Rebellion (18 page)

I wipe my nose with the back of my hand, and rub some of the blood still on my cheeks around a little. Hopefully that will make me look less like Clementine, since I’m sure I’ll have to pass Sam on the way out of the building.

“Where are you hurt?” the guard asks when he reaches me. His figure blocks Sam from view.

“I’m fine,” I say, but when I let go of the wall I purposely lose my balance. He grabs my shoulders so I won’t fall.

“No, you’re not,” he says, and signals the medics to set the stretcher on the ground. “Where did you come from?”

“One of the exam rooms.” I talk fast. “A wall blew apart right after my doctor gave me a shot. I think it knocked me out. I woke up and she was dead. Her blood was all over me. I heard another explosion and I knew I had to get out of there. I was so scared.”

“It’s gonna be okay.” The guard helps me over to the stretcher, and the medics help me climb onto it.

“Who set off the bombs?” I ask, curling up on my side. “How many people died? Some of my friends were in the other exam rooms.”

“We got a lot of people out, but we don’t know how many were trapped inside, or who made this happen.” The guard crouches beside the stretcher. “Listen, uh…”

“Brea.”

“Brea. These nurses are gonna take you outside and make sure you’re okay, and get you back to the camp safely. We’re gonna make sure your friends got out. Okay?”

“Okay.”

“You’ll be just fine,” he says.

“Promise?”

“Yes.” The thinness of his lips tells me he’s lying. He must know Charlie’s plans for me and everyone else in the camp. He knows, by the end of it, it’s likely we’re all going to end up dead.

He straightens as the medics lift my stretcher. We start down the hallway, and I curl up tighter, wrapping my arms around my stomach. Sam is straight ahead. There’s no way he won’t recognize me, if he gets a good look at my face. Joe did, after all.

Joe’s face flashes through my head, with the blood trickling from his hairline.

No, I will not berate myself for what I did to him. This wasn’t like what happened with Cady. I was ready to let him go; I was ready to trust him, because I didn’t want to kill him. But he gave me no choice.

The sound of Sam and the other guards talking tells me when we’ve reached the entrance. I open my eyes a little, enough to see Sam giving orders to several more officials who’ve just entered the building.

“I want teams of two,” he says. “You check
every room
. Haul out anyone who’s still alive, and try to identify the rest.”

He doesn’t spare a glance my way as the medics carry my stretcher out of the entrance. But I keep expecting him to. I can’t believe he really wouldn’t notice me a second time.

Not ten seconds later, we’re outside, and his voice is lost in the midst of others. There are a few more officials moving on the wide pathway, but mostly it’s filled with the nurses and doctors who must’ve evacuated. There aren’t as many as I would expect—nine or ten at the most. Smoke is heavy in the air; it smells like the whole world is burning. Some of the nurses are crying loudly and hugging each other, like they can’t believe this happened.

The medics set my stretcher down on the side of the pathway, where it branches off into another road along the edge of the cavern. It must lead to the city because there are transports parked here—small, silver ones Sam and the extra guards and the medics must’ve used. It makes sense they’d have a faster way to get here, instead of cutting through the camp.

“They’re gonna need us inside,” one of the medics says.

“You go,” his partner says. “Tell the lieutenant I’ll get in there as soon as I can.”

As the first medic jogs back to the building entrance, I push myself up with my elbows, ready to stand and limp back into the camp. Sam hasn’t come out of the quarantine facility, but he could at any moment. The camp is the safest place for me to hide.

“Hold up there,” the medic says, putting a hand on my shoulder to push me back down. “You need to sit tight for a minute. I’m not letting you go until I’ve had a look at your injuries.”

I was afraid he’d say that. “I’m not really hurt. The blood isn’t mine.”

My head’s still throbbing, but I doubt there’s a way he can fix it without giving me a shot, and I’m done with those forever.

“I need to at least check your vitals,” the medic says, stepping over to the back of his medical transport. “And maybe you’d like clean clothes, or some water? I’d take advantage of this, if I were you. I know your daily rations are scarce.”

He has a point, if he’s going to make me sit here anyway. “Water, I suppose.”

