They were moving too fast for me to keep up with them. And Tian was gone, chasing after the people who had slit my throat. I didn’t care if she had called Dylan—she needed to get back here. “One thing at a time,” I warbled. “Net Tian and get her back here.”
“I’ve tried,” Quess said angrily. “She’s rejecting the call.”
“Quess, they attacked the Champion,” I said evenly, though my insides were twisted with fear. I remembered the feeling of having my throat cut, and the terrifying empty seconds when I had felt my life’s blood spilling in between my fingers and down my throat. He’d left something for my friends to use to fix me, but now Tian was out there by herself, and she was just a little girl. If they caught her, I wasn’t so sure they’d spare her.
Wait, why hadn’t their leader just left me to bleed out? Why had he left me with the means to survive? When he’d attacked me on the catwalk, I was certain that he’d been there to kill me, but now… Had something changed? If so, what?
I swallowed hard, confused and terrified by the implications. Did their “boss” want me alive for some reason? If so, why? I could cope with the idea of them wanting me dead, but the idea they were keeping me alive for unknown purposes filled me with dread.
A sharp snap in my ear made me jerk out of my thoughts, alarm skittering over my skin. I focused on Leo, and realized he had snapped his fingers next to my ear. “Sorry,” I croaked. I looked at Quess and remembered my earlier fear. The threat—or lack thereof—to my life could wait. Tian’s life was in danger. “Tian.”
“Liana, even if you override her net to force her to accept a call, she won’t listen,” he said, raking a hand through his hair. “But she’ll be okay. She survived with Jang-Mi, remember? Besides, you really, really need to see this.”
It was the third time he’d mentioned whatever “this” was, and Leo made an irritated sound, opening his mouth to once again suggest we go. I placed a hand on his shoulder, gently cutting him off, and looked at Quess. “See what?”
Quess shot Leo a triumphant look and then turned to me. “Can you get up? I think it’s a lot easier if I just show you.”
I hesitated, but then nodded when I looked down at the puddle of blood on the floor. Yes. Yes, I could. Especially if it meant getting away from that spot. “Yup,” I said, removing my hand from his shoulder. “Help me up.”
I hated asking for it, but I was still too shaky to stand. Both Quess and Leo held hands out to me, but I took Leo’s based purely on the fact that he was on my left, and my right hand still had a fulltime job ensuring that my throat remained whole and undamaged. That didn’t stop Quess from putting a hand under my elbow to help Leo keep me from tipping over when I stumbled, my knees wobbling.
When it became clear to them that I was still too shaken to walk on my own, they pressed me between them, supporting me—something for which I was eternally grateful—as we moved away from the blood. I kept my head down, focusing on putting one foot in front of the other without tripping up.
“So what’s the weird thing that Quess wants me to see?” I asked hoarsely. My voice echoed wildly, and I looked up from the floor in alarm. The room was massive, perhaps just as big as the storage room from before, but devoid of any boxes. I kept expecting to see them as I looked around, but it was empty, save for one lone thing: a structure built out of… well… everything, really. It looked like they’d gathered a bunch of stuff that had been destined for the recyclers in Cogstown and used it to create uneven and angular walls with slanted doors and irregularly shaped windows. Pipes of all different sizes filled the gaps, even making up some of the walls in a few places, and helping to define and outline aspects of the patchwork structure.
A house, a dim memory from the legacy net told me, and I nodded. It fit with the descriptions that I had heard. A house. Inside an empty storage room in the Attic. In the Tower. Where we had found a group of legacies.
It seemed like a bad joke, but there was no denying it was there, and I couldn’t help but gape at it, confused by its presence.
“Ummmm…” I said, unable to vocalize anything beyond that.
“I know, right?” Quess said, and it was hard to tell whether the undercurrent in his voice was excitement or fear. Then I realized it was probably both. “It’s really weird.”
