Read Fell of Dark for Free Online Page B

surface.
    This time, I woke up with a tattoo on my right forearm. The letter
F.
In black, just below the scar where my ulna broke the skin, and the letter was bleeding. Blood smeared down to my hand. Fingerprints. Not just the tips, whole fingers, someone holding my arm. Maybe the person who gave me the tattoo. One of my Guardians? Or my mother? I don’t know. What does
F
signify? Fire? Frenzy? Fever? Fuel? Fall?
    The letter bleeds, and it won’t stop. Or am I bleeding at all? I can’t tell.

    On the other side of my bedroom wall, there’s another apartment. In that apartment, there’s a man. This man owns guns. If I press my ear to the wall, I can hear him pulling triggers and making the sounds of little explosions with his mouth.
    Pow, pow, pow.

    A trestle where I thought I’d die. I had to do a lot to get there. I had to fight through the Sawmen and the Guardians. The saws.
    I sat on the bridge, looking down at the tracks. The wood, stones, and rails. How long before a freight train comes through?
    Then, as I sat there, prepared and ready, another me showed up. He stood on the bridge, a witness. He didn’t judge me. He didn’t beg me to jump or beg me to think again. He had no emotion at all. He was me, a little older, a little taller.
    Then, another me, a third Thorn, appeared. He stood behind the second me. Definitely wider and taller; he could see over the second Thorn’s head. Not a man, not yet, and he, too, didn’t say a word.
    I stood up and walked over to them. I looked back on the me sitting with his legs over the side of the bridge, waiting to jump. The fall would’ve broken my legs in front of an approaching train. No escape.
    I started thinking.
    You’ve been shortsighted. You haven’t seen anything, done anything.
    I thought and thought.
    You haven’t climbed a mountain. You’ve never gone anywhere on your own. What do you know about anything?
    I watched myself for a little while longer.
    You’ve never been in love.
    I slid off the bridge onto the sidewalk. The other Thorns, already gone, had disappeared into me or the air.

    The Sawmen made me suffer. I felt their blades. I bled from my stomach, my spine split, and they cut me in half again and again. The Architect’s punishment for my thoughts of suicide.
    I survived myself. Doesn’t this mean I’ll survive everything and everyone?

    I was halfway across a street, but the woman in the car didn’t want to stop for the sign. She wanted to slide by. At the last second, she realized she couldn’t make the turn without hitting me. She stopped short. I glared at her and brought my fist down on the hood of her car. “What the hell are you doing?”
    What did she do? She raised her hands and shouted back through her windshield. I could read her lips: “What? I stopped.”
    I argued with myself whether or not to hit her car again.
    Things happen inside of me, and sometimes they come out. I brought my hand down, laid my palm on the hood, and the engine stopped. The tires deflated, all four of them, flat to their rims, and I glued the woman’s hands to the steering wheel. I willed her window down. She couldn’t speak.
    â€œYou’ve got to watch the people,” I said. My voice sounded deep and foreign, even to me: my Protector. “You’ve got to watch the people.”
    Minutes went by before my mind and heart were mine again. Then the sadness came.
    I released the woman’s hands, started the car, inflated the tires, and gave her back her tongue. An angry miracle.

    My name is Hawthorn Blythe. I had a sister named Salome. Her name comes from the Hebrew word for peace.
Shalom.
She drowned when I was four. Saving my life. All I remember is the taste of the ocean. Salome turned into a seahorse. I’d swear it.
    Her bedroom looks exactly like it did when she was thirteen. A few posters on the wall, certificates of merit in swimming and medals, but,