Gods of Blood and Bone (Seeds of Chaos Book 1) (41 page)

I wondered if I should go ahead and tell them everything, so they could be on their guard if I weren’t around to watch their backs. But what if that made things worse? They could both be stubborn and reckless, especially Zed. My pack in the corner started to vibrate and lit up, distracting me from my thoughts. I'd put my ID sheath inside and left it at the base, so in case something went wrong NIX wouldn't be able to use it to identify me.
 

I retrieved my pack, and the ID sheath from within it. It was an unknown caller. The call went to message when I didn't respond, but after only a few seconds, the person on the other end redialed. I answered, sending a warning look to the others to stay quiet. "Hello?"

"Eve?"

"Who is this?"

"It's Bunny. Listen, everything's going crazy—”

"How do you have this number?" I demanded, my heart racing. If he knew, NIX new, and we were screwed.
 

"I…I just happened to remember it. Listen, this is a secure line. They don't know I'm calling, and I don't have much time. They don't even know I know who you are."
 

"Why are you calling me?"

"Just listen! Everything's in chaos here. The whole place is on lockdown because some unknown people with Seed augmentation broke in, but they don't know who you are. They know you had Seed augmentation, so they know you're probably Players, and they're going to find you using the next Boneshaker, if they don't get any other leads before that."

I shook my head. "But we killed the GPS. How would they find us? They can’t use the Boneshaker without knowing where we are."

"That's what I'm trying to tell you. I figured out what you did. Tried to cut yourself off from NIX's access to you, escape the Game? I mean, it was smart, but I heard them talking. They said as long as you're alive and have any Seed material from our facility in your body, the Trial will take you along with the others. They're going to run scans on the Shortcut, the huge metal ball-thing above the courtyard. At the moment of transfer, it's going to show them where all the transfers are coming from. They'll track all the ones they know, and the ones they don't must be you guys. They’re worried you might be Players from an unknown entity and in that case they won’t be able to track you. But you are one of ours. So they’ll find you."

Disappointment sucked the strength from me. "What? I—I thought…"
 

"I thought so, too. When I realized what you'd done, honestly, I was so glad for you, but then…"
 

Suspicion flared. "Why are you telling me this?" I stared blankly out at the others sitting around the table, who stared at me with almost identical expressions of horror.
 

"I couldn't go along with it any more. What you said to me before…I realized it was true. And when I saw you guys fighting in that room, and then what happened to China, I—I just couldn't, not anymore."

"You were that guy?" I'd thought the guy who ran up and got shielded by the soldiers looked at me with familiarity. Now I knew why. Because he'd had access to every waking and sleeping moment of my life for the last few months, except for the Trials.
 

"If they find out, I'm screwed. But I had to do something to stand up to them."

"How can I trust you?"

"Well, there’s no way to…
prove
it, but does it matter? If I was trying to betray you, you'll know soon, because they'd be tracking this communication signal right now, and you'd have an army crashing down around your ears in a few minutes. But you won't."
 

"That doesn't mean I can trust you. This could be a trap."

"So don't trust me. But I'm here to help, if there's anything I can do. Look, I've got to go. If you need to contact me, call me and hang up. I'll get back with you as soon as I'm able."
 

The line went dead.
 

I dropped my ID sheath back into my pack and sat down again at the table. "You guys heard all that, right?"

Adam dropped his head into his hands. "It was all…for nothing. The Trial is coming again in four days, and along with it we're going to be caught by NIX. We've only made things
worse
."

I felt hollow. All of it was my fault. I'd gone to China and told her about her sister so she would agree to help me. I'd gathered the rest of the team and convinced them to help me try to escape from the Trials. I hadn't forced China to stay behind, even though I should have kept her safe. I hadn't forced her and the team to wait till NIX's next shift change so we had more time to prepare and grow stronger.
 

The only thing I'd accomplished was to get China killed, and put the rest of us on NIX's hit list. So much for my promise not to regret my actions ever again.
 

