Luke stands and walks around to the bedside table where he’s put the toast.
“I’m not hungry.”
“Force it down then.”
I glare at the plate because I want to glare at Luke but can’t quite bring myself to meet his eyes. “Just because I moved in doesn’t make you responsible for me.”
He leans back against the far wall, watching me over crossed arms. “How long have you had this kind of depression?”
“I don’t have depression. I’m fine.”
“It’s not fine to sleep for a day without eating or drinking.”
“You’ve got no idea what you’re talking about.”
“I’ve seen it before,” he says flatly. “We need to do something.”
“No!” I exclaim loudly. “You don’t get anything, do you? I’m uncured, Luke! If I go to a doctor they’ll fry my brain and turn me into a zombie!”
“I didn’t say anything about a doctor. We’re just going for a walk, so hop up.”
I shake my head, furious with him. “I’m not going outside.” Where all the drones are. I’m sick of them, so unbelievably sick of the dead-eyed gazes and vacant words. Among them I feel myself starting to disappear.
“Yes you are.” Luke is always so flat and calm and I hate it. I want him to roar with primal humanity, because then I’ll know that he’s alive and that I’m alive too.
I sink into the bed but he pulls the covers off me and hauls me into his arms. I go limp, trying to make my body as heavy as possible, but this only makes him laugh. “You are such a brat, Josephine Luquet. Will the day ever come when you listen to me?”
“Doubtful.”
His smile changes and I see something real in his eyes, something alive, something hot and frantic and flickering.
“Put me down,” I demand. “I’ll walk.”
He puts me down. I consider climbing back into bed just to piss him off, and because it would be a huge relief; my body is exhausted, my head sinking into a heavy fog. But getting back into bed would spur another fight and I am too tired for resistance, so I pull on my sneakers and follow Luke out the front door.
All my muscles feel squishy and soft like they haven’t been used in decades and the light of the afternoon is glary against my sore eyes. I zip up my jumper and pull the hood over my head, sinking as far into it as possible. Luke glances at me once, expression unreadable, and then strides ahead at a cracking pace. I spend my time swearing at him and praying for him to trip over and hurt himself.
I am beginning to regret this whole venture. Not just the walk, but the moving in with him and agreeing to solve the mystery. What could have possessed me to live with a drone?
I sink onto a seat at a bus stop and pull my hood further over my eyes. Before I know it he’s lifting me to my feet and tugging me along with him. “Get off me,” I snap, wrenching my arm from his grip. He puts his hand on my back and propels me forward.
“We’re just taking a walk, for Christ’s sake,” Luke says.
“In zombieland,” I point out grumpily. “Any moment now these people could turn on us.”
“Which people?” he asks, gesturing to the empty street we’re walking down.
“You could turn crazy any time.”
“If you keep acting like this I might,” he mutters.
I have an idea, a cruel, bitter idea. “I’ll show you something. Come this way.” I head off, turning onto a main street. We hurry down steps and into the train station, past a woman who is staring at the wall and crying, past people shooting up in a corner, past a man screaming at the top of his lungs about the rapture. I can’t bear to look at any of them, so I start to run, moving my legs to the rhythm of the screams, just in time to jump onto a train as the doors are sliding shut. In the quiet of the moving carriage I suck air into my lungs and look at Luke. His eyes are darting up and down the train, checking for something, and I wonder what he’s looking for.
I’m about to sit when he says, “Don’t. Stay on your feet by the door.” I glance at him, surprised by the sharp tone. I follow his eyes to the end of our carriage and see that there are four men lurking. They are dressed strangely, their clothes ragged but functional, and even from here I can see that they’re armed with knives and guns. My heart lurches.
“Stand very still and keep your eyes trained on the wall,” Luke tells me, and it seems the day has come when I will listen to him after all. I do as he says, heart beating frantically. I’ve never seen people like that—they are sort of savage looking, and something about them makes the hairs on my arms stand on end. I’m not sure if I’m frightened or excited. They are, very clearly, uncured. I don’t know how I know, but I do.
“Who are they?” I ask in a whisper, but Luke doesn’t respond, watching the men closely.
As the train starts sliding to a stop, the men approach the door I am standing before. Luke takes my hand and gives it a squeeze.
“Step aside,” one of the men orders crisply. Luke and I move aside and watch as the four men line up in front of the door, drawing their guns and aiming out of the doors. Jesus Christ—what the hell are they doing? The gunman standing closest to us turns and meets my eyes. He’s young. “Best get out of the way, love,” he tells me softly. I am frozen in my spot because there is something deeply human in him, something so utterly present that I feel an ache for what has been lost from the world.
Too stunned to move, I stare at the men until the train stops and the doors open. Streaming down through the entrance tunnels of the station are dozens of men dressed in black. The Bloods, I realize with a chill. Countless of them, like machines flooding the subway.
The four men at the train door start firing their guns, loud explosions that rock the train and my bones. Luke shoves me behind him, pressing me against the far wall, but I can still see beneath his arms as the men are taken down in a flurry of violence by the Bloods. The man who spoke to me has his neck snapped by a huge Blood; another of the four gets shot in the head; the third is riddled with bullets to the chest and the last of the men is thrown onto the tracks and crushed as the train moves forward once more.
