“If you can hear me, get to Dylan. Get to Dylan now!”
Faith and Clara stared at each other, inches apart, neither of them precisely sure of what would come next.
“If you’re not going to finish what you started, you better run,” Clara said, boring down on Faith with her sharp eyes. “Because I am one angry bitch right now.”
“I will never run from you,” Faith said. She pushed Clara harder against the tree and held her weakened adversary still.
“Faith! If you’re there, get to the dam,” Clooger yelled into the sound ring. “Now!”
Clara laughed through her nose smugly, but it lasted only a second before she started taunting Faith again. “You’re going to pay for messing up my perfect face. It’s going to cost you. Hope it was worth the thrill.”
Faith gave Clara one last shove, pushing her to the side this time, sending her careening through the trees deeper into forest.
She pressed her sound ring.
“I’m coming, Dylan.”
Faith saw the gun on the forest floor and picked it up with her mind. It landed heavy in the palm of her hand. When she cleared the forest and saw the dam, she understood immediately why Dylan was in trouble. He’d opened the turbines and water was churning through in frothy white tubes. The power lines were sparking and dancing on the water’s surface like huge electrified snakes, but that wasn’t the really dangerous thing. Dylan was standing on the top of the dam and the train-car twister was headed right for him. Wade was pushing it forward and down, spinning it faster, and it was going to crash right on top of Dylan before Faith could get there.
“Faith, we need to seriously run,” Dylan said into the sound ring. “I’m going to have to dive into the water on the other side of the dam. It’s the only place he won’t be able to see me. Take to the sky! We’ll find each other.”
But Faith had no intention of leaving Dylan’s side, and besides, she could feel Clara’s presence behind her. Clara was on the chase, bleeding and angry.
The twister of train cars hit the dam like a twisting metal bomb, blowing a giant hole into a wall of concrete that had stood for a century. The dam burst as freight cars flew in every direction. Chunks of concrete and rebar filled the path of water pouring down the river, and somewhere in all that metal and stone, Dylan was trying to swim away unseen.
Faith pulled a truck-sized boulder from the bottom of the river and launched it at Wade, slamming him in the back and sending him spinning wildly through the air. When he recovered and saw that Faith was trapped between himself and Clara, he smiled that terrible smile of his.
I’m in control now, the smile said. There are no rocks big enough to stop me.
Faith knew instinctively when she had met her match. Dylan was right. Now she really did have to get out of there if she could.
If she tried to fly away, they would eventually catch her or she’d end up in the middle of a battalion of Western State troops out searching for her. There was only one way out, one hope now that she was alone between two of the most dangerous people in the world.
She dove, hard and fast, into the Columbia River.
Untold megawattage coursing through the river stunned her senses. Her second pulse protected her from harm, but it still felt like diving into a pool of broken glass, cutting every square inch of her skin. She opened her eyes and saw the waves of blue electricity pulsing down her sides as the force of the current pulled her forward toward the broken dam. This was water and debris that had been held in place for decades, unmoved. But it was moving now. Everything was moving.
Sunken cars, trees, boulders, slabs of concrete, bathtubs, sheets of metal—anything and everything that had ever been dumped into this slow-moving stretch of water was now tumbling toward the gaping hole of a dam that was no longer holding back the water.
Faith felt the stinging-jellyfish sensation of electricity covering her skin as she came up for air and saw how close she was to the dam. Something slammed into her from behind and she went under, rolling uncontrolled with the flow of a river gone mad.
When she cleared the dam itself, the electric current began to weaken. Each time she bobbed up for more air she glanced quickly overhead. She could see Wade and Clara against the blue sky behind her, searching the surface for signs of life.
She took another breath, dove under, and let the water carry her away.
Chapter 3
Poison Flowers
Faith awoke to the sound of a scream. At first she thought the voice was inside of a dream she was having, but when her eyes were open and the sound persisted, she sat up, throwing the covers from her bed with the power of her mind. She focused on a baseball bat she kept next to the door and it came to her, landing with a sharp sound in the palms of her hands.
