Taken (21 page)

“I don’t do well waiting,” I admit.

“That works out perfectly,” my father chimes in. “You start training tomorrow, and standards in Crevice Valley are no picnic.”

“How’s that?”

“They are brutal. Intense,” Fallyn says with a wicked smile.

I believe her instantly. When I am dismissed from the room, I head back to my quarters with slow, deliberate steps, dreading the training that awaits me and the weary muscles I will certainly have by the following evening.

TWENTY-SIX

I WAKE EARLY. OR MAYBE
in the middle of the night. It is impossible to tell. I wonder if there is a moon tonight, if it is casting a silver-blue glow on the land beyond the mountain. On nights in Claysoot when Blaine was snoring too loudly for me to sleep, I used to walk out to the livestock fields and stare at the sky. There were evenings when the stars shone so brightly and the sky stretched so wide that I feared I might slip from the grass and float away into nothing. Now I have only four stone walls.

I try to return to my dreams, but my cot feels increasingly stiff. I sit up eventually and pull on my boots. If I can’t sleep, I should do something useful, and I have gone too long without seeing my brother.

Crevice Valley’s hospital is far more advanced than Claysoot’s. Illuminated screens blink. Strange units hum. The place is deserted when I arrive, with the exception of the patients who sleep soundly in the dim room. I find Blaine in the back, on the very last bed.

The arrow has been removed and he sleeps in shorts, a bandage wrapped around his thigh. The bandage looks silly, as if his leg snapped in two and they tried to tie it back together with a piece of string. His hair is growing back, like mine, and his chest rises and falls softly as he sleeps. He’s hooked up to some sort of machine, tubes from it burrowing into his arm.

I reach a hand out to hold his. It is heavy, stiff like a statue.

“He’s doing better. Even if he doesn’t look it.” A young nurse stands behind me. I hadn’t realized there was anyone else awake.

“Do you know how much longer? When he’ll wake up?”

She shakes her head. “It could be a day. It could be months. There’s no way to be sure.”

Months? What if he’s like this forever? What if he never wakes up? I drop his hand. I can’t look at him. It’s like watching Emma get carted off to Frank’s prison. I don’t want to see another situation I am powerless to change.

I hurry toward the exit and the nurse calls out to me.

“You should come back and talk to him sometime. I think he’d like that.”

I look at Blaine one last time, and then leave without another word. I manage to sleep a little after that, although I’m not sure how. The thought of losing Blaine again, of being just half of myself for the rest of my life, terrifies me. My palms sweat throughout a dreamless sleep.

Morning brings a regime that I can scarcely complete. After a breakfast of gruel, Bree leads me to the Conditioning Room, which is an enclosed and sizeable training space located at the end of a tunnel housing the captains’ quarters. There’s a rock wall for scaling, targets that hang overhead, and a series of stairs and platforms I have no desire to climb.

Bree leaves me with Elijah for introductory training and heads to a more advanced conditioning session led by my father. He waves at me reassuringly, but then, as if he feels foolish or uncomfortable showing affection, turns his attention back to his troops.

Elijah has us start with a ridiculously lengthy run, following a path on the ground that creates an oblong loop through the room. A stitch forms in my side after the second lap, but I fight through it. I focus my thoughts on Emma. I promise myself, right then as I run and struggle to ignore the cramp in my abdomen, that I will return for her at any and all costs.

A dozen laps later, my legs are jelly, but Elijah is far from through with us. After a series of exercises called pushups, squats, and lunges, we take to scaling the rock wall. He orders us to climb in all directions: top to bottom, side to side, diagonally. Each pass takes more effort and concentration than the previous, muscles growing weak and footholds becoming harder to find. When we move on to a drill Elijah refers to as suicides—sprinting at varying lengths—I have lost all feeling in my legs. By the time Elijah passes out bows and arrows, I can barely stand without my knees knocking.

