The Wandering (The Lux Guardians, #2) (28 page)

I
tear the entrance to our room open, the material ripping in my
fist. It’s empty. The tent is empty.
Where
are they?
I don’t do anything but stare at
the empty room, the three beds, our scattered belongings—Livy’s red
T-shirt thrown on the floor, Tom’s wet clothes hung to dry on the
ceiling poles, a pillow that still has the imprint of mine and
Yosiah’s heads—for seconds. My head is hollow, my body
numb.

A scream somewhere
across the room thumps me into action. I run, hobbling on my
twisted ankle, screaming for my siblings. The Station fills with a
stifling heat that inflames my panic. I scream their names over and
over, my heart beating so fast. I don’t have time to stop, to pray
that Timofei still has Siah, because I’m hurtling into someone’s
back and kicking their ankles to get them out of my way and
punching someone else in the gut. The only thing I know is that I
need to find Thomas and Olive. They’ll pull my body out of the
ashes before I stop looking for them.

“
Thomas! Olive!” My throat is raw with the smoke but I don’t
care. I yell their names and run—and run.

“Leah?”

Thomas
.

I whirl around,
scanning the Guardians running for the door with desperation. I can
hear Tom, his voice small in the midst of chaos, but he’s too short
to see. A second later he runs into my leg. I gather him into my
arms and hold him to my heart like a promise.

“Where’s Livy?” They
shouldn’t be separate.

“I don’t know.”

Her name emerges as a
howl. The terror is a real thing sitting at the back of my throat
and controlling my voice.

“I’ve got her.”

Yosiah.
My heart lurches with a
mangled form of relief. And then he’s there, my sister held safely
in his arms. I choke on his name. A brittle crack comes out of
nowhere, a groaning and shattering sound I can’t place.

“Leah,” Tom breathes. He pulls on my hair, points up.
Up.
The ceiling.
Breathing hard, I tip my head up. A crack has cut the roof in two.
Smaller cracks break off from the main crack, and tiny cracks break
off from those. I watch it happen, like a weird kind of art, cracks
upon cracks upon cracks. It’s like a tree, like the branches of a
tree. And it’s breaking. The roof is breaking. I don’t know how
it’s still suspended.

“Miya.” Yosiah’s voice steals my focus. “Miya we have to
go—
now
.”

I stumble after him.
Everything is going to be okay. I’m not going to lose anyone.

I take a long drag of
the acrid air, letting it out slowly, and then I’m back to myself.
The fear is locked away in a vault so far deep inside me even I
don’t know where it is, the hysteria along with it.

I hear the cracks
above us get bigger, feel the room get hotter as the fiery air
seeps inside. We reach the door as the first bricks fall. Around
the Station is pure heat—muggy, scorching, smothering heat. It’s
hard to breathe but we have no choice but to run into it. The
building must be wrecked now, because all that’s behind us is
deafening noise, low roars and the crash of broken glass. But we
can’t look back. If we look back we’ll fall and if we fall we’ll
die.

“Run,” Livy
screams.

The crashing gets
louder, the collapse gets more urgent. I throw a glance over my
shoulder. The Station has collapsed in on itself, the domed roof
gone, but the front wall stands apart from the rest, the half-moon
of glass still in one piece—and it’s tipping. Tipping and leaning
and falling towards us.

“Siah!”

“I
know.
”

I push myself as fast
as I can go but I’m slowed by my ankle, by the sparks of pain I
feel everywhere. The ground quakes as the wall crashes into it but
I don’t let myself stop, don’t let myself breathe. I follow Yosiah,
racing across Manchester, until he says we’re safe enough to slow
down. Only then do I let myself look back, but we’re too far away,
we’ve taken too many turns, to see the wreckage of the building
that was our home for the past week and a half.

“You’re okay,” Yosiah
says, breaking the drawn out tension between the four of us.

“Of course I am,” I
snap. “I’m fine.”

He shuffles my sister
so she’s held to the other side of his body and then his hand is on
the side of my head, pulling me to him. He leaves a long kiss in my
hair and I think this must be something he does every time we’re
going to die. I can’t bear it. I jerk away from him, my heart
pulsing with a physical ache I didn’t even know was possible. I
thought heartache was something romantics had made up.

