The Wandering (The Lux Guardians, #2) (12 page)

We traipse through the
entryway, following slumped Guardians up a staircase that smells of
dust and damp.

Olive trips over her
feet, exhaustion beginning to get to her. I pick her up by her
scrawny arms and balance her on my hip, ignoring every one of her
complaints and insults. It surprises me how much she’s changed
since I left. Thomas is the same excitable, loving brother as he
always was, but Livy has changed. She’s become harsher, lost the
innocent softness she used to have. Her vocabulary has expanded to
twice its size, filled with curses and insults and God knows what
else. She’s had to grow up far too soon because of me, because I
left them behind with nobody but mum to care for them.

Olive will have had to pick up my jobs—Thomas was always too
sensitive to survive in the world outside our front door, and mum
would do nothing but drink and throw things at the wall for sport.
Livy will have had to work, collect the family’s credits, and brave
the intimidating sight of Camberwell Zone on allocation day. I try
to picture her there, surrounded by people older and more dangerous
than her, but I have to force the image out of my head before it
can form. Anything could have happened to her. Anything
might
have happened to
her. No wonder she’s changed—she had to change to survive, just
like I did.

She is so much like
me, it’s scary.

Her head bumps against
my shoulder as I haul myself up yet another flight of stairs and I
realise she’s fallen asleep. Good. At least in her dreams she
doesn’t have to build walls around herself for safety.

“Leah,” she murmurs in
her sleep and my heart jumps into my throat. It’s been years since
I’ve heard that name spoken aloud. I have a vague memory of Tom and
Livy saying it over and over after Yosiah jumped from the train but
my mind was too hazy to absorb it. Now I’m alert and the name cuts
right through me. It drags a shudder down my spine, terror through
my chest. Memories come in sharp, unwanted flashes—my mother
screaming my name, throwing a plate at my head; Thomas waking from
a nightmare and crying out for me; Officials in dark uniforms
framing a red haired man.

“You give us
information or you die, Leah.”

With a burst of new
energy, I scurry up the stairs until I’m level with Yosiah,
shifting Olive so my left hand is free to grab Yosiah’s wrist. I
squeeze him so hard it must hurt but he doesn’t complain.

“Whatever it is,” he
says, low. He waits until I raise my eyes to continue. “It can’t
beat you. You’re stronger than anyone, Miya. Nothing can break you
unless you let it.”

Siah’s intense stare
gives me a foothold on the present. I loosen my grip on him a
fraction and imagine myself repeatedly punching this crippling fear
until it’s nothing, until it can’t affect me. I am Miya. I created
myself. I’m who I want to be. This won’t beat me, won’t break me. I
never have to be Leah again.

“There,” Siah murmurs,
“you’re you again.”

I feel a smile
building at how right he is but quickly chase it away with a glare
at the flecked-grey steps beneath me. “Thanks,” I mutter. He
touches my hair, quick as anything, and we resume walking.

Our
room is on the third floor—something I’m grateful for when I
realise some people have to go up a hell of a lot more
stairs.
How many floors does this place
even have
? I think, as I stumble through
the doorway. The door doesn’t close right because The Guardians had
to shoot it open, but there’s a chair we can lean against it for
some sense of privacy. All things considered, it’s better than
Underground London Zone luxury to me.

Livy doesn’t wake as I
tuck her into the bed, and Thomas is asleep as soon as his back
hits the mattress. Being quiet about it, Yosiah and I turn the rest
of the furniture the right way up.

I drop onto a
half-comfortable purple sofa and lean my head back, relieved and
ready for bed. The seat dips under Siah’s weight as he settles
beside me and a sigh sinks into the air around us.

“What do you think
will happen,” he asks after a while, “when The Guardians have won
and States has lost control?”

