Taken (28 page)

We race on, following Bree down a stairwell. On the bottom floor, we find ourselves in what must be Frank’s surveillance quarters. Screens split the room into a variety of aisles, each display showing a different corner of Union Central: corridors, bedrooms, fields, the dining hall. It’s eerie, the visuals flickering solemnly as we watch Order members sprint through the frames. Some even show select areas of downtown Taem. Fighting and smoke fill the ones focused on the public square. As we pause to catch our breath, I see a dark flash move beyond a series of screens.

“Someone’s here,” I whisper. We steal silently down the row, moving away from our pursuer. From behind us, another pattering of feet. We cut down a different aisle. Soon we are so deep in the rows that Bree becomes uncertain which way we came from and which way leads to the garage. The feet keep trailing us, flicking around corners and tracking our moves.

“Here,” I whisper, pointing to a room off one of the corridors. We step in quickly and bolt the door behind us. It flattens the alarm into a duller echo. Emma leans against the wall in relief and lights click on.

The room becomes visible, bluish lighting flickering overhead. It is a lengthy room, much like the aisles we’ve left, but its contents are far more important. It doesn’t take long for us to know what we are looking at. There must be hundreds of screens, but their visuals are unmistakable. Dirty streets. Island sand. Huts and livestock fields and town squares.

“This is the control room,” Bree says, her hand running over a screen that shows two young boys playing along a sandy shoreline.

I step up to a screen that houses familiar visuals: the steps leading to the Council building in Claysoot. Kale is hopping up and down them, pulling her wooden duck behind her. There is no sound coming from the screen, and she could be a memory, a daydream, something not even happening. It has been just three months, and yet I feel I’ve been gone for decades longer. So much has changed since I called those clay streets my home. Kale hears something, and hops down the steps and out of the frame.

Another screen is eerily labeled Group C: Maude. Within its borders I can see the inside of her home: the simple wooden table, the faucet that could be pumped for running water. But what’s most unsettling is that these things are in the background, visible beyond her bedroom doorframe. The bulk of the image is focused on Maude’s bed, on the place I saw her standing the night I ran from Claysoot, the place she had discussed things with a voice I’m now certain belonged to Frank. If she was talking to him that night, does that mean she was in on it all along?

Bo moves to my side and taps at the corner of Maude’s visuals. I think it is his customary twitch until I notice the objects beneath his fingers: five strawberries, lined up with precision on the nightstand beside Maude’s bed. He’s not tapping. He is counting.

My voice comes out a whisper. “Five red berries in a row.”

“Sown with love so that they’ll grow,” Bo sings. But this time doesn’t stop.

“The first for when your throat is dry

The next for under rainless skies

If suns are strong, eat the third

Need one more? Just say the word

When water’s scarce, please have the last

Drink its juice and drink it fast

And when the thirst has stricken me

Please sow five new berry seeds

With luck and faith we’ll watch them bloom

Else thirst will drive us to our tomb”

He breaks into tapping again, fingers dancing over Maude’s video.

“We both knew that song when we woke up in Claysoot,” he says. “Maude said our mother must have sung it to us, even though neither of us could remember her. Or a home that we shared with her, even.”

“She knows there’s more out here, doesn’t she?” I ask.

“Yes, and it’s my fault.” He sinks to the floor and leans against the wall, knees pulled in toward his chest. “When the Order caught me running with Ryder, I told them I’d found a way to alert Maude of life beyond the Wall. It was a lie and a foolish one. I thought that if the Order believed Claysoot knew about the project, it all might stop. But that’s not what happened. Someone in the Order made contact with Maude. They discovered she knew nothing, but after revealing themselves, they had to ensure she’d keep quiet. Frank told her I was in his custody and promised to kill me if she let the truth slip.

“She demanded to see me first. I remember the video session. We saw each other for no more than ten seconds, and she started crying in half that time. After that, they used her as a resource, asked her all sorts of questions, still do I think. She is their eyes behind the Wall. And she goes along with everything, all because of me. She’d do anything for me; it’s her greatest weakness.”

