Guardian (14 page)

“I know,” said Syd, knowing full well the permission he had just granted. “If you can avoid . . .”

Liam turned on the EMD stick he’d lifted off Finch. “I’ll try.” He looked at Marie. “Stay alert.” He disappeared over the wall.

“Looks like you’re my bodyguard too,” Syd told her as they leaned against the wall waiting in silence.

“I’m not doing this for you, Syd,” she said back to him.

“I know,” Syd replied.

He could picture her parents’ faces, the barracks stuffed with the sick and dying.

It’s your future.
Choose.

“I’m trying,” Syd answered out loud and tried not the hear the sounds from half a block away, a stifled shout, a grunt, a gurgle. The silence that followed was even louder.

Liam suddenly appeared over the wall again. “Time to go.”

As they made their way to the first hovercraft, Syd didn’t ask what Liam had done, if he’d had to kill the Purifiers or not. One way or another, they were taken care of. Syd’s silence was a small mercy, but Liam was grateful.

WITH A FEW WIRES
crossed, Syd shorted the security on the hovercraft. A few more wires reconnected and the engines roared to life. The batteries discharged, the hovercraft lifted, and Syd smiled. Machines, unlike people, were predictable.

Liam stood behind him, leaning on the pilot’s chair and watching with fascination as Syd worked his magic. “How do you know how to do that?” he asked.

Syd shrugged, feeling the hovercraft come to life. “I studied. I practiced . . . How do you know how to do what you do?”

“I practiced,” said Liam.

The controls shuddered in Syd’s hands and he felt the power of the machine running through him. He shifted the pitch where they hovered; tweaked the roll to get the feel of it, leaning the hovercraft left and then right.

Liam stumbled off his feet, landing sideways wedged behind the copilot’s seat.

“Maybe I should drive,” he suggested as he tried to pry himself up and regain some of the dignity he liked to think he still had.

“Not on your life,” Syd replied. “Or on mine.”

And with that, Syd pushed the throttle and they roared from the depot, smashing through a flimsy fence. Syd rolled hard, taking them along the eastern road out of the jungle city.

“Aren’t we headed west?” Liam asked.

“This Cousin guy doesn’t know that. I want people to see us going east.”

Liam nodded, impressed with Syd’s thinking. Liam was good with blunt force, and he was glad Syd had a head for tactics. Together, they made a powerful team. He wondered whether Syd would see it that way. He also wondered how Marie fit in. She’d served the Reconciliation well. What would she do without a cause to get behind? Could they trust her? In the cabin, she began rummaging through the vehicle, taking an inventory of their supplies. She had the bolt gun now, but Liam had the EMD stick. The only one unarmed was Syd.

Syd accelerated, smashing undergrowth out of their path, slicing past the urban farming co-ops where young Purifiers stood idly about, wondering where most of their workers had gone, and past security checkpoints where young Purifiers didn’t even move to stop them, unaware that they were a vehicle full of fugitives. These young cadres hadn’t yet been told that a hovercraft had been stolen, nor were they yet aware that the Council had collapsed. It was just as well. If they’d tried to stop the hovercraft . . . Syd didn’t let his mind go there.

The vegetation thinned. The ruins of buildings spread out and minute by minute they sped from jungle to desert, cruising over an ancient bit of broken blacktop, the same route Syd had first taken into the city with Knox and Marie all those months ago.

He reached over and hit the intercom.

“Marie?” he asked. “How you doing back there? What do we have to work with?”

Silence.

“Marie?” he repeated, casting a nervous glance at Liam.

“I’ll go check on her,” Liam said.

Suddenly, there was a crashing sound, a shout.

“Marie!” Syd yelled.

Liam rushed back into the cabin. He saw Marie doubled over on a bench, her cheek dripping blood, and standing in front of her, his face bloody, his nose broken, was Finch.

Liam cursed himself for not killing the boy in the dark. He’d been too eager to get Syd away. He hadn’t double-checked his work. Two times he’d allowed Finch to live, which was, to his mind, two times too many.

Finch stood in fighting stance, ready.

Liam adjusted his footing, raised the EMD stick.

Finch whirled on him with a high kick. As Liam dodged, Finch shifted his momentum into a low slide that swept out Liam’s legs. The instant he began to fall, Finch jumped, slamming into Liam’s rib cage. He hit the hard metal deck of the hovercraft with a thud, the EMD stick pinned between them, humming with life, just a hair’s width from his chin. Finch pressed, using the full weight of his body to nudge it closer. One tap against Liam’s skin and it would be over. Liam couldn’t get any leverage to break free.

