than any I’ve seen.

He traces a finger along my jaw, the heat of him so familiar now. So much a part of me. “My Annah,” he murmurs, pulling my head back so that he can look into my eyes.

I’m so happy at that moment that I don’t know what else to do or say. I just know that I love this man. And more than anything, I want to live my life with him—truly live.

“Mine,” I whisper, twining my fingers through his, holding him closer. Knowing that this is what it means to live. That this love, this need is what drives us to push and fight and build and grow. That as long as there’s hope and love in this world, there will always be the living.

For this moment it’s just us and the breaking day, the promise of something new. We sit pressed against each other and stare out at the limitless horizon.

“What now?” I ask him.

He smiles, an excited flicker in his eyes. “That,” he says, turning and pointing. I follow his gaze and draw in a sharp breath that I let out with a laugh. Down the coast a peninsula juts into the water with a fenced field teeming with hot-air balloons of all different colors and sizes. They’re like wild-flowers bobbing and twisting in the breeze. People huddle around them in groups, shaking hands and hugging.

“And there,” he says, pointing toward the shallows, where a large ship sits serenely, deck bustling with activity as smaller boats ferry back and forth from the shore. “Gabry and Elias are already on board, making sure there’s enough room and supplies for everyone. We’ll go to Vista first and then …” He pauses, pulling me tighter, fitting us together as one. “Then we’ll search for other survivors. If we can survive, others have as well.”

I shake my head, not ready to believe it.

“You made it,” Catcher whispers into my ear. He draws back, his forehead resting against mine.

I think about the moment in the tunnel when I didn’t believe I’d make it out. When I was willing to just curl up in the ice and sleep—let the dead take me because it was too hard to keep fighting against them. “I almost gave up,” I admit, unable to put force in my words because it makes me feel weak.

He pulls away, his gaze serious as he meets my eyes. He trails his finger along my cheek, following the path of a tear. “But you didn’t.”

I stare past him at all the people in the field, at those on the boat scrambling to fill it with supplies. They didn’t give up either. Not in the face of the Recruiters or the Rebellion or the horde. All those sparks of light, stars burning brightest in the darkness.

“And I won’t,” I reassure him, knowing it deep inside as truth.

Catcher pulls me to him and I feel his heart thrumming through me, matching the rhythm of my own. I close my eyes, listening to the sound of the ocean, the constant brush of water against shore.

My father, Jacob, used to tell me about the ocean when I was a child. Stories whispered to him on the endless path through the Forest when desperation lay thick like ash. He said it was a place where possibilities were endless and hope stretched as far as the horizon. And now, staring at the pure endlessness of it, I know it to be true.