Frozen (15 page)

Almost as if he
wants
me to pull the trigger.

My finger moves for it, but it’s like that time in Taem all over again, when I couldn’t bring myself to shoot an Order member even though his bullet nearly killed Bree. My arm starts shaking. The outstretched gun grows heavy.

Killing Jackson won’t bring back my father. And I don’t want another face joining the one I already see in my nightmares: Forged Blaine, the arrow in his skull. No, if I have to meet the people I kill again in my dreams, I’m saving this bullet for Marco.

I lower the weapon, hand shaking, and pass it back to Bree. The team stands there in a ring around me and Jackson, speechless.

“Maybe we should talk about where to go from here,” Bo says eventually. “Clipper, you want to share that theory of yours with Gray?”

The boy pulls out his location device. My pulse is still pounding from the confrontation with Jackson, but I take a deep breath and try to focus on what Clipper’s showing me: the landlines running along the western edge of the water and continuing north once the bay ends, dividing AmEast from AmWest.

“Group A’s around here.” Clipper touches an area of land between the two ears of water. “As you pointed out on the
Catherine
, it seems like the Order is expecting us to enter AmWest. They’ll probably sail up Border Bay and try to cut us off at the border.”

“That theory assumes the Forgery didn’t tell them
exactly
where we were going when he ratted us out,” I say. Jackson glares at me.

“I think the Order would have followed us onto land if that were the case,” Bo says. “And they didn’t. That ship took back to sea.”

“But aren’t the borders highly patrolled?” Bree asks. “I can’t believe they think we’d try to cross it on foot.”

“Ignorant is what it is,” Sammy says. “We should thank our lucky stars we’re dealing with idiots.”

“They’re not so dumb if they tracked us and sank our ship!”

“I see the icy water didn’t improve your spirits, Nox,” he shoots back. “And here I was thinking you couldn’t get any more frigid.”

Bree shoves Sammy so hard he stumbles backward.

“Okay, okay!” Xavier says, stepping between them. “This is pointless. What’s the plan?”

The group falls silent and everyone turns to look at me and Bo. I glance at him for help, but he just shrugs. “What do you think, Gray? This is your mission.”

But it’s not. It was my father’s. I may have suggested the excursion, talked with Bo about getting Ryder to endorse it, but Owen was in charge. He was the leader. I’m just some guy whose father is dead, who climbed a Wall and got stuck in a mess far bigger than himself.

“How much longer until we get to the Outer Ring?” I ask Clipper.

“About three days on foot.” He eyes the car behind me. “But we could be there tonight if we drove.”

The car only has five seats, but the rear area is enclosed and large enough to hold the other three in our group.

“We’ll drive,” I say. “It will be tight, especially with all the gear, but if the Order thinks we’re walking, we should cover as much ground as possible.”

“We’ll run out of fuel soon,” Bree warns. “We should be able to make it to Group A, but it will be a one-way trip.”

“Good. Then it’s settled.”

The team starts loading up the gear and Emma brushes past me to examine Jackson. He’s still sitting in the snow, touching his nose cautiously.

“Broken again. And I just set it on the boat.” Emma twists to face me. “I know you’re upset, Gray, but you can’t go around attacking our team.”

“He is
not
a part of our team.”

She gives me a taxed look. “He’s traveling with us and if he’s hurt, I have to tend to him. That makes him part of the group.”

“Maybe by your standards,” I say. “But not mine.”

Emma sighs, bandages in hand. “Can you please just think things through before you react? I know it’s hard for you, but you have to try. You’re better than this.”

She sounds oddly like Blaine, disappointed, calling me out for my shortcomings. But in this moment I don’t need to hear about my faults. My father is dead and I need to hear that there are situations where logic and reason don’t apply, that sometimes an ugly action is a necessary one. I need to hear that I’m not a failure for being impulsive. Above all, I just need someone to say, “It’s okay. I understand,” and if they can’t say that, I don’t want them to say anything at all.

NINETEEN

CRAMMED BETWEEN EMMA AND BO
in the backseat, Clipper calls out directions while Bree drives. Sammy and Xavier are in the rear with the Forgery and most of the gear. Each time we crest a new rise in the plain and see nothing but more land, Sammy asks for an updated estimate on our time of arrival. Bree’s patience runs out quickly.

