Altruist (The Altruist Series Book 1) (21 page)

His body jolts awake as I cup my left hand tightly over his mouth and press my right forearm across his neck, baring my strength against his jugular. His eyes panic as they meet mine and I enjoy seeing him acknowledge his lack of control. “You’re going to walk to the back deck, and you’re not going to make a sound. You’re not going to alert anyone, because if you do, I will kill you and then I will kill whoever those people are that parade around as your parents.”

His eyes search my face and I know that even though he might be aware that I’m bluffing, he’s not willing to chance it. I release my grip and follow him outside. He leans his elbows against the railing and grins. “Well done, Catherine. I have to admit, you caught me off guard.”

“I’m so happy that I’m able to surprise you. I know it must get so dull.” I look back at the prestigious Class 4 house. “This facade you’ve created must be incredibly taxing and mundane.”

He laughs. “Oh how I’ve missed our repartee but I’m bored now.” The phrase makes his spoiled braggart disposition painfully apparent. “What is it that you want?”

“I want a lot of things, Dante. I want you to know that this game we’re playing, this game we’ve
been
playing, will be over soon. I want you to know that you will not be stopping me this time. I want you to know that the Tylin clock will resume shortly so I hope you haven’t become too fond of that porcelain face of yours. But more than anything, Dante.” I walk towards him. “I want you to know that the assassination that you take so much pride in, the assassination that you’ve built your life around, the assassination that, god forbid, contributed to your cocky demeanor, it was my choice. I chose to restart; it was nothing more than a war tactic.” I lean in so close my lips graze his ear and whisper, “I used you.” 

I lean my neck back enough to watch his face light up with anger. He throws me onto my back, the motion catches me off-guard and without pause he pummels his fists into my jaw as I struggle to bring my arms up to shield my face. My hands reach for his neck, gripping and twisting into his flesh. I fight to move my weight from underneath him and as much as I tighten my hands around him, his fists continue to fall against my body, one after the other, relentlessly. I try desperately to quiet my mind, blocking out reality. I focus on his body and slowly it begins to pull away from mine, hovering and balancing in the air in front of me. Scrambling to my feet, my arm remains outstretched holding him in place. His eyes glare at me as his teeth clench together.

“Lower me,” he growls at me .

“Are you going to behave?” I ask, wiping the blood from my lips and glancing at my red stained fingers as they leave my mouth. He swallows hard and joy fills me at the sight of him wrestling with my patronizing tone. My hand begins to lower and his body follows. “You really should try to control your—”

“What are you doing here?” A voice suddenly interrupts our chat and startles me. I turn to see Adam in the doorway behind me and my arms tense involuntarily, pushing Dante towards the rail. In one quick motion, Dante grabs my arm as he sails past the railing and we both plummet towards the ground. I hold his body underneath me, placing my foot and knee against his chest. I brace myself.

“No!” Adam yells and my heart is falling faster than our bodies. I cannot stop this. We hit hard, his back slams against a sharp boulder forcing the rock up through his flesh. In one fell swoop, Dante’s body settles at the base of the boulder and his head rolls down the hill and rests at the base of a tree. I push myself off of his lifeless body and kick at the dirt, my palms pulling me away from the sight of him.

“Cate!” Abel’s voice registers in my head but is deafened by the hatred of my own handiwork. I turn my head towards the sky, my eyes locked on Adam’s. My breath materializes in the cold misty air and the world stops.

“Cate!” Abel’s voice ricochets against my skull and his hands clutch my arms. “Cate, we need to go, now! You don’t know what you’ve done.”

I don’t know what I’ve done? I see what I’ve done. For the first time, I know what I am.

We run through the trees, tracing the route that I took to get there. My heart races and I want so badly to stop and yell and cry, but I can’t. The sound of Abel’s feet running behind me propels me harder.

Back at the Manor, Abel passes me up the stairs and opens the door, then stops and looks at me. “Cate, go upstairs, pack your things and wait for me there. Do not go anywhere except for your room and do not speak to anyone.” In a way, Abel’s crisis mode saves me, every single time. When my world comes crashing down, he’s always there instructing me on motions that should be familiar but instead are painfully foreign.

