Page 97

Kang pulls a canteen from his belt, unscrews it with his teeth, and puts it to my lips. The water is warm, slightly sweet, but it is water, and I drink until he pulls it away.

He sets the canteen down and, without warning, pulls the sleeve of my shirt up and inspects the wound. The flesh is angry, red, puckered around a hole the size of a bean. He prods the wound, then tears a strip from the hem of his uniform and wraps it around the wound, tight but not tourniquet tight.

“I can cauterize it,” he says, “or we can wait until we find a med kit.”

“Not fond of fire,” I mutter.

He almost smiles. “Noted.”

He sits back on his heels, just watching me for a second. The silence is thick with things unsaid.

The forest around us is not silent. It chatters, cracks, and clicks with the life of ten thousand insect species, most of which probably didn’t exist five years ago. I see things moving in the undergrowth: little mammals with double tails, a centipede the color of raw chicken winding up a tree. Above, a web glows with the caught dust of the air, strings vibrating as if plucked by invisible hands.

I stare at the sky, the light, the impossible world. “Where are we?” I say.

He shrugs, looks around as if seeing it for the first time. “Outside the radius. The woods. Sanctuary country.”

The word makes me laugh. “Sanctuary,” I repeat. “You think they’ll take us?”

His mouth goes flat. “Don’t know. Don’t care.” He meets my eyes, steady and green as ever. “I just wanted to get you out.”

The words fill me with an ache more intense than the bullet wound.

I try to sit up. He steadies me, hands at my waist, fingers splayed to brace and guide. The touch is gentle, but possessive. I let him. There is a place in me that wants the anchor, the gravity of another body.

The movement makes my vision tilt, the edges going soft. “I can walk,” I lie.

He lets the lie stand. “You can try.”

I try, and I do—knees buckling, then catching, boots finding purchase on the spongy, moss-covered ground. Kang hovers close, not touching but always there, a boundary I can lean on if I want.

I look at him, and see the exhaustion in the lines at his mouth, the bruises on his arms, the thin trail of blood at his temple, dried and flaked away. He is as wrecked as I am, maybe worse.

He gestures ahead. “We follow the creek,” he says. “It flows east. Sanctuary is two, maybe three days if we’re lucky.”

“And if we’re not?”

He tilts his head and stares at me. “We die together.”

I bark a laugh, too loud, and the sound sets off a chorus of shrieks from the trees.

I take a step, then another. My shoulder burns, but the rest of me is functional. I look down at my hands—scarred, but strong. I close them, open them. I am still here.

We walk. The trees close in, their trunks warped and gnarled, the underbrush littered with the detritus of a world gone mad. I try to catalog the flora, but my brain won’t cooperate. Every time I focus, my mind slips away, back to the hands at my belly, the voice at my neck.

“Almost done, my love.”

I shake my head, try to clear it. Kang walks ahead, checking the path, always circling back to make sure I haven’t collapsed.

The sun goes down. The world glows in shades of blue and green. We make camp in the hollow of a fallen log, the wood soft and sweet with rot. Kang builds a fire with practiced efficiency, using the resin from a strange orange fungus as tinder. The smoke is purple, acrid, but keeps the bugs away.

He sits beside me, close enough that our shoulders touch. I feel the heat radiate from him, a reminder that I am not alone.

For a long time, we don’t speak.

In the hush, Stitch’s laugh slinks back into my thoughts. Her biting humor, her absurd tales—pirate, surgeon, thief—spun with such conviction I stopped trying to sort fact from fiction. It didn’t matter. Beneath the chaos, she carried a heart too vast for this world. And now it’s gone.

Finally, I whisper, “You remember anything? Before the Authority?”