The Other Side of the Sky - Amie Kaufman Page 0,37
the blade sinks into his gut. He stumbles backward, and I keep hold of my knife, yanking it free. It flashes red with his blood in the firelight as he falls.
I feel like someone’s squeezing my lungs, and I’m afraid that I’m going to pass out, because I just stabbed a guy, but an instant later I remember there are more of them, and Nimh’s somewhere behind me, and she needs—
I spin around, and find Nimh standing perfectly still, holding her spear aloft. Six bodies lie still on the ground around her, unmoving.
I’m caught in place, staring at her, somewhere between awe and fear. Then she turns her head to meet my eyes, and I swallow, my mouth dry.
“Nimh, I …”
A flash of movement behind her draws my gaze as a lone figure charges out from the trees, hand raised, blade aimed straight at Nimh’s back. I shout a wordless warning and hurl my knife at her attacker. It sails through the air to bounce harmlessly off a tree, but the warning is all Nimh needs.
She whirls around, and in a continuation of that same movement, brings her spear up and catches the figure under the chin with the blunt end of it. The hooded head snaps back and the assailant falls to the ground, where the firelight reveals the features of a girl about our age.
That’s when I think to turn my head and look back at my guy, but he’s not where I left him. He’s disappeared back into the forest, so I guess … I didn’t kill him? I’m caught between relief that I’m not a murderer, and fear that he’s still out there.
Everything in me is screaming to run, but I can’t move, and the harder I try, the more I feel like I might throw up. I’ve never seen a dead body. I’ve never hurt someone—not like this.
Swallowing my bile and my horror, I force myself to slide one foot forward and then the other, and with that shuffling step, my body begins to unlock. I’m shaking as I approach Nimh.
She still hasn’t moved. Her eyes are starting to glaze over, and I’m not even sure she knows I’m here. She must be in shock.
I want to pull her away from the grisly sight around us—the bodies in the trees might be her friends, even people she loves. She doesn’t seem to hear me, even when I call her name in a rasping half whisper, as loud as I dare with at least one of our attackers still out there. So I reach out, ready to take her by the shoulders and give her a shake.
But then the cat’s there, abruptly tangling through my legs and, without warning, sinking his teeth into Nimh’s ankle.
With a jolt, she seems to come back to herself. She blinks, looks at me, and then, so violently that for a moment I can’t tell what’s happening, she jerks away from my outstretched hands. She moves so quickly that she falls, this graceful creature who navigated a pitch-black rainforest with nary a misstep, landing beside the prone bodies of our attackers.
Bewildered, I take a step toward her—and she scrambles back.
“You cannot touch me!” she gasps, looking at me as though I’m the thing—not the bodies hanging from the forest canopy, not the people all around her who just tried to kill us—that terrified her beyond reason.
“I was only trying to …” Comfort you, I think. Wake you up. Get you to tell me what we do now.
Swallowing, I let the words spill out in a confused tangle. “You weren’t moving, weren’t answering, I thought maybe you were in some kind of shock …”
But she’s scrambling to her feet now, careful to keep a distance between us. “We must go, quickly. There may be more of them.”
“There’s at least one. I stabbed him, but he got away.” I pause, then ask the question that I don’t want to hear the answer to. “Are these others … Are they dead?”
“No,” she says quietly. “But they will sleep for a day or two. If nothing comes for them in that time, they will survive. But the one who ran from you will be bringing others even now, I am sure of it.”
I thought I couldn’t get any more frightened—I was wrong. I glance over my shoulder, my gaze swinging wildly across the blackness of the trees beyond the ring of firelight. “Why would they come back after—after this?”