Fever (The Chemical Garden #2)(17)
Author: Lauren DeStefano

“Let me see your eyes,” I say.

“What?” he mumbles. He flinches but doesn’t pull away when I touch his arm.

“Gabriel,” I say softly. “Look at me.”

Maddie stands beside us, watching, nibbling on the zipper of her coat.

He looks at me, his pupils lost, his blue eyes showing the empty sky behind me.

“You took more angel’s blood.” He looks away, to where the ocean is swishing out of sight, tossing mermaids and the corpses of empresses who jumped ship to drown if they could not have freedom. I wonder if we belong among them.

“I couldn’t see straight,” he says. “I was in so much pain.”

“I was sick too,” I say.

“Not like I was. I was having nightmares. You. Always you. Drowning. Burning alive. Screaming. Even when I was awake and you were sleeping next to me, it sounded like little earthquakes when you breathed—like the ground would split open and pull you in.”

He looks back at me, and I don’t see the drug or Gabriel in his eyes, but some sleepy in-between. Something I created. A boy I ruined.

I had a goldfish when I was little—a bloated orange thing my father gave me for my birthday. Days later I poured it into a drinking glass while I cleaned its tank and filled the tank with fresh water. Only, when I transferred it back into its tank, clean and crystal clear, the fish swam erratically for a while, tilted at an angle, and died.

It was too much too fast, my brother chided me. The transition from one body of water to the next needed to be gradual. I’d killed it with shock.

I wriggle my hands into Gabriel’s sleeves, feel for his wrists and hold on tight. I can’t be angry with him for this. I took him from the mansion, a virtual terrarium where Vaughn controlled everything but the weather, and I dumped him into a world of murderers and thieves and empty shells of people, with nothing for him but the promise of a freedom he didn’t even want before he met me.

“Okay,” I say gently. “How much is left?”

“Most of it.”

“Let’s try to ration it, to get you through until we find a place to rest. Then you have to fight it out of your system, okay?”

He nods, his head lolling back and forth. I wrap my arm around him and scoop up Maddie’s hand, and we start walking again.

We pass through a town that at a glance looks abandoned, but I can hear footsteps running behind broken buildings, the sharp sigh of machines. I don’t have to linger to know we aren’t wanted here.

“Rhine?” Gabriel says after what feels like hours of silence. His voice is sleepy, slurred.

“Hm?”

“When are you going to acknowledge that we can’t walk a straight line to Manhattan?”

Maddie breaks her hand away from mine and crouches in the dirt to inspect a cockroach that’s skittering in circles. There are probably hundreds more of them; we’re standing by a landfill, and the smell is making my eyes water.

“Okay,” I say. “We can take a break and regroup. But not right here. Someplace with cleaner air.”

“There is no place with cleaner air,” Gabriel counters. “From the moment we left it’s been one horrible thing after another.” He looks right into my eyes, pausing purposefully between the words. “There is nothing better.”

The earth rumbles with the weight of a garbage truck in the distance. The truck, shuttering and spitting fumes, hurls more trash into the landfill. It doesn’t seem possible, but I swear the smell gets worse.

“It does get better,” I insist. “Look. If there’s trash, there’s civilization. There’s probably a city nearby.”

Gabriel stares back at me, his eyes glassy, skin marbled and pale. And suddenly I miss him so much that it hurts. I miss his soft, unassuming warmth. His hands around my face when he brought me in for our first kiss. I know that I’m the one who took him from his element without preparing him first. He opens his mouth to speak, and I’m filled with hope that his words will be something familiar, something warm. But all he says is “Maddie!”

I turn to follow his line of vision. Maddie is running away from us, toward the small blue building that says WASTE MANAGEMENT in bold white letters.

“Wait!” I run after her, and surprisingly, Gabriel keeps up with me, Lilac’s bag hitting his side like a broken wing. “Maddie! Stop. You don’t know what’s over there.”

But she doesn’t listen to me, and she’s fast even with her slight limp. She darts to the back corner of the building, and then to my surprise she stops and waits for us. Gabriel and I finally catch up to her, gasping, and I am about to ask what the hell has gotten into her, when Gabriel catches my arm.

“Look,” he says. Maddie brightens. There is a large delivery truck idling in a dirt clearing, its back door wide open.

“I think she found us a ride,” Gabriel says.

I hesitate. My heart is hammering in my ears. From all the way over here, I can smell the metal air of the truck, remember the pulsing darkness of the Gatherers’ van like a weight compressing my skull, the tendrils of madness that slither and coil around my arms and legs. “We—” My voice catches. “We don’t know where it’s going. It could take us in the opposite direction.”

