Escape (Alliance Book 1) (15 page)

The breakfast was incredible. They had eggs, and some smoked dried meat that was crispy and salty and unbelievably good, and Ella made everyone coffee. Drake couldn't find any tea, and they were all out. She hated the bitter taste of it, but liked how it made her mind feel sharper almost immediately. So she drank all of it, hoping that it'd make her think of something to help Riley figure this out, so maybe he could sleep for a bit at least, instead of standing there like a sad statue. She knew a part of that was likely still her doing, but that she couldn't fix now. The other thing, she hoped she could.

Riley, finally tired of standing, slumped into the chair closest to the window and closed his eyes. She walked up to him with one of her blankets and covered him a bit, and then stood at the window looking out, watching for whatever it was they were all supposed to watch for. She stood like that for hours, counting the stories in the other buildings by habit, then counting the number of doors, and windows, and father away tiles on the roofs of smaller houses that she could see from here, light posts, window boxes.

With nothing else left to count and Riley still asleep, she was about to go and lie on the couch, something caught her eye on the street with the tile roofed houses, something moving on it, a miniature person. "Riley, wake up, somebody is there on that little street with the tiny houses, a speck of somebody with arms and legs, and it's moving." He was standing next to her staring at the direction of this speck, and then he ran out of the room, only stopping to tell her to stay put and that he and Drake were going to deal with this.

She watched him and Drake running towards the street with the miniature person on it. And then it hit her that the person was only miniature because of how high up she was, and because she now watched Riley and Drake turn into almost specks as they got farther and farther away from her. She watched Riley and Drake specks approach the unknown speck, and then they had the speck by the arms, apparently dragging him towards the building. As he got a bit larger, she could tell that he was struggling, dragging his feet on the pavement.

She walked away from the window once the three of them were inside the building, and paced around the room, waiting. Few minutes later everyone filed into the room, with Riley and Drake still holding this man by his arms. His hair was long, too long for a man, and he was definitely a man, and falling around his head and down his back in tangles, as if he hadn't washed it in weeks. He was wearing a gray shirt with half the buttons missing, exposing dark hair on his chest. And strangest of all, he was barefoot, his feet dirty and bruised looking, but he didn't seem to pay any attention to any of it.

He was making grunting noises, and jerking his head wildly. He looked Zorin born, but a slightly lighter dark of everything than Riley. He had those things Riley called freckles on his face, only his he couldn't have covered up, there were too many of them. And now he stopped flailing and stared at her, eyes full of anger or hatred, or maybe fear. Definitely fear, she thought. His head turning, scanning the room, and landing on Laurel, and that look again. He was afraid of the two smallest girls. It didn't make sense. And then suddenly it did. They were the only ones not like him. They were like the ones that probably killed everyone in his city.

She's never had anyone look at her with so much fear in their eyes, not even Riley when she had the gun pointing at him. This man definitely saw her as a monster, it was unmistakable. And she couldn't stand it in that moment. She walked over to Laurel, grabbed her by the hand and left the room with her. Nobody tried to stop them from leaving, because they saw that look too, and if this man was going to calm down and tell them anything at all, they couldn't be there for it.

She felt almost relieved they didn't have to hear whatever it was from him anyway. They sat down on the floor in the hallway, just outside the room, and waited for whatever it was to finally come out, hoping the knowing would make it better, not worse for them. And mostly hoping that they wouldn't be looked at like that by every Zorin-born that they run into.

"He thinks we killed his city, Ams. The way he looked at us. That's what it was," Laurel whispered at her, sadly, looking at her like she didn't know what to do about it.

She didn't know either, so she nodded that she knew, that she felt it too, thinking about that look in the man's eyes now. She remembered then the way she looked at Riley at first, and it was like that, with fear in her eyes. She knew that now. And she knew that when he didn't seem to care if she killed him or not, it was in part because he didn't want anybody to look at him like that. Nobody could possibly ever want to be looked at like that.

She'd seen plenty of mad people when working in the many clinics to know that this man was mad. She watched him flail and then freeze when he saw Ams and Laurel. The fear on his face so primal, it hurt to look at him. It was a good thing the girls left when they did. The boys finally let go off his arms and Riley was trying to talk to him, but she knew he wasn't listening. He was lost to whatever it was that happened here, completely lost.

She took her pad and walked over to Riley, "He's mad, Riley. I've seen it before. He won't talk until he needs to, until he can again. Let him be for now." He nodded at her and gently walked the man to the chair, putting a blanket over him for comfort. Drake brought him a steaming mug of coffee and he drank it greedily. They sat in silence, watching him, reading his face for any changes, but his eyes kept darting from one to the other of them and then to the sky through the window, and back over them again.

