“Dave—”
“Maybe if I’d helped he might not have died but I didn’t. There’s no purpose for me. I have no ability to do anything. I have no skills that will benefit anyone. My brain doesn’t even function with clarity – not when it’s supposed to. I can’t offer anyone love or affection, I can’t grieve what’s lost. I can’t feel the beauty I see everywhere. So why am I here, Dad? Why did they make me into this?”
There are tears in his eyes but he doesn’t know what to say.
“What will be left if they do this to us all?”
“I don’t know, my boy.” His voice cracks. “That’s why we fight, to make sure we never know.”
But it’s too late for fighting. It’s too late for any of that. They don’t understand and it’s not their fault, but they are ants beneath Shay’s foot and when he decides to take a single step they will be ground into the earth and this time there will be no crawling free of it.
Chapter 23
April 5th, 2068
Josephine
Luke and I put our clothes back on slowly. There’s a persistent tugging at the base of my heart. I don’t have space for it, I need to be focused, I can’t be falling apart. So I think of the north. I think of Medusa and Astro Boy and Washington. I think of Intirri and know I have to get to her.
“Don’t go,” Luke pleads softly.
“I have to find a way out,” I explain as gently as I’m able. The long dining tunnel has been getting smaller and smaller since we untangled our bodies.
He sits on the edge of the table, feet on a chair. Rubs his face wearily and then silently watches me buttoning my shirt.
“Sorry,” I say. Sorry I let this happen again, sorry I have to leave you again.
“Will you come and see him with me first?”
I shake my head.
“You won’t even say goodbye.”
“He’s gone. He wouldn’t hear it.”
I turn with the feel of Luke still on my lips, the taste of him on my tongue. I have a long run ahead of me if I’m to make it out of these tunnels tonight.
*
Luke
I watch her leave me with nothing but the tingle of her ghost fingers on my body. Each time I think she’s circling back in to me she reveals how very far away she really is. So I go to the infirmary by myself. And find Zachariah sitting with his head in his hands.
I feel no pity for him. Instead there is only cruel resentment. It isn’t his fault. I know that, of course. He’s a boy. Barely more than a child, and yes, he’s capable of amazing things but no, he’s not a doctor, not a real one. He can’t be blamed for this, because in this he was more than anyone else could have been, more even than anyone could have asked him to be. And still I hate him a little for not saving this life.
I cross to the corpse and sit beside it. It still looks like him, only now something catastrophic has been lost. Henrietta’s crying is the only sound I can hear as I sink into the chair and take the boy’s hand and bring it to my cheek.
I’m not ready to go.
I wasn’t ready for you to go either, Lawrence. I could never be ready for that.
A spark has gone out, I will say in the morning when they all come to hear an explanation for this unforgivable loss. His laughter held us together. His unquenchable spirit kept our hopes alive. He was one of a kind and we will be so much less for the loss of him. That’s what I’ll say.
For now I sit with him until I can’t stand the sight of his broken chest and then I go to the lab and tell Dodge that I want the gas ready to be dispersed tomorrow night. I don’t care anymore that Josi wants them alive, because she left me here to deal with this and so I’ll deal with it the only way I know how. Rage swells in my heart, eclipsing all else. I’ll kill the fuckers and not lose a wink of sleep over it.
*
April 6th, 2068
Josephine
I wake to discover that a heavy gray fog has blanketed the world. The grass I’ve slept on is moist and my body trembles with cold. I give a quick whistle and wait for Intirri to emerge from the gray world, wings spread to land on my arm. She holds me with a gentle grip so her talons don’t gouge my skin.
I stroke her gently, soothing her unease in the fog. We’re a long way from the farm or the resistance tunnels – this was my only way free of the ground, and it’s a little too close to the wall for comfort. The fog, at least, protects us from being seen.
“What do you think?” I ask her. “Time to go back?”
Her wings rustle.
“I know. I don’t want to go either.” I close my eyes and rest my forehead gently against her soft chest plumage. “It’ll go quickly now. Luke will want to set the gas. I might not make it back out tonight.”
I look at her dark eyes. “Will you wait for me?”
We hear it at the same time. Footfall nearby.
I turn to face it and wait, wondering who managed to follow me from the tunnels without being detected. But what I see in the fog are the shapes of two people I don’t know. Hikers traipsing through the hills with walking poles and wind jackets. A young man and woman, likely a couple.
They stop the second they see me, standing in the fog with my falcon. Their mouths fall open and fear strikes. It must be how I look – wild and dirty and gruesomely scarred.
I throw Intirri into the air and she explodes up and away into the fog.
“Run,” the man tells his partner softly.
“There’s no need to run,” I say.
But the girl is already running.
“How do you have a bird?” he asks me.
The wound on my throat throbs as I watch her run and I know. I know.
“Tell her to come back,” I instruct him, “Or you both die.”
“How do you have a bird?” he asks again, blank.
“Come back or your boyfriend dies,” I call. I wait a few minutes and then hear the sounds of her return. They stand together, awaiting my decision. It’s a strange feeling of power. I didn’t think I looked scary enough to illicit this much obedience. Maybe it’s not just how I look, but how I sound and smell. Whatever scent they’ve unconsciously picked up from me has triggered their amygdalae and their bodies are screaming at the approaching threat.