"We have to get as far away from here as possible," I said. "So far that they won't be able to retrieve us, even if they do know where we are. And we have to keep moving, so they can't pinpoint our location from Trial to Trial. If you've got family we sent away, you might want to talk to them. It could be a while before we get the chance again. Don't alarm them. We don't want our faces on the news when we disappear and for someone at NIX to notice them and happen to remember we used to be Players. If we can, we want to keep our families safe."
 

"We'll have to come up with some other story, then," Adam said.
 

* * *

Early morning, after a long night without sleep, I called my brother to give him a reason why I’d be disappearing, and to say goodbye. Instead, everything fell apart.
 

“What?” I growled across the connection.

“I’ll go join Mom later, when you do. I used your bed last night, since you weren’t here and mine’s gone. Hope you don’t mind.”

“Weren’t you supposed to drive the moving pod?”

“Err, yeah. Mom was livid.” He snorted. “But she makes enough to afford a driver, now.”
 

I stood up, my chair scraping on the ground as I pushed it away from the table. “You should have gone with her. You need to leave, Zed.”
 

“Why?”

I ground my teeth together. “Cause that’s the plan. There’s stuff waiting for you there. Are you just going to leave Mom to deal with everything? What about the summer programs you were going to enroll in? You should go, Zed.”

“I don’t think so. We need to talk.”
 

I strained to keep my claws sheathed. “I’m going to be home soon. Stay there.” I disconnected the call and quickly explained the situation to the others.
 

“It’s dangerous to be seen going home,” Adam warned.
 

“I don’t have a choice,” I snapped.
 

“At least change your clothes first. You’ve got blood on you.”
 

I nodded. “I’ll be back in an hour. Get everything ready to go.” I dressed as inconspicuously as I could, covering my face like a paranoid film star. As I made my way back to my house, which I’d scheduled to be sterilized of any trace of living inhabitants later that day, rage bloomed in my chest like a flower whose infinite petals just kept spreading open. How could Zed be so willful? Didn’t he know how much danger he was putting himself in? Undoing all my hard work to protect him.
 

 
As I opened the front door of my house, even my anger couldn’t keep me strong. Of course he didn’t know. I stepped through the entrance in silence. My strength had been grated away, hour after hour, and I felt like a creature of trembling tendons and hollow bones. My thoughts had the fuzzy distance that came from extreme fatigue.
 

I moved to the doorway of my room, bracing for an additional weight to land atop the wobbling burden already crushing me.
 

Zed sat on the side of my bed, hands clenched in front of him. He looked up at me with bloodshot eyes, obviously not having slept. “Hey.” He smiled at me gently. “You don’t look so good. Wanna sit down?” He patted the edge of the bed beside him, as it was the only piece of furniture left in the room.
 

I didn't know what to say. Instead, I just stood there in the doorway to my bedroom, staring at him. Anger, I could deal with. Accusations would strengthen my backbone long enough to get me bluffing through the conversation. Even threats would have been preferable. At that moment, compassion slipped through my defenses like a burrowing weasel.
 

There must have been some hint in my face, because he said only, "Oh," then stood and wrapped me in a hug.
 

It was so surprising that it startled a tear right out of me. One, and then another. Then I was sobbing, being nasty and slobbery and unwashed all over him, but he didn't seem to mind.
 

Finally, I calmed down and pulled away from him. I wiped my face on the bottom of my shirt, beyond caring about propriety at that point.
 

He led me into the room and sat me down on the bed, one fist still clenched tight. "You're in trouble," he stated, voice calm.
 

"No, no, I'm really not, Zed. You don't have to worry about me." After crying so hard, and all that had passed since the last time I slept, I barely had the strength to keep sitting up. But I couldn't leave him fretting about me when I disappeared for what might be the rest of his life. "You're way overprotective." I rolled my eyes. "I haven't slept in a while, my body's tired from working out, and I…I’m probably not going to see you for a while."
 

"What do you mean?"

