The Death Code

  It sets me on edge.

  The Leech in charge, a man who’s got to be almost seven feet tall, makes his way down the line. Scanning people’s cuffs.

  He stops in front of a young boy, a kid who could be Peri’s age. I look over at Meadow. See the pain in her eyes, and I can’t take it anymore. I slip away from Sketch, walk quietly to Meadow’s side.

  “Cuff,” the Leech growls.

  The little boy holds out his arm. His whole body shakes uncontrollably, and he’s covered in little specks of yellow, all over his skin.

  “A 73,” the Leech says. “Interesting.” He pulls out some kind of silver tube and presses it to the boy’s arm. The kid flinches, and the Leech pulls the tube away. It beeps, and he looks down at it.

  “Smallpox,” the Leech says, to one of his comrades. “Highest level yet.”

  “I just wanna eat.” The boy starts to cry. “Please.” But his tears don’t hit the ground.

  His body does, instead, when the Leech swings a gun forward.

  And shoots him in the leg. The boy screams. The sound echoes across the Ridge. Birds fly from the tops of trees, scatter into the sky.

  Meadow grabs my hand. Squeezes it tight, like she’s holding herself back from attacking.

  I squeeze back, and for this one second she’s mine again, willing to open up in the midst of her pain.

  Some people flinch. I stand still and steady, because it’s just like the Rations Hall. Only this time, I don’t have to clean up the boy’s body. He’s crying, sobbing on the ground, but he’s alive.

  “Stand up,” the Leech yells at him.

  The boy can’t move.

  “I said stand!”

  Finally, Meadow releases my hand. “Meadow, don’t,” I say, but she rushes forward before any of us can stop her, shoving past the other colors standing around. She bends down, grabs the boy’s arm, and yanks him to his feet. He’s dripping blood. He passes out, but she holds him up.

  “Fix him,” Meadow says, glaring at the Leeches.

  One of them steps up, grabs her cuff. Looks at the C, and then at her Regulator on her skull.

  “You’re the Woodson girl,” he says.

  “Fix the boy,” she says back. “You shot him. Now fix him.”

  The Cure should be healing him by now, stitching up the bullet wound. But the boy’s leg is a blasted mess. From here, I can see the number on his cuff, skyrocketing to a 94.

  All I can do is stare.

  “He’ll survive,” the Leech says. “They always do.” He takes a glass vial, lets some of the boy’s blood drip into it. Corks it shut, and moves on.

  Meadow drags the boy over to us. Sketch rips off the bottom of her shirt, wraps up the kid’s leg. Gradually, the bleeding stops, and his cuff number sinks lower and lower.

  He’ll live, just like the Leech said.

  “She’s not here,” Koi says. “We need to move on.”

  The Leeches go up and down the line, scanning people. Handing over rations bags to some, after they draw their blood. Scolding others, beating the ones that step out of line. I look left, right, searching for Meadow’s sister in the crowd. She isn’t here.

  So where is she?

  CHAPTER 95

  MEADOW

  We search all day.

  As we walk, I think of Peri.

  How tiny she was, when she was born. The very first time when I held her in my arms. A memory resurfaces like a pang in my gut.

  “You will keep her safe, Meadow. Guard her with your life.”

  My father sits beside me on the floor of our houseboat. Peri is asleep on the yellowed mattress, her cheeks stained from tears.

  “I will,” I say. “No matter what.”

  “Good girl,” my father says.

  He hasn’t said my mother’s name. It has been a week, and he hasn’t even acknowledged the fact that she is gone.

  He hasn’t asked me if I’m okay.

  Maybe he knows that I’m not. The question isn’t worth asking, when you already know the ugly truth.

  “Is she really dead?” I ask.

  My father stares out the window of the boat, watching the sun bleed into the sea.

  “She’s never coming back,” he says. “Trust me.” He looks at Peri, the last child he had with my mother. “You are her mother now. Do you understand?”

  I nod. A tear slips down my cheek, and my father reaches out, wipes it away.

