The Burn (16 page)

A huge truck with rows of wheels pulls up, beeping.
People slowly move out of the way, and more soldiers appear to form
a perimeter around the truck. They jab at the crowd and the crowd
falls back.

The back of the truck swings open. The inside is
lined with rows and rows of boxes on shelves, and a man in a suit
almost identical to the woman’s sits in a wheeled chair behind a
desk. Two young men in gray jumpsuits stand behind him with their
hands behind their backs. The woman stands on the ground in front
of the desk, flanked by two soldiers.

An amplified voice speaks. “Welcome, citizens of New
America, to your monthly supply replenishment. This month, we
provide you with medicine and first-aid supplies. Remember, if you
or someone you know is critically ill, bring them to the free
clinic behind Town Hall.”

Mary snorts. “Yeah, and you’ll never see them
again.”

“Show your personal identification chip to the
verifier. Then you will receive your supply box. Once you receive
your box, please leave the premises. If anyone tries to obtain
supplies illegally, you will be detained.”

“Permanently,” Mary whispers.

I wonder again why I’m here. Dave watches Red’s every
move. Will he burst from our cover if something happens to him?
Could we even do anything to save him? None of us have trackers,
and from what I’ve seen, that marks you. Fatally.

But Red knows what he’s doing. People shove to get
closer to the front. A soldier steps in and breaks things up with a
quick swipe of a rifle barrel. Then they fall in a line, and it’s
mostly orderly. Red stays around the fringes, looking down, not
meeting anyone’s eyes. It’s like he’s not there at all. No one else
without a tracker is found.

When a young woman with a bruise covering the whole
left side of her face gets a supply box, her eyes flick around and
she slinks away down a street darkened by tall buildings. Once in
the alley, I see a shadow kick her legs out from under her, swipe
the box, and disappear into the darkness. She falls on her face and
sobs. But she is out of sight from the soldiers, and there’s
nothing she can do.

For the first time since I came here, I want to go
back to the colony. I can deal with the stuff I hated. It might eat
me up inside, but I can do it. I want to live where Mr. Klein can
get me some aloe without having to assault anyone. Where the
corridors are well-lit and I don’t cower from shadows. Where I
don’t look over my shoulder while I’m walking into the Juice
Deck.

I want to be safe.

Then Mary grips my arm. She doesn’t realize she’s
doing it. I look up, and Red stands in front of the woman. He holds
out his arm, and she scans it. His arm flashes blue. She studies
the screen, glancing at Red. She asks him a question. He shrugs. A
long moment passes. What are they doing up there? I scrape my palms
along my pants. The soldier next to Red takes a shuffle step and I
almost burst from the tree and hurl myself across the interstate.
But Dave keeps his hand firmly on my shoulder. Then the woman hands
the screen to the man at the desk. He taps his lips and speaks. Red
answers. The two in gray jumpsuits turn and get supply boxes off
the shelves. They hand them to Red. He puts the boxes in the pack
and slings it on his back.

The black-haired guy watches him, the red mouth in
his sickly face twitching. Red turns, nudging through the thinning
crowd and keeping his head down as he saunters away from the
violence of the supply drop. But he doesn’t come back over the
interstate. He turns down another street.

“He’s got it,” Dave says. “Let’s go. Mary, keep your
eyes on him. Terra, follow me.”

We stay low and dart from tree to tree along the
interstate, parallel to the path Red takes. Mary keeps one hand on
the gun at her back and watches Red make his way down the street.
But I still feel too far from him. Broken concrete litters the
sidewalk. I jump over it as best I can, but my boots weigh me down
and I’m clumsy. Red doesn’t glance at us at all. We aren’t
together.

I see a waver of movement from a window two stories
up. A girl is there, watching us. She might be twelve. Her brown
hair hangs limp around her face. She waves someone else to the
window. A man joins her, and they look down at Red. One of them
puts a walkie-talkie to his mouth. I point to them.

