Summer Ruins (38 page)

“Well, all we promised Deshi is that we’d listen to what he has to say and that we’ll talk about it. Maybe tonight after the Sidhe share what happened at the Harvest Site,” I say, my mind already tripping back to worry over them.

“Okay. Deal.” He leans forward and halfheartedly tugs the end of my ponytail, then sniffs. “You stink.”

I swat his arm and shove him away. “You don’t smell all that wonderful yourself. Leah’s going to run for the hills if you don’t get a shower before bed.”

He grins, the slow, lazy one that gives every girl here an attack of nervous giggles. “Oh, I promise Leah’s not running anywhere. I mean, you’ve kissed me. You know how it is.”

I purse my lips as though trying to recall. “Oh, right. I forgot.”

He snorts and I grin, and when he loops an arm around my waist I lean into his sturdy side. We do stink, like two people who’ve been lying on a dusty floor in the hot sun all day, but his faint scent of apples and cinnamon bolsters my happiness through the summery stench. At the top of the stairs we part ways, slipping into the separate cleansing rooms we’ve established for boys and girls.

***

The Sidhe are late.

It’s almost two in the morning now, hours past when we expected them, and none of us can sit still. Leah slipped out an hour ago to go to the lab; she said she couldn’t wait any longer without having something to keep her hands busy. Deshi and Pax stare out the window hole as though Griffin and Greer are going to walk down the road and into our room at Perkins Hall. I’m standing next to the desk, ripping my cuticles to pieces, and Lucas paces from one side of the room to the other so fast I swear there’s going to be a groove in the floor.

When they do arrive, at first I think I imagined them into existence simply by wanting it so badly. But they appear the way they always do—not there one minute and standing in the room the next. I can’t help the relieved smile that crawls onto my face or the weakness that washes into my knees.

I lean back on the desk for a moment, gathering new strength. The look on their faces say things went well, or at least not disastrously.

“Well?” Pax demands, stepping away from the window with Deshi on his heels.

The portal still bobs and shifts behind Griffin and Greer, who thankfully look like themselves and not Wardens. Their grins stretch wide as they step out of the way. Griffin sweeps his hand in an inviting motion, bending slightly at the waist. “Your Harvest Site, young Dissidents.”

When we don’t move, Griffin stands up and plants his hands on his hips. “Hello, have the four of you gone deaf in the last twenty-four hours? Come and see!”

He’s obviously proud of himself, and when I glance at Greer she smiles and nods. She steps through the portal first, maybe to show us it’s okay even though we’ve all done it before, and I follow a little more hesitantly. The boys step through behind me, one by one, finally followed by Griffin. He shrinks the portal behind him until it’s smaller than the soccer ball we played with a few days ago, but leaves it open.

“Does that make you feel better?” Griffin asks none of us in particular.

We don’t answer but it does make me feel better—being back at the Harvest Site winds my already-tight nerves into vibrating balls. Now that we’re here, though, I take a look around, warm enough but not recognizing the space we’ve entered.

The equipment scattered around, along with the barrels of mined bedrock, suggests we’re in the extraction area of the Harvest Site. Once we’ve all taken inventory and focused back on the Sidhe, Griffin motions for Greer to go ahead.

“It worked. Look.” She spreads open the flaps at the back of the tent, letting in a burst of air so cold it crushes the air from my lungs before I warm myself up.

“Whoa,” Pax breathes.

I have to agree with his assessment. Behind the tent, stretched on their backs in neat rows across the ice, are the Harvest Site Wardens. “Are they dead?”

Greer shakes her head in response to my question. “No. Come on, we’ll show you.”

She and Griffin duck outside, and the four us exchange glances filled with trepidation before following the Sidhe twins for the second time tonight. At the first Warden, I crouch down, ignoring the sick twist in my stomach at being so close to an Other. Even though he’s incapacitated, the sight of him still stabs pins through my eyeballs. The last months have taught me to ignore it with more ease than I would have thought possible before this all started.

He looks almost normal, from the crop of blond hair to the black eyes to the outline of the star mark behind his ear. Except steam rises off his neck and face, his hands, and all other exposed skin. The skin itself appears translucent for the first time, but instead of revealing veins, it looks like shiny black glass underneath. Tremors move through him from head to toe, sending his limbs into tiny, almost unnoticeable convulsions.

“Touch him,” Griffin instructs.

It takes all of my courage, even though he hasn’t moved or acknowledged our presence, to reach out and press a finger against the star on his neck.

I yank my finger back, inspecting the tip and finding a blister. “He’s burning up.”

“Exactly. It’s working.” Greer motions down the line. “Even keeping them out here isn’t reducing their temperature, and it’s put them in their weird recovery state to attempt to heal. Except as long as we keep giving them the wrong praseodymium, they won’t.”

“And they haven’t moved?” Lucas questions.

“Nope. They started collapsing between an hour and three hours after their injections. They took them at midday.” Greer’s eyes are steely, determined. Nothing about her body language suggests she feels badly for hurting them, even though they were presumably Nat’s friends. “We double-checked the hive, but the fever and the recovery state restrict their brain function.”

“Does that mean they can’t alert the Prime to what’s happening here?” I ask.

“Yes and no,” Griffin answers, shivering. “Let’s go back inside, it’s flipping freezing out here.”

I couldn’t agree more, and Pax and Deshi look happy to be out of the cold, too. Inside, we settle on some waist-high stools next to a cluttered counter as Griffin continues.

“Yes and no,” he says again. “We don’t think they’re able to reach out to the Prime, but if someone were to come looking for them in their sinum, they would definitely know something’s up.”

We’re all silent for a few minutes. I think briefly about sealing their alcoves, but that would likely attract more attention than it would prevent.

