Rebellion (24 page)

But if something did happen …

No! Don't think like that.
I shove myself out of the water and stand on the earthen shelf, water dripping and pooling at my feet. I scoop my clothes from the ground, snatch two towels from the shelf, and wrap one around my body and the other around my hair. I stride in long, purposeful steps down the little walkway to the dressing area.

I force myself not to think about Gavin; I force myself not to worry about him. I'm not going to be
that
girl. The one who pines for her lover, moping around like a living corpse.

But when I glance up into the cracked and dirty mirror, water still dripping down my face, in my mind's eye I see the two of us as if it's a window to my past. We're walking hand-in-hand along the beach, and even though I feel awful and scared of almost everything, I'm happy. Because I'm with him. He makes me feel like I can do anything as long as he's with me.

Without warning, he spins me around and tugs so I tumble into his chest.

Laughing, I tilt my head up, but before I can say anything, his lips are on mine. I melt in his arms. Into his kiss.

His fingers flit at the waistband of my skirt, teasing the skin underneath. My head spins. I feel like I'm falling. But I don't want to stop. I want to just keep falling.

“I love you,” he says. “I'll
always
love you.”

It's then the bubble breaks and I find myself staring at my own reflection in the mirror. “You can't,” I whisper, my voice hoarse and cracking with raw emotion. Anger, resentment, and sorrow fill me, crashing into me like a tidal wave and drowning every other feeling. “Because of you!” I glare at my reflection. At the girl who's me, yet not me. “Because of you!” I slam my fists into the mirror.

It explodes. The glass shatters, sending shards all over the cavern floor, slicing my hands in several places.

Pain blooms across my hands like the blood pouring from them.

 

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY

Dispose of the Tippet family. Inflict as much damage as you can before death. Make sure they know it is their
leader
that kills them so unmercifully.

—
E
NFORCER ORDERS FROM
M
OTHER

Evie

“Damn it.” I race across the room to press a washcloth into my palms.

The glass on the floor slices into my feet. I curse with each painful step. Just as I sit on the bench to check my wounds, one of the girls in the Underground bursts through the door. She glances around the room in an obvious panic. She frowns when she sees I'm the only one there, standing in my towel. Her eyes widen when she takes in the broken mirror and the bloody glass spread across the floor.

“Evie?”

For a minute I'm speechless.

How do I answer?

I lost control, but not in the Enforcer I'm-going-to-kill-anyone-who-moves kind of way. In a completely emotional and irrational kind of way that both embarrasses and pleases me. Surface girls—normal girls—throw temper tantrums all the time. They're not soulless automatons. They have real emotions.

However, all of this makes me look insane, and I can't help but remember a similar tantrum Mother had not so long ago. Just then Asher dashes into the room.

He stops short to stare at the blood soaking the cloths in my hand, then at the floor and the blood on the rock. His gaze rises to the mirror, before moving to my hands. His eyes close briefly. When he opens them, he gives me a look that has my stomach burning with guilt and dismay.

He pushes past the girl and, with a grunt, lifts me up. “Please clean up this mess for Evie.” Then he carries me over the remaining glass, which crunches under his feet, and through the courtyard to the cutout in the rock that's my room, and places me on my cot.

My skin is on fire. I've never been so embarrassed. The courtyard was filled with people who saw Asher carrying me. It won't take long before the whole camp knows of my temper tantrum.

“What happened?”

“Nothing. Lost my temper. No big deal.”

“Let me see.” He kneels in front of me.

I hiss as he gently unfolds my hands and pulls the washcloth from them. He sighs and my stomach turns when I see the slices across my palms. It's not a pretty sight by any means. I look away.

“Come on. Let me bandage these.”

His hands are gentle as he cleans, then wraps gauze around my hands and feet. The way the light plays up the gold hue in his hair makes me gasp at the suddenness of the déjà vu that hits me square between the eyes.