“I
think we’ll probably die,” I say on a yawn, getting a prod to my
shoulder in reply. “Okay. If we survive, I reckon The Guardians
will take over from the Ordering Body. They’ll tell people what to
do and control everything. I don’t think they’ll be as bad as
States, but we’ll never be free of authority. There’ll always be
someone telling us what to do, setting rules for good reasons and
for bad.” I shrug my jacket off and close my eyes. “It’ll be
better, probably, if the Guardians win. We might even be able to
live the way we want, with them in charge. But that’s
if
they win.”

“You don’t think they
will?” Siah’s turned towards me—I can tell by the way his breath
falls on my neck.

“If we make it to
Bharat, we’ll stand a better chance.”

“And if we don’t?”

“We’ll be dead.”

“Hmm.”

I crack open an eye to
find Yosiah’s face pressed against the back of the sofa, his eyes
closed and his mouth hanging open. I watch him for minutes. He
shifts in his sleep, his hands closing into fists and his breathing
speeding up. I touch the inside of his elbow but my touch doesn’t
calm him like it normally does.

“No,” he gasps. Then:
“Mel, run!”

My entire body goes
rigid, my spine a straight line. The fear in Siah’s voice … I’ve
never heard him sound that way. Never.

I wake him as gently
as I can. He bolts off the sofa, looking around like a startled
kid.

I approach him slowly.
“Siah?”

“I’m fine.” That’s all
he says for minutes as he fights to keep his hands still, watching
their every tremor. He looks up at me eventually and in a stronger
voice repeats, “I’m fine.”

He
doesn’t speak when I pull a bed from inside the sofa, following
instructions we were given earlier, nor does he comment as I throw
an old cover over it. Yosiah gets into the left side of the
bed,
his
side,
without uttering a word.

‘What’s wrong?’ I
don’t ask. I mean to but exhaustion grabs me in its big hand and
drags me to sleep. I don’t think Siah sleeps at all that night.

***

Honour

06:57. 15.10.2040. The
Free Lands, Northlands.

The Guardians have
spent all night gathering supplies by looting the old shops and
houses of Hull. I think mostly they were given the task to keep
them from dwelling on the loss of their leader. I’m expecting half
of The Guardians to have fallen to pieces by the end of the day;
every Guardian I met loved Alba. I don’t want to think about what
her death will do to her son. I’ve lost too many people to grief. I
can’t lose Dalmar too.

I seem to have escaped
Alba’s death with little pain. I didn’t know her well enough, I
guess. I feel horrible for being so grateful but I can’t help it.
I’m glad I didn’t know Alba, glad I’m not blinded by loss right
now. All I feel is an ache, an echo of Dalmar’s pain. I hurt for
him but I don’t hurt for myself, and I’ve never felt so lucky in my
life. If I lost another person, I know I wouldn’t survive it.

I
won’t
survive it.

When
I lose someone.

Because I will. This
hell isn’t over yet. But who will I lose? Who will be taken from
me?

I can’t think about
it.

The Guardians return
after an hour and we gather under a statue of a woman in the town
centre. Victoria Dei, that’s what it says on the statue. She’s tall
and wide and wearing a crown, framed on either side by angels or
devils—I can’t tell which they are. Maybe that says something about
me, that I can’t tell apart gods and monsters.

I think the crown
means this Victoria Dei was a Queen at some point. Maybe she’s an
ancestor of mine and Tia’s. I stare into her cold, sculpted face
for any common features but find none. With a shrug, I turn away
from the statue and pay more attention to the five people raised in
front of us—the Guardian council.

One of them is the
robed man who took over giving orders yesterday. Timofei is stood
with him, along with three others I vaguely recognise. One of them,
a man twice my age, is called Cell. For the first time it becomes
obvious that every Guardian leader is using a fake name, all but
Timofei at least. Each of their names is four letters long and I
seriously doubt they were born with them. Who christens a kid Cell?
The robed man is Saga. The remaining two are Brig and Hush, two
Guardians that couldn’t be more opposite if they tried. Brig is
blankness personified—white hair, pale skin, watery grey eyes and a
face so young he might be even younger than me. Hush is a black
skinned woman, sharp faced, with close cropped hair and a body that
never had to deal with starvation.

