The raw edge in his voice reminded me of that ragged wildness in his gaze when I first saw him, the shock and hunger when he looked at me. And I had thought I was desperate to see another human face after a week on my own.
After a time, Oren put his hands to his mouth and whistled, a warbling call that burbled and danced.
“What is that?” I asked when he’d finished, my eyes closed. I could still see the firelight dancing behind my closed lids, warm streaks that dazzled me as I dipped in and out of sleep.
“A lark,” he replied.
I opened my eyes. “Where did you learn all these birdcalls?”
He said nothing for a long time, prompting me to lift my head and look at him. I could see only his profile from where I lay. The angle of his nose cast a sharp shadow from the firelight and his lips were pressed together tightly. He blinked, and then again, and I realized he was struggling to answer.
“I’m not sure.” The words were so quiet I had to strain to hear them.
“You don’t remember?”
He hesitated again. I only barely restrained the urge to reach out to him. “I don’t know. I—get confused sometimes.”
“Confused?” I repeated.
“It’s nothing. When you spend all your time out here, alone, sometimes—sometimes you get muddled. You remember things wrong.”
That, at least, I could believe. Just the time I’d been alone in the wilderness, my mind spun on and on whenever I let it.
“I remember it better when you’re around,” he added, very quietly. The rawness in his voice, the longing, made my stomach clench. I tried to imagine living out here, on my own, trying desperately to hold onto myself, and couldn’t.
He started to speak again and then cut himself off. When I looked at him again, a ripple of something electric crossed his features, amplified by the sharp firelight. His eyes flicked toward mine and he froze. His expression was all uncertainty and wanting. Then he shut his eyes, and the moment was gone.
It took me a long moment to find my voice again. “Is that why you left me the shoes, and the food, and everything?”
He shrugged, the movement throwing shadows around the clearing. When he spoke the rawness had vanished, his voice suddenly indifferent. “You were something new, something I’d never seen before. The shoes—it’s all shadow, in my mind. I don’t remember.”
“But—”
“I said I don’t remember.” The coldness in his voice stopped my breath a moment. “Go to sleep.”
I turned onto my side, knowing that if I stayed on my back I’d spend the night watching him, trying to decipher what I’d seen in his face for those few brief seconds. He had not meant for me to see, that much was clear. For the first time in what felt like days I thought of Kris. I tried to imagine a look of such intensity and passion transposed on his smooth, straight, handsome face, but no matter how I pushed, I couldn’t make the expression fit.
• • •
I woke in the morning to the drowsy buzzing of the bees. They had reverted to their daytime activities, a lazy bobbing throughout the meadow as they gathered nectar.
The fire had died down in the night, and I shivered as I sat up. There was only a bit of flattened earth where Oren had been sleeping the night before—and my pack, such as it was, was gone.
Before I had time to so much as wonder, much less panic, Nix swooped down from overhead to land on the hilt of Oren’s knife, blade sticking down in the earth. He wouldn’t have gone far without his only weapon.
The pixie still wore its bee form, fat-bodied and sleepy.
“He’s fetching you supplies.”
“I don’t think he’s from the city,” I said, stretching and curling closer to the embers of the fire.
“I did tell you.”
“You also told me not to trust you.”
“I agreed I was not to be trusted.”
Nix fluttered its wings to settle them.
“There’s a difference.”
I had no time to argue. With his customary silence and ease of movement, Oren appeared again on the far side of the clearing. He had found water somewhere and washed himself. Even with his face clean, he was no less inscrutable. Though his hair was still damp, it proved to be a sandy brown when clean. He glanced from me to the pixie, which had fallen silent again, and then crossed toward us to dump the now heavy pack at my side.
“I’ll get you as far as the edge of the meadow,” he said, turning his back on me to kick dirt over the last glowing coals of the night’s fire. “Then you’re on your own.”
I listened for any hint of the emotion in his voice I had heard last night. There was none. He tossed me the canteen, which he had refilled, and told me to put it in my pack. He could get another.
“You sleep too late,” he told me shortly. “The sun’s well up, you should get moving. It’ll take about three days—no, for you it’ll be four or five—to reach the Iron Wood.”
A flicker of yesterday’s anger stirred. How could he expect me to move as quickly as he did, with less than a week’s experience living under the sky? I felt how heavy my pack was with food, though, and bit my tongue.
He led the way back through the wood. I longed to stop and bid farewell to the meadow, the sea of flowers shining violet-white in the filtered light, but Oren was pushing harder than he had the day before and I had no strength to catch up again if I stopped.
When we stepped back outside the barrier, it was raining again. The sky was monochrome above the slow, steady deluge. The last of the fire’s warmth left my bones, and I shivered miserably as I trudged in Oren’s wake. Where was the boy I’d seen last night, all longing and intensity? All I saw now was a dim shape through the downpour, staying far enough ahead of me that I could read nothing from his body language.
Oren led me along a creek through to the edge of the wood, until I could see the hills stretching away toward the blue mountains. A broken, gray-green line cut through them, unnaturally straight. “Follow the train tracks southwest through the hills until they cross the river,” he said, lifting an arm in that direction. His hand was steady, his voice flat. “It cuts a pass through the mountains; it’ll be chilly but doable if you follow the riverbank. When you reach the falls, cut due west.
“Dig your fire pits low, and try to keep them in the woods where they won’t be seen at a distance. Keep small, keep quiet. You’re in their territory now. If you see them in the distance, don’t stop, just run as quietly and as quickly as you can. Try to cross some water to break up your trail. If you see them up close—” He gave a strange shrug, and let his arm fall again. “Don’t get up close.”
