Bound to Ashes (The Altered Sequence Book 1) (28 page)

“How?”

“Well.... If we keep going, there’s a security room, if I can get the cameras online, we can basically watch for them until they show up. From there we can catch up with them, or head them off, or something.”

“Then let’s get going,” Peregrine says, standing up and grinning. Nothing slows her down.

[Ashton]

“We need to stop.” But my words fall on deaf ears.

Every step we take, every time my calloused feet press against the sharp textured metal, we’re getting more and more lost. With every step, the previous scene feels more and more like a bad dream. That’s why Dev ran and never looked back. He wants to forget.

“Dev!” At least now he’s slowed his pace to a determined speed walk, as opposed to a furious sprint. Maybe my voice will break through his mental shell. Maybe....

Maybe a different approach. I clear my throat and say, “Yeah, or we’ll just keep going until we starve to death. Or run into more Sentinels. Or something equally horrific.” Nope, nothing. I sigh and just follow him. I won’t let him out of my sight, that much is certain. Not after what Jules did. Dev is within grabbing distance, should it come to that. My heart sinks. I can’t trust my best friend—my brother—to not do anything... reckless. He thinks he’s weak for having the flashbacks, or episodes. He thinks he’s weak for being haunted by memories. I wish I could just grab him by the shoulders and shake him and say, ‘You’re not weak.’ But life’s not that simple. His mind is more convoluted than that. He’s guilty about everything that happens to us, whether or not the guilt rightfully falls on him. He could never have known that this would happen... it wouldn’t surprise me if he took Jules’s death as his fault. But it’s ridiculous to think he could have done anything. Nothing could stop Jules.

And now, nothing’s stopping Dev from walking himself into a coma.

“Dev!”

This time I get a huff of a breath as recognition he heard me, but it won’t be enough. He keeps pounding one boot in front of the other.

Huge machines pass overhead like metal blimps. Glass tubes wrap around the pathway and weave between pipes and disappear around obscure corners. Even I feel acrophobic in this place....

Then he stops. I stop as well. His shoulders slump almost imperceptibly— he must have realized that yes, we are lost. As if everything I’ve been saying to him since we left is hitting him all at once.

“Where are we going, Dev?” I would have preferred my voice to sound less pleading. And my question has an unintended double meaning. Where are we going now, but also, with everything?

His response answers it all: “I don’t know.”

“We should go back.”

He almost looks at me, but his gaze stays hovering around the floor as if his eyes are heavy. “I can’t go back to her.”

It’s maddening that the only thing I think to do is shrug. “It’s either that or die alone in here, Dev.”

He turns around suddenly and there’s fear in those big yellow eyes. “Not alone,” he says, like a plead.

I squint at him. “What?”

He buries his face in his hands and breathes, “Sorry, sorry....”

I wish I could run up to him and grab his shoulders, shaking them, maybe even hitting him— whatever it takes to snap him out of it. But it won’t help. Every time he gets like this I get an urge to grab him and move him, or jar him awake. I push the urges down. What he’s going through cannot be outrun. Instead I place a hand on his shoulder and look past his clenched fingers. “Don’t be sorry.”

He looks at me and I can feel how tired he is. I wish I could tell him to sleep, it’ll all be okay once you wake up, but sleep has never done any good for Dev. Action has. “We need to go.”

He pulls his hands away from his face but still stares into the black void. The longer I let him sit in his own mind, the worse it will get. “Dev.”

His big yellow eyes shift over at me.

“We have to go find Alessandra. You know why. And I’m done repeating it to you, anyway.” I let a laugh color my voice.

He almost smiles, so close, but still looks ashamed. “You’re right,” he concedes.

“So... any clue where we are...?”

He shrinks and glances around. I know the answer, he doesn’t have to say anything. That’s what I like about being around Dev. We’re always on the same wavelength.

“Well, let’s start by turning around.”

“Yeah,” he says as a sigh. “Sorry I got us lost.”

“It’s alright.” I suppress any ill feelings about it. It’s done and over with, we should just try to find our way back. I’m glad I didn’t try to smack him out of it. The gentler approach might feel like brushing fur against the grain, but that’s the best way to check for fleas.

I’ll have to write that one down later.

Man. He really took us deep. Was I really chasing after him for so long?

Ahead of me, Dev says, “Do you think she was telling the truth?”

Transferred instead of executed. Both kids. Felt bad for him. Could have been friends.

“Do you remember anything about being here?”

He looks up as he walks and says, “No. But it’s not like I trust my memory much. Things get kind of... messed up.”

I’d be a liar if I said I didn’t lie to myself. “I know how that goes.”

Dev exhales heavily and says, “I just... for some reason I don’t want to believe her.”

“Why?”

