The Other Side (13 page)

He
removes my handcuffs, plunges a needle into my arm. “This is Dilaudid. It will help with the pain.”

He gently probes my body, wincing when I wince, apologizing when I cry out. In between cataloging my injuries beneath his breath—abrasions, bruised or broken ribs, possible internal bleeding—he informs me that we're in a Bureau of Dragon Affairs office in Indianapolis, that it's been two weeks since Chicago, that he's sorry for leaving me.

There are things I need to tell him, but I can't remember what they are.

He prods at a grouping of welts along my forearm, asks if they injected anything into me. I give a weak shrug. “What about food? Did they give you anything? We have to make sure they can't track you.”

I attempt to speak, manage a moan that only deepens the worry etched in his eyes. I jab a shaky finger at the nearest puddle of blood rain. He relaxes a hair.

After cocooning me in a jacket that smells of sweat and him, he scoops me up as if I'm nothing, pulls me to him as if I'm everything. He carries me into a hallway lined on either side with narrow steel doors. Black-suited BoDA agents lie slumped everywhere. For a second I'm back in Mason-Kline. Getting shot in that bivouac by the D-man. James carrying me from the wreckage into carnage.

James!

A couple of blinks later, we're at an elevator. Colin leans me against the wall and presses his hand to the imprint scanner. As the door slides open, I work through the ache strangling my throat and murmur, “James. I think he's here.”

The concern in Colin's features vanishes. “No, Melissa. It's his fault.”

Colin picks me up and moves into the elevator. He presses the up button on the control panel.

“Please,” I croak. “Help him.”

“He's the big fish they want,” Colin says. “Anyway, he'd want you safe. That's why he came back, wasn't it?”

“Please.”

He clenches his jaw, shakes his head. “There's a shift change soon. We don't have time.”

“Allie,” I say. “He knows—”

“He doesn't know,” Colin says, softening a hair. “He doesn't know where she is, Melissa. They were asking him when I entered the control center. I'm sorry.”

The elevator dings.

“Quiet now,” Colin says, setting me in the front corner.

In one quick motion, he draws his sidearm, mounted with a silencer. The door slides open to a drab lobby. A man in a black suit's leaning over a curved desk to talk with the woman behind it.

The woman's eyes widen. She blanches as Colin lifts his gun and, with a whistled
whoosh
, nails the agent in that place where brain stem meets neck. Kill shot. He turns the gun on the secretary, and she swallows her scream.

“Don't even think about that panic button,” Colin says. He presses the stop button on the elevator panel, then steps into the lobby. “What's your name?”

“Buh . . . Buh . . . Becca.”

“You have kids, Becca?” Colin asks with another step.

“A son.” She swallows. “Jeffrey.”

“I had a friend named Jeffrey growing up,” Colin says. “I liked him. He died in the war. He was only sixteen. Do you know who I am, Becca?”

Becca gives a furious shake of her head, smoky lines of makeup tears streaking down her cheeks.

“And you won't press that button when we walk out,” Colin says with another step.

“I won't press it. I promise to God I won't. Please don't hurt me.”

“I'm not going to hurt you. But you need to calm down.”

If anything, her sobbing intensifies. The noise masks the sound of my clumsy crawling. Colin's another step away, coaxing her with words, his gun never straying from her head, when I struggle up to my knees and limply throw my palm against the stop button.

As the elevator doors slide shut, I see Colin spin toward me.

As I hit the down button, I hear Becca scream.

And then I hear a gunshot.

The elevator hits bottom; the doors slide open. Bio-print scanners control access to each cell. There are plenty of hands in the hallway. Will dead ones work? Even if they would, I'd have to lift somebody up to put their hand in position.

I'm not sure I can even lift myself.

In nae.
I crawl for the smallest corpse—a blonde who'd be pretty if not for the penny-sized hole between her eyes. As I grab her collar, I think of Colin and his advice back on Saint Matthew Island.

“Always go for the kill shot.” In our ice cave, whenever it was his turn to perforate the crate, he'd knock out one or two bull's-eyes, maybe come close to a few others. A survey of the seven or eight men and women scattered through the
corridor tells me he was holding back.

So many secrets.

Scooting on my butt, I drag the woman inch by snail inch toward the first door. I'm not even close when Colin comes running out of the elevator. He stops short, wearing an expression that says he wants to rescue me from the unrescueable.

