Pandemonium (15 page)

Just then a shadow zooms past me—so sudden and startling I nearly slip backward. For a moment I feel the terror of free fall—the tipping, the cold air behind me—but at the last second I manage to right myself. My heart is pounding, though, and I can’t shake that momentary impression of falling.

And then I see that it wasn’t a shadow that startled me.

It was a bird. A bird struggling through stickiness: a bird coated in paint, floundering in its nest, splashing color everywhere.

Red. Red. Red.

Dozens of them: black feathers coated thickly with crimson-colored paint, fluttering among the branches.

Red means run.

I don’t know how I get down from the tree. I am slipping and sliding, all the grace and ease driven out of my limbs by the panic. Red means run. I drop the last four feet and land tumbling in the snow. Cold seeps through my jeans and sweater. I snatch my jacket and run, just like Hunter told me to do, through the dazzling, melting world of ice, while blackness eats at the edges of my vision. Every step is an agony, and I feel like I’m in one of those nightmares where you’re trying to escape but you can’t move at all.

Now the humming I heard earlier is louder—not like crickets at all. Like hornets.

Like motors.

My lungs are burning and my chest is aching and tears are stinging my eyes as I flounder toward the homestead. I want to scream. I want to sprout wings and fly. And for a second I think,
Maybe it was all a mistake. Maybe nothing bad will happen.

That is when the humming turns into a roar, and above the trees I see the first plane tearing across the sky, screaming.

But no. I’m the one screaming.

I am screaming as I run. I am screaming when the first bomb falls, and the Wilds turn to fire around me.

I
open my eyes into pain. For a second everything is swirling color, and I have a moment of total panic—
Where am I? What happened?
—but then shapes and boundaries assert themselves. I am in a windowless stone room, lying on a cot. In my confusion I think that perhaps I’ve made it back to the burrow, and found myself in the sickroom.

But no. This room is smaller and dingier. There are no sinks, and only one bucket in the corner, and the mattress I’m lying on is stained and thin and without sheets.

Memories return: the rally in New York; the subway entrance, the horrible vision of the bodyguards. I remember the rasping voice in my ear:
Not so fast.

I try to sit up and instantly have to lay back again, overwhelmed by the surge behind my eyes, like the pressure of a knife.

“Water helps.”

This time I do sit up, whipping around despite the pain. Julian Fineman is sitting on a narrow cot behind me, leaning his head against the wall, watching me through heavy-lidded eyes. He is holding a tin cup, which he extends toward me.

“They brought it earlier,” he says. There is a long, thin gash that runs from his eyebrow to his jaw, caked with dried blood, and a bruise on the left side of his forehead, just beneath his hairline. The room is outfitted with a small bulb, set high in the ceiling, and in its white glow, his hair is the color of new straw.

My eyes go immediately to the door behind him, and he shakes his head. “Locked from the outside.”

So. Prisoners.

“Who’s they?” I ask, even though I know. It must be Scavengers who brought us here. I think of that hellish vision in the tunnels, a guard strung up, another knifed in his back … no one but the Scavengers could have done that.

Julian shakes his head. I see, too, that he has bruises around his neck. They must have choked him. His jacket is gone and his shirt is ripped; there’s more blood ringing his nostrils, and some of it has dripped onto his shirt. But he seems surprisingly calm. The hand holding the cup is steady.

Only his eyes are electric, restless—that vivid, improbable blue, alert and watchful.

I reach out to take the cup from him, but at the last second he draws it away a fraction of an inch.

“I recognize you,” he says, “from the meeting.” Something flickers in his eyes. “You lost your glove.”

“Yeah.” I reach again for the cup.

The water tastes mossy, but it feels amazing on my throat. As soon as I have a sip, I realize I’ve never been so thirsty in my life. There isn’t enough to take more than a bare edge off the feeling; I gulp most of it down in one go before realizing, guiltily, that Julian might want some. There’s a half inch of water left, which I try to return to him.

“You can finish it,” he says, and I don’t argue. As I drink, I can feel his eyes on me again, and when I look at him, I see that he has been staring at the three-pronged scar on my neck. It seems to reassure him.

Amazingly, I still have my backpack. For some reason, the Scavengers have let me keep it. This gives me hope. They may be vicious, but they’re obviously not very practiced at kidnapping people. I remove a granola bar from my bag, then reconsider. I’m not starving yet, and I have no idea how long I’m going to be trapped in this rat hole. I learned in the Wilds: It’s better to wait when you still can. Eventually, you’ll be too desperate to have self-control.

The rest of the things I’ve brought—
The Book of Shhh
, Tack’s stupid umbrella, the water bottle, which I drank dry on the bus ride into Manhattan, and a tube of mascara, probably Raven’s, nestled at the very bottom of the bag—are useless. Now I know why they didn’t bother confiscating the backpack. Still, I take everything out, lay it carefully on my bed, and overturn the backpack—shaking it hard, as though a knife or a lock pick or some other kind of salvation might suddenly materialize.

Nothing. Still, there’s got to be a way out of here.

I stand up and go to the door, bending my left arm. The pain in my elbow has faded to a dull throb. It isn’t broken, then: another good sign.

I try the door: locked, like he said, and made of heavy iron. Impossible to break down. There’s a smaller door—about the size of a cat flap—fitted into the larger one. I squat down and examine it. The way its hinges are fitted allows it to be opened from their side, but not from ours.