“Is there any way to know for sure?” Gabriel asks. The hope of this new possibility has brought a little color to his cheeks. I force down my fears. It would be selfish of me to deny him—to deny all of us—this golden opportunity.

“The lot code,” I say. “My brother ran tons of deliveries, and when he was done, the trucks always went back to their lot. On the back there should be a lot ID number that begins with the state’s abbreviation.”

Gabriel has moved away from me. I watch him approach the truck as though he’s moving in slow motion. “Is this it?”

“What does it start with?” I ask.

“PA . . . Pennsylvania? Is that far from New York?” he asks.

“It’s right next to it,” I say, trying to sound happier than I feel. I would rather walk than climb into the back of another dark vehicle. Maddie, of course, doesn’t have any qualms about hoisting herself up into the abyss.

The side of the truck has a cartoon of a laughing baby chick, and the words CALLIE’S KETTLE SNACKS & SOFT DRINKS are formed around it in a circle.

Gabriel climbs in after Maddie and holds out his hand to help me up. He doesn’t see the deep breath I draw to give me strength.

Chapter 12

WE HIDE behind boxes of Kettle chips and pretzels. The driver slams the door closed, and then there is the initial lurch and the truck starts moving.

There is no darkness like that of a confined space. It’s darker than the inside of eyelids, and darker than the night. My eyes are open wide, trying to adjust, to make out the outline of something, anything. But all I can see are the huddled limbs of Gathered girls. I keep waiting for the scream.

After a while Maddie falls asleep. I can hear her shallow little breaths magnified in these metallic walls.

Gabriel is silent, though I feel him beside me, his arm pressed against mine, his head occasionally hitting the wall behind us.

He just whispered something to me, but I didn’t catch it. Or maybe I imagined it. Maybe I’m dreaming. I’m suddenly finding it hard to know the difference between nightmares and consciousness.

“Rhine?” he says.

“Yeah?” My voice sounds more tight than I mean it to.

“I asked how long you think it will take to get to Pennsylvania.”

“What’s the difference? It’s not like we can tell time,” I say. Then, worried that I might have snapped at him, I try to sound gentle when I ask, “How are you feeling?”

His body shifts against mine. I stare into the darkness of his direction. “You’re shaking,” he says.

“No, I’m okay.”

“Yes,” he says, “you are. I thought it was just the motion of the truck, but it’s you.”

I hug my knees to my chest and close my eyes, wishing for the beige redness of light against my eyelids. There is no reprieve from this blackness. It’s a vise, squeezing at my brain.

Gabriel fumbles around until his hands have found my hair. He weaves his fingers through it, and I let my body lean against him. I can feel beads of sweat dripping from his face onto my skin, and I know it’s because he’s starting to go into withdrawal. He’s in his hell, and I’m in mine.

“I should have known,” he says. “It’s because this reminds you of the Gatherer van, isn’t it?”

I don’t answer. His fingers make their way around the shape of my scalp, and brush down my forehead, to my chin, and back up again. When I was little, I used to wave a flashlight in the darkness to watch the hot streams of light it made, and that is what I imagine happening as Gabriel’s fingers move against me. I imagine trails of light following his touch.

Then I surprise myself by saying, “I knew I wasn’t going to die the day I was Gathered.” I pause, looking for the right words. “I didn’t know what was going to happen to me. I doubted it would be anything good. But still, I didn’t feel like I was going to die.”

“How did you know?” Gabriel says.

“I guess I didn’t. Can you ever be certain?” I tilt my head, and I can feel his collarbone pressing against my cheek. I can smell Annabelle’s strange little house in his clothes, and the heat of her fireplace. I can see her tarot cards arranged in neat piles before me. The Empress. The Emperor. The World.

“I have never thought I was going to die,” I say. “My brother said that I just haven’t accepted it.”

“Your brother doesn’t sound anything like you,” Gabriel says.

“He’s not, really,” I say. “He’s smarter than me. He can fix things, solve things.”

“You can fix and solve things too,” Gabriel says. “Don’t talk yourself down. You’re the smartest person I’ve ever met.”

I laugh a little. “You haven’t met very many people.”

“Granted.” I can feel his smirk. He tilts his head down, and his lips brush my forehead; they’re chapped and warm, and all my nerves awaken. Gabriel is coming back to me.

And just for a little while I feel like maybe Annabelle’s fortune wasn’t so crazy. I feel like everything will fall into place.

I awaken with the distinct feeling I’ve just been someplace safe. And someplace with light. But when I open my eyes, there’s only the darkness of the truck, the rhythm of the road beneath us.

Something is shuddering next to me. It’s Gabriel, I realize. I’m slumped against him, and when I fumble for his outline, my hands find his face, cold and perspiring.