“Sammy, I don’t see how you can spend weeks hiking and not once ask how much farther we have to go, but now, when we are in a car and you know perfectly well we’ll arrive at Group A by dusk, you suddenly need a progress update every two minutes.”

“Nox, if you had to sit back here, feeling carsick because the person driving can’t steer better than an uncoordinated toddler, you’d ask for updates, too.”

Bree glares at him in the mirror. “You better watch your back when we make camp.”

The team chuckles, but I’m staring out the window, watching the landscape fly by. Everything in the Western Territory is gray or white or dead. The snow accumulations seem to grow. The car slides now and again, but Bree makes no attempt to slow our pace. When the sky is just beginning to lose some of its light, a dull structure appears in the distance. The wall encircling Group A’s Outer Ring.

“The nearest town is on the northern side,” Clipper says, studying the location device resting in his lap. “Maybe a two-hour drive out. We should be fine approaching from any direction.”

The car is silent except for the uneven rhythm of Bo’s characteristic tapping as Bree brings us closer. Soon, the wall is towering above us. Imprinted on it is the same word, spaced out at even intervals:
QUARANTINE.
The letters are aggressive, each one blocklike and powerful despite its now-faded state. I know they are a lie, but I can see why people stayed clear when Frank set up these test groups to initiate the Laicos Project.

Bree takes us slowly around the structure. We’re all looking for an inconsistency in the facade, a place that might open wide enough for a car, when Jackson announces, “Right here. Stop.”

Sammy and Xavier lug the Forgery outside on my instruction. From my seat, I watch as Jackson runs his hands along the wall, following a seam that is so subtle I’m amazed he spotted it from the moving car.

“You should have let me try first.” Clipper sounds disappointed, like he’s been told to sit out a thrilling game.

“We didn’t even recognize this stretch of wall as the entrance,” I say. “And besides, it’s time we put all the Forgery’s talk to the test.”

Outside the car, Jackson brushes snow aside from the base of the wall and presses a palm against it. A panel the size of his hand pops open. He starts tapping at something I can’t make out from where I sit.

“Say he enters the right access code,” Bree says. “Will it even open? Frank cut off power for Group A ages ago.”

“I talked about this with Ryder before we left,” Clipper says. “There’s likely a backup power source just for the entrance. One the Order can manually tap into if they ever chose to revisit the place.”

Jackson rubs his forehead almost nervously, then stands. A moment later, the entrance is sliding open.

“Took him long enough,” Emma says, which I find amusing since it seemed rather quick to me and could have taken Clipper far longer.

Sammy shoves Jackson back in the car. “Can we off this maggot now?” he asks.

I almost say yes. The deal is complete and it’s not worth keeping Jackson alive any longer. Not with the stunt he pulled on the
Catherine
. But my father is gone and he’s never coming back and I want Jackson to suffer for it. I don’t want it to be quick. I want him to feel pain and I want him to feel it for a long, long time. Maybe this makes me heartless, but I don’t care.

“We’re leaving him tied up to something in Group A,” I say. “He can starve to death.”

“You can’t do that,” Jackson says, voice panicked. “I held up my part of the deal.”

“Well, Forgery, now you know what betrayal feels like.”

“Dammit, put a bullet in me if you have to. But leaving me to freeze? To starve? No man should die that way.”

I feel like countering with the fact that he’s a Forgery, not a man, but I settle on an offer. A gracious one that he doesn’t even deserve.

“Maybe if you tell us where Frank thought our mission team was originally headed, I’ll reconsider. So how about it? Did he think we were trying to contact AmWest? Is there a reason we should stop thinking of them as our enemy?”

The Forgery doesn’t respond.

“Fine,” I say. “Starve to death.”

He swears. I don’t know what he expected. He made it clear that he’d try to complete his mission in the end, and our deal just prolonged the inevitable. If he has no information left to give me, I won’t give him a chance to retrieve Crevice Valley’s location. Especially when I know his methods of procuring it will include torture.

I tell Bree to drive into the Outer Ring. A shadow passes over the car, and we are inside.