“I’m sorry,” I say.
And I really, truly am, much more than I can say. It’s a brutal world. And the animal is free.
*
Luke finds me dragging them into the marshes. I don’t realize he’s there until the girl’s face has sunk below and I turn to see the horrified expression of my husband. He doesn’t say anything. His eyes are doing something to me that I shouldn’t have to endure.
“They saw Intirri.”
“You chose a bird over the lives of two humans?”
“Yes.”
The set of his jaw turns rigid. We walk silently back over the hills toward the tunnel opening. It will take hours to follow the massive detour around the Furies; I’m not sure how much of this screaming silence I can endure.
“They would have sent the Bloods here. The hills would be crawling and soon they’d work out that they have to look underground.”
He doesn’t reply so I stop trying to explain myself. Heavy hatred hangs in me, but it’s been there a long time now.
Just get through this. Get through the end of this fight and then you can leave or die or whatever you need to do to make the shame end.
*
Luke makes an announcement about Lawrence. It breaks something in everyone, destroys something in the kids. Angry and fearful, they demand something be done and Luke being Luke – the solver of every problem, the winner of hearts – he offers them the perfect answer: an end to the monsters who did this.
He announces our evacuation from the tunnels tonight. We have nowhere to go but up to the hills and marshes I slept in last night, the ones that would now be crawling with Bloods had I not made the choice I did. He asks them to pack warm clothes and blankets and drinking water only. It’ll be
safe to return in the morning, when we’ll have the service for Lawrence, and then move into preparation for the attack on the Blood base tomorrow night.
There’s a lot of commotion when they hear that – they don’t understand why it needs to be so soon, so rushed, but they don’t realize we’ve been preparing for this for months.
When they’ve dispersed to grieve and pack, Luke gives a terse nod for me to follow him. Dave comes with us, offering me a hesitant smile I’m sure is meant to be comforting but isn’t. It isn’t anything.
In the tech room I almost have a heart attack. Waiting for us there is Lawrence, laughing and giving us the finger.
It takes me far too long to realize it’s a holo, and Teddy is under the desk drinking stolen whisky and weeping over the sight of it.
Luke crawls under, drags Teddy out and wraps his arms around the boy. The four of us watch the holo footage together. Lawrence is acting out the scene from Psycho we’ve now all seen a million times. He gets completely undressed and we have to watch his bare ass as he pretends to shower in a very feminine way and then shrieks to feel an invisible knife stabbing him. We’re all laughing as he gets entangled in the invisible shower curtain, crashes to the invisible bath and lies still for a ridiculously long time. He finally explodes into a bow, sending kisses to his audience.
“You are such a loser,” Alo’s voice tells him from off-screen.
“Au contraire, amigo. I’m a winner.”
“Can we see less of the winner, please?” Hen asks, arriving with a towel to wrap around his waist.
“You’re right,” he grins. “The goods are all yours, Hen. Wouldn’t want to share ’em with the undeserving masses.”
The holo ends. There is a long, empty silence.
“What a fucking joke,” Teddy mumbles into the dark tech room. “Sixteen years old. Sixteen fucking years.”
Luke takes the whisky away from the boy and indulges in a mighty swig himself. He passes it to Dave, who passes it to me. I put it down without bothering. No time to be dulling the edges of this nightmare, time only to sink so deep we might yet make it out the other side.
“I need you to pull it together, Teddy boy. We need you more than ever.”
Teddy looks not back at Luke but at me. His glasses are askew, his eyes dull. “My friends keep dying. I’d rather they stopped.”
I nod.
It seems to be enough for him because he pulls himself up, with help from Luke, and turns to the screen. “I have something for you. Was gonna show you this morning but then everything went to shit. Yet again.”
“Good boy. What have you got?”
“I can send out a signal that will disrupt all the Blood comms simultaneously. Protocol when one goes down is for that agent to immediately return to base so they can be fitted with a new device. If it happens to all of them at once, they’ll automatically go back to base without knowing that the others are, too. See what I mean?”
“It’s nice, kid,” Luke says appreciatively. “Simple and straightforward. And shaking up their comms won’t hurt us for the attack, either. When can you do this?”
He slumps in his chair listlessly. “I dunno.”
“We’ll get you some coffee and sober you up. We need it ready by this evening, before we evac.”
Teddy sighs. Nods.
“What if they just switch the frequencies over?” I ask.
“This’ll disrupt all of them. I forgot to say that bit, didn’t I? Probably gonna be a problem for us too.”
“It’ll shut ours off as well?” Luke asks. “How?”
“It’s a bit like an EMP but instead of taking out all power it’ll hit all the radio frequencies, even the protected ones we use.”
“So we’ll have complete radio silence. For how long?”
“Depends how fast they can get it back up.” He shrugs. “Couple of hours. Maybe less.”
“Think you can work with that?” I ask Luke.
He frowns and walks straight out, lost in thought and too angry with me to answer.
