by ID Johnson
There it was--staring up at her, a name she’d only learned a few days ago, but one that had stuck in her mind. She’d always known the girl as RWH347891A, a label the girl wouldn’t even know herself since it was part of the information the Mothers kept on each woman in order to track their heritage. She had been surprised when she’d seen her in person the other day. When the attack they’d been expecting had come and been quickly handled, thanks to the team that had been stationed here before she came to investigate, the same one that had also completely missed this bigger threat, Mother White had come face to face with the girl. That’s what she was, after all, merely a child, with shaking knees and a quivering bottom lip. She’d believed her when she’d told the Medical Mother that the Inseminator hadn’t spoken to her. She looked genuinely frightened and innocent.
Now, Mother White knew she’d been fooled as she saw that Rain was currently one of the missing. The chances that she’d just gotten locked out of Weather House or swept up in the conflict against her will were doubtful. No, she’d been fooled by those large green eyes, the same color as her own. She wouldn’t make the mistake twice.
If it was true that RWH347891A was involved in the insurrection, then she would find a way to bring her in and break her. If anyone would tell her the truth about the threat against the Motherhood, it was Rain. And once she’d spilled all of her secrets, then she’d pay for turning her hand against the Motherhood.
No one raised arms against the Motherhood and lived to tell about it. No one.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
After what seemed like hours of crawling along in near darkness, the light from Mist’s device the only way they could see anything at all, Rain saw a speck of light in the distance. “Is that… the outside?” she whispered.
“Yes,” Mist said from a few feet behind her. “The Construction workers joined their tunnel in with an existing concrete tunnel they located. There used to be a really big city here, a long time ago, and they think this may have been an underground waterway of some sort. They even found some engravings in one of the tunnels with the city name on it. They copied down what it said and brought it back to one of the women in Communication who was able to use a translator to decipher it.”
“What was it called?” Walt asked her, his voice closest to Rain.
“San Antonio,” she replied.
Rain had never heard of that town before, but it sounded like an interesting place. She wondered what sort of language that was. She knew the spoken language they used in Michaelanburg was the same as what had been used in the United States before the Claiming, though the writing had been different. That name sounded more like a name from Spanish-America. Were they going the wrong direction?
She had to assume that wouldn’t be possible. The Constructors couldn’t build the tunnel headed the wrong way. It seemed like they had been crawling forever. Her hands were beginning to ache. “How far are we from the borders of Gretchintown?”
“I’m not sure because I don’t have any devices out to track that at the moment, but I’m going to guess about six miles, which isn’t very far.”
“There was a major city six miles away from where we’ve been living all this time that we’ve never heard of?” Rain asked, actually stopping to turn and look behind her, not that she could see much staring into the blinding light of Mist’s flashtube.
“I guess so. Wait until we get to the border of Michaelanburg and Oklasaw. The remnants of a huge city that was mostly destroyed in the war are still there.”
Rain turned back around, not wanting to be blinded anymore. “What city is that?”
“It was called Dallas Fort Worth before,” she replied. “Now, it’s called Dafo. But it’s pretty far away. It’ll take us days to get there on foot, especially if we’re having to dodge Mothers the entire time.”
“Do you think that will be the case?” Adam asked. It was the first time Rain had heard his voice in a long time, and the sound of it made her tingle a little bit, not that she’d forgotten he was there.
“Yes,” Mist said without a doubt in her voice. “I have a tracking device we can use to keep an eye on them, once we’re out of the tunnel. As long as they’re on the radar, we’ll know where they are. But if they turn the signals off that help them keep track of one another, we won’t have any idea where they are.”
“Where did you get the device?” Walt asked her.
“Lightning made it. They don’t know anything about it, and it’s not trackable itself.”
Rain pulled up a few feet short of the three foot wide end of the tube. “Do you think everyone else is out there waiting for us?”
“I have no idea,” Mist admitted, sliding up the other side of the wall, around Walt, so she was across from Rain. She turned the beam off. They didn’t need it anymore, and it would be impossible to recharge on the run should the battery run out. Rain had no doubt Mist had brought some back up batteries and probably had more flashtubes, too, but there was no use wasting what they had. “Do you remember back there a little ways when there was another route we could’ve taken?”
