The Wanted (31 page)

ROSA

Grant lay on the cold metal bench, his fists clenched, his legs flopped apart casually. I bit into the silk and tasted the salt of my tears that just wouldn’t stop. Denis had isolated himself from me as if I were a hysterical, catching disease. He stood as close to the window as possible. His body locked into place by will. He was able to fool everyone, and it was frightening.

I leaned back in my chair, straining my neck to focus on the corner where the large window met the bumpy, pilling carpeted wall. No one’s attention was on me now. I was a fly buzzing haplessly in the corner. All eyes were on the man with wasted legs and muscled arms.
My
eyes were the only ones that wanted to turn away but couldn’t.

“…one…”

Watching it from the outside was a very different experience. But a memory of pain still ran a routed course through my veins. I could
feel
the searing burn of blue liquid under my own skin as I watched Grant’s body convulse when it entered his. He was silent, his mouth a punched, hard line, but the scream lay plain across his face. His eyes pooled with water, and his arms lifted slightly as he gripped the seams of his hospital gown in his hands. He thought the agony was going to be worth it. He thought this suffering was a means to healing…
not
a means to his end.

I pulled my legs up to my chest and rocked back and forth, trying to shut it out. But it was useless. Thoughts banged in my head, clanging like an empty drum. He had said my death would not be easy.
When was death easy?
I was trapped between my fear of dying and my fear of what I was about to see. There was no avenue to escape, no wall to climb. I would have to watch my actions play out in front of me, just as I had watched myself die over and over again.

“I tried,” I told myself, my lips stretching over the green and pink silk flowers. “I tried.” Words dried up.

I tried, I tried, I tried
.

The guard slapped my shoulder and told me to shut up.

Five minutes of pain, and he thought it would be over.

The glass coffin lifted and people gasped before Grant had even moved or spoken. A whitecoat moved to him and attempted to mop Grant’s forehead with a washcloth. Grant waved him off in irritation, pulled himself up to sitting, and laughed.

The crowd shuffled closer, pulled in by the maniacal laughter, and for a moment, I couldn’t see him. I didn’t want to see the joy on his face. But I could hear it.

Camille’s voice passed through the crowd. “Oh Judy,” she sighed happily. “Did you see that? He just wiggled his toes.”

“I did, Mother. It’s amazing!” Judith crooned. “This will change his whole life.” Her voice had taken on a very considered tone.

He had fifteen minutes to enjoy his legs.

People took turns congratulating him through the intercom. Sekimbo shoved through the guests, shouldering a woman out of the way, and slobbering drunkenly over the intercom. “Well done, Wyatt, well done, friend. Now you can…”

“Daddy, wait!” interrupted whatever uncouth thing Sekimbo was about to say as the guests jostled like tenpins. Judith’s breathless, willowy body pushed through and she landed on the intercom, her thin fingers hanging off the plastic rectangle like she needed it to hold her up.

The crowd pulled back from the window, and I could see clearly again. Grant sat up on the edge of the bed, delighted by his own, working legs, lifting them and rolling his ankles. His face lit up with a genuine smile that fell into a grimace at the sound of Judith’s voice.

He signaled the tech to open the mic. His voice stretched as taut as a set catapult when he barked, “Wait for what?”

From a pocket in her dress, she produced two white pills sealed in a plastic bag. Denis stumbled backwards like they were going to blow up in her palm. I didn’t know what to feel. Relief I wasn’t involved in a murder? Dread I was going to be executed? Every emotion whirred together like a cyclone and sucked into the sky, leaving me an empty shell, watching this play out like a video, a play, a plot.

“Daddy, they tried to make me do it, but I knew it was wrong. They threatened me and Mother, and I didn’t think I had a choice.” She held up the pills and showed them to everyone. “Denny was plotting to murder Superior Grant by withholding these pills.” Her eyes narrowed and her true self was revealed. It had been hiding beneath a layer of taffeta and torn words. She betrayed us.

Camille sat down and put her head between her legs, whispering, “My own child, my own child.”

Confusion dominated the room. Grant’s voice, thick with anger, rose above the crowd.

“Judith, come down here immediately. Guards, detain Denis.”

