“Let’s check it out.”
We follow the men at a distance, stooping low and sticking as close to the outbuildings as we can. They chat, back and forth, and groan under the weight of the load. “Should’ve waited ’til tomorrow,” the one says.
“Best get it over with.” Eventually we reach the back wall marking Sequoia’s border. Like the front, the top is garnished with broken glass. With a sigh, the two men drop the bundle and stand huffing and puffing. “Need air,” one says, coughing.
“Too right. Soon as we’re done with this, I’m gonna set up camp next to an oxybox.” He roots in his pocket and pulls out a heavy, jangling set of keys, which he inspects in the moonlight. “Got it,” he says, and shuffles to the wall with a tiny steel door built into it. He rattles the key in the lock, and the door opens.
The two men let out long breaths as they bend down to retrieve the bundle, and once they have it, they scoot through the door, one walking backward, the other directing from the opposite end.
We spring at the door as quickly as we can, glance around it to make sure the men have moved on, and creep out of Sequoia.
I close my eyes and take a deep breath. “Quick,” Silas whispers.
The men are already way ahead, plodding along the uneven ground and sidestepping heaps of junk abandoned on this side of the wall, where no one has to see it. The moon disappears again, which is fortunate, because there are no buildings to hide behind, only the odd boulder or rusting car, and if the men were to turn, they’d surely see us.
They stop for the final time, and we drop behind an upended, rotting wooden table. Silas nudges me. I lift myself up beside him. There is another figure next to the two men now: a scrawny man with a long beard and wearing a face mask. “The hole doesn’t look big enough,” one of the men complains.
“Gimme a look,” the bearded man grumbles, and knocks the bundle with the handle of a shovel. The men let it drop to the ground and unwrap it.
I lift myself higher to see, sprawled on the ground before us, lifeless and stiff, the body of a man. His head is swollen and his eyes are bulging. I slide back down behind the table and cover the blowoff valve in my mask with my hand.
Silas’s eyes reflect a sliver of light. “Not Quinn,” he whispers, which makes me feel a little better, but not much.
“He’s too wide,” the bearded man says. The shovel hits the ground as he digs a wider hole. “I’ve another spade over there,” he says.
“You do your job, Crab, we’ll do ours.”
There’s a pause and one of the men speaks again. “Hungry?” he asks the other. We hear something being unwrapped and slobbery chewing. I gag. How can they bury someone and eat at the same time?
And that’s when I notice the ground: it isn’t naturally uneven—it’s become that way from the bodies buried here. And though some mounds have already been concealed by rocks and debris, and are almost flat, others are still, the earth barely sunken in next to the body.
I poke Silas. “Graves everywhere,” I whisper.
“Who the hell are they burying?” he says. We stare at each other, not knowing what else to say.
“There you are,” Crab says. We peek over the edge of the table and watch Crab throw his shovel onto the ground.
The two men who carried the body throw aside what remains of their food and stand. “You take that end,” one tells the other.
“Why should I touch the head?” his workmate barks.
“He won’t bite.”
“You take the head then,” he says, and the other man is forced to swap ends.
“One, two, three,” he says, grimacing, and they lift the man by his arms and legs, swing the body, and launch him into the hole where he lands with a crack.
Crab twirls the end of his beard around his finger. “Shall I fill it in?” he asks, nodding at the grave.
“Well, we don’t want it stinking.”
“Doesn’t seem much point if you’re gonna have another delivery for me any day.” Crab picks up his shovel and sticks it into the heap of loose earth.
“Not your place to keep track of these things, Crab,” one of the men says. Crab snorts and covers the dead man with earth. The two deliverymen head back.
“We should’ve run from Sequoia ages ago,” Silas whispers.
“The back gate gives us an escape route. We didn’t know about it until now.”
Silas rubs his head with both hands. The two men are out of sight. If we want to catch them and make it through the door before them, we have to run.