She watched her brother's face and knew Riley couldn't take it anymore. "Tell us about this place, Reston. What was it like before? What did you all do here? It looks unlike any place I've ever been, not Zoriner almost. It looks rich, Alliance rich," Riley asked. The man almost jumped out of the chair, spilling what was left of his coffee in his lap.

She was shaking her head at her brother, but Riley was right. This looked like a real city and everything here was clean and rich. Even the little houses looked taken care of. No shacks, no unfixable roofs. Enormous office buildings. None of it made sense for Zoriners to have. It's as if the Alliance was keeping this city full of Zoriners alive in the first place, but that didn't make any kind of sense.

She took her pad and wrote, "What were you before? What did you do?" and walked it over to the man, slowly, not to scare him and just put it on the chair in front of him. He looked at her, curiosity replacing fear in his eyes, "Mute. I can fix mute. We've fixed mutes before." He was nodding his head at her, and smiling now. A mad smile, but what he said, that was the strangest thing of all. Nobody ever became un-mute once they took the voice out of you, everybody knew that. He kept looking at her, as if finally intrigued by something, "How long? Your voice, how long?" He got up and walked over to her, taking the pad with him.

"A few weeks. I need a lab to fix mute. But no fire. Can't have fire. Need lab without fire. Build one. We can build one. Scientist. Before this, scientist. Can't do science without fire. Can't do science." He went back to his chair and curled up in it now as if he were a small child, and pulled the blanket over his head.

As if on cue, Drake and Riley got up to leave the room. She knew they all needed to talk without the man hearing them. Ams and Laurel were huddling against the wall, looking very out of sorts. She would too, of course. She knew what it felt like when someone looked at you like that. There was no talking them out of feeling what they were feeling.

The mute thing, what he said, it worried her. She didn't want Riley to believe that this madman could fix it for her, or Drake, but she didn't think Drake would believe him or any of his kind but the girls and Brody. Riley watched her, asking without asking. She couldn't let them waste any time on that, not when there was so much they had to worry about. Drake and his tag. They could worry about that or they were going to lose him, and she didn't want to lose him again. Not after finally knowing all the things she knew now. All the things he told her by the fire, when nobody else could hear him, and seeing the pain in his face for not being able to lie to her when she asked the one thing nobody else was asking about, "If we can't get the tag out, you are not going back, are you?" She wrote it before he could tell her anything else and shoved it in his face, and he couldn't lie to her like that. "I'm sorry, El, but no. I can't. I can't go back there. I don't mind it, really. I'll do what Keller did. I'll have a grave at least, somewhere without the walls around me. I'm okay with it." He said it all so softly, not looking at her, not wanting to see her tears.

And then he told her everything else he needed to, and she sat there staring at this big man in front of her, feeling every shade of stupid for not-knowing for all these years, for not once guessing that Drake loved her even back then when they were little kids, and how it pained him that she felt she had to defend him all the time, and all the times when he wanted to tell her, but couldn't because he was always ashamed of how he was. Poor Drake who mistook kindness for cowardice his whole life, and who still looked ashamed over it even now. She hugged him so close then, hugged him for all the years they missed, inhaling that sage smell of his.

"Drake's tag. We need to get it out. Ask him," she handed it to Riley, watching him read it. They walked back into the room. The man was by the wall, drawing something on it with a piece of chalk he must have had in his pocket. The drawing looked as if a child made it, boxes for buildings, different sizes of boxes with lines in them for each floor, and then lines going down for windows, she thought. They stood back and watched. He drew stick figures of people, different sizes, but otherwise the same and they were spilling outside of the boxes, so many of them, and he kept adding more and more of these different sized people to the streets outside of each of the boxes.

And he stood there looking at the wall, shaking his head at it, as if it upset him to see what he drew. He walked over to the clean patch on the wall that he didn't put any boxes or people on and looked at it for a long time, and then drew a circle on it, and wrote: "FIRE" inside the circle. He couldn't draw the fire for some reason, and then he drew the stick figures of people going towards that circle. All the different sized people spilled out of the boxes - that's what happened, she thought, they all went to the fire, but it didn't make any kind of sense. There were no planes or bombs or stick figures with guns or anything in his picture, just the boxes of buildings, people and fire. There was nobody in the picture to make them go to the fire. It's like they all just did it themselves.