Quickly, everything flipped like a coin. Denis was a prisoner, Judith was the hero, and I was still pinned in the corner. The clock above my head ticked. He had five more minutes. I held my breath and waited for the door to open downstairs.

Grant swung his legs on the edge of the bed like a child. Bright lights bounced off the metallic surroundings and made his sweaty skin shine. When the door finally opened, he jumped down and I sensed the power he felt as his legs supported him. He drew strength from the ground as if it were electric as he strode towards Judith’s tiny figure. He eyed the pills and his daughter suspiciously. She talked fast, her head bobbing up and down, and her eyes welling and spilling over with false tears. She moved to hug him and, after a moment of rigidness, he wrapped his arms around her and patted her honey-colored head gently. He swallowed the pills without water while still in her embrace and then turned to the crowd, who were all almost leaning on the glass as they tried to read the situation.

Grant strode proudly over to the mic and flicked the switch. The intercom vibrated with his energy and fury. “Judith has relayed a plot to assassinate me in which she was an unwilling pawn.” My heart rattled in denial. “She has come to my aid and has proved her worth in my eyes. Denis, on the other hand, has proved wanting at every turn since he came to me, and perhaps that is why he has now reached this depth of deception and depravity. Working with a rebel to murder his own father is despicable and unforgiveable.” Grant shook his head and swiped his forehead. “I have no choice but to disown him and sentence him to death along with the rebel.” He didn’t even look at me. He had won. I could be swept down the garbage chute now.

Denis managed to yell, “She’s lying!” as they dragged him away.

Judith took a step back from her father as he began to address the crowd above. His head tilted upwards, his expression glinting all kinds of sharp angles and cuts.

“Friends. See what is possible.” His leg wobbled, and his foot dropped flat when he stepped towards the window. He straightened it. “See what our great society can achieve with the right motivation.” He cringed inwards and coughed, a blue drip appearing at his nostril. “I am healed…” He stumbled. “I am…” One knee collapsed, and he reached down with his strong arms to pull it back up. But as he leaned down, his other knee buckled.

Camille whispered, “Wyatt,” and reached her arm out towards him. He fell forward, bracing himself with his hands. His legs were once again useless. He rolled to sitting and grabbed at them, pinched them, shaking his head.

The guests breathed in one collective breath and held it.

“No,” he wheezed. Another cough sprayed blue liquid down the front of his gown. I retreated deeper into my seat, the second hand pounding over my head.

In the corner, leaning against the door, Judith smirked. No one saw her but me. Then she rushed to him.

“Daddy!” she screamed. Her voice was over the top, her screams strangled and full of huffs and gasps as she sobbed hysterically.

The mic was still on and we heard every word.

“What’s happening?” he rasped, his voice weak, desperate, as he sat staring at his hopeless legs.

Judith kneeled down. “I don’t know, Daddy. They should work. Unless she gave me fake ones.” She pointed up at me and I shrank back, the events leading up to this moment sifting through my mind and landing in a neat and ordered stack.

I gave Judith four pills. She took two to give to Gwen and I watched her flush the other two down the toilet. Initially, when she rushed to Grant’s aid, I thought she had somehow kept the pills I’d given her. I was wrong. All she’d done was give Grant fake pills. The only possible reason—to get Denis out of the picture so that she would be named Grant’s successor.

Grant was incapable of doubting her in his last minutes. She held his head and stroked his hair as his fingers swelled and turned blue. I watched in sickening horror as it eventually tracked up his veins and across his face.

The last thing he said was, “See it through.”

His head fell to his chest, the whites of his eyes bright blue. I recoiled and shuddered, my fingers finding the bumps in the carpet and counting them one by one. Judith threw her head up and wailed. The whitecoats crowded around Grant, suddenly pushed to action by her siren-like voice. Camille shed silent tears as they grabbed his body and dumped it on the table, attempting to resuscitate him. But when blue liquid started pouring from his mouth, eyes, and ears as they pumped his chest, they jumped away, pulling a kicking and screaming Judith with them.

Camille let out a dry, withered moan and shriveled like a blade of grass scorched by the sun.

The whitecoats exited the room screaming, “Biohazard!” One of the techs hit a red button, and the alarm drowned out Judith’s howling.

