Mud Vein(45)

“Let’s go back inside,” Isaac says. His voice is wiped clean of emotion. It’s his doctor’s voice; factual. His hope just fell down that cliff, I think. He heads back without me. I stay to look—look at the spread of mountains. Look at the dangerous drop-off that could turn a falling body into a sack of skin and liquid organs.

When I turn around, Isaac is carrying armfuls of wood from the shack and into the house. It’s not a house, I tell myself. It’s a cabin in the middle of nowhere. What happens when we run out of food? Fuel for the generator? I walk back toward the shed and peer inside. There are piles and piles of chopped wood. An axe rests against the wall closest to where I stand to the back of the shed are several large metal containers. I am about to go investigate them when Isaac comes back for more wood.

“What are those?” I ask.

“Diesel,” he says, without looking up.

“For the generator?”

“Yes, Senna. For the generator.”

I don’t understand the edge in his voice. Why he’s speaking to me like he is. I crouch down beside him and reach for the logs, loading my arms. We walk back together and stock the wood closet in the cabin. I am about to follow him outside for more when he stops me.

“Stay here,” he says, touching my arm. “I’ll do the rest.”

If he hadn’t touched my arm, I would have insisted on helping. But there is something to his touch. Something he is telling me. I crouch in front of the fire he’s built until my shivering stops. Isaac makes a dozen more trips before our wood closet is full, then he starts piling logs in the corners of the room. In case we get locked in again, I think.

“Could we leave the door open? Wedge something in between the door jamb so it can’t close?”

Isaac runs a hand along the back of his neck. His clothes are filthy and covered in a thousand flecks of wood.

“Would we be guarding it, too? In case someone closes it in the middle of the night?”

I shake my head. “There is no one here, Isaac. They dropped us off and left us here.”

He seems to be torn about telling me something. This pisses me off. He’s always had the tendency to treat me like I’m fragile.

“What, Isaac?” I snap. “Just say it.”

“The generator,” he says. “I’ve seen them before. They have underground tanks with a hose system attached.”

I don’t get it at first. A generator … no windows on the back of the house … a hose system to refill the diesel.

“Oh my God.” I collapse on the couch and stick my head between my knees. I can feel myself gasping for air. I hear Isaac’s footsteps on the wood floor. He grabs me by the shoulders and drags me to my feet.

“Look at me, Senna.”

I do. “Calm down. Breathe. I can’t afford to have anything happen to you, okay?”

I nod. He shakes me until my head snaps back.

“Okay?” he says again.

“Okay,” I mimic. He lets me go, but doesn’t step away. He pulls me into a hug and my face buries itself in the crook of his neck.

“He’s been filling that tank hasn’t he? That’s why there are no windows on the back of the house.”

Isaac’s silence is confirmation enough.

“Will he come back? Now that we have the door open and can fill it ourselves?” It seems unlikely. Is it our punishment now that we figured out the code? A reward and a punishment: you can go outside, but now it’s only a matter of time before you run out of fuel and freeze to death. Tick-tock, tick-tock.

He squeezes me tighter. I can feel how tense his muscles are underneath my palms.

“If he comes back,” I say. “I’m going to kill him.”





I haven’t cut myself since the day I met Isaac. I don’t know why. It might be because he made me feel things, and I didn’t need a blade to feel anymore. That’s why we do it, right? Cut ourselves to feel? Saphira would have said so. The dragon and her existential bullshit. “Since humans can choose to be eitherrrr cruel or good, they arrre, in fact, neither of these things essentially.”

Now I am feeling too many things. I crave my white room. What was the opposite of cutting? Wrapping yourself in a cocoon and never coming out. I roll myself in the feather comforter on the attic bed—that’s what we we’re calling it—the attic. My room. The place where my kidnapper put me in pajamas and laid me. Laid me out to what? I don’t know, but I’m starting to like it in the attic. I can’t hear the music as well when I’m wrapped in feathers. Landscape has not stopped playing. The first of our songs. The one he gave to me to let me know he understood.

“You look like a joint,” Isaac says. He hardly ever comes up here. I feel him touch my hair, which is sticking out of the top of my cocoon. I bury my face in the white and try to suffocate myself. I traded comforters with him. He took the red because I couldn’t stand to look at it.

“There is something downstairs you should probably see,” he says. He’s touching my hair in a way that’s lulling me. If he wants me to get up he’s going to have to stop doing that.

I came straight up here after we carried the wood into the house and discovered the electric fence. Isaac must have found something more outside.

“Unless it’s a dead body, I don’t want to see it.”