I bite into my lip. “Were you . . . were you in Georgetown?”

He crouches in front me, his face inches from mine. I look away. He unwraps my hands from the woman's collar and takes them between his. I pull them free.

“I'd heard of it, but I was never there,” he says.

“James and I were,” I mumble, staring at the dead woman's face. I feel nothing for her. She is but a broken doll. I force myself to look at Colin and decide that I will believe him. I must. “You were there, too.”

His brow furrows. “I wasn't. I swear to you.”

“We're fragments, Colin. All of us. James, too. Broken.” My head hurts. I close my eyes for a moment. “Just trying to figure out . . . how to be unbroken.” I clutch at him. “Please, Colin.”

Colin tenses but nods. “Okay.”

He starts to lift me, but I shake him off. “I want to walk.”

With an arm about my waist, we trudge by door after steel door, our footsteps the only breaks in the silence. My
breath remains thick in my lungs, my tongue thick in my mouth, but some coordination returns. I'm still rickety, but at least my legs don't feel like buckling every other second.

“How . . . how did you find me, Colin?”

“The tracer in your arm.”

“Keith said . . . said he removed it,” I say. I have a scar on my right bicep where they operated.

“He couldn't bring himself do it,” Colin says, but I barely hear him.

Baby!

“I caved,” I say. “I told them about Denver. . . .”

“They evacced right after Chicago,” he says. “Standard protocol. They're safe.”

“I can't reach her, Colin, I can't reach her,” I mumble, hyperventilating. I lose my balance. He catches me.

“Signal's blocked down here,” he says. “They're fine. Baby says hello and, I quote, ‘If the scale chaser doesn't bring you back in riding condition, I am going to turn him into an ice sculpture and drop him off a mountain.'”

I cough out a laugh.

We pass an open door. I peek inside. Spotlights illuminate chains dangling from the ceiling, rivulets of blood rain seeping into a drain. I look at Colin. He nods.

Two cells beyond mine—two worlds apart—Colin stops walking.

“I have to warn you, he's not who you remember.” He gives me a wan smile, then pushes on the door.

The prisoner, bathed in a yellow glow from the thinscreen video feed of an empty cell that I assume is mine, sits shackled at room center, rocking himself in slow arcs. His left arm appears dislocated or broken, his right's heavily wrapped beneath his own crimson-stained scrubs, and his face is so bloated by injury I'm not even sure it's him.

Not until he looks up and I see his eyes.

“What are you doing here, Sarge?” James whispers. “You're wasting your time.”

Colin squeezes my shoulder. “You sure about this?”

“We can't leave him.”

Colin kneels beside James to uncuff him.

“Get him out of the CENSIR first.”

“It stays on,” Colin says. “It's set to passive inhibit. Nobody can hurt him.”

“Passive slave, huh?” James rubs at his wrists, his smirk contorting into a grimace.

Colin pulls a needle from his pocket. James's eyes go wide. “Stay away.”

“It's a painkiller.” He brushes James hands aside and injects him in the shoulder. He lifts him to his feet. “Move.”

James limps forward. Colin wraps an arm around my waist, takes a long breath that does nothing to calm the tension that
so palpably suffuses him, and guides me out of the cell.

“This all you, Sarge?” James says, surveying the carnage. He foot-nudges a gun from the hand of a dead agent slumped against the wall. He bends over to retrieve it.

“I wouldn't do that,” Colin says, drawing his own gun.

James straightens, glances back with that smirked grimace. “Nice work.”

Colin tenses further, waves James forward with his gun.

On the elevator ride up, Colin tells us his plan for escape. In the lobby, I don't see that secretary behind the desk, but there is another bloodstain on the wall behind where her head would have been.

We exit into a parking garage, where Colin directs us to the Humvee marked
U
.
S
.
ARMY
that's parked in a handicap spot. He loads us in the back, puts bags over our heads, handcuffs us to the doors.

We drive off.

“This the Krakus transfer?” someone asks a couple minutes later. The gate guard, I assume.

“King of hearts and queen of spades,” Colin says. He sounds almost jovial.

“Treat them right,” the guard says with a laugh, and we're on our way.

Colin removes my hood. I look back, half expecting to find a road of bodies leading to a torture fortress, but we're
on an ordinary street surrounded by ordinary high-rises in an ordinary city.