“That’s where they put the water through,” Julian says. “Food, too.”

“Food?” This surprises me. “They gave you food?”

“A little bit of bread. Some nuts, too. I ate it all. I didn’t know how long you’d be out.” He looks away.

“That’s all right.” I straighten up, and scan the walls for cracks or fissures, a hidden door, or a weak place we might be able to push through. “I would have done the same thing.”

Food, water, an underground cell: Those are the facts. I can tell we’re underground because of the pattern of mold at the top of the walls—it’s a particular kind that we used to get all the time in the burrow. It comes from the dirt all around us.

It means, essentially, that we’re buried.

But if they’d wanted us dead, we’d have been dead already. That is a fact also.

Still, it is not particularly comforting. If the Scavengers have kept us alive so far, it can only be because they’re planning something far worse for us than death.

“What do you remember?” I ask Julian.

“What?”

“What do you remember? About the attack? Noises, smells, order of events?” When I look directly at Julian, he clicks his eyes away from mine. Of course, he has had years of training—segregation, principles of avoidance, the Protective Three: Distance, Detachment, Dispassion. I’m tempted to remind him that it isn’t illegal to make eye contact with a cured. But it seems absurd to have a conversation about right and wrong here.

He must be in denial. That’s why he’s staying so calm.

He sighs, runs a hand through his hair. “I don’t remember anything.”

“Try.”

He shakes his head, as though trying to dislodge the memory, leans back again, and stares at the ceiling. “When the Invalids came during the rally…”

I wince unconsciously as he pronounces the word. I have to bite my lip to keep from correcting him: Scavengers. Not Invalids. We’re not all the same.

“Go on,” I prompt him. I’m moving down the walls now, running my hands along the concrete. I don’t know what I’m hoping to find. We’re trapped, pure and simple. But it seems to make it easier for Julian to speak when I’m not looking at him.

“Bill and Tony—those are my dad’s bodyguards—grabbed me and dragged me toward the emergency exit. We’d planned it earlier, in case something went wrong; we were supposed to go into the tunnels and reconvene, wait for my father.” His voice catches the slightest bit on the word
father
, and he coughs. “The tunnels were dark. Tony went looking for the flashlights. He’d stashed them earlier. Then we heard—then we heard a shout, and a cracking noise. Like a nut.”

Julian swallows hard. For a moment I feel bad for him. He has seen a lot, and quickly.

But I remind myself that he and his father are the reason that the Scavengers exist—the reason they’re forced to exist. The DFA and organizations like it have pushed and squeezed and elbowed out all the feeling in the world. They have clamped their fists around a geyser to keep it from exploding.

But the pressure eventually builds, and the explosion will always come.

“Then Bill went ahead, to make sure Tony was okay. He told me not to move. I waited there. And then—I felt someone squeezing my throat from behind. I couldn’t breathe. Everything went blurry. I saw someone approaching but couldn’t make out any features. Then he hit me.” He gestures to his nose and shirt. “I passed out. When I woke up, I was in here. With you.”

I’ve finished my tour of our makeshift cell. But I’m filled with nervous energy and can’t bring myself to sit down. I continue pacing, back and forth, keeping my eyes trained on the ground.

“And you don’t remember anything else? No other noises or smells?”

“No.”

“And nobody spoke? Nobody said anything to you?”

There’s a pause before he says, “No.” I’m not sure whether he’s lying or not. But I don’t push it. A feeling of complete exhaustion overwhelms me. The pain comes slamming back into my skull, exploding little points of color behind my eyelids. I thump down hard on the ground, draw my knees up to my chest.

“So what now?” Julian says. There’s a small note of desperation in his voice. I realize that he isn’t in denial. He isn’t calm, either. He’s scared, and fighting it.

I lean my head back against the wall and close my eyes. “Now we wait.”

It is impossible to know what time it is, and whether it is night or day. The electric bulb fitted high in the wall casts a flat white light over everything. Hours pass. At least Julian knows how to be quiet. He stays on his cot, and whenever I am not looking at him, I can feel him watching me. This is, in all probability, the first time he has ever been alone with a girl his age for an extended period of time, and his eyes travel over my hair, and legs, and arms, as though I am a strange species of animal at the zoo. It makes me want to put on my jacket again, to cover up, but I don’t. It’s hot.

“When did you have your procedure?” he asks me at a certain point.

“November,” I answer automatically. My mind is turning the same questions over and over again. Why bring us here? Why keep us alive? Julian, I can understand. He’s worth something. They must be after a ransom.

But I’m not worth anything. And that makes me very, very nervous.

“Did it hurt?” he asks.

I look up at him. I’m once again startled by the clarity of his eyes: now a clear river color, threaded with purple and navy shadows.

“Not too bad,” I lie.

“I hate hospitals,” he says, looking away. “Labs, scientists, doctors. All that.”

A few beats of silence stretch between us. “Aren’t you kind of used to it by now?” I say, because I can’t help it.

The left corner of his mouth twitches upward: a tiny smile. He looks at me sideways.

“I guess there are some things you never get used to,” he says, and for no reason at all, I think of Alex and feel a tightening in my stomach.

“I guess so,” I say.

Later on there is a change, a shift in the silence. I have been lying on the cot, preserving my strength, but now I sit up.