Free What Blood Leaves Behind (The Poison Rose) by Delany Beaumont Page B

reached the legendary city at the north end of the highway. The city—
    I can’t just surrender. I won’t permit myself to simply roll over and die.
    But I need water. I need food.
    I stand up as much as I can, trying to maintain balance, crouching with my back pressed against the craggy layer of wood above me. I grab hold of the bars facing the industrial side of the river and try to raise my voice. I hear myself make a sound like an elderly crow, a sort of broken cackle. Then I’m able to form actual words. “I’m here!” I’m not sure if the words are loud enough but it’s the best I can do.
    “Ah, I think she’s alive,” William says. “Moira will be so happy.”
    “Can you hold on for a few more hours?” Jendra calls down to me.
    “Give me water,” I say. I try to raise my voice above the sound of the birds.
    “We’ll have to think about that. You don’t sound like you’re at the end of your rope yet. Get it? End of your rope?”
    “We could cut this rope, you know,” a strange voice says.
    “I happen to have a knife,” William says. “Would you like that, Gillian? If we sawed away at the rope a little? I don’t know how strong the rope is. It was the best one we could find to hang your cage with.”
    Panic makes my stomach knot. The dull pain in my head recedes a bit and lets in the full realization of what’s happened. It’s like something from a horror movie. It can’t be real but it is real .
    I’m in a cage made for an animal, suspended high above the wide river that runs through the city of Raintree, dangling from the side of a bridge.
    It maddens me that I can’t see anything directly above me, can’t see the rope, how securely they’ve tied it or what they’ve tied it to. Or the row of grinning, mocking faces staring down at me. I want to hurt them. I want them to feel like I feel, be as frightened as I am.
    “And I have a stone, a large round stone,” Jendra says. “What if I drop that stone? Gillian, what do you think will happen?”
    “Should you do that?” another voice says. “They want her alive.”
    “It’s the ceremony tonight. Moira is going to take over.”
    “Gideon would have wanted her to,” the first voice says with deep respect.
    Moira. Gideon. I killed Gideon . That’s what the three in the van said.
    “Oh, no,” Jendra cries out, laughing. “The stone slipped out of my hand.”
    A heavy thud on one end of the roof of the cage immediately follows the sound of her voice. It causes the cage to tip and me to sprawl back against the bars. The entire cage quakes. I hear a plonk and a splash from far down below. I scramble back to the middle of the cage and wait for it to stop rocking.
    I imagine dropping straight down into the chilly waters of the river. I’m a good swimmer but in this cage I would sink to the muddy riverbed, thrashing against the bars until I could no longer breathe, the pressure of the water pounding against my ears until everything grew completely still, completely quiet.
    If I had to dream up an ultimate nightmare for myself, I couldn’t come up with anything better.
    But they want to keep me alive a little longer. They want to torture me. They want me to suffer.
    “I think that’s enough for now,” Jendra says brightly. Then she calls down to me. “We’re going now. All you have to do is to wait until dark.”
    The voices continue to chatter, happy and carefree, as they fade into the distance. Two thoughts fill my mind.
    The water they offered was a lie. The food was a lie.
    I open my mouth to call out but let the words die in my throat. I know the harsh, pleading rasp I made would be ignored, laughed at if they heard it at all.
    All that water below me and I can’t taste a drop. I hope for a moment that the cage does fall so I can at least drink deep the river’s steel-gray depths in the moments remaining before I slip away from this life.
    Then I fall asleep or pass out. The only reason I’m aware of this is because, when