The Isle (3 page)

I
need more time.
My brain doesn't work like Renny's does. She thinks things over so fast.

I yank my hand back from the lady in white and cross my arms. “I have to use the bathroom!” I shout. “It's an emergency. I'm serious.” And I am. I really do have to pee.

She doesn't believe me. Her helmet hair actually stiffens around her head.

“Do you want me to go in the bed while I'm under?”

The lady exhales through her nose, flat-lipped like a dead fish.

“A bed full of pee is no fun for anyone. . . .”

She nods toward a door in the far corner. “There's the bathroom. I'll be waiting for you.”

I'm sure you will
. If Ren were here now, she'd know how
to escape in the amount of time it took to pee. I don't know if I'm that smart. Steadying myself, I place both feet on the floor and take all the time in the world. Then I stay like that for a bunch more seconds.

“Sorry,” I say, breathing heavily. “I'm so dizzy. And my stomach hurts.” I clutch it, the same as when I'd skip class at Nale's to go penny-hunting.

The lady doesn't respond.

Once I'm finally inside the bathroom, I look around. It's a normal bathroom with normal bathroom things: sink, toilet, toilet paper.

How will any of this help me?
I can't flush myself down the drain. Above the toilet there's a metal air vent. If I followed it long enough, could I eventually find a way out? It looks like I could unscrew it, too.
But what if I get caught?

My fear embarrasses me. Ren wouldn't think like that
.

Still mulling over the vent, I lift the hospital gown above my waist and pee, since I was telling the truth about that part. I'd need to get the lady out of the room—at least for a few minutes—if I were going to try for the vent. At Nale's, other girls used to spend hours and hours in the bathroom. They'd rather be in a smelly bathroom than in class. They'd say they had their period. I've never had mine. Survival trumps baby-making, Ren told me once.

I could get it, though. . . .
I clap my hands together. Today's as good a day as any.

I decide to scream.

“Oh my god, oh my god! There's blood!” I start fake crying.

“What is it, child?” I hear the lady say from outside the
door. She's banging on the metal, announcing to me that she's coming in. Since the door doesn't have a lock, she's able to walk in on me like this, squatting on the seat, knees locked together.

“What are you doing?” I howl, blushing furiously, clutching my penny necklace. “Go away!”

Quickly, she shuts the door and says from the other side, “Don't you know what a period is? Jesus, child. That's nothing to scream about.”

“Please, I hate blood. I need . . . something,” I answer through the tears.

“All right, all right,” the lady mutters. “You stay where you are. And stop your crying.” I hear her walking away, and then a door closes.

It worked.

I . . . I don't believe it. I stifle a giggle. I'm not sure I've ever felt smarter than I do in this very moment. This was just the first hurdle—there are more to go—but I can't help it. If Ren were here, she'd—well . . .

First she'd tell me to get over myself. Then she'd tell me to keep moving. Last, when I was definitely out of danger, she'd tell me she's not surprised in the least.

With that thought keeping me afloat, I hop onto the toilet seat and examine the vent. My fingernails are too short to twist the screws free. I try anyway and end up with a bloody thumb.

What can I do?
I'm not even sure how much time has passed. . . .

In bed, time never seemed to pass. Since I drank the water,
time moves so much quicker. I rub the copper penny between my fingers, staring at the screws, chewing on my lip, and getting the squirmy feeling in my stomach.

The penny!
I tug off my necklace and fit the copper piece into the end of one screw.
Work, work
, I think, and I turn it like a key, twisting as hard as my fingers can manage.

The screw budges. I spin it round and round until it drops onto the floor. I have to work fast on the next three.
Twist, twist, twist, pull, repeat.

I don't notice the door as it swings open. The lady is staring at me with her black hair-helmet, a square package in her hand. Quickly, I hide my hands behind my back. The last screw drops out on its own. The vent falls. It clatters against the linoleum.

We stare into each other's eyes.

The contest lasts less than three seconds.

She grabs my wrist. I'm dragged off the toilet seat and out of the bathroom. “N-no,” I groan, digging my bare heels into the floor. It does nothing. A cool sweat has covered every inch of my skin. “I need some assistance in Lab A1,” the lady says into a tiny mic at her neck.

I'm breathing through a pinhole. “You can't keep me. You can't do this!”

The lab door opens. A young man in white runs in, rushing to my other side—but . . . he's not here to help me. He's helping the lady instead.

Together, they grip my wrists. I've got so much fear in me, so much adrenaline swimming around, that I jerk and jolt, swinging as far as my arms will let me.

They're too strong, or I'm too weak. I'm dragged along like a toy, soles squeaking against the linoleum, until they throw me stomach-down onto the bed. With both arms crossed behind me, it's useless. I choke on the dead smell of bleached linens and my own sour tears.

A needle pierces my vein. I flinch, and from the corner of my vision, I watch the syringe pump itself empty inside me.
Don't close your eyes
, I tell myself, repeating, repeating, but the words lose their meaning. They become a lullaby.