He returns with a bag of medical supplies and a small canister of water. I take the canister and down the cool liquid in only a few swallows. I wish I’d taken my time after it’s gone.

The medic chuckles as he takes the empty canister away. He reaches into his bag and pulls out a stethoscope. He listens to my heart, while my eyes stray to the smoke trailing from the ruins of the quarantine facility, up to the mossy stone in the high ceiling of the cavern. I hope the kill chambers are really destroyed, and the furnaces and all the medical equipment too. I hope when Charlie hears what happened here, it makes him furious.

I’m almost smiling to myself when I remember he has Beechy. What will he do to him for this?

“Thomas,” someone says behind me.

The medic looks up. “Yes?”

“Lieutenant Sam wants you in there. I’ll get this girl back to the camp.” The person sets his hand on my shoulder, gripping it a bit too tightly.

It’s Skylar, I’m 99 percent sure. But I have to act normal.

Thomas mutters something incoherent, but takes the stethoscope out of his ears and straightens. “All righty, then. It seems you’re well enough, Brea.”

“Thank you for the water,” I say.

“My pleasure.” He smiles and tosses the empty canister into the back of the medi-pod, and heads back to the building.

I get to my feet a bit unsteadily and turn to Skylar. She has a helmet on but the visor’s open, so I can tell she’s glancing over my body.

“You’re gonna get me all bloody,” she says, and grips my shoulder again and shoves me toward the medi-pod. She lets go of me to climb into the back, to rummage for a towel or something. “Don’t you dare move,” she adds loud enough she must want people to hear her.

Quieter, she says, “Did they give you a shot? Whisper when you answer, or I swear I’ll strangle you.”

“No, they didn’t,” I say in a low voice. “The first explosion cut them off.”

“Good thing you made it out of there alive. Paley and Jensen screwed up the timers. The explosives were supposed to go off this morning.”

“I wondered if it was a mistake.”

“Yeah, well at least it’s over.”

She steps out of the medi-pod and hands me a towel. I wipe off the blood from my cheeks, though some of it seems already dried.

Skylar checks behind me, then says, “Listen. Charlie’s got a lot of people looking for you.”

“So I’ve heard,” I say. “Do you know if he wants me dead or alive?”

“Alive.”

That’s what I don’t understand. Charlie was going to leave me to die in the flight hangar the day of the bomb. I’d become too reckless for him to have any hope of turning me into one of his mindless soldiers anymore. The only reason I can imagine he’d let me live now would be to punish me for my crimes before he kills me. To torture me worse than he already has.

“So what am I supposed to do?” I ask.

“I need you to stay undercover in the camp as long as you can. Spread the word to everyone you can that an uprising is underway. Those in the camps can be a part of it soon.”

Now that they’re all subdued, I’m not sure how much help they’ll be. But hopefully some of them—those with stronger wills—will be able to fight the injection. Those are the people I can still get on our side.

But I don’t know how Skylar expects me to be useful if she keeps me in the dark about Alliance movements. “It would help if you’d keep me informed about what you and the others are planning,” I say, not hiding the annoyance in my voice.

“It’s too dangerous to get messages to you often,” Skylar says, grabbing the towel from me and throwing it back into the pod. “But I’ll try. Now let’s get you back to the camp before someone comes over.”

Gripping my arm, she hauls me toward the gate, less than twenty feet away.

We need more time. I have at least a hundred more questions about Beechy, and Mal, and whatever information the Alliance might’ve found out about Charlie’s plan by now. But one thing can’t wait.

“Logan. Is he in the other camp?”

“Yes,” she says. “He was called for inspection this morning like you, but Jensen checked on him, and he was already out of the building when the bomb went off.”

She pushes me through the open camp gate with more force than necessary. But I don’t even care. I could laugh, I’m so relieved. Logan is alive; he’s all right.

The gate clangs shut behind me. I push myself to my feet and turn in time to see Skylar walking away, before she disappears into the crowd.

She seemed harsher than her usual self. I hope she’s not still angry at me for Cady’s death. I hope she’s just trying to stay in character, even when no one’s watching.

