Taken (23 page)

“I’m gonna take her back,” I tell the others. She’s had enough, and no one argues with me. It takes us longer than it should to get to her quarters. I’m dizzy myself, not terribly, but Bree keeps directing me down incorrect passageways and we have to double back with uneven steps. She clings to my neck the entire time, her weight mostly supported by my arms, and mumbles incoherent things that I know she wouldn’t be saying if it weren’t for the alcohol: how nice I am, how she’s thankful I stuck up for her with Drake, how she wishes she could go back and not be so cruel to me when I was first brought in.

“It’s really hard discovering the truth,” she mumbles as we get to her place. “And it was probably terrifying . . . you know? How we treated you like a prisoner . . . a Forgery.” She pauses for a second and adds, “I’m sorry I wasn’t nicer.”

“No, you’re not,” I tell her. I let go of her cautiously as I fumble to open the door. She stands wavering on the spot, like tall grass in a breeze.

“Yes, I am. I’m sorry,” she says stubbornly. Her shirt is hanging lazily off one of her shoulders and her eyes look confused, soft blue seas. She steps very close to me, so close that her eyelashes brush my chin, and leans in, pressing her hands into my chest. I know what she wants and I pull my head away.

“Why won’t you kiss me?” she asks simply. Her voice sounds like a child’s.

“You don’t want me to kiss you.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No. You don’t.” We stand frozen in the doorway and she drops her hands to her sides.

“You don’t think I’m pretty.”

“That’s not it,” I admit.

“Then why? You got a girl already? You married?”

“What’s
married
?”

“You know—two people, with rings. Together forever.” She’s swaying again, blowing ever so gently. I think of Emma. Two people. Together, like the birds.

“No, I’m not married,” I say.

“Then kiss me.” Her hands press onto my chest and she leans into me again, but I pull away. It’s harder to resist her this time. There’s this urge inside me, tugging, telling me that I should follow my feelings. It’s what I always do. But this isn’t really Bree, and this isn’t really me, either. We are in cloudy bodies, foggy reflections of ourselves. We are feeling things that we might not tomorrow. And I love Emma. Emma, not Bree.

“I can’t,” I say, taking her hands in mine and squeezing them. Her skin is warm, on fire in my palms, and the words escape me before I can reflect on them. “But if you wake up tomorrow and you still want me to kiss you, I will.”

Bree smiles, and then bends over to throw up on my boots.

TWENTY-NINE

THE NEXT MORNING, WHEN I
report to the Conditioning Room for training, Bree is nowhere to be found. Elijah runs us through another session of torturous hell. Every muscle in my body is stiff, pulled taut like an overstretched bow. I think I may snap in two, but as the drills continue, I slowly loosen up.

When the session finally ends, Elijah congratulates me on another strong performance, and then disappears with my father for a status meeting. I head to the Eatery for lunch but halfway there change directions and visit the hospital instead.

Blaine is on the same bed, wearing clean bandages. He still sleeps. I stand in the doorway and stare at him. A nurse urges me on, but she doesn’t realize I’m terrified. Spending time with a person you may lose is the worst kind of torture. Blaine and I went through it with our mother. We sat by her side and held her hand and told her we loved her, and it only made it that much worse the day she failed to wake up.

I find the courage eventually, force my feet to move. I sit on the edge of Blaine’s bed and hold his hand. I talk to him, as the night-shift nurse suggested. I tell him everything. I recount our trip through the forest, the waterfall behind the rocks. I tell him about Bree and the Rebels and our father. I tell him the truth that I had so long searched for, about the Laicos Project and the Heist, about Frank and Harvey. It’s exhausting and it makes me realize how completely lost I feel, even now that I have the answers. Without Blaine, I am only half of myself.

“Wake up, Blaine. Please. I can’t do this alone.”

I squeeze his hand. He’s still sleeping, but I swear he returns the pressure. It is so soft, I’m not positive it even happened.

I squeeze his hand a second time. This time I know I’m not imagining it. He squeezes back.

“Blaine? Can you hear me?”

He squeezes my hand again.

And then I’m yelling for the nurse and she’s standing behind me as I tell her to watch, but she doesn’t need to look at Blaine’s hand, because this time, when I squeeze his palm, his eyes flutter open.