“Because... I don’t know. It gives her the upper hand.”

I pull up alongside him and give him a look that hopefully tells him, ‘Are you kidding me?’ “We’re on the same side, Dev. She doesn’t have an upper hand.”

He twists his mouth to the side in a tight grimace and looks away. “I guess.”

“Just let the idea that maybe she is telling the truth sit for a while. I mean, she seemed pretty sincere.”

“She knows so much more about us than we do,” Dev says. “It’s almost embarrassing.”

A laugh escapes me. “She knows about our creators, she knows the blueprints. But she’s still getting to know us.”

Even though he doesn’t look at me or nod or anything of the sort, the slight smile at the corners of his mouth is enough for me.

I try to imagine the facility as a gigantic library instead of a heartless metal death-trap. It helps a little.

We did find a huge library, long time ago, but it was far from intact. Most of the books were dust— pulped from rain, dried by the drought, and blown around by the wind. But some were still alive, some I saved. And even though a tree fell into the giant dome-shaped skylight above and brown moss grew from the velvet chairs, it still felt leagues more comfortable than anywhere else I’ve been. I hope the Ecodome has libraries.

I try to make this horrible place more like that library. And it’s working, more or less. They’re both tall and full of echoes and things I’ll never have the time to understand.

My mind flashes back to the green liquid and the lies and the scaffolding and the red lights....

It’s hard. But for my sake, and Dev’s, I’m refusing to bring up that stuff.

“I think it was a left here,” Dev mentions, so we take the left at the fork in the path. We approach a wall and a door with a tiny broken glass window.

“Are you sure this is it?” It doesn’t seem familiar.

“Well,” he admits. “Sort of.”

“Might as well try....” I ease the door open, but it still creaks.

I don’t remember passing piles of dead Sentinels and a hallway riddled with scorch lines. I think I would have remembered that.

“Definitely was a right, then,” Dev mutters, entering the room cautiously.

“Who did this?” The obvious question. I push around some of the Sentinels— or more accurately, the Sentinel parts. None of them are whole. And at the back, past the other three normal ones, is a red Sentinel. My chest gets tight when I try to decide if it was a Vinder Sentinel, or a Jules.

“Could have been the others, if they left, came this way....” but even though he says it, I can tell he doesn’t believe it.

“They’re tough for humans, but not even they could rip the Sentinels apart like this.” The narrow hallway is barely wide enough for a whole Sentinel to crawl through. So they had to come in one by one. Could it be a storage area for spare parts? Or... a repair bay? It seems so chaotic, though.... Sentinel legs sprawled in different locations, over hand rails, wires pressed into the grooved metal floor....

Dev steps over the wreckage and picks something up at the end of the hall. Something cloth. He turns it over in his hands.

I tiptoe over the shrapnel and see it’s a dark jacket riddled with burn holes. One of the sleeves is shorn off. It smells like burnt meat.

“It’s Heydrich’s,” Dev says, gripping the fabric like it was Heydrich himself.

“You’re sure?”

“This was the coat he was wearing at the stadium. I remember this,” he shows me the collar where a little golden pin is attached. “When he was trying to throw me out the window.”

“Then....”

“He’s in here somewhere.”

The urgency to keep moving multiplies. If Heydrich did all this himself, the humans won’t stand a chance. And if it’s anything that keeps someone alive and kicking, it’s a grudge, and for whatever reason, Heydrich has plenty of those.

15
• strangers again

[Dev]

Going back is going to be the hardest part.

I can just see it—staring at us like they don’t know us anymore. Like they never knew us to begin with. Back to square one... talk about an uphill battle.

But maybe with the information we have, they’ll be willing to set aside everything and move on. Like nothing ever happened. Like that incubation room is nothing but a bad dream. As much as I try to reprogram that memory as false, I can’t. It stings the inside of my skull. Are we willing to move on for the sake of moving on and nothing else? Can forgiveness be given over time, or will the humans demand it up front? They don’t need an apology. It’s us that need the apology.

Whatever.

“Dev, come on, I hate to rush us but....”

“No, I know. It’s this way.” This route seems a fraction more familiar than the others. It just seems less... menacing than the other. Something about the way the path opens up instead of clogged with pipes and rails. But who’s to say that the me that was blind with anger thought the same thing? The lost feeling grabs at my chest with icy fingers and I have to stave it off somehow. One foot in front of the other.

I lead us to a stretch of scaffolding that overlooks a massive ravine. Geometric snags of pipes and rails spread out between the mechanical rocks on the side of the canyon. The variation and random placement of shapes make them seem more and more like rocks— technological sandstone. Trying to picture how long it took to make this place, all the planning and labor, makes me dizzy.

“I hear something,” Ashton says behind me and that’s my signal to freeze and hold my breath.

