Talker 25 (34 page)

As I grab the hilt from Twenty-Six, he stumbles toward me. I’m not sure whether momentum carries him into the sword, or if I push the sword into him because I’m trembling so much. Either way, the blade slides into his stomach.

He doesn’t retreat and I don’t pull back. I feel drunk, like my body’s acting a second faster than my brain and everything’s happening sideways.

All I can think about as I watch the blade disappear into him is that human skin’s a lot softer than dragon scale. And then my hand reaches his stomach, and there’s no more blade left, except for what’s sticking out his back.

He grunts something, then goes quiet.

For a moment, I wonder if I killed him. I imagine I should be happy, but for the most part, I’m confused. I don’t think I started out stabbing him, but I definitely didn’t try to stop.

In the next moment, I spot soldiers running toward us, hear shouting and screaming. At gunpoint, Lester orders me to release the sword. I didn’t realize I was still holding it. When I let go, he taps his tablet, and pain detonates behind my eyes.

I blink once and see Twenty-Six lying beside me with a
sword sticking out of him. When I blink again, I’m in complete blackness, surrounded on all sides by the wails of dying people and the roars of furious dragons.

A nightmare. But I’m not asleep. My reconditioning has begun.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

A
dragon screeches, somewhere to my left. I can’t see it. But I hear it—I hear everything, every damn thing. Behind and above me, the crackle of impending dragonfire blisters my ears, the reek of char clogs my nostrils, so I crawl through trampled brush and moist leaves, toward the whimpers of a woman. To my right, a man orders people to a dragon shelter.

In waves, they shriek their deaths. The reek intensifies. Suddenly, blinding images flash all around. A snarling Green to my left, fire bursting from its throat; a scorched man to my right; three women aflame in front of me.

I tell myself they’re not real, yell it sometimes, but these images take longer to go away than the last. They stick in my vision, specters of death that follow me as I turn and flee.

The ghosts finally vanish; the blackness returns. But
the roars and screams continue, the scent of death lingers. I crawl into a swale. The brush dwindles; the ground hardens to asphalt.

Whenever I shut my eyes too long, my CENSIR jolts me. Whenever I cover my ears, my CENSIR jolts me. Whenever I attempt to stand, whenever I stop crawling to rest my knees and hands—

My CENSIR jolts me.

Asphalt becomes gravel. Pebbles dig into my palms. Every few seconds, I extend a hand in front of me or to my side to protect myself from the obstacles they’ve put in my path. I skirt mounds of rubble, the metal frame of a car, something that I think is a roadblock.

I never find a boundary to my prison, though. They make sure of that. This time, I’m maneuvering across uneven concrete when my CENSIR shocks me in fast succession, jerking me to a halt.

I must change course. Left, right, backward, it doesn’t matter. The dragons chase me wherever I go.

Sometimes it rains. Not water. Too salty. Like Gatorade, except thicker. Early on, I thought it was liquefied dragon meat mixed with water, but I’m beginning to think it might be blood. From dragons . . . from victims?

Best not to think about it. I get so very thirsty.

Whenever it stops, a strong gust of hot air envelops me.
In those minutes, as my scrubs dry and stiffen, as the liquid clinging to my skin evaporates, the clamor of murderous dragons and dying humans subsides.

And that’s when I hear the girl. Weeping, moaning, or screaming. Unlike the other noises, she seems far away. Or maybe it’s my own torment echoing back at me. Before I can ever decide, the dryer’s hum shuts off and the reconditioning cycle starts over.

My knees and hands ache, my head throbs, my eyes burn. I crawl on. The rain comes and goes. The dragons roar longer. The people die louder. Bodies pile up around me.

Always screaming.

They’re everywhere.

A dozen Reds burst forth. I turn away, attempt to stand, crash back to my knees. Skyscrapers burn all around. I scurry around a burned-out minivan. A businessman leaps from a window. He gets swallowed halfway down.

“Not real!” I shout, can hardly hear myself over the din.

My knees scrape against asphalt as frenzied footsteps surround me. A townhome collapses. I crash into a pile of rubble, jam my finger.

A flash to my left. An All-Black exhorts me to hurry, waves me toward a public dragon shelter. I adjust course, accelerate. The heat intensifies. Sweat drenches me. Flames roil in. People melt. I beg them to get down, but they never
listen. A Red decapitates the soldier. His headless body bleeds out beside me, wetness seeps through my clothes, splatters my face.