Her next thought was of the sound ring.
It must be coming from inside the ring. Someone is in trouble.
She’d gotten so used to hearing familiar voices in her head that it was sometimes hard to distinguish them from her own thoughts.
She pressed her earlobe, and that was when she felt a sharp pain and remembered Hawk had removed it. He’d used a scary-looking pair of needle-nosed pliers that looked as if they were designed to reach inside someone’s head and pull out all sorts of stuff that should be left alone. Hawk had removed the sound rings from everyone’s ears.
“Repairs and upgrades,” he’d said.
Faith hadn’t bothered to ask what the upgrades might be as blood ran down the side of her neck and she punched him in the chest. Hawk was never very forthcoming about how much things were going to hurt, and removing the sound ring had really stung. Faith didn’t even want to think about what putting an upgraded version back into her head was going to feel like. That was the thing about a second pulse: she had to let her guard down in order to allow something like the sound ring inside. And when she did that, she felt pain just like everyone else.
The scream kept on, accompanied by the sound of an ax hitting a door over and over again. Faith shook her head awake as she walked down a cedar-walled hallway and arrived at a door three down from her own. By then she was aware of what the sound was. She’d heard it many times before.
“Trying to catch a few z’s,” she said, tapping the bat on the door several times. “Can you guys keep it down in there?”
All sound ended behind the door. There was some shuffling of feet, some giggling, and then the whispery voice of a girl.
“How come she goes to sleep so early?”
Faith turned the handle on the door with her mind and pushed it open with the bat. Dylan was sitting on the lone couch as if he’d been waiting for her to show up. Hawk sat on the floor of the small room, and there was a young girl of thirteen next to him. She had a round face and long, dark hair. Faith had quickly come to see the girl for the enigma she was: at once bored and full of mischief. One minute she was talkative, the next aloof. And she was especially nervous around boys at or near her own age. Hawk and Dylan were something altogether new, dangerous, exciting. Her name was Jade, which matched the color of her eyes.
“Again?” Faith asked. “How many times have you watched this movie?”
“A dozen,” Hawk said. “No, eleven. Eleven times. Twelve if you count this time. So 11.735 times, give or take.”
Faith rolled her eyes and mumbled, “Too much information.”
She flopped down on the battered cloth couch next to Dylan and put her head on his shoulder.
“Have you fixed anything else yet? Scary movies scare me.”
“It’s more than a scary movie. The Shining is a masterpiece,” Dylan said in a sleepy, half-zoned-out voice. “This Stanley Kubrick guy was off-the-charts intelligent. If I didn’t know better, I’d say he was an Intel. This movie is layered.”
“So layered,” Hawk added. “It’s a mind-blower.”
“Deeeeeeeep,” Jade said, holding back a laugh with her delicate hand.
“I’d definitely say some minds are blown in here,” a
dded Faith. She averted her eyes from the screen, pulling closer to Dylan and smelling the woodsy pine of the flannel shirt he was wearing.
“Did you roll around in the forest today? You smell awesome,” she said.
Jade took notice of the interaction and leaned approximately one centimeter in Hawk’s direction, sniffing the air.
Dylan held his sleeve to his nose and breathed in deep. “It does smell awesome. This place is awesome. Let’s never leave.”
“The shirt smelled like that when you found it in the cedar chest?” Faith asked.
“Yeah,” Dylan admitted.
She put a hand on his chest and kissed him on the neck, furrowing in like a cat on a cold night.
Dylan loved old movies and he wished more of them worked. “These VHS tapes are falling apart. Options are limited until Hawk figures out a restoration process for the classics. The tapes are basically disintegrating.”
“Yup, total annihilation,” Hawk said. “It was bad mass storage to begin with.”
Faith picked her head up off Dylan’s shoulder and stared at him zombielike.
“I know what to get you for your birthday,” she said. “Old scary movies. You can watch, I’ll snuggle. Win-win.”
Faith found The Shining—what little of it she had watched—highly disturbing. The story was about a writer who goes insane and tries to murder his family. And the setting?