  “Never let her see you cry.”

  Peri wakes up screaming.

  I go to her, hold her close.

  My father turns his back on us and puts his head in his hands.

  There’s no sign of my little sister.

  I feel as if I am back in the Shallows, the same day that I went after my mother. Only then, I knew she would appear. Now I can’t be sure of anything. We stop, drink from the stream.

  Sketch gets a splitting headache.

  Zephyr’s ears ring so loudly he can’t hear us.

  I switch back and forth twice, three times.

  Koi is carrying me when I notice we’re finally on a path, the ground trampled from hundreds of feet. My mind drifts back to the Shallows, the path in the Everglades that led me to discovering my mother’s secrets.

  The path opens up into a larger, thicker part of the forest. The trees are taller here, fatter around, as if they are ancient. I wonder how tangled their roots must be.

  “I haven’t come this far yet,” Koi says. “I’ve been taking care of . . .”

  He stops.

  And I know that he is talking about our father.

  “He’s dying,” I whisper.

  Koi takes a deep breath, his silver hair shining in the sunlight.

  He scratches his arms, and more of his scabs peel away. “I don’t know for sure, Meadow,” he says. “The AntiCure comes in many forms. Sometimes, we think we’re going to lose a person. But then the nanites fight their way through the system, and they heal.” He leans against a tree. “He will heal. Just like you keep healing.”

  “Koi,” I say. “It’s obvious that every time I switch, I get worse. Eventually, I’m going to die.”

  It gets easier, every time I tell someone. They don’t believe me.

  They won’t.

  I share with him the secret from my mother, keeping my voice low, so that Zephyr and Sketch cannot hear. Koi is quiet the whole time, and when I am done, he simply nods.

  My brother was never one to share many words. When he does speak, though, they are soft and honest.

  Understanding, as always.

  “We’ll find Peri,” he says. “Then we’ll get help. We’ll save you.”

  The wind blows, pulling strands of my hair into my face. I turn away, my back to the wind, just as I see movement in the clearing.

  “I think I see something,” I whisper.

  “There isn’t a tribe here,” Koi says. “Shouldn’t be, at least.”

  It happens so fast.

  A spear whistles through the air and lands in his shoulder.

  Blood spurts, and Koi cries out. He falls, and I tumble from his arms, into the ground. I crawl back to him, rip the spear away, close my hand over Koi’s mouth so he doesn’t scream.

  “We have to run,” I say. I try to get to my feet, but I can’t. I’m too weak.

  “Meadow!” I hear Zephyr’s voice in the trees, but I can’t see him. He’s too far away, and it’s getting dark already.

  Another spear lands in the ground, close by.

  “Get back to the cave!” Koi yells.

  I see a flash of motion, twenty paces to the left. It’s Sketch yanking Zephyr along, back through the trees, even as he shouts my name and tries to fight her.

  Koi helps me to my feet. Puts his good arm around my waist and starts hauling me after them.

  A person steps in front of us, their body masked by leaves and sticks, the perfect camouflage. “Hand over your clothes!” she screams. A woman. She holds a bow, and when she shoots, Koi and I separate, and the arrow s
oars right between us.

  The fear brings the switch back to me.

  I’m strong in a flash.

  I sprint for the woman, shove her against a tree. She yells and tries to fight me off, but I slam her head back. I can hear Koi fighting someone behind me, but I know he can handle himself.

  I slam the woman’s head against the tree again and again, until there’s blood, and she goes slack. I let her slide to the ground.

  “Come on!” Koi shouts from behind me.

  He’s taken out a guy half his size. His shoulder is dripping blood.

  “Only two?” I point at the dead woman’s cuff. Orange.

  “No,” Koi says. “Never just two.”

  Then there’s a shout, like the caw of a bird, and others pour from the darkness.

  The chase is on. We run.

  “Left!” Koi yells. I follow his command, leaping over the river as it comes into view.

  Another spear whistles past, barely missing my head.

  We duck beneath a cluster of low-hanging branches, roll to our feet, and start running all over again.

