Creators (5 page)

“I need more bandages, sheets, anything to help soak up this blood,” Sharon yelled, nearly knocking me over as she ran toward the community’s makeshift infirmary. Despite being ready to give birth at any moment, she moved with a quickness that defied logic. But, then again, she had always put others before herself.

My father’s soldiers ungraciously dragged Al and his wounded men into the gates of the community by their arms. When the other members saw us enter, their guards following behind us with bowed heads, our men holding their guns, they scurried back into their rooms, rushing what children they had left far away from us.

The community had always feared invasion by the council’s chosen ones; they never thought they would have to fear their fellow naturals.

My father had told me that this was the way it needed to be done—the way he could protect us all. I knew the community would have a hard time accepting that. Especially considering he had shot one of their leaders…but they really didn’t have a choice.

While my father went to work setting up a perimeter, replacing the community’s watchmen with his own trusted guards, I ran as quickly as I could behind Sharon, dragging my little sister with me.

“Please, Tess, I’m tired. I can’t run so fast,” Louisa said.

I shut out her pleas. There would be time for her to complain and moan later, but now we needed to search for the truth. That was all that mattered in the end. Inside the walls of the community, I could almost understand my father’s frenzy, his willingness to do whatever it took to protect his own. I would do just about anything to find the answers I needed for my sister. Was she going to die? The only person who could even possibly tell me was off tending to the wounds of three men my father was responsible for shooting.

When I busted into the small infirmary, my hair sticking to my forehead with sweat, the sight of blood nearly made me throw up. Towel after towel lay abandoned on the floor as Al and his men cried out, cursing my father. Sharon and two others, a man and woman I vaguely recognized from my time in the community, were exchanging a lightning-quick series of medical terms I didn’t understand.

“You won’t take my leg, Sharon. I’d rather die. You hear me?” Al screamed, his face beet red from exertion.

“The wounds aren’t too deep with these two, but I’m afraid…” The woman’s voice trailed off, her face grim as she stared down at Al.

Sharon gave the woman a curt nod, hustling to a drawer and yanking it open. I recognized the needle and thread from my own experience getting stitched up. Sharon threw it to the woman.

“Lazarus? I need you to go find Eric and Lockwood. We’re going to need help holding Al down.” Sharon panted, running a trembling hand through her hair.

I swallowed, forcing down whatever food was left in my stomach. I had seen a lot of blood and death in my life, but something about watching Al pray and beg not to have his leg cut off caused my very being to shake. Under the monster was a man, and for some reason, that made this all the more frightening.

My sister urgently tugged on my hand, but I wouldn’t leave. If I had learned one thing in the past couple months it was that life was unpredictable, wild—the bitch of fate itself. This was where my sister needed to be, and I wouldn’t move from this space until I attempted to make sense of a world that seemed increasingly senseless.

I just couldn’t.

Sharon turned back to the drawer and pulled out a saw. At the sight of it, my sister gasped and grabbed my hand. “I…I can’t. I can’t—” A frantic, high-pitched squeak issued from her lips and she fell to the floor.

It was only then that Sharon saw me. Her eyes traveled to where my sister lay on the floor, stirring slightly. Her eyes fluttered as I gently shook her back to consciousness. Sharon placed her hand over her abdomen. “Oh, Tess,” she whispered.

Her voice didn’t sound helpful. It only sounded sad.

I gasped for breath, suddenly finding it near impossible to breathe. “You…you have to help her. Check her,” I begged. I didn’t care about the men behind her that were also calling for Sharon’s attention.

Sharon nodded and pressed her lips together, pulling in air through her nose. I don’t know where in her mind she went during that brief moment of silence, but it certainly wasn’t with those in the room. When she returned, her eyes met mine. “One crisis at a time.”

“Lazarus said you needed us?” Eric called out from behind me.

“Louisa! What happened? Is she all right?” Lockwood called, clearly panicked.

“Lock, take this girl into the other room. There’s an extra cot out by the dining tables. I’ll be there as soon as I can.” Sharon turned to me. “I promise.”

I blinked away tears and nodded as Lockwood bent down and scooped Louisa into his arms. My resolve, my control over the hurt and fear, was slipping.

…

Later that night when everyone was fast asleep, I scrounged up some paper and a pen and crept away from the group, calling back the skills I’d learned while sneaking around to see James. Back then, life had seemed so difficult. I was falling in love with a boy who was created to hate me. It was complicated.

Now, I longed for the problems of those days. Because back then, those problems only affected me. Now there didn’t seem to be anyone left untouched by the darkness. Not even Al escaped from it; he had embraced it, claimed it as his own, and it had taken his leg.

Sharon had yet to check in on Louisa. Hours after leaving her, she was still deep in the blood of Al and the other men shot during what felt like a part of some nightmare that never ended.

Blood.

Always so much blood.

It continuously hunted me, and I didn’t know how to outrun it anymore. I needed the hope my father offered. His words continued to move about in my mind. There was a possibility that I could speak to James through letters. Words. It was words that had brought us together in the first place. Sitting on his bed reading the outlawed passages of
Jane Eyre
, our fingers aching to reach for each other in between the space of the words we read aloud. What would I write to him? What could I say? How does one put their very soul onto the page?

I could only hope that the cool, brisk night air and the stars above would help me write my letter.

When my father and his men set up camp in the dining hall, and I was sure Louisa was safe, watched over by a trio of personal guards—Henry, Robert, and Lockwood—I pretended to fall asleep. It wasn’t long before the others around me went to sleep, too. We had traveled far, further than any distance measured by miles. It felt like we were constantly traveling from one world to another. None of us sure which we were meant to live in.

