Tether (16 page)

The train was exactly on time. I shielded my eyes, glancing down the tracks, and caught the glimmer of its headlights in the distance. Bells sounded, signaling its arrival. I couldn’t shake the certainty that Thomas wasn’t coming. It was hard, knowing what had happened to him in Farnham, not to worry. I kept hoping to see his familiar shape emerging from the shadows of the surrounding forest, and when it didn’t, my mind went to a dark place. If Selene noticed, she didn’t say anything; she seemed miles away. Listening. The fear had drained out of her, and she was as placid and determined as ever. The tether swung as if pushed along by a light breeze.

“What’s this?” Selene was standing in front of the bronze plaque, which carried the Seal of the Commonwealth—I recognized it from my time in the Castle.

“Some kind of commemoration?” I ran my fingers over the raised words.
Here in the city of Almond, King’s Dominion of New York, the fathers of the Commonwealth met for the first time to discuss the possibilities of a Second Revolution against the British Empire.
I looked around, half expecting an entire town to have sprung up around us like Brigadoon, but it was just Selene and I and
the lonely station shack. If this town was such an important historical landmark, where had the rest of it gone?

“Revolution,” Selene said, as if trying the word out for the very first time.
There are barbarians who wage war with each other, who kill each other over nothing,
she thought.

“What?” But she hadn’t been talking to me—I’d been
overhearing
her. She shot me a look of surprise, then turned away. I refocused my attention on the approaching train.

I almost didn’t notice the big black utility vehicles speeding toward us from the opposite direction. At first I thought it was Thomas coming to meet us, but then another car emerged: if it was him, he wasn’t alone. They came to a stop in the middle of the highway just as the train pulled into the station. I saw KES agents pouring onto the asphalt through the gaps between train cars, and I grabbed Selene’s arm.

“They’re here,” I told her. The tether pitched like a boat in a storm, and I felt I was going to be sick.

The train doors opened, and we clambered up the steps. I fell into one of the seats and pressed my face to the tinted window. The agents swarmed the road below us, but there was no way they were going to get around the train to the other side before it pulled out of the station. I squinted, trying to make out Thomas’s face, but I didn’t see him. I did, however, spy the girl who’d pretended not to see us in the Labyrinth: Adele. She gave a group of agents some furious commands, and they fanned out, running in all directions. She’d protected us once, but that didn’t mean she was going to do it again. She certainly
looked
as if she was trying to find us. Panic rose in my throat, but then the train’s breaks released with a huff and we began to move.

“We made it,” Selene whispered, taking the seat next to me. “What now?”

I caught my reflection in the window and was reminded, in a way that came as a shock, exactly what—and
who
—I looked like. Who
we
looked like. Forget money or tickets; our appearance was our biggest problem. We couldn’t let the conductor or any other passengers see our faces. One girl with a resemblance to the crown princess might be able to get away with it by hiding behind her hair or something, but two? That Selene and I looked exactly alike already made us conspicuous, never mind the fact that we were dead ringers for Juliana.

Luckily, the few passengers in the car we’d boarded were so busy watching the KES agents recede into the distance and murmuring to each other about what was going on that they hadn’t noticed us yet, but I didn’t expect things would stay that way. Through the glass door that separated the car we were in from the one behind it, I could see the conductor threading his way through the aisle, picking up tickets, passing them through a scanner, and counting out change.

We have to hide,
I told Selene.

Where?

There was a bathroom right below the stairs that led to the train’s upper level. It looked big enough to fit us both.
There.
She slipped out of the seat.
Be careful,
I warned her.
Don’t make it too obvious or people will notice.

But nobody seemed to be paying any attention. After the commotion at Almond, they’d all turned back to what they were doing: reading or dozing or playing with handheld gadgets.

Selene slipped into the lavatory first, and I followed, sliding the door closed and taking care not to lock it in case that triggered something that labeled it occupied. Besides, a lock wasn’t going to do us much good anyway if someone was trying to get at us. We were cornered. I held my breath, hoping
there was something—the universe, maybe, or destiny, or just plain old dumb luck—that would keep us from being discovered.

They’re gone,
Selene said after minutes had passed. I inched the door open a crack to check if the coast was clear.

Okay,
I said.
Let’s get out of here before someone actually wants to use this thing.

The train continued to fill with more passengers. Selene was too busy marveling at the train to worry—she kept asking me questions over the tether about how it worked, as if I had any idea. I was freaked out. Eventually the conductors were going to come around again to collect tickets from the people who’d gotten on at the last couple of stations, and we couldn’t hide in the bathroom every single time they walked through the cabins. The sun climbed in the sky, and with each passing minute I felt more and more exposed.

I tried to focus my mind, to listen the way Selene did, but I couldn’t hear anything besides the pounding of my own heart and the rumble of the train tracks beneath our feet. The man sitting in front of us was reading a newspaper, the
Columbia City Eagle,
and I glimpsed the main headline over his shoulder: “Conflict Escalates in Farnham-UCC Borderlands.”

The photograph accompanying the article was of a bombed-out neighborhood, structures that had once been houses reduced to cinders and bones. In the corner of the picture I could see the tattered remains of a Farnham flag: a black phoenix rising on a crimson background. I swallowed back bile. This was the General’s great war, the culmination of decades of planning, but it wasn’t his only war. Another would be fought on a cosmic battlefield, and Selene and I were directly in the line of fire. Or were we warriors?

