Sparks Rise (10 page)

I bump shoulders with a PSF hauling a stack of boxes in his arms, but he’s concentrating too hard on not dropping them to level me with a cutting remark or hit. I draw the girl over to the side to make way for more uniforms and boxes, and we narrowly avoid colliding with two women in gray scrubs. Nurses, I think. They’re weaving in and out of all of us, shouting, “Coming through!” with what looks like bags of blood in their hands.

I glance back, alarmed, just as the first door on the right opens and two men step out, allowing the nurses inside the room. One is O’Ryan, rubbing his buzzed hair, the other is in a white coat. We reach office twelve before their words can carry down the echoing hallway, but I feel unsettled as I guide the girl inside and kick the stool over so she can climb up onto the metal examination table. Two sharp, dark thoughts try to connect to one another, and then a third, but I force them out. I need to be focused on finding a way back into the kennel today. I have to make sure she’s okay.

I position myself by the door, near the small counter with its jars of cotton balls and ear swabs. I let my hand rest on the flat surface, fingers inching over to the computer’s mouse. At the smallest touch, the dark screen erupts with light.
It’s on,
I think, but the screen it brings up is locked and the only thing on it is a space for entering a password.

The door swings open behind me and I straighten, shifting to allow the person in. Gray scrubs, reddish-brown hair—it’s the guy from the landing, the one who’d been arguing with Olsen. When he turns to shut the door, he takes a moment to collect himself and clear the anger clouding his expression. When he faces the girl again, he’s not smiling, but he no longer looks like he wants to rip someone’s head off.

The nurse steps past me to get to the computer. My eyes dart down to the keyboard as he types his password: Martin09! I track his progress as he clicks through several different programs and screens to bring up the girl’s file. Chelsea. Her name is Chelsea.

“How are you feeling? The cold giving you any trouble?” he asks, and, to my surprise, there’s no malice or irony coating the questions. The girl relaxed the moment she saw him and is no longer trying to wring her hands raw. She shakes her head, keeping her eyes on the toes of her shoes.

Right. No eye contact.

The nurse reaches up into the cabinet on the wall and unlocks it. Inside are rows upon rows of bottles and jars. I shift my gaze back to the ceiling as he turns around and fills a paper cup with water from the sink. Chelsea accepts it along with two pills.

He takes a long, thin piece of latex and ties it around the girl’s arm. A tourniquet. He’s drawing blood. Only, even when he gets a grip on her arm, she’s trembling so hard he’s struggling to get the needle in.

“You have to stop shaking,” he says.

Her gaze slides over to me before jerking back to the nurse’s face. Her bottom lip is caught between her teeth, bloodless with how hard she’s biting it. A look of understanding breaks across the man’s face. The way the girl clutches the examination table makes me feel like I’m wearing a disgusting Halloween mask I can never take off.

Oh,
I think.

“Oh,” he says. To his credit, it only takes him a second to steel his nerves and turn toward me with that same calm face. For the first time I see the name on his ID tag: R. Dunn. “Step out for a moment.”

I don’t release the breath I’m holding until I’m in the hall again, and the door is shut behind me. The rumble of his voice starts up again. I press my hands flat against the wall behind me, turning my face away. I don’t want to hear it. For some reason, it feels like a rejection—it feels like I’ve been stung, and I’m swelling with toxic resentment.

The day marches on with half my thoughts on the wooden structure behind the Mess, and the other half on monitoring the Infirmary’s hallway. I’m barely listening to a sound track of status updates in my earpiece and nearly miss a request aimed at me.

Sam isn’t in the Factory when I go to pull one of the girls there so she can get a hit from her asthma inhaler. She isn’t in the Mess during the midday meal. If it hadn’t been for Tildon, I would have assumed that they’d just forgotten about her, or stretched her punishment out another night to drive home their point with a wrecking ball instead of a hammer. Has she eaten anything? Did they bring her water, at least? I come up with a thousand different ways I can ask Olsen about her without actually asking, but none of them work. They all make me seem like I have a heart.

Focus. Computer.
Then Sam. I just have to be fast.

