Authors: Erin Bowman
Without warning, there is a noise out on the water, a mournful call. It is solitary and eerie, drawn out. And then there is another, in response. The two echo each other, wailing into the evening.
“Loons,” Bree says. I’m not familiar with the bird, but she identifies their call so surely I don’t question her judgment.
“They sound sad.”
“But a sort of peaceful sad, don’t you think?”
They call out again and I suppose I can see what she means. There is something bittersweet and melancholy to their cries.
“If a pair gets separated, they call for each other until they’re reunited,” she explains. “We had them during the summers in Saltwater. You could always hear them when dusk fell. Their songs helped me sleep, just like my waves, but the birds migrated away for the winter—warmer waters, I think. It doesn’t seem warm enough here, to be honest, but then again, this water didn’t always exist. Maybe the flooding changed their habits.”
The loons call out again. Bree clasps her hands together and blows on her thumbs. The whistle she produces is strikingly similar to the birds’ cries on the water. Beautiful and haunting and stark.
Bree shows me how to shape my hands, the way to bend my thumbs, where to place my lips. She makes it look so easy but after many attempts, I’ve done nothing but blow soundlessly into my palms.
“This is impossible.”
She shoots me an unforgiving look. “It took me almost a month to learn how to do it when I was a kid. If you picked it up after two minutes, I’d be furious.”
“Knowing how rare it is to see you angry about something, I don’t want to miss this opportunity.” I dramatically roll up my sleeves and cup my hands together. I blow on them without success, but a loon wails at the same exact moment. “Look at that! Perfection.”
I expect a snide comment but it never comes. I turn and find Bree staring at the burn scars on my left forearm. They look more pronounced in the firelight: the rippled portions of skin deeper, the slight discolorations more severe. I wonder what state my arm would be in if Bo hadn’t pulled me from the flaming platform as quickly as he did. When Emma first tended to me, she said I was lucky and that the scarring wouldn’t be too drastic. Even still, my arm has never looked the same.
Bree presses a hand to my skin like she hasn’t seen the burn before, like she didn’t spend our first night together running her palms over the scars and kissing from my fingers to my elbow.
“I wish there had been a way to get you out of that square faster,” she says. “It kills me that this happened to you. That I let it happen.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“It feels like it was.”
“You did an awful lot of good that day, too,” I say, thinking about how I was staring down the barrel of a rifle at Harvey moments before her rubber bullet hit me. “You saved me from pulling the trigger. I don’t know if it’s possible to repay someone for a thing like that.”
“I didn’t do it so you’d owe me, Gray. And I didn’t do it to save you from shooting Harvey, either. I did it because it saved you. Period.”
I feel a smile creep over my lips. “You see why
thank you
doesn’t seem like enough?”
She elbows me and the loons start crying again. Bree calls back, and I try to do the same, failing to make a noise that even slightly resembles their wails.
“This was a perfect way to end my birthday,” she says, resting her head on my shoulder.
“We should have done something as a group, like we did for Sammy’s.”
“No, this is better. Just you and me.”
Yes, just the two of us,
I think.
Always for a few hours. Always when no one is looking. But never for an entire night.
Bree tilts her chin toward me, offering me her lips. I hesitate and she sits back, frowning.
“Why are you fighting this, Gray?”
I glance at her fingers still resting on my skin.
“Tell me,” she demands.
It’s only now that she’s asking—willing to talk about us in the open rather than hide behind all our jokes and teasing—that the truth seems so painfully clear.
“Because . . .” I look out to sea, terrified to say it to her face. “Because maybe we’re not right, Bree.” A wave crashes against the shore. “You and me . . . Maybe we’re too aggressive for each other. We’re either at each other’s throats or we can’t keep our hands to ourselves. We fight and yell and argue. We shove each other around. We never stop critiquing what the other is doing. It’s exhausting. And that’s not a real relationship. That’s not how it should be.”
“Yes, it is,” she says firmly. “That’s exactly how it should be. We’re a team. We push each other. If it’s not honest and truthful and challenging, what’s the point?”
