Betrayals in Spring (33 page)

Something flickers in his blue eyes, and I notice for the first time that black veins run through the whites. It catches my breath, this evidence of his Otherness, but it doesn’t change the fact that we need him. The slight shift in expression is almost invisible, equally unreadable. It doesn’t look like forgiveness, though.

He says nothing; the silence begins to unnerve me.

“My father asked that the three of you be alive when he returns from the Harvest Site. I’ll do the best I can, but I’m afraid I can’t predict the ramifications of those burns on your leg, Althea. I’ll tell him to hurry.”

“Nitric, sulfuric, hydrochloric, we can cure it. Hydroflouric turns the living into bones, bones full of holes, eaten eaten eaten up.” Kendaja regards me seriously, as though she’s making some kind of sense.

Deshi’s black-veined eyes jerk to my pants where they’ve been burned away, but his expression doesn’t change.

“I’ll be seeing you, my dear abominations. Perhaps sooner than later, yes?” Zakej takes a couple steps back on the landing, then turns to go.

I wonder dully how they’re going to get down, but Zakej merely wanders to the edge, kicking the two Wardens Lucas incapacitated earlier until the last of the ice falls off their hair and from around their noses.

“Get up,” he snarls.

What’s left of the group that pursued us, including the Prime’s family and the boy we risked everything to save, walk out onto what must be an invisible staircase, leaving us alone.

CHAPTER 28.

“Althea, let me look at your leg.” Lucas flops down against the back wall, still holding the wounded skin at his chin.

I sink down beside him, and Pax joins us. Exhaustion eases out of my limbs until I want nothing more than to lie down and sleep. Now that we’re alone, my leg burns as though it’s on fire, and this kind of fire hurts as bad as anything the Others have ever done inside my mind. It’s as though someone sawed off the nerves in my calf and is holding a hot hair dryer directly against the raw ends.

Lucas runs his fingers over the ruined skin until water gushes across the wound. It offers little relief, but he doesn’t stop when I tell him it’s not helping. The grim set of his mouth spears new anxiety into my heart.

“I’m not cleaning it to stop the pain. Those words Kendaja said? They weren’t nonsense.” He squints at me, trying a halfhearted smile. “I mean, I know you were distracted by my mere presence in chemistry last year, but what about the hundreds of classes you sat through before that?”

Too many things trip and stumble through my mind for me to be able to respond to his teasing, even though I appreciate the effort. The events of the past couple of hours run over me like a rider, leaving imprints on my body that won’t heal. I call up the memory of Kendaja’s strange rhyme, and after a moment, the words she said strike a chord. “Acid.”

“Yeah. Where did it come from?” His fingers continue to gush cool water over my injury.

“The black goop they launched was alive. It secreted it.”

“Did it get you anywhere else?”

“There was one on my ankle, but it didn’t burn.” My voice sounds far away, detached from my body somehow. I really am so tired.

Pax leans over now, inspecting the second spot. It’s still a bit pink, but otherwise unharmed. Nothing like the plum-sized hole in my calf. The look they exchange tells me I’m still missing something.

“Let’s get out of here.” Lucas reaches for my hand, nodding toward Pax.

They’ve left us our bracelets, which seems a little odd now that I think about it. They’ve seen us travel, and they must know by now that we can do it without help. Maybe Zakej is smug enough to believe Cadi’s death will put an end to it, but that doesn’t seem right. He and his father have learned by now not to underestimate us, so something else is going on. Either way, we can’t leave.

“No,” Pax and I say in unison.

My eyes meet his, finding the same concern and resignation that’s pressing against my skin from the inside. I nod, too tired to explain.

“We can’t do a thing without Deshi, Winter. There’s no point in leaving. Better we stay here and try to find a way to bring him back around to our side.” Pax pauses, glancing at me. “And if Althea’s hurt as badly as Zakej thinks, we need to be here. They’re the only ones who can fix it.”

“They won’t fix me, but you’re right about Deshi. He doesn’t know everything we do, and we owe him. He’s been in here all this time, without the benefits of meeting Cadi and Greer and Wolf. Even Griffin and Nat have helped us see our responsibility for what it is. We can’t leave him again. It would only reinforce what he thinks—that we don’t care about him, that he can’t count on us.”

“But how are we even going to talk to him? He didn’t say a word just now, and I doubt he’ll be coming around for chats.” Lucas threads his fingers through mine, spilling cool relief into my burning palms.

“I don’t know. But we’re together; we’re all alive. It could be worse.”

I snort in response to Pax’s optimism. “How on earth could this be any worse?”

As though we conjured Deshi with our idle thoughts, he appears at the bars holding us captive. He’s shorter than I remember, and thinner than either of the boys flanking me. Strength flows from him, though, and self-assurance.

That same elusive flicker of emotion flashes in his gaze, then disappears. “You’re still here.”

Despite the fact that I hurt all over, I get up and walk closer to him. Lucas and Pax stay put, maybe to give me a chance to get through to him. “We’re not leaving without you, Deshi. You have to believe us, we’ve never forgotten about you, and there are things—”

I break off with a gasp when the bars disappear again. Before I can react he reaches toward me and wraps strong fingers around my arm, yanking me to his chest. The thick smell of freshly turned earth, the tinny scent of a spring rain, cloak me like an extra layer of clothes; it’s suffocating.

Lucas and Pax are shouting, and their fingertips brush my hair and shoulders, but Deshi moves me back a few steps, out of their reach. I glimpse Kendaja twitching at the edge of the invisible stairs, her hungry gaze on the boys trying with all their might to reach me.