  I dodge, weave, make myself a harder target to hit. Koi follows suit, and soon I take the lead, blindly running through the woods, trusting my instincts to guide us.

  The ground slopes, cutting to a ravine so steep that I don’t have time to stop. Right as the switch hits. I stumble, and Koi knocks into my back.

  My feet go out from under me.

  Together, we fall. Trees rush at me in fast-forward. I can’t stop, can’t slow my falling.

  My body slams against a tree trunk. My head cracks against something hard, but the Regulator saves me.

  Koi isn’t so lucky. His shoulder is out of the socket, dangling like a half-broken stick.

  Everything fades in and out of focus, but I grit my teeth, force myself to stay alert. I’m able to stumble to my feet, stagger over to Koi.

  “No, no, just wait a second,” he says, as I reach for him. But I’m too weak to snap it back into place right now.

  “It happened again, didn’t it?” he asks.

  I nod and show him my cuff.

  96.

  “It’s happening more often,” I whisper. “I’m not going to make it out of here, even if we find Peri.”

  “No,” he says. “Meadow, just . . . stop. Right now, we need to find shelter.”

  We both look up. We’re in the middle of a deep ravine, a natural dip in the ground, with steep rocky walls all around us. We’ll have to climb our way out.

  But how can we, with his shoulder? And with me, weakened again from the switch?

  “We’ll stay the night,” Koi says. “Find a place to hide, in case there are Needles or Cams or other tribes. You’ll be able to rest. You’ll be okay once you switch back, and then we’ll keep hunting for Peri.”

  “Where exactly are we going to hide?” I ask. Blood drips from my nose.

  Koi looks away, like he can’t bear to see me like this.

  “We could go there,” he says. He points behind me with his good arm.

  There’s a tiny cave opening, up against the rock wall.

  Together, broken and bruised, we make our way inside.

  CHAPTER 96

  ZEPHYR

  We make it back to the cave wounded, but alive.

  Meadow and Koi are nowhere to be found.

  I can’t believe we ran, left them behind like that. But I figured, with her brother . . .

  “Woodson is fine,” Sketch tells me. “It’s her dad who’s not going to be, once he sees us come back without his kids.”

  “I forgot about him,” I growl, as I knock on the door. Abram opens it, and we step inside.

  Meadow’s dad is watching, waiting.

  He sees Sketch and me enter, alone.

  His eyes might be bloody, but they’re still able to see. And the look he gives me could kill.

  I know right here and now that he’d beat me senseless, until I was dead.

  We wait for hours.

  They don’t come back. I keep myself busy by watching Tox carve.

  He still has that long walking stick in his hands, and a sharp black rock. He leans over, carving and carving. Never stopping.

  There’s dried blood on his hands. Like he hasn’t quit for days. The number on his cuff still reads high.

  “What’s he doing?” Sketch asks.

  That’s when Doc comes up behind us. “He never stops,” he says. He hands Tox a leaf full of rations.

  Tox doesn’t look up. He keeps carving.

  “You have to eat, old man.” Doc sighs, then reaches out to take the stick from Tox’s hands. He reacts, faster than I thought possible, slicing the top of Doc’s hand with the rock.

  “No rest,” Tox says. “Paddle for days and days.”

  “Damnit! Forget you!” Doc curses, holding his cut hand to his chest. “Sad sack of bones, you are.”

  Sketch follows Doc back to the fire.

  But I stay behind, staring at Tox’s symbols. Crude representations of mountains. Strange waves that could be the sea. Twisting, turning patterns that go around the stick, and all sorts of numbers, jagged lines, strange shapes I’ve never seen before. The wings of an eagle, spreading outward. A sketched letter X.

  “Is the Green real?” I ask him. “Is there a safe place, in our world?”

  He doesn’t answer. There’s just the scratching of his rock on the smooth, old wood.

  “The Green,” I say again. “I need to know how to get to the Green.”

  He looks up, only for a second. “Green?” he asks, and I swear he understands, knows exactly what I’m talking about. “Outside. With the eagle.”