Jade crinkled her nose. “How can you not love The Shining? It was filmed here.”
“That makes it double scary for a romantic-comedy girl like me.”
It was true. The Shining had been filmed in the very location where Faith Daniels was hiding out with the tattered remains of a resistance: Timberline Lodge, up a long, abandoned road on Mount Hood. Faith and Dylan had tumbled three miles down the Columbia River before escaping unseen into the woods. Dylan had been hit by chunks of concrete blown free from the dam as he tried to swim away, but he’d survived. They’d stayed to the woods after that, guided up the mountain by Clooger and Hawk, and here they were.
They’d been holed up in the lodge for over a week while the adults plotted and planned. The stakes were higher than they’d ever been now that Hotspur Chance was free, and it made Faith feel that they shouldn’t be hiding out, that they should be doing something. But then she’d smell Dylan’s shirt and think about the night at the safe house and wonder: Could we just stay here, like forever, and never go back into the fray?
The lodge was high enough up that she could see the very top of the mountain. It was a breathtaking peak half blanketed in snow, beautiful and wild, covered in jagged rocks and steep angles. She could stare at the peak for long moments, thinking of nothing at all, losing herself in its grandeur.
Timberline Lodge had been a ski resort before the States wiped everything out. The isolation of the place only made the movie they were watching more macabre. No one had been near the lodge in decades; at least that’s what people in the States assumed. But Clooger’s brother Carl and his daughter, Jade, had been living there for years. They never used Tablets, never went near the Western State. Carl lived off whatever the mountain gave him, hunting and gathering, and he liked it that way. They were an exceptionally rare breed, these two: off the grid, totally undetected, unknown to the States by any assigned Tablet or known address. They were ghostlike apparitions outside the never-ending crawl of the State system.
“Who knew being a fugitive could be so relaxing?” Dylan said, smiling as he ran his fingers through Faith’s long hair and signaled Hawk to restart the VCR.
“It can get a little boring,” Faith added.
“It’s a fine line, boredom and relaxation,” Hawk said. “Depends on your DNA, your personality. Me, I’m never bored. I’m always thinking.”
“Me neither,” Jade agreed.
Faith noticed Hawk’s eyes light up and was reminded once more that she was no longer Hawk’s crush. He had finally moved on.
“Without our Tablets there aren’t a lot of choices,” Hawk reminded Faith, tapping the remote control as the VCR whirled back to life.
The screaming started up again.
“She really has a set of pipes,” Faith said. “I bet they can hear her screaming in the Western State.”
The crazy writer’s wife in the movie was holding a butcher knife, which was only fair since the writer was holding an ax. She was also 100 percent unhinged.
Dylan put his warm hand over Faith’s ear as she thought about all the shows she wanted to watch but couldn’t. New shows and games were accessible only through their Tablets, but streaming content on Tablets sent a signal. Even with Hawk’s knack for hacking into the code in order to keep them hidden, they were among the most wanted people in the world. They had to stay off the grid unless it was absolutely necessary for some vital piece of information, like coordinates or maps or intel. Movies and TV shows didn’t qualify as risk-worthy, so whatever VHS tapes still worked were all they had to choose from.
The entire usable collection was made up of Star Wars, a murky-looking Titanic, the second half of Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, The Breakfast Club, Sixteen Candles (recently added to the dead pile), and The Shining.
The Shining had cult status among the group.
“You just have to lean into it,” Hawk said. He’d become weirdly obsessed with The Shining. “Like Dylan said, Stanley Kubrick was probably a pre-Intel or whatever. He was something else.”
“Like Hotspur Chance?” Faith asked, perking up a little. Hotspur was their mortal enemy, and as far as they knew, he was plotting to destroy the States and usher in some kind of new world order. Intel had been hard to come by in the intervening days, which was driving Faith crazy.
The screen on the old TV was filled with Jack Nicholson’s maniacally grinning face as he peered through a door. Faith had seen only snippets of the movie, because they were always stopping it to debate the meaning of things like the twins, the colors, the numbers, the hand-holding, and the endless loop the boy rode on his Big Wheel.
