23

000.154.01.03.54

I land, flat as a board, and my lungs collapse. What felt like a brick road turns out to be the marshy water. The back of my head connects with the mossy bottom, but not hard enough to steal my consciousness. Water rushes into my lungs, carried by my ill-timed gasp.

My pack absorbs most of the impact, which is why every vertebra feels hyper extended. Hot tingling spreads through my body like scorching acid. I’m drenched. I can’t move. My head is now held above water by my pack.

My breath returns in minute increments. “Help.” A cough wracks my body into a sitting position.

The pain frightening me subsides into mere discomfort. I can conquer discomfort. Using my right hand, I roll over onto my knees. Green slime washes over my face as I disturb the water. I come up, gasping. Cattails surround me like a green wall. My eyes focus on a large locust mere inches away on the thick leaf.

Eww.

I stand with a groan and look up. The albinos are gone. The cut tightrope hangs on the opposite wall, twenty feet above my head. Blood creeps down my right arm. I broke several cattails, but each one pierced my body in thick gashes. I guess I’ve atoned for them.

The air seems oddly calm compared to the chaos moments ago. My right hand stings from a rope burn. I trail it in the water.

“Jude?” I weave through the cattails. Broken spines of old stalks hide under the water like brittle stakes. My rabbit fur boots are thick, but won’t withstand the rough marsh bottom for long. “Jude?” A second parting of cattails reveals his body facedown in the marsh, black coat filled with a pocket of air. “No!”

I stumble forward, snapping cattails with my knees. I clench his coat by the shoulder and rotate him with a loud grunt.

“Jude! Don’t be dead.” I keep my left arm under his neck to hold his head above water. A purple bruise swells on his forehead and blood streams from his nose. I tilt my ear by his mouth, but I’m breathing so loud I can’t tell if he’s breathing at all. I hold my breath.

No sound meets my ears. No exhale touches my face. But his heartbeat is faint against my hand on his chest. God, he’s dying.

I wasn’t taught how to save anyone. I was raised to locate a Clock and look at the Numbers, but a quick scan of Jude’s coat doesn’t reveal a Clock bulge. Is he zeroing out?

He’s not breathing. He needs air. My panic rises like an inevitable tide. We’re surrounded by swamp. No place is flat enough to lay him out. I’ve seen a man thrust his fist into another man’s abdomen when the second man choked on a boiled egg. I’ve also heard the boys in school joke about mouth-to-mouth.

Nothing funny about it now.

I adjust my knee to support his body out of the water as much as possible. I curve my right arm around to plug his nose, wiping blood away with my elbow. Then I lower my face to his.

Our lips touch. It’s anything but romantic and I can’t help feeling awkward. I send a long breath into his mouth. His chest barely rises. Marsh water touches my tongue, bringing with it the taste of aged fish.

I gag, but force myself to send another breath into his lungs, blowing harder. His chest rises higher. I stifle another heave against the green sheen of water covering his skin. It reeks. God, revive him. Please revive him.

Halfway through my fifth breath, his body convulses. I jerk back as he vomits on me. Instinctively, I dunk myself in the water. When I emerge, the smell reaches my nose and I struggle not to retch in response.

I peek back at Jude. He’s breathing heavily. Coughs seize him with each exhale. I help him sit up and clean off his face with some swamp water. He looks around and spits into the cattails. Blood mixes with the water from his nose to his jawline. Neither of us speaks for a long moment. I watch air return to his body.

The sun flickers in my eyes with a water ripple. My dagger is wedged between two rocks, reflecting the light. Without mentioning it to Jude, I slip it into my sheath, feeling much safer with a weapon. Thank You, Lord.

“How are you?” Jude’s hoarse voice is garbled by blood and a broken nose.

How am I? At the moment, hollow. I breathed out every emotion and reaction when saving Jude. Perhaps the panic devoured them.

I peek at him from the corner of my eye. Does he know I semi-kissed him? I avoid his gaze. We are alive. Neither of us should be. By God’s continued grace, Jude breathed again.

Shame seeps into my soul as the swamp water laps against my side. Of course I’m alive. How could I allow myself to think I would die? Where was my wolf-walking confidence when I clung to the tightrope? I feared for my life, even though I knew—know—I won’t die until October. My current survival is proof.