The corpses dissolve, the screams fade, but the stench and wetness remains.

It’s raining.

I can hear it. The pitter-patter. I stop crawling. No shock. I fall to my back, drink as I pick away gravel embedded in my palms. Are they done? No . . . I don’t hate dragons yet. A glitch?

I need to sleep. I curl up—

Wait. A girl’s sobbing. I dab at my eyes. Not me. A hallucination? Or maybe this is phase two. This girl could be the daughter of someone from Montego Bay, of someone Baby iced. Listen to the child, Melissa. Alone, helpless. That’s the dragons’ fault. That’s your fault.

I cover my ears. Silence.

I pull my hands away. The girl’s gone. A trick of my captors, my mind?

I sleep. It seems that I’ve barely closed my eyes when my CENSIR jolts me awake.

A round later, I hear the girl again. She needs to shut up so I can rest. I try to tell her so in various ways, but whenever I open my mouth to speak, my CENSIR shocks me.

I start toward her cries. My CENSIR jolts me. I grit my
teeth and try again. Another jolt, sharper. My arms give out; I collapse onto asphalt. On my third attempt, I almost pass out from the shock wave that ripples through my head.

And I scream, in a voice I barely recognize as my own. Whoever’s controlling my CENSIR does nothing to stop me. Lying there on my back, legs and arms twitching, I listen, but the girl’s no longer crying. Maybe she’s on the other side of this place. Maybe she’s trying to talk, but they’ve got her CENSIRed—

Twenty-One.

I flip onto my stomach, put one arm down, then the next. My entire body trembles as I push myself up. I slide a knee forward. I wait, but nothing happens, so I keep crawling. On a couple of occasions, when I’m reaching out, hoping that my hand finds hers, my CENSIR fires in quick staccato bursts until I change course.

They will never let me find her. Nonetheless, I crawl on.

Eventually I fade into a dreamless sleep cut short by a pandemonium of roars.

Behind the dragons, there’s a low rumble. A gravel road appears. APCs with red crosses painted on their sides maneuver through a mountain pass. My CENSIR shocks me. I start right, it shocks me again. I go left, up a small rise through the wild grass that skirts the road. It tickles my nose.

Five Greens erupt from behind a mountain. Saddled, harnessed. Their riders wear white cloaks and wield machine guns and rocket launchers. A cascading rumble of dragonfire thunders in front of me. I flinch, spin around. An explosion ignites.

The thunder crescendos. Gunshots echo. Car horns blare. Soldiers scramble from the wreckage of APCs.

I crawl beneath one as the Greens converge.

I squeeze my eyes shut, cover my ears. Doesn’t matter. I still see everything, hear everything.

Something shocks me. I retch.

Men in white cloaks sift through the carnage. I hear laughter.

“Not real.” I collapse. Another shock. I crawl on.

Blues charge through the streets of a small town. The road cracks beneath me. Soldiers fire weapons. Reds and their riders battle dragon jets overhead.

A Red swoops in behind a squadron of soldiers using a scorched minivan as cover from the Blue stampede. The rider fires his rocket launcher into their huddle.

I get a closer look. Bandanna over an oxygen mask. Beady eyes barely visible behind goggles. Familiar?

The word Jedi leaps to mind, though I have no idea what it means.

The world spins. I’m in an explosion crater. Beside me, I
find a severed hand holding a picture of a family.

“Not real,” I mumble.

The earthquake subsides. The sky shades bright green. Growled roars blast from above. The temperature swells. Tornados of fire erupt. Gunshots ring out. Explosions detonate.

I wipe sweat from my eyes. Through wisps of smoke, I see hills of rubble. A Tiny Tots child-care center sign dangles from the blown-up remnants of a roof. A firefighter emerges nearby, a crisped body in his hands.

A number pops into my head. “Twenty-One?”

A man dismounts from his Green. He looks familiar, though I don’t know why. He aims his machine gun, shoots. The firefighter falls, full of holes. The dead child tumbles from his hands.

“Please don’t be real.”

I hear singing in the distance. Coming closer? Nursery rhymes?

A school bus appears at the end of the street.

“Faster! Drive faster!” I implore, but instead the driver stops, his jaw slack, his focus on the sky. I look over my shoulder, see only the sun. There. Two spots of red breaking the corona. They take shape. Wings tight to bodies, they dive in fast.

