“They’ve barricaded the city.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN
“That’s Gardiners Avenue,” said Jayden. “We’re very close.” He paused. “How far do you think the wall goes around?”
“It doesn’t make sense to build it here and nowhere else,” said Gianna. “Otherwise they’d just build a fort and guard the intersection.”
“Either way,” said Xochi, “we can sneak past them mid-block somewhere. They can’t have guards along the whole length of it.”
The others agreed, and they picked their way through the overgrown yards of a sprawling residential neighborhood. They worked their way down to a spot halfway between cross streets, and when Kira peeked out through the kudzu-covered fence, she saw that the barricade was lower here—just cars in a line, with no reinforcing boards or boxes. They haven’t had time to finish the whole thing. As if to balance it out, the far side of the street was not a row of houses but a strip mall with a wide parking lot—anyone watching from a post at either intersection would have that much more time to see them as they pelted across the extra open space.
“Curse this wretched island and its strip malls,” said Kira. “Everything on this island is covered with trees—how can there be this much open ground?”
“There’s some underbrush,” said Xochi, “but probably not enough to hide us all the way across.”
“Look down there,” said Gianna, pointing south. “That next clump of soldiers is at least two blocks away. The gap between guards is actually pretty big—when it gets dark, we’ll have a pretty good chance.”
Kira looked south, then north again, gauging the distance. “Flip around the radio and see if you can find what channel that checkpoint is using.”
Gianna started clicking the knob, tic, pause, tic, pause, tic, pause, searching for an active frequency. Each time she heard voices she stopped, listening for street names, and Kira felt a surge of relief when they heard a man mention Gardiners Avenue.
“That’s us,” said Kira, tapping her fingers on the wall. “Keep monitoring all three channels; we’ll set a watch, lie low, and wait for dark.” She peeked back through the fence, sizing up the distances to either guard post. At night, if we stay down, they shouldn’t see us at all.
Each hour that passed, Kira felt her stomach twist further into knots. What am I? Why am I here—and who put me here? Do I have the pheromone? Do I have something worse? A hundred thousand questions swirled madly through her head, and she was desperate for answers. She forced herself to forget them, to think about the task at hand, but that was even worse. When she thought about Madison and Arwen, it was all she could do not to run straight to the hospital. She patted the wrapped syringe on her waist, and forced herself to be patient.
When darkness finally fell, Farad pulled more planks from the fence and pushed a small hole through the kudzu. They shouldered their gear, strapped it on tightly, and poised on the brink in a thin line: Farad, Xochi, Jayden, Gianna, Kira, and Marcus. Kira gripped her rifle and took a deep, slow breath.
“Keep the radio on,” said Kira, “as quiet as you can make it. If the Grid sees us crossing, I want to know about it.”
Gianna smiled thinly. “Already done.”
“Then we go,” said Kira. “Stay down, stay silent, but if they spot us just run for it.”
Farad bounced loosely on the balls of his feet. “Ready … set-y … spaghetti.” He dropped to his stomach and slipped out, pushing silently through the weeds toward the makeshift wall of cars. The others followed, trying not to rustle as they went. There were a few long seconds of desperate silence, and suddenly the radio burst into cries and shouts and static.
“There! There! South of Twenty-Three!”
A bullet slammed into the asphalt barely ten inches from Kira’s hand.
“Stealth is over,” she said. “Just run.” They leaped to their feet and charged across the street, vaulting the wall of cars; Kira planted her right hand on a broad metal hood for leverage; it scalded her skin, still hot from a day in the sun, but she jumped up and tromped across it, two quick, clanging steps before leaping back down to the ground beyond. The radio was screaming alarms, and she heard warped, echoing gunfire—first over the radio, then in real life as the sharp reports finally reached her ears. Farad was across now, sprinting through the parking lot toward a gap in the strip mall buildings, when suddenly Gianna dropped like a stone, a puff of thick mist hanging in the air above her.
“No!” Kira screamed, following so close behind Gianna that she tripped over her body and crashed to the broken asphalt. She found her feet and tried to rise, turning to help Gianna, but Marcus grabbed her as he passed and pulled her to her feet, dragging her forward.
“Keep going!”
“We have to help her.”
“She’s dead, keep going!”
Kira wrenched her arm from his grip and turned back, hearing a bullet slam into the ground somewhere dangerously close. Gianna lay facedown in a puddle of blood. “Forgive me,” Kira whispered, and grabbed not the girl but her radio. This is too important to leave behind.
Kira felt her body twist with an impact, but she kept her feet and ran again toward Marcus and the others. Where was I hit? She catalogued every limb as she ran, trying to identify the pain, but felt none. Too much adrenaline, said the scientist in her head, strangely calm and analytical. You’re going to bleed out and die without ever feeling the bullet. She reached the shelter of the alley and ran on while Marcus cursed her wildly from behind.
“Are you trying to get killed?”
“Shut up and run,” said Xochi, pulling them through a broken gate that listed sadly on one rusty hinge. The space beyond was a backyard, dense with weeds, and they fought through them to the shattered back door of a sagging house, the paint peeling off in long, faded strips. This close to the edge of the city the houses were still uninhabited, and they dropped to the floor in a skeleton’s living room. Jayden turned back with his rifle to cover the door.
