Steel Lily ARC (7 page)

I couldn’t look up from the bag. If I did, my expression would betray my inner conflict on whether to stay or go. “It can’t be any worse than here, can it?”

Once again I’d stepped on Alice’s feelings, I could feel it. I pulled myself away the bag and watched her carefully. Her face was full of sadness, and I scrambled to try to pick up the pieces.

I pulled her from the doorframe of the room and hugged her tightly. Her petite frame was practically swallowed up by my embrace, which was saying something, considering I wasn’t that big. After a moment we pulled away and I gave her my best smile. “Look, why don’t you come and we can talk to Mr. Riggs. We can talk him into letting you come with us. You can leave the sewing factory. Who knows, maybe the dome he talked about will have clean air.”

She smiled and opened her mouth to reply, but a magnified voice bellowed outside.

“Misses Pike and Dobson,” the voice called, “we know you’re in there. You are under arrest for evading government officials, illegal use of personal generators, and fraternizing with known criminals. Come out with your hands up and you will not be harmed.”

Panic swept through my body. Alice was rooted to the floor, her eyes wide with horror. “How…” was all she managed.

My mind immediately went back to the Polatzi woman from this morning. She knew where we were all along.

That, or Legs gave them the information they’d wanted.

I grabbed Alice’s hand and slung the duffel bag over my shoulder, not bothering to close it. “Time to go!”

A hovercraft was outside; the whirring sound of the blades roared through the windows. Alice stumbled through the house behind me as I tripped over her sewing kit and my messenger bag.

“Avery, your bag!” Alice cried and wiggled her tiny hand from my grasp.

“Leave it. It doesn’t matter.”

She ignored me and snatched it against my wishes. “You need your bag!”

With her behind me, I tore the seal off the basement door and bolted downstairs.

The air immediately got thick.

Alice coughed and clutched her chest. “The air filters are off,” she wheezed, “We don’t have our masks!”

Thank God she grabbed my bag. I pulled it from her shoulder and dug into it, all the while holding my breath. After pushing aside a sketchbook, mom’s molten blob, and a pair of goggles, I found the mask. Without even thinking, I thrust it in Alice’s hands.

“Breathe,” I ordered.

The minute she placed the mask on her face, suction took hold and I heard her take a deep breath. Only seconds had passed, but we lost precious time standing on the stairs.

Stars floated before my eyes as I refused my body the air it so desperately screamed for. I took off across the dank basement for the broken window and pushed the desk against the wall to create a step. I used the last stores of my oxygen to spur on my stunned roommate. “Alice, come on!”

Her shoulders and chest heaved as she took another deep breath and ran to me, pulling off the mask as she neared. She pushed the mask onto my face. “Your turn.”

I felt the pull of the seal tightening around my skin. The hiss of clean air filling the mask was music to my ears, and I sucked in a deep breath. The O2 concentration sped past my eyes on the right lens, then the notification that I didn’t want to see.

Filtration system offline. Lung collapse within fifty-three seconds without mask.

When the message disappeared, Alice was already through the basement window and in the alleyway.

Above us, the front door exploded with a deafening crash, and the voice sounded again. “Misses Pike and Dobson, you’ve left us no choice. We’re coming in. Do not resist.”

Alice knelt down and yanked my upper body through the window. “Come on!” Alice hissed through clenched teeth.

Once free, I ripped the mask from my face and handed it to her. “Breathe, then let’s go.”

She sucked in a lungful of air and pushed me away from the lights and chaos unfolding in our front yard. Instinct took over. I clutched Alice’s hand and we ran.

I felt light headed as I pushed myself not to inhale the toxic air. We turned the corner and pressed ourselves against the dank brick wall. Soot and grime intermingled on the surface. Humidity made everything wet and miserable, and even the buildings seemed to weep with how horrible this place was.

My legs burned and I began to slide down the wall. Alice pulled off the mask and handed it to me. I greedily attached it to my face, my body clinging to consciousness.

“We have less than a minute before our lungs collapse if we can’t get into a building,” I spluttered, my voice muffled and hollow through mouthpiece of the mask. Oxygen had never tasted so sweet. It filled my lungs and I felt them expand like balloons. Relief. I took another deep breath and handed the mask back to her.