I’m now positive Maude is the reason I was saved from the Outer Ring. She likely worried Bo would be hurt if Frank believed her responsible for my beating the Heist, for keeping my birth date secret. She must have told him the truth as soon as I admitted it to her.

“And the berries?” I ask.

He shrugs. “I’m guessing she leaves them there in case I were to reappear, to show that she’s never forgotten me.”

“We should go,” Emma says.

I nod and move for the door, but something catches me off guard. Something odd in one of the topmost screens labeled Group A. “Wait! Did you see that?”

“See what?” Bree asks, looking at the screen I point to. We wait, and again there is movement, a shadow darting through the frame.

“That, just there. Did you see that?” Bree nods. So does Emma.

We spread out in the control room, locating the other screens labeled Group A and wait. While each screen shows havoc—charred buildings and trampled livestock fields—we begin to see life among them: the faintest of silhouettes, darting through the frames. You would miss them if you weren’t deliberately looking for life, which would be easy to do when the screens sit beside the lively pictures of groups B, C, and D.

“I thought Group A was gone,” I say.

Bree shrugs. “Our journals are incomplete, so I’m not sure.”

“No, they killed each other off,” Bo says. “I heard it reported. Occasionally, in the early weeks after I was captured, I became Frank’s favorite test subject. He hated Ryder for escaping and he took that anger out on me. I spent hours on his workers’ tables. Each time I prayed that I would die, but I never got quite that lucky.

“I remember the day Frank received the report that Group A had died off. They thought I was unconscious, but I heard the whole thing. Dead. Extinct. Gone. Every last one of them.”

“Maybe Frank’s wrong, though,” Bree says, looking back to the images. “Maybe a few of them made it.”

“And maybe our eyes are playing tricks on us,” Bo says. “Whatever is left of that ruined place, it is not an area that could easily foster life.”

“True,” I say. “But even if they were fighting at one point, all it would have taken was a handful of people who had hope, who wanted to keep going. Claysoot formed out of nearly nothing. So did Saltwater and Dextern. These people in Group A had electricity and shelter. If they decided they wanted to live, they did.”

Bree and Bo nod in agreement, but Emma has grown distracted by a display that shows Carter hunched over medical scrolls in the Clinic.

“Come on,” Bo says. “We need to keep moving.”

He checks the door, and after deeming it safe, we open it. The alarm is still blaring and we skirt through the rows of screens, red light dancing over our faces. Up ahead, the hallway opens into the garage.

And then there is a voice behind us. “Freeze.”

Bo, Emma, and I do, but Bree reacts so instinctively I don’t have time to stop her. She spins on her heels, brings her rifle up to her chest. She aims and fires.

But I hear two shots.

And then I hear two bodies crumpling to the ground.

THIRTY-SIX

THE BLOOD COMES SLOWLY AT
first, soft and delicate, and then spreads over the fabric of her shirt like fire swallowing dry leaves. Bree lies on her back, eyes looking up at the ceiling, and draws short, panicked breaths. I drop beside her, not bothering to check if the threat has been eliminated.

“Bree?”

“I’m okay. I’m okay,” she gasps. Her hand finds mine and grips it tightly. The bullet has hit her upper arm, and as she lies there, panting violently, I realize how much she means to me. My chest starts pounding. I stand up quickly, my hands moving of their own accord. I aim my rifle down the hallway, but it is empty.

There is a body lying on the concrete floor. Bo has gone into self-preservation mode at my side, rocking and tapping and humming his song about berries. Emma stoops to examine Bree, and I leave them, cautiously approaching the fallen Order member.

He is young and his breathing rapid and shallow. Bree’s bullet hit him square in the chest.

“You won’t . . . get out . . . of here . . . alive,” he pants.

I look down at his chest, damp with blood. “Are you alone?” He keeps panting. I move my rifle before his eyes. “Answer me. Are you alone?”

He nods, and then forces out more words. “You won’t . . . make it . . . back,” he gasps. “Frank . . . will kill . . . you all . . . All the Rebels.”

I clench my teeth, push the rifle against his cheek. My finger reaches for the trigger.

“Do it,” he begs. “Please.”

I don’t.

“Please?”

