Death Thieves (12 page)

I glared at the Orbital. Stupid Tag and his stupid ring and stupid password. I crossed my arms over my chest, determined not to sleep just to spite him. Imagine him telling me what to do. Who did he think he was?

Not too long after that decision, the sun warming its way to my bones lulled me into drowsiness. I finally succumbed and lay down on the ground, curling into a ball, and giving in to the darkness behind my eyelids, part of me grateful not to think about the babies being handed over to the doctors with smiles and syringes of poison.

Fitful dreams interrupted my nap. I awoke with a cry, but once awake couldn’t recall anything from my dreams.

“Day sleep must not suit you. You slept far better in the night than you did just now.” Tag said. He’d created a little fire pit and had lit a small fire. My first thought was that it was far too hot to be worrying about fires until I smelled the aroma. He was cooking. My stomach rumbled. We’d missed breakfast due to our hasty exit from the house. I edged closer to him, almost feeling like we were starting over from the beginning.

“What are you cooking?”

Without meeting my eye, he shrugged and ground several green leaves between his fingers into the small pan. “Mushrooms. I could only find sage for seasoning. I hope you don’t have allergies.”

“I don’t.” Wild mushrooms sautéed in nothing but sage leaves didn’t sound like something I’d order from a restaurant, but at the moment, food was food. Anything was fine. He partitioned off a portion for himself and poured it into one of the empty tin foil packets. He handed the pan to me. Handle side out so I didn’t burn myself on the metal.

“You didn’t split it fairly. Why should you give me more?”

“It’s my job to ta—”

“I know. To take care of me.” I pushed the pan back in his direction, but he refused to take it. “You can tell your Professor Raik that I can take care of myself.” I put the pan down at his feet and stalked off, wondering if I could catch a fish in the river with my bare hands. Nathan had a couple of friends who could do it.

“If I divide it evenly, will you come back?” His voice called after me.

Instead of responding, I returned to his little fire and sat down. I divided out the food again and dumped his remaining portion into his packet. I held the pan up by its handle. “Cheers,” I said, scooping the mushrooms with my fingers and slurping them into my mouth. The mushrooms burned both my fingers and my tongue, but I felt too famished to care. We’d hiked far to get to where we were—not that I disagreed with putting distance between us and civilization—not when I now knew that civilization had so many issues.

We ate in relative silence. When we were through, I stood and brushed off my skirt. “Let’s get back.”

We took our time gathering things up and making our way back to the house. And we kept conversation to a minimum. What could we say? With his new password protected Orbital, I resigned myself to no escape. Running away seemed pointless. Where would I run? I was trapped in a life-threatening time with not one friend to my name. Perhaps in the time Tag planned on dragging me to, I’d discover a way home.

Tag’s silence seemed to stem from a different source. He held himself rigid, kept himself in check. His silence felt like a billboard announcing that there would be no more socializing between us.

Darkness had fallen before we made it back to the house. I tripped several times due to the makeshift shoes and my toes jamming into rocks. Once back at the house, Tag jimmied the window open with his knife without my help. I did help with dinner, regardless of his protests. The minimal communication killed me until, during our actual meal, I couldn’t handle it any longer. “So how long were you watching me?” I asked.

“Excuse me?” His fork hung in midair, and I swear a blush came over him in the green glow-stick light.

“You were there in the cave. But I’d had creepy being-watched feelings about a week before that. How long were you watching me?”

“Eight days prior to your death.” He took a huge forkful of beans into his mouth as though finalizing that discussion.

“What were you watching me for?”

He swallowed and fiddled with his fork on his plate before answering. “There are specifications that qualify a person to be recruited to the New Youth. Your blood had to be tested, obviously. A recruit must be resilient, strong, adaptable to new environments and changes, and . . .” he paused for long enough that I raised my eyebrows at him. “And they have to be of a particular aesthetic beauty—genetically superior in frame, height, that sort of thing.”

“Who decides who is aesthetically beautiful?”

He blushed. “Each soldier is trusted to make that determination.”

So, Tag thought me beautiful? The notion made me blush as well.