“I'm sorry,” he murmurs. His touch turns even lighter. He reminds me so much of Timothy in this moment, I can only stare. Mother was right. He's practically a double of the boy I once loved. I want to cry as the last lock smashes open and every single forgotten memory bursts into life.

But I choke them back.

Still, my eyes sting and I sniff.

Asher looks up from where he's kneeling and he sighs, then leans forward. “I'm sorry, Evie. But you can't keep doing this to yourself. He'll come back when he can.” What he leaves unsaid is clear as a bell.
If
he can.

I don't say anything; I just look away. He's right, of course.

“I can't pretend to know what you're going through,” he continues. “But I know all this waiting you're doing. All the sleepless nights. All the food you
aren't
eating. All the time you spend just sitting, staring into space isn't helping you do what you wanted to do before he left. What he left to help you do. Save your people.” He takes my chin in his fingers and forces me to look at him. “You can't help them if you can't help yourself.”

Asher's right. I have to let go of the past and make the best of the present, to make a better future for everyone.

There's a knock on my makeshift door. Asher hesitates a second before he answers it, slipping out of the door to talk to whomever it is and leaving me to get dressed.

I pick my favorite dress: one with a loose, flowy fit. A frilly neckline, exposed shoulders, and an eyelet cutout pattern on the hemline and frilled sleeves. A gift Evangeline managed to smuggle in for my birthday. It's my “power” dress. A trick I picked up from Mother. Except it's not red like hers usually are, but white.

The color of innocence instead of the color of blood.

I pull the dress over my head, listening to Asher outside the door.

“What?” His voice is cold and hard.

A man says something, but it's too muffled for me to understand.

“She's busy.”

The man keeps talking, but Asher interrupts. “My orders stand. Now leave.” The door shuts quietly and I slip out, wincing at the pain erupting from the soles of my feet.

“Everything all right?” I ask.

He nods, but then there's another knock. He yanks open the door, but stops short when he sees Evangeline standing there.

“I apologize,” she says, obviously sensing the tension in the room as Asher steps aside to let her in, “but it's of the utmost import that you come with me. There is … an issue.”

“What's going on?” I ask.

“There's been an … incident.”

Asher narrows his eyes. “What kind of incident?”

Evangeline refuses to meet either of our eyes. “A family's gone missing. One of the ones that didn't want to leave just yet.”

Asher's whole face darkens. “When?”

“A little while ago.”

“Who?” I demand, even though I have a sinking feeling I know who it is already.

“Kara and Tate … and their little girl, Myra.”

I pull my shoulders back and straighten, even as everything in me is telling me it's already too late. “We need to find them.”

Evangeline swallows. “We've already found them.”

Asher and I both stare at her. Even though I already know the answer, I ask, “Are they alive?”

Her lower lip quivers for a fraction of a second before she bites down on it. She shakes her head.

Despite the fact that I'd been expecting the answer, my head spins. I lose my balance and stumble when my legs wobble. Asher touches a hand to my shoulder. I can't tell if it's to steady him or me.

“Even little Myra?” I whisper. This time I really don't want to know. Myra's only three. Evangeline merely shakes her head and even though I know she's having as much trouble as I am with this, a little bubble of anger and resentment floats through my grief.

“Why are you shaking your head?” I demand. “What kind of answer is that?”

Asher squeezes my shoulder. “Easy,” he says under his breath, reminding me to keep my temper in check.

“She's alive. She was found a little while ago wandering around the maintenance tunnels.”

I let out the breath I was holding and close my eyes in relief.

“Well, that's something,” Asher says quietly.

“She won't talk,” Evangeline says.

My eyes fly open. “What?”

“She won't talk, but she led us to her parents.”

“Show me.”

Four eyes jerk up to mine.

“What?” they both say.

“Take me to them. I want to see this for myself.”

Asher shakes his head, but I cut him off. “No. I need to see them.”