I walk faster,
ignoring my new limp, and shoot my best friend a look that’s half
glare, half plea. His head whips around, cataloguing our smoky
surroundings—the buildings barely peeking out of billows of grey
and white and black, the panicked people running in one direction
and then another, the distant shapes against the hazy sky. A muscle
in Siah’s jaw twitches but his face doesn’t change. He looks
completely calm, in control. Only I know he’s not.

He takes hold of my
elbow and steers me away, down a back road that runs parallel to
the high street. The smell around here is a damp tang, and only
when I look down a side road do I realise the scent is blood. I
watch Siah’s expression harden to mirror my own. I hold Tom’s head
against my shoulder so he doesn’t see the carnage. Bodies are piled
up—Guardians, Manchester guards, Officials. These deaths aren’t the
result of a bomb. These people have been shot, and by the looks of
who’s been killed—some of who I recognise: the dark skinned woman
on the Guardian council, a few Manchester people who were at an
important meeting—they knew exactly who to target. Which means
they’ve been watching.

“They’ve been played,”
Siah says. “Someone had to have been an Official spy.” His mouth
twists into a grimace. “Why else would Manchester be attacked the
night their leaders planned to join the rebel movement in
Bharat?”

“We could have led
them here.” I watch the shadows but the street is empty.

Yosiah looks at the
street behind us. It’s ordinary and quiet, just shuttered loading
bays and shop backs. “No. If they’d followed us, they would have
killed us the first night. Why wait ten days? They wouldn’t—”

A harsh wind picks up
a few streets over and Yosiah whips his head back to me, his eyes
so wide the amber is swallowed. He grabs my arm and bolts—running
so fast I can’t keep up. My bad ankle drags behind me. My hair is
sucked away from my face, the wind sending a cold shiver through
me.

A noise stalks us,
whining. Something metal scrapes the roofs of buildings. I hear
bricks clatter to the street.

Thomas opens his mouth
wide and screams.

As Siah throws himself
around a corner, away from the wind following us, it’s everything I
can do to keep myself from falling. In the split second I look
back, desperate to know what’s responsible for Tom’s screams, I see
a squat metal creature slicing through the air, a hurricane
spinning on top of it and legs like knife blades on its bottom.

I spin away, a new
kind of fear pushing my legs faster. The pain in my ankle is
suddenly irrelevant. Pain means I’m alive. Letting it slow me down
means I’ll die.

We fly around another
corner, and another, and another, until we reach an alleyway so
thin the metal thing is forced to back off. The whisper of wind
seeks but can’t find us. We collapse behind an industrial metal
bin.

I
run my hands over Tom’s back, his spindly arms. “It’s okay,” I tell
him. “I won’t let it hurt you. You’re
fine
, Thomas. Just please stop
screaming.” And he does. He listens to me. So I promise again and
again that I’ll keep him safe. I’m his big sister—that’s my
job.

I reach across my body
to where Yosiah is wedged between me and the bin, and I grab
Olive’s arm through her dark coat. She looks at me, for the first
time, without the bravado she’s built over the two years I’d been
missing. She lets out a sob and writhes to free herself from Siah’s
arms, pressing herself against me.

Yosiah’s next exhale
shudders from him and as he turns to me, dropping his head onto my
shoulder, his nose sliding along my neck, he lets out a scolding
sigh on my cold skin. With my family pressed against me I realise
two things: we’re going to die, and Yosiah doesn’t know how much I
love him.

I put my arms around
all three of them, fierceness surging through me like it can make
me superhuman, like I can somehow protect them all from the whining
machine now directly above us if I’m only brave enough.

I press a kiss to the
heads of both my siblings.

As a dark cloud rises
around us, I tilt my head to Siah’s and whisper that I love him.
His kiss, hot and gentle, obliterates the burning sky above us.

***

III

The Promise of War

***

Branwell

00:41. 30.10.2040. The
Free Lands, Northlands, Manchester.

Manchester is
burning.

