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When his eyes find me again, they’re lucid, absent of the crazed look I’ve seen a few times before when broaching this subject with him. “How unfortunate for her.” His gaze dips to my stomach, holding the same longing as when he first spoke of the woman from the tunnels, when he expressed a desire to impregnate me, and I pull my knees up to break his stare.
“Unless the woman from your memories is correct, and the cure exists somewhere below the hospital.”
Rolling his shoulders back, he abandons his staring and flicks his cigarette into the bonfire. “Might be worth cracking open the seal on that hospital.”
“Might be worth the risk to save her and the unborn child.” I don’t dare let a smile escape, for fear my hopes may well be too high.
Might be worth saving Valdys.
Chapter 12
Wren
“She could very well be lying. We don’t know anything about these people!” Six paces inside the small cave, his hands smoothing over short cropped hair. “Don’t let her words get to you.”
“It’s not her words that are getting to me, Six. I saw the woman bleeding out her son. I saw those things clinging to a shredded placenta. As if they destroyed it from the inside out. I’ve felt the stabbing pain in my belly that makes me wonder if something is doing that very thing to me.”
“I did this to you.” Hands at his skull, he falls to his knees, his chest expanding and contracting too fast with his shallow breaths. “I can’t let you carry this baby, Wren. I can’t lose you that way.”
I cross the small cave to where he remains on his knees, and run my hand over his hair. “We don’t have a choice. I’m not giving up on this baby, Six. Not this time.”
His eyes are brimming with tears, jaw set to a hard line. “If I lose you … I’ll be a fraction of a man.”
“A fraction that will need to remain strong, in the event something happens to me while giving birth. This child is ours. I won’t see it destroyed.”
“Tell me what to do. I’m begging you. I’ll do whatever it takes.”
A knock at the barrier of the cave interrupts my thoughts, and I swing my attention toward the makeshift door. “Who is it?”
“Cali. Um. The one who--”
“Yes, I know. Come in.”
The barrier slides to the side, and the girl stands in the doorway, wringing the fabric of her tattered shirt. Nervous, I would guess, particularly as Six slowly rises to his feet beside me.
“I want to apologize for … what I said earlier. That was … had I known you were ... “
The growl in Six’s chest is the irrational anger of a desperate man, misdirected at a girl who has nothing to do with my ultimate fate.
I reach behind and grip his hand in warning. “You spoke freely, and unless you’re here to tell me it was all a lie, I needed to hear it. To know what I’m up against.”
“The fate of women these days always seems to rest in the hands of men, whether we wish it that way, or not.”
I glance back at Six, who remains disenchanted by her presence, as he stands with his shoulders bunched, hands balled into tight fists. “I chose this particular fate. And I don’t regret it. Regardless of the outcome.”
“It doesn’t have to be death.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean … there is a cure. One Doctor Ericsson spoke of.”
I scoff at that and shake my head. “Doctor Ericsson was an obsessed maniac. The only cure they produced in that hospital was the cyanide I fed to his son, before both were torn apart by mutations.”
“He’s dead.”
“Yes. In pieces.”
“Cadmus … the one I travel with, he was sent down to those tunnels. That’s what we think, anyway. Hard to tell what was real, or hallucination, in that place.”