And all of a sudden, as if none of it ever happened, there is silence in the train, and the black walls of the tunnel all around. My eyes are wide and I can feel myself tremble—it was so quick, so terribly fast. I blinked and the men were dead. There is blood on the windows of the train and I can’t stop looking at it.
Luke presses his palm against my cheek. “You okay?” There’s something bleak in his expression, but he isn’t shocked by what’s just happened.
I nod and manage to whisper, “What was that? Were they… resisters?” It’s the only possible explanation I can come up with.
Luke’s jaw tightens but he doesn’t reply. He searches my eyes and his hard gaze softens. With a long sigh, he shakes his head and leads me to sit down. We stare at the passing walls silently, and I’m so lost in my thoughts that I almost miss our stop.
Luke may not believe that the men were resisters, but I do. I know it. There are no legal weapons anymore—only the Bloods have access to guns or knives. But those men carried them as though they were comfortable with their weapons and trained in using them. And yet. And yet—they still got killed in the barest blink of an eye, like their lives weren’t even worth a struggle, weren’t even worth the effort it took to kill them. It fills me with despair.
“Let’s go,” I mutter, leading Luke off the train and searching warily for any more gun massacres. A part of me wants a gun of my own, so I can shoot every Blood in the world. Another part of me wishes I’d been gunned down too, or even thrown under a train. In this life you are one or the other—the shooter or the shot.
Luke takes my hand again, and I let him, because I can barely feel it. I lead him up onto the street—it is peak hour now and the crowds flow home like a wave of water, impossible to move against. All these people are expressionless, moving as one without a conscious thought to the alternative.
I know
it’s dangerous and stupid but I can’t stop myself from plowing into the oncoming rush of bodies and pushing through them, elbowing and kicking to forge a path, striding forward with raging determination and pulling Luke along with me. People look at me as though I am crazy, as though I’ve threatened them in some way, when the truth is all I’m doing is walking in the opposite direction.
Luke wrenches me out of the path of the streaming mass, pressing me against the steel wall of a building. “Are you trying to get yourself shot?”
“Why—would that make you angry?”
He blinks slowly. “It would confuse me,” he says, but he doesn’t seem confused. He seems to understand perfectly, given the way he’s looking at me. Kind of sad, almost.
I shake my head and set off once more, letting Luke decide if he wants to follow me or not. I take him around behind a huge building to where the fire escape hugs the brick wall. It’s not lowered all the way so I have to climb onto a trash bin and try to reach the base of it.
Luke peers at me, then takes pity and hoists himself up beside me. His movements are nothing like my jerky, weak ones—he has an odd animal quality to the way his muscles work, swinging up with all the grace of a gymnast. Without asking why, he grabs the fire escape and pulls it down so that we can climb all the way to the top of it. I jump onto the roof and head around to the northern side, where I crouch low and motion for Luke to do the same. He appears at my side, utterly soundless, his eyes scanning the area below. The light has turned golden with the approach of sunset, and something about it makes his skin glow beautifully, all the hard lines of his face further defined to make him even more severe and handsome.
Before us is another building, and from this height we can see directly down through its windows. There are young children playing quietly with trucks and blocks, and drawing at tables. We watch them for a moment before I motion for Luke to follow me across the roof to where we can see the backyard. Here there’s a small area of stone and a metal slide. A few older kids run around the colorless playground, making do with the limited area.
“Foster kids,” I explain unnecessarily.
“Did you live here?”
“Now and then, in between homes.”
“Doesn’t look too bad, I guess,” he murmurs, watching the kids chasing each other.
“This isn’t what I wanted to show you.” I head for the stairwell—this building’s been abandoned for years—and follow it down two floors, despite the danger all of this puts us in. We are allowed to be in our homes, our places of work, some recreational areas and shops. Nowhere else. We cannot gather in other people’s homes, as this could be seen as a meeting of dissent. We can’t be in groups, nor can we go outside the city without permission.
We certainly can’t lurk in a dark, abandoned building right next to where they hold uncured children.
In one of the empty offices I cross to the window—from this level we can see into the basement of the foster facility. I point, feeling my throat tighten. “See that? The fourteen-year-olds.”
Through the barred windows we can clearly see several children shackled to their beds, restrained so tightly they can barely move.
“They’re drugged, too,” I say softly. “They can barely think, let alone escape.”
At fifteen we are cured. So at fourteen we are imprisoned. I want to scream and scream and scream.
Luke is staring at them, at these poor children, and although I never know what he’s thinking, I can see that his knuckles have turned white as his hands grip the windowsill with all the strength in his body. It is this—these white knuckles—that make me realize something about Luke, and about myself.
“I want to break them out,” I tell him, something I have longed to do for years. I have never been able to figure out how, not on my own, but if Luke will help me, perhaps—
“Let me show you something,” he says softly, moving behind me and pointing along my eye level. “See that?” He points to a small black shape. “Security cameras at every window. And there? That’s an armed guard, and there are bound to be more at every entrance.”