“I still have five more months.” But I remember what Reid wrote in his journal. The Clock is mine. How in time’s name, could he know?

Jude clears his throat and spits again. “You hab a Clock?”

“Don’t you? I know you’re not an Independent.”

He wipes his face with his wet sleeve, tapping his nose tenderly. “I’b a Radical frob the East. Crossed id Canada.”

I gape at his easy admission. I expected him to avoid the topic. Even more question marks and confusion pop through the soil of my mind like moles. I thought I was the only one to cross and live. Skelley Chase made it sound like I was doing something original.

A loud crunch sound and exclamation from Jude makes me jump. He holds his nose with both hands and a new gush of blood spurts down his face and clothes.

I look away, holding my breath.

“Ah,” Jude groans. “Hopefully that helped and didn’t hinder.” His voice sounds clearer.

I look back at him. He holds a sleeve to his nose. It’s less crooked. I shudder, thankful he broke his nose and not me. I wouldn’t have the mental strength to pull it straight again.

“So you have five months left on your Clock?” Jude examines a scratch on his hand, not even looking at me.

“Yeah.” Yes. Yes, I do. Reid didn’t know what he was writing. He has no more knowledge about our Clock than I do. And it must be my Clock. Reid needs to live because . . . I can’t be the survivor. I can’t even accept the idea of outliving him. “So you’re a Radical? Were you sent through the Wall as punishment?”

“Nah, I smashed my Clock on this side of the Wall. I snuck through.”

“Are you Canadian?” How did Jude cross? Why did he cross? The Canada Opening is thousands of miles away.

He cocks a head to one side. “I’m from the USE and I’ve been here just under two months.”

Two months? I’ve almost been here a month, yet I have a scrap of the confidence and naturalness he has in this wilderness. Perhaps he’s used to living more in the wild. What are the odds I meet a man from the United States of the East and we have an acquaintance on the other side?

Jude stands up and shrugs off his coat. Underneath, a brown vest tied in the front covers a sleeveless frayed shirt patterned with black and silver. Something squirms on his bare right arm. Something alive.

“Look out!” I gasp, lifting my hand to hit the black and green snake.

“Calm down. It’s my tattoo.”

I pause. “But it’s . . . moving.” The snake is in his skin. The tattoo pauses then continues its pattern, coiling around his wrist and back toward his shoulder. My hand sinks back to my side. “How does it do that?”

His eyes light up and his speech comes out fast, excited. “It’s made with flexible silicon light-emitting diodes that conformed to the shape of my skin. They’re no thicker than a couple hundred nanometers each. It’s combined with bioluminescent ink and programmable kinetic energy.” He pauses as if waiting for me to probe deeper.

“I’ve never heard about it.” Why couldn’t he just say, “It’s paint acting alive inside my body.” His mixture of scientific words threatens to collapse my uneducated brain cells. I try a simpler question. “Where did you get it?”

“In Prime.”

“The High City? That’s somewhere northeast, right?”

He wrings the water out of his coat. “Of course. In New York, near the Canada border. You didn’t know?”

His ‘this-should-be-common-knowledge’ attitude irks me. I straighten to look him in the eyes. “I’ve never been to a High City, Jude-man. The best I can do is read about them, but that doesn’t mean you should treat me like a schoolgirl. I’m from a Low City—born, raised, and toughened like leather.”

High-City status. So Jude is oblivious to struggles of people beneath him. I bet he’s been raised behind hundreds of smooth glass windows, eating flour and processed food. Does he even know about the injustice done to Radicals in Low Cities? He’ll probably think I deserved betrayal.

“Jude-man?” Well, he has his breath back. Now it makes more sense why Jude would know someone like Hawke. Did Hawke enforce in Prime?

The memory of him pointing the gun steady and intent at Alder reminds me I don’t know this man. Yet here we are, trapped inside a boggy canyon bottom.

“So what do we do?” I bet Jude’s never even been to a Low City.

A gust of wind blows through the canyon. I didn’t notice the chill until now as the portion of my body out of the water grows goose bumps.

Jude rubs his bare arms. “Well, we’re in the Dregs.”

If this place has a name, it has a reputation. The albinos knew this—Alder knew this. They must have known we’d die down here. Why else would they refrain from throwing stones and axes at us?

I have five months. I can’t die in here. “You got us here, don’t you have a plan?”

