Creators (16 page)

“You do know you don’t have to sneak around, right? I’m okay with you and Stephanie,” I told Henry as we went to work on setting up the camp.

Henry froze and his mouth dropped open. Once he realized I had noted his reaction, he popped his mouth closed and went back to work building the campfire. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“So I didn’t see you holding her hand last night at dinner when you thought no one was looking?”

Henry blushed. “I…I was just asking if she was okay.”

I threw my head back and laughed. “Oh my God! If you can’t admit it to your best friend, how are you ever going to tell her?”

“We’re back to being best friends, then?” he asked, his voice growing serious.

I dropped the tarp I had been holding and walked over to him. I took his hand into mine. “We’ve always been best friends, Henry.”

He squeezed my hand. “I guess we have. Even when we’re both pretending to hate each other.”

“Even then,” I said quietly.

Henry squeezed my hand once more and then went back to work. “So, it doesn’t make you jealous? Not even a little?” he joked.

“You’re unreal.” I laughed. “So, you going to tell her?”

“I don’t know. We’re in the middle of a war. It doesn’t exactly feel like the best time,” he said, throwing a stick at me.

“Oh, Henry. Don’t be a dumb-ass. There is no better time.” I poked him in the ribs with the twig for good measure.

Later that night, as Henry snuck Stephanie off to talk to her alone, I pulled out a book Robert had given me before I left the camp. Our parting had been marked with strangeness. I never took my brother-in-law to be an avid reader. But as he mumbled final tips and combat instructions, he placed a copy of William Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night
into my hands. He said nothing of the book or why he gave it to me. He simply told me he found it on Eric before he was buried, and he thought I should have it.

I pulled the book from my satchel and leaned closer to the glowing fire to borrow some of its light. We would be reaching my old compound in the morning, and while I should have been sleeping, I knew I wouldn’t be able to.

When I opened the book, my breath caught in my throat. Etched onto the title page was a name:
William McNair
. Below it was a hand-sketched drawing of a wild shipwreck. The sea had tossed the vessel right into a reef. Below it, he’d hastily drawn a beach and on the land stood a girl. Despite the violent sea behind her, the girl looked happy.

I remembered how McNair talked of the sea. And I wondered if he would have been as happy as the girl in the picture, weathered any storm, to find such a piece of land. Land untouched by our troubles.

I skimmed a couple of pages of the book and came across an underlined passage. It was an exchange between a captain and a shipwrecked girl named Viola. The heroine wondered what she would do in this new and unfamiliar land, and the captain told her it was a miracle she was saved.

It had been so long since any one of us had seen a miracle.

Feeling the ghost of McNair throughout the pages of the book, I snuggled down against the ground and pulled a blanket over my shoulders. I’d rather fight sleep than fight a dead man’s unfulfilled hopes and dreams. I had too many of those myself.

Somehow sleep found me. I only woke once when Henry and Stephanie returned to the campsite. They held hands as they walked, and I watched as Henry placed a gentle kiss on her cheek. He was different with her than he was with me, and I wondered if it was because he sensed the fire in her was stronger than his. That he would be the one to calm it.

Did we draw people to ourselves to fill in our missing parts, or did we seek out those missing parts ourselves?

…

The next morning, as we trudged closer and closer to the place Henry and I called home for so many years, Stephanie and my best friend tried unsuccessfully to keep their hands off each other. That didn’t mean she wasn’t focused entirely on the task at hand. Their touches were small and quick. A gentle hair tug. A playful kick in the heel here and there. Looking at the two of them, I realized Henry had found his partner in war. Something I had never wanted to be. Something he had searched out in Julia Norris, the girl who had helped him murder the incubating chosen ones back at Templeton. He had wanted a warrior, someone committed to the cause as much as he was, but I wasn’t that girl. I would choose love over war any day.

But maybe in Stephanie he had found both. I couldn’t help but smile as I walked behind them. Lost in my own musings, I barely noticed when everyone stopped. Thomas, one of the men my father assigned to our group, held up his hand and scrunched his nose. “Do you smell that?”

I sniffed. A pungent and familiar odor crept up my nose and traveled down to my stomach, where it painfully churned. Stephanie and Henry stopped whispering to each other and tried to identify the stench as well.

My eyes darted to Henry’s. “I know what that is,” I said. Without wasting another second, I bolted toward where the compound stood. It couldn’t have been half a mile from our current location. My heart beat hard against my chest and not just from running.

If I was right…

I couldn’t be right.