We pick our way through the junk, veering to the right to bypass the men. It’s so dark it’s difficult to see where we’re going, and we’re sprinting so fast, I stumble several times and my shoes clank against old metal pipes. Finally the wall appears, and we slam against it, almost knocking ourselves out. I use my hands to feel for the door. Silas points at the open door about fifty feet away, but we’re too late. The men saunter out of the scrub and seconds later slip though the door, slamming it behind them. We run and I try the handle. “Locked. We’ll have to climb over the wall,” I say.
“I’m not sure it’s possible,” Silas says, and I’m about to argue when there’s a bang and he crumples to the ground.
I scream and jump just in time to dodge the gravedigger who is aiming his shovel directly for my head.
“Drifters!” Crab yells, grappling for my face mask. I kick him in the chest with both feet and knock him to the ground, giving me a few seconds to grab his face mask. I pull it so hard the tubing comes away from the air tank, and he lashes out. But he isn’t as adept at breathing as the others, and after a few seconds he stops fighting, hacking instead, as the sinewy atmosphere attacks his lungs.
“Give me my mask, you dirty br-brat,” he sputters.
I dash to Silas, refit his face mask, and shake him violently. “Wake up.” I lift his head to see if he’s been injured, but I can’t see much in the dark, and suddenly there’s a rustle behind me and my own face mask is pulled off. I jump up and turn, and as I do, Crab, who looked done for only moments before, puts his hands around my throat. His eyes bulge as he squeezes.
Neither of us has enough air, and together we crumple to the ground.
His hands are clamped so firmly there’s no way he’s letting go. It feels like he might snap my neck. I dig my nails into his hands and scratch his face, fighting, fighting for life. And then a shadow appears above us.
Silas.
Crab releases me and tries to scurry away but Silas has the shovel. Crab covers his eyes with his hands, as though this will protect him, and Silas smacks the shovel against Crab’s head. Crab doesn’t utter another sound and drops to the ground. I shudder and stare at Silas.
Silas throws me his face mask, then retrieves mine and puts it over his own mouth and nose. “He’s dead,” I say.
Silas lifts Crab’s head. “Yes,” he says. A dark, thick liquid oozes from his head onto the earth. A stabbing of regret trickles into me, but I sweep it away: it was him or us. Right?
“No one can find him,” Silas says. He pulls me to my feet.
“What does it matter?” My throat is still stinging.
“They’ll suspect us. I don’t want to be next.”
I bend down and lift Crab’s legs. Silas takes his arms. Blood drips from the gravedigger’s fractured skull.
Quickly, we carry Crab to the hole he dug himself and throw him on top of the other body. “I’ll get the shovel,” Silas says. I stare down at Crab, lying cheek to cheek with the other dead man, their limbs bent all out of shape.
Silas begins filling the hole as soon as he returns, and when his muscles ache, I take over. We work like this until we’re done. “We’re murderers,” I say, wiping my sweaty hands on my trousers.
On our way back we use stones and loose earth to cover the track of Crab’s blood. “Let’s stash the air tank. We may need it later,” Silas says, leaving me by the wall for a few minutes while he finds a good hiding spot.
We still have the problem of how we’re going to get into Sequoia. There don’t seem to be any cameras at this rear exit, and there’s the glass on the wall; it won’t go unnoticed if we turn up to breakfast gashed to pieces from climbing over it.
“Alina,” Silas mutters. He’s on his knees. “A way in. Or out,” he says. I squat next to him and look.
Someone has furrowed a narrow tunnel underneath the wall.
“Can you fit?” I ask.
Silas answers by crawling into the tunnel headfirst. He has to wriggle from side to side to get through, but he does it, and soon after I am through, too, covered from head to toe in dirt. “Hopefully the flood lights are still off,” Silas says.
Tonight we have achieved nothing more than killing a man, and as we head for the cabin, one word repeats itself in my head: Murderer. Murderer.
That is what I have become.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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32
QUINN
I’m awoken by arguing. “Quit nudging me!” the boy groans from his cell.
“But you won’t stop snoring,” the girl says.
“I can’t help it.”
