The Aftermath (20 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

I don’t trust myself with Declan—hell, I still don’t trust him after all the lies he’s told me—so I break apart from him after a few minutes and walk next to Mia. Every couple hundred yards, she catches my eye and grins.

“I’m guessing you two will continue that once we’re out?” she says, jumping up and tapping a low-hanging tree branch with the palm of her hand. “And don’t make that face. Wesley told me what he saw.”

When I turn my head to glare at him, Wesley waves cheerfully. We’re in more danger than ever before, and they’re all grins and laughter. But I suppose it makes dealing with the threat of capture a little less crushing. I shake my head. “I doubt Declan and I will see much of one another after this.”

He can tell me a million times that he has no plan to disappear on me within the next twenty-four hours, but I’ve prepared for the worst. Once The Aftermath is behind us, there are no promises binding him to me. And as much as I want to kiss him again, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. I’m starting to think that I need to start over, away from his lies. Alone.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” she says. “Everybody needs someone. I have my brother.”

I pick up a rock and skip it along the forest floor. My stomach churns. Sooner or later I’ll have to tell her the truth and prepare her for the worst. I feel guilty. I’ve been so angry at Declan for lying to me for so long, and I’m doing the same thing right now, to Mia.

“Look, there’s something I have to—”

“What the hell is that?” Wesley runs past us, maneuvering through the trees until he disappears. The rest of us race after him. I’m terrified, and my heart lodges in my throat. Twigs snag my hair and clothing and rake across bare areas of skin. At last I break through the canopy of trees with Mia close behind.

Towering piles of rocks and stones, every texture and color, lie in front of us. “You scared me like that because you saw a rock yard?” I hiss at Wesley.

He shrugs. Bouncing on his toes, he points behind the labyrinth of stones. “There’s a building, too. If we’re going to make it to the border before the mods start showing up, we’d better get rid of anything we don’t need.” He has a good point, but I scowl at him anyway. Declan slams his bag into his brother’s chest.

“Don’t run off like that again.”

“Here, take mine, too,” I say, hanging my strap on Wesley’s wrist. He frowns at us, then trudges off toward the building. Mia catches up to him and takes my backpack, slinging it onto her back. I glance over at Declan. My lips tingle when our eyes connect. “I need to...check on Olivia.”

“I’ll wait with you... Besides, I need to talk to you.”

But I shake my head. “Not now, Declan. This is something I have to do alone,” I say. So far I’ve done a good job keeping her out of my brain, but I don’t want to risk her taking control of me again with anybody nearby. I won’t let them jeopardize their lives for me.

“You don’t have to face this by yourself, you know. There are people who care about you. More people than you think.”

Hearing him say that only puts more pressure on me. It leaves me feeling weighed down, as though there are ten tons sitting atop my shoulders right now. I feel as if I’m going to be sick. “I know,” I say. “That’s why I’m asking you to leave.”

He touches his lips to my forehead. “If you need me—”

“I will,” I whisper.

“Okay. But we’re going to have to talk sooner or later, Claudia.”

I wait until he disappears inside the building to lean back against a pile of rocks and try to access Olivia’s brain. My head still hurts from the hallucination, but I manage to slip in just a bit. Even though I can’t get a clear image of what she sees, I hear snippets of conversations.

“I can find her myself,” Olivia growls. “I don’t need your help.”

“We’re dispatching guards to—”

“She’s
my
character! I’m responsible for her!”

I float halfway between my brain and hers, so when I hear the shuffle of footsteps, I’m not sure where it’s coming from. But then I recognize the noise—Declan’s boots. I release my grip on her mind and turn to him. “I told you—”

But this isn’t Declan. It’s a dark-haired man who’s dressed like him. A real moderator.

The punch to my face literally sweeps me off my feet. I fall hard, my entire backside a dartboard for the jagged gravel. Getting hit doesn’t daunt me. I’m so used to being knocked around, I don’t feel the pain. He rushes me again, but I roll over and scramble to my feet. I swoop up one of the larger rocks—it’s as big as my shoe—and hurl it at him. It hits him square in the forehead. Sends him collapsing into a bed of stone.

I don’t have time to savor this small victory. Another mod with floppy blond hair comes at me, this time with a fist to my stomach. The air whooshes from my lungs. My body convulses. Dust flies into my face, sticking to my eyelashes and clogging my nostrils, and I realize I’m on the ground. Again.

