Passenger (40 page)

Ethan wiped a forearm across his wet mouth. He looked scared, confused. “But I know you.”

“Please don’t say anything.” More boys started following Griffin down from the ridge. “It’s something bad. And I have to make it stop.”

“But we were there. You were there, too. You had to have seen it. We were there, together, all morning. Hours.”

“No,” I said. “It was a second, Ethan. That’s why you have to understand. Please don’t say anything to the others. Let me explain.”

I needed to talk to the kid. He saw something that I didn’t, and now he knew me. But it was too late. Griffin and the boys were already in earshot, coming through the pack of horses, watching us, curious about Jack and the other outcast.

But I had to know what Ethan saw; where we were.

“Please let me talk to you later, Ethan.”

He looked straight at me.

I thought I could trust him.

There’s a certain allegiance kids who aren’t wanted naturally feel toward one another.

“I want to know about it, Jack.”

And, whispering, I said, “I will tell you.”

*   *   *

Griffin jogged across the flat of our encampment.

He was out of breath when he got to me.

Five other Odds followed him down to where Ethan and I sat in the crusty ash. Alex and his friends were in the group, naturally, always eager for an opportunity to pick on Ethan away from the majority of the others.

“I think you need to come up there and see before he gets too far away,” Griffin said.

“Before who gets away?” I looked up at the ridge. Henry was there, standing beside Frankie and Ben.

Griffin put his hand out and pulled me up to my feet.

“The rider. Ben saw him, too. We think it’s Conner.”

Then I realized that for the whole time Henry and I sat there with the glasses, while we ducked into another not-world that was falling apart worse than anything I’d seen, the boys on the ridge had been shouting about a rider in the desert. And I was too selfishly involved in what I wanted, what I was doing, looking for home, and now worried about having to deal with what that skinny English kid saw, to even consider for a moment that this was it, what it was always supposed to be—that Conner would come this way, too, as he had promised.

It had to be him.

I took a deep breath, still feeling weak, wondering if I could make it up to the top of the ridge. I hurried toward the gap in the rocks the other boys had been using as their ladder.

And before I’d gotten ten feet away, Griffin grabbed my wrist and pulled me around.

He said, “They’re fucking with that kid.”

When I turned back, Fee was sitting on top of Ethan’s chest, pinning the scrawny boy down, and giggling moronically while his tattooed brother worked at stealing the kid’s shoes.

Stronger Odds always stole whatever they wanted from kids like Ethan.

Fee gurgled joyfully, “Sack his fucking face! Sack his fucking face!”

And the white-haired thug, Alex, squatted above Ethan’s head, fumbling at unbuttoning his fly.

“Hey!”

When I screamed, the three assholes didn’t even glance over at me.

That was enough. My hand went to my knife. I pulled it out and ran back to where the kids were fucking with Ethan.

He wasn’t even trying to fight them, and that pissed me off even more. Rum had both the kid’s shoes off and sat in the dirt, preparing to try them on. Fee laughed so hard it sounded like he was having a seizure, and Alex had just gotten his balls out of his pants when I grabbed him by the hair and jerked him back.

Before Alex knew what was happening, I laid him out flat on his back in the salty ash. Fee’s expression turned serious when he saw the knife I held. I stepped the toe of my boot on Alex’s hand that he had wrapped around his balls, and pressed the blade of my knife firmly beneath his nose.

Griffin knew there was a fight on. I caught a flashing view from the corner of my eye of him throwing a roundhouse kick directly into Fee’s jaw.

I opened a small cut across the bottom of Alex’s nose, still twisting his hair in my grasp. More Odds scrambled down from above to watch the fight. But it was over before much of anything else could happen.

Fee rolled around in the dirt, crying and squeezing his jaw. Rum dropped Ethan’s shoes and put his hands in the air, backing away from me and Griffin like he was an arrestee held at gunpoint, and Alex just whimpered faintly, too scared to move.

I let go of his hair.

“You ever touch anyone again, I’ll fucking kill you, kid. Anyone. Understand me?”

Alex nodded enough to let me know he got the message, so I pulled my knife away from his face.