“To find a balance, maybe? A counterweight? Someone who is the things you’re not.”
“Like Emma?” She is staring right at me, but I’m too much of a coward to look at her. I can face Frank and Forgeries and Walls, but a girl half my size terrifies me.
“Maybe. Or someone like her. I don’t know. It’s just that Emma helps me fight my weaknesses. She calms me. I could probably use someone like that.”
“Emma makes you boring, Gray. She makes you safe.”
Those words are spoken with such bitterness that I’m suddenly brave enough to look her in the eye. “What?”
“You heard me. She takes all the things I love about you and stifles them. She doesn’t mean to, but that’s what happens when you’re with her. You fizzle. You die. You become quiet and guarded and cautious and not yourself. I hate it. I hate how I accept you in your entirety—the good
and
bad—and you do the same for me, and yet you’re still fighting it. Trying to act like you can’t feel what I feel. Like this won’t work.” She motions between us.
“Well, look at us. All we do is argue. Maybe it
won’t
work. Maybe it was
never
going to work.”
“Bullshit,” she spits. “A part of your heart has always belonged to her, so don’t you dare tell me this won’t work when you haven’t even tried. Not truly.”
“
I
haven’t tried? Really? Me? Because last I checked,
you’re
the one rushing out every night, running back to your own bed.”
“Oh, sure—blame me, Gray. Make this
my
fault. My defenses could never be because I sense your hesitation. Because I catch you watching her. Because it’s been this way since the day we met. No, I should gladly hand my heart over so that you can stomp all over it.”
“I have no intention of—are you even listening? This is exactly why I just said everything I did. Because we’re not right, Bree. We self-destruct! Can you not understand that?”
She throws sand on the fire and the beach goes dark. “Oh, I understand. I understand so well I swear I’m in your head! I knew this was coming. I knew it all along. Do me a favor, will you? The next time a girl wanders into your bedroom, think real hard about what you’re doing before you pull back the covers for her. I’d hate for her to get
confused
and
misled
by your oh-so-clear intentions.”
“I’ll go, then,” I say, because she is furious, and a wildfire cannot be controlled,
will
not be controlled. A civil conversation is not going to take place tonight.
I stand and she jumps to her feet, squares her shoulders to me.
“Yeah, great. You go! That’s just perfect! It really was a lovely birthday, though, Gray. I appreciate the effort.”
And then she is storming toward the waves, hair whipping in the wind, jacket flailing. I think of following her, but know it’s useless. The only words she wants to hear are words I’m not sure I can give her without lying.
BREE WON’T TALK TO ME
in the morning. She won’t even make eye contact. When the team heads north along the shore toward Bone Harbor, she runs ahead to walk with Xavier and I feel her absence from my side more deeply than I expect to.
It is another cloudless day, warm enough for us to forgo our hats and let our jackets hang open. It’s liberating to walk in so few layers after weeks of frigid temperatures. Clipper says the change is a combination of things: the Gulf trapping warm air and the fact that we are farther south than we were when we set out from Crevice Valley. But I don’t care to make sense of the change, not when I can finally feel the sun again.
Bone Harbor appears well before noon. It is unlike Taem in every way possible. The town is tucked back into a cove, no dome protecting it, no glamorous signs or flying trolley. Docks clutter the shoreline. Shanty buildings along the water are discolored with growth from the sea. The ones set back farther hunch as though the wind has crippled them, paint peeling. The entire place smells like fish, and a rowdy species of white birds hovers overhead, screeching endlessly.
“Is it called Bone Harbor because it looks like death?” Sammy asks as we enter the town from the south.
“Course not,” Bo says. “It was the backbone of the fishing industry for a while after the Quake; hence the name. But the flooding continued and the Gulf crept closer to Haven, so now Bone Harbor is just a forgotten waterfront community where those not fortunate enough to buy their way under a dome make do the best they can.”
“You know something about everything, don’t you?” I say. “Did they let you read a history book on AmEast when you sat in Frank’s prisons?”
Bo stops tapping at his pack’s straps long enough to wink. “It’s phenomenal how much a person can learn if they only listen.”
