The Gathering Dark (38 page)

The two of them turned in unison, faced the jagged rocks in front of them, and began to climb.

Chapter Forty-Eight

T
HE SLOPE STEEPENED ABRUPTLY
,
and Keira grunted as her shoes scrabbled for purchase against the slippery rock. The irregular face of the mountain at least offered hand- and footholds, though she felt more like she was crawling up the incline, rather than climbing it.

She could hear Walker behind her, his breathing heavy with exertion. By the time the cave seemed within reach, Keira’s arms shook with the effort of the climb. She paused, clinging to the rocks. Her gaze jumped from handhold to foot-ledge, measuring gaps and drops and spans of smooth, flat rock. She needed a path. A connect-the-dots way to get to the black mouth of the cave.

Come on—just find a pattern—like notes on a staff.

She squinted at the rocks, trying to see the right outcroppings to grab while keeping the ocean—the whole crushing, rolling enormity of the ocean—out of view.

And then it appeared, the same way she could hear music when she rolled her gaze over the notes.

Walker pulled up short behind her, panting hard. “You need to head to the le—”

“I see it,” she said, reaching for the first handhold in the chain, holding her breath the same way she did when she reached for the first note in a piece of music.

“Okay. I’ll add free-climbing to your list of skills, then.”

They climbed the rest of the way in silence. Keira moved from rock to rock, pretending the whole way that she was simply playing a new concerto, or an unfamiliar étude. There were the expected hesitations and near misses, the fear of the unknown combined with the need to keep going at the expected pace. As long as she pretended her fingers were striking keys instead of curling around bits of rock and kept up the illusion that her feet were pressing pedals instead of feeling for toeholds, she would be okay.

She could keep her fear from swallowing her.

At least, until the floor of the cave appeared in front of her, interrupting her fantasy. Then, she hesitated.

“Go on,” Walker said behind her. “The sooner we’re out of sight, the better.”

She shook herself, willing her frozen muscles to stir. In one fast move, she slithered into the cave on her belly. Inside, it was blacker than the devil’s own heart. Leaving just enough room for Walker to come in, Keira curled up against the slippery stone of the cave’s wall, shivering with fear and the exertion of the climb.

He pulled himself in next to her and they both turned to face the darkness at the back of the cave.

“Hello?” Keira called hesitantly.

The walls seemed to soak up her voice. Nothing responded to her—no answer. Not even an echo. The silence that followed was the most heartbreaking sound Keira had ever heard.

In the noiseless dark, a sob rose in her throat. She hadn’t realized how deeply she’d believed Pike would be waiting for her.

Walker pulled her against his side.

“It’s okay,” he whispered. “This is a good place to hide. We’ll wait for the chaos to die down and then we’ll figure out a new plan. We can keep traveling, find some way that you can keep up with your music. . . . ”

Keira’s hands curled into fists at her sides. She could feel her whole life slipping through her fingers like sand. Juilliard was gone. Her family, Susan—all of it, gone. Just like that.

There was a snapping sound at the back of the cave. Before Keira could even ask Walker what it might have been, one of the peculiar Darkside lights began to glow in the recesses of the cave.

Keira leapt to her feet, ready to run, but clueless as to whether she should be running toward the light or away from it.

A figure stepped toward the lantern, shrouded in a heavy hooded cloak. Keira felt Walker’s protective presence behind her as she willed herself to call out again.

“Uncle Pike? Is that you?”

A hand reached up to pull back the hood and Keira leaned in, struggling to see. In the strange Darkside light, the face that appeared was thin and aged, but it was distinctly familiar.

Pike Sendson grinned at her. In the gloom of the cave, it looked like a skeletal rictus, instead of the charming smile she remembered. But still, she smiled back.

“Keira. You made it.” His voice was cracked and reedy, a long-unused instrument. He stretched his arms out to her, but when she didn’t go to him, he looked so wounded that his arms began to shake. Keira’s stomach knotted when she saw that he was missing most of the fingers on his right hand. “You look like Hope itself,” he said. “I’d almost given up. All these years, hiding and waiting—I thought maybe I’d been wrong about you. Misjudged. That happens, you know. Bad judgment.” He wrapped his arms around himself, rocking slowly back and forth in front of the lantern.

