The Other Side (12 page)

The
dream always starts the same way. Lorena and me sitting in the barracks bathroom,
Kissing Dragons
playing on the thinscreen. Claire's nearby, her face stuck somewhere between a snarl and a scream. Only her eyes move, from me to the show and back to me.

Gunshots erupt from outside. Dragons roar. I turn to ask Lorena what's happening, but she's transformed into a corpse with bullet holes for eyes. A rivulet of alcohol trickles from her lips.

The noise of the battle intensifies. I leave the bathroom to investigate. My feet stick in a layer of liquid, but I can't see what it is because the thinscreen's off. Calling out names and numbers that go unanswered, I feel my way to the door.

It opens on its own. Sunlight blinds me. I look back into the barracks.

Daggers of light illuminate a floor coated in a crimson film, broken only by the meandering path of my footprints. My eyes drift up. Every bed appears to be filled. The blankets that cover the bodies begin to creep down to reveal dead faces. They're all the same.

Allie.

I bolt out the door. The Antarctic snow is warm and soft, like bread a few minutes out of the oven. I look down. Not bread. Flesh. A human abdomen. I attempt to retreat into the barracks, but Georgetown's disappeared, replaced by an endless field of bodies. I know them all. The man I'm balancing on died in my battle-room attack on Montego Bay. As did the children pressed shoulder to shoulder on either side of him. I saw the adjacent woman in the reconditioning chamber. There's Sheriff and Old Man. Ahead, I spot Claire and Lorena.

I flee, keeping my eyes locked on the horizon. The sun drains from yellow to black and the sky shades a dark red. My foot lodges in an armpit or a groin and I trip forward. I reach out to break my fall and find myself inches from my mother's face.

Her eyes open. “Run!”

I do.

I stumble onward, slip again.

This time it's Dad, his eyes paralyzed, but not his mouth.

“Run!”

I fall again.

Sam. Glaring. “Run!”

Then Allie. Smiling. “Run!”

Colin. “Run!”

And as I push myself up, he turns into Claire.

I run.

I trip again, but this time my hands fall into emptiness. I'm spun around so that I'm facing the sky. The bodies on either side of me link their arms through mine, jam their legs against me. Feet above me curl into my hair and lock my head down. Fingers entwine my toes.

I'm sinking, sinking, sinking . . . becoming one with the dead.

Then I see the light above me, swelling larger and brighter.

Green, the entrance to hell. I blink and it's gone and there's only darkness. The smell of pine trees and earth reaches me.

Another blink and James is there, crouched beside me, close enough to touch, if only I could move my arms. But I cannot move, nor can I speak. I can only look at him. And
I do, for as long as my eyes will stay open. His black hair's cut too short and his blue eyes carry that ever-sadness, but it's him.

“You're not supposed to be here,” he says, a world away. He digs me out from the wreckage, cradles me in his arms, looks at me in a way that makes me want to forget about the pain erupting through me. But it's too much.

The dream boy drifts from sight.

Awareness returns with a low buzz.

I push through the heaviness and force open my eyes.

Blackness.

That buzz intensifies until it strikes through the numbness and drills into my skull.

Someone's calling out something.

A number, maybe?

A jet of liquid hits my face. Salty, familiar, but I can't place it. I get another burst on the other cheek. The jets slap me back and forth. Sensation trickles into my body, and soon I feel it all.

The bandages compressing my ribs.

The cuts stinging my face.

The shackles digging into my wrists overhead, stretching my arms from their shoulders.

And that ringing, so sharply resonant, means a CENSIR,
means that hell will have to wait while crueler demons take their flesh.

“Twenty-Five?” The electronically deepened voice, so distant before, now booms from above.

I shudder. “No. No!”

The jets shut off, the ringing subsides.

“What were your plans, Twenty-Five?”

“What happened?” I groan. Even my toes hurt.

My CENSIR jolts me.