The guards left me and ushered the guests out of the viewing room. I stared down at Grant’s lifeless body. He cried tears of blue. He had one moment of pure joy and then he was gone.
Maybe that’s all you can hope for
.

Maybe I shouldn’t care.

One arm hung limply off the table, his nails and finger bulbous like frogs’ feet from the pressure of the blue trying to escape anyway it could. A guard grabbed my shoulders and pulled me away from the glass, lifting my trembling body and carrying me to the lift. Grant was abandoned, broken and bleeding like he had left so many of his citizens. A picture he would have flipped like the page of a book without a second thought.

Superior Grant was dead.

And in his place was an evil, unhinged teenager who had fooled us all.

ROSA

Maybe I can’t learn. Maybe my brain is set in concrete now and there’s no undoing it. But then, maybe I was never going to get out of this.

At least I tried.

The rain whipped up by spinning chopper blades gave me hope I shouldn’t have. Gwen, escorted by two rough guards, the wind and sleet pelting their harried faces, gave me strength I shouldn’t have. A swollen, beaten face that I barely recognized as Denis brought me crashing back down to earth.

A small man clutching a metal suitcase to his chest scuttled past me and hopped into the waiting chopper.

Before I could comprehend what was happening, we were forced into the chopper, our harnesses were secured, and we lifted off the ground.

I passed a look to Gwen, who shrugged, but had a slight squish to her expression. It was too loud to speak with the chopper blades, the wind and rain slapping the sides and streaming in the open door. Denis appeared completely baffled. Everything he’d carefully planned was left in the shrinking mud below.

A guard strapped to a thick, nylon line stumbled towards the door and closed it, shutting out some of the noise.

The little man rested his chin on his case and gazed out of the window at the lightening dark and the glow of floodlights getting smaller and smaller. “Well, this is exciting isn’t it?”

No one answered.

It was close to dawn when we lifted off and now a sunrise lathered in blood reds and failing purples spread before us like a flapping, silk scarf over the land. I counted eight soldiers plus the pilot strapped to the sides of the craft. All inwardly focused, sunrise washing their cheeks in color as they avoided our eyes.

“So where are we headed?” Gwen asked, her legs pumping up and down on the hard, black floor.

Nothing.

The small man laid the case flat on his lap and opened it, a small chime sounding from within. A computer sat in one side and sixteen flat, plastic rectangles the size and shape of handhelds nested in the other.

“What’s in the case?” Gwen asked, hoping she could get some response out of someone.

The man scratched his nose and pursed his lips, squinting at the screen. I didn’t think he even heard her. I’d had enough. I stomped my foot and everyone looked up, their eyes fiery red from the sun’s rays.

“Where are we going?”

Denis spoke, his mouth struggling to form words through his bruised lips. “I assume we are headed for Pau Brazil, right? My father has always been very creative with his punishments.” He spat blood on the ground in front of him and wiped his mouth on his already crimson-spattered shirt.

All Grant’s cryptic statements rolled out of a sack with a clunk, and I pieced them together. There were no hard parts to this puzzle; it fit together easily with sharp edges and straight lines.

“So your psychopath sister is having us dropped in Ring Two with my mother and sister,” I said resignedly. My punishment was to watch them die and know I couldn’t save them. Judith was honoring his sick wish.

Denis nodded.

“Do you know what the plan…?” A sharp punch to my stomach blew the words from my mouth.

“No talking!” an older soldier snapped.

I connected with Denis’ eyes. The warning in them was huge, lighting the clouds. I closed my mouth and gazed down at my cracked, purplish fingers.

Joseph would be there. The thought drove me into the sky and pulled me through the dirt. They knew he would be there because of Olga. I wanted to crack her open, peel her shell off, and show everyone what she’d done. He was in danger—the whole group was. But the only thing my heart would hold onto was the idea of seeing him again, despite the million obstacles between us.

It was all part of Grant’s twisted sense of justice. He wanted me to have hope. He wanted me to fight. And I would. I would find my mother and sister, and I would try to save them. Even from death, I heard his cruel laugh and pictured his calculating eyes.