Shooting is at least enjoyable. The moving targets that zip by overhead create a near-realistic effect. My arms are tired from climbing, but I manage to hit nine out of my ten targets. For once, I easily outshine the others in my group. No matter how long I am away from it, shooting an arrow straight will always be second nature. My hands are incapable of forgetting the exact tautness to achieve before a release, the way to set my shot and exhale on followthrough.

We finish the session with a final lap around the room, and I collapse onto the floor upon completion. When my lungs stop screaming, when I can finally breathe without panting, I sit up to discover that the others in my group have already left.

“You did well today,” Elijah says as he stacks bows back into a storage cabinet. He looks too young to have started a rebellion. “You kept up, and on your first session, which is more than most can say.” I thank him, and he excuses himself, mumbling about a status meeting he is late for.

I stay on the ground, stretching my already tightening muscles. Bree’s group is wrapping up their session in the distance. My father has them climbing ropes that hang from hooks anchored in the ceiling, and Bree floats up and down as though the rope were doing the work for her.

Their final drill is to find passage from one raised platform in the back of the room to another, which seems impossible. The space between the platforms is wide, and a fall would certainly result in some broken bones. The largest boy in the group, who looks something like a bear, simply jumps across, but his legs are so long he has an unfair advantage. Most of the others drop out completely, unable to complete the task. Bree, on the other hand, takes a spear in hand and runs full speed toward the gap. As her feet near the edge, she burrows the tip of the spear against the lip of the platform and propels herself into the air. The spear bows gracefully and projects her as fluidly as a bird in flight. She releases the spear at the peak of her arc and lands safely on the other platform, her knees bending and her hands finding ground before pushing to right herself. My father claps in approval, but the others stare on. I do, too. She’s completely crazy—wild and ruthless. I scowl in disapproval until I realize this doesn’t sound much unlike myself. As soon as their session ends, my father hurries off, mentioning how he needs to join Elijah.

“The captains have daily status meetings,” Bree says, striding over to me. There is a ring of sweat on the neckline of her shirt. “Updates on the war, planning, tactics, that sort of stuff.”

I stand and stretch my arms. Every muscle in my body argues with fatigue. I can already feel the soreness settling in.

“Library?” she asks.

“Definitely. Assuming you’re still willing to take me.”

She half smiles. “It’s not on the top of my wish list, but I know how badly you’re craving the truth. And, besides, there are so many details your father left out. Like the scale of the project, for instance.”

“Scale?”

Bree’s lips press into a smirk. “Makes you hate Frank even more when you know it wasn’t just one test group, but five.”

“Five? Like five different Claysoots?”

“Well, where do you think I came from, brainless? You didn’t think I was one of those mundane Order folk turned Rebel, did you?”

“Aren’t you?”

“Oh please, Gray,” she says. “Even you admitted I was good—quiet, stealthy, quick. It shouldn’t be so surprising that some places Heisted girls.”

It makes sense. Her fluid and swift movements, her utmost silence while tracking. She is tough. Raw, and powerful. Bree is like me, only from another Claysoot.

And suddenly, she is twice as interesting.

As we are leaving the Conditioning Room, the large boy who had leaped the width of the platforms brushes past us. He’s a good head taller than me, with hands the size of a hornet’s nest.

“That was some display back there, Bree,” he says, running his hand over her shoulder in a way that comes across more condescending than sincere. “You know, there’s nothing more sexy than a strong, aggressive woman.”

“I’m not interested, Drake,” she says, slapping his hand away.

Drake reaches for her again. “Aw, come on, Bree, you know you want to.”

“She said she’s not interested,” I snap.

“No one asked your opinion.” He pushes me in the chest firmly with both hands, and I nearly fall over from the force.

“No, but you asked hers, and she turned you down, so move on.” His fist hits my jaw before I even see it coming. I stagger backward.

“See you tomorrow, gorgeous,” Drake says to Bree, and then stalks away with cumbersome steps.

Bree folds her arms across her chest and looks at me. “You didn’t have to do that. I can take care of myself.”

“I know,” I say. I lick my lips and taste blood. “You should really report him.”