"I got an offer from the foreign relations branch of enforcers. If I join their training program as a recruit right out of high school, I'll get the chance to travel the world, have adventures, get more schooling, all while getting paid. It's a wonderful opportunity." I tilted my head to the side and smiled as cheerfully as I could. "I think I'm going to accept. I realized I'm going to miss you and your stupid overprotectiveness. That's why I started blubbering like a sea cow." I elbowed him playfully.
 

He stood and started to pace back and forth. “Don’t lie to me, Eve. I
know
you.” He reached the far wall and turned to stare at me.
 

Maybe at one point that was true, I thought. But who I was had changed over the last couple months. He didn’t know me, not any more. I didn’t say any of that, but I saw the recognition of it in his eyes, and realized how sad this must all be for him. We’d been so close before the Game. We looked out for each other. But all of a sudden, with no explanation, I’d started distancing myself from him, cutting him out of my life. And he could never know why.
 

“You look so tired you might as well be wearing panda makeup, you’ve got dried blood behind your ear,” he nodded when my hand flew to my ear, giving me away. “And you’re so freaking scared, all the time now.”
 

I opened my mouth to protest, but he held up a hand and talked over me. “I’ve listened to you pretend everything’s okay, that you have everything under control, over and over now. But whatever’s going on, it’s obvious you’re
not
‘handling’ it.” He took a deep breath, clenched his fist, and said. “So I have to force my help on you.” His fist opened to reveal a Seed.

Even as my mind was stuttering for a response, an excuse, he did the one thing that could make everything that had come before seem like a trivial test of my ability to hold myself together.
 

Before he even had the, “I wish I was,” out of his mouth, I’d lunged across the room toward him. But I didn’t make it in time to stop him from saying, “like Eve,” and clenching his fist around the Seed.
 

I clamped one hand down around his wrist hard enough to force his fingers loose, and used the other to slap the Seed out of his grip with stunning force.
 

It flew across the room like a bullet and left a dent in the wall.
 

"Ahh!" my brother screamed, yanking back and cradling the hand I'd slapped. "What the hell!"

I ignored him and pulled his hand forward, inspecting it for a small incision that might soon be gone. Sure enough, even as I watched, the small puncture wound disappeared, knitting itself back up so quickly and so flawlessly I might have believed it a figment of my imagination if I hadn't experienced it so many times before in my own flesh.

Chapter 29

Part of my soul I seek thee, and claim thee my other half.— John Milton

"Now, whatever you're caught up in, I'm part of, too," he said.
 

"What the hell did you do!" I screamed.
 

"I saw you, Eve. The other day when the power went off and you disappeared. And then you reappeared, hurt. Bad hurt. You left your link here, though. So I used it to access all your files stored in the cloud for the last few months, since you started acting strange. You tried to hide those videos, I could tell. Even a password. But I’ve known your favorite password for years…” he trailed off and took a deep breath, frowning.

Rage overwhelmed me for a moment, and I wanted to punch him. I'd been trying so, so hard, and he'd just ruined it all. Instead, I forced him to the bed and made him sit down. “How did you get the Seed?”

“That marble thing? You dropped it when you reappeared.” He plopped a hand on my shoulder, eyes drooping. “You don’t realize it, but you can’t fix everything alone. Now you don’t have a choice. Whatever that was I just did, you’ll have to let me in… Whoa,” he blinked in disorientation and swayed on the bed.

“You’re okay,” I muttered, scrabbling with inept fingers at my link.

“I’m not feeling too grlll…” he slurred, and then his eyes rolled back in his head.

"No, no. Stay awake. Don't pass out, Zed!" I slapped his cheek, but it had no effect, so I turned my attention back to my ID link and finally managed to dial the number Bunny had called me from. My hands were trembling, and when I heard the first ring I forced myself to hang up and wait for him to call back. I shook Zed, slapped his cheeks, and yelled at him, but he lay unresponsive. “They’ll take you to the Trials too. No, don’t do this to him,” I pleaded.