A small group of us
were discussing secret plans of a device to scan for life forms
when the first explosion shook the ground. By the time we were
herded out of a side door, the sky was already full of smoke,
flames were licking at some of the smaller buildings, and we’d lost
Dagné and Marc. By now the flickers of orange have crawled up the
length of the brick buildings, devouring any people left
inside.

Yosiah’s sister Kari,
who is now the highest authority in Manchester, leads us—Honour,
Hele, Cell, a Manchester guard, and me—across a smoky road towards
the train tracks. Dalmar has gone to find Horatia, Miya and Yosiah.
They’re supposed to meet us at the train and then we’ll be taken to
an evacuation point.

I cover my mouth with
my sleeve, breathing through it as Honour and I stumble onto the
platform and wait for the yellow train to accept us.

“Everyone still here?”
Kari asks, looking over our heads.

“We need to wait for
Dalmar,” Honour says. “And my sister.”

“And our friends,” I
add. “Your brother included.”

Kari nods, a tightness
about her expression suggesting distress. She exchanges words with
the Manchester guard who depresses a button in the side of the tram
and boards it. Our driver, I assume. What would have happened if
nobody knew how to work the train?

Kari gestures for us
to embark, too, but since Honour hangs back so do I. Dalmar and
Horatia come careening into the road several minutes later, but
without Miya, Yosiah, or their family.

Honour lets out a
breath and rushes to embrace Horatia.

“Where are they?” I
ask. “Where are Miya and Yosiah?”

“I don’t know.” Dalmar
shakes his head, coming over to take Hele’s hand. “I couldn’t find
them. They weren’t anywhere, and the … the Station collapsed.”

“Were they inside?”
Kari strides out of the train, her attention fixed on Dalmar.

“I don’t know.”

Kari’s eyes narrow. “What
do
you know?”

“Nothing. All I know
is I turned up to the Station and it was a wreck. I found Horatia
and a group of Guardians wandering around the main street. I told
the rest of them to go to the evacuation point.”

“Thank you for your
honesty.” She looks off into the distance, searching for Yosiah, I
assume. I follow her gaze but there is nothing but fire and smoke.
My heart clenches. Miya and Yosiah can’t truly have been in that
building, can they? They can’t really be gone, be dead.

It’s unthinkable.

“On the tram,” Kari
says and we obey.

I notice we’re yet
again in the strange purgatory of being half Guardian, half
civilian as I stumble across the gap between tram and platform,
pressing my back firmly against the solid carriage wall.

Unlike the trains of
my home and the Underground trains of Forgotten London, this train
is two carriages long, narrow, and bright yellow. It connects to an
overhead cable via an antennae and powers up with a low whirr.

Honour is close beside
me, his eyes shifting nervously. He’s jumpy and afraid but
suffering silently in true Honour Frie fashion. His sister, Dalmar,
and Hele drop into ratty seats by us and Honour’s tension lessens
slightly.

In the dark, the
bright electric lights cocooning this carriage are a beacon drawing
the wrong attention. We’re going to be shot or bombed—whatever is
causing the massive earthquakes still rippling through the ground
is going to fix upon us. I sigh with relief when the train is
pitched into darkness abruptly.

With a gasp, the tram
begins to move. Slowly, steadily, we crawl through the town. At
some point Honour grips my arm, whether for stability as we round a
corner or because he’s frightened, I can’t tell. I search for him
in the dark but can only see a faint profile, the crook of his nose
catching the light of distant fire.

“Are you alright?” I
ask.

“Fine,” he says, which
is Honour-speak for ‘not at all’.

I lean my arm against
his. “I’m sure everything will be okay.”

“Yeah. We’re just
getting bombed. No big deal.”

I smile, though he
can’t see it. “It’s hardly as if we don’t have prior experience.
We’re practically specialists in surviving an attack.”

I sense his eyes on
me. “Anyone can die,” Honour says. “Even us. Even people who’ve
cheated death twice before.”

“You’re melancholy
tonight,” I reply. “Usually conflict brings you alive—truly
alive.”

“Maybe I’m tired of
fighting. Maybe I’d rather just die.”