Deviants (21 page)

Most streets are covered by canopies now, and I understand why. The wind builds. Dust strikes my face, stinging my skin and forcing me to squint. I try to cover my mouth and nose with my free hand, but it’s impossible to hold that position as Burn leaps from roof to roof. I know he’s saving me, but he’s holding me so tightly, he’s killing me, too. The pain’s blinding.

The tank appears on the other side of the wall. Its gun points toward us. Burn sets me down on a roof, grabs two guns from holsters on our man-shield, then tosses his body off the building. The guard lands on one of the canopies, lifeless. A huge boom sounds and Burn grabs me and leaps over the wall of the fort, down into the dust.

Whatever projectile was shot from the tank lands inside the fort, and I hear screams and smell smoke. Burn drops me to the ground and I gasp, realizing that I’m pulling in dust. Pain spikes my chest when I move, but I fight it. Burn climbs onto the tank and bends its big gun to the side. He’s strong normally, but that’s crazy-strong. Inhuman. Deviant.

Remembering my mask, I reach for it, but he jumps off the tank, grabs me by the arm, and leaps again. Feeling as if my arm might come out of its socket, pain sears through me and the world goes white. Behind us, there’s a huge explosion. The men in the tank must have tried to fire their now-bent gun.

Burn leaps again and I dangle, almost striking the ground when he lands. He shifts his hold. My chest screams in pain as he binds his arm around what must be broken ribs, but at least I’m more secure. He runs so quickly the wind and the dust are like shards as they strike.

“Burn,” I call out. “You’re hurting me.” But he can’t hear as he runs across the dust, leaping over obstacles, landing hard.

Weak from the pain, I fade in and out of consciousness, until I realize he hasn’t landed from his last leap—we’re falling.

I open my eyes and we’ve dropped down a huge hill of dust. Burn hits the ground first and we roll, over and over, but he doesn’t let go.

We stop in a heap, me on top of him, and I struggle to make sense of what I’m seeing and smelling. It’s like we jumped from a high dust dune into the stretch of green I saw earlier. The dust isn’t blowing down here, and the scent filling my head is like nothing I’ve experienced before. Sharp but pleasant, the scent washes through my sinuses, reviving me for a moment. A canopy of green stretches overhead, supported by thick-stemmed plants—some several feet in diameter—each with a rough surface.

I’m pulled from my dumbfounded awe by the sight of Burn. He’s not moving. His grip on my body has loosened, so I tentatively shift my position, wincing at the sharp pain my movement fires. My vision blurs from the pain. I’m going to pass out.

“Burn?”

He’s shrunk back to his normal size. I can’t tell if he’s
breathing. The cut on his arm is bleeding, and I can only imagine what’s going on with the much worse wound on his back.

“Burn?” I shake him, but moving hurts so much I’m not sure I can rouse him. I slide off his body and land on the ground. Pain spikes from my chest to my brain; my vision blurs and blacks.

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

^T
HE SUN CASTS
yellow light filtered through a canopy of green and brown. Without trying to sit, I crane my neck to discover Burn crouched about ten feet away. That same strong scent I smelled earlier clears my head.

The fort. The general. Burn. The monster. Escape. It mostly comes back—I think. My ribs feel broken but at least I can breathe.

Burn doesn’t move but raises his gaze in my direction. “You okay? Because if you are, we need to move.”

I draw a deep breath. It pinches, but the pain isn’t as bad as I expect, and I remember how much dust I must have breathed while we escaped. Turning from him as I sit, I lift my shirt. My abdomen and side are bright purple, magenta in places, and I tentatively poke my ribs. While I was sure they were broken, they must be just bruised. Or maybe the dust healed them. I shudder.

At a sharp intake of breath, I look up. Burn’s standing over me, his eyes on the bruises. I cringe, pulling down my shirt.

When I stand every inch of me cries out, but I try not to show it.

“What happened?” he asks. “Who did that to you?”

My head snaps up. Is he kidding me? His eyes look sincere and concerned, but he hardens his expression as if I’ve caught him in a look he didn’t intend.

“You don’t remember?”

He shifts the goggles resting on the top of his head. “Last thing I remember is that asshole general putting his hands on you.” His lips twist. “Did he”—he looks down—“did
I
do that to you?”