“Um . . . guys?” Bree waves a hand to get everyone’s attention. When I see what she’s pointing at, my stomach lurches.
Plastered against the walls of the back alley we’re walking through is a series of posters. Most threaten arrest for anyone caught harboring, trading with, or even conversing with an AmWest citizen. Several announce the recent capture and execution of Harvey. But one is larger than the rest, hung dead center, overlapping a curfew warning.
WANTED ALIVE FOR CRIMES AGAINST AMEAST INCLUDING LARCENY, SEDITION, ESPIONAGE, AND HIGH TREASON.
And above the crimes is my name, and above that, my face, staring out into the street with the gray eyes for which I was named. It’s a recent picture, probably taken by Frank’s cameras when I returned to Taem for the vaccine. I will most certainly be recognized in Bone Harbor.
“Oh hell,” Sammy says. I think he’s reacting to the poster, but I follow his gaze and just when I think things can’t get any worse, they do.
The Franconian Order. Two of them, ahead in the alley, questioning an older woman who’s wiping her hands nervously on her apron.
Xavier turns on Jackson. “The damn Forgery sold us out.”
“Me?” he says, startled. “How? Telepathy? Magic?”
“You got ahold of our gear! Radioed someone!”
“We had a deal: You keep me alive and I get you into the Outer Ring. I still don’t have what I was sent for—your headquarters’ location—so why would I risk my own life to call the Order, who may or may not be able to get me out of this mess?”
Xavier looks furious. “Oh, I don’t know, maybe to—”
“Clipper and Xavier, stay with me and the horses,” my father orders harshly. “Everyone else, split up. I don’t care how you do it; just do it now. We’ll meet at the docks. After sundown, if we can manage.”
“But the Forgery,” Xavier says. “He—”
“Not now,” Owen snaps. “There isn’t time.”
We scatter not a second too soon. I somehow get stuck with Jackson after Xavier shoves him at me. The two of us run for the nearest side street—or rather, I run and Jackson refuses to cooperate, so I have to drag him behind me. I shoulder my way into the first building we come to. It is a single-level home, set on the corner of the side street and the alley we just fled. It’s currently vacant, but there are clothes hanging on a drying rack and a few dishes set out on a table that also holds a bowl of fruit. Someone will be back eventually.
I move into the kitchen, where a window looks onto the alley. My father is just coming into view.
“You’re going to get caught,” Jackson says, a note of humor in his voice.
“Shut up.”
“I’m just stating the facts.”
I shove him against the wall. “I mean it. Not another word.”
Outside, my father has pulled his hat back on even in the comfortable weather, but I know he’s done it to cover his hair. Between the hat, and his blue eyes and full beard, he no longer looks like an obvious father to the boy on the wanted posters. Xavier holds the reins of the two horses at his side and Clipper has his hands on the straps of his backpack, gripping them so tightly his knuckles have gone white.
The Order members flag them down as they approach. The red triangles on their chests are screaming danger, and I want my father to turn and run. Nothing good can come of these people.
“Morning, folks,” one of them says. His words are murky through the glass window, but I can hear well enough.
“Morning,” Owen echoes.
“What brings you to Bone Harbor?” the second asks. A female. Her face is square and angular, her neck so thick she almost appears not to have one.
“What makes you think we are only visiting?”
“There’s not much need for horses around here,” the woman says, eyeing the reins in Xavier’s hands.
“We plan to trade them,” my father answers. “They were necessary to get here, but we need a boat now, not horses.”
“Where are you headed?”
“Haven,” Clipper says.
“You’re pretty far south of home. Where are you coming from?”
“Even farther south, ma’am,” Clipper continues. “A small town in the Southern Sector. We have family there.”
“So you’re all related?” the male asks.
“My son and nephew,” Owen says of Clipper and Xavier, which is believable enough.
“And you chose to travel by boat and horse from Haven all the way to the Southern Sector?”
“Not everyone living under a dome can afford to power a car. And a trip through the Wastes is desolate, too easy to get stranded without fuel. I don’t mean to pry, but was there a point to this questioning?”