“Tess! Wait!” Henry yelled. I could hear the others running after me, but I didn’t slow down. What was the worst that could happen? We would get caught? That was all part of the plan anyway.

I skidded to a stop and Henry crashed into me from behind. We both toppled to the ground. “Holy shit,” Stephanie breathed.

Home was a strange concept to most naturals. Forced to leave the shantytowns that we grew up in, we had nothing but cement walls and communal living quarters for most of our lives. A place to wait for the end—but never a home. But as we stared at what was left of the compound, I realized the building was more than a collection of walls—it was the people who lived inside. A people destroyed.

Henry and I lifted our heads to find the compound burned to the ground. Piled high in front were bodies upon bodies. Everyone we knew. Everyone we shared meals with and passed in the hall. Everyone the council promised to protect.

Eradicated.

I vomited into the dirt. Stephanie fell next to me and pulled my hair back, saving what wasn’t already soiled the first time from my second round of throwing up.

“God damn them!” Henry screamed into the sky. I reached up a shaky hand and clutched onto his shirt, attempting to hold him in place. Hold him together. He pushed my hand away and brought himself to his feet. “Damn them,” he sobbed. He paced back and forth, pulling at tufts of his hair.

“What do you think happened?” Thomas asked our fifth traveling companion, a solider named Daniel.

“Charlie said this sort of thing’s been happening,” Stephanie said. “The war isn’t going so well, so they’ve been getting rid of the compounds. That way they can use the chosen ones to focus on the front. What do they need naturals for anymore?” She ran her free hand up and down my back.

I wiped my mouth with my sleeve and sat on my backside, pulling my knees to my chest. “Henry and I came across another compound like this one before. Everyone had been taken out and shot, and then they burned it to the ground. Didn’t want to leave anything that the Isolationists could salvage. But I never thought it would happen here.”

Henry rounded on me. “Then you’re naïve.”

“Calm down,” Stephanie pleaded with him.

“Calm down? That’s our whole species’ problem. We’ve just been sitting back and letting this happen. Over and over again we let them get the best of us. We should have—”

Stephanie got to her feet and walked over to Henry, placing both of her hands on his face. She pressed her forehead against his. “We’re going to get them. I swear it. We’ll make every last one of them pay.”

“Going to make us pay? How do you plan on doing that?”

I whipped my head around to find three chosen ones surrounding us. They were the tools of the council, the weapons of the men responsible for the destruction of my people. The one who asked us the question was carelessly throwing a stick from one hand to the other.

“You sons of bitches!” Henry screamed, and without warning or thought, fueled by the fire that always burned inside of him, he ran straight at them.

The chosen one flicked his wrist and it was over. The small, seemingly harmless twig struck Henry right in the neck. Blood spewed from him like water from a fountain. His eyes bulged as he crumpled to the ground.

“Noooooooooooooo!” It ripped from me like my soul was tearing with it. I had lied to James when I said he had all of my soul. I stupidly thought that Henry’s lie had forever destroyed his claim to a small part of it. But when he lied about James being in the community, it hadn’t ruined what took years to build—our connection. Instead, I had been right those early days back in the compound when James had once asked me what my definition of the soul was, and I told him a soul has many different aspects.

My words drifted back to me.
There are people who can fill a part of you, make it stronger. The part of my soul that longed to be carefree, the part that didn’t know fear of disappointment, that was the part of my soul that Henry belonged to. He took it with him.

Part of me would die with him, and I would always, forever, be undone.

Stephanie instinctively reached for her gun, but before she could lift it, a chosen one held her by the neck off the ground. In the blink of an eye, the chosen one who speared Henry was crouched in front of me. He reached up and placed a finger on my lips.

I wanted to bite it off. My eyes darted to Henry. He lay shaking on the dirt floor, his body jerking and moving like some uncoordinated dance. I rocked back and forth gently to try and control the lightning storm that raged inside of me. I looked up at Stephanie, who remained stoic, and I attempted to channel her.

The third chosen one stood behind Thomas and Daniel, who both held their hands up in surrender. That had been the mission, after all.

“Look what we have here,” the one holding Stephanie purred. He yanked her hair to the side. “This one has three marks. A fresh one at that! What could you have done to earn that last one so recently? How naughty were you?” he teased.

“I struck one of you bastards right in front of his friends. He thought he had the right to put his hands on me. I guess he didn’t like it when I marked up his pretty little face,” Stephanie boasted without hesitation. If she was still reeling from Henry’s death, she was hiding it well. She was a pro. Striking a chosen one would earn a girl a one-way ticket to doom. I wondered if this was something she had practiced with my father.