I turn over on the hard slab of concrete. They’re standing face-to-face and grappling with each other through the bars. The girl sees me watching and stops.
“What did you do?” she asks. I stand up and dust myself off.
“Nothing,” I say. “But seems like that’s enough here.” The girl squeals with laughter. She hits the boy as she continues to titter. It’s not a genuine laugh: she’s hysterical. “Is there a way out?” I ask. There’s a sliver of a window by the roof, but that’s about it.
“I wouldn’t try to escape, if I were you,” the boy says. He pulls up his shirt to show me his chest, which is covered in bruises.
“Maks?” I ask.
He nods and puts his hands between the bars to pull up the back of the girl’s shirt. Her skin is crisscrossed with red welts. “He beat me and whipped her,” he says. “Because we stole an air tank. That was it.”
I dry heave. I miss Bea, but thank goodness I didn’t bring her here.
Keys rattle in the lock and Maks pushes open the door. The boy and girl scuttle to the backs of their cells and watch as he approaches me. “Exciting news. Vanya’s forgiven you, which means you have a busy day of exams ahead.”
“Exams?”
“Just get a move on,” Maks says, pulling open the cell door and grabbing me by the back of the neck. I don’t struggle, because I could be in for if I do. Besides, I have a better chance of finding Alina and getting out of here and back to the pod if I’m not locked in a prison cell.
The boy and girl watch me go. They look afraid.
And I should probably look afraid, too.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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33
ALINA
I wake in a sweat, sure someone has his hands around my throat. Silas is sitting on my bunk. “It was a dream,” he says.
I push my hair out of my face. “What time is it?” I ask. Everyone else is up and dressed.
“Six in the evening. We’re getting ready for this stupid Pairing Ceremony,” he says.
“I’ve been asleep all day?”
“I told Vanya you had an iffy stomach,” he says.
I think of Crab’s foaming mouth as he tried to kill me and I am breathless again. “Did you tell them?” I whisper. I can’t remember anything that happened after we snuck back into Sequoia. Silas had to half carry me to the cabin.
Silas slides closer. “They know we saw a body being buried. We’ll tell them what we did, if we have to.” He holds me by the chin and looks at me directly. “Keep it together, Alina. You’ve killed before.” I shake my head to contradict him. “At The Grove. You think none of your bullets hit those soldiers?”
But it was easier then—the troops were far away; I couldn’t see their faces, and I didn’t have to bury them.
Silas turns to the others. “Seeing the body last night leaves us in no doubt. . . . We need to get out of here. Our main concern is oxygen. Song?”
Song bites his lips. “I can find a way to store oxygen and pump it into an airtight space, but we need trees to produce it or the formula for manufactured air . . . plus the chemicals.”
“Well, that’s impossible,” Silas says. We’re all silent. Our options are meager. “I have the map that Inger was putting together, which has the locations of solar respirators on it. We can survive on those and wait for Song to design something better.” He looks at each of us in turn. I want to have a better idea, but I don’t.
“We was fine on solar respirators before you lot showed up,” Maude lies. If it was fine, she wouldn’t have tried to kill me for my air tank the first time she saw me.
Dorian puts his hands on his hips. “We buried people at The Grove, you know. I don’t know why this dead body should change anything.”
“This wasn’t a one-off, Dorian. There were dozens of graves,” I say.
Dorian pulls his red robe over his head and faces us, defiant. “I don’t agree with pairings any more than you, but I’m not spending the rest of my life drifting and barely clinging to life,” he says.
We all watch Silas and wait, willing him to find a solution to Dorian’s fears. Fears that are ours, too. But he has no answer for this. “We have to leave Sequoia now,” is all he says.
“We won’t make it a mile before they’re on top of us,” I say. I don’t mean to contradict Silas, who is glaring at me, but we have to bide our time, run when they least expect it. Besides, if we run now, they’ll know we were the ones who killed Crab. “We found a way out. It’s a narrow tunnel under the wall at the back, about fifty feet from a steel door. Anything heavy goes down, we leave that way and wait for each another on the other side. There are only a few places back there to hide,” I say.
