Page 86 of This Vicious Hunger
“And you spoke to her, just like you did with me.”
“I did.” Olea inclines her head thoughtfully. “It was different, though, Thora. I’m not just saying that—it was. At first she was kind and patient, but it didn’t take long for that to slip. After a while she was brash and sharp and, well, sort of mean. She told horrible tales about the ladies who lived near her, made snide comments about their husbands and children too; she told me stories about her hometown and how much she hated it here. At first Ithought she was funny and charming, and I was so tired of beingalone.”
“It didn’t last?”
“It wasn’t long before I started to see through the facade, no. By the time I realised she never truly cared for me, I’d already decided I loved her, though, and it felt too late. I thought maybe if I let her into the garden, if I could touch her, it would be different, like when we first met. Maybe we’d get some of that magic back. So I invited her in.”
“And instead she robbed you.”
Olea nods. “Let’s call it a mistake. I’m… I still feel awful about it, though. She didn’t deserve—what I did. I never meant for it to be punishment. I was just trying to protect myself—and the garden. I was sure, even then, that Florencia’s cure would come.”
“You did love her, though,” I say gently.
“Maybe I did. It was puppy love. It’s not like it is with you—and I’m not talking about now, all the… the blood and the sex.”
“I know. It’s like the antidote has reduced us to our basest needs. It isn’t who we were before.”
“The garden had already stripped away many of my defences.” Olea glances behind me, to where she can no doubt see the stinging tree in the distance. “What does it mean for the cure, though, if it’s breaking down again in our blood?”
Always the cure. Everything leads back to the damned antidote.
“I don’t know,” I say honestly. “We can try a batch with our blood, but it congeals so fast I can’t see how it’ll be any good as a mixture. We’d have to water it down a degree to even get it to mix.”
“We need human blood,” Olea says, repeating Petaccia’s phrase. “You said we could leave the garden if we wanted to. Get throughthe gate. I’ve always been too afraid… Please promise me you won’t go without me.”
“It doesn’t matter about leaving the garden,” I say. Olea eats another cherry and offers me the punnet, but I shake my head. I’m queasy and dizzy, my stomach all in knots. “I’m not sure where we’d find it anyway. Petaccia keeps only animal specimens in the lab.”
“Promise me you won’t go without me anyway,” she urges. “Please?”
“Olea—”
“No.” She is firm in this. “Please promise me.”
“Fine,” I say, shrugging. “I’m not so sure I can manage the gate any more anyway.”
“No. I suppose not. It’s like recovering after a long sickness, isn’t it? Only we’re not getting any better.”
That’s exactly what it’s like. I had the flu once as a small child and I recall those aching days afterwards, hot and cold and feverish, starving and thirsty though it hurt to eat and drink. And the delirium… My father never treated me the same after that. It makes me wonder what I said during those hours. What I did.
“We can’t let her do this,” Olea says. I only half hear her, stuck in my thoughts. “My whole life she was the only constant I knew, aside from the plants. And I still don’t understand how she could just… leave me to die. For all our talk of monsters—”
“That’s it!” I cut her off, then grasp her hands in apology, startling her. “Sorry, sorry. But.”
“But?”
“Petaccia,” I breathe. “She’ll have to come back to the garden with supplies soon. We can make sure we’re awake, that she can’t sneak past us. We’ll find a way to get her blood.”
Olea grips my hands right back, so tight it hurts, smearing cherry juice over my thumbs.
“You can do it, can’t you?” I ask. “Even though she’s…”
“Yes. And then we make the cure for both of us.”
For the first time in days our minds are occupied—not with food and sex but with plotting. We work out how much food we have left, make a calendar based on the last drop, or the best we can remember it, and attempt to cover all our bases.
If Petaccia comes between dawn and dusk she will likely bring the food into the cellar, though we can’t assume that to be the case. If she comes overnight, the likelihood of us being awake will be much higher, but she’s more likely to abandon the supplies by the gate as she’s done for Olea before rather than demanding we help given the new revelations about her hidden knowledge. She’d be a fool to assume we won’t be working against her.
We plan to use strips of sacking and some of Olea’s craft tools—knitting needles and crochet hooks amongst them—to create tiny alarms for the perimeter, hoping the jangle might alert us as we take it in turns to keep watch.
