The Dark and Hollow Places (2 page)

“Some men have a strange idea of what love is.” She pushes a strand of greasy hair back behind her ear and I see bruises dotting her neck.

What she doesn’t understand about me and Elias is that I promised him I’d wait for him to come back, and leaving would mean he’s dead. I know there’s nothing else that could keep him from coming home to me. The evening he left he said he’d find me again, and I believe him.

But a dark thought seeps into my mind, one that’s been curling around the edges of my consciousness for months: Elias left my sister alone in the Forest of Hands and Teeth when we were kids. Why would I ever think that he wouldn’t leave me?

The woman stands and I whirl to face her, pulling the knife back between us, ready to end it. She doesn’t come closer or threaten me in any way. She just flips her pipe over and knocks it against one of the chimneys, spirals of embers twirling and fading around her legs and feet.

“Did you ever think about what you really wanted your life to be like? Like when you were a little girl?” She moves toward the edge of the roof. The darkness seems to stretch forever.

I think about the village where I was born. Where I had a
sister and a father and a community of people who loved and took care of me.

That. That’s what I want my life to be like. Not this city. Not these scars. Not this loneliness. I remember the moment in the Forest when my sister fell and scratched her knee and how bright the blood looked. How desperately the dead clawed at the fences while Elias and I walked away from her.

But I tell this woman none of those things. Instead I shake my head. “No.”

Her face falls a little as if she was expecting a different answer. “Ever wonder what you’d do if you knew you were going to die?”

“We’re all going to die eventually,” I tell her.

She smiles, more like a wince. “I mean if you knew when,” she clarifies. “If you only had a few days.” She inhales, sharp, and adds, “A few moments.”

I shake my head. It’s a lie, but I don’t want this woman to know me any better than she already does. Being here for her death—that’s already more intimacy than I’ve shared with anyone in years. I don’t want to like this woman—I don’t want to care about her—because then this moment and the one that’s coming next will hurt too much.

I refuse to have feelings about someone when I know they’re going to leave me. I feel sorry that I can’t offer this woman something different, but I have to protect myself more than I have to protect her.

Her eyes begin to glisten and her shoulders shift as she pretends to laugh. “Oh well,” she says, waving her dirty pipe in the air as if it could clear it all away. “Oh well,” she says again, barely a whisper.

She begins to shake. I’ve seen it before, the infection
taking a firmer grasp, burrowing in deep for the kill. Any moment she’ll collapse, her body giving out and dying. And then she’ll Return, clawing for my flesh.

I move toward her, knife tight in my hand, but she jerks her head, waves me away with a fling of her arm. She’s standing on the ledge of the roof. Below us the plague rats moan.

“I just…,” she says, raising a hand to her head, patting her hair into place. She presses her lips together, her nostrils quivering as she takes a deep breath. “I just wanted someone to remember,” she says then. “I just wanted to be beautiful to someone, just for a little while.”

And before I can ask “Remember what?” or “Remember who?” she tips forward and jumps. The rushing air pulls her hair from her face, and her body twists like a ribbon caught in a breeze for a moment before she tumbles into the darkness.

She doesn’t even scream.

I don’t have to run toward the ledge to know what happened to her. I hear the thump of her body hitting the concrete below. The sound of bones breaking, of her skull shattering.

I drop the knife and press my face into my hands, dig my fingers against my forehead, as if that will hold me together. I shouldn’t have been the person here at her death. I don’t even know the woman’s name or who to tell that she’s gone.

And suddenly I realize just how much her situation echoes my own. How no one would know or care if the same thing happened to me. How unlikely it is that any of the few neighbors remaining in my corner of the Dark City could even recall my name, much less notice if I went missing one day.

I’ve never felt so alone in my life. Sure, I’ve spent the last three years on my own but I’ve always focused on surviving
and waiting for Elias. This woman’s done something to me, though. She’s made me recognize a kind of gap inside, and now I don’t know if I’ll ever figure out how to close or fill it.

Finally, I raise my head and notice a bundle left in the nook between the two chimneys where the woman was sitting. Numbly, I pick it up. It feels wrong to sift through the contents, but that doesn’t stop me.

Her few possessions amount to not much more than half-empty cases of colored powders and stains. Makeup that could never come close to hiding her age or the desperation seeped into every line on her face.

I trace my fingers through a vermillion red, something about the tone of it calling to me. Then, tentatively, I press my hand against the chimney next to where the woman sat, tracing a red slash across the smoke-blackened bricks.

Digging through the pots, I find a blue that I smudge over the red and then black around the blue. Eyes, lips, hair, chin: Bit by bit I create a portrait of the woman. Not the way she was at the end, crouched in the shadows, but how she looked falling, with her wide smile and the knowledge that her misery was ended.

Plague rats moan in the alley, and from a window below me I hear men laugh and women joke. The air’s thick with the smell of their sweat and need as they find solace together while I hunker in the night drawing the woman. I make her beautiful, make her flying through the air as if gravity would never dare to sully her with its grasp.

It’s a rush. I feel like I’m reclaiming the control the woman stole from me. And when it’s over and I step back I realize that at some point I stopped painting the stranger and started painting myself. But not how I am now, not scarred, with
stringy blond hair that tangles in front of my face. How I could have been if I’d never left my sister in the Forest that day.

The woman asked me what I wanted in my life if it could be anything. I haven’t given any thought to what I want in a long time, outside of longing for Elias to come back. When we first arrived in the Dark City I’d have said I wanted to go home to my village in the Forest but somewhere along the way I’ve forgotten that. I’ve let the day-to-day existence of life blind me to dreams.

