Lewis licks his lips as if they are too dry for words. It seems impossible that so many hours before they all felt so hopeful. Just as it seems impossible that York—his face now tight with rage—is the same man who pranced and goofed around the fire last night.
“I’ll tell you what we’re going to do,” York says, and now his voice quiets. “We’re going to find my sister.” He tightens his grip on the shotgun. “That’s what we’re going to do. She saved all of us, and now we’re going to save her.” His voice breaks in the middle, but he keeps his eyes steady on all of them until they nod.
Chapter 18
IN THE BASEMENT of the museum, when Simon slips from the ladder, when he holds out an arm to brace his fall and it snaps beneath him, she climbs down. He can hardly hear or see her, the pain so absorbs him, a hot sword that jags from his wrist to his chest. He can see his own bone—his inside brought outside—and he feels as amazed as he does disgusted, touching the sharp, slick point of it with a finger. Already he has lost so much blood. He does nothing to stop the flow of it. He just stares and matches his heartbeat with its ebb and flow.
Then the girl grabs him by the shirt as if to throttle him, but she only means to rip it, a sharp blade of glass in one hand, the remains of his lantern. She slices away the fabric and tears it off him and knots it around his arm to stanch the wound. She slides him out of his backpack and he cries out with pain and she tells him to quit whining, the worst is yet to come.
Then she hoists him onto her shoulders. She grunts her way up the ladder. And in this way, she escorts him outside, through the nighttime city, to the hospital, where a sleepy-eyed doctor sets the bone and sews the puncture and wraps him into a temporary cast and fits him with a sling. Simon faints more than once from the pain. During his moments of wakefulness she berates him. “You are a world-class moron,” she says. “World-class.”
Her name is Ella, she finally tells him. Her shoulders are squarer than his. She keeps her straw-colored hair cut in a pageboy. Her forehead is so often wrinkled with suspicion and consternation that even when it goes flat it carries red creases. Her eyes rarely blink, steady in their focus, above a small nose freckled and rounded at the tip.
It is still dark when they leave the hospital. He walks in a wobbling way and she supports him with an arm as if he were drunk. He does not think to question where she is taking him. He is not capable of rational thought. He has lost too much blood and the doctor has doped him with an opiate. His mind is a pleasant fog.
At one point, a deputy steps from the shadows and orders them to stop. They are out past curfew, he says, and that is all he says, because the girl lights into him, saying that there is nowhere else she would rather be right now than home, but Simon broke his arm badly, a compound fracture, and if not for her, he probably would have died, but she managed to drag him to the hospital and now she has to drag him back home, and that’s where they are headed if the deputy would only get out of their way thank you very much.
The man says nothing—he seems afraid that will only encourage her to keep talking—but steps aside. The streets are shadowed canyons Simon does not recognize in his delirium. They branch and branch again and he wonders if they will ever find their way.
“I could have turned you in, you know,” she says. Not only was he trespassing in the museum—that was trouble enough—but can you imagine what the deputies would do, she says, if they knew he was roaming around beneath the city? They would make an example of him; that’s what they would do. Whip him or hang him or worse. What was he thinking?
Simon shrugs and then flinches at the lightning strike of pain in his arm. He is not sure what to think of this girl who never seems to stop talking. That’s what she is, a girl, maybe a year older or younger than him, but she speaks with the domineering voice of an adult. She smells nice. He’ll give her that. Grassy.
The sky is beginning to lighten and the first bell is ringing when they arrive at the museum. His backpack, he says as she leads him inside. He needs his backpack.
She asks what’s in it and he says a fifty-pound load, some to sell, some to keep.
“A load of what? What could you have possibly taken from the sewer?”
Probably he shouldn’t speak so loosely, but she has protected him so far—and right now, with drugs in his veins and a poisonous snake with big fangs seeming to twist through his arm, nothing seems to matter.
“I didn’t find anything in the sewer. The sewer is the way in and the way out.”
“The way out?”
“The way out of the Sanctuary.”
Chapter 19
THE FIVE OF THEM stand before the house on the hill. A cloud hangs over it like a messy gray wig. The siding is pocked with holes from birds and bugs. The porch sags and blood stains it, they hope from the deer the day before. Lewis stares at the black doorway, with the wood scarred and splintered all around it.
There was a time, when they were children, when Clark bullied him. Knocked a book from his hands. Yanked down his pants and ran away. Fired a pebble at his cheek with a slingshot. Hog-tied him and hung him from a balcony. But there was a time, too, when they played kindly with each other. And on one occasion, during a game of hide-and-seek in the Dome, he feared her gone forever. He searched for what felt like hours, peering under beds and in closets and behind doors, all the usual places where she couldn’t be found. He began to cry out—“I give up! I said I give up!”—and even then she did not appear. She had abandoned him, it turned out. Grown bored. Gone outside. He was reduced to tears and the terror that the building had somehow swallowed her up—until he heard laughter out a window and spied her playing in the streets with a gang of children. He had never felt so irrelevant, betrayed.