Footsteps rang down the hallway, accompanying a chorus of angry voices that were muffled by thick masks. “They can’t be far, we were advised they’d be home. Come on.”

Alice draped one of my arms over her shoulder and pulled me along. “Avery, we need to find somewhere to hide.”

We began our sprint again, every thirty seconds or so passing the mask between the two of us. Twice Alice held it too long and I nearly fell to the ground from lack of oxygen. Twice Alice came through in the nick of time.

We zigzagged through alleyways and dead bushes, accumulating cuts and bruises as we went. There was no time to stop, no time to examine the extent of our wounds. It was time to run.

The mask blocked my vision except for what was directly in front of me. I allowed Alice to guide me when I wore it, and vice-versa. We were so panicked, trying to avoid the voices and the hovercraft that I didn’t even look to the side to see a young man step in front of us.

It was like running into a brick wall.

My face crashed into his hard chest, and he barely moved. Alice bore so much momentum that she flew forward, skidding along the debris littered cement on her stomach. She cried out, and I skittered backward from the man I’d run headlong into.

Alice had the mask; she’d had it for forty seconds. Thirteen seconds before I was nothing more than a body bag. The man took a step forward and looked down at me. His hat masked his face, his voice velvet. “Running around on a day when the filtration system is off with one mask? That makes me think you have a death wish.”

Eight seconds. I didn’t want to die, but I’d be damned if this guy would have the last word before I passed out. “Being willing to watch someone die leads me to think you’re an ass.”

Three seconds. My lungs screamed. It felt like my chest would explode.

Just breathe in, Avery, and end it.

No. No. I wouldn’t do it. Alice would come. The man’s body swam before my eyes. His voice melted in my ears. “Not the first time I’ve been called that, but not for letting someone die.”

My eyes rolled into the back of my head. I wondered if I’d see my parents when I died. Alice’s scream pierced through my scattered thoughts.

Suddenly oxygen rushed into my nostrils. My eyes flew open, and I tried to figure out what happened. I looked up.

The man stood there. His hat obscured his eyes, but I could see his curious smile.

His mask was on my face.

I gripped the sides of the mask like a life vest and swallowed gulps of air. My chest heaved and red dots danced before my eyes. I tried to gather words to tell the man I owed him my life.

He extended his hand, and I took it willingly. “Let’s go. The Polatzi are coming.”

He turned, and his knee-length overcoat swirled around him. He picked Alice up by her waist and carried her under his arm. She seemed too shocked to argue. He looked over his shoulder back to me, his smile growing. “Care to join us, or would you rather get to know the Polatzi on a personal, first-name basis?”

I followed him, questions burning through my mind like my lungs had only minutes before.

Minutes before.

Why didn’t this guy need a mask? His graceful stride reminded me of pictures I’d seen of deer. The way they loped and jumped and acted like no wall was too high, no speed unattainable. They were beautiful, and this man reminded me of that.

He sprinted down an alley that was completely obscured by trash and shadows. I never would have seen it. He clambered over the heaps of trash with no trouble, even with Alice in his arms. I struggled, slipped, and lost my footing more than once.

I saw the top of his hat disappear over the peak of the trash heap, and fell into despair. He’d taken Alice and left me here.

At least he hadn’t let me die. He’d let the Polatzi take care of that.

So kind of him.

All of a sudden a beam of light blinded me from above. “THERE! THE PERPETRATOR IS THERE!”

Three more steady beams of light pinned me to my spot. I was terrified. Polatzi swarmed from all directions, flooding through every alleyway. There were at least thirty of them. I pressed myself against the sediment and willed myself to be invisible.

A hand gripped my right shoulder tightly. The hand pulled me backward, and dragged me over the top of the trash heap and hastily down the other side.

It was the man in the hat.

The man without a mask.

“Come on, you lump,” he huffed. He ran down the alleyway and picked up Alice. Again, she let him whisk her away. If we survived this, we were having a talk about that.

