Betrayals in Spring (18 page)

“I’m going to tell you what happened at the Harvest Site…and exactly whose side I’m on now.”

CHAPTER 14.

For a couple seconds, nothing but undiluted terror bangs around inside me. If we’ve been wrong to trust him, if he’s been spying on us this whole time, we’re dead. The Wardens could be waiting in the woods to snatch us up.

I tell myself that’s not possible. Why would he have helped with Greer only to betray us now? It shocks me that even as my brain remains unsure of Lucas’s allegiance, my heart instinctively believes in him.

Lucas heaves a sigh, looking twenty years older than when I left him in the park last autumn. “I wish Cadi were here. She could just show you the whole thing and I wouldn’t have to tell you about it.”

He looks so tired, so lost. It makes me want to wrap my arms around him and make it all go away. But nothing is going away, and if this spring has taught me anything, it’s that whether alone or together, Lucas and I are capable of handling it.

Pax sets his book down carefully, looking a little bit as if he’s prepared to jump up and sock Lucas in the jaw if he says anything that’s less than agreeable. The two of us lock eyes through the dying flames, sharing concern at the detached tone of Lucas’s voice. I give him a tight shake of the head and he shrugs.

“She’s not here, Lucas, and you’re scaring us,” I prod.

“The Goblert—the little guy who blew the dust on me—transported me straight to the Harvest Site. This place…you guys wouldn’t believe it. My fantastic dream, your nightmare, Althea. Ice as far as you can see. Temperatures so cold the Others built these structures just so human beings can survive. They told me regular people would freeze to death in less than fifteen minutes if unprotected, and there isn’t any wildlife.”

“This is on Earth? How is that possible?” It’s fascinating, but now that we’ve seen a map that shows just how small of a speck our Sanctioned Cities are, I suppose it’s not as far-fetched as it sounds that there could be a place with such an extreme climate.

“They put me to work. The Prime was there along with some Wardens, maybe fifty. Apa’s job is to keep the ice thick so they can mine. They’re extracting something underneath the surface, pulling it up through the ice, and all of the activity melts it unless Apa—or me, I guess—keeps it frozen.”

“What happens if it melts?” Pax leaps in with a question this time, his eyes riveted by Lucas.

“Primarily their concern is that it would compromise their resource. I still don’t know what it is, by the way. I never saw what they’re harvesting, but if the ice melts the mines will collapse. Secondary issues are what would have forced them off the planet—if the ice all melts, eventually the rest of the planet would be uninhabitable. It would flood the oceans and swamp most of the landmasses, given enough time.”

“How could you not see the resource? And if only some of the Wardens were there with the Prime, how are they harvesting enough of whatever it is to sustain their race?”

Lucas levels me with an empty gaze. “That Nat guy didn’t lie about the Broken not being dead. They’re there. At the Harvest Site. Thousands of them.”

The forest and the hills, the crackling fire, the warmth of Wolf’s presence at my back, everything disappears into blackness. A buzzing takes up residence in my ears, but I can hear Pax’s gasped reaction, so I’m not passed out, even though I can’t see. Finally my vision clears, and Lucas’s stare has filled with concern, at least around the edges.

“You okay, Althea?”

“No. No, I’m definitely not okay. Tell us about them. The Broken.”

“The Prime made sure to keep me separated from them. I saw them from afar; he kept me locked in a cage like our parents, and no one was allowed to speak to me. It was a boring job, honestly, just pressing my hands into the ice three times a day and expending enough energy to refreeze the water that started to flow deep down. The ice goes down forever, from what I could feel, and the mines reach like fingers into the deepest parts of the earth. But I saw them. People we know…knew.”

I’m holding my breath, but it squeaks out at those last words. “Who? Who did you see?”

“One of the girls from our chemistry class. Emmy, I think. Our chemistry Monitor, the one whose smile always quivered. That little boy from the news, the one whose parents Broke and killed each other or whatever.”

Pax’s strangled gasp squeezes my heart. Tommy’s alive after all.

“What are they doing to them?” Pax manages to croak. The fear and desperate guilt swirl off him like a windstorm, sweeping up little tornados and swirling his spicy-sweet scent through the air.

Lucas shoots Pax a strange look, then turns one full of questions at me, but I give him a tiny head shake. It’s Pax’s story to tell, not mine.

“They’re prisoners, obviously. And they’re not treated very well, from what I can see. They’re thin and they look tired, but they don’t seem veiled. Unhappy faces all around. I’m guessing the Others don’t bother with controlling their minds since they’re in control of their bodies.” Lucas stops, sucks in a deep breath. “They work all day and half the night. If they don’t cooperate they’re punished. Even the…even the kids.”

Silence returns, and I don’t know about Pax, but my emotions start at horrified, climb toward distress, and end up at anger like I’ve haven’t felt since Zakej tortured Lucas right in front of me or those Wardens hurt Wolf in Wyoming. “At least they’re alive. Even if things are bad, we can still save them,” I bite out.

“That’s what changed my mind once and for all. No matter how much time I spend with Apa, or how sure I am that he wants the best for me—and I
do
believe that—it doesn’t alter the bald truth that they don’t care about the humans. It doesn’t mean they won’t do the same thing to another planet. The bottom line for them isn’t love, it’s survival.” He breaks off, biting his lower lip. “That’s not what I want to believe. So, I’m in for saving Earth, for ousting the Others, for setting those people—all people—free. No matter what it costs, no matter who has to die. I’m in.”

The bottom line for them isn’t love, it’s survival
.

Those words wrap around my brain like a freezing wet blanket, uncomfortable and hard to cast off. It’s the essence of the questions that have been rattling around inside me for the past several weeks, as I wonder about my mother and about how we’ll defeat the Others or whether they’re evil at all.

