Page 44 of The Quiet
Provided with the ultimatum, Ella realized that he’d probably known about these pits all along, hence his sudden willingness to share the truths he’d realized about the world. Clasping the vile, she broke away from Kay and eased down against the wall. Jackson backed away from the entrance of the pit, Ella imagining that they were both settling in for a long wait.
“What have we gotten ourselves into?” Kay said, pacing back and forth in the dark, but there was little else to add. “We have to get back,” he whispered.
Minutes extended out and she and Kay sat across from each other, Kay’s expression eventually morphing until his eyes broached the request timidly.
“Ella,” he said eventually, “Maybe it’s for the best. Ever since the embolism, you’ve been struggling. Something just hasn’t been…right.”
“I used to be an addict.” She didn’t have to elaborate. Kay knew enough about her early years on the streets of the Imperia when her mind was arrested in the sea of emptiness that Amnesia created. That was a long time ago, and she didn’t feel the need or desire to bury herself in that place now, but she needed Kay to back away from the suggestion, back so far away that he could only sit there speechless.
“I know.”
She knew it was all he could say in response.
She stared back with an unrelenting refusal. Instead of speaking, she pulled Mark’s lucky coin from her pocket and turned it over and over in the silence. Soon, she rolled it over her fingers, back and forth as if it were enough to entertain her for the next few hours. Kay watched the coin like it carried the weight of all of his concerns, balancing precariously as it flipped from one finger to the next.
Between each turn, she could see Kay’s gaze across from her until the fullness of the coin eclipsed him again.
She couldn’t think.
She was too full of too many things and she could hardly decipher her physical state from her mental and emotional state. Every part of her was suffering and full of so much noise. Her focus on the coin felt like the only stability she had left until one more flip in her fingers eclipsed her vision a final time. When she looked past the coin again, she didn’t see Kay, but the white table, now accompanied by two white chairs.
She dropped the coin and it clattered against the floor as she gasped and pressed her body back against the wall.
Her heart throbbed in her chest, chest growing tight as fire burned across her brain, blurring her vision. All of the feelings she’d experienced in the embolism returned, as if spilling from some thinly bandaged crack in her psyche, and she gasped for air as the white table waited without meaning in front of her. Light cascaded off it from a nearby window, and footfalls echoed from behind her before Kay’s voice broke through the illusion and shook her back to reality.
Kay was standing over her.
“Ella,” He pleaded, and when she jolted back into reality he shook his head and in a panic said, “Something is wrong. Ella, you have to take it. We have to go back.”
She swallowed and tried to form an objection, but her mind was still flooded with intense emotion that burned through her entire body.
Before she could even consider her next move, she heard footsteps in the tunnel, not just one, but multiple. They both looked up as a head peered over them before withdrawing. Another head came back, and then another, causing Kay and Ella to ease to their feet.
“Jackson?” she asked, swallowing the tremor in her voice. No response.
A few minutes later a rope ladder rolled down into the pit. Kay urged her up first, holding the ladder taught at the bottom as she climbed up with one arm.
Hands helped her up at the top, Ella watching the four scouts waiting at the top, armed with knives and swords, but positioned so that they didn’t seem to be anticipating a fight.
“Welcome to The Quiet,” one said with an accent and a light smile. He stood ahead of the rest, a different symbol than the others stitched onto his shoulder. “My name is Hollow. I’m a representative of The Quiet. You’re going to want to avoid asking too many questions,” he added, “unless you’re planning to stay for good.”
Jackson was nowhere to be seen.
The war didn’t end how you think it did, Ella rolled the words through her head as the scouts walked them out. She struggled to digest them through the fresh wave of fear that had consumed her only moments ago.
It felt like she was falling apart.
“We’re going to take you to get patched up and fed,” Hollow said as they left the cave, “and then send you on your way home.”
Ella exchanged glances with Kay. She searched the forest for Jackson as they started on their final hike outside of the cave.
The war ended here ten years ago.Jackson’s words rolled through her brain.
His skepticism of Peter’s death now made alarming sense. Nothing else did.
CHAPTER 12
DEATH