“They’re watching him,” Dave says. Mary nods and her
hands turn white as they tighten around her gun. I glance back the
way we came. We’ve already gone a block. There’s no one behind us,
but the black-haired man is a ways behind Red, walking casually
with his hands in his pockets. He kicks a chunk of broken concrete.
It skitters across the sidewalk and onto the road, and he never
looks away from Red. He doesn’t care about us—we don’t have supply
boxes. I can’t tell if Red knows he’s there, but his face is drawn
and his eyes are wide. He looks about to catch us out of the corner
of his eyes, but he doesn’t let himself.

“He’s going to panic,” Mary says.

Dave keeps walking. “He’s fine. He’s done this
before. He’ll be fine.” He prods me along. The worry is
overwhelming, but I can’t look at Red. We’re not together.

“Turn south here and the building is just on the
corner,” Mary hisses.

A rendezvous point. The bridge over the interstate is
passable here. We duck behind an awning and wait. Mary stands next
to me. Dave looks past the corner. My heart slams against my ribs
as I watch Red walk alone across the bridge. The black-haired man
doesn’t close the gap. The path we’ve chosen is too exposed, and
he’s making sure we’re well enough away from the supply drop before
he attacks. He slinks along like a panther.

I shudder the length of my body. My hands shake so
badly I take them off the gun in my waistband. I can’t be trusted
with a weapon. I barely know how to use it. The violence of half an
hour ago catches up with me, and the sweat pours down my face even
though I feel cold. Small pings of light hover around the edges of
my vision. I put a hand out to steady myself.

“Dave, I don’t know if she can make it.” Mary
actually looks concerned. Dave glances back at me. He puts both
hands on my shoulders and stoops down to look in my face.

“You okay, Terra?”

I almost scream when he touches me, and I smack a
hand over my mouth. I shake my head. I am far from okay.

“Why’d I listen to him? I knew it was too much too
soon.”

Mary peers around the corner. “Red’s across. On our
side of the street now. Time to move.”

I can’t look away from Dave’s eyes. They draw me in.
There has to be some calm there I can borrow. He doesn’t blink but
stares at me. My heart slows in my chest and I try to breathe
deeply. Don’t look away from me, I beg silently. But he can’t look
at me forever. He tears his eyes from mine to follow Red. My breath
hitches again.

“We have to move now, Terra.” Dave slips his hands
off my shoulders. He grabs my hand too hard and pulls me away from
the building. My fingers ache but I don’t want him to loosen his
grip. It helps hold me together. My legs follow him, but I can’t
feel them. My whole body is going numb.

We’re in a canyon of buildings so tall the clouds
look small above them. All the windows are blown out and some of
the roofs are ragged. Glass crunches under our feet. Red walks two
hundred feet behind us, but I can’t see the black-haired man
anywhere. Then Mary nods and we hunch through a broken hole in a
door and wait. A minute later, Red crawls through.

He’s sweaty and a little pale, but fine. Scared,
though. Just like me.

“I forgot how intense it is,” he says as he slips the
pack from his shoulders and slumps to the floor. He holds his head
in his hands. Mary offers him her canteen and he takes a drink. I
hear him swallow. The quiet around us is suffocating. Dim light
shines through windows and lights squares across the floor littered
with glass and boards as far as I can see.

“How long we staying?” Red asks.

“Until dark,” Dave says.

Mary takes the canteen back. “They won’t be able to
see us as easily. Hopefully we can slip away before they find us.”
Mary looks down and scuffs the floor with her shoe. “Med drop is
always rough—worse than any other. People care more about drugs
than they do about food. I didn’t like the look of that dark-haired
guy. You could tell he’s been on it for a while. He’s the dangerous
one. Terra, did you see him following us?”

I nod frantically. My body is still laced with
adrenaline and I can’t do anything small.

“Where?”

I open her hand.
I saw him until we hid the first
time.

“He might not know we’re here,” she says. “But I
doubt it. Always doubt it. We’ll need to keep watch at the door.
This is obviously some kind of territory for him. He’ll know it
better than we do.”

Dave offers first watch. He stands at the door and
with the light streaming in, I can’t see anything more than his
black silhouette. I lean my head back against a cinderblock wall. I
want to cry. My longing for the colony overwhelms me. Mary sits
down beside me. I wish she were Jessa.