“Is it evil to try to survive, even if that means kill or be killed?” I watch the question harden disdain into lines around Lucas’s eyes.

“It’s not evil to try to survive, Althea, but they don’t have to do it this way. Their presence does fundamentally change a planet’s atmosphere, that’s true. But they don’t have to slip the veils into people’s minds—that’s for their convenience. They don’t have to take people who don’t fit into society, whether it’s because of how smart they are or if they’re physically deformed or maybe their brain just can’t handle being controlled, but they do. They call them Broken and enslave them, and they don’t think it’s wrong.” He frowns at me. “I know how you feel, because you’ve spent time with your mother and seen the love in her eyes. Pax’s dad saved his life a couple of weeks ago, too. Maybe the Elements have changed, but we can’t let the fact that they’re our parents cloud our judgment.”

“And we have human parents, too, you know,” Pax interjects, his voice urgent, as though he can’t stand the fact that we can’t jump into a battle right this second. “Just because we never met them doesn’t mean they didn’t love us, too.”

Sadness opens up in my heart like a flower, one that might always be there, fed by the knowledge that I’ll never meet my father—that he died because of my mom and me. “You’re right. We might be half-Other, but we’re half-human, too. And in this fight, I don’t see how we can choose the Others’ side. Even if it means we don’t live through the war.”

The relief that Lucas’s time at the Harvest Site deposited him back in the right frame of mind loosens my muscles until I want to collapse. “If the Harvest Site is surrounded by nothing but a huge expanse of ice, so there were no trees, how did you use Greer’s portal to return?”

“Once my dad healed enough to take over, they sent me back with the Goblert. He was supposed to take me to where Deshi is and hold me like bait for you two. Once we were off the ice block, I leaned on the first tree we passed and poof—back at the cabin.” He shrugs. “He didn’t seem interested in stopping me.”

“What’s a Goblert?” Pax asks the question I’m suddenly too exhausted to form.

“Another half-breed experiment. They can forge certain elements, and the Others thought perhaps they could learn to synthetically create the resource that sustains them. It didn’t work; apparently the Goblerts can only forge gases. The one you saw is one of three, but he can’t tell us what the resource is, either. The Others genetically engineered the half-Goblerts to be born without tongues.” He shivers, then slides sideways until his head lays on one of the backpacks. “I think I’ll go to sleep now.”

“Me, too.” Pax drags his blankets farther away from the fire so he can nestle against a tree.

My eyes droop, too; the past few days have completely drained me. Wolf’s snores wind through the night, and Pax’s join them a few minutes later. The sounds of animals in the hills, rustling, hooting, holding indecipherable conversations in the night, twine into a sort of lullaby that’s become a familiar comfort over the past several months.

The fire has gone out when movement starts me fully awake, and then the scent of pine brushes my cheek and threads through my hair. Breath catches in my lungs as Lucas climbs over me and settles so we’re facing each other but not touching, the lengths of our bodies stretched out on my thick pad of blankets. I huddle under one, but of course Lucas isn’t chilled by the northern spring air.

Even so, every inch of me is aware of him—from my toes, up my shins, across my belly, and into the tip of my nose. My skin prickles and shivers, alight with the knowledge that I could reach out and hold him the way I used to, but that now something more urgent runs beneath the thrilling familiarity.

For a moment I worry about Pax, but he’s at least fifteen feet away and clouds have rolled over the moon and stars, leaving the night oppressively black.

Lucas gives me a weary smile, but the sight of his dimple drops my stomach into my toes. “Hi.”

“Hey.” I smile back, laying my hand flat on the blanket in the space between us.

Lucas copies my movement so that our pinkie fingers are touching. We breathe each other in for a while, and even though we’re not talking and it should be weird, searching his eyes for the answers to my life seems like a normal thing to do for the next couple of hours. Or days. Or for the rest of my life.

“I’m sorry.”

“For what?” I want to wipe away the guilt crinkling the corners of his worried blue eyes. It’s behind us now.

“For scaring you. For letting the time I spent with my dad cloud my judgment. I was always coming back, Althea. Even if I had to walk from the Harvest Site. I wouldn’t have gone anywhere without you. For a while I just thought…I guess I wondered if both of us wouldn’t have a better future with them.” He moves his hand until his pinkie intertwines with mine.

“They wouldn’t let us have a life, Lucas. We’d be prisoners. Like our parents.”

“I know. I realized that pretty quickly. While I was there, I couldn’t sleep. All I could do was lie awake, staring at all that ice, terrified I was never going to see you again.” He swallows hard a couple of times, anxiety washing off of him in pine-scented waves.

Like the first time he kissed me, his nerves infect me, smudge the world around us out of existence. He snuck over here to say something, and the thought of what it might be pounds my heart into a frantic beat.

“You asked me to leave the feelings between us on the back burner until we got through the coming fight, Althea, and I get why. But being away reminded me that we might not have a chance to move them to the front. If we never get to know what the future will bring, then that’s the way it is. But I can’t live another minute scared that you aren’t sure of me. Of what I want.” He pauses, eyes finding mine and holding on for dear life. His hand crosses farther into my space, covering mine and squeezing hard. “I love you, Althea. I didn’t even know what that meant before I met you, and sometimes I still think we really don’t, but when I see you and touch you and feelings fill me and turn into words, that’s what’s there. I love you.”

His face blurs through my tears, and no matter how many times I swallow, I can’t respond. It’s too much to believe—that he’s never going to leave me, that we’re going to fight the Others together the way we planned last autumn, that the possibility of what’s between us could solidify into something lasting.

That he loves me as much as I love him.

It’s not confusion that stills my tongue. It’s partly fear of ruining the moment, and partly the fact that we don’t know if we’ll ever have a future, and talking about how we’d like it to be scares me all over again.