Bound to Ashes (The Altered Sequence Book 1) (25 page)

“No,” I say immediately. What am I thinking? I open my hand. “Here.”

He gives me the cigarette and I put the two together. Just like lighting kindling, right? No big deal. ...No big deal.

It’s easy to breathe a medium, average-sized plume of fire, but changing the size from there is the hard part. I manage a small flare up, though, and pull the cigarettes away in time for the fire to barely graze the tops.

That could have gone worse.

James grins and takes his back, he sucks on it immediately. His exhale is colored with grimy smoke. “Thanks.”

Cain never let us within an inch of his stash, but I’d seen him do it before. I pull on the cigarette. My throat protests. The smoke is bitter and foul and the coughing starts without warning.

Once it subsides James is laughing. “You’re kidding me,” he says, covering his mouth with his sleeve. “You breathe fire and you’ve never smoked before?” His laughing fades and he says quickly, “Look, it’s like this. Just pull on it, slow, keep your tongue at the back of your throat.” It’s the first time he’s ever sounded patient.

I try what he says and the coughing doesn’t return.

“There,” he says, though not a praise. “Better. Just enjoy it.”

So far I can’t see anything to enjoy. It’s just smoke. It makes my head buzz a little bit. But watching James puff away at it, his sighing breaths, he’s really savoring it. He holds it between his index and middle finger, almost carelessly. He probably thinks it’ll be the last cigarette he’ll ever smoke. I wonder if the humans have had lots of those times.... the last time they could drive a car or get a certain kind of food. Our world is no world for luxuries.

“Hey,” he says, not looking at me. “I think Vinder would be dead without Ashton cutting in like that.”

I swallow. I guess he’s right, but I don’t want to agree in case it sounds like bragging.

He continues, “Vin’s a stupid kid but he doesn’t deserve what he got.” He pulls on the cigarette again and he settles into his exhale. “Tell Ashton thanks when he wakes up.” The white portion of his cigarette is gone and he smashes the ashy bit on the hand rail. Without looking at me, he walks past and says, “Gonna try to get some sleep.”

He leaves me alone on the scaffolding. He actually said thank you? Can’t tell if my head is buzzing from the smoke or from the fact that James went out of his way to be nice. The cigarette burns down enough so I put it out and flick it into the darkness where it disappears soundlessly, the last of its kind.

The decadence of the office spills onto the pathway leading out. The carpet feels flimsy under my boots after getting so used to hard metal. The side of the pathway, anchored on one side, is nothing but picture windows on the other wall. I can imagine Alessandra’s father, whoever he was, guiding other humans along, showing them the interior of the facility, playing it up so they’d sacrifice everything to join him in the Ecodome before the war got too bad. I’m still finding it hard to feel sorry for humans in that way. I was never on anyone’s side, so when the virus hit, it only benefitted us. Maybe that sentiment should feel callous and selfish, since Alessandra and her humans are on our side... but it’s also a mental exercise to think of whoever made the Sentinels as ‘our side’. Maybe there are no sides. Not sure which scenario I’d prefer.

The tour route feels more hostile than the outside of the facility. Maybe because of how nice it’s trying to look. Like a mask hiding a monster’s face.

Through another door that slides open gingerly, we pass strange-looking sculptures—oh, miniatures. Probably projects Stem Inc. had lined up. A tiny coastline crawls through a wide display table. The ocean, sculpted out of some clear material, is the same teal-blue as the real thing. Still waves crash on the rocky shore. The landscape ends abruptly in a cross section exposing the layers of ground, all different textures and colors.

The most interesting sculpture, of course, is the Ecodome. For a miniature, it sure is large. The scale model stretches about four feet long and half as wide. It isn’t just a dome like I thought. It looks more like the shape soap bubbles make when stuck together. It has a large main section, which on its own would have been dome-like, but then three smaller little domes stick to it, merged halfway.

“Why is it shaped like that?” Ashton asked, carefully touching the tip of a delicate pine tree. It might have been as thick around as a pipe cleaner and was clearly meant to be a massive tree, to scale.