On some level I must have known—I’ve spotted the cameras and the guards before—but I never really let myself contemplate that it might be impossible.
“So, what—you’re saying it can’t be done? I don’t accept that.”
“I’m saying it can’t be done by us at this point in time,” he says, sounding like a politician. “Our focus is getting you better. If we survive that, then we can look into helping others.”
“Nice attitude, Luke,” I snap. “Very compassionate of you.”
He turns and faces me, spreading his hands. “What do you propose, Josi? That we smash in there right now and get ourselves shot to smithereens like the poor bastards on the train? Because that would be a certainty—neither of us would walk out alive, and then who can we help?”
The rationality of it makes me furious.
Something in his face softens. “You’ve had a shock,” he says gently, a light in his eyes that wasn’t there before, something vast and seductive. “I know the attack at the casino sent you into a bad place—”
“Don’t.”
“Listen to me—I know it sent you somewhere bad, that you want to scream and fight and tear things apart, but you don’t get out of that place by being reckless.”
“How do you get out of it?” I demand, not expecting him to have an answer. The sun has dipped below the buildings and everything is gray, sapping all the color away.
Luke smiles without any humour; a dangerous smile. “With cunning.”
I feel a shiver race over my skin, lifting the hairs and sending my pulse into overdrive. I want to kiss him. Desperately. He leans in like he might want to do the same and my body tenses; I can feel his breath against my face and our eyes are locked together. I can see a thousand shades of green in his deep gaze, and all the rest disappears, my nightmarish life goes floating away on a breath and all that is left is the unyielding certainty that this man is going to change the world with the power in his beautiful face. I don’t know who he is, but I know that he is more than a drone, a follower—or he could be, one day. If he can be convinced to fight.
We are standing like this, locked in a weird, too-long pause, when Luke’s entire body jerks up, his head cocking to the side as though he’s been alerted to something. With the spell broken, I blink to clear the fog from my mind and look around.
“What—?”
“Shh!” he hisses, all of his muscles tense. I watch his face, my heart thumping, and then I finally hear what he does. Sounds from below. Inside this building.
“Shit,” I whisper, mind whirling. “Back to the roof!”
He grabs my arm in a grip so tight it hurts. “Don’t move,” he orders in a low growl that sends shivers along my spine. “They’re above and below.”
I feel cold. “Who? Police? Bloods?”
We might have a slim chance of escaping if it’s the police. A very slim chance. But if it’s the Bloods we are dead. No doubt about it. In my mind, I see the four men from the train blown to pieces over and over again, their red blood splashing against the train windows. I can’t stop seeing them, imagining how they got there, to a moment in time when all four of them ceased to be. Who knew and loved those men? Who will remember them, now that they are gone?
Who will remember me when I am gunned down within minutes?
Luke might have, but he will be dead too.
“It’s the Bloods, isn’t it?” I whisper.
Luke turns his head slowly to look at me. “No. Not the Bloods.”
My heart leaps with hope. “Then who?”
At first he doesn’t say anything, even with the muffled noises growing slowly closer. My hope dies as I watch him—in Luke there is no fear, no panic, but something in him has turned to granite. “Listen,” he murmurs urgently. “There’s no order to how they move. No stealth. They sound like …” He meets my eyes. “It’s the Furies.”
r /> My first thought is disbelief that he could make a joke at such a time. Then I blink, realizing he’s serious. Dread settles at the bottom of my stomach and starts to claw its way up through my insides, tearing and ripping as it goes. “No,” I whisper. “That’s impossible. They’re not real. They’re a stupid children’s story.” I’m babbling with panic.
Luke shakes his head, turning to the window. He inspects the edges, running his fingers along them with quick efficiency. When he can’t get it open, he uses his elbow to make a crack in the glass, then pushes the pieces out carefully enough to catch each one and place them quietly on the floor.
I don’t know what he’s doing but I wish he’d hurry up. The Furies are every child’s nightmare—actually they’re the stuff of adult nightmares, too. Everyone in the world is terrified of the very idea of such creatures, savages with no access to any thought or feeling that isn’t fury. Every once in a while a whisper will be heard about the monsters in the wild, men and women who crave the taste of human flesh and will go to any lengths to get it. It is said that this is what would become of us if we weren’t given the cure. But it’s just the government’s way of scaring people; everyone knows it has no basis in reality.
Luke has all the glass out of the window now, but the awful noises are growing closer quickly. He sticks his head out and peers around. We’re on the third storey, and the drop to the ground is dizzying.
“Okay, here’s the plan,” he says briskly. “You’re going to hop onto my back and I’ll climb out the window over to that power line there. Then I’ll swing along it to the foster facility, from where I can probably reach that old scaffolding and make it to the ground.”
“What?” An explosion of laughter erupts from me and Luke crams his hand over my mouth. “Are you completely out of your mind?” I gasp through his fingers. “That’s absurd!”
“Well what’s your idea then?”
I shake my head. “If by some miracle we make it to the other building, won’t we set off the alarms there?”