She looks at me funny, her head cocked to one side again, and then the amber eyes fall closed. And Samara just … goes away. The facade comes down in a landslide, and I see raw emotion moving across her face. Uncertainty, fear, and is that anguish?
I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know what Jill and I have walked into. I don’t know if we can walk out again. But I do know that the decades of studying tool marks on a rock or the break patterns of a piece of pottery are never going to be enough for me now, not when the solution to every mystery is sitting right here at my feet. Samara has a head stuffed full of answers, and my need to know those answers might very well take priority over my personal safety. Which is completely unfair to Jill.
I think these things in a few blinks of an eye, and then Samara’s snap open. She’s with us again, her breath coming fast. She looks to Jill.
“They will be inside the walls soon. We need to hurry. I’ll help you hide him, and when the Council is gone, in return, I ask that you tell me everything you know about forgetting.”
Jill doesn’t respond until I nudge her, and then she says, “Okay.”
Samara almost smiles.
“I’ll go for water and something to brace his leg. We should move him into the next room, where we cannot be seen if they climb the mound. And then you must help me block up the door.”
“How long will they look for us?” I ask.
Samara shakes her head as she stands, picks up her pack. “I will hurry.” And then she’s halfway to the door, moving like she’s melting into the dark.
Jill waits, watching me watch Samara through the glasses. I see her in grays and greens, sprinting through the vast, dark room that is beyond the doorway like she can see it. As soon as she’s out the other side, I say, “Gone.”
Jill immediately relaxes her stance, then jumps to her feet and starts her expert cussing.
“You know I’ve got the recording function on,” I tell her. It doesn’t improve her mood.
“I don’t believe you, Beckett, I really don’t! She is pretech! A local!” She says it like it’s something to be ashamed of.
I get up on my elbows, carefully lift my leg to the floor while she rants. That infusion is starting to wear off a little. Jill doesn’t even slow down.
“You know this changes everything. And someone is coming to kill us in ‘half a bell,’ whatever that means. And what is she talking about, ‘forgetting,’ and asking if we remember our names? Who wouldn’t remember their own name … ”
I think about the wall behind me, and the carved sign that brought me up the pile of rubble in the first place. “Remember Our Truth” and “Without Memories, They Are Nothing.” I have to know what happened here.
“And why would someone want to kill us, anyway?” Jill goes on. She’s not slowing down for breath, making the domed room echo. “I mean, I know why I want to kill you, but—”
“Jillian,” I say. “Shut up.” Her mouth closes, her eyes wide. Then they narrow. “Listen, you can yell at me later. You can call me every name you can think of and scream for a week straight. But right now we need to talk about getting my bones mended before she gets back.”
Jill just looks at me, then snatches up her pack. “Fine.” She’s already pulling out the medical kit. And the sanitizer. “But as soon as you can stand, we’re out. Agreed?”
I don’t answer. Because I’m not sure I agree with that at all.
I search through the street outside the mound of rubble, scanning the ground for broken branches to make Beckett a splint. And all the while I’m listening, for a rustle, a shout, a change in the wind, I’m not even sure what. My own heartbeat thuds in my ears. Those two are going to show me how to Forget, or the Council is going to end this, and I’m not sure which will happen first.
And what if the Council had come before Samara Archiva? What would the Outsiders have done then? I’m not as naive as I used to be. Nita told me what happened to Sonia’s boy from the Outside, the one she couldn’t leave alone after the Changing of the Seasons. Craddock made an example of him. At the post in the Bartering Square, and he did not live. It makes me sick to think of it. I never told Sonia. I wasn’t sure how good she was at caching guilt. As things turned out, maybe not good at all. Or maybe that boy was more than an addiction. Or maybe she just feared Judgment.
But the two inside the rubble mound seem to have Forgotten danger completely. They are strange, like children. I never thought the Forgetting would make me like a child. I’m not sure I want that. But then again, children are innocent. And they can grow up again. Right now, I need for them to trust me. To help me. I need for all of us to live through this. And then I will take the Forgetting to the Underneath, destroy the Council, and let the Outside rebel. Heal everyone else. For Nita. And Adam.
If only Sonia could have waited a little longer.
And then a shadow flits across the sun. Not a person, or any other creature. The shadow of something large. Silent. High in the air.
I leap to my feet, spinning, eyes to the sky. But there’s nothing. Nothing at all. Just the empty violet beyond the treetops, now beginning to show a few telling stripes of pink. The sun is setting. And yet, I can hear that wrong kind of quiet again, the waiting stillness. I wait with it, holding my breath, and when I look back the way I came, dustmoths are rising in a line, from one end of my sight to the other. Moving toward me.
I grab my pack and Beckett’s splints and run. A careful run. Silent, no brushing of the branches. When I reach the mound I throw my things inside and start to do the same with pieces of rubble, placing them in the doorway without noise, so I can barricade the opening from the inside. I don’t have time. But if I don’t get this blocked up, we’re going to be found, and we’re going to die.
Someone shouts, not in the distance, but in the mound, noise reverberating through the empty interior. Beckett. So now he yells. Now, when the Council is here. When he’s going to bring them straight to us. I hesitate, glance at the stones that need to be stacked, then start the same careful, silent run through the darkness of the interior rooms. Beckett needs to breathe, cache, bite something, whatever it takes to stay quiet and give us time to block the door.
I hit the dark inner chamber at a full sprint, but then I slow my steps. There’s a glow coming through the broken doorway. Light like I’ve never seen. Green. Bright. So bright it’s startling. Unnatural. Wrong. My feet stop, well inside the darkness. On the other side of the open doorway, Jillian and Beckett are talking, still with the short, clipped words, but very differently from before.
“Fibula, Jill, toward the heel.”
“Is it a revelation to you, Beckett, that I can’t see your fibula?”
“That should be the angle, right there.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Please let me do the infusion first. I don’t want to miss again.”