Something’s bothering Dave. “You’ll be with us, right?” he asks me.
I make sure to meet his eyes as I nod. That’s how you lie.
*
Dave
I’m making a habit of following Josephine Luquet. At first, yes, it was my own rather pathetic curiosity but now I intend to make sure she doesn’t stuff anything up or get in Luke’s way. Surely this is something I can be capable of. Surely in this small way I can help my brother.
I keep as silent as humanly possible. I half expect her to hear me anyway – she seems to have a supernatural set of ears on her – but she keeps moving and doesn’t look my way once. I’m uncomfortable; after all, I really like the girl, and it’s no secret how much my brother loves her. But sure enough, she leads me to Dodge’s little makeshift laboratory. In silence I watch her pile the gas canisters into her pack and climb out of the tunnel.
Caught redhanded.
My stomach sinks. I was really hoping to be wrong.
*
My brother, of course, doesn’t believe me. I mean, I’m sure he does believe me, but he goes through the motions of arguing, defending, denying and then checking the lab himself, where Dodge miserably admits to having left the canisters unguarded.
Luke doesn’t say a word, but I follow him around like a little puppy as he searches for his wife. We find Zach in the infirmary tending to a recovering Will and they both deny having seen her. Shadow is cleaning guns in the armory and hasn’t seen her. Pace is changing Hal and hasn’t seen her. And all the while we search I can feel my brother’s anger rising. It’s like a physical sensation on my skin, a palpable prickling. He’s about to lose it.
“I’m here,” her voice eventually sounds from up ahead. She’s sitting on the middle rung of the ladder that goes down to the water treatment tunnel.
Luke and I stop before her.
“Tell me you didn’t,” he says.
She doesn’t look happy or smug, she just looks calm. “I did. I’m sorry.”
“How did you get rid of it?” I ask.
“Water stops gas from diffusing into air particles, so I dropped them straight into the run-off stream. It’s toast.”
“Do you have any idea …?” I ask, then realize that of course she does.
Luke hasn’t said anything, but that bristling prickling sensation is getting worse.
“How are we meant to get out of here to make the attack?” I ask, since by the looks of him my brother is gearing up to something pretty high on the Richter scale.
“I’ll program the train. You can take it straight to the subway beneath the base.”
My eyebrows arch – I didn’t even know we had a train.
We wait for Luke to respond to this, but he doesn’t. He just stares at her, looking lost. “I don’t know who you are anymore. You’re out of control.”
She jumps to the ground and nods. “Fair enough. Do what you have to.”
I’m lost. I follow them both back to the arena, wondering what’s going on. Luke retrieves something from the armory along the way. When Josi sees what it is she goes apeshit.
A set of handcuffs.
“Are you kidding me?” she snaps. “There’s no way you’re getting those on me. I have stuff to do.”
He approaches her. I watch in astonishment as she moves into a fighting stance. “Punish me however else you want but you’re not locking me in here. You can’t.”
“Don’t fight me. I’m not in the mood.”
“Like hell I won’t fight you, condescending asshole.”
He rushes her at the same time she dives. I scramble out of the way of the fight erupting. Josi’s fist swings by Luke’s head as he ducks sideways and goes for her guts with a jab. She curls inwards to take the weight from the hit and then twists away.
There are people trickling into the silo now, assuming this is a training spar.
“Nice, haven’t seen this in a while,” Blue exclaims happily.
/>
“Block the door!” Luke grunts.
Those watching are confused, but do as he says.
He kicks her feet out from under her and she hits the ground hard. Luke’s weight comes down on top of her but she manages to get a knee into his groin and roll free. Their fists are a blur now, hitting and blocking with incredible speed. Josi has only one advantage and that’s the fact that Luke isn’t trying to hurt her, simply contain her long enough to get the cuffs on. She sprints for the door but he dives for her arm and tightens his iron grip. The momentum carries her back around and she uses it to send a heavy kick into Luke’s shoulder. He grunts in pain but keeps hold of her and starts dragging her to the side. There’s an exercise bar soldered to the wall – that’s what he’ll be going for, as it’ll be impossible for her to escape.
“What’s going on?” I hear someone ask worriedly.
“Ease up, Luke!”
“They’re not training, dumbass.”
Josi struggles wildly but he’s so much stronger than she is. He has his arms completely around her middle, binding her arms to her body while he drags her.
So she does the only thing she can – she turns her face and bites down on his shoulder so hard that I see blood spurt.
Jesus Christ.
“Chill out, Josi!” I hear him snarl. “This is happening no matter how badly you hurt me.”
Her elbow finds enough room to hit him hard in the ribs and then she uses the slight loss in pressure to wriggle down and out of his hold, sending the same elbow into his solar plexus. With a spinning twist she dashes for the door but he catches up and flattens her.
“Someone wanna give me a hand here?” he roars, using his whole body weight to keep her flattened.
“How could you?” she gasps.
“How could you?” he yells into her face. “How could you not see the danger you’ve put us in? It’s unforgivable!”
By this point Blue and Eric are there to help contain and drag her over to the bar. Luke cuffs her hand to it and they all step back.