Promised (31 page)

“What has happened to you?” she asked, frustrated and broken-hearted. “This is
wrong!
”

“
You're
the problem, you and your terrorists,” said one of the merchants in the crowd. “Things were good until you stirred up trouble.”

A woman spoke up beside him. “Mabrother Rhodeski there can give the new people a little water if he wants, like he says. That's his business. But we want the rest of things to go back like they were.”

“The way things were was
bad
!” Gaia said forcefully. She was undeterred by the guard's tightening grip on her arm. “The rich people here are using all of us. They don't even care enough about you to let Myrna Silk run her blood bank inside the wall. They're going to expand the baby factory to buy and sell babies, just for themselves. The Protectorat tortured his
own son
, and me.” She clutched a hand to her abdomen, and struggled to find words for what Sephie had done to her. “They've gutted me. I can never have children of my own.”

The crowd began to shift then, and voices started up.

“Enough! Remove her,” the Protectorat called. “The nooses! Now!”

Guards looped the ropes around Malachai's and Peter's necks, cinching them neatly. A growl came from Malachai on the platform behind them, and Leon jostled forward, bumping Pyrho.

“She's right!” Leon called. “My father's promises are lies!”

“Wait! You have to listen!” called a new, high-pitched voice from the corner of the terrace. Sasha, her enormous pregnant belly swelling before her, strode forward beside a man in a cook's apron and lifted the cut band of her bracelet. “They're keeping vessel mothers against their will. Everything Gaia says is true!”

Gaia jerked free from the guard who held her, dodged down into the crowd, and charged toward the obelisk. Despite her surgery pain, she clenched her muscles and hauled herself up onto the base to stand tall. “Look at your neighbors and search your hearts,” Gaia urged the people. She bored her gaze into face after face. “You know it's time for a change. For fairness. This is about us,” she waved her arm toward the square, encompassing all of the people from inside and outside the wall, “against the few of them. Now is the time. We have to stop them!”

“Guards!” the Protectorat ordered.

“I call for the Protectorat to stand down!” Gaia called loudly. “It's time to elect new leaders! Stand down, Miles Quarry!”

A stunned silence immobilized the people.

The Protectorat produced a pistol and aimed it at Leon. His voice came clearly across the square for all to hear. “Drop the convicts. Shoot Gaia Stone and anyone who tries to protect her.”

Someone yanked Gaia down off the base of the obelisk as shots smashed into the stonework behind her. The explosion of a gun blasted on her left. Some of the merchants were shooting back at the guards. Gaia realized they'd been armed and prepared, vacillating, all this time.

A corps of guards circled tightly around the Protectorat and Genevieve, firing their guns outward. Men and women screamed, trying to duck and run simultaneously. Many were fleeing in chaos, but a swarm of people crowded in around Gaia at the base of the obelisk. She craned forward, trying to see what was happening on the gallows. Bullets smacked into the splintering wood, and she was agonized to see that Malachai and Peter were still up on the gallows platform, blinded by the hoods over their heads and unable to dodge free from the nooses around their necks. Leon and the others were gone. She had no idea where.

The initial blasts of rifle shots changed to scattered pops of gunfire and the clash of swords. The gallows hatchways opened with a slamming bang. As Peter and Malachai dropped, instead of hitching in the air, caught by their necks, their bodies fell all the way to the ground below the platform. Someone, Gaia realized, had cut the ropes.

“We have to get you out of here!” a man called in her ear.

She turned to find Mace Jackson tugging at her arm.

“I have to find Leon,” she said.

“He went for his father,” Mace said. “You can't go out there!”

She was already scrambling to push forward between the people that were massed up against the base of the obelisk. Some were holding each other, and many of them were wild-eyed with fear, but they huddled tight around her, people from New Sylum, Wharfton, and the Enclave all together, as a wall of courage, united in protecting her from the Protectorat.

Another explosion of gunfire came from the terrace, and people screamed again, huddling down, and drawing her with them. For an instant, she hunched with them, but her need to find Leon propelled her forward. As she tried again to push her way through, people put out their hands to stop her and pull her low.

“Don't go up there,” they said.

She tried to see ahead. The firing stopped again, leaving an awful, expectant noise of moans and crying in its wake.