We wait in nothing more than silence, to me.

“They’re coming,” he says.

My heart plummets. “Sentinels?”

He smiles and shakes his head. “No, the humans.”

Usually those words wouldn’t fill me with relief. I’m ready to let this all blow over and get on with things. That feeling of prideful anger keeps resurfacing, though. I should be livid about Alessandra lying to us. But the feeling is overwritten by what she said.
You can have a chance at a real life.
Even recalling it makes my heart thump faster.
They shipped you back to Caduceus instead of the gas chambers.

“Where are they?”

“I can hear them somewhere on the other side of this wall, it’s hollow on the inside up there,” Ashton says, gesturing above us. Sure enough, windows.

“Can we climb it...?” The ‘canyon’ walls nearest us are riddled with foot and handholds. We could do it. Maybe the window opens?

“Better idea,” Ashton says, pulling something out of his pack. A can opener.

My blank stare prompts him to laugh, but he says nothing, only turns around and throws it straight up. It sails easily to the height of the window and clinks against it gently, deliberately.

Eventually the silhouettes of humans fill the window, stare down for a moment, and rush away.

Here we go.

Should I prepare an apology? But it’s them who should apologize. I wish I wasn’t so good at making myself nervous.

“Ash....”

“Hm?”

“I don’t know what to do about all this.”

“About... what happened in the....”

“Yeah. I don’t know who’s at fault here. Do I apologize, or Alessandra? Or both of us? I just don’t know what’s going to happen....” It sounds so weird coming out of my mouth. This is usually something I’d work out internally.

“Just play it by ear,” Ashton says, smiling easily. “Sometimes no one’s to blame.”

Leave it to Ashton to make the most complicated things seem easy.

He leads the way along the path and every step gets harder and harder to take. Even though Ashton is right, maybe it’s no one’s fault, it doesn’t make it easier to bear.

I’m not ready for it, but there they are. The humans file up on a railed scaffolding parallel to ours across a narrow gap. All standing in a row, grabbing the rails and throwing themselves forward as far as they can.

“I am so glad we found you guys,” Alessandra is the first to speak. Her voice makes my nervousness bloom. “Being alone in this place has got to be a nightmare!” Her eyes flicker downward into the gap between us and she says, “We’ll find a way to you, hold tight.”

“Hey,” Ashton says, smiling, “give me some credit.” He starts to climb over the railing on our side onto the sliver-thin lip of scaffolding on the other side. I grab his arm.

He looks over, caught off guard, and I tell him, “We’ll go around.”

It’s times like this I swear he reads my mind. He’s thinking about Jules now, too. “Okay,” he says, stepping back over. “Probably a good idea.”

Thankfully it’s only a few moments before Alessandra and the others round the bend and join us. She takes a deep breath, shakes her arms out, and holds out her hand to me.

“I’m sorry for holding out on you,” she says. “But I think you understand why I did.”

I inadvertently hesitate and stiffly shake her hand. “Yeah. And I’m sorry for....” I swallow. “Overreacting.”

“No,” she says dismissively. “You’ve got nothing to apologize about.” Her shoulders fall and she looks at me, her jaw pressing hard. “I am so... so sorry.” A sob jostles her body and she smiles, laughs at herself softly, and says, “It’s just... so messed up. I messed up. I’ll... when we get to the dome, I’ll let you guys decide what to do with... the ones in incubation. If you want. I’ll take your advice into heavy consideration.”

It’s hard to know what to say to that. Thank you, for the consideration. Thank you, for putting hundreds of lives in our hands?

Ashton says softly, “Thank you.”

I guess it’s as simple as that.

Alessandra wipes her eyes with her sleeve and sighs. “Alright. We’re so close to the dome. It’s probably only a day’s walk.”

“There’s something else,” Ashton says.

“What? Doesn’t sound like good news,” Alessandra says, slowing to a stop.

“Correct,” Ashton says. “Here.” He pulls the jacket out of the loop in his pack straps and tosses it her way. It takes her a moment of turning the fabric over, but she recognizes it and swears under her breath.

“Yeah,” Ashton says. “It’s a good thing we’re close, like you said.”

But Alessandra just looks at him angrily and crumples the jacket up. She frowns, turns, and throws it over the ledge. All traces of her remorse from earlier are gone with the jacket as it plummets silently into the chasm. “Let’s go.”

Over time, harsh mechanical shapes slowly smooth out. Keyboards, screens with endlessly scrolling numbers and coding, swivel chairs and office desks. Alessandra passes it all with admiration as if returning home, as if ‘home’ were a positive thing. Home either meant Caduceus, the home of blood, or the silo in the desert forged from desperation. No happiness or fond nostalgia. Will I ever experience ‘home’? The closest thing to that is when I’m with Ashton. And if that isn’t how ‘home’ works, I’m not sure I want that feeling.

