Chapter 10
When the sun is low in the sky and shadows stretch long, Bowen, eyes wary, comes for me. We walk through the camp—me in front—and stop at a cold, deserted fire ring constructed from a handful of small boulders.
“Sit,” Bowen orders, motioning to a large, flat boulder a few feet from the ring.
I sit and try to stare without staring, peering at him through my tangled bangs while he stacks pieces of wood that look like broken table legs inside the ring of rocks.
Can this cruel man be the same person who lived across the street? I wonder. My butt still throbs from his kick. He sprays lighter fluid on the varnished wood and holds a match to it. Flames flare up, heating my face. I quickly lean away and Bowen jumps, aiming the remote at me, eyes wide with fear.
“No sudden moves,” he warns.
“Sorry,” I grumble, glaring at him. “The flames burned my face. I couldn’t help it.”
The guard from the bathroom—Tommy—walks over to us, something dangling from his hand. Bowen looks up and shades his eyes against the glare of sunset.
“Hey, Bowen. I caught this by the wall. Thought you might want to feed it to the Fec.” He holds out a wet, skinned carcass and grins.
Bowen takes it and frowns, then looks up at the man again. The man shrugs beefy, broad shoulders.
“Thanks, Tommy. I’ll cook it up. See how he likes it,” Bowen says.
Tommy chuckles and studies me with dark, satisfied eyes. I look away and stare at the flames eating the wood. “You want me to hang around? Just in case?” Tommy asks.
I can feel Bowen’s eyes on me. “I think I’ve got it under control,” he says. “But I’ll let you know if he starts scaring me more than he already is.”
“You just say the word, and I got your back,” Tommy says. He walks away.
Bowen slides a long metal rod through the carcass and balances it across the fire pit, turning the meat as the flames jump up to lick it, and I study him again. Aside from the dark scruff covering his lower face and framing his lips, he’s hardly changed. If anything, time has made him more handsome than he was when I’d stare at him on his front porch—even with the scruff.
The smell of roasting meat makes my head spin and my stomach growl, and Bowen glares at me, mouth hard, as if he’s mad that my stomach is making noise. I shrug.
The sun shines into his face and lights up his eyes, and I completely forget about the roasting meat. I was wrong about him. He is not Duncan—not the gray-eyed teenager I’d stare at across the street. Bowen’s eyes are too green, like grass and mint and dandelion leaves. Yet, I know him.
I look away from his guarded eyes and study my brown-stained pants, worn so thin above my knees they are sheer, and try to remember who he is, why he’s so familiar.
His hand is on the spit again, a hard, strong hand, brown from days in the sun. His long fingers turn it, making grease drip from the meat into the flames. I dare another look at him. This time he’s waiting. Our eyes meet. His eyebrows lift, his face hardens, and the remote is pointing at me.
“You planning something?” he asks with a smirk.
Like I can move with my legs and arms locked together. If I even attempted to stand, I’d topple forward into the fire. Not to mention I’m in a camp filled with men who would shoot me if I so much as stepped wrong. I laugh at the absurdity of it.
Bowen leans forward, eyes intent, and I stop laughing.
“Open your mouth again,” he says. I open my mouth and he peers inside. “Huh. Your teeth aren’t rotten. How old are you?”
“Thirteen?”
“You’re tall for a thirteen-year-old, Fec.” He leans back, but his eyes don’t leave me. They slowly cover every inch of my body, as if they can see the secret lying beneath my clothes. I hunch forward, praying he can’t tell I have breasts. “Lift your hands. Show me your palms.”
I bend my arms at the elbow, forearms still locked, and splay my fingers. His hand leaves the spit. Without lowering the remote, he trails a finger over my palm and frowns.
For a heartbeat his eyes meet mine, and then I am forgotten. Turning the meat takes all his attention. More grease drips from it, popping in the fire. For a long time we sit in silence, Bowen intent on the meat, me intent on looking at him without looking at him. Without him noticing, at least.
He looks up and catches me staring again, but I don’t look away this time—not when I almost remember where I have seen eyes the color of summer. But then he says something and I forget that he looks familiar.
He says, “You’re not a Fec.”
I catch my lip in my teeth, heart pounding with fear. “What is a Fec?” I whisper.
His brows draw together. “Didn’t you come here with one? The kid who tried to break that Level Three out last night?”
“The one you shot?”
“Yeah. He was a Fec. A feces dweller—F-E-C. You know, the people with the sign of the beast who didn’t go to the lab, and didn’t go instantly mad, so hide out in the sewers instead of turning themselves in?”