“I have to get past. Let me by,” she said, squeezing through.

Shot people lay slumped on the cobblestones. Others were already trying to help them. As Gaia neared the terrace, looking for Leon, she saw a dozen armed guards, Marquez among them, but now their rifles were pointed inward at a hub of other guards who held their hands open and empty before them. The arrangement made no sense to her until she realized the reversal meant a faction of the guards had rebelled.

Farther within the inner circle, in the place where the Protectorat had stood before, several people were bent over with their backs to her, and as one of them shifted, she saw Mabrother Rhodeski and several others were injured. Leon was nowhere to be seen. Sephie was opening a medical bag.

With increasing fear, Gaia turned again toward the square. More gunshots sounded on the far side, near the prison. Chaos reigned, and though people were running in all directions and dozens were trying to help the injured, the crowd never seemed to diminish.

“Leon!” she called. “Where are you?”

“Over here!” called a young voice. “Mlass Gaia! He's here!”

She peered to her left, under the arches of the arcade, where Angie was waving madly.

Gaia sprinted forward, weaving through the hurrying people. She stepped around the corpse of man with his head shot open. A guard was trying to staunch a woman's bloody arm wound. Another round of rifle shots ripped around her, and she flew under the archway.

Beside the library wall, Leon lay crumpled in a heap, with Angie pressing both of her small hands against his chest.

 

CHAPTER 22

life first

“
I
DON'T KNOW WHAT TO
do!” Angie said.

“Let me see,” Gaia said, shoving nearer.

Leon's dark shirt was covered in blood, so much that she couldn't tell for certain where it was coming from. Angie was holding a saturated bandana to Leon's chest, just below his left shoulder, and when Gaia lifted it to take a quick look, more blood surfaced out of a deep hole. Gaia covered it again, pressing firmly.

“Get Myrna!” she said to Angie.

Angie staggered to her feet, her eyes tormented. “I don't know where she is!”

“I
said,
get Myrna,” Gaia said in hard tones. The girl recoiled, and Gaia switched to pleading. “You can find her if anyone can. She was ready for this moment. Run and find her as fast as you can!”

Angie took a terrified look toward Leon and fled.

Leon turned his face weakly, and Gaia pressed the bandana back onto his chest wound. He must be injured in other places, too, she thought, fighting back panic. The splint on his broken arm was gone. When she slid back his shirt from his torso, she found another bleeding bullet wound on his lower right side.

“Gaia,” Leon said softly. “Just tell me I got the Protectorat.”

“I don't even know,” she said, her throat tightening.

She tried bunching the shirt against his lower side to apply more pressure there.

“I guess you'll end up with Peter now,” Leon said.

“Stop it,” she said.

Leon winced. She looked around to see who was near to help and what else she might use as to stop the bleeding. The sandstone pavers were cool beneath her legs, and out of the direct sunlight, the air had a dusty, dim quality that gave a darker tinge to the blood. The only other people under the arcade of the library were wounded, too.

She bit her teeth into the shoulder of her sleeve and ripped the fabric off to ball it up and pack it against his side.

“Are you okay?” Leon asked.

“Of course,” she said.

“Don't try to lie. I saw Iris shock you. And they did the surgery,” Leon said. “That's what you meant about being gutted, isn't it?”

She couldn't bear the concern in his eyes, as if her problems mattered when he might be dying.

“I'm all right, though,” she said. “I survived it.”

“I want you to adopt someday,” he said. “Hear me? That's what I want.”

“Don't say that.”

“You're the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said.

“Leon, don't,” she said, leaning near. “I'm not having this. You're not saying good-bye.”

“The best.” He smiled, and his eyelids lowered halfway.

She kept the pressure on his wounds the best she could, but she could feel him fading.

“Don't do this to me, Leon,” she pleaded.

He didn't reply. Behind her, the noises of battle had diminished to scuffles and cries, but no more gunshots. She glanced briefly through the arch of the arcade to where people were rushing past, paying no attention to the two of them huddled there. She could feel each of his breaths under her hands.
Just stop bleeding so much
.

She wanted Myrna badly, but it occurred to her that even if Angie found her, it could be too late.

