The Darkest Path

“Leave for where?”

I grabbed my own breakfast and ripped it open. Beef stew. “Home.”

“You think you’re going to get all the way to New York? Cal—”

“We just have to get across the border,” I said. “Once we explain that we’re captures, the Feds will help us from there. And the Path isn’t going to get bent out of shape searching for two escaped novices. We’ll travel at night. We’ll be careful.”

“You can’t run away from this.”

“Run away from what?”

“You killed someone.”

It was like a punch in the gut. I flexed the sore muscles of my right hand, still able to feel the kick of the gun.

“You know the kind of person Quarles was.”

“And you made sure he never had the chance to become anything better.”

I glared across our camp. “And how many people has the Path killed, James?”

“It’s a war. It’s different.”

“You learn a lot about war sitting in camp and fetching Monroe’s coffee?”

“As much as you did mucking out a dog kennel.”

I threw the half-eaten MRE into the dirt and stormed down the trail.

“You want to know how I really got that medicine for you?” I asked, holding up my cast. “How I got this? It was a little deal I worked out with your buddy Monroe. Your medicine in exchange for Rhames going at me with a baseball bat so I’d look pathetic enough to draw some Feds out of their base. I was right there, James. I listened while they gave them the Choice, while they murdered men, women, and children.”

“That’s not true!” James said. “Anyone who refuses the Path is taken to a camp until the end of the war. After the war—”

“I was there! I was right there. What did they do to you?”

“They didn’t do anything to me! I made a choice.”

“Then make another one. Get your things together. As soon as it’s dark, we leave.”

“I’m not going.”

“I swear to God, I will tie you up and drag you home if I have to.”

James pressed his wrists together and thrust them toward me. “Do it.”

“James—”

“I am on a Glorious Path,” he spat at me, his voice quickly finding the rhythm of a first-year novice prayer. “I will not turn from it even if it means my death. I will not succumb to the temptations of the lost and the wicked. I will be their beacon instead.”

He stood there, hands out, daring me. I went back and rooted through my backpack until I found a length of rope. Bear ran up from the stream, growing increasingly distressed as I bound James’s wrists, yanking the knot tight enough to make him gasp.

“We leave when the sun goes down.”

I left James, snatching the map off the ground and flattening it in front of me. I searched the map’s blocks of gold and blue for a way out. Salt Lake City sat like a citadel near the southern edge of the Wyoming border, but north of that, the border looked nearly empty. A plan started to snap together — head north, skirting west to avoid Salt Lake City, then head east to cross the border. It was a tough route, but as long as we stayed away from the hornet’s nest of SLC, maybe we had a chance.

I sat back and breathed deep, trying to calm the thud of a headache that was pounding just behind my eyes. Once it calmed, I drew my finger across the map, past Wyoming and South Dakota and Iowa, all the way to New York and Ithaca.

I closed my eyes, seeing it all as it was — the lake, the trees, the cobalt-blue walls of our house — going over each image like they were the words of a prayer.

• • •

After the sun had been down for more than an hour, I threw on my backpack and went down to the stream. James and Bear were nowhere to be found.

“James?” I called as loudly as I dared. Nothing. “Bear?”

I cracked another chem light and held it up. A shuffling sound came from somewhere beyond its reach. I crept toward it as silently as I could until I came around a pillar of rock and saw him.

James was on his knees in the dirt, his back to me, his bound hands in front of him. His forehead was pressed into Bear’s neck and his entire body was shaking. At first I thought he was having another attack, but then I heard his voice.

“I just want to go home.”

He said it over and over, quiet, but so strained it was like the words were slicing his throat on their way out.

“I just want to go home. I just want to go home. I just want to go home.”

Bear grew anxious, dancing back and forth and then setting his front paws on James’s legs with a whine. James flung his hands over Bear’s head, drawing him in as he cried. Soon Bear went still and then James did too.

A rock shifted as I took a step, and James turned toward the sound. When he saw me, he left Bear and slowly crossed into the circle of green light. James put his bound hands out in front of him.

“You said you’d be dragging me.”

Bear whimpered at his feet, staring up at me. I seized the ropes and flung James out onto the path ahead of me. He stumbled, nearly pitching into the dirt before righting himself and continuing on without a word. Bear shied back with a growl.

“What? You want to stay?”

Bear barked once, an angry yap, but then I took his collar and hurried him along too. As we climbed, the deep blue sky shaded to black. By the time we were topside, the stars were out, circling a full moon. The land was quiet and flat, vastly dark. Bear dashed out into the night to explore. I found the Big Dipper and traced a line from it to the North Star.

Beside me, James began to pray.

It was like a knot tightening inside me. I remembered the nights I stood in the dark by his bunk trying to quiet him as he sobbed. We’d just been taken by the Path and he’d gone days without food, surviving on nothing but the few drops of water I was able to force into him. How many of those nights had I lain below him in the bunk, sleepless, terrified that I’d wake to find my brother dead of grief?

Listening to him pray, some dark part of me wished I had. I felt sick even as I thought it, but at that moment, even his absence seemed more welcome than standing beside this stranger.

“We should go if we’re going,” James said when he finished his prayer.

I slipped my knife out of its sheath and cut his bonds with a single slash. James looked up at me, confused, as the ropes fell to the ground. I shoved his pack into his chest.

“Go home.”

James was motionless for a few seconds and then he drew the pack toward him.

“Maybe we don’t have to go back to Cormorant,” he said, tempering the edge in his voice. “Beacon Quan told me about this place in Oklahoma called Foley. It’s a real Path town, way behind the lines. Just a few farms and a small Lighthouse. Maybe we could—”

“The highway we came in on is that way. Leave now and you’ll be in your bunk before morning.”

James started to protest, but whatever fight he had in him seemed to evaporate. “What do you want me to tell Monroe?”

“Tell him whatever you want,” I snapped. And then, “Tell him… tell him I had a gun and I tried to force you to come with me but you managed to escape. Say I’m heading west to California.”

James nodded. I dug through my own pack and held out the asthma inhalers.

“Here.”

“I don’t need them.”

“Don’t be—”