Griffin had his hands in a fighting position, eyes shifting alternately between the brothers. I could tell he wanted to kick Fee again, but he wasn’t about to fight back. Fee just rolled around and sobbed.

Ethan sat up.

I was disgusted with everything. “Get your shoes on and come with us.”

*   *   *

I heard them following me, but I kept my eyes forward as we climbed the rocky chute that led up to the ridge where the lookouts perched.

I dug my fingers as forcefully as I could into the sharp rock face, trying to make it hurt so the anger might stop howling inside me. But it didn’t work. It just made me madder. I wanted to run back down so I could feel the satisfaction of jamming my knife as far as it would go into Alex’s belly, to marvel at the kid’s warm blood as it spilled out on me, and watch the show of his eyes as they alternately flickered surprise and horror at what Jack was capable of doing.

I was sick of myself, of what I’d become.

I killed Quinn Cahill.

I climbed faster.

All the not-worlds left me numb. All the not-worlds trapped in the Marbury lens made Jack a monster no matter where he found himself.

Fun game.

I am the King of Marbury.

If I couldn’t get home, back to Nickie, back to my friends and what was real, everything would be lost.

Everything except my kingdom.

*   *   *

Henry was different.

I could see it as soon as I looked at his face. He didn’t need to say anything to me at all. He knew who I was.

Ben nodded to me and gave a wary glance past my shoulder at Ethan. “This is it, Jack.”

Frankie hovered behind him, practically bumping into Ben with his chest. His voice sounded tense, ready for a fight. “This is
what
, Odd?”

When nobody answered him, he grabbed Henry’s arm, made the man look at him. “This is
what
, Henry? What’s going on?”

Henry shook his head and shrugged, as if to tell the boy he had no answers.

Then I saw the rider.

I squinted, cupped my hands around my eyes so I could screen out the endless wash of gray in the fading evening sky. Solitary, so far away that he nearly vanished, half in, half out of the Marbury haze, keeping his head down as he rode southeast; and I was certain beyond any doubt that it was Conner Kirk out there.

We’d been closer than brothers, and I could recognize Conner Kirk from the angle of his shoulders, the motion of his hand when he wiped across his eyes. Even as tired and worn as he must have been after being hunted by the Rangers since helping me to escape, I knew I was looking at my friend.

“That’s him,” I said.

“Fuck this,” Frankie snapped. He started off down the path to the clearing. “I’ll show you who he is. We’ll fucking go kill him. I’ll bring back his fucking head.”

“You won’t get anywhere near him,” I said.

Frankie stopped. “I’m not afraid of guns. We’ve fucking killed Rangers before. There’s more of us than him.”

“Believe me, Frankie. You don’t want to fuck with him.”

Frankie’s eyes darted from me to Henry, then to each of the other boys who stood there on the lookout with us, as though he were searching for any gesture of support.

He spit a long, stringy blob down on the rocks between us. Frankie put his hands up to Henry, like he was expecting something. “We’re just going to let him go, then?”

Henry inhaled slowly and looked at the sky. “Nobody wants to go out there at night.”

“I’m going to go after him,” I said.

“Jack—” Ben started, but I cut him off.

“We’ll talk about it later, Ben.”

I already knew he was going to tell me I couldn’t go out there looking for Conner without taking him and Griffin. I tried not to think about leaving, about not coming back. This was Marbury, after all. Or not-Marbury. Who knew where the four of us would be tomorrow, and the next day after that?

So I stared at Conner until I couldn’t see him anymore. I tried to estimate the distance and direction where I might intercept his path, but calculations like those were meaningless in Marbury.

The dimness of the gray night fell over the silent Odds who stood on the ridge beside me.

We scanned the nothingness of the desert below until Frankie got tired of waiting for some affirmation from the other boys that he was right, that he was still in charge. When it never came, he started down the narrow path, half whispering that it was time to eat.

Frankie chose out the next shift of boys to keep guard on the watchposts. Nighttime meant Hunters would be out, and the Odds never slept. At least, they never all slept at the same time. It was perhaps the only reason they had survived to escape Glenbrook and attempt the crossing to the settlement in the first place.