I climb the 40 steps to my room, and with each one my heart simultaneously races and stops in a painful cycle. I grab the green duffle bag from my closet—packing under duress is becoming routine and I’m not sure what to think of it. After throwing my few belongings into the bag and zipping it up, I drop it on the ground and sit on the bed, waiting, just waiting. Murmurs of pressurized voices paired with hurried footsteps echo from the floors below me and the combination overly excites my already ragged disposition. I need to get out of here; I am making things worse than they need to be. The consequence of tonight’s actions seems obvious, but his words,
you don’t know what you’ve done
, linger in my mind and my heart aches at their possible meaning. I walk towards the window and look down. I’ve never made a jump from this high and I wonder if my limbs will hold strong against the hard earth below. My eyes close, involuntarily urging my nerves to settle, telling me to slow down, to think about what leaving, what disappearing, would mean. I slide the window from its resting place; the crisp night air feels like escape in and of itself.

“Cate…” Abel says from behind me. I turn my head so that his eyes are able to meet mine, to pierce mine. I know he knows what he walked in on, and our decades of time together shows in his ability to ignore it. “We’re leaving. The others are waiting in the car.” He takes my hand in his. “Come on.”

My heart feels so heavy that I don’t know how I can move anymore, but I do. I follow his closely to the car and as I open the door I spot missing faces. “Where’s my family?” I ask. They can’t possibly expect me to leave them here with whatever revenge is on its way.

“They’re about 10 minutes ahead of us; you’ll see them briefly at the rendezvous.” I nod my head, both acknowledging his reassuring statement but also attempting to soothe my nerves and regain clarity.

Chapter 24

The ride into the city is quiet. The rustle of dirt beneath the tires paired with the hum of the engine is so redundant and soothing that under any other circumstance I would be asleep by now. Abel feels far away, though he’s just a seat over from me. He leans his elbow against the window and props his chin and mouth against his fist, rubbing his knuckles into his lips and occasionally pressing his teeth into them. Shoshanna and Eliath are taking full advantage of the silence and it’s eerie how similar the three of them are. The way they react to crisis, to danger, it’s almost as if there is no reaction at all and the absence of panic only strengthens the fact that they aren’t human.

But I am panicked, and I am not human, and what does that mean? I suppose Tylin emotion is just as varied and diverse between one family to the next as it is with any other culture. I wonder if my family is panicked—they are human, they must be. Thoughts of Max and Sophie making the same drive into the city right now spin in my mind: headlights piercing the countryside darkness, making their way back to where green streetlamps cradle buildings with their soft glow, back to where soldiers patrol the sidewalks and bullets fly with ease. Hurried in the middle of night to an unknown place, they must be terrified. 

“It was an accident.” My voice splits the silence and both Shoshanna and Abel look at me. I glance at Eliath through the rearview mirror but his gaze thankfully stays on the road and I’m grateful for not being subjected to his judgment.

“Maybe we can speak to someone, someone from the other side and me…I can explain, it was an accident. Adam saw it; he knows I didn’t mean to hurt him.” I stumble through the excuse, wondering if anyone buys it. Just because it’s the truth, doesn’t mean it’s believable.

“Adam is going to say that there was an altercation…” Shoshanna’s voice is quiet and humble, understanding and for a moment I almost forget that she must have seen similar instances take place a thousand times over. That for whatever reason, it’s not something I can talk my way out of. “An altercation, which ended the life of a Tylin.”

Eliath interrupts her. “And not just a Tylin—Dante.”

“Why does that make any difference?” I feel my words becoming saturated with defensiveness. “They are constantly trying to murder me, and with a fantastic success rate I might add. And for once, the tables are turned and now we’re suddenly on the run? What’s—”

“Dante is, was, Aliah’s youngest son,” Abel says. My lips part, my body is surprised and I don’t have time to stop its motions. “Aliah isn’t the caring type, but in his own way he loves his children. Most of them have been split up among different caretakers, and Dante was gifted to Pricilla.”

Eliath’s grip on the steering wheel tightens before he raises one hand to the bridge of his nose and presses his fingertips down, attempting to ease his tension.

“It was a way for Aliah to ask for her forgiveness for forbidding Tylin procreation to resume—for deciding that keeping you from maturing was worth allowing Pricilla to never experience motherhood.”

“She’s clearly the mothering type,” Shoshanna scoffs under her breath and stares out the window.