“I’m not dead.” I reminded him. “Where’d you get a body to use in place of mine?”

He winced, but seemed resigned to march forward through my questions. “Professor Raik oversees those details. I merely stopped time and made the necessary changes.”

“How do you know he didn’t kill the girl just to make her my surrogate body?”

“Summer, Professor Raik is a noble man. He did not murder anyone.” He took another huge bite—rice this time—and looked away, pretending to be acutely interested in the swirled blue designs on the table.

“I’m doubting that a whole lot right now. Has this professor of yours been checked for mental stability? Because he sounds insane to me.”

“Summer!” Tag’s chair scraped back as he leaped to his feet. “Use caution!” He took his plate of food and left.

I didn’t think my questions were so reprehensible as to merit him wanting to eat alone in the dark rather than with me by glow-stick light. All of my questions were reasonable. And if he thought moving to a different room was going to stop me . . .

I picked up my plate and the glow sticks and followed him out.

“Don’t go walking out of a conversation with me,” I said once I found him sitting on the end of the bed he’d claimed as his. His plate sat balanced precariously on his lap. His lips twisted in irritation when he saw me.

“You didn’t need a whole eight days to see I was genetically fit. Why were you spying on me the rest of the time?”

“Every soldier is required to view the subject until they feel satisfied that the future will benefit from their presence.”

“So if I hadn’t passed the test, the car wreck would have been the end of me?”

“Yes.”

“That means you think I’m not so bad.” I tried to smile as I sat next to him, balancing my plate on my knees.

He scooted away so as not to actually be touching me. I took the challenge and scooted close enough that our legs were touching. His body went rigid, he could have been stone.

“What if I get to the future and don’t like the boys your professor handpicked for me?”

“Any of them will be far preferable to your last relationship.”

“Hey!” I knocked his knee with mine, upsetting his plate. He caught it before it flipped to the ground. “What’s your problem with Nathan? Nathan was a good guy. Don’t dis on the dead.”

“His blood was already bad, already tainted. I checked him as well—to see if he would have been a suitable fit for the future of mankind. He was a level-one infected.”

“How do you know that?” My mind raced. Nathan—bad blood? He’d had a couple of girlfriends before me, but none of them had been serious, not serious enough for . . .

“He’d injured himself working on his father’s vehicle. I tested the cloth he’d used to clean his hand.”

I interrupted there. “What’s a level one infected?”

“HTHBI, or the
shakes
as people on the street call it, started when several sexually transmitted infections mutated. Human cells mutated. HTHBI is a level five. Level one is a basic infection. Syphilis, chlamydia, HIV, herpes—those are all level one.”

That news bothered me. If Nathan was a level one and I wasn’t, how had Nathan contracted the infection? Which infection did Nathan have? I almost asked but didn’t really want to know.

Tag must have warmed to the topic because he kept talking. “I actually assumed because of your relationship status that you were poisoned, too, but Professor Raik insisted every individual be tested separately.”

“So if I’d been a level one infected, you would have left me in the car wreck like you left him?”

“Letting him go was a mercy. A lifetime of disease is hardly one to look forward to.” He scooped up more rice.

“I bet if you asked him, he’d feel differently.”

“You’re angry.”

His observation only served to make me angrier. “You think? Of course I’m angry. He’s dead! I could be dead, too! I’m getting hauled into a world that kills babies and you’re sitting here stuffing your mouth with rice and acting smug and self-righteous over your choice to let Nathan die. And you’re judgmental, too! What makes you the grim reaper who decides who lives and dies? Nathan was great! You don’t know anything about him! You don’t know anything about me!”

I moved off the bed in disgust and went back to the kitchen to eat by myself, but not before I heard him whisper, “I know everything about you.” The gentle, yet sorrowed, whisper washed over me like an embrace begging forgiveness. I shrugged it off and sat down hard at the kitchen table. I finished off my food quickly, went and found the pots we’d stowed under the bed, and filled them with water. The house still didn’t have any electricity, so I’d have to boil my bathwater. I searched the drawers for matches to light the pilot, but couldn’t locate any.