Alessandra replies, “The main area,” she touches the large center, “is the actual dome. The spaces added to the side,” she gestures to each small bubble on the edges, “is mostly storage and control areas. Airlocks, pumps, generators.” She rests her hand on the final bubble as if it were a sweet, sleeping animal, the way Ashton used to do when Punk was small.

Ashton walks over to the cutaway and peers into the dome. His eyes trace the thin metal lattice of support beams along the ceiling. The whole dome’s floor is ribbed with white tubes, and after looking at it for a minute, I realize they’re houses. Little doors and windows. The tubing... houses... are occasionally interrupted by tall glass viewing platforms and sometimes little channels of water.

“And look here,” Alessandra says, touching a strange structure towards the center of the dome. The white tower reminds me of a plant with lots of small, round leaves peeling off the main stem, but with more geometric order. “A green tower. It’s the equivalent of an entire farm’s worth of crops. Every platform is a different crop.”

If that’s how big the farms are, then... this dome is as big as she said. I never understood the scope of it before. The image of the dome I’d formed in my imagination slowly disintegrates into a blurrier, larger form. Even more impossible to grasp.

“They left a lot of the edges undeveloped,” Alessandra continues. The edges of the dome are mostly green with a few little trees dotting the area. “For livestock grazing and oxygen production, probably.” Suddenly she sighs quickly and says, “Isn’t it amazing? How could people come up with something like this? And the public didn’t even know about it. It could have changed the world if it had gotten out sooner....”

Peregrine forces a smile. She gently takes Alessandra’s hand in hers and says, “Well, it’s changing the world now. Better late than never.”

Alessandra smiles, then says, “We have to get there first.”

Vinder, quiet as the grave, lets his glazed eyes pass over the miniatures with no shred of interest. Peregrine touches him on the shoulder gently and he follows.

The humans decide to take a break and I can’t help but think it’s for Vinder’s sake. The dark circles under his eyes deepen every time I see him and his usually upbeat attitude is gone. I even miss the stupid, casual way he talks. ‘Dude.’

Peregrine sits down across from Vinder and yanks something out of her pack.

“Oh my gosh,” she says in one breath, “Ziggy!”

“What?” I can’t help it.

She shows whatever ‘Ziggy’ is to me. It’s a child’s toy, stuffed and dirty and staring at me with big eyes. Peregrine laughs to herself and fiddles with the green, fuzzy toy, looking at it fondly. “Yeah,” she says. “Go on. Call me a child. It’s Jenny’s, my daughter’s, though....”

“I’m in no position to call anyone anything.” She looks at me suddenly, her eyes still and unsmiling, and she looks back down to Ziggy slowly and methodically strokes the fake hair away from its eyes.

My first reaction is to think, why would she carry that thing around? Why waste your time on something so childish?

But then again.

I used to be the one up in the middle of the night, screaming. I was the one tearing my own hair out, waiting for Ashton or Jules to rush over and grab me. I’d keep shouting as they cradled me and pressed my head against their chest and swayed and said everything would be okay.

I can’t ever call someone childish. Not ever.

Peregrine stands up and walks over to Vinder. If corpses could move, they’d move about as slow as he did looking up at her.

“Here,” she says unabashedly, handing him the toy.

Vinder looks like she handed him a piece of garbage to throw away and says hotly, “What the hell is this?”

“Shut up and take it,” she says, shaking the floppy thing at him. “It’ll help.”

He just glares at her and takes it. He doesn’t hold it like Peregrine does— gently, like a tiny animal— more like the inanimate object it is.

“Ziggy,” Peregrine says seriously, looking back and forth as if to spot anyone that might overhear, then leans in and whispers, “has healing powers.”

To this Vinder finally closes his eyes and shakes his head, smiling, and I know he’s forcing back a laugh. He half-heartedly waves the toy. “The all-powerful healing Ziggy.” He sets it so it’s sitting up against the empty cans left from the meal, like it could be alive. He stares at it and I can tell it’s a bittersweet moment for him. It wouldn’t surprise me if every moment for him from now on is bittersweet. He’s crippled... for life, probably. Unless Alessandra finds some mechanical prosthetic for him, he won’t be able to fend for himself. He’ll always have to rely on others for help. He can’t do things normal people can. Won’t be able to deal with normal life.