Suddenly, the hovercraft pitched hard, and Finch fell off him, crashing down onto the side of the vehicle. Liam caught on to the bench to keep from falling after him, and as the hovercraft spun in a tight circle to land, he hopped to his feet, rushing Finch before the boy could get up again.

But then he froze.

Finch had Marie’s bolt gun and it was pointed at Liam’s chest. His eyes were locked on Liam’s hips. Finch had gotten good training somewhere along the line. A person could fake a lot of movements before a dive to one side or the other, but you couldn’t fake with your hips. His first move and he’d get a bolt through the gut.

“I’m taking Syd back,” Finch said.

Around them, the engines powered down. Syd stepped into the cabin.

“Take cover!” Liam shouted.

“Finch,” Syd said calmly. “Put the gun down. You’re outnumbered.”

“I can handle this,” said Liam.

“Nothing to handle,” said Syd. “We’re all going to relax and lower our weapons, okay?”

Finch’s eyes darted to Syd. In that instant, Liam started to move forward, but Finch shook his head. “Don’t move. Drop that stick.”

Liam gripped the EMD stick tighter.

“I said drop it!” Finch’s finger moved to fire, just as Marie sprang from the bench and charged at him. Liam tossed her the stick, which she caught and swung into Finch’s face. It hit him with a full blast of power, knocking him back against the bulkhead. His limbs flailed out of control, and as he fell, his fingers released the bolt gun’s spring.

There was a loud crack as it fired. Liam dove and the bolt smacked into the metal wall of the hovercraft with a clang and an ear-popping echo. On the floor beneath Marie, Finch’s body quivered and then fell still. A full charge from the EMD stick was enough to stop his heart. He wouldn’t be getting up again.

When Liam stood, he felt a sharp pain. The bolt had grazed his rib cage, slicing open the side of his shirt and a thin line of his skin. It bled fast, like a waterfall.

Marie kicked the gun away from Finch’s lifeless hand as Syd stepped forward and looked down at the body. The mangled face and lifeless eyes stared up at him. It’d been high school the last time Syd had let his stare linger on Finch. The world had changed a lot since. Looking down on him, Syd was surprised he still felt a clenching in his chest. The boy had hated him, had tried to kill him. Why should Syd mourn him? Why should Syd be the only one left who would?

He remembered that line from an old book that Baram had muttered to him:
God gives burdens, but also shoulders.
A half-understood line from a mostly forgotten book. Funny what occurred to you when you weren’t sure how to feel.

“Are you okay?” Syd turned to Liam.

Liam touched his side and made sure not to wince. “Yeah,” he said. “Just a little cut.”

“It doesn’t look little,” Syd told him.

“We need to get moving. Cousin will be after us.”

“The sun’s going down soon,” Syd said. “I can’t see in the dark and if we run with lights on, we’ll be easy to spot from miles away. I set us down by some kind of rock formation. We’ll wait out the night, let anyone chasing us go by, thinking we’re still headed east, then we can double back and head west in the morning. We’ll make the Mountain City before noon. Right now, we can rest a minute. We can eat.” He pointed at Liam’s side. “And we can stop your bleeding.”

Liam sat back on the bench behind him. He was tired. He felt lightheaded. Hunger, exhaustion, and blood loss. A rest wasn’t the worst idea. He nodded.

Syd squatted and pulled out the emergency kit from under the passenger bench. He was glad the Reconciliation kept their vehicles well supplied.

“Don’t worry about me,” Liam objected. “I’ll be fine.”

“It’s not a problem,” Syd told him. “Remember? I’m good at fixing things.” He pulled a tube of BioGlue from the kit. It was lux, high-end stuff from before the Jubilee. The Reconciliation didn’t manufacture anything nearly this good. All their stitching was done with needle and thread, like ancient cave people.

“The BioGlue’s not even expired yet,” Syd told him. “It won’t leave a scar.”

Liam hadn’t actually ever had a wound patched with the good stuff. All his wounds scarred.

“Take your shirt off,” Syd ordered.

It was Liam’s turn to hesitate.

Syd raised an eyebrow. “So
now
you care about privacy?”

Liam glanced at Marie, who busied herself looking out the small porthole at the desert, pink and red as the sun went down. Liam took a deep breath and peeled his shirt off. The movement was agony and he tried to stifle a groan.

Syd froze looking at him. His entire right side, from just under his armpit down to the waistband of his pants, was sliced open, soaked with blood. That, however, wasn’t what startled Syd.

On the upper left side of Liam’s chest, scrawled across his pectoral muscle just below the collarbone, he had four letters roughly tattooed. The ink was slightly blue, some natural pigment, and there was no telling how long he’d had it, but the letters were clear as day. They were the same letters that were behind Syd’s ear, the letters for Syd’s other name, Yovel.