I took a step toward it and then stopped again. There was something eerie about this entire thing, and my already-frayed emotional state was screaming at me to run away from this anomaly as quickly as possible. Telling me that anything I found inside would only horrify me.
I managed to put a lid on it, though, dismissing the idea. I was being irrational. It was odd, but not anything to panic over. Not until I saw what was inside.
“We can let Dylan check it out,” Leo suggested gently.
“You haven’t been inside?” I asked, studying the house. It definitely wasn’t big enough for the number of people I’d heard, but given the cavernous nature of the room, that number could be wrong—exaggerated by echoes. Going inside would give us a count of how many people were in the legacy group, and possibly some clues as to who they were working for and what they were up to.
“You’re joking, right?” Quess said. “That thing gives me the willies, and you and Leo were too busy hugging it out to help me, so I stayed out.”
“We don’t have to go in, Liana,” Leo reminded me, but I was already moving forward, pulling out of his grasp, my need to see inside giving strength to my shaky limbs. This was clearly the home of our enemies, and accident or not, finding it gave us an opportunity to learn more about them.
I approached a black hole made from the frame of a pressure door at the front and stopped when I saw that the angular light of the room only penetrated the darkness inside for a few feet. I reached into my pocket to pull out my hand light, but realized it was gone, left back where the man had set it after I pulled it out of my pocket.
Leo clicked his on and then brushed past me, with a brusque, “I’ll go first this time.”
There was a thread of anger in his voice, and my hand tightened on my throat, the memory of the bite of the blade flashing through me. I’d plunged in first after Tian, yes—and it had nearly gotten me killed. Leo was clearly angry about that, and wasn’t going to let me repeat the mistake.
And I was ashamed that I let him. As our leader, I should set the example and tone. But as the girl who had just had her throat cut… I watched and waited as he shone his light forward, his baton ready in the other hand. I looked down at my baton and realized that if I wanted to pull it, I would have to let go of my throat.
“Quess,” I said as Leo’s light revealed a straight hallway, which he began to ease down. “Tell me my throat is okay?”
I hated myself for feeling so needy. I was sure Quess’s medical training had been enough to handle this, but I was still afraid that something was wrong inside me. Quess reached out and pulled me into a tight hug, comforting me.
“I promise that you are whole and intact. It’s over.”
I nodded shakily and then sucked in a deep, calming breath as he slowly released me. It was over. I was safe. It would be a long time before I would ever be able to feel that, but for now, I had to let it go.
“Okay,” I said, closing my eyes. I slowly lowered my hand, fighting through a swell of panic, and took another breath. Breathed out. No gurgle of blood. I swallowed back the nausea the memory produced, but kept pushing my hand down, reaching for my baton and finally sliding it out of its loop. I gripped it tightly, and though my hand itched to return to my neck, I resisted, turning back toward the house instead… and following Leo.
The first few steps were hard, but I continued to force air in and out of my lungs at a slow and steady pace, and it helped. I stepped over the threshold into the hall, and saw that Leo’s light had stopped at the end of the long, straight corridor. And as he shone it around, I could see that the hallway split off in two different directions. He waited, not going any farther without us, and I ma
de my way toward him, as his light shone across walls with the same patchwork construction as the ones outside.
At the junction, I stopped and took a glance down the intersecting hall. “Which way should we go?” I asked softly.
Leo hesitated, and then nodded toward the right. I followed his lead, Quess right at my heels. The hall continued on for fifteen steps, and then stopped at a wall. Another hall opened up to the left, while the right wall held a doorway with a cloth of black microfiber draped over it. Leo pushed it aside with his baton and shone the light in, revealing what appeared to be a cafeteria of sorts. Mismatched tables had been set up in long rows with seating on either side, holding spots for sixteen people. Plates and bowls sat on the table, full of the remains of what looked like a breakfast that had been hastily abandoned. Some of the food was odd and cube-like. A few torn silver packs suggested that I was looking at the inside of an MRE package, and I wrinkled my nose.