“Turn around! Run! Go away!” I scream at the driver.

Nobody ever listens.

I try to crawl toward the bus, but something holds me back. A sharp throb ignites in my head. I turn left, scurry down a side street, jump to my feet, get knocked down.

“Over here!” I yell, flourishing one arm overhead.

The dragons swoop in low. Their riders rise from their saddles, aim their weapons. I wave more frantically, yell louder, but they don’t notice me. I whirl to my right, just in time to see a torrent of bullets rip through the bus.

“No, no, no. Not real!”

My world blurs. I blink. Shattered glass everywhere. The Reds pick through the wreckage of the overturned bus, gorging themselves. Their riders watch from the steps of the adjacent school building, goggles on their heads, oxygen masks unstrapped. A man and a woman. A cigarette dangles from her mouth. He’s smiling, pointing at his neck. Closer, I see the tattoos. Little swords.

I crawl forward for a better look at the woman. Olive skin, dark hair pulled back in a tight bun, a faint tan line around the ring finger on her left hand.

“Mom?”

No, Mom didn’t smoke. . . .

At least I don’t think so.

“Not real!”

I scream it at her, flee as fast as my aching knees and
hands can take me.

Asphalt gives way to gravel and gravel mixes with grass, then back to gravel and asphalt. I feint left, take a sharp angle right, whirl around, then do it again, push up a rise, circumnavigate a scorched APC, scurry through wild grass into gravel. . . .

She meets me at every turn, follows me across the broken world through rain and darkness, sometimes on foot, sometimes atop her dragon, sometimes beside the man with tattoos.

My knees go numb, my palms turn bloody. I push on. Crawl and crawl and—

I tumble into a trough, face-plant in wet grass. I struggle to my knees; my wrists buckle. I lie there. At some point I realize my eyes are closed. Yet I still see her. Delivering death in a thousand different ways. I cover my ears, but it doesn’t matter. They’re part of me now.

Not real, not real, not real.

But what if it is?

Dragons murder people. Insurgents murder people. Maybe in the deep dark of my soul I knew the truth. Maybe I’ve gotten mixed up backward because I couldn’t handle the fact that Mom was evil—

“No! No!”

It takes me awhile to visualize her face, her real face, but seeing her there, smiling at me, floods me with good
memories. I hold on to them as I drift asleep, because I know it won’t be long before I hate her forever.

An explosion rattles me awake. I’m lost in darkness.

A second explosion sends me skittering sideways. The sirens cut out. Something clanks beside me. My head starts to throb as the
boom boom boom
of antidragon artillery fire goes off.

New sounds, new sensations. Same terror. Unable to find my balance with the ground trembling beneath me, I fall onto my stomach. I lie there, but receive no CENSIR shock. No need to crawl, I guess, when they can throw me around at their whim.

Or perhaps I’m not supposed to be fleeing dragons this round. Maybe I’m stuck in a gen-one dragon shelter, buried beneath tons of concrete. It’s getting colder in here. Breathing hurts.

A deafening blast pitches me sideways into a wall.

A wall? Real? The throbbing in my shoulder definitely is. I reach out to check, expecting to be CENSIRed, but receive no jolt, and my fingers find a glassy surface. I quickly run my hands along my scalp until they meet atop my head. No CENSIR. I do it again, just to make sure.

I’m wobbling to my feet, steadying myself against the wall because my legs are weak and the ground’s still shaking, when a door opens. The haze of distant daylight illuminates a swath of asphalt spattered with gravel, the shadowy edge
of a roadblock. A silhouetted figure appears in the doorway. The blinding beam of a flashlight swings my way.

Two things occur to me in fast order: whoever opened the door did so without hesitation, like he knew what waited on the other side; I should move.

I dart sideways as a gunshot echoes through the room. A sting of hot pain slices across my upper arm. Fear and adrenaline suffuse me. I duck low and race toward a nearby mound of rocks.

“Take your medicine like a good girl, Melissa.”

Major Alderson.

He fires again. The bullet whistles past.

Someone screams. The major shifts the flashlight to a grassy knoll on the opposite side of the room. With my eyes adjusting to the light, it takes me a moment to spot the girl peeking out between thick shoots of brush. Twenty-One. I’d forgotten about her.