“Blaine!”

An older nurse pulls me away. “Careful, son. We don’t want to startle him. He’s opening his eyes for the first time in days.”

I push her off. “You guys are the ones that will startle him. He’s my brother. Seeing me will help.”

But then I can hear his labored breathing, and there’s a flurry of women around Blaine’s bed. They wheel him from the room hurriedly, and all I can think is that he’s not going to make it and they didn’t even let me be the last thing he saw.

They bring him back in eventually, but the wait feels like an eternity. He is alive, intact, awake. Blaine rolls his head to the side, and when his eyes connect with mine, he is forcing a smile.

“Gray.” It’s all Blaine says, and it sounds dry and brittle.

“Hey.”

He swallows heavily. “I heard you.”

“I’m glad. ’Bout time you listened and came back.”

“Not just that. I heard all of it . . . every last word.”

He doesn’t look angry or confused the way I did after discovering the truth, but maybe painting those expressions onto his face right now requires more energy than he has. Blaine places his palms against the bed and attempts to sit up. He fails.

“I need to get better.” He forces the words out, his voice strained. “I need to get out of this bed and we need to stop him, Gray. Think of Kale.”

I hadn’t and I instantly feel terrible. There is a long pause where I hear nothing but the humming of a nurse and then Blaine finally says, “Everything was dark and I didn’t know which way was up. Then I heard you. It was easy after that.”

That feeling I get when he is gone, that pang in my chest—he must get it, too. We are linked, bound, reliant on the other even when we try so hard to appear independent. He needed me. This whole time, all he needed was to hear my voice.

“I’m so glad you’re all right. I just . . . I thought . . . I don’t know what to say.”

“Don’t say anything.”

And I don’t. We sit there together, comfortable in our silence. When my stomach growls audibly, he tells me to go eat.

“Come visit soon,” he says.

“Only if you promise to stay here, with us.”

“I have to, don’t I? You wouldn’t last a day without me.”

I laugh. “Blaine . . . you made a joke.”

He smiles, but it looks pained. “I’m shooting for a fast recovery.”

Back in the Eatery, I get some food and sit alone. The fruit on my plate is mushy and I nibble at it cautiously. A couple of tables over I can make out Harvey, who is showing an odd contraption to Clipper. The boy holds it in his hands, turning it over in awe and amazement. I can’t hear what they are saying, but I can tell Clipper is locked on every word escaping Harvey’s lips.

I am just finishing my meal when a shadow falls across my plate. I look up to find an exhausted Bree, pale and somber, standing before me. Her hair is kinked from sleeping and fresh lines produced by bedsheets are strewn across her arms. She still smells like alcohol.

“Don’t. Say. Anything,” she commands as she sits.

“Wasn’t planning on it.” I can’t help smiling, though. It’s amusing to see her embarrassed.

“You’re a jerk,” she snaps. “I take back anything and everything I said last night.”

“Do you even remember last night?”

“Some of it.” She examines the fruit but ends up drinking some water instead.

“What’s Clipper doing with Harvey?” I ask, changing the subject.

Bree rubs her temples. “He’s in training. Next in line for head of tech operations.”

“Really? He’s the most qualified?”

“Do you have a thing against young talent or something?” she snaps. “Clipper invented the clipping machine on his own and was responsible for a lot of our basic technology. None of it was as advanced as what we have now, but it got the job done when there was no Harvey.”

“He just seems so young.”

“What were you doing at twelve, Gray? Were you hunting for your village? Did people rely on you for things?”

I nod.

“Well, it’s no different here. We rely on people with talent regardless of their age.”

“Okay, okay, I’m sorry. Don’t get all worked up.”

She snorts and blows a stray hair from her eyes. “Oh please. As if you could do anything to get me worked up.”

“I seemed to be able to last night.”

She glares at me. “Yeah, well, sobriety changes things.”

She looks pretty even in her wrecked and hungover state, but she’s hot and unpredictable, a wild forest fire. What had we been thinking last night? Why had we gotten confused, even if only for a second? We are not a suitable match. We are better at each other’s throats, better when we challenge the other. We are deadly. But one thing is for certain: We are back to normal.

