Chapter 146

Chapter 146
Alina's POV

Darkness pressed in from every direction. My consciousness swung back and forth between breaking apart and knitting back together, like a string stretched to its snapping point.

When I woke, my whole body ached—my back, my sides, my arms, my forehead. Every inch of skin throbbed with a dull, heavy pain, as if I'd been stuffed into a barrel, tumbled around, and hurled down from a great height. But the pain was unevenly distributed. My back hurt the worst, my limbs less so, while my stomach and chest felt almost nothing at all.

With difficulty I rolled over and propped myself up on my elbows. The moment my upper body lifted from the mud, I looked down and saw Lowell.

He lay on his back less than half a meter away, his body half-submerged in shallow water, the back of his head resting against a rotting tree root. Everything below his chest was soaking in the cold current. Leaves and mud covered his upper body, and his face was as pale as a crumpled sheet of paper, his lips drained of all color—a stark, jarring contrast against the dark river beneath him.

I sat up slowly. Something was flashing back through my mind at lightning speed: the instant we'd gone over the cliff, he'd wrapped his body around mine, putting himself underneath. The stones on the cliff face, the broken branches of shrubs, every sharp thing—all of it had come down on him.

My gaze moved from his face to his body, and then stopped.

There was a long wound along his side, running from beneath his ribs all the way up past his hip, as though a sharp rock had sliced him open. The edges of the gash were ragged, the peeled-back flesh gone white from soaking in water, and blood was still seeping out. Dark blood ran down the line of his waist and dissolved into the river beneath him, staining that small patch of water a deep red—shockingly vivid against his pale skin.

I knelt in the mud and reached out to feel the side of his neck. The moment my fingertips touched his skin, I realized my whole hand was trembling. Beneath my fingers, his pulse was still beating. I let out a breath—it meant he was still alive.

I drew in a deep breath and pushed myself up off the ground. My knees shook, my legs heavy as lead. My clothes were already soaked through, and when the wind blew, the cold made me shiver.

I bent down and dragged him partway out of the water, lifting his upper body clear of the surface and laying him flat on a relatively dry patch of mud. Then I crouched down and began examining his wounds.

The one on his side was the worst. Blood was still oozing from it, and its edges had gone white from being submerged too long, with fine grains of sand and dirt embedded in the flesh around it. I tore off the hem of my shirt; the fabric ripped with a sharp sound that carried startlingly clear through the silence of the ravine. I folded the strip of cloth over several times, pressed it against the wound, and bore down hard.

The whole time, I kept scanning our surroundings, in case the people who had ambushed us came down after us.

When I lowered my eyes again, my gaze landed on the edge of the cloth strip I'd torn off to bind the wound—and my hands went still.

Tucked into a fold on the inner side of the fabric was a tiny electronic component, less than half the size of a fingernail, semi-transparent, giving off a cold metallic gleam, fixed to the inner cloth with an ultra-thin film of adhesive. Wedged into the crease of the fabric, it was impossible to spot unless you looked closely.

My breath stopped in that instant.

It was a tracker—a tracker someone had sewn into my clothes.

It was because I'd been carrying this tracker that they'd been able to set up the ambush ahead of time on that suburban road and cut us down before we could fight back.

And as for who had planted it here—that needed no explanation.

My hands began to shake. Fear and fury surged up like two opposing tides at once, crashing together inside my chest, the suffocating pressure of it almost enough to drop me to my knees.

Only Roald had both the reason and the means to plant a tracker in my clothes. And only he would give the order to strike the moment Lowell and I left—because he didn't just want to stop me from learning the truth. He wanted to seize the chance to get rid of Lowell along the way.

He had never intended to let Lowell go, and he had never intended to let me go either. As long as I was still useful to him, he wouldn't let me die—but he could let the people around me die, one after another, until I had no one left to lean on, until I had no choice but to return to his side.

I looked back at Lowell's face. He was still sunk in unconsciousness, the blood loss leaving his lips cracked and pale, rainwater trickling down from the corner of his brow.

I couldn't stay here too long. If the people up above discovered we hadn't been killed in the fall, they'd very likely keep searching downstream along the river. I had to find somewhere to shelter before he lost too much blood.

I pressed the cloth firmly against the wound again and tied it off in a tight knot. Then I bent down, draped his arm over my shoulder, and hauled him up off the ground with everything I had.

He was heavier than me, and with the blood loss and unconsciousness leaving his body utterly limp, the full weight of him bore down on my spine. My knees buckled and I nearly dropped back into the mud, but I gritted my teeth and held on, shifting my center of gravity forward and taking one step at a time.

Both banks of the river were lined with moss-covered rocks and low shrubs. In some places I had to turn sideways to squeeze through; in others I had to climb using both hands and feet. I carried him a stretch, caught my breath, then pressed on again.

At some point the rain had stopped, but the sky was still overcast, not a sliver of light breaking through. I followed the current for a while, then climbed over a low rise of earth, cut through a patch of thin woodland, and finally, in a slightly more open space, found the road leading out.

I recognized this direction. This road ran from the suburbs toward the old residential district on the edge of Brooklyn. Megan's apartment was nearby—I'd walked this way many times before.

I didn't dare take the main road. I could only keep to the shadows along the walls and back alleys.

I don't know how long I walked. I only knew the sky had begun to change—the coldest hour before dawn after the rain had passed—but my strength gave out around then too.

I carried Lowell through the final stretch, a narrow alley flanked by aging apartment buildings, their wall-mounted pipes streaked with rust, clotheslines swaying gently in the wind on the rooftops. One of the streetlamps at the mouth of the alley was broken; the other cast a dim yellow glow, throwing a small circle of warm light onto the ground.

The wind cut against my drenched body, the cold like a knife driven into my bones. My knees gave way, and I collapsed onto the freezing concrete.

The fall nearly sent Roald—Lowell—tumbling off my back. I steadied him carefully, then lay flat against the ground, bracing myself on my arms and crawling forward inch by inch on my elbows and knees. The cold, rough pavement scraped my knees and elbows, tearing through the fabric, scraping my skin raw and bloody. Behind me stretched a dragging trail of blood, a broken line of dark red, painfully stark in the pale gray light of dawn. My hands were caked with blood, sand, and dirt, cold and aching.

With the last of my strength I raised my hand and knocked on the door of Megan's apartment. When there was no answer, I knocked three more times, then slumped against the door, my forehead pressed to the cold metal.

I didn't have the strength left to say a single word. Just as I was thinking I'd rest a moment before knocking again, the door opened from the inside—Megan.

Her face appeared in the crack of the doorway, bleary with sleep. But the moment she looked down and saw me, her whole body jolted as if she'd been struck by electricity. Her pupils contracted sharply, her mouth fell open but no sound came out. Then her gaze traveled past me and landed on Lowell behind me—unconscious, soaked to the bone.

Her face went white in an instant.

My lips moved, and only a few hoarse words scraped out of my throat, barely a sentence: "Save him... save him... first..."

Then my vision began to blur, the strength draining from my limbs, my forehead knocking against the cold threshold, and the last flicker of clarity sank down into the darkness.