“We only need to get through the next three days. What are the chances one of the Others finds out before then?” Pax asks the Sidhe.

“Are you asking for real or is that a rhetorical question?” Greer snorts. “Because your guess is as good as ours.”

Griffin’s eyes flit to Deshi. “But maybe not as good as his.”

Deshi shrugs, looking uncomfortable with the sudden scrutiny. “If you two fake the reports well enough, they won’t have any reason to suspect anything’s off. The Prime only listens in on the reports occasionally. They’re normally given to one of the Warden Captains, as far as I know.”

“So if we have a little luck for the next couple of days and you two hold up your end of the bargain, this could work,” I chirp with a smile that’s more confident than I feel.

“We’re due for a little luck, I think,” Deshi replies, returning my smile.

It makes me feel warm when Deshi displays the ability to fit in with us, even if I often still feel as though we don’t understand him or what he’s been through as well as we should. There hasn’t been time to coax out of him the experiences he’s keeping close to the vest, but in spite of that fact, I believe in him. I care about him, and I catch him watching all of us at times, quiet but always there, and it’s clear he cares about us, too. That after everything, he has come to believe we’re the family he belongs with, no matter his lingering feelings for his father or for Zakej.

“Is there anything else we should know before we go back and figure out how to duplicate this with the rest of the Others?” Lucas asks, standing up and pacing anxiously.

“Wait until the first official day of the Celebration. The Prime Other and his family won’t arrive until that afternoon, and if you don’t get them, too, you’ll be in trouble.” Greer stands up, too, shifting nervously from one foot to the other. “And Griffin has an idea. A backup plan of sorts.”

I’m almost afraid to ask, because with Griffin one never knows if the idea will be helpful or the opposite. “What is it?”

“There are almost ten thousand people here, between the four Stations,” he starts. “A lot of them aren’t right in the head since the Others weren’t careful about removing their veils, but some of them are. If something goes wrong and you end up needing to fight for real, they could give you the pure numbers you need to overwhelm the Others, weapons or not.”

“Speaking of weapons…” Greer drags two big duffel bags, each large enough to hide a body, from behind an isotope separation machine. “We raided some castles in Ireland. Nothing too modern, but they’re better than nothing. They should nicely augment the training we’ve been giving your friends.”

Lucas bends and unzips one of the bags, and Deshi reaches inside to pull out what appears to be a long, thick, incredibly sharp knife. He blows hair out of his eyes and turns a questioning gaze on Greer. “What is it?”

“They’re called swords, and there are a bunch of different kinds in there,” she replies.

“Stick the Others with the pointy ends, yeah?” Griffin snorts, taking in our hesitant faces. “It’s not so hard.”

I roll my eyes at him, then turn toward my friends. “I don’t see any harm in them telling everyone here what’s going on, do you? With the Wardens gone they obviously know something, anyway. And if we end up needing backup, a few thousand humans could overwhelm the Others, even if they do have fancy weapons.”

“Not without loss, though,” Deshi reminds me. “People would die.”

“It’s still not our first choice. But this is a war, like you said, Desh. Sometimes people die. Maybe even us.” It hardens inside me, the promise Pax, Lucas, and I made to one another when we were here at the Harvest Site earlier this summer. “Remember, no matter what happens—we lose this planet, or the Others leave—we’re not going with them. Maybe we can’t save Earth, but if we’re this generation’s Elements and we die before there are more, the Others won’t survive.”

“We die before letting them use us. Yes.” Fear gathers like a storm in Deshi’s black-veined gaze, but after a moment or two it clears, making way for steady determination.

“Aww. You guys are like the Three Musketeers,” Griffin drawls in a fake emotional voice. “Only there are four of you.”

“Well, technically there
were
four Musketeers; d’Artagnan gets left out. I don’t know why,” Greer corrects her brother.

“Because at the beginning of the story he wasn’t a Musketeer, dummy.”

“But he
is
a Musketeer at the end. And he pretty much saves all of their asses. It seems a little rude not to call it the Four Musketeers, don’t you—”

She stops when Pax clears his throat, and they both dissolve into laughter at our quartet of baffled expressions. It’s as though they’ve forgotten we were listening.

“
What
are you two talking about?” I demand.

“It’s a book,” Greer explains.

“And a movie,” Griffin interrupts. “Well, several movies.”

“Whatever, just shut up.” She turns back to us, still frowning at her brother. “It’s a book about these three—
four
—Musketeers, which are like men who guarded the leaders of this country called France.”

“Where Lucas is from!” I exclaim.

“Where my mother is from,” he corrects, smiling at me.

“
Anyway
, they used swords like the ones we gave you and they had this motto: ‘All for one, one for all.’ You guys reminded us of that just now with your creepy death pact,” Greer finally finishes.

“It’s not creepy,” I insist, trying to read her opinion in her lilac eyes.

“Oh, it’s creepy,” she assures me. “Noble, but creepy.”

I shrug, then turn back to my Musketeers and raise my eyebrows. “So, all for one, and one for all?”

Deshi nods. “Yes.”

“It’s our best bad plan,” Pax agrees.

“Where you are, I am. No matter what.” Lucas’s soft gaze holds mine, and I know that in three days or less, we’ll know the answer to where that’s going to be.

Chapter 36.

Half of our little army is at work in the lab, making more of the compound that took out the Wardens at the Harvest Site. The rest of us have spent the past twenty-four hours coming up with a plan of attack for actually making the switch. The Summer Celebration begins tomorrow morning, and we’ve decided to move toward the end of the first day, just to make sure their praseodymium has been delivered and stocked. Hopefully in the black tent like we think.

The eight of us who are going to make the swap have hunkered down in the old book depository, which is a few blocks from the site of the Celebration but not on the Others’ delivery route to and from their staging area.