Jeff Hirsch - The Darkest Path

“You’re okay,” I whispered. “You’re going to be okay.”

Bear appeared in the dark, sniffing at him with great concern. James managed to lift one weak hand and pat his side. He took a shaky breath, then pulled himself into the deeper shadows on the opposite side of the platform. Bear followed, standing halfway between the two of us. He looked over his shoulder at me.

“Look,” I said to James’s back. “You need time to adjust. Okay? Once we get away from them, you’ll see.”

I stopped at the faint sound of James’s voice.

“James? I can’t hear you. What are you saying?”

I moved closer until I was at his back. I put my hand on his shoulder and turned him around.

“… consecrate my life to the Glorious Path. I am the light in the darkness. The hand offering guidance to those who have gone astray. I am the rod that falls upon the backs of the defiant….”

My hand fell from his shoulder as I backed away. The glow of the chem stick faded and I was left there in the deep dark with nothing but the sound of my brother praying.

I spread our map out on the ground the next morning and bent over it.

Path states were bordered in gold, Fed in blue. I used a pencil to sketch out the western and eastern fronts. The closest Federal territory was California, but that was a pipe dream. California was a major prize for the Path, second only to the new Federal capital in Philadelphia. Fighting along the border had been intense for years. James was right; we could never cross there.

I moved my finger over the map to Nevada and Oregon, which, with California, made up the Federal-controlled land in the region. Nevada was a slightly better bet, but it was still westward, the wrong direction, and the word for the last few weeks was that Idaho was probably going to fall any day. If we were in Nevada when that happened, it’d close off our only route back to New York. We’d be trapped on the West Coast until the end of the war — forever if the Path came out on top.

The only possibility left was Wyoming, which seemed insane. Between us and Wyoming were more than eight hundred miles of Path lands in Arizona and Utah. On top of that, Salt Lake City sat too close to the Utah–Wyoming border and was among one of the Path’s major strongholds. Two scruffy-looking kids and a dog trying to walk anywhere near that city would be in jail before they took two steps.

I kicked the map away and sat back against a rock. It couldn’t have been more than eight o’clock in the morning and the sun was already intense. I wiped a film of sweat from my forehead and reached for our canteen but stopped before taking a drink. It was almost a thousand miles to Fed territory and we had one canteen and a handful of food. I set the water back down.

James was at the end of the trail, knees hugged to his chest, watching without expression as Bear splashed about in a thin stream of water. James and I hadn’t said a word to each other since we’d woken up at dawn.

I rummaged in my pack and threw an MRE down to him.

“You should eat,” I said. “We’ll leave as soon as it gets dark.”

“Leave for where?”

I grabbed my own breakfast and ripped it open. Beef stew. “Home.”

“You think you’re going to get all the way to New York? Cal—”

“We just have to get across the border,” I said. “Once we explain that we’re captures, the Feds will help us from there. And the Path isn’t going to get bent out of shape searching for two escaped novices. We’ll travel at night. We’ll be careful.”

“You can’t run away from this.”

“Run away from what?”

“You killed someone.”

It was like a punch in the gut. I flexed the sore muscles of my right hand, still able to feel the kick of the gun.

“You know the kind of person Quarles was.”

“And you made sure he never had the chance to become anything better.”

I glared across our camp. “And how many people has the Path killed, James?”

“It’s a war. It’s different.”

“You learn a lot about war sitting in camp and fetching Monroe’s coffee?”

“As much as you did mucking out a dog kennel.”

I threw the half-eaten MRE into the dirt and stormed down the trail.

“You want to know how I really got that medicine for you?” I asked, holding up my cast. “How I got this? It was a little deal I worked out with your buddy Monroe. Your medicine in exchange for Rhames going at me with a baseball bat so I’d look pathetic enough to draw some Feds out of their base. I was right there, James. I listened while they gave them the Choice, while they murdered men, women, and children.”

“That’s not true!” James said. “Anyone who refuses the Path is taken to a camp until the end of the war. After the war—”

“I was there! I was right there. What did they do to you?”

“They didn’t do anything to me! I made a choice.”

“Then make another one. Get your things together. As soon as it’s dark, we leave.”

“I’m not going.”

“I swear to God, I will tie you up and drag you home if I have to.”

James pressed his wrists together and thrust them toward me. “Do it.”

“James—”

“I am on a Glorious Path,” he spat at me, his voice quickly finding the rhythm of a first-year novice prayer. “I will not turn from it even if it means my death. I will not succumb to the temptations of the lost and the wicked. I will be their beacon instead.”

He stood there, hands out, daring me. I went back and rooted through my backpack until I found a length of rope. Bear ran up from the stream, growing increasingly distressed as I bound James’s wrists, yanking the knot tight enough to make him gasp.

“We leave when the sun goes down.”

I left James, snatching the map off the ground and flattening it in front of me. I searched the map’s blocks of gold and blue for a way out. Salt Lake City sat like a citadel near the southern edge of the Wyoming border, but north of that, the border looked nearly empty. A plan started to snap together — head north, skirting west to avoid Salt Lake City, then head east to cross the border. It was a tough route, but as long as we stayed away from the hornet’s nest of SLC, maybe we had a chance.

I sat back and breathed deep, trying to calm the thud of a headache that was pounding just behind my eyes. Once it calmed, I drew my finger across the map, past Wyoming and South Dakota and Iowa, all the way to New York and Ithaca.

I closed my eyes, seeing it all as it was — the lake, the trees, the cobalt-blue walls of our house — going over each image like they were the words of a prayer.

After the sun had been down for more than an hour, I threw on my backpack and went down to the stream. James and Bear were nowhere to be found.

“James?” I called as loudly as I dared. Nothing. “Bear?”

I cracked another chem light and held it up. A shuffling sound came from somewhere beyond its reach. I crept toward it as silently as I could until I came around a pillar of rock and saw him.

James was on his knees in the dirt, his back to me, his bound hands in front of him. His forehead was pressed into Bear’s neck and his entire body was shaking. At first I thought he was having another attack, but then I heard his voice.

“I just want to go home.”

He said it over and over, quiet, but so strained it was like the words were slicing his throat on their way out.

“I just want to go home. I just want to go home. I just want to go home.”

Bear grew anxious, dancing back and forth and then setting his front paws on James’s legs with a whine. James flung his hands over Bear’s head, drawing him in as he cried. Soon Bear went still and then James did too.