“I’ve been hit,” Kira said, dropping the radio to pat herself, looking for blood. Farad snatched up the radio, thumbed the switch, and barked into it, “Checkpoint Twenty-Three, this is Patrol Forty. We’re right here, but the Voice have not come through the houses. Repeat, they have not come through the houses. Do you have visual contact? Over.”
“Negative, Forty,” squawked the radio. “Still searching. Over.”
“Understood, we’ll keep searching as well. Over and out.” He clicked off the radio and threw it back to her. “You risked your idiot life for that thing, we may as well use it.”
“What’s Patrol Forty?” asked Xochi.
“They’re stationed on the north side,” said Farad, “which is a different radio channel. That gives us maybe ten minutes before they figure it out. Now we’ve got to get out of this house before a real patrol comes chasing us in here.”
Before he even finished whispering, they heard footsteps and voices in the yard behind them. Jayden grabbed his gun and ran to the back door, crouching behind the sagging wall.
“This is the Long Island Defense Grid,” Jayden shouted, glancing back at the others and gesturing for them to pick up their guns. “You are ordered to drop your weapons and surrender immediately.”
There was a small pause, and Jayden listened with his head cocked. After a moment a voice shouted back, “Is that you, Patrol Forty?”
Jayden smiled wickedly. “Yes, it is. Is that Checkpoint Twenty-Three?”
Kira heard the men outside cursing. “Don’t tell me we lost them!”
Farad pulled on his uniform cap and stepped carefully out of the back door. Kira watched through a tiny gap in the crumbling wall.
“We checked this whole area,” he said. “They haven’t come through.”
“What do you mean they haven’t come through?” asked the soldier. “We chased them right down this alley.”
“I’ve got men in half of these houses,” said Farad, gesturing around him, “and none of th
em have seen anything.”
“How could you let them get past you?”
“Listen, soldier,” said Farad, “you’re the ones who let them get past the border—we’re trying to clean up your mess here, not ours. Now spread out. We’ll check these houses, you check those, and don’t forget to leave someone here to guard this alley. The last thing we need is more of them crossing your checkpoint.”
The other soldiers muttered a bit, and Kira heard them tromp away to the next house. She exhaled, then continued checking herself for a bullet hole. Finally finding it—in her backpack. She hadn’t been hurt, but her equipment was destroyed.
Farad stepped back inside, whistling lowly in relief. “Let’s get out of here.”
“I can’t believe that worked,” said Xochi.
“It won’t work for very long,” said Jayden. “They’re going to search Gianna eventually, and they’re going to see she’s wearing a Grid uniform. We’ve got about sixty seconds to disappear.”
They worked their way to the front of the house and slipped from there into the next yard, then the next, moving deeper into East Meadow and as far from the infiltration site as they could. As they walked, the city became more populated, the houses better tended, and at last Kira saw the glint of window glass. I’m home. And yet even as the city looked familiar, it looked wrong; the houses were occupied, but the doors were all closed and the glassed-in windows were all curtained or even boarded up. On a nice summer night like this, even after sunset, the streets should be full of people talking, chatting, enjoying themselves, but now the few people who walked the streets did so quickly, eager to get back inside again, avoiding eye contact with everyone else. Groups of Grid soldiers and Mkele’s special police patrolled the city at regular intervals, and Kira saw more than one of the scared, furtive citizens stopped and questioned in the streets. They’re looking for us, she thought, but they’re punishing the wrong people.
They reached the Turnpike and took shelter in a ruined storefront, looking across at the hospital that had practically become a fortress. There were guards on the doors, but more important there was a perimeter of guards all around the grounds. The rear door they’d been planning to use was probably still available, but without their Grid jeep they couldn’t get to it safely, let alone get out again with Madison.
“This is going to be interesting,” said Xochi.
“No kidding,” said Jayden. Farad merely shook his head.
“Bad news,” said Marcus, and motioned them over to the radio. They clustered around him, and Kira heard a staticky voice shouting an urgent warning: “… I repeat, the Voice has Defense Grid uniforms. They are already inside the city, and there may be more coming. Full identification checks are now mandatory for all encounters, code protocol Sigma.” The message repeated, and Marcus shook his head. “This just keeps getting better and better.”
“I don’t know code protocol Sigma,” said Farad, pacing nervously in the ruined building. “Some of it, maybe, but not enough. We won’t get past anyone now.”
Kira stared at the hospital, willing herself to find something, anything, that she could use to get in. I’m a wanted criminal with a face well-known by every single person in that building. If I get in, it will be because I’m in chains. She shook her head, forcing herself to think it through. I am stronger than my trials, she thought. I can use my trials to help me; I can make them serve my own ends. Don’t say, “I’ll never do it,” say, “How can I turn this situation in my favor?” She studied the building more closely, counting the guards she could see, estimating the number of guards she couldn’t, drawing a detailed mental picture of the inner hallways to guess where each soldier would be stationed. She counted the windows, determining the exact location of every good entrance point, and found to her dismay that each one had been blocked by cars or reinforced with sheets of metal and planks of wood. It’s too well defended. They’ve thought of everything—they’ve anticipated every plan we could use.