“I warned you to keep a tight grip.”

I wave my hand in front of his face. “This is all I have. I was already weak from crawling.” There’s that word again. Weak. “I mean, I was tired.” An ache steals back into my emotions. I look away as if I can erase the loss of my hand from my mind.

“Tally ho. I’ll try and find us a way out.”

“Tally ho? Hawke says that.”

“Everyone from a High City says that.”

Hours pass and we find no golden stairs. At first, we go for the rope. Jude tries climbing, jumping, and putting me on his shoulders. We are still short a good fifteen feet. I take my wet rope from my bag and we try lassoing the end of the other rope. Jude’s aim is as good as his manners. I’m not much better. The walls are impossible to climb, slicked smooth by years of rainfall. Small vines of purple and yellow flowers crawl down the canyon face, but they’re too flimsy to hold any amount of weight.

“We’ll head northwest.” Jude leads the way up the canyon.

I can’t tell the direction, nor do I care. What I do care about is the growing ache in my severed arm, the chill making its way to my bones, the shrinking sun, and the fact that we have two feet of cold swamp water for a bed.

“How will we sleep?” I follow him through thick patches of cattails. The water is at our thighs, too deep to lie down in and I don’t like the idea of locusts crawling on my face.

“Are you tired?”

“Well, not yet, but we will be.”

“You can’t sleep in the Dregs.You can’t hide in the Dregs. You can’t drink the swamp water. You can’t build a fire in the Dregs. You can’t climb out of the Dregs.”

“I will escape the Dregs,” I snap, incited by his pessimism. “God’s assigned me a purpose. I have five months left to my Clock, remember?”

“You base a lot of your life on your Clock.” Jude sneers. “Try imagining life without it for once.”

How can I tell him I’ve lived both lives—Clocked and Clockless—until a month ago? “You had a Clock once.”

He swats a tiny blue dragonfly from his face. “And now I’m a Radical.”

I’m viewed as a Radical, too. That somehow makes Jude and me a team. “Why did you destroy your Clock?”

“Personal reasons. My family wanted to sell it on the black market for specie, but I don’t like the idea of Clocks running the world.”

“Oh.” I frown. “I didn’t know people could sell them.” So Jude has a High-City family that participates in an illegal economy. This still doesn’t explain why or how he crossed.

“A Radical who has no Clock but wants one can buy it and pretend it’s his,” Jude explains. “Then he can enter society and receive the benefits his former Radical status denied him.”

“I wonder if the government will ever figure out how to match Clocks to people after conception.” I marvel at the idea of a secret world of illegal Clock holders. “Then the black market wouldn’t be necessary. Anyone who lost or accidentally broke his or her Clock could just get a new one.”

Do people in Unity have black-market Clocks? No one would ever know. Reid and I could have solved our problem years ago with a little extra coin.

“Jude, why did you cross?”

He turns away from me. “That’s not your business.”

Closed door. All right. He’s entitled to his privacy, but he doesn’t have to be so sharp about it. “I’m glad you crossed in Canada,” I say, attempting to reinstate peace. “Otherwise you’d be dead.”

“You survived.”

“I had nothing to do with it.” I wave my hand in front of my face as tiny gnats buzz in a growing group. “The West side of Opening Three was the top of a cliff. I either had to jump or starve to death in the Wall tunnel. I jumped off the cliff thinking I was diving to my death, but my rope got caught in the sliding electric door. It almost hung me.” I rub the fading burn on my neck. “I climbed down the rest of the way.”

My throat closes and I look at my hands—well, my hand and stump. I wouldn’t be able to climb down now. Will I be able to climb back up the cliff to meet Skelley Chase in five months?

“Why would you think you were diving to your death if you have a Clock?”

“Well, it could have been my brother’s Clock.” I shrug. “It’s complicated. Never mind.”

“Tally ho.” He faces forward, leading a path through the Dregs like a water snake. Sharp tingling crackles in my left arm. I stare at my stump, feeling, but not seeing my hand. I can’t clench it against the pain. My lips tighten, tugged downward by the threat of tears.

I stumble.

Jude turns around. “Are you tired?”

No, I’m just missing a piece of me, inside and out. But he mustn’t know that. “I need a small rest.”