I shivered. “Okay,” I whispered. I wanted to shout,
Don’t leave me alone.
“You’ve got enough food for maybe five days if you’re careful. And you should be careful. Will you be okay in the rain?”
The sky was an even gray, a two-dimensional expanse not unlike the Wall at home. The rain dripped steadily, a reminder of the empty sea above. I took a deep breath and nodded. His face was so blank that I wanted to scream at him to look at me, to see how unprepared for this I was, and to stay at my side. If I knew how to summon that ferocity of mixed desires he’d displayed the night before, I would have in a heartbeat.
“All right.” Oren glanced at me once and brushed past me, heading back toward the forest. This time he moved so silently that I realized the minute noises of movement he made in the camp were for my benefit alone. I watched him go, not realizing until the shadows of the forest began to swallow him that he was leaving for good.
“Wait!” He stopped. He didn’t speak, just stood there tense and waiting for me to go on.
“You’re really just going to leave me?”
“Yes.” His voice was as dispassionate as his face usually was.
But I need you
. I only got as far as the first word before it stuck in my throat, strangled. “But—”
He made an abrupt slashing motion with his hand, cutting me off without a word. “I can’t afford to need you,” he said harshly. “I can’t afford to need anyone.” He started moving again through the shadows.
For a moment I was too shocked to do anything but watch him go. Need
me
?
I remember better when you’re around
, came his voice, last night’s memory searing hot through the cold. He wasn’t leaving because I needed him. It was the opposite.
“Aren’t you going to tell me not to go?” I whispered.
He stopped, shoulders slightly stooped as his head bowed. “Would you listen?”
I stood, shivering lightly in the morning rain. I wanted to say yes—I could learn to live out here like him. I could forget about my magic, learn to avoid the monsters, learn which pockets were full of food and which were deadly. Surely one friendly—or at least not dangerous—face now was better than a place so frightening even Oren was afraid.
The pixie’s mechanism surged briefly as it stirred its wings from its perch on my shoulder.
The Institute would still be coming for me. For all the resources it took to find me, the promise of a Renewable chained to them for life was worth it. They would never stop hunting me until I was safe with my own kind.
Perhaps Oren, so skilled at tracking and hunting, read my answer in my face when he turned around to look at me. Or perhaps my silence was eloquent enough for him. He watched me for a long moment, the unlikely pale blue of his eyes stark in the shadows. Around me the rain roared, sweeping me up into its current, drowning me. I closed my eyes, gasping for breath and inhaling air and water both, and when I looked again Oren was gone.
• • •
Though the morning was cold and damp, I set a brisk enough pace that I soon warmed a little. It was faster than I would have moved before, but Oren’s warnings kept me going. The sunburn on my face was healing, and the mist of rain soothed the itching skin.
I reached the train tracks he’d mentioned not long after I left the forest. Overgrown and broken, I wouldn’t have recognized them for what they were: highways for the huge magic engines that at one point had carried people and goods from one side of the continent to the other. Grass and trees, and time, had ripped the tracks apart, but left enough of a recognizable trail for me to follow.
Nix and I talked, growing its vocabulary. Its voice wasn’t Oren’s and wasn’t mine—wasn’t Gloriette’s voice and wasn’t Kris’s. It had acquired a voice that was all of them, and none of them, and something all its own.
Oren rarely spoke when we were walking, and in the silence now I imagined him just ahead, his shape visible now and then through the rain. I could almost see him, impatient, pushing faster. I quickened my pace, and tried to drive him from my mind.
The tracks cut a neat path through the hills, saving me some climbing. Though they had appeared to be little more than gentle swells at a distance, up close my legs ached at the mere thought of having to climb them.
My stomach informed me it was lunchtime when I reached the river, and I stopped at the broken and crumbling bridge that had once carried the trains over the water. I sat on an outcropping of rotting stone and mortar, letting my aching feet dangle weightlessly over space.
I opened the pack, hoping to find the nuts he’d toasted last night, though my memory told me I had eaten them all. There was a little empty space at the top of the pack, where the supplies had settled—tucked into it was a cone of grubby paper.
I pulled it out, the paper crinkling under my fingers. The rain spattered it, first one drop and then two and then a dozen, loud and shocking in the quiet. It was real paper, unrecycled paper. Old paper. Where had Oren found it? Had he any idea the rations you could get for such a treasure, back in the city?
I turned it over in my hands and caught a flash of white. Nestled inside the cone, protected by it, was a handful of the tiny white flowers from the meadow.
There was such beauty here, in the world beyond the Wall.
A wave of loneliness swept over me. Three hours, and I wanted him back. The sound of another human voice, the sight of another human face. No, not just another human face. Oren’s face. I put the flowers back in my pack, tucking them carefully where they wouldn’t be crushed against my body when I moved out again.
I made a meager lunch of roasted tubers and strawberries. As I ate, I felt a familiar trickle down the back of my spine that I couldn’t blame on the rain.
Someone was watching me.
I immediately thought of Oren—perhaps he was still following, making sure I didn’t lose it the moment he left me alone? And yet as soon as the thought came to me, I abandoned it. Why would Oren cause such a cold shudder to run down my spine?
“Nix,” I said softly. “Can you see anything? Hear anything?”
The pixie buzzed off of my shoulder, and flitted up some yards above my head, darting here and there as it surveyed the landscape.
“Nothing,”
it reported as it swooped back down.
“Why?”
I shook my head. “I’m imagining things now that I’m alone, that’s all.”
“Not alone,”
Nix argued, landing back on my shoulder.
“And you’ve been out here for some time now. Perhaps you should trust your instincts.”