Song goes to the door, takes the rest of the robes from the hook, and hands them out. The sleeves are too long, eating up our hands.
Silas goes to the wall and punches it. Dorian pulls up his hood and it covers his entire forehead, right down to his eyes. “Red ain’t my color,” Maude says. She tries to struggle out of the robe, but Bruce stops her.
“It’s just for an hour or so, Maddie.”
Somewhere beyond the cabin a shrill whistle sounds.
“Pairings,” I say.
Before being led into the orangery where the pairings will be performed, we’re held in a waiting room with narrow benches running the length of it. Silas is on my one side, Dorian on my other. Apart from those of us from The Grove, around ten people are with us. Abel sits opposite me. When he smiles, I smile back. He’s always been able to make me do this, even when things were dire.
I scan the bench and the faces of the other boys. They don’t look particularly menacing; I’d be willing to fend off any one of them.
A door opens and another candidate is pushed into the room. “Quinn!” I say, and go to him. “We were worried,” I whisper.
“I’ve just had a three-hour test followed by the most humiliating physical exam of my life,” Quinn says.
“Where are Bea and Jazz?”
He edges closer. In the past I might have moved away, but he isn’t flirting. “They’re alive,” he says, and suddenly hope fizzles through me. If Bea’s alive, and Jazz too, there’s no excuse for any of us to give up. “Bea was with Ronan Knavery. They’re planning a new rebellion in the pod. They have my father on our side this time and think they can take control of the army. But we need you.”
“Cain Knavery’s son?” I ask. He nods. It’s a lot to take in, and I have a hundred questions, but I haven’t time to ask any more because a bell rings, and Maks enters from the opposite end of the room wearing a skintight r
ed shirt.
“Excited?” he asks. He rubs his hands together. I don’t like the gesture, or his leering expression. After what I saw in the stairwell, I pity poor Jo and her life with him. “Let’s do this,” he says. My gut tightens and I pull back the lower half of my face mask, so I can bite my nails.
“So the first civil war in the pod didn’t achieve anything?” I ask, taking Quinn by the arm.
“Well, it was enough to make my father and Ronan turn against the Ministry. Will you come back with me?” he asks.
“Yes,” I tell him. “Of course, I will.”
The orangery is an enormous conservatory attached to the east wing of the main house. Along three sides are rows of Sequoians gawking at us, and on the remaining fourth side is a stage decorated with a red banner that reads For Air, We Pair. It doesn’t even make sense: the only way to re-oxygenate the planet is to grow trees.
Vanya is standing under the banner wearing a red robe, although hers has no hood and plunges at the neckline where it’s held in place with a metal pin. Maks steers us to some empty chairs, then steps up onto the stage and stands next to Vanya.
We sit.
“A Pairing Ceremony is our most valued celebration,” Vanya says. “Through pairings, we preserve the human race from extinction. Along with pairings, these candidates will also learn their vocations. They will become troopers, responsible for the group’s physical needs; academics, responsible for the group’s mental needs; or benefactors, responsible for the group’s spiritual needs.” I look around the room. I haven’t met anyone here who seems particularly spiritually enlightened, and she must have forgotten that humans and overpopulation was the reason for The Switch in the first place. Cut down the trees to feed the people—what a good plan that turned out to be.
“I marvel at what we have achieved,” Vanya continues. “We’ve made mistakes and sacrifices along the way, but we are stronger for it, and unlike other groups who have fallen, we prevail.” Vanya looks down at our group and I nearly give her the finger. It isn’t our fault The Grove perished. “Many of the candidates are refugees. Sequoia is the last stronghold against the Ministry and we defend our right, not only to breathe, but to breed a new people invincible to the elements.” The audience cheers. I look along at Silas, but he’s focused on the floor, his cheeks burning, his hands curled into fists. I wouldn’t put it past him to start something right now, but we can’t win if we try to battle these people. There are too many of them. When we leave, we should simply sneak away.