The desperation rolled off him in waves, pushing Keira back even though she wanted to run to him. Walker put a hand on her shoulder and Keira reached for it, covering his fingers with her own.

“Uncle Pike—”

“Uncle?” he interrupted her. His eyes cleared and he spoke with the same ringing confidence she remembered. “Don’t you know? Can you really have come all this way and not
know
?”

Keira grimaced. It was one thing to think of Pike as her father—her biological father—in the abstract. It was another to acknowledge it to him in person. For all his flaws, her true father was Dennis Brannon. He was the one who’d always been there when she needed him. Pike was a memory; a myth. “I know that you’re my father.”

He smoothed the front of his tattered robe again and again. “I imagine it’s not easy for you to accept that, but I hope in time you’ll be able to. I am prouder of you than anything else I’ve done in my life. I knew you were special the first moment you smiled up at me from your mother’s arms.” His face darkened. “Keira, you’re in a great deal of danger.”

“I know. That’s why we came. We read the note.” She stepped toward him.

“We?”
The suspicion in Pike voice was shrill as a siren. The muscles in Keira’s legs bunched in response, begging her to back up—warning her to keep her distance. Pike’s eyes darted around the cave and his hands clutched ineffectively at the sides of his robe as though he’d lost not just his fingers but his grasp on reality, too.

“We. Walker and me. Walker was the one who found me,” she said.

Pike squinted at Walker, who waited outside the wavering lantern light. “I wanted a visitor, but I wasn’t expecting two. Two might be too many. Who are you, exactly?” he asked.

Walker stepped forward. “I’m Walker Andover.”

Pike wavered on his feet, stretching out an arm for balance. “Andover? But then you must be—that’s not
possible—
” he stammered. His eyes rolled wildly.

The
thud, thud, thud
of something hitting the cave floor behind them made Keira spin like a jewelry-box ballerina. Three of the Reformers’ guards stood in the doorway. Their long fingers curled around lengths of black rope. One of their hoods had slipped back, and Keira could see a pale, hooked nose and pitlike black eyes staring at them.

She couldn’t feel her legs beneath her.

All this time.

All this running.

And now—
now—
they were caught?

“Shit,” Walker said simply.

“Congratulations, Experimental,” one of the guards said in his strange, rhythmic language. “It took longer to track you down than we thought it would.”

Behind Keira, Pike began to laugh, burbling and bubbling in a way that made Keira’s skin crawl. Her gaze raced around the cave, looking for an escape, looking for something to fight with. There were only three guards—maybe Walker was strong enough to—

The end of her thought snapped off like the tip of a too-sharp pencil. Walker had already turned and put his hands together behind him, surrendering to the guards. His instant submission shocked her.

He glanced up at her and the pain in his eyes was so sharp that it hurt Keira just to look at it.

“Turn around,” he begged. “Turn around and hold out your hands.”

She stared at him, dumbfounded. “We’re giving up? Just like that?”

“This isn’t a game, Keira. We have to go with them now. We can try to talk to the Reformers”—his words were coming faster and faster, and Keira’s throat tightened in response—“but the guards—”

“Show no mercy,” the guard hissed as he strode toward her, a black cord stretched taut between his hands.

Keira spun before it could touch her, stretching out her hands. In her blind reaching, the cave walls around her seemed to shift, and for a moment, she thought about letting herself go back to Maine. They weren’t as deep beneath the ocean as they had been. She could swim for it, and as long as the currents didn’t keep her trapped in the sea cave, she might even make it.

Before she could decide, though, the cords tightened around her wrists, cool and metallic, like unbelievably fine mesh. The ocean disappeared. She tried to see it, reaching for it in spite of the danger, but the metallic cord tugged at her wrists, anchoring
her in Darkside. She couldn’t see anything but the cave. Her own world had disappeared completely. She was trapped, stuck in Darkside and at the mercy of the Darklings.

Oh, fuck.

At the back of the cave, Pike kicked over the lantern, which went out with a
whuff
, throwing the cavern into sudden blackness. The guard who had bound Keira’s hands tossed her to the ground next to Walker, who lay in a trussed heap. The three guards converged on Pike. He shot past them and leapt out of the mouth of the cave, swinging onto the rock face with the ease of a mountain goat. The guards scrambled to follow him. His shouts turned into a series of keening shrieks that made the hair on Keira’s arms stand up.