She looks at her hands. “I don’t know where you’re
from, but it’s obviously different than here. You act like you’ve
never seen anyone beaten, never seen anyone killed. But you had
your tongue hacked out. I guess we’ve all been brutalized no matter
where we’re from. I’m not sure what’s worse, losing your tongue or
being used to seeing people get hurt like that.”

She lays her gun across her knees. “My family—why do
I still call them that?—the people I stayed with here, they would
lock me in a janitor’s closet. My job was to steal other people’s
supplies. I was pretty, I was small. I guess they thought I’d be
good at it. I couldn’t bring myself to hurt other people, so I’d
beg. I’d never bring back enough to please them. So they’d lock me
in the closet. It was one building over from where they lived, and
it was abandoned. They cut out my tracker not long after I started.
They didn’t want an agent to find me and be able to trace me back
to them. So they hacked it out of me and stitched me up.”

She runs her fingers over the lumpy scar. I can’t
help staring at it. I was wrong about her tracker. Had they used
anesthetic? Had they pinned her down?

She glances quickly at Dave. “The closet was always
dark. The building would groan, and I would sit crouched in the
corner thinking it would crash down on me at any second. Then I
would hear the footsteps outside. Heavy boots and the click of high
heels. Agents were out there. I knew if they found me, they would
take me away and no one would ever see me again. I couldn’t cry
because I didn’t want to make noise. I thought of Dave every
day.”

Her eyes glisten, but she brings the neck of her
shirt up to her face before the tears spill over. I sit awkwardly
next to her and put a hand on her arm. I don’t touch the scar. I
feel ashamed for having thought badly of her. Of course she doesn’t
trust me; she’s hard-wired not to. And then she came back to the
settlement only to find Dave wasn’t there when she needed him. How
messed up all our lives are.

I can’t make out the details of him as he stands
darkened by the light behind him, but I trace the profile with my
eyes. The firm jaw, broad shoulders. The longish hair and straight
nose. He is strong. No wonder she leaned on him. But what changed
for him? Why does he push her away? And again I feel hopeful. He
lets me lean on him. That knowledge will have to be enough to bury
the thoughts of the colony. It will have to be, or I might not make
it out of Seattle alive.

The light shifts across the floor as the sun sets.
The day was quiet. Two people had passed the door, but neither of
them had been the black-haired man, and they hadn’t shown any
interest.

As dusk creeps on, we stand up and stretch. Dave
offers us some old bread from the pack. We each take a swig from
the canteen. Then as soon as the sun is completely down and the
street is more shadow than light, Dave sticks his head out the
door. The street is violet gray and barren.

“Quiet now,” Mary says. “We’re out after curfew.”

I don’t want to know what the punishment is if we’re
caught.

We file out. This time, they take out their guns and
make no show of hiding them. I reach for mine, and my hands tremble
as I take it out and hold it at my side.We stick to the sides of
buildings where awnings and overhangs hide us occasionally. Not
enough to make me comfortable. Clouds blanket the moon, but it
still feels too bright. Every so often we pause, listening for
footsteps. None come.

Then I hear the whirring chop of a helicopter. My
feet freeze to the ground, unable to move. The others hear it, and
urge me forward. A helicopter bursts over the top of a building
with a single beam of light swinging across the street.

“We can’t stop now, Terra!” Dave pushes me forward.
He’s rough but I know the urgency behind it. There are agents up
there, looking for people just like us. My bare arm almost glows in
the night. It’s unblemished. What would they think of that? I’ve
never even had a tracker. There are a few people like that at the
settlement, and I know they will never be asked to go to a supply
drop.

We are almost to the pier and we jog faster. The
helicopter retreats back away from the water. Red pants next to me,
the pack tugging on his shoulders. Dave leads. Mary comes behind
us, turning every few seconds to glance behind. We cut over on the
next north-south street to go back where we started, and I see the
long dark line of pier slice into the water. Dark shadows rise up
were the pier meets the street.

“Thought you’d come back this way,” drawls the
black-haired man. His face is rugged with shadows, carving deep
lines into his cheeks. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen someone
come across the water for a drop. Wonder if you’re part of the same
group. You have some camp across the sound? I’d be interested in
that.”