Soon every one of my eyelashes is a building, heavy and lumbering against my eyelids. I have no choice. I have to close my eyes—the room rabbit-holes away from me. From the cobwebby corner of a memory there's a smell like the color yellow. It kisses the tip of my nose, nodding good-bye, and again I'm made of doll bones.

D
erek and I run, palms jostling, but we stay tight together. “Are we close?” I huff.

He slows to a stop. He's not listening to me, but he is listening to
something
. If he were a dog, I imagine his ears would be perking up right now. “Do you hear that?”

A few moments of silence pass, then—

“Brack.”
Someone is definitely behind us. Each second, their footsteps pound closer. I wait for Derek to make the next move. Ain't used to doing that sort of thing, but he knows his way through the PATH and I don't, plain and simple.

“Derek,”
I hear Derek's own voice say.

And yet, of course, I know it's not Derek. Same timbre, same cadence. How can two totally different people be so similar? Their features, their bodies, the sounds that come
out of their mouths . . . it confuses me to my very core.

“She's not worth it,” Derek's brother Lucas says.

I'm flattered he thinks this is about me, but he's wrong. It ain't—not entirely, at least. Derek's been part of a family that refused to help when hundreds took sick. Can't Lucas imagine that maybe—just maybe—Derek's feeling guilty after sitting back and doing nothing for so long?

Lucas's flashlight flickers on, and I search the tunnel's graffiti-worn brick for a place to hide. Behind us I find a small alcove, shielded in shadow, with a recessed metal door tucked neatly out of sight.
Jackpot
.

Derek nudges me into the nook. I feel him slip the leash from his wrist; we're no longer connected. He pushes his bag into my arms and the contents clink softly, sounding fragile. He wastes no time. Stepping into the center of the tunnel, Lucas's flashlight finds him immediately, as he meant it to.

“Brother,” Derek says, like he don't care that his own blood is out for his blood. Even his smile seems sincere. He draws the beam a few more feet away, and I stay hidden.

“She's with you. I heard her.” Lucas sounds frantic. The warped circle of light darts up and down the tunnel, searching. But the alcove is deep. If I keep myself pressed against its side, I'm safe. “Do you think she'll like it when you're a corpse, Derek?”

A corpse?
Shrinking back, the realization cuts straight to my marrow.

Derek's going to die soon.

How didn't I think of it?
If he doesn't keep drinking the water, his age will catch up with him. And the moment
Derek got booted from the Tètai for helping Aven, he left his own supply too. I go so stiff, so cold, I may as well have turned into the corpse first.

“It's not too late for you to come home,” Lucas says, and Derek stops breathing. “She'd accept you as family, if not her partner. With some help, Kitaneh's gotten over you fairly easily; you'd be surprised.” At this, Lucas snickers to himself, exactly like an older brother. “We don't need to speak about what you've done, but this must stop, here and now. Your girl is a risk, Derek. Say Governor Voss catches her. If it'd get her friend back, would she tell him the spring's in our basement?”

Derek's silence frightens me.

“You have to let her go.”

Would he do it? Would he go back to them?
Though I'm fully out of sight, both legs ache from the sudden rush of adrenaline. Not from fear of being found, but from fear of being left.

Please don't, Derek
, I find myself praying. Under the flashlight's yellow, his hair burns. He's the brightest thing in the tunnel. I watch him like a wildfire. Waiting for his answer, I've forgotten to breathe.

Somewhere back the way we came, shoes crunch gravel—I whip my head. I find nothing.
I'm imagining things.

“She is not the risk,” Derek says after an eternity. He moves closer to Lucas, his footsteps tightwire steady. Ten feet off, I hear scuffling.
Someone else is here.

Lucas flicks his flashlight in its direction. Finding no one,
he says, “Your girl's a coward, Derek,” and turns the beam back on his brother.

“Governor Voss is the risk. Or have you forgotten? This is larger than the four of us can handle. We've made too many mistakes.”

Derek's words are slow. Too slow. He's stalling.
He wants me to make a move. A distraction until he steps in—

The light follows him, keeping me well out of sight. I lower both packs and ease over, ignoring the size of Lucas's muscled arms. They're Derek-sized, which says enough. I hesitate before moving in; a surprise attack by a five-foot-tall teenage girl might not end in my favor, but I'm the best we've got.

“Voss never should have survived this long,” Derek goes on, his words smooth and deliberate. “We should have caught on earlier that he'd kept so much water. Over and over we failed. Now the rules must change.
We
must change. There are not enough of us to continue as we have.”

Under my feet, tiny bits of asphalt shift around.
I'm being too loud
, I think, stopping, but Lucas doesn't notice. Derek's speech is doing the trick. I can't walk straight toward Lucas—that'd put me in the way of his flashlight. Instead, I inch along the wall and cross the tracks behind him. About five feet off—when I'm so close I can hear him breathing—someone's foot finds a puddle. It makes a soft, slurping noise.