Everything's so damn ordinary.

I take a deep breath, repeat my mantras, and contact Baby. She squeals and cries and laughs. I can almost see her, body wiggling back and forth with delight, stomping around, causing a minor earthquake, and it alleviates some of the hurt. I talk with her for a few minutes, assuring her I'm very okay (though a little too warm and in need of a good frosty kiss), then ask Grackel for an update on Allie.

She is sleeping again, human. . . . It is strange, human. When the Greens were attacking, she was awake, I am certain of that. It was as if she knew I was speaking, but she could not hear my words. I do not understand what is happening.

Grackel's confusion terrifies me, but it also provides me clarity.

I look at myself in the rearview mirror, my new ordinary. I hold on to the image of the hideous train wreck that is Melissa Callahan, Twenty-Five, the queen of fucking spades, and make a decision.

I'm done running.

I'm done hiding.

I'm going to save Allie.

I'm going to join the Diocletians.

At
a middle-of-nowhere motel that evening, while James is showering, Colin sits me down on the bed, where he re-dresses the bandage around my ribs and applies antiseptic to various abrasions across my body. Another dose of painkillers helps keep the pain in the background.

“You want to talk about it?” he asks.

He means the torture. “I've been doing a lot of thinking.” I chew at my lip, wishing the room's mini-fridge held something other than water bottles.

He takes my hand. “What is it?”

“Allie . . . Oren's done something to her.” I recount my conversation with Grackel.

“It's probably a bad coincidence.”

“You don't believe that.”

“I don't know what to believe. At least we know she's alive.”

“And nothing else.” I shake my head. I'm only stalling. I have to tell him. I know what his response will be, but I have to tell him. I look at him, pull my hand free. “You have to let me go, Colin.”

His eyes widen with comprehension. “Melissa, you're not thinking straight.”

“I'm thinking straighter than I have in a long time,” I say. “I can't sit around and hope that things work out okay, because they won't. If I infiltrate them—”

“Say you somehow do infiltrate them. They'll make you do things, horrible, horrible things.”

“What was that secretary's name?” I ask. It's a cruel shot, but it doesn't faze him.

“You're only going to get yourself killed,” he says, almost pleading. “Oren's not an idiot. He'll know what you're doing.”

“Not if James vouches for me.”

“The Diocletians work in isolated cells, Melissa. James wouldn't be able to get you—”

A clatter of metal sounds in the bathroom. Colin bursts through the door, reaching for his gun. I'm two steps behind.

James lies in the tub, shower curtain draped over him,
plastic rings strewn everywhere. The rod to which Colin cuffed him dangles over the edge.

Chin to his chest, he glares at us through matted black hair. “Get out!”

Colin holsters his gun. He grabs me by the elbow, but I shake him off. “He needs help.”

“He didn't want my help earlier.” He lowers his voice. “And I promise you that he doesn't want yours.”

“Doesn't matter what he wants.” I retreat from the bathroom, return a few seconds later with Colin's medical supply bag. “Give me the handcuff keys.”

“No.”

“He's not going anywhere,” I say.

“No.”

“Sit on the toilet and point that gun at us if you want, but take off those goddamn handcuffs.”

He retrieves the keys from a pocket and presses them into my palm. “He's dangerous, Melissa,” he whispers to me, then leaves.

“Get out,” James says when I uncuff him. I reach over him and shut off the water. “Get out, Melissa.”

I dig through the bag until I find a syringe of that Dilaudid stuff and an antiseptic towelette. I lower the curtain enough to expose his torso. Vicious scars, fresh and enflamed, undulate along his back and chest. He grunts a curse, flails limply,
the shower rod clattering against the acrylic. I push him down. He's too weak to resist.

I use the towelette to clean an undamaged patch of skin along his left shoulder, just above the tattoo that encircles his bicep.
Drink the Wild Air.

“What happened to our salubrity?” I jam the syringe into his shoulder.

“Get out. Please,” he says through clenched teeth. A tear slips free from his right eye. “Please.”

“Shhh. Save your breath, farmboy.”

I pat him dry as gently as possible, though he grimaces with every touch. He passes out. I check his pulse. It beats strong, angry almost. Dragon exposure? I push the hair from his eyes. Even asleep, he appears tormented.