He pauses, ignoring her remark and redirects his focus towards me. His crisp tone is something I’ve never experienced before, he’s irritated. More specifically, he’s irritated with my actions, with my recklessness. He’s irritated with my incompetence. “That’s why this is different. She will come after you, and she will not stop until you are permanently erased from this world.” Abel breathes in deeply and holds my hands in his as the heaviness of the situation, of my actions, begin to weigh on me. “They will find you and they will take you. They will break you mentally and beat you physically until there is no fight left in you. She will starve you until the brink of death, keeping you alive just long enough until you reach 18 and then she will kill you in whichever method brings her the most satisfaction. She won’t care what Aliah wants, she will take whatever punishment comes her way.”

I swallow hard.

“We need to hurry.” Abel takes my hand in his, “ "they'll be sending a death squad, 25 soldiers to clear the house.

“25? That seems like overkill? “ I ask.

“That's the point, complete bombardment, nothing left up to chance. Doesn't matter if there's one suspected houseguest or 10. There is no coming back from this, not this time,” he says.

And I know, I know with everything that I am, with everything that I’ve ever been, that he is right. I look out the window, and though the blackness of night covers everything, it’s better than looking at them right now. “Where are we going? We can’t get out of the city and you said that the Nassai controlled most of the government officials. There’s no way they’re going to just let us out.”

“We’re going to see Reuben. He’ll assist with an exit plan,” says Abel.

“Reuben?” I ask. “Is he a Tylin?”

“No, he’s a Pleb sympathetic to our plight. He’s also a trash man.”

I stare blankly but before I ask any more questions, Eliath makes eye contact with me for the first time since the decapitation of Dante, and explains, “He cleans up messes.”

Chapter 25

Reuben lives in a Class 1 sector, which makes sense if he helps people get out of the city. The Council doesn’t pay nearly as much attention to the coming and goings of Class 1’s so long as they don’t interfere with the upper class too much. The streets here are wet from days of rain and a slimy residue covers everything. I feel like I need to shower and that thought, that tingle of judgment that so effortlessly spills from my mind, makes me hate myself. My judgment should be towards the Nasai, towards the Council. The Council who has become such corrupt masters of propaganda that they’ve successfully screwed up our minds so badly that even I for a brief second actually think that these people ever had a choice, that they ever had a chance. To think that there was ever a moment where they could have chosen something different than this life, a life where their main task isn’t to make the upper class sectors better, cleaner, easier to manage. What does it mean that for so many years I have paid so little attention to how screwed up our society is? What does it mean that I have gone through each day paying little attention to the segregated Summit Academy, that I’ve ignored the fact that the lower classes are able to attend the same school, so long as they keep to their halls and engage in mandatory work study.

Two men walk towards our car, assault rifles in hand.
Reuben must be working with the city security. How many people know about us?
I wonder. One of the men opens my door and pulls me out by my arm. “This way,” he says, tugging me towards a basement door. His hands are rough against my skin. They match his voice perfectly and I struggle not to pull away. The man is taller, much taller than me, and his stature matches his height. His hair is dark but the dimly lit streetlight refracts off of grey streaks. His face is hard to make out but his skin is tight against his bones as if his hair has begun to age much quicker than his body.

“Hey, Cate.”

I turn my head back towards the other officer escorting Abel. I can’t make out the man’s features but his high voice is unmistakable.
Ben
. I smile and look up at the man whose hand is too tightly wrapped around my arm. “Joseph?” I say, and he grunts.
The Council’s poster boy is helping us.
I’m beginning to realize that I know absolutely nothing about anything.

I follow Joseph’s lead down a few slick stairs to a rusted metal door. Joseph pulls a key from his front shirt pocket and the sight of the tiny silver object makes me smile. Actual keys haven’t been in production since long before I was born and watching Joseph use it to manipulate the door into opening is like a small secret that makes me feel warm inside to be a part of it. The door creaks open and we’re led through a series of dimly lit tunnels. The electricity is most certainly turned off at this time of night, so this facility must have an independent energy source. Dripping water echoes as our feet splash through puddles of standing water. My skepticism is impossible to turn off so as we walk I trace our path in my mind, carefully cataloging each turn.

