My heart pounded; the thought of opening the door to something forbidden and unknown terrified me, and I sensed a similar unease in him.
Yet, a rush of thrilling curiosity surged within me.
I spent that whole day and much of that night gnawing on the memory of his gaze. How it had lit on my body, lingered, then retreated as if burned.
I told myself it disgusted me. I told myself it was proof that he was every inch his father’s spawn, that even now, even after all we’d survived, I was just a thing to be consumed.
But it was a lie, and the lie soured in my mouth, rancid and persistent.
This old anger was transforming into something that tasted like longing and disaster. That terrified me.
I couldn’t sleep that night. I told Caiden I was going to keepwatch, though both of us knew I was too exhausted to last more than a few hours.
I perched on a boulder by the water, knees hugged to my chest, and watched the moon’s reflection shiver on the surface.
I tried to meditate on the beauty of the world, to remind myself that it still existed, that it hadn’t all been eaten away by cruelty and hunger.
But every time I closed my eyes, I saw the blood pooling under that man’s face, saw the edge of the knife flashing in two directions at once. I saw the glimmer in Caiden’s eyes when he’d finally killed for me.
I was so tired of being a victim that I barely noticed the moment I started to become the monster.
When the sky tilted from blue to pale yellow, I crept back to where Caiden slept. He was curled on his side like a kicked dog, his face stripped of anger, just soft with exhaustion and a thin film of sweat.
I knelt beside him and watched the way his eyelids twitched, the muscle beneath jerking at some remembered pain. I wondered if he was dreaming of his father, or the cage, or of me. Possibly all three.
I reached out and brushed a stray hair from his forehead.
The contact startled him awake, and for a moment he looked at me like he didn’t recognize my face in the morning light.
Maybe he didn’t. Maybe we were both strangers now, two new creatures with nothing left but hunger and the memory of what we used to be.
“What?” was all he said, but the word came out on a breath that was ragged, almost pleading.
“It’s day.”
We stared at each other, and then he nodded.
We shouldered the pack, picked a direction, and started walking.
It wasn’t until afternoon that we ran into the first sign of other human life: a dead hiker, collapsed in a tangle of sage and rock. He’d been there a year maybe, or longer. What was left of him was all bone and mummified sinew, the rags of his clothes fluttering around the frame. His ribcage gaped, a hollow birdcage, and the sockets where his eyes had been stared straight up at thecloudless sky.
I stood over him, hypnotized, unable to look away.
Caiden knelt, his face unreadable, and searched the dead hiker’s pockets with a gentleness that nearly broke me. He found a battered lighter, a half-empty bottle of iodine, and a wallet with a faded photo stuffed behind a driver’s license.
The man’s name was Steven. His picture showed him with a woman and a boy, arms around each other at a backyard barbecue. Smiles too big for the camera, faces alight with a hunger for something.
I took the photo from Caiden, numb, and turned it over in my hands. Some animal in my chest wanted to scream, to warn the woman and child that this was what would become of Steven, all meat peeled away by time and loneliness.
I slipped the photo back into the wallet, hands suddenly shaking.
I wondered if that’s what I would become. A leftover, a corpse for the next lost animal to discover.
I thought: this could have been us. This almost was us.
I thought of the man in the cabin, how easily he could have made us this, and how easy it would be for the world to forget what we looked like before we were reduced to bone and dirt.
We left the corpse behind, but parts of it clung to us. The empty sockets, the decay, the glint of hope made monstrous by abandonment.