“Can you get across?” Walker asked in an urgent whisper.

“No,” Keira whispered back. “I can’t even see it!”

“Damn. Me either. How did they get here?”

The scuff of a shoe against the cave floor made Keira lift her head. She squinted at the backlit figure, unable to see who it was. It turned out not to matter.

“I told them where to find you.”

As soon as he spoke, she recognized Smith’s voice, and she didn’t think she’d ever heard anything so horrible in her life.

Chapter Forty-Nine

W
ALKER ROLLED TO FACE
his cousin. “What the—how did you—we left . . . ” His voice was slick with frustration. The impossible half questions slid off his tongue.

Smith crossed his arms. “You went too far this time, Walker.” He sounded like an actor.

A bad actor.

He leaned over them. “I told you to hurry!” he spit the words at them. “You hung around Keira’s house so long that I didn’t have any choice. They were watching me watching you. I
had
to follow you guys.”

Keira closed her eyes. If she hadn’t been so desperate to
say good-bye, they might have escaped. Staying for dinner had used up too much time. They’d forced Smith’s hand. She felt sick.

Smith straightened, resuming his booming fake stage voice.

“Besides, it turns out delivering both Experimentals to the Reformers came with quite a prize.”

Keira choked on her own breath. Both Experimentals? She looked at Walker.

“What does he mean, ‘both Experimentals’?”

Smith’s laugh was as sudden and ugly as a misstruck note. He nudged Walker with his toe. “You didn’t tell her? Wow. You’re better at keeping secrets than I thought.” His voice dropped and softened. “I can’t believe you didn’t say anything. You really did care about her after all, didn’t you?”

There was a rough shout from outside the cave. “Seeker!”

Keira saw Walker flinch as Smith turned in response.

“Get out here and help us!”

Smith dutifully scurried to the mouth of the cave.

Walker and Keira lay alone on the cold stone floor.

Keira tried to breathe, but the air seemed too thick to get past her throat.

“Why didn’t you tell me?” she choked out.

Walker was silent. In the blackness of the cave, with her own hands bound behind her, Keira died a thousand little deaths for every second he didn’t speak.

By the time he finally responded, she was numb.

“I was scared,” he admitted. “I was going to tell you. I was going to tell you every day. Every time I saw you. Not that I expect you to believe me. But I’d already told you that the Reformers wanted all the Experimentals dead. I’m not exempt from that, Keira. They let me live as long as I was looking for you. As long as I was doing their work, I was safe. When I did the seeking, it kept the other Seekers from being damaged by traveling back and forth between the worlds. That way, no one else would have to end up like Pike—eaten away, physically and mentally.”

Keira sucked in an enormous breath, ready to rage at him for all the lies—for breaking the trust he’d always begged her to have in him. If he’d just
told
her, she would have . . .

Her breath hung suspended in her chest, her lungs stretched and aching.

What would she have done? Once Walker’d started helping her, he’d signed his own death warrant. She never would have let him protect her if she’d known. Not when the cost was so high.

Outside, Pike’s shrieks turned into a slow, moaning whimper. The guards had caught him.

Between her clenched teeth, Keira snarled with frustration.

She wanted to be angry with Walker—to be scared of him, even.

But she wasn’t. And there was no time to second-guess herself, either.

“If I weren’t so damn stubborn,” she growled, “I—”

Walker cut her off. “If you weren’t so damn stubborn, then I wouldn’t have found you nearly as interesting. Or sexy. Or worth risking so much for.”

Keira thought about that. “So, you really are just like me?”

“Not exactly,” he admitted. “For one thing, you’re much prettier than I am.”

“Walker, I’m being serious,” she protested.

“I am too!” he insisted. “But there’s other stuff. My mother was a Darkling—it was my dad who was human. Their relationship was more complicated than the other people’s in the Breeding Program. They fell in love. And I was raised Darkside. So, we’re not the same. You can play music. And I can’t. So, if it comes down to it, you might have a way to save yourself. But after today—”