The chosen one in front of me narrowed his eyes. “Do you have three pretty little marks, too?”

I swallowed down the bile that sat rotting in my throat and nodded.

“Isn’t that lovely? Looks like we get to keep you two,” he said with a smile. He stood up and held out his hand to me. I jutted my chin away from his touch. “Let’s not start out like this. Hmm?” he replied, pushing his hand back into my face.

I clenched my jaw and grabbed his hand. When he pulled me up, I turned my head to look back at Henry. He wasn’t moving anymore. I blinked away the tears that pooled in my eyes.

“Friend of yours?” the chosen one asked.

I pressed my lips together and looked away. I wouldn’t put up a fight, but that didn’t mean I had to give him everything he wanted. His eyes darkened and he slapped me hard across the face. I fell forward.

The time between crashes of lightning and thunder was getting shorter and shorter. Soon, I wouldn’t be able to stop hell from breaking loose. Mission or no mission.

“I asked if he was your friend,” the chosen one snarled. I nodded, unable to stop a lone tear from trailing down my face. “Tell me, what are you two girls doing out here?”

“We ran,” Stephanie answered. “From the compound a few weeks back. We didn’t want to know what happens after we got the third mark. These men are Isolationists. They were supposed to help us escape, but she got sick, and so we had to wait her illness out.”

I was caught off guard by how easily her lies came. I cleared my throat. “When we saw the smoke, we thought we might be able to find something in the wreckage. Something to help us survive.”

“Well, I’m afraid you’re going to find out what happens after all,” he said with a causal shrug. He looked up at his two compatriots. “Kill them.” In a synchronized series of movements, Thomas’s and Daniel’s necks were snapped.

I gasped.

“What?” the man asked, looking at me as if I was the crazy one. “We always kill the men. What do we need them for?”

As the three chosen ones led Stephanie and me to our new destiny, only one thought kept me going: my father knew this was going to happen. He knew Henry, Thomas, and Daniel would be killed.

Henry.

I would make it through this.

If only for him.

I leaned my head back against the wall and tried to slow my breathing. I was sucking in too much air, and I didn’t know how much longer I would be locked in the closet. It was the third time this week that I had been forced into the cramped room and bolted inside. The last time I had passed out from lack of oxygen.

I was being punished for my sins.

After the incident in the woods, our captors, Stephanie, and I had traveled by foot for a week to a safe point belonging to the council’s network of outposts and training facilities. Of course, these places were quickly becoming abandoned and obsolete. The council no longer had the manpower to run the establishments, so they moved their armies closer to the headquarters themselves. There, we were joined by other female prisoners taken from the compounds and training centers destroyed in what the chosen ones were calling the Great Reckoning.

The Great Reckoning. I didn’t ask what it meant. It remained a series of words for me. The only meaning they held was created by the council, and I had stopped caring long ago what they wanted me to believe.

Even the war that seemed to be brewing out of control felt unimportant to me. What did I know of Eastern and Western except what was told to me through the council? A distorted and dirty filter that attempted to shape my world in whatever fashion it desired. This wasn’t a war I was part of; I was merely collateral damage. This was a war between two giants who used science as their weapons. And I was just trying to survive.

Surviving meant living in the council headquarters themselves, the heart of evil. If I were going to find that beach McNair dreamed of, I’d uncover the map there.

The chosen ones were proud of the council’s headquarters and boasted of its beauty almost as if I should feel honored to be imprisoned within its walls. Built in what was once called Nevada, the headquarters, like the chosen ones who protected it, was a work of art that left one breathless. The chosen one who had killed Henry explained that it was copied from a building that once existed in England. This hardly came as a surprise, as much of the council’s prescribed buildings, clothing, and etiquette harkened back to ideas of English propriety. They had always tried to recapture the spirit of that great empire.

But they should have known that all empires fall.

Somerleyton Hall was the name of the original building the headquarters was copied from. When Stephanie and I came upon it, after a week of walking and several days in a council transport, we both gasped. We couldn’t help it.

Surrounded by formal gardens and mazes built from hedges, the vast greenery glared against the harsh tans and golds of the desert that surrounded it. Worlds that weren’t meant to live together. When I had dared to bend down and touch the grass, marveling at its ability to exist in such a place, I discovered it was fake. Learning this truth did little to diminish the splendor.