I nod.

He stomps away, and the brown, stick-like things covering the ground fly up around his boots. “I don’t remember. I can’t control it.”

“You saved me.” I take a step toward him.

His jaw shifts. “I hurt you.” His voice is low and broken. “I’m a monster.” He raises a hand toward me.

I jump back, instantly ashamed by my behavior, but Burn scares me and now that I’ve seen what he can do, what he becomes, my fear’s much worse.

“What triggers your”—I stop myself—“your gift.”

“Rage,” he says, low and hard. “At least based on what others have told me.”

“You’re not sure?” I ask, wondering if his curse will shed light on mine. “Can you feel it coming on?”

He stays silent for a while, and then turns toward me. “How did you learn to control yours?”

I shake my head sharply. “I told you, I
can’t
control it. I can’t control
anything
.” An understatement these past days and I realize my previous sense of control over my life, over Drake’s safety, over anything, was illusion. Our survival these past three years wasn’t due to my precautions. It was dumb luck.

“I’ve seen you control it.” He stands but keeps his distance. “I’ve seen you hold back. I’ve seen you stop.”

I spot my mask on the ground, pick it up, and pull it tightly to my chest. “It doesn’t feel controlled.” Burn’s brow wrinkles and there’s such deep pain in his eyes.

“Did I”—he looks down—“did I
kill
anyone?”

I nod slowly—at a minimum Phadon and probably the guard he used as a shield. Maybe more men when that tank exploded.

Burn’s shoulders lurch forward like someone punched him hard in the gut.

His imposing figure exudes danger and malice, but all I see in his eyes is anguish. Even if he’s not very good at expressing himself, he’s deeply sorry that he hurt me, sorry he caused anyone’s death. If he could have gotten us out of that fort, saved me in any other way, he would have.

“Killing the general was an accident. You didn’t mean to. You said yourself that you can’t control it.”

“That’s no excuse.” He looks down and stomps, shaking his head like he’s arguing with himself. “I never, ever want to turn into that monster again.”

“You saved me,” I say softly. “If you hadn’t stopped him, I don’t know what General Phadon would have done.”

“I do.” He grunts and his eyes narrow, but then he looks overhead. I don’t want to talk about this anymore, either. Thinking about the general yanks emotions to the surface, sparking the backs of my eyes. If Burn thinks I have a modicum of control, he’s wrong.

“What is this place?” I change the subject. “What are these?” I put my hand on one of the thick-stemmed plants we saw earlier.

“Pine trees.” He gestures around us. “We’re in a forest.”

I look up and spin. “I’ve heard of trees, and I know there are plants in the farms and the air-scrubbing factories inside Haven, but I never imagined…They’re so tall.” The tallest must rise forty feet. I look down and realize the ground is covered by bits of the trees that have fallen.

“Did these come from the trees?”

He nods. “Needles. They turn brown and fall off to make room for new ones to grow.”

Ignoring the ache in my ribs, I bend and pick up a handful of the brown pine needles.

“How did the trees survive the dust?” Every living thing outside Haven—whether man, animal, or plant—perished when the dust fell. That’s what I learned in GT, but in the past twenty-four hours I’ve learned how much I don’t know.

“See these?” He lifts an oddly-shaped brown thing off the ground. “It’s called a cone, and it contains the seeds. When it’s in danger, it closes up and only opens when it’s safe for the seeds.”

Just like my little brother
, I think but don’t say. Instead I rub my hand on the surface of the tree, then over a grouping of needles. The lovely scent definitely comes from these trees. I can’t imagine a more glorious place and wonder if Drake’s been here, too.

“How soon until we find my brother?”

“If we walk through the night, we might catch up with them tomorrow.”

Joy spreads inside me.

“What’s it like?” Burn leans against a tree and looks down.

“What?”

“Having a family.”

“You don’t have one?”

He shakes his head, and I remember how he told me that he doesn’t even know his birthday. “What happened to your parents?”

He doesn’t move.

“My brother is the most important person in the world to me.”

“That’s why you took care of him after your parents…” his voice trails off.

“Yes,” I say quickly. “Drake is funny and smart and a really talented artist, and even though he has so much to complain about, he almost never does.”