In our two-hour car ride, I spoke no more than a few words to him. But now . . . I cannot bring myself to update him on the awesomeness of my life since we went our separate ways, and it hurts too much to discuss Allie. I decide to tell him about Baby, hoping my voice filters into the darkness, provides him some flicker of light.

“She's one of the few good things in this entire mess,” I whisper as I dab at his chest with antiseptic. “Don't get me wrong, she's turning into a real pain in the ass.”

I move to his stomach, smearing ointment everywhere. “She's so incredibly stubborn. She's grown enormous.
Keeping her in line was difficult enough before, but now she's a damn flying brontosaurus. I don't think she realizes how strong she is. One time she got so mad. Nearly caused a cave-in. Grackel was livid. And a little bit terrified. And you know Grackel. That's saying something.

“She'd hate me for telling you this, but she misses you. Allie misses you. I—” My hands ball into fists. “They're just children!”

I bite hard into my lip until the desire to hit him passes. It takes a while. I wipe an arm across my eyes to clear them and continue treating him in silence.

After applying bandages, I call Colin, who helps me dress him in mismatched Walmart clothes. We carry him to the bed.

I'm checking his pulse again when, out of my peripheral vision, I see Colin coming around to my side, a pair of needles in his hand.

“What are those?” I ask.

“Sedatives. I'm sorry,” Colin says, and drives one into my arm.

I slap him. “You asshole.”

“I need to go grab some things to get us through the checkpoint. I can't risk you doing something stupid.”

My eyelids grow heavy. He kisses my forehead, lays me down. His footsteps echo into emptiness. From across the
universe, I hear a door open and shut, a car engine rumble to life.

I fight the urge to sleep. Opening my eyes requires effort. Sitting up proves a struggle. Unzipping his backpack is damn near impossible. I fumble through it with clumsy fingers, not sure what I'm looking for. Tablet, needles, underwear, gun clips. No gun.

In a pocket, I find a pair of metallic flash drives. There's something familiar about them. A couple of groggy blinks later, I remember where I've seen them before. Preston procured several drives like these from Georgetown; he used them to make his RedJediGrunt vids.

Repeating my mantras does nothing to quell the shaking in my hands as I struggle to stick the first drive into Colin's tablet. A file folder opens. It contains a dozen videos, ranging in date from a week ago to yesterday. My trembling subsides. This isn't Georgetown.

I load the first video. Via infrared cameras, it shows me hanging from a chain, jets of blood rain assaulting me until I wake. I tug out the drive, swap it for the other one, load the last file in the folder.

James dangles from a chain similar to mine. He's soaked in blood rain.

Blink.

He's screaming.

Blink.

“Where's the next attack, Twenty-Six?”

My eyes snap open at Interrogator's voice. A woman's in the room with James now, a whip coiled in her hand. She steps in front of him. It's the pretty lady from the hallway, the one Colin shot between the eyes.

“Oren doesn't operate like that,” James says.

The woman strikes in a flash, the whip slicing into James's back. He cries out.

Blink.

“. . . he gave us . . . orders . . .” James is saying between heavy breaths. “Two days before the attack . . . didn't know before.”

The woman removes a bottle from her pocket, dips latex-gloved fingers into it, and rubs a substance into a fresh laceration. James writhes and wails.

“Twenty-Six, you expect me to believe that you're just a common soldier in the Diocletian army?”

Blink.

“. . . telling the truth.” James clenches his jaw. “Check my CENSIR.”

“You've managed to fool us before, Twenty-Six.”

“I don't know!”

The screen in front of James bursts to life. There I am, spotlighted in my cell, soaked with blood rain, screaming.

Blink.

“I don't know!”

On the screen, my CENSIR jolts me several times in rapid succession, and the geysers of blood rain open fire. They feed the audio from my cell into his.

“Stop lying,” Interrogator says. “Where were the other riders?”

“Others?”

I get shocked again. James attempts to shut his eyes, but they shock them open via his CENSIR.

“In your trio, you were the only rider on your dragon,” Interrogator says.

“Huh?” James says. Sounds drugged.

They shock me. They shock him. We scream.

Blink.

“. . . this makes any sense. What's this have to do with the girl?” Interrogator asks.

“I don't know why Oren wants Allie,” James says. “Please stop.”

“Tell me something new, Twenty-Six, and I'll end Twenty-Five's suffering.”

“Okay . . . okay . . . I've got a theory. . . .”

Blink.