Page 87 of This Vicious Hunger
It isn’t much of a plan, but given our limited resources it’s the best we can do. Neither of us is particularly confident we’ll be able to take Petaccia in a fight if it comes to it, and though Olea suggests she might be able to concoct some type of sedative from the garden easily enough, we’re not convinced we’d be able to get her to consume such a thing.
Still, it’s better to have something of a bad plan than no plan at all. We quickly lose ourselves in security, taking turns keeping watch near the gate. Our couplings are urgent, quiet, and brief.Neither of us suggests taking a break from them and for this I’m grateful—without Olea, the smell of her tangled in my hair, on my hands, I’d go mad.
We wait. The days stretch, and with them the last of the fresh supplies. We run out of milk and meat first, then fresh vegetables and fruit. Then we start to run low on staples: potatoes, pasta, wheat, and oats. The hunger is another form of madness, gnawing, desperate. We return to fucking louder and more often between explosive, repetitive arguments, burning through our frustration every way we can, almost hoping Petaccia disturbs us in such a state. Then it becomes harder to do even that. We are exhausted, unable to sleep, eat, or drink anything but water from the well.
It takes another week—five, now, since our initial exposure to the antidote—for me to realise: Petaccia isn’t coming back.
Chapter Forty
Istudy 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 thatOlea 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 doctorwith 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 searcharound 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. Foodisn’thelping. 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.”
