Fever (The Chemical Garden #2)(21)
Author: Lauren DeStefano

Maddie has been waiting for us here, smart girl that she is. She’s hugging her mother’s bag. Over the noise Gabriel is asking me what authorities the alarm will summon. He is still expecting some rule maker, some god, some Vaughn to come and punish the offenders.

“None,” I say. “No one is coming. The alarm is meant to wake them up if anyone breaks in.” Wispy, frail Elsa, and dark, staggering Greg, who is in his own way just as gone as his wife. They are the keepers of their own little restaurant. The only ones who can protect it. Just as Rowan and I were the only ones who could protect our home with the cans and string we placed in our kitchen.

Everyone wants to defend what belongs to them. I must have said that last part out loud, because Gabriel answers with “Not well enough” and opens his fist to show me a wad of crisp green bills.

Gabriel. I didn’t think he had it in him. And I might have been unhappier about the fact that he stole from the people who took us in if I couldn’t still feel Greg’s hand on my thigh. If my bottom lip weren’t quivering.

“It should be enough for bus fare,” Gabriel says, after the restaurant is behind us. “So you won’t have to hide in the back of another truck.”

It would have been easier for him to work out his withdrawal simply lying in the back of a truck, in the cool darkness. But he did this for me, because he could feel how I was reacting to that dark place and knows I don’t care to relive it. I feel a wave of something I can’t explain, but it makes me happy and weak and nauseous at the same time.

The alarm cuts out in the distance. Greg knows that nobody has broken into his restaurant, of course, and he’s in no condition to chase after us. If he even wants to.

We walk along a rocky paved road that takes us downhill and into a sleeping town lit only by dull streetlights. All of the houses seem to be in good shape, their yards not overrun with weeds or covered in dirt. This just reaffirms my belief that first generations make up the population. I use that to convince myself there will be no Gatherer vans. Still, though, I gasp when a car passes us, and Gabriel asks me what’s wrong and why did I stop walking. I assure him I’m fine.

“I’m more worried about you,” I say. “How are you feeling?”

“Tired. Not so bad.” He stoops to pick up Maddie, who is dragging her feet, but she resists, and he lets her carry on.

“Any more hallucinations?” I ask.

“I keep seeing snakes in the shadows.”

Snakes. In the worst of my medicated delirium, Vaughn always became a snake. But I thought that had more to do with Vaughn than anything else. There was one time when Vaughn, Linden, my sister wives, and I were holed up in the basement during a hurricane. I’d started falling asleep, and as Vaughn spoke in the distance, he transformed into a giant insect. A cricket, I think. Not as damaging as a snake but still unsettling. And every time he spoke to me, I could feel cockroaches running down my neck. But that’s no surprise. Vaughn has never seemed human to me.

As I’m thinking about this, we find the bus station. It’s one of the few buildings still lit. I don’t think about what could be in the shadows, and Gabriel says nothing of what he sees lurking in them. I admire him for that.

In the mansion he was meant to be subdued. And he followed the rules, ran mechanically on a schedule. But there was always something more under the surface, held in the bright wrappers of the June Beans he brought me. And his arms opening to catch me when I flew from the lighthouse in the hurricane. I always knew he was stronger than he had cause to be in that place.

And now that we are stepping into the bus station, the neon lights remind me how pale he is, show me the bruises under his eyes. I figure it’s the least I can do to read the glowing map on the wall and find the fastest route out of here. “You should sit down and try to eat something,” I tell him. “There are still some Kettle thingies in Lilac’s bag.”

“Kettle thingies,” Gabriel says wryly. “Yum.”

But he doesn’t go. Rather, he watches me as I trace my finger along a green line on the map, the same way I traced my finger along my blanket back at the mansion when I was telling him my delusion of grandeur—that there was still hope for the world.

“Why aren’t you resting?” I say.

“Why aren’t you?”

“What?” I say. “Me? I’m okay.” I purse my lips, trying to focus on the city names but finding they all look the same. For some reason I’m not comprehending what I’m looking at.

Gabriel puts his hand on my shoulder. “Rhine,” he says. “You’re not okay. Just admit it.”

“No.” My teeth are chattering once I’ve said the word. I swallow hard, take a deep breath as he turns me to face him. “I’m all right. Really. I just need to think.”

He pushes the hair from my face. “Just admit it.” His voice is so gentle, and I feel so sad all of a sudden. I put my head on his shoulder, and he draws me in, and my knees give way, but it doesn’t matter; he’s holding me up.

“It’s okay,” he whispers. My lips brush against his neck, and I can feel the sweat, taste his fever, the sickness seeping out of him. This is all wrong. I should be comforting him, not the other way around. But I’m the one who’s shaking. And those are my hot tears plopping onto his collar.

