The Dead Lands

“What else would there be? Why would there be anything for you?” Lewis holds out a hand until Reed returns the owl to him. Then he starts for the forest. He does not look over his shoulder when he directs someone to bring a blanket. He knows they will.

 

They follow him between the trees, into the shade, several degrees short of evening, but gray enough. Lewis indicates a low-hanging branch and Clark throws the blanket over it. They huddle close. Lewis holds up the owl. There is a metallic snap, a motorized buzz. Its eyes glow.

 

On the blanket, a burst of static solidifies into the image of a hillside strewn with red rock. A dead bush trembles in the wind. For a long minute this is all they see and Reed says, “What’s the point of this?” and Lewis holds up a finger to hush him.

 

At that moment there comes a noise from the other side of the hill, a clopping and clanking, like some piece of machinery grinding into motion. No one moves or says a word, not even to say, What is that?, though they all wonder.

 

A shape trundles into view, slowly cresting the hill—a man, Colter. He rides an armored black horse and wears a wide-rimmed black hat that casts a shadow over his face, but Lewis knows him. He knows him immediately. One hand rests on the saddle horn and the other on the machete strapped to his thigh, the blade catching the sun like a crackling spurt of yellow-orange flame. Two sand wolves appear on either side of him, panting and pricking their ears and testing the air with their noses.

 

“The man who killed my father,” Lewis says, “has come to kill me.”

 

 

 

 

 

Chapter 26

 

 

 

LEWIS MUST WANT her dead. That’s what Ella keeps saying to Simon. He must want to see her dragged out of the Sanctuary and shackled to the altar and torn to shreds. Or whipped. Or maybe bludgeoned or speared through the middle. Chopped up into tiny pieces and fed to rats. He couldn’t possibly want her to live, not with the charge he has given her in this letter.

 

Ella—

 

I need you to do something for me. Spread the news of our expedition’s success so far. I am writing this letter from northern Kansas, along the banks of the Missouri River, near South Dakota. It is not a riverbed, but a river, a genuine river, surrounded by thick green foliage. We have not yet encountered any human outpost, but I trust now more than ever that we shall. Where there’s life, there’s hope. We follow Gawea to a better place and a new country. You must find a way to communicate this to the Sanctuary. I understand that this will be difficult, and I won’t presume to know the best way you might go about it, but I’m certain you will do your best.

 

Additionally, you must expose what is hidden in the Dome. You will—

 

 

 

There the letter ends.

 

“You will,” Simon says. “You will what?”

 

She stands by the open window and reads by the dying red sunset. She crumples the letter into a ball—then hurriedly flattens it again. She should feel thrilled, she knows. He is alive. There is water. There is life. There is, as he says, hope after all. But how on earth she will share this news with others—without arousing suspicion that she is the source—she has no idea. And his impersonal tone, his arrogant presumption, his reckless directive—it’s enough to make her want to write fuck you on a piece of paper and shove it in the owl and hurl it out the window. He is asking her to risk her life. Is a thank-you or a please or an I hope you are well so much to ask?

 

“I hate him,” she says. “I hate hate hate hate him.”

 

Simon wears a fresh plaster cast that cuts off at the elbow. He has drawn on it a picture of a broken bone. The skin beneath itches as if socked by fire ants and he keeps an old wire coat hanger handy to creep inside the cast and scratch those hard-to-reach places. “What about the other one?”

 

On the bed lies the other letter, the one sealed and addressed to Danica Lancer. They crouch on either side of it, their faces propped in their hands, their cheeks bunched and their mouths fishy from the pressure. “Are we supposed to open it, you think?” he says.

 

“Is that your name?”

 

“You think that’s going to stop me? I’m a thief, remember?”

 

Ella tightens her lips into a pink button. “Go on, then.”

 

He fingers open the seal and he unfolds its many creases and reads, in a rush, the words scribbled there. “‘My darling Danica!’” His voice comes out as a flamboyant yell, as if he were a street performer. “‘With every mile I travel, my pulse seems to weaken, as if I am farther from its source, my heart.’”

 

She rips the letter from his hand. “Let me see that.”

 

“It’s just a stupid love letter.”

 

She reads silently at first, then aloud. “‘I didn’t realize how much you mattered until I left you. And now I feel sick. I’m fucking sick. I’m fucking sick sick sick. I want to eat rocks and puke blood and stab myself with sticks. I want to open that box you gave me and lick its center and let death come because that would be easier than this. We’re all going to die anyway. The world is eating us one by one. So we might as well die now.’”

 

Simon says, “Wow, I thought it started off bad.”

 

She goes quiet another few seconds before saying, “I can’t read anything in the last few lines—his handwriting is a mess—except the words death and love.”

 

A sound comes from the hallway. What could be a cough or a broom sweep or a boot scuffed across stone. Before Ella can process what has happened, before she can say, Hide or Someone’s coming—Simon has already snatched the letter from her hand, the owl from the bedside table, and darted out the open window, cat quick.

 

She turns to face the sound just as Slade darkens the doorway.

 

 

 

He leans against the doorframe. The last bit of sun flares from the window, reddening his face, which the very next instant goes to shadow. He is smiling. His teeth are too small for his mouth. “Who were you talking to?”

 

“You can’t just come in here.”

 

“Can’t I?” His eyebrows are only a suggestion, two fleshy creases above his eyes, but they raise now. “Who were you talking to?”

 

“No one.” She tries to say this casually but she is not a practiced liar.

 

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