Page 11 of The Catacomb King
“Don’t be angry at her.”
“I’m not angry,” I said, exhausted. It wasn’t a lie, not really. I was too resigned to be angry.
I only wondered who the godlingswouldtake, if Josie was so far away.
He of the Bloodline of the Monarch of the Void
Calix and I went home. It was early afternoon. When we arrived, Josie was just leaving my hut. She had used a precious portion of her own family’s water to wash my mother’s hair.
I didn’t trust myself to ask her when she was moving. But she saw it on my face. Her shoulders slumped. Calix pulled her away before she could apologize, or maybe it was before I had a chance to lose my shit. I stood in the dusty doorway, my mother coughing behind me, and watched as the two of them headed off to the village square, backdropped by Josie’s giant house. My muscles felt like needles. I bit my tongue hard enough to draw blood.
The rest of the day and night were the same as ever. My mother coughing up her insides. Me, shivering on the floor. The only difference was that now I got to imagine Josie trundling off to Corcagia. Living her dreams. Hanging out with Calix. Enrolling at the nursing college, which was right next door to the engineering college, where I would never, ever get to go. Probably she and Calix would fall in love and get married and forget to invite me.
Meanwhile, the only wayIwould ever leave this place was if my mother died. And I couldn’t hope for that.
I had been so little when Dad had died. He’d broken his arm, which was a typical injury for farmhands like him. But instead of healing quickly, the bone had become infected. Over the course of the next few weeks, red threads of sickness had crawled up his skin. I had been sent away to stay with Calix’s family so I would not have to watch my father convulsing and foaming at the mouth. I had not been allowed to say goodbye until he was already in the casket. And at that point, when my mother nudged me to say my final words to him, I stayed silent. I knew in my six-year-old heart that it didn’t matter what I said. He couldn’t hear.
After that, it was just me and Mom. Mom took Dad’s job in the fields — a job typically reserved for men — and worked twice as hard as any other farmhand. It wasn’t long until she earned their respect. Some of them had had sons and grandsons who’d gone to school, and they gifted her their sons’ old books, books full of mathematical equations and fairy tales. Mom brought those books home and gave them to me. Dad had taught me to read, and now Mom encouraged me to learn the old stories, to teach myself languages, to solve calculus problems in my head while scrubbing toilets at the Stammerers’ house.
She grew too old to work in the fields. But she waved off my concerns when I begged her to quit. She wanted to earn enough money to send me to college. She kept working even as her body weakened. As the drought set in. As the crops withered. As the farmhands drove themselves ever harder and sucked ugly dry dust into their lungs. Those farmhands, men who’d known my father and my mother both, began to drop like flies. And then my mother began to cough. And then she could not work anymore. And then she could not even stand up. And then she began to forget me.
But I had not forgotten her. I would break my own body, steal every breath from my own lungs, if it meant I could take care of her the way she’d taken care of me.
Calix didn’t understand. Josie didn’t either.
I rose and walked again to the border to gather my own fucking edenica herbs. As I walked, I seethed. Howdarethey all leave me? How daretheyall get what they wanted while my mother and I suffered?! How dare Calix stroll back in here, two months early with his handsome face, and refuse to even help! How dare he make me feel like an idiot for so much as having an idea!
By the time I got to the fields over the underworld, I was mad as all hell. I ripped the little red flowers out of the earth in a blind fury, hurling them into my basket until they wouldn’t even fit anymore. I knew I was wasting them, but I couldn’t stop. Even though every herb I picked now was an herb I couldn’t pick later, was a waste of a six-hour walk, was another inch of pain I couldn’t save my mother from, another link in the chain that bound me to this godsforsaken place —
I flung my head back and screamed.
A deafening crack sounded behind me. My heart stopped. I whipped around, the earth shifting under my feet, my body catching itself on blind instinct just before I fell, my fists up —
The earth had opened up. Before me yawned a pit four feet across. If I had been standing just two feet back, I would have been sucked into it.
It looked like a mouth waiting to swallow me… or an open gate.
My breath caught in my throat. I backed away from the hole, slowly, feeling like a hunted animal. Feeling like I had just a day ago, when my boots had moved across the border.
Someone — or something — had to be here. Waiting for me.
I knew it the way I knew gravity, the way a hunted animal knows a hawk. I couldn’t see him, but I sensed him. It was crazy, but I thought I could evensmellhim, the scent of rough soil and something deep and rich like camphor. Or maybe I was only smelling myself. My own fear. Sweat drenched my underarms and stomach.
And still I did not see him.
The darkness was total. How could it be so terribly dark? Just a moment ago I had screamed at the stars —
The stars.
Something was blocking my view of the stars.
I saw its outline just before it caught me. Tall. Broad. Human-shaped. Masculine. I caught that whiff of earth and camphor.
I screamed. I tried to stumble backward, my fists still up, but the thing had hold of my hips. He plunged with me into the pit.
I screamed again. I could do nothing else. We were already so deep that even the stars had vanished. And I was still holding my basket! I hadn’t even dropped myfuckingbasket!
“Wait!” I cried. “My mother! At least let me give this stuff to my mother!”
