What Blood Leaves Behind (The Poison Rose) (27 page)

I have to keep talking to myself. Keep myself on track, my goal in mind.

Look ahead. Concentrate. Pay no attention to the ache in your leg.

You don’t have much time.

My stomach gurgles and yowls but I’ve grown used to ignoring the pangs. The sandpaper scratch in my throat is harder to get past and I stare at the steel-gray, white-capped water below, imagining how it tastes. A pontoon walkway that once went along the river’s east embankment is in tatters. I see no easy way of getting down to the water’s edge. Maybe if I had a bucket and a rope I could lower them down and bring up a sip.

Then I forget about hunger, thirst. My sore leg.

Reaching the middle of the bridge, its highest point, I see someone. Small, girl-like, standing perfectly still just where the far end of the bridge meets the street beyond.

The figure is far enough away that to my eyes she’s hazy, wavering in the distance like a mirage in desert heat.

I keep moving, never slow my pace. Refuse to take time to process this strange apparition, work out what I should do.

It doesn’t matter. Going back and trying to find another way over the river is pointless. There could be somebody waiting at the end of every bridge I tried to cross.

If this creature isn’t a Black Rider, it must be an Elder. And the closer I get the more familiar it looks.

Emily.

Suddenly I know this hazy figure in the distance is Emily.

The blond hair, a face growing more familiar with each step I take. I pick up my pace now, the certainty it’s her overcoming the pain in my leg.

It’s when I’m closer that I do stop for a moment. In that instant she reminds me so much of someone else—
Jendra
. Not Emily. It has to be—

But that’s impossible. I shake my head, squeeze my eyes shut, open them and see only Emily. Her face is rounded, well-fed, very Jendra-like. She looks immaculate and smartly dressed. She’s wearing thick black tights, a long khaki coat with a leopard fur collar, suede boots that reach her knees.

As far as I can tell, she’s alone. I scan the streets beyond her for anybody else. I squint hard but can’t quite make out the expression on her face. She’s wearing makeup, that I can tell. Lots of makeup. Like a little girl playing grownup in her big sister’s clothes.

It’s hard to square this Emily with the memory of the first time I saw her, desperately needy, reaching out to me despite the danger.

I was about to fire into the darkness, try to scare whatever it was away, when I heard a voice. “Don’t.” It was a small voice, the word so fragile it hardly seemed to have been spoken.

“If you don’t want me to shoot, come out where I can see you,” I shouted.

I heard the scrape of a chair again and the soft shuffle of feet. Then I saw the shape of a small girl younger than me emerge from the shadows. She looked filthy and emaciated, her hair a wild tangle of blond straw, the cast-off clothes she wore rags. “Don’t hurt me,” she said.

I’ve never hurt her. Or I’ve never intended to.

I start hurrying toward her again but feel like I’m trudging through sand.

Surely she’ll warm up when I reach her. We’ll hug each other and all will be forgiven.
She’ll
be the one to help me when she sees just how filthy, hungry, tired I am.

She raises a hand and beckons to me with all the emotion of the next available cashier in a crowded store. Otherwise she doesn’t move, not rushing to meet me, not venturing beyond the lower lip of the bridge. Making me come to her.

When I’m near enough to make out the expression on her face, she’s definitely not smiling, does not appear happy to see me. Her face is pinched, like a sour apple. A heavily made-up sour apple.

I’m maybe twenty feet away from her when she turns and begins marching down the middle of Blackwell Street, a wide thoroughfare that leads deep into the east side of the city.

She walks briskly along, never slowing, not waiting for me to catch up. Never looking over her shoulder to make sure I’m behind her.

I follow where she leads me, the khaki coat with its faux fur collar, the neatly styled blonde hair. I have to trust her. I have to talk to her.

While trying to keep up, I search for an explanation for her behavior. She might be leading me to someplace safe, a place where we can be alone. Maybe we’re being observed here. Maybe it’s not safe out in the open.

