I shake my head. “We’re going to try to hel
p him.”
Even as I say the words, I think, We are? Is that even possible? Is it wise? But what is the alternative? He isn’t going to let us walk away. That’s what Maryanne means. We can’t scare him off. We can’t injure him and hope he slinks away to nurse his wounds. The guy beneath me is like a killing-machine movie cyborg. He’ll just keep coming. He isn’t a cyborg, though. He’s a person, and we cannot keep killing hostiles every time they attack us.
“We need to—” I begin, and then the man bites me.
This is my fault. Caught up in my thoughts, I give him the opportunity to bite, and when he does, I jump, more in surprise than pain. The moment my weight shifts, he’s ready, and he fights like the cornered beast he is.
He bites and twists and kicks and hits. I try to pin him. Petra tries to pin him. Then Maryanne is on him. Blood flies before I even realize what she’s doing. She howls and stabs, her face a mask of rage even as tears stream down her face.
“No!” she shouts. “No, no, no!”
Petra and I haul her off him. The hostile crawls away, and I try to go after him, but the moment I relax my grip, Maryanne fights harder. Petra can subdue her, but I don’t trust her not to hurt Maryanne in the process.
The hostile scrambles to his feet, a hand to his side where Maryanne stabbed him, blood running from the shot to his shoulder. Whatever bloodlust consumed him, the survival instinct overpowers it, and he staggers into the forest. Maryanne doesn’t calm down until he’s gone.
I sit on my haunches and look up at her. “Maryanne, we—”
“Warned you,” she says. “You didn’t listen.”
“You warned me about him? I know, you said to shoot—”
“Not him. All.” She looks around. “They’re watching now. Always watching.”
She means the hostiles are watching us. That’s what she meant with that skull she gave me for Dalton. A warning. Rockton has gone decades rarely interacting with the hostiles, and then we slaughtered a hunting party of them. Killed them because they attacked us, and we tried to avoid even that—it’s Val who finished off the injured—but to them, it was a slaughter. They won’t hide in the forest anymore. They’re watching. They’re waiting. They’re attacking. I look at the blood soaking the ground. And now we’ve attacked back.
“Come to Rockton,” I say. “Eric’s there. He wants to help—”
She shakes her head.
“Maryanne, please.”
She lifts her hand with the missing partial fingers and touches her ruined ear and then her filed front teeth. Tears fill her eyes.
“Not like this,” she says.
I’m not going back like this. That’s what she means. That is the horror of her situation. Something has happened to her since we last met. Dalton made a connection, and she’d been ready for it. She wasn’t the madwoman who attacked him years ago. She’d already changed, calmed. When he made that connection, it reminded her of who she’d been and something sparked. She began rising from that pit. Her mind rising, but her body … Her body had already changed, and no epiphany could regrow her ear and fingers and teeth. She now had the mental wherewithal to realize that, which made it all the worse.
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. “We have a doctor. We can help. You can—”
“No,” she says, those tears spilling.
She turns and runs in the opposite direction the hostile went. Petra looks at me, poised to sprint after her, and my muscles tense, ready to do the same. I take a deep breath and shake my head.
“It can’t be like that,” I say.
She nods. Then she keeps looking in the direction Maryanne went.
“That was a…” Petra begins.
“Hostile, yes.”
She’s still staring. “I thought…”
“Thought we were lying? Exaggerating? Trying to scare people with tales of bogeymen in the forest?” I hear my voice, harsh, and I shake my head. “Never mind. I’m just tired and frustrated.”
She looks over then, meeting my gaze. “I get it now, Casey. I really do.”