Maplecroft (The Borden Dispatches #1)(105)

“I don’t know where it is. I’m sorry. I didn’t see where you dropped it.”

But she pointed, back at the ground near the edge of the rocks. Yes, there it was—the oft-polished blade glittered in the light of the frantic sky. “I need it,” she said, and she began to stagger toward it. Her strength was waning; small wonder, considering the mile-long run to the rocky shore, and her subsequent swim.

But she picked up speed as she stomped down the pier, her footsteps echoing loudly even against the thunder, and the cry of the ocean (if indeed it was the ocean, and not something worse). I followed her, not because I couldn’t outpace her—she was still weak from her ordeal, or weaker than usual, if I must degrade her strength—but because I was ready to catch her if she stumbled or fell. I’d saved her; now I had to protect her. Now I was responsible for her. Isn’t that the way of philosophy?

I patted at my chest for my gun, but it was gone. I’d lost it in the water, or somewhere along the way. “My gun!” I exclaimed, almost tripping at the end of the wooden walkway. I collected myself and arrived at Lizzie’s side as she retrieved her weapon of choice. So one of us was armed, and there was that much on our side.

“When we get back to Maplecroft,” she wheezed, “you can have my father’s.”

“Your father’s?”

“His gun. Liquor cabinet, in the parlor. Top drawer,” she said. She picked up the axe and flipped it expertly, feeling for the familiar move and sway of its weight with more grace and better precision than the most experienced of lumberjacks. It was almost lovely, the way she turned it between her hands—almost divine, how the light sparked off it and bounded back into the sky.

I was wrong. She wasn’t weakened at all.

I do not know what fueled her beyond that point of near death, into vigorous rebellion. Pure willpower? Terror? Curiosity? Oh, but I hoped it was that simple.

She turned to me, and stepped so close that I could feel her breath in the hollow of my throat. Her gaze was dark and deadly, even though her eyes were rheumy and bloodshot, and vomit-water clouded the front of her dress.

She said, “He’s here.”

I nodded. “Let’s go.”

Together, we set off—not at top speed, but at a steady pace. Did I say it was a mile to Maplecroft? A little less than that, I think; but in the dark, after such an evening of exertion, an outright run was more than either of us could manage.

(It’s more than I could’ve managed. I do not know about her, since I do not know what kept her moving. I did not want to consider that she was tainted somehow, too, granted extra strength, or a touch of madness, like the rest of them. I wonder if she wondered it about me. Fine then. We’re all mad, maybe. No one will escape the Problem. Nothing but consensus will have the final say.)





? ? ?


Anyway we hurried as best we could, and as we retreated to the big house I tried to formulate some plan. “When we get there,” I gasped, timing my words between footfalls, trying to lay them down between the crackling, fracturing heavens and all their requisite chatter. “We should . . .”

“Yes?” she said, not looking back. She still outpaced me. She was younger, after all. And I was glad she looked steadier now than when I’d first pulled her from the water; I was no longer certain I could catch her if she fell. I wasn’t sure from one step to the next, for the exhaustion and confusion were at war with my excitement, and I was light-headed from the turbulence of it all.

“The toxins,” I told her. “Use the toxins against the professor.”

“You still think it will help?”

“It can’t hurt to try,” I insisted, my chest burning from the running and talking in tandem. This was what old age felt like. Old age and death: remembering how it felt to run without pain and the tightening lungs, but unable to do so anymore.

“The globulins . . . they worked on Nance.” She nodded, but not to me. Still facing forward, toward the house, toward our fate—whatever it might turn out to be. “She did not go mad. She awoke. She did not kill us all.”

A rather loose definition of success, but she wasn’t wrong—and given the circumstances, I’d cling to anything, even a margin so slim as that one. Perhaps someone would make it out alive.

“But the toxins, not the globulins, they are . . .” I struggled to catch my breath. “Deadly. To us, maybe to them.”

“I know. You told me.”

I honestly could not recall having done so. I remembered thinking about telling her, and sorting out the facts, and working to assemble the loose pieces of this terrible puzzle. I remembered telling Emma. Or I thought I remembered. I might well have been wrong.

I am slipping.

The thought whisked through my mind. My feet were still sound. My footing was sound. The ground was not wet, for it had not actually rained at all—the sky’s noisy protests be damned, it was only the squishing of my wet socks in wet shoes. I was running, and we were nearly upon Maplecroft, and my legs felt weak but I was still upright, still determined. But I was slipping all the same, and cursed to be aware of it. A stupider man might not have noticed. Someone more inclined to self-deception might never have considered it.

Regardless, there it was. A loosening grasp on sanity. One finger at a time giving up, letting go.