“Doesn’t this movie bother you?” Faith asked Jade. Faith had been playing big sister since they’d arrived, a decision that sometimes worked and other times didn’t. Jade was unpredictable, so when she turned those stunning green eyes toward the couch, Faith wasn’t sure what to expect.
“They’re almost to the hedge maze,” Jade said. “Scariest part.”
Jade got up off the floor and sat next to Faith. That left Hawk alone on the throw rug with the remote. He eyed the couch, calculating whether he could fit in the space that remained.
“Don’t even try it,” Dylan said. “This sucker is maxed out.”
Hawk went back to watching the movie and Faith pulled Jade in close.
“I’ve seen it like a hundred times,” Jade whispered over the screams, leaning harder into Faith. “But it always scares me just the same.”
Faith couldn’t help but think about how this innocent girl had never been off the mountain and had no idea how scary life could really get.
“Stop it there,” Dylan said.
Hawk fumbled with the controller and had to rewind a little bit. He was nervous around Jade. The scene had shifted to a snowy night outside and a little boy was hiding behind a snowplow.
“It’s the dead of winter,” Dylan said, “but you can’t see his breath. Do you think that’s on purpose or a mistake?”
“I think I’m going back to bed,” Faith said.
She kissed Dylan and wandered out of the room with her baseball bat, wondering how it was that she could be so tuned out to something everyone else seemed so tuned into. It’s them, right? she kept telling herself. Or possibly it’s me. Either way, she couldn’t watch parts of that movie without imagining a nightmare in the making.
The lodge was an abandoned outpost, full of old snowboards, guest rooms, and long hallways. Almost all the rooms were empty, but it didn’t make the lodge feel haunted or lonely. Faith liked it up here, away from the world and all its problems. She liked to think she pref
erred the thrill of being in the fight, but Faith was starting to feel something new on top of this mountain: she had found a place she could imagine calling home.
She walked down the long hallway lined with old pictures of people skiing. The images looked as if they were from a million years ago, everyone laughing and posing in their powder pants and goofy goggles. She wondered if such emotions existed inside the States, because carefree was the last thing Faith could imagine ever feeling again. Too much had happened. Too many people had been taken from her. Her world had moved irreversibly beyond lighthearted. She could never get that back, not that she could recall ever feeling that way to begin with.
Faith heard a sound behind her, a faint creak on floorboards marred with age-old ski-boot scratches. She turned, instinctively wielding the bat.
“I’ve seen that movie more than twelve times.”
It was Jade, whose forehead didn’t even reach Faith’s shoulders. Jade tiptoed a few steps closer, rubbing her hands together nervously.
Faith played along. “How many times have you seen it?”
Jade shrugged. “I’ve been up here my whole life with no Tablet and eight movies on those old tapes. How many times do you think I’ve seen it?”
“Too many?”
Jade shrugged and looked at the floor again, a habit that made her appear younger than she was, a vestige of childhood she didn’t know how to throw off. “Hawk likes it.”
Faith smiled and moved a step closer. “And you like Hawk?”
Jade laughed nervously, quietly. She glanced back toward the door to the TV room as if her biggest secret had just been revealed and someone might hear. She turned back to Faith with a knowing look and shrugged once more.
Faith lifted her shoulders, too, raising an eyebrow.
“Your secret’s safe with me,” Faith said, although she knew it was obvious to everyone that Jade and Hawk were circling each other.
“Can you tell me something about him? Something that might, you know, help me?”
Faith knew that Jade was desperate for help navigating her first crush. And so, while she knew it would hurt, Faith let her memory drift back to the Dr. Seuss book she had torn to shreds, and further still to Liz and Hawk on a night alone in a hidden library full of books. The memories bloomed inside her like poison flowers, fast and all-consuming, drawing her down into darkness. Faith pushed the memories down, deeper than they were before, and told herself not to go searching for them ever again.