“Very well. Follow me.” Evangeline turns to Asher. “You should come, too.”

I may have only known them for a little over two months, but they were my friends. Actual,
real
friends who trusted me to keep them and their daughter safe. They would have done anything for me, and I couldn't even keep them safe.

Without a word, we follow Evangeline out of the camp and sneak quietly into the Residential Sector on the farthest side of the Sector. We take the six flights of stairs two at a time because the elevators are death traps. At the top, I'm not winded, but Evangeline and Asher are, so I wait impatiently until they can catch their breaths, before continuing forward all the way to the last door in the hallway.

Evangeline knocks. I reach for Asher's hand. He grips mine and squeezes back just as tightly. I honestly don't know who's supporting whom.

The door is slowly opened by one of the Underground. The man glances at Evangeline before his gaze settles on me. He straightens as if he'd been pulled into place by a rubber band. “Ma'am. I don't think you'll want to see this.”

I straighten my own shoulders, but keep my hand in Asher's. “Yes. I do.”

He opens the door wider, letting us in before shutting it behind us with a snap. I stop almost immediately. The scent of copper chokes me.

This was no murder.

It was a slaughter.

It's also a message. To me. To the rest of the Underground. To every single person who wears the masks.

Blood is splashed against the walls in numerous places. One of the bodies—I can't tell for sure whose, the face is too badly mutilated, but I assume Tate since it's definitely a male body—lays stomach down in the living room, blood pooling around it. Bile crawls up my throat and snakes wriggle in my stomach, but I swallow repeatedly, trying not to vomit.

Asher, however, can't do it and runs straight to the bathroom. The sound of his retching reaches my ears as I continue to gaze down at the body.

I squat down to try to see closer and Evangeline pulls at me. “Oh, Evie.” Her tone is that of a mother talking to her three-year-old who's playing in the mud. “Don't. You're going to get your dress all bloody.”

I barely spare her a glance. “My dress is hardly a consideration compared to what's happened here.”

I roll him over and see the same mutilation on the front of his body as on the back. Again, I have to force myself not to vomit, or cry, scream, rage. Everything I want to do. I force myself not to feel anything as I try to study the body, but it's futile; there's nothing here I don't know already.

Mother had her Enforcers do this. The cuts are too precise. Made in exactly the right spots to cause as much damage and blood as they could.

The only thing that surprises me is it appears he was attacked from behind. The way the slash wound on his neck is angled suggests that, and explains the blood splatter on the walls. But that wasn't what killed him. It may have been the first move, but the killing blow was obviously when she rammed his head into the concrete wall.

His skull is completely caved in on the left side. Blood and things I don't even
want
to think about spill out of it.

However, it's that long cut across his neck that's caught my attention. It starts just to the right of the top of his spinal column. Then slides down across his neck, and over his jugular. The slice is smallish. Possibly from some sort of thin blade. I touch it gently, studying it and what it means, only glancing over when Asher kneels next to me. He still looks a little pale, but he seems in control of himself.

“What is this?” He points to where I'm touching.

“A mistake. I think.” I sigh. “See this part here? There's a hole in the skull right there. If she would have stabbed him here, it would have killed him instantly. I think that's what she was trying to do.” I push myself up, still frowning. “I don't understand why, though. If she was ordered to kill and make it as messy as possible, that wouldn't make any sense. Unless whoever did this didn't want him to suffer.”

“Why do you say that?”

“She came at him from behind; probably from the maintenance door, then grabbed him in a strangle hold so he couldn't call out for help.” I can imagine the whole scene in my head as if I was the one who did it. “She probably was going to plunge the knife in here, but he must've moved. So all she ended up doing was slicing his throat. It was still very fatal, but she chose to bash his head in, too. But just once, which suggests she wasn't angry.” I point to the splatter. “Since it appears she was trying to go for a quick kill, I think she smashed his head in so he wouldn't suffer as he bled out.”