“He’s lucky to have you as a sister.”

“No.” I shake my head. “I’m lucky to have him.” But my joy hardens. Family is a loaded concept for me, the bad hidden in the good like a terrorist’s bomb.

Still, I can’t wait to find Drake—even if it means facing my father.

We’re slower with my walking, but Burn hasn’t offered to carry me, and frankly it’s a relief. We move without talking, our progress only interrupted when Burn hears something and raises his hand to signal me to stop. The light from the real moon is prettier than the fake one in Haven, and Burn explains why the moon’s such a funny shape, like someone’s taken a bite from a circle.

I’m not sure what I expected, but the world outside Haven is varied and vast. We leave the pine forest soon after dark, pass through other areas much like the ruins near Haven and then enter another pine forest even larger than the first. After the forest, we follow a deep rocky path that’s almost like a road. Burn says it used to carry water down to the big lake near Haven, but that doesn’t seem possible.

Just thinking of water makes my tongue stick to the roof of my mouth. Drake was carrying more than his share of our water, and the last of the three rat-skin bladders I had is now nearly empty. At least the sunlight’s not so hot when it’s bouncing off the moon.

Burn holds up his hand. I stop, then move closer to him. An eerie howling fills the air, followed by snorting. Rocks roll down the banked surface to our right.

“Behind me. Get down.” Burn reaches into his coat and yanks out the bigger of the two guns he stole from the guard. He drags part of the gun against itself and it clicks. Then he
waits and waits and waits. My muscles twitch, desperate to run.

A hairy monster jumps over the edge of the bank. Scrambling down on four legs—like a rat—it’s much bigger and covered in dirty, matted gray fur. Nearly yellow eyes spark in the bright moonlight and I suck in a sharp breath. I saw an example of this supposedly extinct animal once as a child. It’s a dog or a wolf. But opposed to the stuffed version in Haven’s history museum, this wolf has foam around its snarling teeth and several huge gashes caked in dried blood on its body.

Burn fires the gun and the creature flies back, half of its head blown off. Then it rolls down the rest of the hill and lands with a thud, about fifteen feet away. Burn retrains the weapon on the hilltop, as if convinced another will follow.

He’s breathing quickly. His shoulders rise and fall with each shallow breath as he holds the gun aimed and ready. After what feels like ten minutes, I raise my hand but stop short of touching him. We haven’t touched since our escape from the fort. Not really.

I slide my hand onto his back.

He jumps, then relaxes and lowers his gun. “Shredder dog,” he says without turning. “Even worse than the humans who turned Shredder. Pack animals didn’t need dust madness to give them the instincts to hunt and kill.”

“Are there many animals out here?” I try to remember the other beasts I saw stuffed in the museum, some much bigger than wolves.

“Not many.” He finally puts the gun away and turns toward me. His face is slick with sweat.

I step toward the carcass and my stomach pinches. “Can we eat it?”

“Too dry and tough.”

I cringe, thinking of the chunks of flesh that flew off the Shredders the Comps shot, and how little blood there was. “If there are Shredder animals, are there
Deviant
ones, too—like us?”

He shakes his head. “Not that I’ve seen. No normal ones in the wild, either. Any born must get killed.”

“Born?” I try to speculate how this is possible. I never thought about why the Shredder population hasn’t died out. “Can Shredder dogs—can Shredders—have babies? Normal ones?”

“Yes.” Burn’s short answer is so cold and dark, I’m afraid to ask for more details. I try to focus on a less-terrifying, less-repulsive subject than Shredder sex.

“How much farther until the meeting point?”

He looks down and doesn’t answer.

“What aren’t you telling me?” I step into his path.

“We passed the meeting point four hours ago.” He looks me directly in the eyes and I glance away quickly, his words swirling around my head and stealing my balance. I stagger to the side.

We passed the meeting point. They weren’t there.

I’ve lost Drake.

If my father hasn’t already killed him, he’ll be tortured by Shredders or torn apart by one of those wolves.

“Let’s go.” Burn starts walking.

Then I remember. Burn mentioned a Settlement. “We can still find him, right?”

Burn stops and points down. “Look.” He steps to the side and points down to the rocky surface of the riverbed.

I rush to his side. “What am I looking at?”