Betrayals in Spring (25 page)

It’s surprising that, even with the Spritan bracelets, we managed to end up where and when we wanted to. Our power really has grown with the three of us together.

“Now what?” Lucas asks, checking out our surroundings.

“I say we grab Leah again, like we did the last couple of times. That worked pretty well,” Pax suggests. Then he pauses, face darkening. “Mostly.”

I know he’s thinking about Leah and her mother, about what we’re going to find when we sneak into her room later tonight.

Lucas’s lips tighten, and I can tell it bothers him that he wasn’t with us the last two times we were here. We filled him in on what happened with Mrs. Olsen and what Leah suspects about primordial nuclides, but didn’t bother with specifics.

“What did you do the last time?”

“We waited until the adults retired and woke her up,” I explain.

“I bet that scared the waste out of her.”

I shrug. “She got over it pretty quick. Leah’s an adaptor.”

“I know.” Lucas reminds me with a small smile that he knows Leah better than any of us, since he spent three years in Danbury once.

The tiny girl has been through so much, but it’s never Broken her the way it might have. She went a little wonky when Lucas first damaged her veil and the Others refused to fix it, thinking to use her oddity to smoke us out. Pax and I having to fix her mother probably didn’t help matters, but she’s strong.

A little lonely, perhaps, but mentally sound.

The sun dips below the horizon as we pace the trees like Wolf when he’s trapped inside during a snowstorm, all anxious to get moving.

“Now that we know we can travel and not lose any time, we should go to all the cities tonight,” Pax offers.

I bite my lip. “I don’t think so. Leah’s the only one we know won’t have a complete meltdown over finding us in her room at night. Do either of you have good enough relationships with kids in Atlanta, or Portland, or Des Moines that you’d be able to keep them calm?”

Pax doesn’t look happy that it means more waiting before going after Deshi, but both he and Lucas shake their heads. They look as dejected about having to answer that way as I feel. Almost seventeen years on this planet and between the three of us we have exactly one friend. I can’t even count Brittany, really. And even though my heart wants to include Monica and Val, my old sort-of friends from Portland, in my tally, it remains to be seen how they’ll handle being unveiled. Until their minds are their own, I can’t assume they’ll want to take up our cause.

We sneak into town later, double-checking to make sure all of the porch lights have been extinguished, then slink through the shadows to Leah’s. The back door is unlocked like always, but when we step into the kitchen, something feels off.

I stop, putting one hand out to still the boys and the other to my lips, looking around. The furniture and appliances sit where expected, a low hum of electricity coming from the refrigerator. Maybe it’s the lack of scent, or the way the air seems to hold completely still, but the house feels…empty.

Fear slices into my heart, splitting it into neat little chunks that tumble into my belly. Something’s wrong, but I don’t know what it is or whether to treat it like a threat. It’s too quiet, that’s all I know, and the tense concern crackling between the three of us says I’m not the only one who feels it.

After several minutes of standing as still as statues in the kitchen, I take a hesitant step forward. Nothing jumps from the shadows, so I lead the way up the stairs to Leah’s room. No sounds slip under her parents’ door and into the hallway, not a squeaky mattress or a light snore. My steps quicken, desperate to get to Leah and reassure myself that she’s okay, and worried more than ever now about how Pax and I left her five days ago.

It’s not okay. The room smells stale, like dust and old spit and dirty clothes. Her bed’s been made, not slept in since at least last night. No homework or textbooks sit on her desk. It’s been less than a week since Pax and I were here, so it can’t have sat empty for long, but Leah hasn’t been here today. A cursory glance reveals nothing of use, so I turn and sprint back down the stairs, throwing open the door to her parents’ room, knowing I’m going to find nothing but empty space.

“Where are they?” I ask no one in particular.

“The Wardens took them.” Pax stares into the closet, clothes hanging in perfect, color-coded rows. He looks ill, his normally olive skin tinged green, reminding me he’s as responsible for Leah as I am. A familiar pallor of guilt drapes an arm over him like an old friend. “It doesn’t look like they took anything.”