I sling the rifle across my back and run the other way. I drop to my knees beside Emma. “Will she live?”

“I don’t know,” she says. “It only hit her arm, but there’s a lot of blood. And she’s going into shock from the pain.”

I scoop Bree into my arms and nudge Bo with my boot. “Come on, let’s go.”

He keeps rocking back and forth, his hands covering his head, humming.

“Bo, please,” Emma urges.

He snaps from his panicked trance at Emma’s touch, and again we are moving. We duck into the garage and stay out of view, our backs pressed against the rear wall. The place is racing with activity. Vehicles maneuver about the troops, making their way toward the exit and the riot downtown.

“Bree’s not going to be able to drive us,” I say to Bo. She has grown heavy in my arms, and her blood is sticky on my skin. I look at the various cars before us. “Which ones do you know how to operate?”

“I don’t,” he says. “But how hard can it be? Your hands steer and your feet handle the stop and go. I’ll figure the rest out as I need to.”

I’m skeptical but in no position to argue. We slink toward a deep green car. Bo pulls the back door open and I lay Bree across the bench seat. She shudders as I transfer her to the leather.

Bo finds keys under the front seat and Emma and I climb into the back. I look at Bree. Her chest is still heaving.

“Can you fix her?” I ask Emma. She looks so unsure it nearly breaks me. “Please, Emma. I need you to fix her.”

The car lunges forward. No one stops us. We are just another vehicle heading to the riot. As we break into the now dark evening, Emma bends over Bree, and opens her bag.

By the time the last ounce of light has been leeched from the night sky, we enter the woods.

Bo’s driving is turbulent at best, and Emma fights the lurching and abrupt movements of the car as she works on Bree. She fishes out the bullet—a skill she must have learned during her time working in Union Central’s hospital—and makes a bloody mess of both Bree’s arm and the car seat in the process. Bree loses consciousness along the way, but Emma stitches her up, dresses the wound, and tells me she’s done the best she can. Bo takes us as far as possible, following a dirt road that weaves through the trees, which grow thicker and thicker, until we finally have to abandon our vehicle.

I gather Bree in my arms, and lead the way, hiking in what I believe to be the right direction. I’m slow, carrying her like that, and it gives me too much time to think about Harvey. We left him. We didn’t know if he was dead or alive or taken captive and we left without him.

Eventually, Bo claims we should rest. “Only Bree knows how to get back,” he points out. “We should make camp for the night.”

Taem’s dome is barely visible in the distance, and the occasional explosion or gunfire can be heard. It makes me uncomfortable, being so close.

“What if someone’s following us?” I ask.

“They’re not,” Bo says. “They are fighting a bigger battle right now.”

Bo makes a fire and Emma and I sit on opposite sides, staring at each other through the flames. Bree sleeps, her head in my lap. I say nothing to Emma. I don’t even know where to begin. I want her beside me, and yet I want her far, far away, hurting as I do.

“Gray?”

I look down to see Bree’s eyes flickering open. They are blue again. She must have ditched her contacts at some point.

“Hey, Bree.”

She tries to sit up, but winces. “What happened?”

“You got shot.”

“I know that, stupid. What happened
after
I got shot?” She speaks slowly, but I can tell it’s meant to have fire in it. Her stubbornness makes me grin.

“We got to a car. Bo drove us to safety. And Emma fixed you. We’re camping in the woods now.”

“Emma? The Emma you never told me about? The girl you risked all our lives attempting to save?”

“Yeah, that one.”

She frowns. “She means a lot to you, doesn’t she?”

“Yes. But so do you.” It’s a complicated response, but an honest one.

Bree lies there for a second, looking up at me. “Your eyes are still blue. I like them better when they’re gray.”

“Why?” I ask, thinking of how gray is so dull, and not even a color at all.

“They remind me of cloudy skies over Saltwater. And morning waves. That color is familiar. Comforting.”

I fish the contacts from my eyes and flick them aside. “Better?”

She smiles. I return my attention to the fire, admiring an especially hot patch of blue flames.

“Gray?” Bree whispers again.

“Yeah?”

“Do you remember that night in the Tap Room, when I drank too much?”