I bring each kid I go to collect for their treatment down to the nurse in that same room, counting the minutes it takes for him to finish with them. In those minutes, I look for cameras. In the hallway. Through the doors that swing open. In the room directly across from where I’m standing I have seen not one, but two separate pairings of female nurse and male PSF disappear inside of it. I have heard the door lock behind them. And I have pretended not to notice how winded they always seem when they come out again a short time later. Whatever happens in that room is not being monitored, clearly.

I bring the last kid, 2231, a Green boy, in, open the examination room door, and practically push him inside to where the nurse is waiting. I take two seconds to look both ways down the empty hall and duck through the door opposite me.
Fast,
I think,
just be fast.

My heart slams against my rib cage as I lurch toward the dark computer. The room is a mirror of the one across the hall, with one exception: the PC isn’t already on. I waste two full minutes waiting for it to boot up, my ears straining at every muffled sound bleeding in through the walls. Sure enough, the camera in the upper corner has been all but torn off the wall and has been left dangling there by its rainbow wires.

There. Finally. The log-in screen glides into place and, before I can second-guess myself, I’m typing in the username and password I’d seen Dunn use. The system seems to load pixel by pixel, and it seems like each second is being shaved down to fractions of their former selves. I can’t explain the rush of power I feel when the database finally loads and a blinking cursor appears in the search field.

I type
Orfeo
and hit Enter.

No results.

I have to look again, because that can’t be possible.

No results.

I go hollow at the core. Pure, helpless anguish rushes in to fill the empty space where hope used to be. She’s not in the system at all? That means—it’s not possible, I won’t—Mia—
Mia
—

The door slams open behind me, hits the wall, and slams shut again.

“Dammit, dammit,
dammit
, heartless son of a
bitch
!”

I’m up and on my feet, whirling around, reaching for a weapon I don’t have. He’s so busy cursing and tearing his hands back through his chestnut hair that he doesn’t even notice me until the stool I’d been sitting on rocks back against the counter and clatters to the floor.

There’s a second where neither of us moves.

“What—
oh
.” It’s Nurse Dunn.

I can actually feel my heart stop on the next beat. I know what the others feel now, because my head has gone completely dark. I don’t have a thought inside, save for a single word:
shit.

How is he already done treating the kid I
just
brought in?

He’s breathing hard, his pale face flooded with furious color. And just when I need it most, my brain just walks off and abandons me. My body has to rely on instinct to protect it, and instinct is telling it to pick up one of the jars from the counter and—

“Easy—easy—it’s okay,” Dunn says, balking at the way I raise my arm to reach for the glass jar. He seems to remember what I am suddenly and puts his hands out in front of him. “Pal, it’s okay. You just...I didn’t see you in here. What’s—”

His eyes flick between the computer screen and my face. A roar of blood moves between my ears, and I can’t speak, I can’t think of an excuse fast enough. Why did I come in here without thinking of one? Damn, I’m so
stupid
I didn’t even think to try locking the door.

“Did someone tell you to come in here?” he asks. I can’t read his expression now. His words sound strained.
He thinks I’ll hurt him, kill him, burn him—

Maybe I’ll have to.

No. I can’t. Not without setting the room on fire. People with flames racing along their skin don’t just stand still and calmly let their bodies be burned to cinder and bone. He’ll take the whole place down with him. It’s a gruesome thought, one that brings the sickening smell of burnt flesh to mind. My stomach flips over. In what scenario are both of us getting out of this room?

“Okay,” Dunn says when I don’t answer.

My heart is slamming against my ribs. He doesn’t know it wasn’t an order for me to come in here. Not yet. Maybe he won’t think to radio in and ask someone.

Can I scare him into silence? I think so—I take a step forward and he takes a generous one back. The Trainers taught us to fight with fists as well as fire. They wanted strength in body, not strength in mind. But he would know, wouldn’t he? That we aren’t supposed to do anything without orders, that my will has supposedly been crippled. Two issues with that: he can’t be as scared of me as I think, but when he finds out the rules don’t apply to me, he
will
tell someone. There’s no way he won’t. These adults are all on the same side.