A clink and a rattle from the dark bathroom pluck my frayed nerves, but Lucas emerges a moment later, wiping his hands on his jeans. “Yeah. Nothing’s missing from the bathroom, either. I don’t think they planned on leaving.”

Dread slicks my stomach, climbing into my throat. The certainty that Pax and I somehow caused this throbs in my brain, aching down the back of my neck. The need to know if it’s true overwhelms everything else, and I turn to leave the house, the boys on my heels. Out the back door, instead of going left and to the park, I turn right.

“Where are we going?” Lucas whispers.

“To find out what happened.”

My teeth clench together so hard my jaw aches, and anger boils in my palms. Sweat breaks out on my forehead and droplets form on my back. I swear they must be sizzling.

I don’t know if I’m angry at the Wardens or at us for leaving Leah to deal with what happened to her mother on her own. We should have at least made sure her veil went back up properly.

The identical two-story next door belongs to Brittany, if memory serves, and a step inside the door reveals a more natural quiet. As we pass the master bedroom at the foot of the stairs, a loud snort emanates. It would be funny on any night but this one.

Brittany’s room, decorated in a nauseating array of pinks, announces itself with a cloud of fruity perfume. The sight of her under the covers, white-blond hair spilling onto her fuchsia pillowcase, offers a knee-weakening amount of relief. It almost cools the overheated anger I’m barely controlling under my skin.

I motion to the boys to wait by the door and cross to her bed. In a scene that reminds me so much of Leah it hurts, I reach out, shaking her slightly, then clamp my hand over her mouth until she wakes up and recognizes me.

“What are you guys doing here?” She sits up quickly, pulling her petal-soft comforter against her chest when the boys step out of the shadows.

At least she’s alive, and still unveiled.

“We were looking for Leah,” I manage to get out. The words stick to the sides of my throat, a little unenthusiastic about being answered.

Her face crumbles, lower lip quivering as tears fill her eyes. I wait out the storm, and after a moment she bites her full lower lip hard, putting her emotions back on the familiar tether. “They took her. Wardens. They said she Broke, but they lied.”

“When?”

Brittany jerks her gaze to Pax, her cheeks deepening to a pretty pink that matches her bedspread. “The day after you left.”

None of us speaks for a moment. Blood pools in her cheeks, and Brittany continues in a contrite tone of voice I’ve never heard pass her lips before tonight. “I didn’t know what to do. They came after Cell. I was supposed to meet her in the park but I forgot my bag in my locker and had to go back. By the time I arrived at the park entrance, they were shoving her in a rider. At dinner, my parents were talking about the Wardens coming and taking the Olsens away earlier that same afternoon.”

My knees tremble and I sink down next to her on the bed, letting her presence reassure me a little. We still have Brittany.

I study her from the corner of my eye while Pax runs his fingers through his dark brown mop and Lucas watches us, silent and serious. Brittany is one of the more beautiful girls at any of my Cells, with corn-silk blond hair that reaches to the middle of her back, some of the palest blue eyes I’ve ever seen, and a perfect peaches-and-cream complexion that’s never blemished.

It’s always irritated me a bit, as did her assumption that she led the girls in our year here in Danbury, but right now, she’s who we’ve got. And if I’m being completely fair, I’ve never really known her.

I’m not sure I want to learn what happened, but we owe it to Leah. “Did they take her because of us? Because of what happened to Mrs. Olsen?” I stop, holding my breath when Brittany shakes her head, hard.

“No. It was because of the research she was doing for you guys. The day they took her, the astronomy Monitor told her something maybe useful, and she spent all of lunch reading reference books on solar systems and planetary makeup.” She gets up off the bed, tugging the bedspread out from underneath me so she can keep it wrapped around her. Brittany’s more modest than I would have expected, or perhaps her pajamas are more flimsy that any that my human stand-in parents ever bought for me.

Pax catches my eye, and after a moment he gives a tiny shake of his head. I can’t decipher its meaning, whether he wants to give this up since 50 percent of the people we’ve let out of the Others’ control have been taken, or if he isn’t sure what we should do right now.