Creating something artificial wasn’t an entirely new practice for the council. Their scientists were called creators, after all. They simply had to think of what they wanted, and then it would come into existence. Or it would be forced to.

Stephanie and I were informed the building was constructed in a mixture of Tudor and Jacobean designs. Those terms meant nothing to us. All I could know was what I saw—a mixture of brick and granite. Crèmes melting into reds. Domes and spires that reached for the sky. Flowers that crawled up from the ground and danced with the brick, weaving and twisting over columns and railings.

Inside, the grandeur of Templeton was taken to the extreme. Gold and silver gleamed and sparkled like the sun and stars themselves were at war. Marble floors were covered with rugs with the most interesting designs and colors I had ever seen—blues, yellows, indigos, greens, and reds meshed and melded together in perfect, dizzying harmony.

So much color for an organization that infused our lives with darkness. Did they think they were the only ones who got to keep the richness and beauty of the world?

When we lined up that first day to receive our orders, I had convinced myself that my time at the headquarters would be spent in a similar fashion to my time served at Templeton. I would keep hidden, cleaning and tending to the needs of the great estate that kept and trained young chosen ones.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

Terribly and utterly wrong.

I should have known from the noise.

We were forced to wait more than an hour in the grand lobby of the establishment. As we stood there, men, chosen ones and naturals alike, hustled and bustled through the halls. Their movements were always with a purpose, always anxious. Their conversations hummed like a hive of bees had taken residency inside. The pounding of soldiers’ boots echoed across the halls as groups marched in order.

These men paid us little attention. We were a hodgepodge of girls ranging in age from one girl who barely made it to her teens to an older woman who must have been nearing seventy. Dirty and worn from our long travels, we all stank of sweat. But there was one girl who stood apart. Injured and hastily sewn up after the attack on her compound, a small, waifish girl named Rachel had a haphazard set of stitches that ran from under her left eye down to the top of her lips. She would be hideously scarred forever. The rest of the girls stood apart from her as if they sensed what was coming. Like her disfigurement would crawl from her face and mark theirs, and amongst the finery around them, they were already feeling self-conscious.

Was this feeling, this need to please, something the council had conditioned us into believing, or had it always existed in us girls?

Everyone except Stephanie.

She had made it her mission to stick by the girl during travel. While part of me thought she did it to avoid talking to me about the loss of Henry, Stephanie ate her meals with the girl and slept near her. The firm reserve that she’d called from within herself minutes after he was killed seemed to deplete the further we got from Henry’s body. As we stood there waiting for whatever came next, Stephanie took the girl’s hand in her own.

It was against protocol. We were supposed to blend in. Gather information. As I glanced at her from the corner of my eye, I was growing more certain that something broke inside of her when she watched Henry die. She had lost a sister as well…

I shifted my weight from one foot to the other. I wanted things to begin. Left with nothing to do for too long and I would remember Henry, too. The images would return of his blood spilling from him and the way he crumpled to the ground, and I didn’t know how long I could repress it.

A series of bells chimed throughout the halls of the massive building and every man stopped in place. Their whole demeanor relaxed at the wretched sound. The naturals slumped and slouched their way to where we waited while the chosen ones followed behind. That was where they always stood, behind the men who had created them.

I remembered the bells that warned of the attack on the community and my teeth scraped against each other. A few girls next to me stood a little bit straighter while others tried to hide behind their hair.

A man near my father’s age, dressed in a clean and finely tailored suit of tweed, walked back and forth in front of us. Inspecting us. A chosen one followed behind him and when the council member made some observation of a girl, he mumbled it to the chosen one, who jotted it down onto a clipboard. It was as if he were defining us with a simple
tsk
or cluck of his tongue. I wasn’t quite sure if I wanted to hear a
tsk
or cluck when he passed by me.

When he finally stopped in front of Stephanie’s new ward, Rachel, the man scowled. He slowly looked back at the chosen one who stood behind him. “What is this?”

“One of the girls brought in from the compound attacks. She had all three marks,” the chosen one replied matter-of-factly.

“And who would bid on her?” the man replied.

Bid on her?
As if we were something to be owned and traded to suit their needs. But hadn’t that been the way they always treated us girls? I couldn’t help but think of Abrams—the never-ending horror she must have felt when she realized that the two men most important to her were working to ensure the death of her gender. Sacrificing the women in order to create a new master race of superhumans. They had made her a thing, and so she destroyed the world they wanted to rebuild.

Stephanie pursed her lips. Her knuckles turned white with the force with which she clutched onto the shaking girl’s hand. The inspector’s eyes moved to Stephanie. “Let go of her,” he demanded.

