Struck (21 page)

We were on the edge of the dance floor now. I crossed my arms over my chest, partly out of indignation, partly because I needed to trap them, keep them from doing what they wanted to do, which was to touch Jeremy. To feel the burn of him. How could I still be thinking this way about a guy who had considered stabbing me to death?

“Please, Mia,” Jeremy said, the anger in his voice softening until he was almost begging. “You can’t be here.”

My folded arms tightened, and I began scanning the room once again. “I’m not going anywhere without Parker.”

Jeremy’s face froze between expressions. “Who … who’s Parker?”

“My brother. He’s here somewhere, and I’m not leaving without him.”

“Oh.” Jeremy’s shoulders dropped a little, as though he was relieved.

Did he think I was talking about another guy? A non-brother guy?

Jeremy, too, started scouring the room with his eyes.

“Do you even know what my brother looks like?” I asked.

He nodded. “I’ve seen him before.”

My heart lurched. “When? Were you in his room? Were you going to stick a knife in him, too?”

“No! I swear I’ve never gone near him. You were the only one I …” His words fell away, like they’d stumbled off a cliff. He must have realized there was no good way to say,
You were the only one I considered murdering
.

But if he wanted me dead, why was he so intent on saving me?

I let my eyes linger on Jeremy, studying him, trying to decide if I could see past the knife incident to trust him. But the only thing I could think about when I stared at him was how I wanted to keep staring, never take my eyes away. Even with his eyes and teeth glowing, he looked miles beyond good, in a beaten black motorcycle jacket and white jeans that were luminous under the black light. The white jeans threw me off for a second, but on Jeremy they worked.

I pried my eyes from Jeremy and stood on tiptoes to see over the mass of people bunched together on the dance floor. “Let’s pretend I would consider going anywhere with you,” I said. “I assume you have a car?”

“A bike.”

“A bike as in motorcycle?” I shook my head. I wouldn’t be ditching Katrina after all. “Where’s my brother supposed to sit?”

Jeremy cursed under his breath. His jaw clenched. Fists clenched. “You’ll have to go without him.”

“No way. Why do you want me to—” My words stopped. I thought of what I’d seen when Jeremy pressed his hands to my eyes, me falling into the chasm. The same chasm I’d almost plunged into tonight. “Something’s going to happen, isn’t it?” I said, eyes widening. “You saw it.”

Jeremy didn’t get a chance to confirm or deny. At that moment the elevator doors opened, and a new group of rovers filed into the room.

They were dressed in white.
All
in white. They glowed under the black light like a pack of ghosts.

“This is bad,” Jeremy said.

The Followers glided toward the DJ station, their feet barely seeming to touch the ground. They were young. Not one of them looked older than twenty, but that might have been due to the air of innocence they carried in their empty expressions.

Some of the rovers on the elevator side of the dance floor had noticed the Followers, and their movements slowed to a stop, like windup toys that had run down. The two
DJs looked up to see the procession heading straight for them, and they gawked, forgetting their records. They missed a transition, and more rovers took notice. Voices rose in complaint and quickly fell as more and more people saw the Followers.

The two Followers at the head of the procession, a boy and a girl, both with hair so blond it glowed as bright as their whites, came to a stop at the DJ table. I recognized them from
The Hour of Light
. They were two of Prophet’s adopted children, the freakishly tall twins.

The rest of the Followers looked familiar, too. I thought of the headline I’d read on Schiz’s blog—
Where Is Prophet’s Twelfth Apostle?
—and counted them. There were only eleven, but I was sure these were Prophet’s adopted children.

I looked at Jeremy, at the grim expression on his face. Had he known Prophet’s Apostles were coming? Had he seen it, the way he’d seen me coming to the Waste, falling into the chasm?

Panic twisted my stomach into cruel knots. Where was Parker?

The twins spoke to the DJs for a moment in voices no one else could hear. There was a lot of head shaking on the DJs’ end. But the other Apostles surrounded the DJ station, and finally the DJs gave the twins what they wanted.

They handed over their microphones and shut off the music.

The room went so quiet I felt like I’d gone spontaneously deaf.