But that sour expression—uncaring, nearly hateful—it gets to me. Eats away any attempt of mine to put a positive spin on her behavior, to shrug it away.

As with Blackwell Bridge, Blackwell Street is also almost entirely clear of cars. This must have been an emergency route, kept passable for ambulances, fire trucks, military convoys.

I study my surroundings, marking odd buildings, street signs where they’re still standing, trying to orient myself. We’re many blocks from the Orphanage, from the bridge I crossed with William and Tetch the night before—the bridge I dangled from in a cage.

Emily turns down a side street and heads south for a few blocks, then down another street leading into an industrial area nearer to the river’s embankment.

Unlike the wide open pavement of Blackwell Street, the streets here are choked with refuse, the entire contents of four and five story warehouses spilled out across the pavement. There are automotive parts, home remodeling supplies, office furniture, medical equipment, toys.

We start weaving through all this—around a dumpster, past a delivery truck on its side, over a morass of sodden schoolbooks—and I have to keep a close watch on Emily, look for that little blond head bobbing above and around all this junk, so that she doesn’t simply disappear, lose me in this maze.

I’m so intent on not losing sight of her, I fail to notice the streetcar rails embedded along this block until my right foot slips into a groove between pavement and steel. Immediately I yank it loose—my only thought to keep up with Emily—then drop to the ground in agony. Pain sears the entire length of my leg, nausea makes my head spin.

Emily
—I start to yell it out to make her stop but snap my mouth shut, swallow her name. If it’s a safe place she’s leading me to, secret and out of sight, I can’t spoil it by blaring to the world our location.

Don’t let her disappear.
I struggle back to my feet and start walking again, limping badly.

But Emily comes to a full stop only half a block farther on. She’s in front of a warehouse four stories high, staring up at tiers of empty windows. As I approach, I see a row of loading bays where trucks pulled in and unloaded their cargo. The bays line the building’s ground floor, almost all of their steel rollup doors wrenched open, crates and boxes and clothing racks from a dark interior tumbled out onto the pavement.

Emily finally turns toward me, her face still sour, locked in a frown so deep it’s like she’s wearing a sad clown’s makeup, and waits for me to catch up to her. But she makes no sign, doesn’t beckon me to her side.

Not able to walk fast in any event, I take it even slower, now that she’s waiting for me. I scan the area, staring up as she did at the open windows above me. Was she looking up at something specific—someone’s face looking down?

I’m eager to catch up to her but also worried. Her coldness seems even more unnatural. Why doesn’t she let her guard down now that we’ve reached this place? She should be waving to me, pointing the way inside.

Is it possible Emily has changed so much? This feels more like a trap than the prelude to a warm reunion. My skin prickles with the tension, my hands clench, the instinctive part of my brain broadcasts urgent warnings as it has so many times before.
Never let yourself become trapped. Stay in the open. Don’t go indoors unless you’re sure you can get out again.

I’ve stopped in my tracks, staring at her, struggling with my instinct for self-preservation.

But it’s Emily and we’ve been together so long.

I
have
to trust her.

There
has
to be something remaining between us, a remnant of that bond we shared, that feeling that we were family, as close as any family could be.

A few more steps and I’m at her side.

Up close, she doesn’t look as fresh, as well-fed as I thought she did. The makeup she’s slathered on only covers the pastiness of her skin. It was an illusion. She looks thinner than I expected. She doesn’t have that Jendra-like glow, the ease and self-assurance Jendra radiated when I first encountered her at the motel on the outskirts of Raintree.

I try to read her expression. She also doesn’t have Jendra’s obvious contempt for me. I can see the worry in her sour face. My heartbeat quickens—maybe she
is
holding herself back, not responding to me like she used to for some reason involving our safety. But maybe that’s what I want to believe she’s doing.

I try to put a hand on her shoulder but she jerks away, takes a quick step back. “What’s wrong?” I ask but my voice quavers—I’m not the mothering one now. I wonder how I must look to her, filthy, bruised and bloodied, stinking of whatever surrounded me in that crawlspace below the bridge.