“What were your plans, Twenty-Five?”

“I don't understand.”

The wall in front of me lights up with a panning image of downtown Chicago. What's left of it. Rescue crews are already picking through the rubble.

How long have I been out?

I search for memories of what happened after the car flipped.

Nothing.

“Why were you in Chicago?” Interrogator asks.

“Did the shelters hold up?” I ask. “Did that man in the red suit make it? He was on Halsted Street near the—”

Another jolt. “Answer the question, Twenty-Five.”

If I lie, the CENSIR will detect it, so I stick to the generic truth. “I was headed back home.”

“You're telling me your appearance during this attack was a coincidence?”

“Don't you think I would have been flying a dragon and not driving a car?” I say, which earns me another jolt. “Yes, it was a coincidence.”

A couple more questions to verify my bad luck, then: “You went to see your family in Ann Arbor in search of your brother.”

Not a question.

The throbbing in my ribs intensifies. “Sam tell you that?”

There's the briefest pause before he says “Yes,” but it's enough. He's lying.

For a moment, the pain of everything dulls. Sam didn't report me.

“Where were you headed?”

“Home,” I say.

I receive a sharper jolt. I bite hard into my lip, choke back a scream.

“Don't make me ask again. You know what we're capable of, Twenty-Five.”

Far too well. But I won't betray my friends. Never again.

My CENSIR shocks me hard enough to rattle the chains overhead. I scream.

“Where is home?” Interrogator asks after I've quieted. “If you do not cooperate, we will recondition you.”

I let my tears run.

“Saint Matthew Island,” I mutter, which is as much a home as any.

Silence. Does he detect the half lie?

I'm starting to think he's no longer there when another picture flashes onto the wall, showing the inside of Kanakanak Hospital, cordoned off with crime-scene tape, the sheriff and his deputy laid out on the floor, necks twisted to dead.

“Was this you?” Interrogator asks.

“I was there. I didn't kill them.” Another half lie. “Oren and his Greens were after Allie. Twenty-One.”

“Why?”

“I'm not sure. Oren mentioned something about her being tangled. Something about multichannel telepathy.”

“She can talk to multiple dragons at once?”

“Yes.”

“You can't?”

“No.”

“Do you know anybody else who can?”

“No. I don't understand. Why is she so important?”

Interrogator ignores my question, asks me dozens of his own about Oren and his Diocletians, often repeating them in different ways. I provide him Evelyn's name, a guesstimate of the number of dragons at Oren's disposal, and basic information that anybody could glean from news reports or
Oren's propaganda vids. Otherwise, my answers are a variation of “I have no idea.”

“How did the insurgents find Georgetown?” Interrogator asks after finishing his Oren line of questioning.

“There was a tracker in my arm,” I say.

“Was?”

“After we escaped Georgetown, it was removed.”

“What about the others?” he asks.

“Others?”

My CENSIR jolts me. “Loki's Grunts? Where are they?”

“Most of them are dead,” I say. After a sharper reprimand, I admit another generic truth. “Only Keith and Preston remain.”

“Where are they?”

“I don't know,” I say.

The jolts sharpen, my screams weaken, my thoughts crumble.

“If you do not tell us the truth, we will hurt someone you love. Think on that, Twenty-Five.”

I'm lowered to a sitting position, shackled wrists laid in my lap. The thinscreen shuts off, and it starts to rain. It's that same concoction from the jets. Salty and metallic, and this time I recognize it. They used it during my reconditioning. I'm lucid enough now to know it's not blood—too watery. Not human, at least. Could be dragon.

I let my tongue pull in a few drops to wet my lips and lube my throat, then push away the thirst that twists my insides. I attempt to stand, wanting to get a better sense of my prison, but the chain connected to my shackles is locked rigid and I'm pushed back to the floor. There's enough play for me to sit or lie down, nothing more.