As I turn away from the gate, her last words play through my mind again:
He was already outside the building when the bomb went off.

Every limb of my body freezes.

She was talking about Logan. She said he’d been called in for inspection, but if he was outside before the explosion, that means he finished sooner than I did. He got all the way through his examination with a doctor.

That can only mean one thing: he was given the shot. He couldn’t have gotten out of the exam without it.

Logan is one of the mindless.

16

The camp seems oddly quiet tonight. People aren’t even whispering; they’re sleeping, or staring at the walls with uncertain looks on their faces. In the Surface camp, if we’d heard that someone set off explosives in the quarantine facility, we would’ve cheered.

I can only assume the submission serum is the reason no one here seems to care. Their eyes don’t seem muddled or lifeless, like the eyes of most of the subdued I’ve seen, but there’s clearly something different about them. Maybe the effects are taking longer to set in, because there’s something different about the injections they were given.

In the shadows, I lean against the wall hugging my knees to my chest. It’s been hours since the explosion. I couldn’t stay near the building to watch the rescue teams, because of Sam, so I don’t know if they’re still trying to get people out. I don’t know where Hector or Evie or Arthur is. Hopefully not trapped in the facility—hopefully they’re somewhere in one of these crowded rooms. I haven’t exactly been looking for them. Chances are they were given the injection, so they’re probably silent like all the rest of these people. But Skylar’s right—there must be a few people in the camp, at least, whose bodies have rejected the serum. There must even be a few who didn’t get the shot at all, since the bomb went off in the middle of the inspections. If they aren’t subdued like all the others, they must be aware that something is wrong. Maybe they would believe me if I told them what I know. But how can I pick them out from all the rest?

If only Logan were here. Maybe he’d be subdued like everyone else, but at least he’d be with me. Most of the time, things make more sense with him around.

When we first arrived at the KIMO facility, he hardly left my side. We’d been apart for so long since I left for the Core—even when we were reunited, it was in the midst of a fight we almost didn’t survive—and both of us were afraid of losing each other again.

The first night in the compound, we’d been assigned separate bunk rooms, and I resigned myself to the fact that we’d have to spend our nights apart. But Logan had a different idea. He told me to wait until everyone else in my room was asleep, slip out of bed, and meet him in one of the training rooms. When I found him, he’d set up a makeshift bed with blankets on the floor mat, in a corner.

“I figured it’s still better than where we used to sleep, back in the camp,” Logan said with a sheepish smile.

“It’s perfect,” I said, dropping onto the mat and pulling one of the blankets over me. “Even if people can see us on the security cameras.”

“It’s dark. Anyway, I doubt the techs pay much attention during the night.”

“Hopefully not.”

Logan slid an arm around my waist. “I missed you,” he said softly.

His words were soft and simple, but they sent an ache straight through me, because a few days before, they’d meant so much more.

I leaned my forehead against his. “I’m here now,” I reminded him.

“Good,” he whispered, and kissed me. His lips were soft and tasted sweet. I melted into him, pushing off the blanket so it wouldn’t be between us. He responded by shifting his body closer to mine. Nervousness trickled down my spine, but I didn’t stop him.

All those days I was separated from him, and finally he was right there beside me.

He kissed me again and again, each kiss deeper than the last. My fingers drifted under his shirt and traced lines above the hem of his pants. Logan made a low, guttural sound in his throat. His mouth moved to my neck, while his hands slipped underneath my shirt.

He was kissing me faster now, pressing his lips against my skin once, twice, a hundred times. I fell apart, unraveling at his fingertips. Every breath for him, every touch for him.

He pulled away from me abruptly, wincing.

“What’s wrong?” I whispered.

“Nothing,” he said. But when he leaned in to kiss me, whatever it was made him stop again. He groaned.

“Is it your leg?” I asked.

His face tightened with pain. “It’s been acting up lately.”

I helped him lower onto his side on the mat, to take his weight off his bad leg. Laying beside him, I pulled the blanket over both of us.

“Thanks,” he said. “Sorry. I didn’t mean for it to mess this up.”

“You don’t have to apologize. This was perfect.” I wrapped my arms around him, and he snuggled me back with a sigh.