A wave of anger makes me bold, and I glare right into his eyes. “Why did you have to shoot her little brother? He was only eleven! She was trying to save him.”
His jaw muscles pulse. “She? I only saw two boys. And shooting him was the humane thing to do.” His gaze flickers to my hand, to the tattoo, and his mouth puckers in distaste.
“What are you going to do with me?”
Instead of answering, he focuses on the roasting meat again. He lifts the spit away from the flames and sets it on a chipped plaster plate.
“What am I going to do with you?” He says it like he’s asking himself, his eyes never leaving the meat as it drips tiny beads of moisture onto the plate. “I don’t know. I could take you to the lab and get eight ounces of honey. And be well off for a year. Or I can sell you to the black market and get eighty ounces of honey. Eighty ounces of honey would buy me a life inside the wall. I could quit the militia.”
“The black market?”
“Yeah. The black market runs the pit. Where they put people like you to fight to the death.”
Fight to the death? Me? “You’re joking, right?” I ask, my voice disbelieving.
He shakes his head but doesn’t look at me. “The pit is the best form of entertainment the wall-dwellers have.” His voice is full of bitter sarcasm. “They don’t get to see all the violence on this side of the wall, so they make their own.”
“Don’t sell me to the black market,” I whisper.
“I have until Sunday to decide.” He gives the meat a little shake, letting grease splatter off it.
“Sunday?”
“The only day of the week they open the wall. So if you can manage to keep yourself alive for five days …”
He whips his head to the side, swinging his brown bangs from his forehead, and makes eye contact. Years melt from his face, and I see him how he used to be, fuller cheeks, no scruff on his chin, a gleam of mischief in his eyes. His eyes narrow, dark lashes framing bright green irises, and I realize my mistake. He’s not Duncan, the guy I watched make out with his girlfriend on the porch swing. It’s Duncan’s younger brother, Dreyden. Dreyden Bowen.
We were the same grade in school. He was the boy who always teased me about playing the piano and threw snowballs at me when we walked home from school. But something’s so wrong with how he looks now that I almost don’t believe my own memory. Because … He’s a …
Man.
Which means that I should be a—
Panic overwhelms my better judgment, and my entire body starts to tremble. “How old are you, Dr—” I snap my mouth shut, cringing at the near mistake of saying his first name.
He tilts his head to the side and studies me with his vibrant eyes, looking at me like I’m a freak, like my skin has turned green and is covered with scales.
“Why are you looking at me like that?” I ask, my heart hammering my ribs. Does he recognize me?
“You’re so normal,” he says, brow furrowed. “I keep waiting for you to start drooling and bite me, or tear my head from my shoulders with one sound twist, or yank my beating heart out of my chest and eat it. I mean … you’re a Level Ten! I don’t get it!” His gaze lowers. “What happened to your arms?”
I look at my bound arms. “You locked them up?”
“No. Right in the creases above your elbows,” he says. I look at the creases. On both arms, the skin is clouded purple and green.
“I don’t know,” I answer, thinking I should remember how the bruises got there. Bruises form from blood pooling beneath the skin. Getting them must have hurt. I close my eyes and think. And am met by a gray wall of nothing.
“Your neck, too. You have bruises in the shape of hands circling your throat.”
Those I remember. Vividly. “I was attacked in the tunnels.” I open my eyes and swallow. My throat still hurts. “Someone tried to strangle me. Yesterday. I got away. Arrin was attacked too, but she killed the man.”
“Arrin?” he asks, still studying me like I’m liable to explode at any moment.
“The girl who tried to save her brother. You killed her brother. He was only eleven.”
“I didn’t pull the trigger, kid,” he grumbles, picking up the spit. He holds it out to me, an animal the size of my forearm, with a long scaly-looking tail that has been blackened by the fire.
I take it from him and, with my fused arms, attempt to eat. I shove my face against the food, suck the grease from it, and gnaw the flesh from the tiny bones like I am eating corn on the cob. Nothing has ever tasted so good, and I sigh.
Bowen watches me eat with a fascinated frown. When more than half of the meat is gone, he says, “I heard Fecs will eat rat. I just never believed it.” Looking away, he shudders.
Rat. I know the very thought should make my stomach turn, should make me want to vomit. But starvation doesn’t discriminate. And besides, it’s better than wriggling earthworms or a leather belt. Way better.
“They eat worms, too,” I mumble, my mouth full. “The problem is, I’m not a Fec.” I might not remember a lot of things, but I know this.