“I just—” Liam began, but how could he explain? Syd hadn’t put those letters on his body by choice. They were a curse to him, a symbol of all the agony he’d endured and the death he’d caused. On Liam, they represented a promise. Debts forgiven. What he gave, he gave freely.

Syd couldn’t take his eyes off them.

Liam felt a moment of relief that he was bleeding so much. It made it impossible for him to blush again.

Marie cleared her throat.

“I should clean the wound,” Syd told Liam, snapping his eyes away from the letters. He knelt next to Liam with the BioGlue and the medic’s kit, taking out a sterile cloth and wiping down Liam’s side. There was so much blood, he couldn’t even see where the cut was in order to seal it.

When the cloth touched his side, Liam winced, but not because it hurt.

Syd shot a look up at him and, when their eyes met, he looked back down just as quickly, focused on the task, not on the rise and fall of the rib cage, the tattoo across the side, the way the light through the porthole made Liam’s pale skin glow.

No different from fixing a broken machine,
Syd told himself.

No different from any other wound I’ve had patched up,
Liam told himself.

Marie went back to organizing the supplies in the hovercraft, inventorying what they had, the weapons, the food, tools. She didn’t know what they’d need or why Syd thought they’d find what they were looking for in Mountain City, but it would help to have an inventory regardless. And it would keep her from watching Syd and Liam in the most awkward medical procedure she’d ever seen.

“I—” Syd started to say something.

“I—” Liam said at the same time.

They fell silent again.

Syd located the edges of the wound. He dabbed the blood away gently and Liam sucked in a breath. Syd began to apply the BioGlue and it stung more than Liam would have imagined. He clenched and unclenched the metal fist, reminding himself he had suffered much, much worse than this.

Syd filled the silence between them with things that didn’t need saying. “So, uh, I think, in the city, we might find the Machine, or, like, the parts I need to build a machine . . .”

“Uh-huh,” Liam grunted through the pain.

“I mean, if there are pieces of tech left that could do it, I think we’ll find them there,” Syd continued.

“We have to,” said Marie. “If we can’t get the network back on . . .”

“Your parents,” said Syd.

Marie nodded. “Everyone.”

Syd sighed. “You, me, Liam—”

“Not me,” Liam whispered. Syd looked up at him. “I was never linked to the network, never had biodata installed. I grew up out here. I’m one of the few. I won’t get sick, at least not from this.” He looked down at Syd. “Not like you will.”

Syd went back to applying the medicated bandage over the sealed wound, kept his eyes lowered. He studied his own dark hand pressed against Liam’s pale skin, the dried blood on his fingernails, and through them, like a reflection in water, he saw the Guardians with their black veins oozing, their silent groans as they itched their own skin off, bled out, died. Were they a vision of his future? All their futures? All but Liam’s?

“You sound like you want to apologize for it,” he told his bodyguard.

“I do,” said Liam, and Syd finally looked up and saw those sad puppy eyes, Liam’s face twisted into a frown. “I don’t know how to protect you from this.”

“The Council is gone.” Syd looked back down at his hand against Liam’s skin. He didn’t pull it away. “The Reconciliation is over. I’m not their symbol anymore. I’m not Yovel. Your job is done. The Reconciliation doesn’t need you to protect me.”

Liam swallowed. “I never did it for them. You know I didn’t.”

“I know you didn’t,” said Syd.

Liam raised his good hand under Syd’s chin, lifted his face up so their eyes would meet again. He felt a chill run through him, heard his own pulse in his ears. There was a reason he never touched Syd with his good hand. He could almost feel himself shaking. “Let me protect you.”

“You just said that you can’t.”

“I’ll find a way.”

Syd’s lips were cracked, his eyes wet and dark. His stubble grew in unevenly. They looked at each other. “I’m not an easy guy to protect.”

Liam leaned down, in spite of the pain in his side. His face was just in front of Syd’s. He whispered, “I don’t need easy.”

Syd took his hand off Liam’s side, wrapped his fingers around Liam’s hand against his cheek, held it, closed his eyes. Then he took Liam’s hand away from his face. He turned away.

“You’ll need to keep that bandage on for at least twelve hours,” he said, standing. He looked to Marie, who was pretending to be absorbed in organizing the tools in the repair kit by size and shape and color. “When we get to Mountain City tomorrow,” Syd told her, “I’ll need you to navigate for me.”

“Okay,” she agreed quickly, acting like she hadn’t just been listening to their conversation. “Where to?”

“Knox’s father ran SecuriTech,” said Syd. “If there is a Machine, he would’ve had it.”