The twins faced an audience of stunned rovers, glowing eyes empty, smiles lifting the corners of their mouths to unnatural heights.

Jeremy nudged me and jerked his head toward a door on the far side of the room. There was a little plaque next to the door with a picture of a stick figure man walking down a flight of stick-figure stairs.

I shook my head.

“Hello,” the she-twin said into the microphone, her voice booming.

“Good evening.” The he-twin gave a tiny bow. “You’re probably wondering why we’ve interrupted your party.”

Silence from the rovers. I kept expecting the uproar to start, but they seemed to be in shock.

“We’ve come to deliver an important message from Rance Ridley Prophet of the Church of Light,” the she-twin said, her smile stretching wider, though if it continued to grow it would extend the limits of her face. “In two days, you will all die.”

I didn’t think it was possible for the silence to deepen, but it did. Until the he-twin broke it.

“
Unless
,” the he-twin amended, “you come to Prophet with a penitent heart and surrender your souls to his mercy.”

“It’s not too late,” said the she-twin. “You can still be saved. All you have to do is ask humbly, and he will grant you his blessing.”

“And the fires of hell will never touch you.”

“You will be protected on the last day of earth.”

“You will be raptured to Paradise.”

“God speaks to Prophet and tells him so.”

“But if you refuse to heed this warning … if you continue down the path of iniquity … you—”

The twins cast their eyes about the room, as did the rest
of the Apostles. I looked at Jeremy and saw his head was lowered, hair hanging in his face. He almost looked like he was praying.

“—
you
,” the she-twin continued, “will be the first to die when the sixth seal is broken. The first to perish when the earth is rent asunder and the stars fall from the sky and the moon turns to blood. You will be—”

“Shut up, you psycho bitch!”

The voice rang out like a bell and seemed to reverberate through the room for seconds after it was raised.

The she-twin’s smile shriveled. “Who said that?”

The he-twin put his arm around his sister’s shoulder. “Who dares speak ill of my sister?”

“Your sister’s a freak, and so are you!”

Suddenly the rovers were all shouting at once. Cursing and hurling insults. And the Apostles were shouting back. I couldn’t make out their words. It was like someone had turned on a hundred blenders and thrown every voice in.

One of the DJs tried to snatch the mic out of the she-twin’s hand. Her brother reacted, lashing out with his fist, connecting with the DJ’s throat. Another rover, this one twitchy and wild-eyed and definitely on something, launched himself at the he-twin, knocking him backward onto the floor. The rover landed on top and started pummeling the he-twin with both fists. The she-twin tried to pull the rover off her brother, and he shoved her away. She fell and hit her face on the corner of the DJ table, and when she got to her feet her mouth was gushing blood from a split lip. The blood dribbled down her chin and made dark splotches on her white dress.

That was when the fighting really started.

But all of it was background noise compared to the urgent voice shouting in my head,
Find Parker! Find Parker!

I searched the crowd, desperate to see him, but—

I spotted someone I did recognize, moving toward the melee with a determined look on his face. I grabbed him as he passed.

Quentin tried to jerk away. Then he saw my face and froze, eyes growing. “Mia? What are you doing here?” He looked at my hand on his arm and grimaced slightly, as though I were hurting him. I wasn’t gripping hard, but Quentin was a Seeker. If I really was emitting some kind of Spark, it must not feel good to him.

“Where’s my brother!” I shouted at him. “Where’s Parker!”

He shook his head, seeming dazed. “How should I know?”

“You brought him here!”

“No, I didn’t.” His head shaking became more insistent. “If he’s here, he didn’t come with me.” His eyes narrowed. “Who told you I brought him?”

Realization was clearing out a space in my mind.

“Katrina,” I said, and Quentin nodded.

“Sounds like something she would pull.”

She lied to me. Katrina lied to me. My brother wasn’t here.

“Where is she now?” Quentin asked.

“Hopefully getting kicked in the face by an Apostle,” I said. There was no real force behind the words. I was too relieved to be angry. “If you see her, tell her to go to hell. I found another way home.”

I turned from Quentin to tell Jeremy I was ready to go willingly, but Jeremy was nowhere in sight.

