Page 66 of This Vicious Hunger

Chapter Forty

I study Olea as she sleeps. We’ve given up the shift watches for the last couple of days, mostly out of necessity.

Neither of us can face being out in the sun for more than a minute or two, coming up in great red welts that take much too long to heal, and we won’t have the strength to do anything if Petaccia does turn up.

Instead we sleep together through the daylight hours, burrowed in our blanket den in the cellar, the constant reminder of our steady starvation all around us.

I’ve considered more than once how I might be able to leave the garden.

I don’t like to think of breaking my promise to Olea, but the more days pass since our last delivery of food, the more likely it is that I will have to.

Olea does little except sleep now, and that she doesn’t do well, tossing and turning, crying out until her sobs echo in the tower.

There is no doubt that while my mind might be the weaker of the two of us, more prone to giving in to its animal urges, Olea’s body has endured much more punishment.

The plants may have protected her since she was a child, but they have little control over what we have done to ourselves, and it hurts me to admit that Olea will almost certainly succumb to whatever the end may look like first.

And in truth, I’m not sure what scares me the most. The idea that she will waste away quickly, her body scooped hollow from the inside with this dreadful hunger, that she will starve before I can do anything to help her; or that the agony will linger, her mind unravelling alongside her body as I’m forced to watch.

“Maybe Florencia miscalculated because of how much we’ve been eating,” Olea had suggested tiredly at dawn as we snuggled down to try to sleep, still desperately clinging to her hope.

“I know she’s been watching us, but maybe she got it wrong.

We’ve not really had a schedule. I used to eat—oh, not much at all.

Peck like a bird. Do you think she might just be delayed? Perhaps she’s had to travel…”

I didn’t answer then, but my would-be response has been playing on my mind ever since.

Petaccia may have been watching us, especially at first—and she may have fully intended to see which of us would come to death’s door first—but the longer it goes, the more likely it seems to me that she isn’t coming back at all.

When she implied she would wait to see which of us lived, this time she wasn’t lying.

It has been more than five weeks; if the doctor cared as much as she said she did about blood cell counts and the life of the antidote inside the body, she would be here, right now, observing us.

Instead she hides in the shadows, not even brave enough to enter the garden to provide us with food.

Not even to gloat. No, it seems to me that the doctor hasn’t told us the entire truth, yet again.

What’s to say she hasn’t already brewed another batch of the antidote to administer to test subjects elsewhere?

The stinging tree might be rare, but it isn’t the only one of its kind, and a doctor with her network and experience would have little trouble tracking down another.

And, of course, who’s to say the stinging tree is a necessary part of the colloid? It frustrates me so very badly to have only half the information, even though the damn thing’s very existence is almost entirely my fucking fault.

Olea tosses in her sleep, rolling from her back to her side and then onto her front, arms splayed as if she is trying to fly—up and away from this place.

She is so frail. I haven’t noticed before, but the bluish shadows under her eyes are bruises, and the skin is pulled gaunt across her face so it is all skull, juts, and hollows.

I can see her ribs, and the collarbones I once saw in the garden—a view that had seemed so untamed it bordered on the obscene—are now deeper, more pronounced than ever. She is skin and bone.

All at once, I bend over breathless, my stomach clenching as sobs force their way up inside my chest like bubbles of air.

“Olie,” I say softly. I stroke her face, forcing back my tears. “Olie, darling. Can you eat?”

She rolls onto her side again, opening her eyes. They are dull with sleep. When she sees me she doesn’t react. I hold a glass of water to her lips and she takes a hesitant sip.

“Tastes like nothing,” she murmurs.

“Can you eat?” I say again.

“There’s nothing left.”

“There must be. Any more of the crackers? No, we finished those yesterday. Oh, how about the oat dust in water?”

“Leave it, Thora,” Olea says tiredly. “Let me sleep. Maybe Florencia will come tomorrow. I’m so tired. Won’t you just leave me?”

“No,” I say. I’m frantic now, but Olea hardly seems to care.

She’s closed her eyes again and pulled the pillow up over her ears.

I search around desperately, look for something—anything.

“Olie, I’m going to go and find us something to eat.

Okay? I’ll figure the gate out. It’ll be fine.

I’ll come back with steaks and sausages… Olie?”

“Thora,” she warns. She opens one eye like a cat and stares at me in my panic. She doesn’t move, only watches. “You know food isn’t the real issue.”

“It’s not helping!” But I know she’s right.

I feel it in the twist of my gut. It’s the same thing I’ve known for days and days and refused to acknowledge.

Food isn’t helping. Because it isn’t food we need.

It isn’t even just the toxins, for chewing the stinging tree leaves does nothing except tingle our tongues.

We’ve tried it. It’s the blood. Human blood.

“Petaccia’s gone,” Olea says. “She has, hasn’t she?”

“I think so. So we’ve got to go too. We could leave and try to follow her—she won’t disappear without a trace. If we find her we can still get her blood, still make more of the antidote.”

“She’ll come back,” Olea assures me without force. “She has to. All her research is here.”

“How do we know? You said yourself she travels a lot. I bet she’s got other gardens exactly like this one.”

“She doesn’t.”

“How do you know?”

Olea rubs her face, that single movement exhausting her so she lies with her hand over her face. “I suppose I don’t. But how do we know leaving isn’t going to make things worse? Your Leonardo might have told people tales and if we appear it’ll only be—”

“Worse?” I bark. “How could things possibly get any worse? Olea, we can keep having this argument a thousand different ways, but the answer is always going to be the same. Aren’t you sick of it? How long before we go mad?”

“I don’t know!” Olea wails. “Please, Thora. Just let me sleep.”

I’m silent for a moment before the rest of it bubbles out of me. I try to keep it in but the fear, it’s too big. “Olie, if I get us some blood from somewhere… Will you take it?”

This, finally, wakes her up completely. She thrusts herself upright and stares at me in horror. “Where from?” she demands.

“I… I don’t know. One of the scholars, maybe.”

“Right. And what are you going to do, just walk up to one—in the middle of the night, might I add—and ask them if you can borrow some blood?”

“I… well. I hadn’t thought—”

“No,” Olea snaps. “You hadn’t thought about it. Thora, I asked you not to go out there without me. What if it happens again, like with Leonardo? What if you lose control and really hurt somebody?”

“I won’t! I can’t let this happen without fighting it.”

“I will not let you do something you’ll regret either. There is another solution, we just haven’t thought of it yet. Let me sleep and maybe I’ll come up with it.”

“Olea—”

“No,” she cuts me off. “No more. It isn’t even a discussion. We can make tea from the nettles and eat the fruits off the trees. This is not the end.”

She lies down without another word, rolling away so she doesn’t have to look at me. I fix my gaze on her back for the longest time, long enough that she eventually falls back to sleep. But I can’t stop thinking about it. The blood. We need it.

We’re running out of time. If I don’t do something, Olea will die.