Around us, though, nothing moved, and Leo stepped in and did a quick search.
“Nobody here,” he called softly, returning to us. I stepped back to let him pass, and then followed him down the other hall. This one had several doors in it, and as we looked through them, it became clear that they were additional rooms. They weren’t in the best condition; old, used mattresses that had apparently been recovered from a trash pile were tossed haphazardly around each room, with dirty and ragged bits of fabric strewn around, including blankets comprised of old and neglected uniforms that had been sewn together.
It was hard to tell how many people had been sleeping here, but I counted ten individual blankets scattered in piles in the first room, and another twelve in the second. The third had just as many, telling me that there was a total of thirty-four people minimum living here.
That was a lot more than I had expected, really. I had guessed the legacy group had a lot of people, but thirty-four was excessive. Those were thirty-four mouths to feed, to procure water for, and to keep hidden. The possibility of disease was high if they weren’t able to clean regularly. Smaller groups would be safer, both from detection and sickness, and would help keep their resource requirements manageable. But these people weren’t a small group. There was no sign of running water or a bathing area, and they were surviving on MREs. So then why keep so many in such a way that would get them easily caught?
I supposed it was possible that whoever was in charge wanted to keep their people together so they could use them for various deeds, so maybe the entire place was like a contingent of foot soldiers, sent out on missions as they were needed? My eyes widened at the scale and the scope of the operation, and I realized that these people were likely foot soldiers for the legacies, kept purposefully outside the system so that they could move freely and carry out their orders. I was betting that whoever was giving them those orders was doing so from inside the Tower.
I’d double my bet and wager that their orders were coming directly from Sadie Monroe. I found myself wondering if she’d been here, and realized that if I wanted to know, I’d need a team to come in and take DNA samples from everything—which meant calling Dylan in. I resolved to do that after we checked the place out. And I’d send Maddox with Dylan to doublecheck every sample herself, and so they could walk them down to the Medica together.
The rooms now cleared, we backtracked quickly to check the other hall. This one turned right and stopped a few feet later at a door. Not just any door, either, but a pressure door, complete with a frame that sat perfectly straight at the end of the hallway, held up by the patchwork walls.
The presence of the door in a house where there hadn’t been any so far was so bizarre that it was almost surreal—and staring at it left me with a sense of foreboding, warning me that nothing good could lie behind it, and that opening it would be a big mistake. I tried to dismiss the feeling as I studied the door from where I had halted, but I couldn’t seem to shake it, no matter how hard I tried. It was on the tip of my tongue to tell Leo to stop as he wrapped his hand around the wheel, and turned.
I expected it to refuse to budge, but to my surprise, it began to move silently, spinning freely without any resistance.
25
I wasn’t sure why, but the hand wheel turning so easily only doubled my concern about what was inside the room. It meant someone had cared enough to oil the gears inside the door, to keep it working well. More than they’d done for any of the rooms in this place.
What exactly was so special that they kept it behind this door?
Leo tugged it open, and Quess and I stepped back as it swung out toward us. Inside was an… office?
It was an office. There was a desk, chairs, cabinets… and I gaped at them as I stepped in after Leo, horrified and alarmed to see that they were made of wood! Trees were precious in the Tower, and were never cut down unless they were diseased. I had only ever seen wood used on the Grounds and in the Council Room, and that had been harvested from the pre-End world. Even the furniture available to the Champion wasn’t made of wood.
But somehow this office contained a wooden desk, wooden chairs, and wooden cabinets. Leo stepped deeper into the room, and I followed, spotting even more wood hidden in the corner that I hadn’t been able to see from the door, in the form of tables that held short stacks of thin things that looked like books, but were too thin and wide to be real books. Not only that, they had colors, and though they were muted and faded with age, they weren’t possible with Tower printing.