It brings back a lot of memories. Running with Emma. The feeling of confusion and bewilderment at finding not only more land beyond Claysoot, but another wall still trapping us in place, not to mention the sprawling, unimaginable world outside it. I crack my window open, and the bite of cold air is a comfort.

We cut through the dead, snow-covered earth until Group A’s Wall suddenly looms before us. I scramble from the car, walk up to the structure, and lay a palm against it. It is smooth and sleek, the facade like ice to the touch. It looks just like our Claysoot Wall.

“Now what?” Xavier asks.

The entire team is watching me, even Bo. I hate that I’ve somehow become the person in charge. I have no clue what I’m doing.

Bo seems frigid and miserable; Emma, anxious. Clipper looks . . . young. I don’t know how my father handled having so many people under his command. I don’t know how to lead them. I only know what I would do alone, so that’s where I start.

“These people are cautious. When we saw them in the control room, they were barely visible—just a quick glimpse of a hand or leg. If we saunter in now, while there’s still a bit of light, there’s no way they’ll show themselves. But at night, if we are quiet about our approach, we may be able to find them before they have the chance to hide. And we could use the cover of dark either way; I don’t want to be spotted by the cameras.”

Now that I’ve started talking, the plan is forming effortlessly. “We’ll split up. Bo will man the camp here—with Xavier and Emma—so that we have ears on the outside. The rest of us are going in.”

While Sammy warms canned beans over a fire for dinner, Xavier and I take an inventory of our weapons. What made it off the ship on the lifeboat is all we have left: Xavier’s bow and arrows; two knives, carried by Bo and Clipper; two extra handguns stowed away in my father’s pack. There’s also the gun I found in the Order car that Bree’s currently carrying.

When Sammy says dinner is ready, I bring a cup of beans to Jackson. He’s locked in the car, staring at the towering Wall through his window. Something in his eyes looks a bit too hopeful.

It should have been him, I decide—not Owen—that went down with the
Catherine
.

It is dark and once again snowing when we move the car alongside the Wall to make our crossing. Xavier lends me his bow—I’ve never favored firearms, especially if they don’t have a lengthy barrel—and he takes one of my father’s handguns so that the team staying behind isn’t left unarmed. Sammy has the second of my father’s guns, and Bree, the weapon that’s been tucked in her waistband since I threatened Jackson with it.

There were only two pairs of night-vision goggles in the Order’s car and I’m wearing one of them. Bree has the other. The rest of the team coming with us has flashlights stowed away, though the goal is to avoid using them unless absolutely necessary. We’ve also got a handheld radio so that we can communicate with the crew staying behind. Clipper double- and triple-checks the channels and reception before telling me we’re ready.

As the team scrambles onto the car to make the climb, a hand grabs my elbow. Emma.

“I want to go with you,” she says. “I could help if someone gets hurt.” She puts her palms on the front of my jacket and I feel a familiar ache in my chest.

“No one’s getting hurt.”

“But if they do, I should be there.”

“Clipper knows enough first aid to handle anything minor.”

She frowns. “If the worst injuries will be minor, I don’t see why I can’t come.”

This debate could go in circles all night. I put my hands on her shoulders. “Emma.” She looks up at me. “Please stay here, with Bo and Xavier. With people we trust. Where it’s safe. I’ll be back soon.”

She glances at the Wall. “Just be careful?”

“I’ll try my hardest not to do anything stupid.”

“I’m not sure that makes me feel better. I know how you are.”

I laugh, then freeze as she hooks her hands behind my neck. She raises herself up onto her toes and plants a kiss on my lips. Quick and friendly, but there are a million memories attached to it.

“I have a good feeling about this,” she says, stepping back. “Group A. The mission. A real good feeling.”

“Me, too,” I say, overwhelmed with newfound confidence. “I’ll see you soon. Promise.”

She gives me her typical half smile. “I’ll be waiting.”

I head for the car, climb onto the roof where the team waits impatiently. Especially Bree. She’s scowling at me, arms folded against her chest, pointer fingers tapping her biceps. There’s something else to the expression, an emotion I can’t place. Fear, maybe? Anxiety?

“You okay?” I ask.

“I’m a big girl, Gray. I don’t care who you kiss.”