And she had it in her head before anyone else did, that if they could take her voice just by talking it right out of her, they could maybe do this too. And she saw the real people of all the different sizes in this childish drawing coming out of all the real houses with the window boxes and doors, and real grass, and stepping on the asphalt of real streets, ones they walked on every day, and the kids, stepping on all the dirt they played on, and dug for worms in, all going to that circle, the only thing that wasn't real to her yet, the only thing that couldn't possibly be real.

She wrote on her pad and showed it to him, and he nodded without turning around, without looking at any of them. And then he sat down right where he was, put his head in his hands and started to rock back and forth, like a little kid who couldn't understand something basic, something everyone else knew. Riley took the pad from her, looked back at the wall for a very long time and ran out of the room, and then out of the building, and she could see him through the window running all the way to the end of the street, and the two little girls were running behind him, going to where the empty spot on the wall was.

She felt Drake's arms around her then, and she knew that he saw the picture and knew what happened, and that he didn't need to run to where the circle with the word was. He could see it all in his mind just like she did. She let him hug her for a very long time, as she cried into his chest until she had no tears left, and she knew looking at him that she couldn't make him go back, even to save his life. That to make him do that would be the worst thing of all, a cruel thing, and she could never do that to Drake. Could never do that to anyone.

She knew, felt it from when Riley was talking by the fire, that this thing would be heartbreakingly sad. She felt it even before that, when she crouched alone by the edge of this city watching for any sign of life, and she knew after a very long time of watching that there wasn't any life left here.

She knew that when Riley ran out of that room with the strange man in it they would know for sure then, and she didn't want to go with him. But she knew Ams would go after him, and she couldn't let Ams see it alone, whatever it was. Riley had the strangest look on his face for the second he stopped for. It wasn't anything she'd ever seen on him before, on anybody. Nothing she could identify, she just knew looking at him that he needed to do whatever it was he was running out to do and they had to let him.

So they ran, nobody saying anything, and finally her legs and her lungs couldn't take it anymore, and she had to stop to catch her breath. Ams stopped just ahead of her too, and walked back a few steps, panting, face flushed, sweat making her shirt sticky. They watched Riley keep on running, as if they weren't there and finally disappear around the curve.

Neither one of them seemed strong enough to run anymore, so they started walking, slowly at first to where they saw Riley turn. The buildings were much shorter here and then there weren't any more buildings, just houses, all neatly arranged next to each other, white, and pink and light brown. Most had window boxes with flowers in them.

She saw a swing in front of one, like the ones they had at the compound when they were little, and then it got taken away overnight, and she remembered missing that swing. Her and Ams spent so much time there going up and down and talking at each other when their swings came together for just enough time for a word, long word at first and then shorter and shorter. They made a game out of it then and whoever had the longest last word that the other person could identify won. It was usually Ams who won all of their games, but the swing one she was better at.

This one was painted pink, the seat dangling on the long chain, making a ringing noise every time it touched one of the metal poles. She saw that Ams saw it too, and watched her turn away from it, only she couldn't tell if it was because she was missing theirs or because she could picture a little girl on it who was now gone.

They turned the corner where Riley disappeared earlier. The houses were farther apart here, and they didn't have window boxes, but trees and flowers growing right in the ground in front of them. Then they stopped all together, no more houses, just empty land on both side of the road for as far as they could see, and far ahead of them, Riley. He must have been running this whole time, she thought, still couldn't stop running only she couldn't tell what it was he was running to. There didn't seem to be anything ahead of them, but he kept going, and so they followed, because there didn't seem to be anything else for them to do.

She thought they walked for hours, in silence, when finally they couldn't see Riley in front of them anymore, but there was no place here he could have disappeared to, no turns off of this road, not even trees. And then she saw it, a patch of grass to their right that looked all black, and then the patch turning into a field, as they got closer, all of it looking charred, like their fires at the end of the night did. They saw Riley standing there, hands making fists at his sides, and then he was running back to them, shaking his head, screaming at them to stop.

"You can't..." He was panting so hard he couldn't talk. He had his arms out in front of him, stopping them where they were, "You can't go there. You just can't," and for the first time since she met this boy he looked utterly broken. He kneeled in the middle of the road in front of them, put his head in his hands, touching the pavement and she knew he was crying and that she needed to let him.

She looked at Ams who stood there watching Riley, and she saw that flash of anger in her eyes again, the thing she didn't understand in Ams at all, that made her do things that Ams never did before the boy happened, and then she was running past where Riley was to the charred field, and she let her run. She knew she couldn't stop her, and she couldn't go with her. Whatever this thing was that broke Riley, she didn't want to see it, didn't want it to break her like that.

She knelt next to where Riley was, still sobbing into his hands, and put her arm around him. She didn't know what else to do now but wait. And so she did, for a long time, and then Riley was done with the crying, and looked at her, a question in his eyes. He didn't notice before that Ams was gone, and he got up, his face so pale he barely looked Zoriner and ran after Ams.