THIRTY

MY FIRST TWO MONTHS IN
Crevice Valley pass quickly.

Training takes up most of my time, and I eventually graduate from Elijah’s group into my father’s. The work is harder, but my body has strengthened. I gain weight in ways I never had in Claysoot, muscles growing strong from repetitive workouts. My shooting lessons shift to include guns. I master them eventually, but only the long, slender ones. Rifles. I need a long barrel so that I feel I am holding a bow, and then my aim rings true.

Training with Owen is enjoyable, although I still don’t feel like he’s my father. If anything, he is an aged version of myself, with similar ideals and as stubborn a personality. We grow close, over the occasional drink at the Tap Room or an extra one-on-one training session, but not in the traditional way a parent and child might. The only time he ever feels like a father is when I catch him staring at me as I train, some look of utmost confusion on his face, as if he is uncertain I am really his.

The two of us visit Blaine often. Despite the fast recovery he wished for, his progress is slow but steady.

“The steady is the important part,” our father says, “not the speed.”

Most of our trips to the hospital consist of watching Blaine walk with crutches and telling him he’s doing fantastic even when he’s not. He knows we are lying and will change the subject of the conversation, asking questions about the Laicos Project or Crevice Valley. Most of the details my father spills are ones I’ve already heard, but I learn a few new gems during these visits, including the fact that our father joined the Rebels the way I did, after being captured and dragged through the door, and that Crevice Valley is such a fabulous and well-supplied site because it was once a military facility.

“When Elijah found it, all the hallways and rooms were already in place, the Conditioning Room sat there like it was waiting to be used, and the Basin was filled with dead crops. People had been here before us. And the fact that much of this place has electricity, plus a few underground bomb shelters that would be protected during a major attack—well, that proves this is more than a nifty hideout in the woods.”

“If it’s such a great military asset, why isn’t the Order crawling all over it?” Blaine asks.

“We’ve often wondered that ourselves,” Owen says. “Ryder thinks knowledge of this place died long before Frank and the Order came into power. He wagers its location was top secret and known only by a few key officials, all of whom likely were killed during the war.”

“Lucky break,” I say.

“Extremely. If Frank is so hungry to breach Mount Martyr for Harvey, imagine how rabid he’d be if he knew Crevice Valley was actually a functional military facility.”

“Well, what
does
he think?” Blaine asks, wobbling on his crutches. “That you guys are sleeping out under the stars with nothing more than tents and campfires for company?”

“Who knows? He has a lot on his hands,” our father says. “And we are a small threat in comparison to AmWest. The poor man is extremely overextended. If he doesn’t watch it, everything is going to go crashing out of control on him.”

I laugh. “Wouldn’t that be tragic.”

It is sometimes hard to believe that Crevice Valley flourished into its current state so quickly, but then I remember how Claysoot sprung from those dirt streets in under twelve months. When there was a need, the Rebels found a way, and the military officials that had previously engineered Crevice Valley had provided extremely sturdy building blocks.

Since replanting the crop fields, the land thrives. Sunlight and rain make their way into the Basin, giving way to corn and grain and endless rows of fruits and vegetables. The livestock fields are busy and dairy products always available. The hospital is all too often filled with injured or disabled soldiers, but a sizable field beside it houses much play, people joining together to kick a ball or host friendly archery matches. The laughter of their games drowns out cries of the injured.

There’s also a school system for the youngest ones. I see one girl often, with curls so vibrant she reminds me of Kale. I imagine at some point later in their lives, this girl and all the children of Crevice Valley will look back and understand what took place here. They will come to see they were not just living, they were resisting. They burrowed into the earth by way of their parents and grew up amid a revolution. People here chose this life. Kale, however, will never have that luxury. Her life will always be a part of someone else’s plan.

My absolute favorite place in Crevice Valley is the Technology Center. It is a mess of buildings, testing grounds, and storage facilities that begin in the Basin and roll their way into a set of tunnels piercing the mountain’s depths. There is a weapons unit—where workers clean, repair, and improve upon any firearm, bow, arrow, spear, or ax that walks its way through the Crevice—and a monitoring room, where Harvey can not only survey the areas surrounding Mount Martyr but also keep tabs on all the motion sensors.