Rain remembered that vaguely. She’d been in such a hurry to get to a place where she could stand up, she had crawled straight ahead when Mist had told her to. “Yeah.”
“I’m guessing some of them took that route. That tube is longer, much longer. If they wanted to be sure not to be detected for another ten miles or so, they would’ve gone that way. Anyone like me who is a little claustrophobic would’ve taken this route. I’m sure they were allowed to decide.” She shrugged like she had no idea who would’ve made that decision.
“Are you sure this is the right route for us?” Adam asked her.
“I think so,” Mist said. “I know it will give us more exposure, but the Mothers shouldn’t know anything about this tunnel. They won’t know we built a pathway that leads to it, anyway, and this way we can run upright if we need to. I don’t like the idea of being trapped down here. We can’t out crawl their bullets.”
She had a good point. Rain tended to agree with her. She didn’t really want to be caught from behind crawling along at this slow pace either. At least, out there, they’d be able to hide behind trees and rocks and run in any number of directions. Whereas, in the tunnel, they were sitting ducks, waiting to be shot from behind.
“How do we make sure that anyone out there knows that we’re friends--without tipping off any Mothers that might be out there that we’re here?” Walt asked. Another good question. Rain wandered the same thing.
Mist crawled closer to the end of the tunnel and made that bird call. That wasn’t the answer Rain was hoping for. By now, the Mothers could’ve caught wind that that was the sound they were making to signal each other.
They all waited a moment. Rain brought her gun around in front of her, in case there was a hail of bullets to greet them, but there was nothing. Not a sound. She looked at the others, her eyes holding Adam’s a bit longer than was completely necessary.
“Why don’t you let me go first?” Walt said, putting his hand on Mist’s shoulder.
“Why?” she asked him, her forehead crinkled like he was offending her by trying to be a gentleman, which seemed a little ironic to Rain since it was Mist who most wanted everything to be like it was in the old days.
“Because… I’ve already been shot once. May as well.”
“Rain should be last. She’s the only one that can fix us,” Adam said.
She opened her mouth to protest, but everyone else agreed, and she got shoved to the back somehow. Since she was behind Adam now, it wasn’t so bad, though they were all sort of sliding, not crawling as they had been before.
Walt stuck the end of his weapon out first. Rain had no idea where his gun had even come from, but she supposed Mist had armed him. She noticed Adam had a gun, too. She wondered if either of the men even had the faintest idea how to use them.
Again, they heard nothing, so he slowly slid out of the tube. Mist followed quickly behind him, pop
ping up with her gun ready to fire. “It appears to be clear,” she said quietly. Adam went out, and Rain followed him.
They weren’t in the forest now, though. It was odd. The place where they were standing was a collection of crumbled ruins. Had these large chunks of concrete and wood been houses of some sort? She could hear the tinkling of water moving in the distance. The sky overhead was cloudy, and the sun was sinking behind the horizon, difficult to see beyond the ruins. “What was this place?” She assumed they were still in San Antonio, but the place where they were standing looked significant somehow, as if it had been important to the people who had lived here before the war. So many buildings all crumbling down in one place must’ve been a hub of some sort.
“I have no idea where we are,” Mist admitted. “But we should probably move on. I don’t know if they’ll be able to find our tunnel or not, but if they do, we don’t want to be standing here.”
“Did you bring a compass?” Adam asked her.
Rain was impressed that he knew what a compass even was. What use would a compass be to someone in IW? But then, he had mentioned that he liked to read.
Mist pulled a small, round device out of her pocket. “Do you know how to read one?” she asked him.
“I’ve never even seen one in real life before, but I bet I can figure it out,” he said as she handed it over.
“Here you go.” Pointing at it, she told him, “We want to head more north than any other direction, obviously, so just keep us following that arrow.”
“Right,” he said with a nod. Mist stepped away and pulled out something else.
“What’s that?” Rain asked her.
“Lightning calls it a Mother Reader, but it’s really just a tracker. Look.”