The rain eased and the sun rose chillingly over the vast forest beneath us. Gwen put her hand over mine, and I was pulled back to the last time I was in a chopper, Joseph’s warm hand over mine, his reassurance. We were scared and didn’t know what was ahead, but in that moment, the future was immense and could have been anything—there was promise in the sky. Things had changed. I shook my head and laughed, causing some of the soldiers to glance in my direction in surprise.

There wasn’t much I could do, little I had control over, but I promised I wouldn’t give up.
Never.
I would always fight. It was the only certain thing. A solid, glowing part of me that had endured every single atrocity they’d thrown at me.

I didn’t know any other way.

I couldn’t
be
any other way.

I curled my fingers around Gwen’s hand and she squeezed them tightly. She was with me.

I was ready for my lungs to burn, to scream with the force of the turning blades above me. To survive.

I wish I could have slept. Most of the soldiers closed their eyes at different times, resting for their mission. Their hunt-down-my-friends-and-kill-them mission. It made me smile a dark smile to know this would not be easy for them. They were in for the fight of their lives.

My eyelids were peeled back with pure adrenaline as they took in the lush green beneath. The river. The places I’d stepped in and over. I could hear the water over the rocks, the patches of ice shifting and cracking on the surface. It brought me home, gave me strength.

I searched for the Survivors, hoping to catch a glimpse of them walking, but of course, they weren’t there. They would hide well. They weren’t likely to be caught in the open.

Gwen and I whispered to each other as we passed over the first town. “When we hit the ground, we will have to run, like really run. How are your legs?” I asked.

Gwen raised them in front of her and wiggled her bare feet. “Better than ever!”

The soldier snorted next to her and rolled his eyes.

I stared down at my dress, torn and muddy. I had court shoes on, better than nothing, but they would slow me down.

The small man spoke, his voice sounding like the air being let out of a balloon slowly. “Unless you have super speed on your side, I don’t like your chances. Once you touch down, you’ll have thirty minutes before the tip, the…” He stopped midsentence and pulled his top lip into his mouth.

A few soldiers jerked their heads in his direction but then the older soldier growled, his teeth sharp and gappy. “No talking. No questions. Those were the orders.”

“Yes sir,” several said in unison.

Denis slept, and I wondered what I was going to do with him.
Did I owe him anything
?
Should I include him in my plans?
The truth was I felt very little for him, but he had promised to save my life in exchange for my help with Grant. He had said he wanted to change things…

The chopper jolted over an air pocket. Below, the rings of Bagassa darkened the perfect forest. We were close now. Pau was next.

Just before Pau, the helicopter slowed and hovered, bouncing lower and lower, sending us flying up out of our seats. The soldiers started unbuckling their harnesses and hooking themselves to ropes. The chopper lowered until it was quite close to the ground, hovering like a dragonfly.

Denis startled awake when the body of the chopper tipped as soldiers shifted their weight around the craft.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

The door slid open and the soldiers jumped out one by one without answering. Only two were left behind, plus the pilot and the computer man, who glanced up from his screen. “An ambush works better with the element of surprise, don’t you think?”

They were going to sneak up behind Joseph and the others.

I grabbed at my harness and started unbuckling it, ready to hurt someone, push them out of the door, scream a warning, anything, but the soldier next to Gwen braced me with his strong arm and pushed down on my chest until the last soldier dropped and the helicopter rose higher. When we were high above ground, he violently shoved me against the wall and re-buckled my harness, sneering.

“Wouldn’t want you to fall out and kill yerself, now would we?” he growled.

I closed my eyes and banged my head back in frustration.
They won’t find them.

It took very little time to arrive at Pau.

The chopper brushed over the walls and headed for the center circle where it touched down. The soldiers undid our harnesses and shoved us out of the door. Denis fell flat on his chest, the saturated sandstone pavers absorbing more blood. I heaved him up and stared at the chopper, everything coming full circle. I was back.
Changed. The same.
My hair whipped around my face as it rose. I shivered and tugged my ragged sleeve up over my collarbone, an insubstantial gesture against the cold morning. The small man shut the case and waved happily at me.

“Good luck!” he shouted before a soldier slammed the door.

Thirty minutes.