He’s rubbing my back, and as he whispers to me, his lips are moving right against my ear so that the words tickle and buzz. “It’s okay. I won’t let anyone touch you like that ever again. I won’t. Not ever again.”

“Gabriel—” My voice is a whimper.

“I know.” His voice is low, soothing for me, but it serves as a warning for anything dangerous that might try to slither up between the hold we have on each other. Maybe he’s still seeing snakes.

I sob. And when the tremor rattles from my body to his, there is true pain in his voice. “I know, Rhine, I know.”

I can’t get the feeling of that man’s hand off my skin. Over and over again I feel his fingertips boring into my thigh. But it isn’t just that. It’s his words, imbedded so deeply into my brain that I’ll never be rid of them: You will be nothing but ash.

How could Jenna have known me so well, even in death? How could she have known, when she asked Gabriel to take care of me so very long ago, that at this moment it would be the only thing I wanted?

Chapter 15

SOMETIME AFTER DAWN we board a bus that will take us to Pennsylvania. After that we’ll have enough money to take another bus to New Jersey, and from there, Manhattan. Gabriel told me all of this before the bus even came, but still the name of my home is echoing through my head. Like a gift. Like an unattainable thing. I can’t believe we’re so close.

I take the seat by the window, and Gabriel takes the aisle, with Maddie wedged between us. My mouth has gone dry. I try to contain my smile, and can feel it inside of me anyway, tightening the muscles of my face and neck, making me giddy. Manhattan. Home. The engine is thrumming under my legs.

When I crane my neck over Maddie and rest my head on Gabriel’s shoulder, he says, “I’ll take first watch.”

“Okay,” I say. But I doubt I’ll be able to get any sleep, even when I feel my eyelids becoming heavy.

I do not dream about the mansion, or about Greg, or the haunted blue flowers on the wall. Instead I dream that the bus has stopped, that when I step outside, there is a wealth of people. Not first generations or new generations, but people: children, teenagers, young adults, adults, the elderly. Like a moving snapshot from a newspaper clipping of the twenty-first century.

I am holding something in my hand, and I look down at it. Annabelle’s tarot card: The World. The whole world.

Something is not quite right about it, though. I can’t find Rowan. I have a horrible thought that maybe nobody has told him that the world is saved, that I have the proof right here in my hand. Too late, a voice is telling me. You got here too late.

I recognize the voice just as the people recede into blackness, and I do not get the word out in time.

“Mom?”

My eyelids are rising on their own, and the daylight is unwelcome and harsh. I shield my eyes with my forearm. “Where are we?” I mumble.

Gabriel doesn’t answer right away. He leans forward just enough to look at me, where my head rests lazily on his chest, and he peels some hair from my eyes. I repeat the question.

“Just making sure you’re really awake,” he says. “You were talking in your sleep.”

“I was?”

“You’ve been doing it a lot lately,” he says, and for some reason he looks unhappy before he tilts his head back so I can’t see his face. He works his fingers through my hair. I close my eyes, lulled back toward sleep by his touch and the whirr of the engine. And I’ve forgotten my question by the time he answers it. “You could sleep a little more if you want.”

“I’ll take next watch,” I mumble. “Thank you.”

His fingertips tap the rhythm of the engine. They’re warm and alive with his pulse, his energy. And I drift into a half sleep, listening to the voices on the bus, sometimes dreaming of faces, street signs passing by too fast for me to make out the words printed on them.

I dream of where I am, and what lies before me. I do not dream of where I’ve been or what I’ve left behind. I tell myself that this is what I’ve wanted from the moment I was captured, and that I should be happy.

Despite the nagging feeling of emptiness, I should be happy.

At the bus station in Pennsylvania, Maddie and I leave Gabriel only long enough to use the women’s bathroom and to wash up. Gabriel is waiting for us outside the door, looking tired but not as beat-up. We wait on the plastic chairs, eating Callie’s Kettle Snacks and warm, flat soda.

“How are you feeling?” I ask.

“Okay, I think,” Gabriel says. “My head hurts a little bit, and my back.”

“It’s because you were so clenched up,” I say. “Your muscles are stiff.”

“I know,” he says. But there’s something he’s not telling me. Hallucinations, horrors that he endured while I was sleeping peacefully on his chest. Or more secrets he shared with my sister wives. More things I’m not meant to know.

While he’s chewing on a Kettle chip, I search his eyes. I see a bright and youthful blue, the boy who brought me June Beans in the early hours of morning. I see none of the darkness of the angel’s blood holding him hostage, but when I glance, subtly, in Lilac’s bag, I see that the vial of liquid is still there.

On the bus Gabriel is asleep even before we’ve started moving. He’s directly beside me, head on my shoulder. His lips move against my neck and form words that have no sound. “Dream of good things,” I whisper, and hope my voice will reach him. I imagine it as a mist entering his nightmares, coiling around the monsters and then tightening, causing them to burst into oblivion.