I clenched my fists, like I meant to join the fight. But there was only one person I wanted to punch right then.

He’d ditched me. Jeremy had ditched me … again.

I turned back to Quentin to ask him how he had gotten to the Rove and caught a glimpse of the back of his head before he dove into the fray.

I was doomed to be reliant on Katrina for a way out of the Waste.

I had started searching the crowd for her when Jeremy reappeared, and before I could say a word he grabbed me, threw me over his shoulder, and started for the stairwell door.

I would have fought him.

I would have kicked and beaten at him until he let me down.

But almost immediately after he touched me and the heat of him swelled through me, my mind went brilliant white and then plummeted into darkness and then I was—

—
rushing through the Waste, with Jeremy at my side. Hollow buildings watched us with the empty, midnight eyes of their shattered windows. The wind was fierce, tearing at me like it would steal my skin
.

I held myself, bracing against the wind as it hurled cement and glass dust at us, coating our skin and clothes, trying to bury us
.

“Come on!” I said, grabbing Jeremy’s hand and running blindly
.

We sprinted through the torn, rubble-filled streets, eyes closed against the dust and the wind. I didn’t know how long we ran, and I didn’t know where we were going. The wind seemed to choose our direction for us, pushing and pulling us
.

Then, suddenly, the wind stopped, and I could see
.

“No …”

We stood at the foot of the Tower. I craned my head to see to its top, and I heard music, thumping bass rumbling the whole building, like every floor was wired with massive speakers
.

But when thunder boomed, it drowned the Rove’s bass drive
.

Clouds. Thick and black as the sky, tall as mountains, seethed into being above the massive building
.

Thunder destroyed my thoughts. I felt the charge of the storm. The thrill of the storm
.

“It’s time for me to go,” I said to Jeremy, staring up at the clouds
.

I gasped myself back to the present. Or I thought I did. My eyes were open, but all I saw was a solid wall of black.

“Mia, are you back?” It was Jeremy’s voice.

“What did you do to her?” That was Katrina’s.

Jeremy: “Nothing.”

Katrina: “You can’t just go throwing girls over your shoulder and carrying them away. Who
are
you? Why did you run away from us the other day? Are you a spy for the Followers?”

Me: “What’s going on? Where are we? I can’t see a thing.”

I blinked and blinked. Shapes started to form in the darkness. I felt the ground. It was cold and hard. Cement. And the wall behind me, the wall I was leaning against, also cement. I reached up and felt a hard, rounded rod. Metal. A handrail.

“We’re in the stairwell,” Jeremy said.

I used the handrail to hoist myself to my feet. I kept my hand on the rail, felt the way it slanted upward. I could hear distant shouting from several floors above us, beyond a closed door.

The Rove was up.

Parker was up.

I started to climb, and then remembered … Parker was not at the Rove. Katrina had lied to me. Manipulated me.

I rounded on Katrina, though I couldn’t exactly see her. “Guess who I ran into upstairs? Quentin,” I said. “And guess what he told me? Oh, wait, you don’t have to guess because you already know, you lying—”

“Mia, I’m sorry,” Katrina cut in. “I knew I couldn’t get you to come here unless I bent the truth a little.”

“It’s called
lying
.”

“I did what I had to do! We’re running out of time, and I needed you to feel how it is here, in the Waste and the Tower. I thought … I don’t know, that if I just
got
you here everything would fall into place, and you’d accept your destiny.”

“Shut. Up.” There was a surprising lack of emotion in my voice. “Just shut up, Katrina. We’re leaving now.”

“All right,” she said. “Fine, we’ll leave.”

“Not you,” I said. “Jeremy and me. You can do whatever you want, as long as you stay away from me.”

“What? Mia, no! You can’t go with him! You don’t know anything about him. He could be a spy!”

“Are you a spy, Jeremy?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Then it’s settled. We’re leaving. Don’t follow me, Katrina.”

“Mia, please—”

“Let’s go,” I said to Jeremy’s shadow shape.

I descended into darkness thick as paint, and heard Jeremy’s footsteps echo mine. A third pair of footsteps did not follow.