Think, Lucas—Christ, do something, say anything, get the hell out of here—

Killing him won’t help me and Sam get out of here. It won’t help me find Mia who—a wave of nausea passes through me—might not be findable. I can break the jar, use the shards to cut him deep where the Trainers showed us to, but how long before the Control Tower puts together who did it?

“It’s...hey,” the man says, his voice strained, “everyone needs to take a break, get away, right?” He starts to lower his hands. “It’s fine. Go get the kid you brought in and take him—”

His eyes have latched on to the computer screen. He squints at it and my pulse starts beating behind my temple.

“Orfeo?”

The name cuts me like a knife through my spinal cord.
I didn’t clear the search field.
I shouldn’t have done this, I should have made a plan, a real one, but—
I need to get out of here. I need to get Sam out of here. I need to find Mia.
My uniform is drenched in hot, clammy sweat and the collar of my vest has me like a hand wrapped around my throat.

The nurse steps closer to it, giving me a wary look as he reaches past my arm. I can’t speak. And not just because I’m supposed to be playing a role.

“Did you search for this?”

Can’t. Breathe.

I want to disappear into my head so badly. The silence that stretches between us is unbearable. I look down. He must take it as a nod.

“There’s no one here by that name,” he continues, leaning over the desk to move and click the mouse around. Another field appears on the screen, and the whole thing refreshes. “But there’s a Natalie Orfeo who’s listed as being in Belle Plain. That’s in Texas, apparently.”

I hadn’t searched right? I catch myself before I can spin toward him.
He’s baiting you. He wants to catch you. He’ll turn you back over to the Trainers.

But...if I hadn’t searched right, that meant that there were listings I didn’t see. It meant—

“No? What about a Mia?”

My body reacts before my brain can stop it. My whole body surges toward the computer. Dunn jumps back, both arms up, but I don’t care about anything other than what’s on the screen. Joy crashes into relief. My knees might give out on me if I don’t hold on to the table.

There’s a photo of her next to a profile—her hair is longer than I remember, dark and curling over her shoulder the way Mom’s used to. My throat burns. Weight, height—classified as Blue. God. Thank you, God. She’s alive. She’s not like me. Something brittle in my chest snaps, and I have to keep swallowing back the urge to cry.

Black Rock.
That’s her camp. Where is it? I keep scrolling, but it doesn’t say.

“Is that...your sister? A cousin?” Dunn is edging back toward me but stops when I turn and pin him with a glare.

They’re all the same. The Trainers, the PSFs, even these nurses. They are not on our side and they’ll never be. He is going to take so much pleasure in taking me down for this. Was this worth it? I know she’s alive and where she is, but I’m done. Done. I won’t even get to say good-bye to Sam, or somehow tell her that they’re taking me out, back to the Facility, back to be worked over again and again until they figure out a way to turn my head into an empty husk. The thought of the building with its bleach-white walls makes me feel almost manically desperate.

Mia is alive. She’s
alive
. Any happiness at the thought is smashed into pieces under the weight of knowing that, yeah, she’s alive, but she’s in a place like this. I’ll never be assigned there once the Trainers are told about this. They’ll keep me for months, trying to break me. Would they hurt her in order to hurt me? That would work. God—oh my God. There would be no place safe for that kind of pain.

Dunn leans against the counter, his arms crossed over his chest. “They would never ask any of you to look something up in the system, so I have to believe that this was important enough to you to risk getting caught. I’d ask whose log-in you used, but it doesn’t matter. I admire your balls, but if you’re going to try this again, you have to be more careful. Anyone could have walked in.”

I rise to my full height, clenching a fist and drawing it up in front of me like I’m about to...do something. I have enough control over the fire to spark a flame with a small snap.

Dunn flinches. His voice goes tight and high as he waves his hands in front of him, saying, “Wait—
wait
.”

For some reason, I do. I wait as he turns back to the computer to type something else into the program. When he’s finished, he turns the screen toward me so I can see the profile he’s brought up.