A minute or so later, the overhead sprinklers shut off. I expect another round of interrogation or the next phase in the torture progression—images of dead Chicago cycled rapid-fire on the thinscreen, or maybe episodes of
Kissing Dragons
played in an endless loop . . . just don't let it be that show with Sam.

I wait, but nothing happens. I listen. For footsteps somewhere outside my cell, for voices, for anything at all. Rain drips from my hair in fading intervals, and sometimes I rattle my bound hands just to hear the
clink
of the connecting chain. But that's it.

The world's gone eerily silent, and I am but a ghost in it.

The
blood rain's at it again. It seems only minutes ago that the sprinklers shut off, but I've thought that before. I keep track anyway. That and my bladder are the only metrics by which I can measure time's ebb and flow.

Sprinklers: fourteen. Me: six. My best guess is that it's been four days.

I take my few sips, then start my silent count. One scale chaser, two scale chaser . . . In sixty scale chasers, the sprinklers shut off. My shivering lasts another several minutes. Afterward, I struggle to find the relative peace of nightmares.

“We will hurt someone you love,” Interrogator said. They need time to collect collateral to ensure my cooperation. What's taking so long? Who will they torment me with?

Though sometimes it seems like they've left me here to
wither, I'm sure they're monitoring my emotions via the CENSIR, and I want them to know that fear does not top my list.

I glower at the invisible cameras that are surely watching me and think about Mom and how the Green that killed her was part of a secret army project to control dragons, a project they later forced me to partake in.

I think about Dad, once powerful, broken when the military came to Mason-Kline to kill Baby and the other dragon children.

I think about Sam, that wild-haired, wild-eyed kid in a Prius, the brother who loved me before the government convinced him I was a traitor.

I think about Allie and the video those guys showed me in that Dillingham diner.

I think about Baby, another child tortured and rolled out in front of the cameras, all in the name of ending this war.

And I think about James, the boy who loved dragons like my mother loved dragons, the boy I never really got to know. The military didn't kill him, not in a flesh-and-blood, Mom sort of way, but what's the difference?

I'm wondering what would have happened if we'd met in a better world . . . when the sprinklers start up again.

Already? It was only minutes ago that they turned off, no more than an hour, I'm sure of it.

One scale chaser, two scale chaser . . . but the rain doesn't
stop when I reach sixty, nor a hundred, and soon I'm soaked and shivering.

And then it does stop, and a strange mechanical noise echoes from afar. The chain connected to my shackles retracts, pulls me into tiptoe standing position.

It's time. Now they're going to activate the thinscreen. “We will hurt someone you love.” Dad. It's gotta be Dad. They used him against me before. They know how important he is to me. Confess, or he dies. Would they actually kill him?

I don't know, but if I see him, I will break, so I squeeze my eyes shut. A stalled breath later, a sharp brightness shines through my eyelids; an uncomfortable warmth envelops me. I squeeze tighter.

Minutes pass. My CENSIR remains dormant. Nobody comes on over the speaker system. All I can hear is the fast drip of liquid onto metal as I twist on my tiptoes, the chain above me spinning back and forth in calm gyrations. My shoulders burn.

I peek out between my eyelids, am blinded momentarily. When my eyes adjust, I see that the thinscreen's off, that the illumination stems from a row of floodlights along the ceiling. My scrubs aren't the black, prison-camp issue I envisioned. White once, they're now stained scarlet.

“What's going on?” I ask.

Nobody answers.

I look for the cameras, find them in the corners. Not invisible at all. You can find similar models in department stores, the ones you sometimes wave at and wonder if there's someone on the other side watching. . . .

With sudden horror, I notice how the lights, so bright, converge on me.

Spotlight me.

I'm the one on display.

Beneath my scrubs, now semitransparent and clinging to my skin, I'm naked save for the wrapped bandages around my stomach. Bedraggled, dripping blood, I'm in a macabre peep show.