Deshi sets me a little away from him so it’s easier to walk, and it’s then I realize why Pax and Lucas are so hard to hear, why I feel slightly covered by Deshi’s scent. He’s thrown a protective barrier of moss around us. Not a thick one, but enough to block any wind or water the boys might try to throw our way.

They won’t try that, though, not with the chance of hitting me instead.

I open my mouth to try again to get him to see our true intentions, but he puts a thin hand tight across my mouth. “I wouldn’t. Kenda’s been promised free access to you if you speak to me.”

We step out onto the empty space, the weightless support solid even though it’s invisible. The freak of a girl stays close behind us, but my mouth moves anyway, without any thought to what Deshi just told me. “Where are we going?”

I’m rewarded with a poke in the back, her fingernail stabbing through two layers of clothes and into my skin, trailing downward with a familiar slicing pain. I grit my teeth, grunting and breaking into a sweat, until Deshi pulls me away from her.

“The Prime has been contacted about the change in our fortunes, and requested that the three of you be separated. So, you’re being separated.”

The reminder of what Kendaja can do with a featherlight touch keeps me silent the rest of the twenty-minute walk to the ground, and even though the growing distance between Lucas, Pax, and I aches in my core like a physical wound, the solid rock under my feet straightens my back a bit.

We wind downward through tunnels too dark for me to make out much of anything until Deshi stops in front of an arched doorway smaller than the ones in the big room and with a marble grating on the front. He reaches above the door and it disappears, then he shoves me so hard I smack my face on the back wall.

I can’t see him leave through the tears of pain in my eyes, and blood gushes from my nose until it coats my lips. His footsteps, accompanied by Kendaja’s erratic shuffle, disappear into the blackness.

The knowledge that Deshi betrayed us to the Others, that he helped orchestrate the entire evening that led to our capture, torments me. I should have put the clues together sooner, should have realized he might have been brainwashed by the aliens who had access to him all this time.

Not brainwashed the way the humans are, not in his mind. But convinced because they presented him with facts skewed to make them out to be the good guys.

But I’m the good guy. Pax and Lucas are the good guys. How we can make Deshi believe that if we can’t talk to him?

The truth sinks in, a heavy burden than knocks me to my back in the dark, head cradled by nothing but cold rock.

I’m all alone with a smashed-up face, deadly acid eating my leg, trapped in a dark hole deep in the Others’ Underground Core.

I decide to never again ask the universe how things could get worse.

CHAPTER 29.

Not too much time passes before a throbbing pain starts on the outside of my ankle. A few hours, no more.

At first I blame the ache on the injury I sustained running from the Wardens last winter, perhaps exacerbated by tonight’s events. But Kendaja’s chanting and the serious looks passing between Pax and Lucas upstairs lodge behind my eyes and refuse to let me fool myself into believing it’s going to be okay.

The burns along my calf, the ones Lucas cleaned with his water, are tender to the touch and sting, but my ankle feels different. The pain there sinks deep under my skin.

Quiet footsteps interrupt my battered mind as it tries to piece together old chemistry lessons. They grow louder as I hold my breath, scared who might be coming and at the same time relieved someone is coming at all.

Maybe they’re bringing Lucas or Pax. The Prime told Deshi to keep us separated, so they won’t be in here with me, but even knowing they’re close would give me some small comfort.

I know in my heart they won’t bring them near for that reason alone.

Even though my eyes have adjusted, it’s dark enough down here to obscure details. A black shadow emerges from the inky tunnel leading toward me, and my hands grip the slippery marble bars of my cell. I wonder how long ago they built these, how they knew they would need to use a substance that could withstand the elements, if they planned all along to keep us in here—or if our parents had been the previous tenants.

Deshi’s face melts out of the gloom, rigid and angry. His eyes refuse to meet mine as he stops a few feet away, far enough to prevent me from reaching out and touching him. Does he think I would hurt him?

“How’s your leg?”

Focusing on it makes the thumping pain worse, and I wince without really meaning to. The strange pulsing in my ankle sinks deeper, as though the bone is dissolving slowly into pieces. “The burns aren’t too bad but my ankle hurts.”

Without answering, he squats and places a small cloth bag on the ground. When he straightens, he crosses his arms and meets my eyes for the briefest of seconds. In the shadows only the whites of his eyes show, letting me forget about the black veins crawling toward the blue irises that match mine. “Did you understand what Kenda told you upstairs?”

I swallow hard, willing my voice to come out confident and not scared. Not desperate. “Yes. I mean, I understand the slugs or whatever they are secrete acid.”

“Different kinds. The burn on your ankle will kill you, eventually. Dissolve the bone and poison you with fluoride.”

When my brain doesn’t compute the facts fast enough, he takes a step forward, hands curled into fists against his sides. “You should have learned this in Cell.”

“Well, I…” Things are fuzzy, and suddenly I’m so tired. My face aches from smacking into the wall earlier, and the blunt information that I’m going to die from the acid burn on my leg retards my thought process.

“Never mind. There’s a salve in the bag. Use it all.”

Before I can answer, or figure out what to say to reach him, Deshi kicks the little pouch within reach, then turns and disappears the way he came. The soft material of the bag brushes against my fingers, and I tug it through the bars, retreating to the back wall of my tiny compartment before sitting down. I unscrew the cap on the little tub, finding cool gel inside, then put it down to roll my jeans up to my knee.