I looked behind me to find Polatzi cascading down the mound. Boots, old masks, newspapers and debris flew in all directions as their feet struggled to gain ground. Empty glass bottles clattered down the heap and broke into a million pieces, and the thundering sound of the hovercraft above roared closer.

My instincts and muscles worked together, driving me in the opposite direction of the inevitable arrest.

At the end of the alleyway I found the man putting Alice in a contraption I’d never seen before. Its spindly metal legs gleamed in the darkness, the bolts protruding slightly from the joints. The legs were bent and the body of the machine was situated on the ground, awaiting passengers. It hummed in anticipation, as though it were a living thing. He placed Alice gingerly in the back seat, then waved me forward with urgency. “Let’s go!”

I scrutinized the contraption before a misguided taser gun missed me by a hair. I sprinted and jumped into the machine beside Alice while the man pulled himself into the driver’s seat. His hands swept over the innumerable cogs, switches, and pulleys. Lights flashed and the contraption came to life, the legs extending and lifting us off the ground.

We were at least twenty feet in the air. The six legs moved elegantly for being constructed of steel, and the man had his hands in gloves that connected to the chaises of the body. Each time he moved his hands, the legs moved.

I heard shouts of terror from below and watched as the Polatzi scattered and dove out of the way of this…this thing. All of the hovercraft’s lights were directed at us, and we were nearly eye-to-eye with it. My eyes burned and watered from the light.

The man laughed as the machine lurched forward. There was a loud bang like a shotgun going off, and a net covered the Polatzi’s hovercraft. There were massive weights at the bottom of the net, and the hovercraft struggled in vain to stay in the air. It crashed to the ground with a sickening crunch.

We covered more ground than should have been possible. The faster the thing went, the jerkier its motions became. I struggled to keep myself seated, and Alice clung to me for dear life. Neither of us said a word, but simply stared below us as old homes and vendor carts passed by in a blur.

When we were out of range for the Polatzi hovercrafts, the man slowed his contraption down and I forced my legs to move. I held onto the sides of the steel body for support and fell into the front passenger seat with relief when I reached the front. “What in the hell is this thing?”

The boy didn’t look at me. He kept his eyes forward and his hands continued to make our getaway. “It’s my buggy. Do you like it? It’s a play on words, you see,” he said, not waiting on my opinion of the machine, “back before the war, before cars and planes, people had things called buggies, but they were silly carriage-like inventions pulled by animals. I fashioned this after the common spider, which is technically an arachnid, but most people call them bugs. Hence, this is my buggy.”

I had no idea what to say, so I turned and stumbled to the back of the bug gadget to sit by Alice. She leaned in and whispered in my ear. “What did you ask him?”

“I asked what this thing was,” I said dully, still trying to swallow everything that just happened.

“And what’d he say?”

“He said it was a spider bug thing.”

Alice shook her head. “I’ve seen spiders, and this is
not
a spider. Or a bug, for that matter.”

“It’s a buggy, actually,” called the man from the front.

Alice looked at me, and suspicion leaked into the tone of her voice. “Who is this guy?”

He never faced us, but yelled over the din of the metal legs working in unison. “My name is Jaxon Pierce, but you can call me Jax. Pleased to make your acquaintance, ladies. Now why don’t you two shush and let me drive this thing.”

“You know, technically spiders are arachnids,” Alice whispered. “I don’t think this guy knows the difference between a bug and an arachnid.”

I was pretty sure that the classification of a spider was the least of our worries.

CHAPTER

SEVEN

My body ached from exhaustion, but I willed myself to stay awake. Alice, however, couldn’t stave off sleep. Her head bounced gently against my shoulder with each step the buggy took, and I put a hand on her head to steady her.

My muscles burned. Every time I moved, a surge of pain shot through my legs where lactic acid had built up. It felt good but painful at the same time. My toes tingled as though they were asleep.

A million thoughts sped through my mind, battling for my attention. These seats were uncomfortable. Who was this Jaxon figure? Were we going to end up dead in a ditch somewhere? Maybe that’s what happened to my parents.

The familiar twang of loss cracked like a whip across my heart at the thought of my parents. I begged my brain to shut down for a while. Just long enough to make me forget the day. I squeezed my eyes shut and saw red from the pressure.