I reached out and touched the surface of one, expecting it to be brittle or rough, but it wasn’t. It was smooth. I gently slid it off the stack, and suddenly I knew exactly what it was, the legacy net hitting me with another brief memory—of idly turning the pages of something called a magazine. Specifically, the memory was of a fashion magazine, in which women were depicted with bright red lips and pale skin, wearing outfits that were nothing like what we wore but somehow made me feel slightly insecure.
Frowning, I looked at the front of the magazine in my hand, reading the words there out loud. “‘Noninvasive Rhinoplasty Techniques’?” I looked at Leo questioningly, holding up the magazine.
“Rhinoplasty?” he repeated, cocking his head. “I’m not sure what that is. What’s on the inside?”
I carefully opened the book, and my eyes widened. Where the outside had been faded and muted, the inside was bright with pinks and reds and whites and blues. Bright and awful, although it took me a second to figure that last part out.
Because that was how long it took me to realize I was looking at a person’s face. It was partially blocked by a pair of blue gloved hands that were holding two long metal objects against what I could tell was a nose, though part of the skin had been cut back to reveal the bone inside. One of the long metal objects was pressed to the bridge of the bone, and the other object—a hammer—was hovering over the end of the first, about to hit it and drive the metal into the soft bone of the nose.
I slapped the magazine shut in horror, sickened by the image. Revulsion curled through me as I tried to imagine what reason anyone would have to drive a piece of blunted metal into another person’s open face cavity, and found nothing good. Hands took the magazine away from me, and a second later I heard the pages rustle as it was flipped back open.
“Don’t,” I managed thickly around my nausea.
“Scipio help me,” Quess muttered next to me, and I realized he was the one who had taken the magazine. Only there wasn’t horror in his voice… but awe. I looked over to see him flipping through the pages one by one, his eyes dancing over the images there. I glanced, but as soon as I saw the bright pink flash that denoted a human being flayed open, I looked away.
“What is it?” I asked. He seemed excited about something, because he quickly closed the magazine and opened another one, reaching around me to grab it. “What are they? Manuals on how to torture people?”
It was the only thing I could think of to explain the gruesome image, and I wouldn’t have been at all surprised to find it, given my r
ealization that these were the same legacies who had attacked Leo and me. But to my surprise, Quess shook his head.
“They’re medical journals,” he replied. “Pre-End medical journals. Look at this.” He closed the magazine and showed me the cover, pointing to a faded black line at the top. It took me a second, but I realized it wasn’t a line, but letters and numbers. “March 4, 2009,” Quess said, sparing me from having to puzzle it out. “These are over two hundred and fifty years old. Sage would literally die if he could see all of these.”
“Sage?” I asked, turning toward him and arching an eyebrow. “Why would he care about this?”
“The man loves pre-End medical journals, and has a standing deal to give a week’s worth of protein rations to any Medic who finds them. He’s obsessed with them. But his collection is only a fraction of this, and I don’t think he has anything on… plastic and reconstructive surgery?” He looked up at me and then Leo, baffled. “What’s plastic surgery?”
Leo shook his head, looking equally confused. “Lionel and I talked about all sorts of ailments of the human body, and various treatments and cures, but I’ve never heard of it before. I’m sorry.”
Disappointed that for once Leo couldn’t fill us in on something about pre-End society, I looked back at the magazine, thinking. “How many medical journals does Sage have?” I asked.
“Oh, I don’t know,” Quess said. “A lot, but not this many.”
I considered the pile in front of me, and the office itself. If it had just been the magazines in here, with no door, I would’ve assumed the legacies had been trading them for supplies on the black market. They had food, but there was so much more that they needed to survive, like water, medicine, growing pods for small produce… But none of that had been evident in the house. And then there was the wood—something that no one would trade on the black market, because no one could afford it—and from the look of the furniture in the room, it was clearly being used from time to time. Putting them in here with all of that meant that these medical journals were important to them, in some way. It was another piece of the puzzle—one that I didn’t quite understand.