So I half expected him to appoint me as a replacement for Ben or Griffin on the ridge, but the kid never asked me to do anything throughout the five days that I’d been with the Odds, and he continued to ignore me over the small rations of food that were distributed for our dinner.

We ate in segregated groups. The division was more than just the few feet of dirt that separated us from the other boys. The Odds were talking about me, about the three new kids and the bed wetter. No matter what happened to us tonight, I knew things would be different from now on.

Ben and Griffin sat with me while we ate. Henry stayed up on the ridge.
I knew he wanted to talk to me, but he was just waiting for the situation between the Odds and me to calm down,
I thought.

Ethan sat with us. There was nowhere else the kid could go. That was my fault, too. He never tried to fight back against the bullying of the other boys, and things would probably be calmer, easier, if I’d just let them get away with their shit.

But it was too late for that once Ethan had seen through the lens. He knew me. Another thread had been woven into this hopeless string, and I couldn’t ignore it, no matter how much I wished I could.

In the other group, Frankie stayed where he could watch us. He always watched us. But the three assholes—Alex, Fee, and Rum—sat as far away from us as they could, wounded and angry, backs turned, never so much as glancing toward me.

Griffin broke our mournful silence with one word.

“When?”

I shook my head. “Henry needs to make it okay. I need to ask him to let us go, so he can help us.”

Ben watched me, like he was waiting for me to say something more. Then he looked at Ethan.

“I’m not stupid, you know,” Ethan said.

Ben spit in the dirt and turned away from the kid. “I guess putting up with all the shit those fuckers do to you makes you smart, then.”

Something like that would have been the first act in a fistfight with any one of the other boys. Not the English kid, though.

Ethan shrugged. “I know you’re not Odds. I know why you’re not like them.”

“Because you fit in so well, right?” Griffin said.

“Him, too,” I said. I lowered my voice and scooted in closer to the other boys. “He went through the lens today.”

I watched Ethan to see if what I said made any difference to him. But I just couldn’t figure out that kid at all.

“He went through?” Griffin said.

He knew what it meant. Griffin and Ben couldn’t see anything in the glasses. Because you don’t see anything when you’re dead and inside a fucking trash can in some twisted and rearranged goddamned not-world. And the first lens, the broken lens, the one that caused it all, could only destroy things now.

Nobody went through the broken lens. It only let things
out
. Ben and Griffin saw what it did at the market when we were attacked by Hunters, and again on the roof deck at Quinn’s firehouse.

They knew what it meant.

“Where did you go?” Ben asked.

I watched the knobby Adam’s apple in Ethan’s neck twitch as he considered what he should say.

“Well?” I said. “You can tell us.”

“You were there, Jack. You had to have seen it,” Ethan said. “It was real.”

He glanced around nervously. It was like he was trying to gauge our expressions to see if we thought he was crazy, or stupid. And he looked carefully, too, across the way at the other Odds.

Ethan’s voice fell to a whisper. “It was morning. I think it was the most pleasant place I’ve ever seen. We were inside a room, our room. We lived there, and it was clean and felt cold beneath my feet, too. There was a window on a wall, between our two beds. Outside, it was raining, but I could see trees and the most fantastic colors I have ever seen.”

I knew where it was.

Of course I knew.

Ethan looked directly at me. “You were still lying in bed.” He looked down, embarrassed, and said, “I had just taken a piss. In a toilet. With water in it. And you asked me about some news. And I remembered we were leaving that morning, that we would be catching a train somewhere.”

“London,” I said.

“Yes. That was it. Do you remember, Jack?”

I shook my head.

Ben leaned in closer to us. “Fuck that. How come we couldn’t get through, then? Fuck that, Jack.”

“It’s my fault,” I said. “I messed it all up.”

“That’s why he talks like Henry,” Griffin said. “He’s English. That’s why, isn’t it?”

“He’s from my school,” I said. “St. Atticus.”

Ethan’s brow tightened. He was excited. “That’s it! That’s what it was called. St. Atticus Grammar School for Boys. You remember!”

“No. I just know it. But it’s a good thing, Ben. Maybe he’s right. Maybe we are all home, where we belong. We just need to—”