Just like this city, I used to be something once. I used to be a girl who liked to get out of bed every morning and who understood passion. Yet for the past three years—longer than that, even—I’ve been frozen, incapable of accepting that life around me has shifted without my consent.

Exhausted and lost in thought, I push away from the wall and start making my way back to my flat, needing the familiar surroundings to remind me why I’m still here.

Why I’ve allowed myself to stay stuck waiting.

The darkness of the night settles heavy on my shoulders as I retreat toward the Dark City. I scamper over bridges and wade through the line of people waiting to cross the Palisade wall into the City proper. I feel invisible, everyone around me wrapped up in their own problems, not caring about an anonymous girl with her gaze trained on the ground.

I scramble past the debris pile of what used to be a wing of the building housing our flat and climb down the fire escape, slipping through the window into the emptiness of my home. Bare walls, scarred floor, dust coating everything.

Nothing personal except for the quilt twisted at the bottom of the bed, where it landed after I kicked it off this
morning. I wrap it around myself, burying my face in the tattered cloth that was once bright. That once held his smell.

Usually sleep comes fast and easy. Usually I want nothing more than to be yanked into the featureless dreams, but not tonight.

Tonight I think of the woman. The stars spin outside, chasing dawn across the sky, and sleep never comes. Only the cold emptiness of the flat.

No other heartbeat to keep me company. No voice to keep away the blackness of night. Nobody to share the length of days with.

And I realize that I’ve been spending too long trying to forget that I’ve lost the part of myself that used to belong to someone else. That I once held my sister’s hand and sat on my father’s lap and knew my neighbors’ names. I’ve filled that place with an emptiness, and the woman tonight made me see that that hole inside me is from Elias and that I’ve waited for him to come home long enough. He’s gone. And I’m alone. Crouching here in my empty flat, listening to the moaning of the City dying around me, I remember what I want.

I want to find my way back home, to my sister and my family and my village in the Forest of Hands and Teeth.

T
here are only two ways off the island: boat or bridge. The boat docks sit on the southeast side, deep in the protected range of the Dark City. A series of gates and fences blocks the City from the docks, and Recruiters patrol with dogs that can smell infection to ensure that no vessels carry it into the City.

The few boats remaining after people fled during the Recruiter Rebellion are fiercely guarded, and I know it would be almost impossible for me to book passage on one. Which means that if I’m going to really do this—leave—I’ll have to travel by foot like everyone else who wants to get off the island. And the only bridges in and out are far north in the Neverlands.

I start my journey in the late morning after a sleepless night standing on the roof of my empty building waiting for dawn. I stared at the few remaining lights flickering in the skyscrapers along the bottom edge of the island and tried to
find the strength to leave it behind. Elias fought so hard for our flat in the Dark City, scraping together the exorbitant rent just for the promise of safety, and I feel wrong abandoning it.

What if he comes home tomorrow and I’m not here? What if he’s just over the edge of the horizon, dreaming of me, fighting his way back to me?

But then I remember that woman. Her falling through the air. If I only had a few days left to live would I spend them like her, huddled on a roof, waiting for a stranger to stumble upon me?

And the answer is no.

By the time I arrive at the Palisade wall it’s early afternoon. No one challenges me as I make my way through the series of gates separating the Dark City from the Neverlands. It’s only those coming the opposite direction—those trying to gain access into the Dark City—they care about. People leave every day.

The journey through the Neverlands is uneventful as I stick to the well-traveled avenues, keeping safe in the crush of people scurrying about. Streets of broken buildings spread out around me, dark alleys with sinister promises that I walk past gripping my knife tightly, promising a fight if anyone tries to mess with me.

There’s already a line at the bridge when I arrive in the late afternoon, the process of leaving the island a slow and sometimes arduous one. No one meets my eyes. No one glances at me or cares, even when they brush past to shove their way forward, knocking against me as if I’m invisible. It’s easiest when I keep my hair pulled over my face, my head tilted forward as if I’m examining the ground.

My scars make me stand out—they mark me as a distinct
individual, and I’ve learned well enough that it’s better to stay inconspicuous, especially since the Rebellion. The Recruiters like to make examples of people, and their methods have grown crueler and harsher day by day. It used to be their cruelty was a form of keeping order, but now with the Protectorate no longer around to hold them in check, it seems more like some sort of sick pleasure.

I’ve heard rumors of Recruiters enslaving women who catch their eye and taking anything that isn’t theirs. There have been even worse murmurings: black-market dealings in the dead, people disappearing, heads staked throughout the City as proof of Recruiter power. Things I choose not to contemplate but that have convinced me to avoid causing trouble as much as possible.

Around me people shuffle anxiously. Some of them carry bags and one or two push a cart piled with crates. Those are the ones I try to stay away from—they’ll only attract attention from the Recruiters interested in looting, and there’s no one to stop them.

The main bridge spanning the river between the Neverlands and the mainland is cut into sections by thick metal walls, each with two doors: one for those leaving the island and one for those entering. Running along the center of the bridge is a metal fence separating the coming from the going. A bell rings, the doors slide open and people pool from one lock into the next, and then the doors close and we wait, trapped in a pen until the bell signals again.

People push past me, elbows digging into my arms and back. I’m wearing most of the clothes I own: thick trousers under a skirt, three shirts layered over one another and a worn coat hanging down to my thighs. A small pack holding
my old quilt rests against my lower back, and I’ve tucked my knife against my hip. I was afraid anything else I packed might be taken. The layers of clothing make my skin slick with sweat as the sun beats down, the day unseasonably warm for winter.