“Look what the cat dragged in.”

“We have to keep watch over that?”

“I wouldn’t want to touch her.”

Voices come from right above me, only a few feet away. I was staring at Emily so intently that I never noticed a dozen or more bodies fan out from the open loading bay doors.

I look up sharply, eyes wide. Elders—more Elders than I can count.

They were waiting for me. Emily brought me right to them.

They don’t give me time to react. Several take off sprinting to either end of the loading ramp, leap down steps that end at street level and rush toward us. I spin around but behind me is another group of Elders approaching from across the street.

It’s pointless to imagine I might outrun them. There’s only Emily—she
must
have a plan, she must have had something else in mind than
this
.

I turn back to her, trying to decipher what’s in her face, uncover some sign that she still has at least a little feeling for me. I notice that she squeezes her eyes closed for a few seconds, as if not wanting to watch a terrible thing that’s about to happen. But she opens her eyes again and says nothing—no warning.

The Elders surround me.

“I brought you
water.”

A light, girlish voice, a little hesitant but trying to be confident.

I raise my head and Emily is standing in front of me. She’s still wearing the khaki coat, still dressed in the tights and the boots. But her hair is mussed, strands of it coming loose from a shiny black clip she’s using to pin back the wings of her bangs. That hair I combed so many times—straw-colored, sun-bleached, always long and wild. And her makeup is smudged, mostly around the eyes as if she’s been rubbing them.

I like this. I like her disarray. It makes her look like the old Emily, reachable.

She holds out a mug, one of those oversized plastic containers people used to take to convenience stores for refills of soda and coffee.

My throat aches but I resist snatching the mug from her hands.

“Aren’t you going to take it?”

She sounds disappointed. She takes a step closer, holding the mug up higher, thrusting it at my face.

We’re in an office inside the warehouse where the Elders took me, a mostly glassed-in room at back end of the main floor. Probably once the office of a supervisor, a floor manager, and I’ve been forced to sit at his dusty metal desk, in his creaky rolling chair, for hours. Sitting where that manager once sat. I can still see his coffee stains, a pad where he doodled.

“Emily, how did you find me?”

She looks puzzled.

“How did you know I would be walking across
that
bridge?”

She shrugs, looks away.

By now I’ve had plenty of time to think over how coincidental it was for her to be on that bridge at that time of the morning, there at just the right moment to beckon to me, to begin leading me here.

It’s so obvious I can’t believe I didn’t think of it until the Elders brought me into this warehouse. The Riders found me last night but for some reason they let me be—

—high headlight beams darting into far corners, flashing momentarily across the crate that hides me.

They, the Riders, told Emily exactly where to position herself in the morning. Or told other Elders who told Emily. There were probably Elders watching me from the moment I emerged from that crawlspace at daybreak.

Any freedom I have is an illusion. I have to get that through my head. But Emily—I wanted so badly to trust her, to believe she wouldn’t betray me.

Why are the Riders toying with me? Why are they stringing me along like this?

“Please take the water,” Emily says. Her hand is trembling. The cup is heavy.

I take it from her, smell it, take a tiny sip, decide it’s good and swig it down. It’s cool and clean and begins washing away the tight ache in my throat like a tiny miracle.

“I’ll get you some food, too.”

“Did someone tell you to bring me water?”

My voice is smoother. It’s easier to talk.

She shakes her head. I don’t believe her at all, that she’s acting on her own.

But I smile at her. “Then you still care about me a little, huh?”

“I just don’t want to see you get hurt.”

I push myself to my feet. Sway a little, unsteady, lightheaded.

I take a long look outside this office’s glass partitions. It’s obvious the Elders have been playing dress up for a long time in a garment warehouse that still holds a ton of clothes.

There’s enough light streaming in through the open loading bay doors to see rows of metal shelving disappearing down the length of the space, jumbled cartons lining individual shelves, sheets of frayed cardboard and spectral heaps of plastic wrap littering the floor. Discarded clothes—maybe too big, maybe not nice enough—are tossed everywhere.