When Alessandra leads us into a pitch-black room, a soft and artificial sound comes on above us. Like a bell, but digitized. I stop in my tracks. A melodic tune follows and then a voice says, “Welcome, visitors,” the way he says ‘visitors’ doesn’t fit in with the rest of the recording, “to the Ecodome version B twelve viewing facility three. This facility was created with the intent of observing the goings-on inside Stem Incorporated’s patented Ecodome, the greatest feat of mankind to date.” I almost laugh. “If in the event of an emergency, exits are located directly to your left and front right.” On cue, the red exit signs light up. “We hope you enjoy your stay, and please refer to an associate, your guide, or the given information plaques for further guidance. And remember, the future is yours— we’re just helping it along.” Then the voice goes silent.

The lights slowly dim on. Raised ledges all around the metal room are lined with velvet seats that face the ceiling-high glass windows. Fake plants in pots stand in every corner and the papered red walls peel at the edges. The room seems deserted, so I walk the edges along the windows.

“Can you see anything?” Ashton asks.

“Not much. It’s too dark.”

“For you?”

“I can make out shapes, that’s it.” I don’t see much past blurs and dark shadows. I can kind of make out the immense ribbing along the ceiling, but everything else is pitch black.

“The Ecodome has a perfectly imitated day and night cycle,” Alessandra says as she leans close and cups her hands around the glass.

“The first time we get to see inside and it’s night. Just our luck, huh?” Peregrine says with good humor. I could tell she’s secretly disappointed, though.

“But hey,” Alessandra said. “It means we’re close.”

We descend more stairs and come upon some more industrial-looking hallways. The hall is clean and white, one end standing open and the other barred with a too-industrial-looking door. Thick metal and bolts everywhere. Aside from haphazard piles of crates and boxes lining the walls, we’re the only things here. Unless you count the massive metal fixtures mounted on top of the ceiling.... Some are long, ridged, and set on a track that stretches all the way down the room. Anything mechanical that looks like it moves is starting to make me feel sick.

“Do you guys hear that?” Ashton says out of nowhere, looking down the hall.

James throws his hands in the air as if to say, ‘Of course we didn’t,’ but Peregrine elbows him.

“It’s a mouse,” Ashton says.

“A mouse? That’s it?” Alessandra says.

Ashton steps closer to the metal door across the narrow room and looks through. I join him, but there’s nothing spectacular about the next room, other than it isn’t filled with stuff like this one. It’s smooth and white, longer than it is wide, and those strange mechanical fixtures stuck on the ceiling. One of the walls is sort of... slumped over, like it’s caving in. Out of the crevice pops out a small brown mouse, just like Ashton said.

“What is a mouse doing all the way down here?” Peregrine says.

“How the hell did you hear that?” James says. Ashton just ignores him.

“Ugh, he’s probably been eating the food stores,” Alessandra groans. “I was hoping this wouldn’t happen....”

A mechanical crackle sounds above us as some hidden speakers come to life. “Please stand back from all doors, deploying cleansers,” it says. The voice is impersonal and official, so we all take a step back from the door.

“Cleansers...?”

“I think I might know what that is....” Alessandra says, glancing back at Vinder.

The mouse scurries around the room cautiously, oblivious to everything. It sniffs the ground and starts grooming itself. Suddenly, the mouse looks to the ceiling, ears standing straight up.

The mechanical attachment shifts, swivels, and clunks into a different orientation.

The room turns red. The red light fans out and scans across the room, nearing closer and closer to the mouse. The creature doesn’t move. As the light passes over it, the mouse disappears. It just isn’t there anymore. After the light finishes its pass over the room, it shuts off and quickly slides back to the other side. There’s a small smudge of dust where the mouse had been.

“Please manually override cleansing functionality in room three,” the voice says again. A moment later, the same message repeats.

“Please tell me we’re in room 3,” James says.

“I think so,” Alessandra says.

“I’ve had enough of this place,” Peregrine says. “Let’s just find a way into the dome.” She sounds bitter, like the danger has no effect on her and is just annoying instead.

“Why do they even have that?” Vinder says, wincing briefly and clutching his stump.

“Cleansers?” Alessandra says. “It’s mainly for sterilizing machinery. The things they brought into the dome had to be perfectly clean.”

Vinder doesn’t seem satisfied by that answer and leans against the wall, scowling.

Alessandra sets to work examining the other doors our room led to. It’s the unsaid consensus to stay where we are, because the mechanical voice continues to repeat its message to override something. Even though its door stands open, I don’t trust the room to the left. It may not require an override. We all work to shove boxes away from the walls to uncover another door, or a panel easily removed, or anything.