Brack.
I freeze.

Lucas spins around with his flashlight. “Where are you?” he asks, but I wasn't the one who stepped in that puddle.
Who the hell else is here?
His light zigzags from one side of the tunnel to the other.

He doesn't know I'm right behind him. I guess there's one advantage to creeping around in an echo chamber—the sounds could be coming from anywhere.

Derek rushes his brother fast, flashlight dropping to the ground with a thud. The two of them lock together, grappling on the tracks. They're throwing punches and playing scrappy, each going for the other's throat.

Each other's
throats.

This is how they die
, I realize.
Suffocation
. Humans have basic needs, like air, Derek just said, and the spring doesn't change that.

I could actually lose him. Right now, I could lose Derek.

I have to do something.
I strain my neck, but I can't tell who's who. All I can make out are big muscles and red hair, which help me a sum total of zero.

I make a dash for the flashlight—it's a few feet away, doing no one any good. The rope leash still tied to my wrist drags as I scoop up the light. I turn its beam on the two brothers. At the same time, they stop to look at me.

I scan both freckled faces for the jaw so square you could learn geometry off it. I thought Derek had one of those until Lucas. Hoping I'm not wrong, I pick out the jaw that best fits the bill and decide Lucas is on top. Derek's lost the advantage.

The rope still dangles from my wrist. I hate the idea it's giving me, but it may be my only option. I've got my trusty knife strapped to my thigh, as always, but if Lucas has been
drinking the water every day, who's to say he'll even feel it?

The rope, however . . .

But what if I
do
kill Derek's brother?

I can actually hear the air hissing from Derek's lungs like a nearly flat tire, deflating fast. His forehead is red with blood, his veins blue and bulging—

I drop the flashlight to the ground. It shudders, then strobes. The brothers' bodies flicker in and out of sight. Pulling the rope tight between both hands, I move closer. The bristled cord shakes in my palms. Each fraying millimeter is rough to the touch. I don't want to kill. I don't want to do it.

Turns out, I don't have to. . . .

A shape, small and thick, tosses me aside.
Kitaneh?
I think, but almost immediately, I'm proven wrong. Jostled backward, I hear a dull thump. Lucas's head rocks and sways; he's been hit in the skull. In the strobing light, I watch as his eyes roll backward and his body rolls forward. He collapses over Derek, utterly still.

Derek gasps. Gripping his neck for air, he pushes his brother off. “Ren?” he chokes out.

“Not Ren. Me,” a girl says softly, holding Lucas's head in her lap. She caresses his forehead, like she didn't just smack the living daylights out of him. Her dyed blond bob hangs unevenly against the dark skin of her jaw.

“Sipu,” Derek wheezes, sitting up and taking deep drags of air. “What the hell are you doing here?”

I step around the girl, Sipu, and pick up the flashlight, only to hit it against the wall a few times. Sure enough, it quits its dance-party antics and gives us some solid light.
Trying not to blind anyone, I aim it onto the ceiling.

Sipu reaches into her backpack, her eyes two sunken shadows, and pulls out a spool of twine. “Lucas was lying,” she says. She lifts his limp body and winds the spool round his hands, binding them together first. “Kitaneh would kill you if you returned. He thought . . . maybe if he could get you home—if we could just go back to the original plan—” Here she looks at me and shrugs.
Killing me. That was the plan.
“Then perhaps he could get Kitaneh to reconsider.” She pauses and swallows hard. “They've become . . . close,” she says finally.

Lucas hinted at the same thing, but I'd written it off as classic brotherly competition. From Sipu's face, though, I see he wasn't lying about that.

Derek crawls toward her. “And you came to warn me? Why?” Together, they pass the spool back and forth around Lucas's body.

Sipu avoids his gaze. “It takes only one falling domino to set the rest in action,” she answers, her body stiff. “The same can be said for guilt. You don't know the half of it, Derek. Kitaneh's made decisions for all of us. I don't believe in hell, but if I did . . .” Her voice wavers.

Derek looks at her briefly but doesn't ask what she means. They tie off a bound and gagged Lucas, laying him down on the tracks. Taking Sipu's hand, Derek asks, “Come with us?”

“I can't,” she says, unable to take her eyes off Lucas's face. “Our cause was worthwhile, our means were not—he must see this. I'm just not ready to give up on him yet. You two keep going. He'll wake soon.”

“And if he saw you knock him out?”

“I couldn't see my husband kill his one remaining brother, only to live an eternity with that kind of guilt. It's true enough.”

Derek and I throw our packs over our shoulders. “I never wanted to be at war with my family, Sipu,” he says, his face haggard under the flashlight's beam. She nods. We turn and walk, following the tracks in silence. I'm sure we're both thinking the same thing.

He's been at war since the moment he saved Aven.