  The eagle. Is he talking about the New Militia?

  I don’t think so. If he was, they’d have told us about a place without Initiative control, without fear. Wouldn’t they have?

  “Yes. The Green,” I say. “Is it real?”

  Tox stares at me, and I can almost see the pieces sliding together in his mind. Clarity in his eyes. “Green,” he says. He holds up his cuff. “Red.”

  He goes back to carving, and my hope fades away. I settle down across from everyone, alone, and wait for Meadow to come back.

  CHAPTER 97

  MEADOW

  The cave is bigger than I thought it would be.

  We crawl inside, slowly at first, our stomachs sliding on sharp rocks. But soon it opens up, and our ragged breaths echo into the darkness.

  I lean up against cool, smooth stone, gasping.

  Koi slides in next to me, and we sit like that for a while.

  At some point, I think I hear something somewhere else in the cave. The pitter-patter of feet. I freeze, listen as best I can, but I think it is only a small animal. Or more bats.

  “She tried to apologize,” I say, suddenly, when the screams have faded. “Before she died.”

  I can’t see Koi, but I can feel him shift next to me. “Our mother?”

  “Yes,” I whisper. “Do you think . . . ?” I can’t find the right words to say. “Did she really . . . ?”

  “Do I think she meant that she was sorry?” Koi asks. He finds my hand in the darkness and grabs a hold. “Dad told me once, that she didn’t want to have children. She didn’t think she could handle the pressure. But then it happened, and she had all of us, and she loved being a mother. You know she loved it, right? Loved us?”

  I think back to the good times. The laughter, the tickle fights in our apartment, the way she’d try in vain to smooth my relentless curls back into a braid, because she knew how much I hated it when the wind blew my hair into my eyes. “She loved us,” I say. “A long time ago.”

  “Love doesn’t die, Meadow. It starts out small at first, and then it grows, and it keeps growing, until it takes over our entire heart. I think some people are born to love. Others fall into it, and when it becomes too much, sometimes, they’re afraid. Mom was afraid. She knew what she was doing to the world wasn’t love. It was . . . something entirely its own. She
knew what we’d think of her, how it would break us, once we found out about her work. So she left.” He sighs, squeezes my hand. “She probably didn’t think she’d ever see any of us again, Meadow. You were with her as she died. And I think, in that moment, she meant every word.”

  We sit side by side like that for hours, until I switch back again.

  When I’m strong enough, I pop Koi’s arm back into the socket.

  “It’s time to move,” I say. “I’m ready. We’ve wasted enough time.”

  He nods, grins so big it lights up his face. He looks so much like my father. “Time spent with my little sister is never wasted.”

  I peer out the cave, into the ravine. “Race you to the top?”

  “I don’t know, Meadow,” he says.

  But before I can argue, he sprints past me, starts to climb the rock wall. I charge after him, laughing, and in this moment we are children again, climbing higher and higher and higher, desperate to get away from a world that begs to hold us down.

  It is only when I reach the top that I turn around and stare out at the world below. We had fallen into a giant hole in the ground, like an open mouth. All around it, there is a ring of land and trees. A hill sinks down, leading to lower ground that seems to stretch on forever. There is a field of yellow flowers. Bright as day, beautiful as the sun. Peri would have loved to see this. I would have taken her there, and we would have danced in the blooms, stretched out on our backs in the middle of a sunshine sea.

  Beyond it, the forest picks back up. It looks never-ending from here.

  The morning is foggy.

  Or maybe it isn’t fog. It’s smoke.

  I skirt around the ravine, to the edge of the hill, and look past the meadow. I see a flickering fire in the distant trees. Another camp.

  Koi climbs up next to me, breathing hard. “You beat me,” he says. “How did that happen?”

  “What tribe lives over there?” I ask, pointing.

  He shrugs. “I told you, I haven’t come this far yet. It’s only been a few weeks. The Ridge is massive, bigger than the Shallows.” He smiles. “I’d love to draw this.”