The train lurched, and a woman passing through the aisle slammed into me, dropping her purse and scattering the contents. “Sorry!” she said, stooping to pick everything up. I tried to help her, hiding behind my long hair so that she wouldn’t recognize me—I just wanted her
gone,
as quickly as possible—but when I sat up to hand her a few of the fallen items, I glanced toward the car door and noticed a figure dressed in black barreling through the forward compartment. It was Adele, with two other agents, both guys: a stocky Native American boy whose dark eyes darted around like search-and-destroy missiles, and a tall, Eastern European–looking dude wearing a black knit cap and sunglasses. If they saw us, we were toast.

I yanked Selene out of the seat, slipping past the woman and knocking her purse to the ground again. “Sorry!” I called as I dragged Selene past the bathroom and through the car doors. The ground sped past below us. The wind was loud in my ears.

“What’s wrong?” Selene asked. The tether shivered. We’d been on the run only a few hours, and already we’d almost been caught more than once. I wasn’t sure how long I could keep this up, but the only thing that made sense to me was to keep moving. It was a coping mechanism my therapist had taught me: to deal with crippling anxiety, don’t try to imagine too far into the future, just make one decision at a time. It wasn’t advanced game theory or anything, but it kind of helped. Once I chose to do something, I felt much more calm.

The KES. They’re on the train, and they’re coming. We have to move.

The train is slowing down,
Selene said in alarm. We were approaching another station. Its name flashed up on the digital display in the car in front of us:
WARREN’S RUN
. I yanked open
the door, and we tumbled through it. I was afraid the commotion would make people look up, and I imagined their eyes locking on us, minds scrolling through a gallery of familiar faces until they realized who we were. But even though people did glance up, their eyes sort of slid over us—they were looking to look, not to find. After all, there was almost nothing more unlikely than the princess of their country riding public transportation.

Okay,
I thought.
New plan. We get off here and find a place to hide. We don’t really know where we’re going anyway. We need to figure out where Juliana is. Maybe we can work on that while we come up with a new plan.

It was too much pressure, the way Selene was blindly following my lead, as if I had any clue as to what I was doing or what a new plan even looked like.

Let’s keep moving,
I said. The closer we got to the station and the more we slowed, the better I felt, but just barely. We hurried through the next car and then the next, Adele and her two agents one step behind us. I wondered why they didn’t give chase—they would catch us if they did.

The train screeched to a stop in the station. We hopped off as soon as the doors opened; I was relieved to find this station quite a bit more packed, though it didn’t seem any larger or better kept than the one at Almond. I knew from experience that it was easier to get away when you used a crowd as cover. I thought we’d nearly made it, but then I heard someone shout “Stop!”

I took off down the platform at a dead sprint, with Selene at my heels. In the maelstrom of people boarding and getting off the train, we were able to get a good head start. I pushed through the throng, threading through the thicket of bodies like a needle. Selene kept pace with me; she was so close I
could hear her breaths coming hard and fast. I threw a glance behind me to see if we’d lost the KES agents, but they were gaining on us. I focused on the steps that led down to the street, thinking if we could just make it that far, we could get away clean, lose ourselves in Warren’s Run.

I was so busy staring at the ground, at the place where the platform gave way to stairs, that I didn’t notice the person standing directly in front of me until I barreled into him. He threw his arms around me, pinning mine to my sides, and shoved me into the shadows beneath the eaves of the station building. I fought back, thrashing and clawing at him as best I could with my hands restrained. I didn’t even think to look at his face.

“Sasha,” Thomas panted in frustration. “
Stop.
It’s me.”

I have to find her.
The refrain kept repeating through Thomas’s head. He’d lost her once; he wouldn’t lose her again. Not after she’d come back, whole and unharmed—come back for
him.
He knew it was rash—foolish, even—to believe that what was between them could withstand the brutal machinations of the multiverse, but he was committed to his folly, and he would find her.

It had been a shock to find her in the portal room, and he remembered the way his throat ached to say her name, the way his heart beat at his chest like a trapped bird when he saw her face. He felt the same way now, but just as before, he couldn’t show her or say a word. Adele and the others—Tim and Sergei, Cora and Navin—they were his friends, but they were KES first, and they would expect him to be, too.

And then there was the one who was
not
his friend. Hector Rockaway—Rocko, as they’d called him at the Academy—had been brought along on this shadow mission, too, and Thomas was pretty sure he knew why.
He probably wet himself when they told him,
Thomas thought. Rocko had hated him ever since they were new recruits, resented him for being the General’s
son, and he wouldn’t hesitate to turn Thomas in for any misstep whatsoever. Rocko was the only KES agent on the mission who hadn’t been part of Thomas’s extraction.
If they’d brought him along, I’d have had a bullet in my brain weeks ago.

“Sasha, stop. It’s me.” Sasha relaxed at the sound of his voice, and she looked up at him, close to tears with relief. He set his mouth in a grim, straight line and gave a small shake of his head; her expression sobered, but he could still see her lips curling a fraction at the ends.

He held her a second or two longer than he should have, relishing her nearness, her solidity; the rise and fall of her chest against his told him that she was real, something he still hadn’t quite wrapped his head around. He shut his eyes against the vision of her crawling on the floor in pain, begging for his help, the terrible, untrue, but visceral things he had experienced in prison. He couldn’t ignore the gut-twisting feeling that it wasn’t a hallucination but a premonition, that the time would come when it would be as real as she was now and that even then he wouldn’t be able to save her.

Behind him, Adele cleared her throat. He turned to see her, Tim, Sergei, and Selene all staring at them. He released Sasha and stepped away; Selene went to Sasha’s side, as if drawn to her by a magnetic force, and took her hand. A moment ago, it had been him and Sasha against the rest of the world. Now, again, it was the two of them on different sides of the line that always seemed to be there, waiting to push them apart.