The blond man digs rough fingers into my shoulders and yanks me up into a sitting position. He shakes me back and forth until my teeth clack together violently. Maybe he’ll shake the block in my head loose. Or maybe he’ll simply kill me now. “You’ll be deleted for this,” he growls. “Probably a public deletion. And I hope I’m there when they fry your brain to ashes.”

I bring my knee to my chest to kick him, but he slams me back, pinning my wrists to the ground. Grinning, he sits on top of my stomach. I dry heave. When I catch my breath, I rasp, “Why wait? Why not kill me now?”

Olivia has corrupted me, made me into a stupid, reckless girl.

He chuckles and shakes his head. “After the stunt your boyfriend pulled last year when he escaped, you really think you deserve anything but a broadcasted deletion?” He leans in close to me and adds, “Besides, there’s a bonus for whoever bags you and brings you in alive.”

“What do you mean there’s a bonus?” My words come out choppy and hoarse.

“Don’t play stupid. You’re a big deal to Lancaster and you know it,” he says. When I draw in a sharp breath, he presses his face so close to mine our foreheads nearly touch. “You’re sending me on vacation early this year.”

This is not the first time that I’ve heard that I was a big deal. Hadn’t Jeremy said those exact words to April when they were talking about Olivia and me weeks ago? I swallow hard. “Why?” I demand. “I’m just a character. I’m nobody.”

The man snorts. “Maybe you really are stupid.”

I writhe and struggle against the blond man. He squeezes my wrists harder, digging his nails into my skin until I shriek.

“Do you really think you can hurt me? Do you really think th—”

I swing my head up with all my might and bash my forehead into his nose. Blood spurts in my face, and he grabs his, howling. Survival instincts from three years of getting chased and beaten kick in. Bucking my hips wildly, I pull down on one of his shoulders and push up on the other, thrashing my forehead at his face all the while.

He falls off me, bloody and shouting obscenities. I clamber to my feet. He tries to do the same, but I knee him in the nose, knocking him unconscious. I grab my knife from the ground and a handful of zip ties from the dead mod’s pocket. I quickly restrain the man’s wrists and ankles. I’m tightening the last plastic tie just as he comes to.

“We’ll just keep tracking you down!” he slurs as I stand up and back away from him. Narrowing my eyes, I shove the remaining zip ties in my back pocket and take off in the direction of Mia’s screams. “We’ll just keep tracking your chip, Virtue!”

He continues to yell at me, but I don’t look back. I don’t need to because I already have a sinking feeling I’ll see his face again at my execution. My face has started to swell. It feels as if I’m traveling through a dark tunnel as I race toward the others, bumping into stacks of stones every few steps. Finally I emerge from the maze and see the rusted metal building.

Mia is pinned to the side of it by a female moderator who dwarfs her tiny body. Two large men are cuffing Declan and Wesley. Declan’s dark gray eyes settle on me and his shoulders sag a little, like he’s relieved. He casts a quick glance a few feet away from me, where his bag lies on the ground, the contents spilling out on the asphalt. I rush to it and pick up the electroshock gun. I’ve yet to use it, but I remember his instructions.

Release safety.

Wait for the light.

Pull the trigger.

And never touch the amp setting.

I crank the amps to as high as it will go, point it at the girl who’s choking Mia and wait for the target light to blink. Then I pull the trigger. She lands facedown in a pile of gravel. I hold my breath as the breeze knocks the odor of burned skin into my face.

Mia staggers toward me, sobbing, but I whirl around and aim the gun at the other two moderators. “Step back with your hands up,” I growl. “Or I’ll send enough electricity through you to kill five people.”

My heart is the only sound I hear as I wait for someone—anyone—to speak. The moderator holding Wesley down glances at me and says something. Then he reaches into his pocket. I pull the trigger once, twice, before he has a chance to remove his hand. He falls. The other man backs away from Declan, his hands stretched high above his head in surrender.

“Shoot him.” Declan’s voice thunders over the sound of my heartbeat. Slowly, other noises come back to me—my own breathing, Mia’s quiet sobs, the blond mod shouting horrible threats from where I left him tied up in the stone labyrinth.

