Run,his eyes seem to tell me.
The same as Harlan’s.
Determination settles in my stomach. I won’t leave. Not when the man is only entangled with the hunters because of me.
I spot the knife lying on the ground and make to grab it, when I am lifted off my feet. The hunter’s grip tightens around my throat. My face heats as I choke and sputter. I kick out frantically, but my feet only slice through air, useless. A gunshot cracks through the forest.
No, no, no. Not again.
My vision swims as the hunter drags me backward with a grunt, away from the scuffle and the Dark Worlder. A prize claimed. I claw at his skin until I feel blood, but his grip only tightens. He crushes my windpipe, and it burns, burns, burns.
Through a haze, I make out the man’s form duck and roll as another shot rings out. Relief plunges into me, cool and sating. He’s still moving. It hasn’t happened again, another life to be sacrificed for my prideful determination.
He dances sideways, kicking out at a hunter’s knee. I want to scream out, to warn him of Murph, who has risen behind him, wielding another pistol. No sounds come from my mouth except breathless squeaks. Desperate wheezes for oxygen.
I think of Easton and wish desperately I could hold his hand. That I could hear his guffaw of laughter, illegal and yet, undying. It seems a shame that we are both going to die so far divided, that I didn’t at least think to die next to him, our fingers intertwined.
Two figures streak out of the woods, tackling one of the hunters to the ground in a furious flurry of limbs. The Dark Worlder throws a sharp hook and the hunter in front of him stumbles to the ground. The man whips his head over his shoulder and shouts, “Max! Get the girl!”
With a detached sort of comfort, I realize I’m the girl he’s referring to, but it hardly matters. The burning in my throat has finally subsided and the world floats before me in waves, waves of an ocean I have never seen. The Dark World man is tackled to the ground, and I want to help—Ialwayswant to help and never can—and it is the last thing I see before the world goes black.
ChapterSix
Mirren
“Wake up, Lemming.”
My first conscious thought is of the rodent we’ve read about in school, but I have never seen. The second is that I can feel my feet, and people who can feel their feet cannot possibly be dead.
I open my eyes, regretting the decision immediately as my retinas burn in the midday sun. A sharp ache throbs in my skull, keeping time with my heartbeat as the events leading up to this headache come back in bright, anxious, flashes. Escaping Similis. The Boundary hunters. The strange and irritating Dark World man apparently saving my life.
“Ah, there you are,” a familiar voice says from nearby.
As my vision sharpens, I see the Dark Worlder clearly for the first time.
My breath catches in my throat. The man can’t be older than twenty and he is, without a doubt, the most beautiful person I’ve ever seen, male or female. His face is made up of angular planes, as if chiseled delicately by a sculptor, with a layer of smooth, caramel colored skin stretched artfully across them. His jet-black hair sweeps effortlessly across his forehead in thick waves, curling at his temples. His lips are full, the corner tilted upward as if in the constant throws of a smirk.
But it isn’t his beauty that leaves me breathless. There’s little use for attractiveness in Similis and I haven’t come so far as to see its point now. It’s his eyes that give me reserve, that make me forget momentarily that he saved me, that he may be an ally.
They are the lightest shade of blue I’ve ever seen, so at odds with the rest of his deep coloring. They are ice in the moonlight, and they churn with an otherworldly power. They crash against me, so cold that they burn or so hot that they melt, and I want to rear away, to hide, from their intrusiveness.
I force myself to remain still but can’t help the gape that widens my mouth. Whatever it is that burns in that gaze, I know instinctively, I would do well to stay away from. A destructive power that consumes not only itself, but everything in its path.
The man stares back at me so intensely that heat rises to my skin. I shake my head.He is just a man. A person like you or Easton.But even as I think it, it rings false. The way he disarmed Murph so easily, as if it is something he has done his entire life, proves his otherness. Even the cold metal of a gun pressed against his temple hadn’t seemed to bother him. He is comfortable around violence in a strange and terrifying way, and though he may have saved my life, I’m right to be wary.
“You can’t kill me,” I blurt out suddenly, trying to wrench myself away from him, from the strange heat of his gaze. I quickly realize that I am on some sort of makeshift cot, tangled up in a pile of thickly woven blankets.
The man tilts his head, an odd expression clouding his handsome features. “And why’s that?” he asks, in the tone of one inquiring about the weather.
“It—it’s the rule.”
I have no idea why I say it. He’s the one so obviously from the Dark World, and probably well aware of their one law. After seeing the way his eyes burned, perhaps I felt compelled to remind him of it.
I wish I had done so slightly more eloquently, because now he examines me as if I am an interesting sort of bug.
“It’s the Dark World rule. You can’t kill me.”
At this, the man narrows his eyes. “There are worse things than death, Lemming,” he says, his voice low and serious.