I try to remember Keith and Baby and everything I need to protect, but they are the merest shadows to the horrid image fixed in my head: Dad, trapped in his wheelchair, made to watch me suffer.

“Keith and Preston are—”

My CENSIR delivers a sizzling shock. Four more, and I'm screaming and writhing. I've barely quieted to moans when nozzles emerge from the wall and pummel me with geysers of blood rain. Feels like someone's digging through my stomach to yank out my spine.

I close my eyes as the world spins, struggling to recall what my captors want. A location. A city. What city?

“Ann Arbor . . . Mason-Kline . . . ,” I blurt between gurgled
screams. “Chicago . . . Arlington . . . Charlottesville . . . Manassas . . . Topeka . . . Wichita . . . Kansas City . . . both of them. Saint Paul . . . Rapid City . . . Montego Bay, Montego Bay, Montego Bay! Georgetown . . . both of them. Dallas . . . D, D, D . . . Dillingham! Dillingham! D, D, D . . . Detroit . . . Michigan . . . Ann Arbor . . . Chicago . . . Dumpster . . . D, D, D . . .”

I black out.

I'm revived with low-voltage prods from my CENSIR. The geysers are off, but it hasn't been long, because I'm still drizzling everywhere.

“Are you okay?” Interrogator asks seconds later. Did I hear him right?

“Please let him go,” I say.

“Answer the question, Twenty—” He stops. Several seconds later: “Answer the question.”

“What question?”

“Are you okay?”

“I'm okay,” I say. “I love you. I'm sorry.”

Abruptly, the lights shut off. I'm lowered to the ground.

I curl into myself, tuck my tears into my elbow so Dad won't see, and eventually sleep.

I'm awakened by a raging fire in my shoulders. I'm upright, already in torture position, and back in the spotlights, but my clothes are stiff and dry. And opaque.

“Denver,” I say before the nozzles change that. My voice comes out weak, so I repeat myself. “They're in Denver.”

Interrogator ignores me.

“What do you want?” I shut my eyes. It's all I can do not to cry. “What do you want? I don't know anything else! Let Dad go.”

The speakers crackle to life. “We do not have your father,” Interrogator says.

“Who do you have?”

“Nobody of your concern.”

Then why am I strung up like this? “Who do you have?”

“Quiet now, Melissa. Behave, and this will all be over soon.”

Melissa? In Georgetown, they only called me Melissa when they wanted something from me, something they couldn't wring out with threats or torture. But I have nothing to offer anymore.

I gasp. Maybe it's the person on the other end of the camera feed who has what they need, a boy who knows what it's like to flinch when you hear anybody, anybody at all, mention the numbers twenty-five or twenty-six.

“James?”

I'm ignored.

“You can't trust them!” I shout. My CENSIR delivers a string of sharp electrical bursts that set my teeth chattering. And I know I'm right. James is here.

“We will not tolerate your disobedience,” Interrogator says.

“I'll be okay,” I say, lifting my head and giving my bravest smile for the cameras. “Don't tell them anything. Don't worry about me—”

These jolts come faster. Electric fire fills my lungs. My vision clouds, dark floaters hopping everywhere.

A bang echoes from the speakers.

The jolts cut out, and I'm dropped to the ground. I spasm. A warm sensation floods my head, and the
clang
of metal sounds nearby. Through the floaters and the haze, I notice a flash of silver on the ground. My CENSIR, I think.

“I'll be there in a second,” someone says. Not Interrogator.

Gunfire erupts far away. Pistol shots respond, these closer, some just outside my cell. The battle grows louder, but more sporadic. And then the gunshots cease altogether.

Muffled footsteps click my way.

The door bursts open.

I can't see much, but I can see enough to know it's a soldier. Dragon camos, a rifle or machine gun slung over one shoulder. He's here to finish me off. That's what they did in Georgetown.

Another step and he's in the spotlight, almost close enough for me to touch. He crouches in front of me, comes into focus.

The soldier is Colin.