Unwilling to ask Tag for a match, I went to my room and dropped down on the bed that was not mine, covering myself in the blanket that was not my sun quilt. This camping out with the kidnapper routine had grown old. Even being in a future with running water and regular normal meals would be better than the nightmare I currently suffered through.

Tag could be heard bumbling around in the kitchen. I’d have gone out to help with the dishes and the cleaning up if I hadn’t wanted to strangle him. The idea that Nathan could have been here with me, instead of dead, filled me with a whole new loss. Had Nathan been with me, we could have overpowered Tag and his Orbital. We’d be home again in no time. At the very least, I wouldn’t feel so entirely lost—so entirely alone.

But Nathan
was
dead. I mourned the loss of him all over again. Crying until my head ached worse than ever before. I curled up in a ball and hugged a pillow to my chest. Everyone I knew was dead. The only way to get them back was to go back to them. And I had no idea how to make that happen.

Tag’s dark shadow stood in the door frame. I felt his presence long before he spoke. “The water’s hot and already poured into the tub should you need it.” He stayed only long enough to deliver his message and then disappeared like the shadow he seemed to be.

I hated him.

I didn’t use the bath water he’d prepared for me, even though every part of me screamed for the relaxation a bath would bring to my body. When he entered my room and asked if my head hurt, I snapped, “It’s so none of your business!”

He stood in the doorway for a moment before saying, “Just so you know, I had already decided to pull you from the wreck before I administered the test on your blood sample. From my observations of you—your kindness, your generosity to your sister, your ability to endure—you were worth saving no matter what the cost.” When I didn’t respond, he went to his own room and stayed there, which led me to believe he’d gone to sleep.

For a long while, the sound of my uneven broken breathing mingled only with the sound of my sniffling. What had he meant by, “You were worth saving no matter what the cost?” Would he have really pulled me out if I’d had a disease? Nathan had been worth saving. Why hadn’t he seen that? Nathan with his desire to make the world beautiful and his absolute love for life. Nathan would have saved the world if he’d lived long enough. Tag pulled the wrong person out of the car.

For a fleeting moment, I wished I could have talked, or even forced, Winter to come with Nathan and me to lunch. If history had recorded her as dead, Tag would’ve pulled her out, too. Going to the future with Winter wouldn’t have been any different from moving to a new foster home. Even leaving our sun and moon quilts behind would have been okay so long as we were together.

I slapped my hands over my eyes. Was I insane? Would I want Winter in this future where toddlers were walked to their deaths by their own parents? Where a crazy person could gouge your eyes out just because you looked at him?

No. Not for even a minute would I want her with me in this. Even being alone in her past, she had Aunt Theresa and all her friends, and her amazing talents of acting and her ability to get scholarships and do something great with her future. And even if Nathan would have passed Tag’s “test,” I wouldn’t have wished this on him, either.

Would Tag have really pulled me out? I thought about how careful he’d been with me, how he worked so hard to keep me comfortable—safe. Maybe, just maybe . . . he might have pulled me from that wreck.

Could I blame him for the casual way he discussed infanticide when he’d been raised with crazy people hurting everyone? Could I blame him for taking me out of that wreck when he’d been sent on an errand he believes will save the world?

Tag was a victim of brainwashing, of a society gone mad. And if I looked hard enough at my own feelings, I found myself respecting him for his perseverance. I found myself respecting all those golden opportunities that he’d had to hurt me, that he’d let pass—where he protected me instead. I found myself respecting that he acted more like a gentleman than most of the adult guys I knew—even more than Paul had with Aunt Theresa. I found myself grudgingly grateful to still have a pulse.

I hated that I couldn’t hate him.

So I shoved my need to hate someone onto this mysterious Professor Raik. Who snatched teenagers from time to start his own super race of clean-blooded humans?

Yet, if things were as bad as Tag had said, if people really did refuse to have more children and mankind really was dying out, did the professor’s mad methods make sense? And wouldn’t it make sense, since I was dead and all anyway, to do something to help?