It was an accident. Everyone thinks so. There was nothing I could have done. He ran into the knife. He did. He was going to hit me. Was I supposed to let him?
I look at my hand, the right one, the one that holds the knife. His blood—dry now—is in the folds of my knuckles, mixed in with the dust and tacky sweat that covers me head to toe.
I’ve never been this dirty. I’ve never been this sweaty and disgusting. I’ve never been this afraid, this thirsty, this alone.
I haven’t been a good leader, but four people are counting on me to take them to safety. I don’t know if I’m twelve or if I’m twenty and I don’t think age matters anymore. We are the only ones here.
There is a way out. I will find a way out.
Behind me, I hear sniffling. I turn, expecting to see Bello crying yet again, but it’s not her—it’s Spingate.
I stop. So do the others.
“You did everything you could for him,” I tell her. “At least you did something. The rest of us were useless.”
She shakes her head.
“It’s not that. It’s just…maybe they’re all dead.”
Aramovsky puts his arm around her shoulders. “All who is dead?”
“All the Grownups,” Spingate says. “I’m so tired. I don’t want to do this anymore. But if they’re gone, then there’s no one left to rescue us.”
“We’ll be all right,” Aramovsky says, then glares at me like I’m the one who made Spingate cry. “Em is our leader. She says she knows what she’s doing.”
I’ve said no such thing. Is he trying to make a point? I’m starting to think that Aramovsky says one thing but means another.
Bello’s hands come together again, clutching and turning in constant motion.
“What if Spingate is right?” she says. “If there are no Grownups, what are we going to do?”
Aramovsky nods. “Yes, Savage, what then? Who is going to take care of us?”
We all saw each other’s coffins; everyone knows my last name, but Aramovsky is the first to speak it. Even I haven’t said it out loud. I don’t like that name and I don’t know why. Hearing it makes me uncomfortable. I think he knew that it would…so why did he do it?
Because he wants to make me look bad in front of the others.
Anger flames in my chest.
He’s challenging my leadership, that’s what he’s doing. He thinks he should be in charge.
My fingers flex on the knife handle.
Cold fury sweeps over me, an urge to teach Aramovsky a lesson—then I recognize that feeling, and when I do it vanishes, replaced by a shudder of realization.
It was exactly how I felt when Yong came at me.
In the shameful calmness that follows, I understand that Aramovsky wasn’t challenging me. He was just talking. There is no harm in that. And even if he was challenging my leadership, that’s okay as long as he’s not hitting anyone. If I’m not the right leader, then someone else is. I don’t care who is in charge. I want to get out of this place.
“Maybe there aren’t any Grownups,” I say. “If that’s true, then we will survive without them.”
They stare at me like my words are as unknown as their first names. Even Aramovsky’s glare dissolves into astonishment. Is it really so impossible to think that we can make it on our own?
I point behind them, back the way we came.
“You want someone to take care of us? Were the people who died back there supposed to do that? You saw what they did to each other. They murdered little kids in their coffins. If the Grownups are all gone…”
I hesitate, knowing I am about to say something none of them want to hear. Saying it might make this real. Maybe I can’t remember anything, but I know that reality is what it is whether we like it or not.
“If the Grownups are really gone, well, then good,” I say. “We don’t need them. We don’t need someone else to rescue us…we can rescue ourselves.”
I feel my face flush, so I turn and start walking again. Rescue ourselves? I suddenly feel like an idiot. We don’t know where we are, don’t know who we are. We’re kids—we’re not supposed to be on our own.
After what I just said, will the others still follow?
Four sets of feet shuffling along behind me answer my question.
Aramovsky falls in on my left.
“Maybe the Grownups didn’t do it to themselves,” he says quietly. Then, louder: “Maybe…maybe it was a monster.”
The word hits us hard. A word made of shapeless forms, woven from fear. Monster is all the things we don’t understand, and right now, we don’t understand anything.
“Spare us,” Spingate says. “There’s no such thing as monsters.”
Aramovsky looks over his shoulder at her. “Really? And how do you know there aren’t monsters?”
“There just aren’t,” Spingate says. “Monsters are something only babies believe in.”
Aramovsky and Spingate start to argue, but I don’t hear their words: far up ahead, I see something, a break in the floor-meets-ceiling illusion.
This time, I know what it is.
“There’s another corridor up ahead,” I say.