I welcomed the cool air that greeted me as I stepped outside of the dining hall. The makeshift command center had grown hot and stuffy. While living in the compound, I had gotten used to sharing cramped sleeping quarters with others, but there was something about sharing a space with a bunch of soldiers sprawled out on tables, their hands protectively around their guns even while they slumbered, that left me feeling antsy.

I grimaced as I took a seat on the wooden steps of the building that had served as everything from mess hall to courtroom to infirmary. My side was still sore from the stabbing. I leaned my head against a post. It was only then, alone with nothing but the crickets and other mysterious noises that made up the night’s symphony, that it all truly hit me.

Louisa. James. My father. McNair. Al.

My eyes pricked with unshed tears. I tucked the paper under my leg, so I wouldn’t lose it, then squeezed the bridge of my nose with my fingers, hoping I could force the tears back down. It was hard to swallow. Even harder to breathe. I pulled my knees to my chest and rested my head against them, my heart pounding painfully against my chest. Like a beacon calling for some ship distressed at sea to return home, wondering if it ever would. I clutched onto the fabric of my shirt, hoping, willing myself to reclaim control.

Even if my father could get my letters to James, they wouldn’t change our situation. We would still be apart. It would be easy to lose it, crumble. But I couldn’t believe that my destiny had already been written. Our last moments in the woods didn’t feel like an ending. The memory of him was almost enough to save me, but I wanted more than some idea of him.

I wanted him back.

I closed my eyes and searched my mind for something, anything that would quiet the fear that was screaming inside me. And then I saw him, the boy I now knew I would never stop loving. Even if I never saw him again, I would love James till my dying breath. If there was anything after death, I was pretty sure I would love him then, too.

I remembered our time together in the woods. I let the memory sweep over me like the waves that McNair had once told me he dreamed of seeing, waves that moved and crashed, echoing the feelings that made life, no matter how difficult it got, worth living—passion and freedom.

It had happened in the woods, the vast land of greens and browns that separated council-controlled territory and the settlement the community was so desperate to keep safe. We had made that bit of woods our own. We had always been able to do that—take a place and define it to suit our needs. The piano room. The closet after the party. The jail cell.

Knowing full well that death was a possibility, I had given myself to James in those woods. I hadn’t wanted to risk missing out on anything. Not when I knew that our meeting with George could mean the end of it all.

But it wasn’t the only reason I had had sex with James. I’d done it because it was what I wanted to do. Want. Desire. All the things the council programmed us to think were dirty and wrong.

But it hadn’t felt wrong.

I didn’t have sex just because I could, either. I knew what it meant for me, and I knew what it meant for him. Whatever the council wanted to make of it was up to them. Even Sharon had changed it to suit the needs of the community. For me, it had been about intimacy.

It had been everything.

It was the first time I had ever completely and utterly trusted anyone in my whole life.

“You don’t have to be careful with me,” I had whispered.

“Won’t it hurt?” he’d asked, moving closer to my lips, his hand running up and down my back.

“Yes.” I’d nodded. “But don’t worry, I won’t break.”

James had hesitated, and, to be honest, it drove me a little mad. I bit on my bottom lip and tugged on the waist of his pants. His breath caught and he looked down at me. His face flashed red as the heat traveled down his neck. I unbuttoned his pants.

And then he had been helping me shed my clothes. It was as if we were both taken over by a frenzy, a fiery fit of emotions. I hadn’t been able to help but giggle. Both naked, we just sat there and stared. My eyes traveled across the body science had perfected, and when his eyes moved across mine in turn, I didn’t feel embarrassed by the randomly flawed construction. The way James looked at me left no room for mortification. His eyes only carried awe.

James had licked his lips as he reached for me, placing a gentle hand on my hip bone. His fingertips grazed my skin, and my whole body erupted into goose bumps. His hand traced its way up my torso. Ever so slow, ever so adoring.

James cleared his throat. I couldn’t take one more second of waiting. I closed the very small distance between us and pressed my hungry lips against his. James, who had always been so careful with me, wrapped his arms around me and pulled me to him with a force that left me breathless.

His tongue pressed against mine, moving not like a teenager afraid of the voyage he was about to take, but, instead, like a man who didn’t worry if he made a mistake. Because no matter what happened in these moments, we had chosen to share them together. Once I realized that, I didn’t feel nervous anymore. We would always be each other’s first. No one, not the council or the community, would ever be able to change that. As we fell to the ground, moving and shifting together, becoming one with each other and the woods that protected us, I knew there was nothing more natural, more human in the world than this.

Maybe sex could mean all the things the council said. Betrayal. Lust. Weakness. But it didn’t mean that’s what it had to be to us.

For us, it felt like hope and love and promise.

…

“Tess, you should come inside. Your neck’s going to hurt like hell if you sleep like that.”

I reluctantly opened my eyes, letting free the weighty breath I held trapped in my throat. I left the comfort of that moment—the moment that would forever only belong to James and me.

Henry reached down to help me up.

“Do you mind sitting here for a bit?” I asked, nervous for the conversation I was about to have, knowing I owed it to the boy in front of me to attempt it.

When I’d thought that I would never see James again, I had allowed myself to feel something for Henry, something I had never been able to completely define. He was my first friend, and when we lived together back in the compound, he had distanced himself from me because we had been taught that love was wrong, But together in the wild lands of the Isolationists, we had grown close. Closer. Henry had always been sure of the way he felt, but I never had such clarity. All I knew was that the shared kisses between us never stirred my soul like the ones I shared with James.

“Of course not,” Henry replied, taking a seat next to me. “But why do I get the feeling I’m not going to like it?”

“Because you won’t. I need to talk to you about James,” I said softly.

Henry sighed. “We don’t need to have this conversation tonight.”

I reached over and took my best friend’s hand in mine. “Yes, we do. We should have had this conversation a long time ago, but I messed things up.”