We walk toward the side of the canyon, but rest only comes in the form of a wall-sit. The mossy rocks on the bottom are too far down to sit on, unless I want the water lapping my nostrils.

Jude helps me take off my pack and holds it as I rummage through. Skelley Chase is probably furious with my limited journaling. He’s going to have to get used to it because my NAB has been doused in Dregs water. I half expect it to be snapped in pieces when I pull it out, but High City electronics are sturdier than I expect. It unfolds like normal and the screen says in shaded blue letters:

Water mode initiated.

“Wow. It’s still alive.”

“So that’s how you communicate with Solomon.” Jude frowns. “And you’re from a Low City?”

“Unity Village isn’t underground, you know. We know about things like NABs.” I press the start button.

He raises his eyebrows. “And moving tattoos?”

I roll my eyes and change the subject. “How do you know Hawke?”

“It’s better for now if you don’t know.” He glances up at the canyon edge with a grim look. “It would have been better if you never even knew me.”

“Why?”

He shrugs. “Never mind.”

I lower the NAB. “You can’t say never mind. I never asked you to stay in the albino village to look after me. You could have left and never known me.”

A tiny weight tugs my heart into a pout. Jude doesn’t want to be with me. Can I blame him? We’re in the Dregs. We’re enemies with the albinos. And I’m not exactly Susie Sunshine.

Jude’s response comes out terse. “If not for me, you’d be dead in a cage at a tree base.”

I lift my chin. “You’re the one who wishes I never knew you. I’m not saying I’m ungrateful.”

He folds his arms. The writhing snake tattoo bulges. “You’re also not saying you are grateful. I tried to save you and you don’t even acknowledge that.”

I gape at him. He lets out a breath as if he’s irritated.

“I am grateful.” I force my voice to work, but I’m lying. His praise-seeking attitude just sucked my gratitude right out. I’m thankful for his effort, but the truth is he didn’t stop anything from happening. I’m still handless.

I, however, saved his life mere hours ago, and he’s yet to utter an ounce of thanks. He vomited on me and I didn’t complain. I look down at my arm and swallow. “Can we keep going, please?” The sooner we’re out of the Dregs, the better. Then we can go our separate ways.

Jude pushes off the canyon wall. “Tally ho.”

I walk with my head down, following him with peripheral vision. I take several deep breaths to calm myself, but only fill my lungs with fishy air. How did we end up angry and distant? I don’t know Jude well enough to be at odds. Why do I care if he enjoys my company?

I turn my focus to the NAB still in my hand. It takes a moment of finagling to balance it on my left arm so I can tap the screen. I enter my journal and record a new entry in a low voice so I don’t have to type.

“I’m no longer with the albinos,” I speak to the screen, watching the letters flow out one by one. “Jude and I fled when we saw the pink dogwood tree broken in half. We didn’t want to be blamed and killed by the albinos.”

Jude glances over his shoulder. I look up, but he faces forward again before we can make eye contact.

“I’m recording a journal entry,” I explain, sensitive to his judgment. He snaps a cattail out of the way.

I enter as many details as my mind recalls, more for my sake than Skelley Chase’s. I want to remember this time—the most traumatic weeks of my life. I speak Willow’s name and scan the canyon edge. Where is she? Does she know how to survive on her own?

God, please protect her. I don’t know why she tried to come with us, but please keep her safe.

My journal entry ends with our plummet into the Dregs. I whisper the portion about saving Jude’s life as soft as possible so he doesn’t hear. Why do I feel ashamed? Maybe Jude doesn’t realize I saved him.

I leave the entry with all facts except Jude’s history. It’s not mine to tell. I don’t want the world reading about him since I don’t know why he crossed. Maybe he’s a victim of the Enforcers.

I gulp. Maybe he’s a convict, escaped from a prison. I stare at the back of his head. Maybe he’s killed people.

No. Hawke sent him to help me. I can at least trust Hawke . . . to an extent.

I send the entry to Skelley Chase and notice Hawke’s bubble pulsing when I exit the journal page. I click it with a stomach-flip, visualizing his shadowy blond hair and light olive skin—the sharpest recollection of his looks I have.

He sent the message yesterday. It is short with little flair, but makes my heart lose its breath.

~I’m glad you’re safe with Jude, Miss Blackwater. He will take good care of you. By the way, today I saw your name in The Daily Hemisphere. The world knows who you are.