She sat there alone, not looking, not wanting to look behind her where the sadness was, the ugliness. She chided herself for not being as strong as they were, trying to force herself to get up and go to where her friends were, hating Ams for doing this to her, making her feel like a coward. She forced herself to get up and walked to the black field, to where Riley was holding Ams in his arms, and she knew that Ams, too, was broken now.

They would tell her, she knew, they would have to tell everybody, so she didn't need to keep going, didn't need to see whatever it was with her eyes. It would be so much harder to undo the picture if she saw it. Words, those she was good at. She could undo almost anything made of words, but not if she saw it, she knew that. Has always known that. So she stopped far enough away from them to not hear what Riley was whispering to Ams, and she felt like she was intruding now on this black field and on her friends. Something caught her eye while she was turning away from them, something that didn't belong in the field.

A stick lying on top of other sticks, different sized sticks. And then she saw that this whole field was made of sticks, piles of charred sticks, but this was wrong, because sticks burned, and these weren't burned. She knew then that they weren't sticks at all but bones, and the part of her that didn't want to know any of this knew that this is why the city was dead. All the life that was there before was here now, in this field. She turned away from it knowing that she'd see more than just sticks now, and wanted to lash out at Riley for falling over that wall at the compound and at Ams for finding him and then for all the other things that happened that made her end up here, that made her see this.

She remembered the way that man looked at her and at Ams, as if they were the monsters that somehow turned everyone in his city into bones. And she couldn't think of how anyone could possibly do this to anybody, not even Keller. And then she remembered putting HealX on Riley's scars, and she knew that anyone who could savagely beat that boy like that could do this too. Could do worse things.

She thought of Kaia and what they may have done to her for asking too many of the wrong kinds of questions, even though they all thought she was mute, but she felt now they knew she had the questions in her, and that's why they took her away. Her people did this. Her people took Kaia, killed Riley's parents and shot his dog, took Ams away from her family, and stole Ella's voice. All these horrible things that civilized people didn't do, savage things... Her people did this.

Maybe that thing she had in her head that gave her all the words made them do it, and someday it would make her into someone who could steal babies and shoot people's dogs and take a razor-sharp whip to some boy's back. This man looking at her and Ams like that, maybe he knew it about them, that they were all going to turn into monsters, even if they didn't know it yet, and there was nothing they could do to change that, and that's why he was so afraid.

She heard them whispering now, behind her. Ams ran up to her and took her hand and wouldn't let go. Nobody said anything now. Nobody knew any of the right things to say. So they walked back in silence and she made sure not to look at the kid's pink swing on the way back, or any of the flowers in the window boxes. She didn't want to look at anything in this city, so she kept her eyes on the road, holding on to Ams' tiny hand, and hoping that somebody, Drake or Ella or the strange man, would tell her if she was already damaged, if she was already somebody who could do something terrible to someone else. If it was something in her, in all of them that made them do it. And she knew that if it was, she would steal the mushrooms from Drake, the ones she could smell on him and knew he held on to for some reason. She could do it then, if there was no other way.

Maybe that's why Drake didn't need the gun with Keller in the end. Maybe the real Keller couldn't really do any of these things after all, and she knew then why it felt so wrong when Ams kicked him after knowing that Drake didn't need the gun, and that Ams knew it too, and felt the wrongness in it. That's why Riley's face was all splotchy with her hand prints on it when he came out with her, why he wasn't talking to Ams or even looking at her for a long time. She held on to her small hand harder now, letting her know that she understood why she tried to make the boy not like her anymore and that she still had her to talk to about any of it when the time was right. That she wasn't the only one afraid of whatever it was they made them and hoping it could somehow be unmade.

They finally made it to the tall building. She knew Ella and Drake would be waiting for them with their questions, but she couldn't tell them any of this. Riley would have to do it, and she didn't want to hear him tell it, and see his face go broken again like that.

She let Ams go when they got to the top floor and walked away from the big room, down to the other side, found a tiny closet of a room, and curled up in a chair that seemed more like the ones they had at the compound, hard and small, and waited. Waited until everyone else knew, and waited for them to cry over it. Waited until it would be the right time to ask any of them what she needed to ask them.

She felt her eyes close after a while, and she was drifting, up and down in a swing, Ams smiling at her, screaming words at her against the wind they were making, short ones now, because of how high up they were going, Ams smiling bigger and bigger, and as she came down to where Ams was just taking off from, she heard it, Ams screaming
"Bones"
at her.