Cell’s moustache
flutters in the wind, a huge beige stripe above his mouth. “We’ve
suffered an unparalleled loss,” he says in a nasally voice. “Alba
was a great leader but she’s dead. Sage’ll act as leader in her
place until we’re stable enough to elect a new one.” His eyes
linger on Dalmar. It takes me a moment to realise that Cell’s
suggesting Dalmar lead the Guardians. I glance sidelong at Dal but
he’s fixated on the stone slabs beneath his feet. “For now, our
mission’s the same. We’ll cross the land to the rebel town of
Manchester, use their resources to gather anyone who’s still alive
on this island, and then we’ll all fly to Bharat. There we’ll
finalise our uprising until we can take control from States’s
President and the Ordering Body.” He crosses his arms over his
round stomach, not bothering to ask if anyone has questions.

Ten minutes later we
begin the week-long walk to Manchester.

For days all I do is
put one foot in front of the other, never mind that the soles of my
feet are screaming and my toes are bleeding from being squashed
into these Guardians boots. I’m not given an option—it’s walk or be
left behind.

People take turns speaking to Dalmar, trying to comfort him,
but they might as well not bother. Dalmar doesn’t want comfort or
molly coddling. He’s dealing with the death of his mother by
getting on with things without complaint. He doesn’t speak about
his loss once and if it weren’t for the hollow expression he wears
every day, I’d think he was trying to convince himself she was
still alive. But I know what he’s doing. He’s throwing himself into
every task, carrying boxes when it’s not required, helping the few
civilians still with us, calming the littlest kids when they freak
out. He’s trying to be the best Guardian, the best
person
, he can—for
Alba.

On the third day of
walking Marie sidles up to me and gives me a crooked grin. “Still
killing people?”

I almost reply with a
snarl but I don’t have the energy for it. “Don’t need to,” I say.
“People are dying without my help.”

That shuts her up for
several minutes, long enough for Priya to realise her girlfriend
has disappeared and catch up to us. Priya is more polite about
asking how I am and I am much nicer in return.

The two girls spend
the next hour or two or three—time doesn’t exist out
here—explaining everything they know about the program that made me
a carrier. As I drag my feet across a dusty expanse of nothing,
evidence of the flares everywhere around me, I learn that States
were experimenting on kids, back in the day, to find a cure for the
demons they created.

The Ordering Body made
The Sixteen Strains to cull the population but Priya tells me the
Strains began to infect States’s own people. They couldn’t find
anything to stop it. This was long before they invented the vaccine
that could kill me at any moment. States began to panic. The
President began to panic.

The program was set up
to find a way to stop the spread of the diseases. The Ordering Body
put an insane amount of money into the development, hired dubious
scientists and madmen, and eventually a solution was found.
Somehow, some lunatic scientist discovered that The Sixteen Strains
didn’t infect children the way they did adults—I try to block out
every question that demands an answer to why children were tested
in the first place—and that foetuses were completely resistant to
the infection.

Marie explains in
great detail, using more scientific jargon than I’ve heard in my
life, that the forbidden files they stumbled upon spoke about a
Strains trial. Scientists infected unborn children and when the
babies were born their biology was fucked around with. Engineered
to carry or resist the Strains. Marie says this must be how Yosiah
and Miya are immune, but she offers more questions than she does
answers.

I clench my fists
through the whole explanation. I still don’t see where my sister
and I fit into this. I wasn’t new-born when they ‘altered’ me and
neither was Tia—if they did anything to her at all.

“Maybe the program had
advanced by that point,” Priya offers but I don’t buy that and
neither does Marie. The conversation fizzles out, killed by a
glaring lack of answers.

I walk in silence, not
bothering to voice my destructive thoughts, and eventually the
girls leave me alone to my fury and my fear. By the seventh day my
emotions are buried inside me where they can do no harm, my arms
are littered with bruises from where I’ve pinched my skin, and I
feel nothing at all.

***

Bennet

10:36. 21.10.2040.
Bharat, Delhi.