I silently begged Stephanie to do what the man said. I needed her here with me. I wasn’t a solider like her, I certainly was no expert on espionage, and I was positive my father had given his most trusted compatriot information that he didn’t think I needed.

Stephanie did not notice my silent pleas. She lifted her head and stared the man down. The inspector’s fingers began to tap furiously against his leg. While the room was absolutely quiet with attention, there was a tension that screamed inside of my ears.

Let her go.

She’s just one person.

We can save so many more.

I shuddered. The unsaid words tasted sour in my mouth, the place I would leave them to rot. I had sounded just like my father. I managed to meet Stephanie’s eyes and gave her the smallest of nods. I didn’t know the girl, but that didn’t mean she was any less important. I didn’t get to sacrifice her for anyone. That wasn’t my right.

Maybe that was what Stephanie had finally realized as she watched Henry die. Maybe he meant more to her than some cause, and the council had taken him from her. She realized too late what I had learned long ago: I didn’t belong to anyone. I didn’t belong to any country. I didn’t belong to any rebellion. I only belonged to myself. My choices and who I fought for would be entirely of my own choosing.

Stephanie brought the girl’s hand to her chest. “No,” she said.

The inspector narrowed his eyes. Clenching his jaw, he looked back at the chosen one. “Very well, then. We don’t need them.”

“Please, she was just being nice. Don’t punish her for me,” Rachel begged, tears streaming down her scarred, imperfect face. The chosen one pulled her by the arm, dragging Stephanie along with her. Stephanie didn’t fight back. Whatever solider she had once been was gone. She had given up the last bit of it to get me here.

At first, my fears were quelled. The chosen one simply ushered the two of them off to the side as the inspector continued to go down the line. Eventually, a few others, including the elderly woman, were also placed in Stephanie’s small group. Once the inspector had looked everyone over, each of us was asked to show our identification numbers—the numbers the council had long ago lasered onto my wrist.

258915

The inspector’s aide pinned a piece of paper to each of our shirts, which proclaimed our number for all of the spectators to see. Men began to huddle into groups in front of us. The aide passed out green cards to each of these families. Groups of men who had lost their mothers and sisters to the illness that threatened to destroy our species. We were what were left. Replacements.

Once each group was prepared, the inspector nodded toward four burly men who waited near the small cluster of women isolated from the group. In unison, the men stepped forward in front of Stephanie, Rachel, and the other women. Each of the men placed one hand against their collarbones. Stephanie turned her head to me and gave a small smile.

And then she closed her eyes.

A wild surge of energy burst through me, and it took everything in me not to run to her and grab her free hand in mine. She still held on tightly to Rachel’s hand. The chosen ones placed their palms under the women’s chins, and with the cluck of the inspector’s tongue, they snapped their heads back.

A girl beside me fell to the floor in a faint while others cried. I saw dark spots in front of my eyes, and I wondered if I was near passing out myself. I had seen chosen ones snap necks before. It seemed to be their specialty. But it was also some weird sort of embrace. They stood behind their victims and wrapped their arms around their necks.

This had been something different. Carried out with the least amount of human contact possible. Women murdered because they did not meet some unknown standard. Murdered because they had been found wanting.

James.

I whispered his name over and over again in my head. It was the only thing that kept me from attacking, from clawing their faces off, from joining Stephanie. James was here, and I would have to play my part to find him.

To save him.

The creators lined up before us, and then the bidding started.

I was auctioned off.

…

This was how I came to be in the service of the Harper family. Once they paid for me, I was taken out back behind the headquarters with Reagan, another girl who was purchased along with me. Shoved forcefully against the wall by the eldest son of the family, the younger brother grabbed a hose. Not the kind used to water plants, but the kind I had been told was carried on the back of trucks once. These trucks would rush to fires and use the traveling water source to put them out.

These trucks would have gotten a lot of use during my lifetime.

Terrance and Richard Harper, the sons of the newly inducted head of the council, turned the hoses onto us. The water burned and pounded against my skin. Regan, who was barely a teenager, stumbled to the ground and covered her head.

“Get up, your dirty, dirty girl,” Richard yelled. The Harper brothers enjoyed themselves way too much.

That night, as Regan cried herself to sleep, I gingerly touched the multitude of bruises that covered my body from the painful pressure of the water. There was barely an inch of me that was left unscathed. I had been a victim. I had been hunted. But before now, I had never been property.