She pulls her shoulders into a shrug, and I’m surprised to see in her what Drake obviously had. Even covered in sweat, she
is
pretty. Stunning, really. Her limbs are long and lean, her curves itching to be touched. And her eyes, which usually look so harsh and stubborn, are suddenly soft. I’m terrified by how she’s snuck up on me.

“Well, are you going to report him or not?” I ask.

“There’s no point,” she says. “People have more important things to worry about. We’re at war, after all. And, besides, the things you fight alone make you stronger.”

I’m fairly certain this is untrue, but I don’t argue.

TWENTY-SEVEN

BREE PULLS A SERIES OF
thin white journals from the overcrowded library shelves.

“Most of the stuff in this room is documentation of the Rebel formation,” she explains. “Forces aligning, plans of attack, defensive strategies. But these”—she raises the pale journals overhead before plopping them on the desk before me—“these are the goods.”

“Proof of the Laicos Project?”

“Proof and then some,” she says. “Notes and commentary written by Frank himself.”

I run my hand over the cover of the top journal. The material is soft, like worn leather, and the corners curl toward the ceiling. A single, handwritten
1
sits on its center. This is the first of many. I take a deep breath and flip open the cover.

The words inside are too uniform to be written by hand. They remind me of the records Emma and I had found in Taem, each letter evenly spaced, each line precisely parallel. I lean over the bound pages and read.

Five test groups have been set up across AmEast, labeled, for now, from A to E. As the nature of this project is to create durable and tough soldiers, we need a range of subjects for experimentation. Each test group will be presented with a different scenario, ranging from most desirable (in A) to least desirable (in E). My initial prediction is that the most successful soldiers will be created from those groups in the most challenging of environments, but only time will tell.

Each group will be enclosed by a wall and supplied with basic tools for survival (axes, saws, knives, etc.). Some groups will even have existing shelters in place—with so many communities deserted or left in ruin after the Second Civil War, it seems foolish to waste these resources. We will raise walls strategically, so that our cameras and monitoring systems can ensure observation from Taem’s control room.

Test subjects will be a mixture of boys and girls—all fifteen or younger—acquired from institutions overcrowded in the wake of the war. Decisions are still to be made regarding when test subjects should be removed and transferred to Taem for further research.

There is a blank page before the documentation picks up again. I look to Bree, but her nose is buried deep in a book, and so I continue.

Test Group Breakdown:

Group A, Western Territory. Most ideal of living situations. Functioning farms, factories, and food supplies already in existence. Fruitful soil, fair weather. Civilian houses in existence and supplied with electricity.

Group B, Southern Sector. Comfortable living conditions. Existing homes. Large freshwater lake, plowable fields, warm weather.

Group C, Capital Region. Base-level conditions. Fair weather and terrain. Collapsing but salvageable cabins. Water resources: small lake and rivers.

Group D, Seacoast. Rough living conditions. Limited freshwater; rocky, dry land surrounded by salt water. No prebuilt structures, harsh sun, exposed to wind and other elements. Cold winters.

Group E, Northern Realm. Survival-of-the-fittest conditions. Cold, long winters. Short, cool summers. Heavily forested. No prebuilt structures.

The next several pages talk about the project’s early days and Frank’s initial observations. All five groups go through a phase he refers to as
hysteria
, where, regardless of the conditions of their environment, the children panic. They know their own identities, as well as basic knowledge acquired through schooling, but are completely unaware of an outside world, nor do they remember people from it. This convenient situation is the result of memory work conducted in Frank’s labs prior to placing the subjects behind the Wall. When the hysteria passes, the real show begins, and the next phase takes up a handful of Frank’s journals.

Interesting developments in groups B and C. A leader has emerged from each and attempted to divvy up roles and responsibilities. Each leader has named their land, Group B going by Dextern (the last name of the leader there) and Group C by Claysoot (selected because of the appearance of the location’s soil). Group A is in a state of constant bickering and chaos. E struggles due to weather exposure. . . .

Group D, finally named Saltwater, has followed suit by producing a leader—surprising twist: a female. Group A remains unnamed and in conflict. Group E has nearly died out. Perhaps conditions there were simply too extreme. . . .