Peregrine stands back up and reclaims her spot near mine. She keeps an eye on Vinder, though, as he settles against the wall to sleep.

“Momma used to say that scars made us beautiful,” she says.

I glance at her. She stares off into nothing, smiling softly. “She said, ‘Baby, life is going to knock you down, you might as well show off that you got back up.’ And she had a word for it...” she covers her mouth and taps her fingers along her lips in thought. “It was some foreign word that meant, ‘to heal with gold.’ From when they used to use gold lacquer to seal the cracks in pottery. It was made more beautiful for being broken.” She smirks at Vinder. “He’ll bounce back.”

She looks at me with that confident smirk and pats me on the shoulder. “Night, Dev.”

It takes me a little effort to reply, “Night.”

She heads off to Vinder again, slipping off her coat and laying it over him.

I’m in the corner, Jules is asleep, the others are far enough away, but I still fight the tears away.

The tour route leads us along a never-ending hallway of niceties, fake plants, and framed photographs and newspaper clippings. Framed magazine covers of a man in round glasses and thin eyes dominate the wall space. Alessandra walks ahead of me and the others trail behind.

Now’s my chance.

“Aless.”

Her shoulders fall.

“Wh—”

“I know what you’re going to ask,” she says. I pull up alongside her and she side-eyes me dejectedly. “And I can’t answer.”

My look does all the talking.

“The Sentinels are all equipped with a retinal scan to determine, basically, if someone is friend or foe. I’m in their database.”

“They didn’t scan anyone else.”

“Sentinels have two scanners—a rudimentary one through their eyes, which can weed out enemies and allies. The scan is just another step to ensure the perceived ally is in their database.”

“So why am I in their database, too?”

“You must have the same iris markers as one of the employees,” she says. “It’s not a perfect mapping system, it just identifies specific shapes and anomalies in the iris. It’s just luck, I guess. We should be counting our lucky stars.”

She looks away. I guess that’s the end of that. Funny how she had such an answer prepared already... and how hesitant she was to give it. That, and I doubt I share the same ‘markers’ as an employee. How many humans exist that have yellow cat eyes?

I watch her walk ahead. I may never get to the bottom of this.

[Alessandra]

“You think he remembers you yet?”

It’s the first thing anyone’s said since we settled down along the scaffolding for the ‘night’. Between two towering, hot machines, Peregrine’s voice sounds far away. The machines near us rumble enough to make me think that I could feign sleep and avoid facing her question. But I can’t. Not this one.

I glance over at Dev. Even when he’s sleeping he doesn’t look at peace. “No. I don’t think so.”

“Think he ever will?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if I even want him to, sometimes.” The machine’s constant breath drowns my sigh. “It would just complicate things.”

“Who knows, what if you just straight up told him? You saving his life or whatever. Wouldn’t he probably like to hear that?”

“I didn’t save his life. I just forged some forms and moved him out of this facility and into the holding areas. It’s what anyone would have done.”

“Would they? For an eight-year-old to show that kind of empathy, man, you had a better set of morals than all those adults.”

She makes me smile despite myself. “I was nine.”

“Still! And I’d say you did a pretty good job saving his life. Look at him.” She gestures in a grand arc to Dev. “Alive.”

Dev’s eyebrows press together, then relax, back and forth in erratic patterns. I wish I could see what he was dreaming about. He tries to hide it, but it’s obvious he has them. Bad ones, frequently. Did I do the right thing by transferring him to a place where he might survive? When I jumped on my father’s computer and switched the E to a T for TRANSFER, how could I have known I was doing the right thing? Were those few days I was buying him worth it? No. I had no idea. I was a child. I couldn’t have had that foresight. But... even if I was older, would I have considered the possibility that death would be preferable to a lifetime of misery?