The Survivors: Body & Blood (book 3)

Undecipherable, pt. 2

THE NEXT MORNING, SADIE STOOD IN FRONT OF THE INVISIBLE CITY WALL, HER left hand tightly locked in my brother's, her right holding The Cider House Rules. Her eyes were filled with a sadness that made them look translucent. Something had happened that morning between when I last left her, joking about L.A. in her room, and now, that pushed her a bit closer to the edge. I got this about her when I think no one else did.

"I can hear them," she said. "In my head. I can hear them thinking.

I can hear them hating."

And though I had maintained my distance from the ruling couple, I stepped to her side and said, "It's a good thing we're not fighting for them anymore. That we're doing it for everyone."

She looked at me then, this glassy gratitude in her eyes, and I understood. "Yeah," she said softly, "good thing." She closed her eyes and shook her head, regaining her confidence. As if the moment of vulnerability hadn't happened, she said, "All right, Kutoyis. You're up."

Kutyois stepped up. He put his hands to the invisible wall and muttered low words in Blackfeet I couldn't translate. A century of living on and off their Reserve, and you think I would have learned it.

He walked down the wall toward where the gate should be, muttering these things and dragging a hand behind him while a blurry heatwave of crimson radiated off his palm. The aging stone of the walls of the Survivors' City appeared beneath his hand. He got to the other side of the gate, before Sadie called for him to stop. She walked in front of the gates and looked inside, but there wasn't a soul visible.

"What do you think he's doing to them?" she asked, but the question was rhetorical. She moved closer and closer until her hands almost touched the gate.

"Do you want me to do the rest?" Kutoyis asked.

"No," Sadie said. "I just wanted to know we could. Close it up. Make them safe again."

"But—"

"Close it up," she said. She walked up to Kutoyis and reached out to hug him, an oddly intimate move for her. "It's been good working with you, brother. We'll be back." Then she turned her back on him.

Kutoyis was pissed. "That's it?"

She turned on her heels. "That's it for now."

"But I'm the only one like you. If you're going after him, I'm going after him too."

"Kutoyis," she said as tenderly as she knew how, "you might be the most important part of this all. But you need to be in Canada. You need to get everyone ready."

"No! I want to go after him with you!"

"Just have some patience, Kutoyis."

"But . . ."

She put her hand to his face. "I'll see you when I see you, little one," she said. The words I'd told her the night I pulled her out of Swan Lake. And before she walked away, she repeated, "I'll see you when I see you."