Lucas’s steady blue gaze reflects concern but also interest, and I know he’s curious about what Brittany has gone to retrieve. She returns from the attached bathroom, unfolding a piece of paper that has a thousand creases in it.

“Here. I folded it up small and trapped it inside my curling iron.” She gives us a wry smile, even though her heart isn’t in it. “I figured if there’s one thing the Wardens don’t know about, it’s fixing hair.”

I take it from her, smoothing out the creases against the bed. My heart jerks at the tight, neat handwriting, missing Leah’s black curls and spunk even though we really didn’t know each other all that well. Something about her attitude had given me hope.

On the top of the page, underlined like a title, are the words
Primordial Elements
, with
Primordial Nuclides
in parentheses right behind them. The rest of the page is scrawled in frantic, halting handwriting, as though she had to stop in the middle of each word to check the spelling. Which makes sense, given that I’ve never seen most of these words before and they’re complicated.

“She told us she thought researching primordial nuclides would help, but what’s the rest of this?” I wonder aloud.

“It’s what she asked about that last day in Astronomy—what’s a primordial element. The Monitor answered in a vague way about how some elements were formed by these nuclides before the solar system came into being, but then Leah found a partial list and puzzled more of them out from the textbooks. She slipped this to me after lunch, all excited, and wanted me to look it over so we could talk about the potential after school.” Brittany gets back into bed, absently winds her hair into her trademark single braid.

“Leah was trying to figure out if the Others’ host planets shared a common primordial nuclide or element. Is that what’s on the list?” Lucas queries softly.

Brittany looks up, her eyes a little baffled like she can’t believe he hasn’t figured it out on his own. She’s brighter than I gave her credit for, I’ll admit. So far, not nicer, though. “Yes. It’s the radioactive primordial elements their previous habitats have in common.”

The list is of the potential substances the Others could be mining from Earth. If Leah’s right, one of these primordial elements is how they choose a planet to invade.

“Forgive us, Brit, but we’re trying to catch up here. Why in ten years of science courses have we never heard about these things?” Pax flops onto her window seat, pushing his hair away from his face.

The moonlight catches his bronze skin, flashing across his cheekbones and lighting his sharp gaze. I can almost feel Brittany’s heart speeding up next to me on the bed, and I do hear her swallow. Hard.

It brings to mind the memory of Leah, also clearly smitten with my friend.

Brittany manages to form words, eventually. “Because they’ve never taught us about them. After you all left last winter, Leah started nabbing the reference books the Astronomy teachers keep on that shelf—the ones they make us copy from if we do poorly on an exam?” We all nod. “We read all of them and memorized the specifics about the previous host planets. It quickly became clear that it couldn’t be the planet’s inhabitants that shared a similarity—several of them were uninhabited—so we decided pretty early that it must have something to do with the planet’s actual makeup. It makes the most sense too, with what you guys said about the Others needing a resource. Inhabitants can be a resource, I suppose, but not a very reliable one.”

She pauses and I think about how she’s right, but also how she said it so matter-of-factly. Brittany’s been trained by these Others to think critically and use reason above all else. The veiled humans don’t have access to anything but reason and routine, but all the same, the Others might have created a generation of kids with the ability to think the way they do—cold, calculated, smart.

“Once we started looking for commonalities there, in the geological foundations,” she continues, “the phrase
primordial elements
came up a few times, like the head of a category. So she wrote them down. This last list is the ones that all of the previous planets have in common with Earth. One of those primordial elements must be what the Others need to survive.”

Leah told us some of this before, but the refresher clears the concept in my head.

“And you think she’s right?” Lucas’s eyes bore holes in Brittany’s.

She shrugs. “I think it’s the most probable theory we’ve happened on. And yes, I think it’s solid.”

“What does primordial mean?” Leah never really told us that, and I want to know. Now that I’ve been reading more for enjoyment, I’ve started to love the words as well as the sentences and stories they build.

“It’s not defined anywhere. But based on the description of these primordial elements and nuclides, and what the Monitor said, it probably just means they’ve existed in the universe since before the planets were even formed. They’re what came together to create this planet, and lots of others, too.”