She glanced up at the snipers on the roof, commanding a matchless view of the land around the hospital. Partial or not, they could still shoot me down no matter how fast I try to run—
She paused, her eyes caught by a gleam of light from a window. That’s the fourth floor—the only people who use that floor are the Senators. Are they meeting right now? Is there any way that could help me?
“Even if we get in,” said Jayden, “I don’t know how we’d ever get out again—not with Madison. They barely let her out of her bed, they’d never let her out of the hospital, and we don’t even have the jeep to hide her in.”
“You are just a little ray of sunshine,” said Marcus. He stood up. “This is fantastic—we can’t get to the hospital, we can’t get out, we probably can’t even get out of East Meadow. Our uniforms don’t even help us anymore—we have literally nothing.”
“That’s not true,” said Kira, looking back at the hospital. There was definitely light on the fourth floor. “You have me.”
“You’ll excuse me for not jumping with joy,” said Farad.
“See that light?” she asked, pointing at the lit upper windows. “That’s the Senate, and you’re going to bring them the one thing they want more than anything in the entire world: me.”
“No, we’re not,” said Marcus hotly, echoed by all three of the others.
“Yes, you are,” said Kira. “Our plan is destroyed, we can’t get Madison out, but we can still give her the shot—if we can get inside. You don’t need me to be there when you do it, and I was serious about giving my life for this. If Arwen lives, I don’t care what the Senate does to me.”
“We’re not going to give you up,” said Xochi.
“Yes, you will,” said Kira. “You pull down your hat brims, march up to the door, and tell them you caught me trying to sneak across the border. It’s the most believable story we could possibly come up with, because any soldier smart enough to be listening to his radio will know people have been hitting the border all day. They won’t even ask for ID, because why would Voice spies turn in one of their own?”
“Good question,” said Xochi. “Why would we? That doesn’t gain us anything.”
“It gets you inside the hospital,” said Kira. “Just hand me off to the guards inside, they’ll take me up to the Senate, and you head to maternity.”
“We don’t have to hand you off,” said Marcus, “once we’re in we could just … make a break for it.”
“And set off every alarm in the building,” said Kira. “If you turn me over, you can work in peace.” She took Marcus’s hand. “If this cure works, humanity has a future; that’s the only thing we’ve ever wanted.”
Marcus’s voice cracked when he spoke. “I wanted it with you.”
“They might not kill me outright,” said Kira, smiling weakly. “Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
Marcus laughed, his eyes wet with tears. “Yeah, our luck’s been awesome so far.”
“We’ll need to call ahead,” said Farad, hefting the radio, “just like we did with the checkpoint. If they hear us before they see us, we stand a much better chance of making this work.”
“We can’t risk the same trick twice,” said Jayden. “Someone who knows exactly how many patrols there are, and where they’ve been assigned, is going to be listening. It won’t take long to figure out we’re lying.”
“We can’t just show up without calling in first,” said Farad. “How suspicious would that look?”
Xochi drew her pistol, screwed on a silencer, and shot the radio squarely in the center; Kira and the others leaped back with a chorus of startled yelps. “Problem solved,” said Xochi, holstering her weapon again. “The evil terrorist Kira Walker shot our radio during the fight. Now: Kira is my best friend in the world, but she’s right. Her plan is the best, fastest way to get us inside that hospital, so take her weapons away and let’s do this.”
Kira pulled out her weapons and other gear, stripping herself of almost every piece of equipment she had; the men in
the group eventually started helping, resigned to the fact that the decision had been made. Marcus wasn’t happy about it, but he wasn’t doing anything to stop it, either. The last piece of equipment was the syringe, wrapped tightly and padded with old shirts, tied firmly to an extra belt inside every other layer of clothing. She took it off, held it a moment, and handed it to Marcus.
“Take care of this,” she whispered.
“I don’t want you to do this.”
“I don’t either,” she said, “but it has to be done.”
Marcus stared into her eyes, saying nothing, then took the belt and tied it carefully under his shirt. He made sure his clothes covered it, then smeared his face with dirt, altering his complexion enough that the nurses at the hospital might not recognize him. Might. Jayden and Xochi did the same, and Kira hoped it would be enough. I just have to make sure everyone is looking at me.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
Kira twisted and pulled, screaming as they carried her toward the first row of guards. “You have to let me go! I’m trying to help you, you idiots, can’t you see that?” The time for stealth was long past: Her job now was to be as visible as possible so that no one looked closely at her friends. She ripped her arm loose from Farad’s grip and attacked Jayden with it, trying to make it look as convincing as she could; he responded in kind by slugging her in the side of the head, then curling her arm behind her in a sudden choke hold that held her completely immobile. “Oof,” she grunted, “nice one.”
“Shut up, Voice.” He dragged her around and cursed at Farad. “That’s how you hold a prisoner, blowhole. Now don’t let go again.”
“I think you’re breaking my arm,” said Kira.