She refolded the patch of sleeve and pressed it to his side wound again. “I don't know what to do,” she whispered helplessly.

“Get married, raise kids, and grow old,” he said.

“Don't try to make me laugh. I'm only doing all of that with you.”

He winced again, and then looked up at her, frowning. “Gaia?”

“I'm here,” she said.

His eyes closed.

For a moment she couldn't move. She'd seen this before, with her mother, with the Matrarc. It wasn't going to happen now. It couldn't.

“Sephie!” she screamed. She took a desperate look at Leon and stood, lurching toward the sunlight beyond the archway. “Sephie! Where are you?”

She started toward the Bastion, instinctively holding a hand to her abdomen as she ran. Most of the terrace had cleared. A dozen disarmed guards were lined up against one wall, contained there by some of the turncoat guards. Other armed rebels surrounded a collection of white-clad people at the top of the terrace stairs. As Gaia hurried nearer, she found Sephie treating the Protectorat, who was sitting on the steps. He gripped his leg with a bloody hand.

Gaia grabbed the handles of Sephie's doctor kit. “Come with me,” she demanded. “Leon's dying. I need you.”

“You knifed me last night,” Sephie reminded her.

“So? You took my ovaries,” Gaia said impatiently. With all her might, she dragged Sephie to her feet. “You have to come with me. Now!”

“Don't you dare go,” the Protectorat said.

“Come!” Gaia insisted. Sephie spared a last glance toward the Protectorat, and then she joined Gaia. They hurried diagonally across the square. Even in her terror for Leon, Gaia grasped the significance of Sephie's defection: the Protectorat had lost his power, utterly.

Gaia sped toward the arch of the arcade and flew up the two steps into the shadows. “Leon?” she asked.

He didn't respond, but he was breathing still. She pressed the bandages over his wounds again, and he didn't move. Sephie came up behind her, panting.

“He's been shot twice,” Gaia said.

“I know. I saw it happen,” Sephie said. “He attacked his father and his father shot him point blank in the chest. That's when your rebel guards were able to move in, but Leon went down. I thought he must be dead already.”

Sephie knelt beside her and set a hand under Leon's jaw. Then Sephie lifted Leon's eyelid, and Gaia saw his pupil contract.

“I don't know what you think I can do for him,” Sephie said quietly.

Gaia was already rifling through the doctor's bag. “Don't tell me you don't have a—” She pulled up a syringe and a length of IV tube. Then she scrambled for Leon's arm, ripping his left sleeve with one savage pull. The skin in the nook of his elbow from where he'd been hooked up to an IV the day before had already healed with a faint scab over the vein. “We need to give him a transfusion,” Gaia said.

“I don't have any fluids here. Besides, it wouldn't—” Sephie began.

“
My
blood,” Gaia said. “Myrna said I was a universal donor. So give him my blood.”

For an instant, Sephie frowned at his arm, motionless in thought, but then she took the syringe and quickly rigged the needle to a short length of IV line. She glanced over to Gaia.

“There, sit there,” Sephie said, pointing with her chin toward where Gaia could be beside Leon with her back against the wall. “I have to do you first. I can't get a bubble in the line.”

“Just hurry,” Gaia said, taking her place. She exposed her right arm to Sephie.

Leon's complexion was a mottled gray, and Gaia was afraid any moment he'd quit breathing.

“Make a fist,” Sephie said curtly.

Gaia did so, while Sephie lined up the needle along Gaia's arm. Then she slid it under her skin into the vein.

“Hold it,” Sephie said. “Here.”

Gaia pressed the needle against her arm to keep it steady. Her blood ran down the line, a dark color in the translucent tube, like a freestanding vein all its own. Sephie took another syringe out of her kit, detached the hypodermic needle and fit it to the end of the IV tube. Gaia watched the blood make it down to the needle and begin to come out the end. Sephie doubled over the IV line, pinching it to stop the blood flow. Then she leaned near, clamped the line between her lips to have both her hands free, and lined up the bloody end of the needle on Leon's arm. She let the line fall from her lips so that Gaia's blood began flowing down the line again just as she stuck the needle under Leon's skin. They were perfectly connected, with Gaia's blood feeding into his veins.