We finally reach another door, this one much newer than the rusty one that leads outside. It’s dark gunmetal grey with thick rivets holding the steel into place. Joseph knocks on the door and a security camera affixed to the ceiling adjusts and zooms in on us. Joseph glances up and the door opens. A large square table sits in the middle of a small room, crowded with too many guests. The ceiling is low, low enough that it makes even me slightly uncomfortable, and I can’t imagine what anyone over six feet tall must feel like. A man, short in stature with a thick black beard stands over the table looking at several maps and the image reminds me of how I met Judah. Except this man is stout and ear buds dangle from his ears. Loud metal music blares through the tiny speakers and is the only sound in the room.

“Hey ya, Katie. I’m way excited to finally meet you and figure out a way to get you the hell out of here,” he says, laughing. My eyes widen,
he’s laughing?
His voice is reminiscent of the California Republic, a territory that plummeted into the ocean after a horrific earthquake. Thousands of CR’s migrated to New Utah 25 years ago, requesting asylum in the sectors. Only a portion agreed to abide by our laws and therefore not all of them were given access and later citizenship. I remember learning about the migration in my freshman history class, I remember how the professor spoke so matter-of-factly, how content spilled from his lips void of all emotion and how my heart broke at the thought of hundreds of thousands of people wandering in the open space that lies beyond our borders. He places the ear buds back into his ears and nods at me, returning to his work.

“This way.” Joseph takes my arm again and I begin to feel like cattle. I hold onto the duffle bag strap that runs across my chest, flash an awkward smile at the soldiers and technicians in the room and follow Joseph down a hallway. We end up in a large barrack. Bunk beds fill the room. Grey walls and blue blankets swallow the concrete room in drowsiness. The linens smell fresh and instantly I find comfort at the prospect of sleep.

“You can stay in here for the night. The rest of the houseguests will stay in a room down the hall and a guard will be placed outside of your door for the remainder of your time here.”

“Down the hall?” I ask. Joseph’s presence is intimidating to me. I’m not sure why since he’s clearly helping our cause, but I feel uneasy around him and my voice leaves my body timidly. He stares at me blankly.

“Yes, down the hall. That’s what I just said.”

I cannot imagine he has many friends. I swallow and try to find a way to rephrase my question. He instantly has become a puzzle to me, one that if I can find the correct way to phrase my words, I may actually receive an answer.

“Right.” I lick my lips. “Why am I staying in here by myself?” I narrow my eyes and he doesn’t respond. “Alone,” I add, and wait to see if my words have satisfactorily aligned this human Rubik’s cube.

“Because those were the orders I was given.” And with that he leaves the room and slides the pocket door closed behind him. I am terrible at puzzles.

I exhale and take the duffle bag from my back, and drop it on a bottom bunk in the far left corner. There aren’t any windows down here, but if there were, I feel like it would be by this bed and maybe that’s why I pick it. I shove the duffle up against the wall and crawl into the bed beside it and lay staring up at the top bunk overhead. I reach my hand into the bag and pull the leather bound journal from within.

March 10
th
, The Ninth Year of Cain

I killed him. It didn’t feel like I did, at the moment it happened or now, but I did. I know I did, because I saw it from a distance so close that I know it was my hand inflicting the pain he felt. What have I done? All I needed to do was breathe, and pause. Train, work, and I would have had the time I needed. I would have been able to safely reach my birthday without threat of another assassination attempt. But no, I couldn’t do that because I am my own worst enemy and am reckless. 13 days, 13 days to grow up. It doesn’t feel like it’s really March. Mostly because the smell of mom’s baking as she perfects whichever birthday cake recipe she’s planning to unveil at the celebration is missing, the celebration that ensures that the home with the red door is decorated in crepe paper and confetti. March, how is it already March? It seems like just yesterday I was flirting with a quiet Abel Cohen at the Carnival. Abel, I was so awful to him today that I wouldn’t be surprised if he actually left me and didn’t return but rather went somewhere on his own, found his own place and just lived. Allowed himself to live. He could. I know he could. I know he wouldn’t. And it’s not because of me necessarily, it’s not because of his parents or whoever his friends are. It’s because he believes in our purpose. He does, he believes is with his entire being and he would never leave. I wish I had that trait, in a world where everyone works so hard to keep their head down and try to just make something out of themselves in this life, he wants more. He wants the world and he makes me want it too. I hurt him, not Dante, not any member of the Nasai, I hurt him, me.