I stare between Declan and the moderator. They’re both bloodied and ragged, breathing heavily.

“Claudia...”

I shake my head. “No. We’re leaving. Right now.” Keeping the electroshock gun focused on the moderator, I pull the rest of the zip ties from my pocket and drop them into Mia’s hand. I jerk my head at Wesley. “Hurry up and cuff him.” I want to get out of this place before LanCorp sends another group after us. I’m not sure how many others are here, or how they arrived in the first place, but I don’t want to stick around to find out.

Declan gathers his belongings, then comes to examine my face. When he reaches out to touch my forehead, I flinch. I leave him to make sure the cuffs are secure. As I tighten the moderator’s restraints, I catch Declan’s eyes. He looks confused. Hurt.

I can’t let him touch me, because I know now that no matter what I want, it might be impossible for me to stay with him.

* * *

We travel through the woods, putting a mile of distance between the moderators and ourselves before we stop to rest. Wesley says it will take LanCorp longer to find us this way because they won’t expect us to stop so soon. I don’t have the heart to tell him that, if the blond mod is to be believed, there’s a chance LanCorp already knows exactly where we are because of
my
chip. So I stay silent, and I hope that the moderator was lying. As my group huddles beneath a towering pine to talk about our next move, I find myself moving away to protect them. From the mods. From Olivia.

And most of all from myself.

There’s a vicious rattling deep within my head. I imagine it’s like someone shaking a single screw around in a thin glass bottle. Still, I grit my teeth and carry on until I no longer hear Declan and Wesley yelling at each other and I can see a creek bed in the distance. I struggle to ignore the pain and the fuzzy thoughts that race through my brain, but finally I can’t help but give in.

And the clarity of this particular thought—the images and voices—is strong enough to bring me to my knees.

“I hate this, Livvie. When’s it my turn to play?” I ask. My voice is a whispery lisp. Sweet and childlike because that’s what I am. A child.

Hopeful.

Olivia’s turned away from me, with her head bent. Bright red ribbons pull half her dark hair from her face. She drags a small digital tablet from her blue dress and places it beside her. “Beat me at chess first.”

“You’ll win. You always do.”

“Then you’ll never play the game, will you?”

Leaning against a tree, I vomit. Is this a memory? Or are the moderators simply screwing with my head—forcing thoughts into my brain just to slow me down? I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand and stand upright. As I wobble down to the creek, I pray it won’t happen again.

Then someone touches my shoulder and I spin around, lifting my fists.

Declan stares down at me. “You saved our asses back there, Virtue.”

But it was instinct. An ironic gift from my gamer. Even though Olivia has been controlling my movements, my brain retained every survival technique, every strategy.

“It was nothing.” I try to relax, but it only makes the muscles in my shoulders tighten even more. Declan shouldn’t be around me. Nobody should. He raises his eyebrow when I take a step backward, drawing my attention to an open cut that runs across his eyelid. “God, you’re hurt,” I whisper.

“It’s nothing.” But he winces. And I know that if we remain together, the next time he won’t be so lucky. “We’ll have to start moving again if—”

“The moderators found us because of me, didn’t they?”

Silence. And that tells me everything I want to know. His nostrils flare as he drops his gray eyes to the forest floor to stare at a pile of broken leaves. I stand perfectly still, wringing my hands together.

It takes a lot of effort not to use them to attack him.

“How long were you going to wait before telling me that LanCorp was going to use my chip to track us down?” I ask. “Were you going to wait until Wesley or Mia got hurt or even killed? Or were you going to tell me as the mods dragged me away?”

“It doesn’t matter what they can do because I plan to take down anyone who tries to hurt you.”

A heavy weight settles on my chest. All hope that the blond man was lying about the mods using me to track us down disappears along with the little I have left of making it out of this game without being captured.

“You lied about not lying,” I say. “But then, what’s new?”

“Guess that makes two of us with trust issues.”

I draw in a breath so deep it burns my nose. Digging my fingernails into my palms, I walk closer to him until he has no other choice but to face me, eye to eye. “Declan, I need to know if all that talk about being unable to disconnect my link to Olivia was a bunch of bullshit, too.” I never thought I’d pray for something to be a lie, but I want to hear that I’m fixable. I want to be able to stay with these people.