All four of them gathered around the slender black device between her hands so they could see the screen. “Are those red dots the Mothers?” Walt asked, swallowing hard.
Rain prayed she’d say no. The screen looked like thousands of red dots were headed their way, and if the other dot, the black one, was the device, they were closing in.
“Yeah, that’s them,” Mist confirmed. “They’re about two miles behind us right now, so we need to get out of here.”
“Shit,” Adam muttered. “Maybe we should go northeast for a while, in hopes of moving out of their direct path.”
“Not a bad idea,” Mist said, taking off. “We also need to get back to the trees sooner rather than later. It’ll be easier to hide in the woods.”
Rain looked around at the abandoned buildings, thinking there were plenty of places to hide here, too, but she agreed that they needed to put as much space between themselves and the Mothers as possible.
Some of the buildings had words on the front of them, and she wished she could read the language. “I wish I knew what these places were,” she muttered to Mist.
Her friend shrugged and headed off in a northeastern direction.
“I think they were stores,” Walt said as he jogged down the concrete path.
“What’s a store?” Rain asked, but no one answered her. They were all in a rush to get out of there. She was a little surprised that someone who’d lived his whole life in IW knew something she didn’t, but she was quickly learning these men were smarter than she’d been giving them credit for. At the moment, that was good news because she wasn’t sure she would’ve been able to read the compass, and if Adam could help them put miles between themselves and the Mothers, then that was fine with her.
Chapter Thirty
Mist’s flashtube wasn’t turned to full power, even though the woods they were walking through were dark. It seemed like they’d been walking forever, but Rain wasn’t tired. She just wanted to keep putting distance between themselves and the red dots. Every once in a while, Mist would give them an update. They were gaining ground because they’d followed Adam’s advice and headed northeast, instead of due north, but throughout the afternoon into the evening, the red dots continued to spread out, some of them traveling so far north that they were off of the device because they’d gotten too far ahead of their location.
“Do we have any way at all of hearing from the other women who escaped?” Walt asked her.
Mist shook her head. “No, we don’t. Some of the others had transmitters that would allow them to communicate with one another, but I didn’t bring one. I was afraid it might also allow the Mothers to see our location.”
“What time is it?” Rain asked. She wondered if they’d been walking for as long as it felt like they had been or if time was standing still.”
Glancing at the device, Mist said, “It’s 9:43.”
“So we’ve been walking for almost eight hours?” Adam asked.
“Something like that,” Mist said with a nod. “I don’t know exactly what time the signal went off.”
“It was around two.” Adam sounded sure of himself. “We were in the gym, about ready to go to our next rotation when the sirens started to blare.”
None of them had said much of anything that wasn’t completely necessary while they were walking, but now that there were no red lights anywhere near them, Rain felt slightly more inclined to talk. As far as she knew, the only threats out here were wild animals. This was some sort of no-man’s land, a buffer between the countries of Michaelanburg and Oklasaw that neither one of them could afford to claim and reincorporate into their own country. As far as Rain knew, most of the people who lived in Oklasaw were uneducated women, some of the descendants of those who hadn’t wanted to come south when Michaela led the women to better weather and more resources in what used to be Texas after the Claiming. There were little pockets like this all over what used to be the United States, but Oklasaw was the closest to Michaelanburg.
Now that they could slow down slightly, Rain thought about the million questions she’d wanted to ask Adam earlier, ones that had popped into her head as they fled but she hadn’t said aloud. Ahead of her, Walt and Mist were having their own conversation, so apparently Mist now thought it was safe to talk. “Did all of your men make it out okay?” she asked Adam.
He looked a little surprised, as if he didn’t realize she was speaking to him at first. “Uh… no. There were a few who didn’t want to go at all. Some got shot as they ran out of the building. That’s what happened to Walt. He was running so fast, he ran right out of his shoes,” Adam chuckling uncomfortably.
Overhearing him, Walt turned slightly. “Damn right I did.”
“What happened to your shirt?” Rain asked smiling at the way they could joke about it now.
“I took it off to hand to a guy who’d gotten shot in the face.” The laughter was gone. “He was trying to stop the bleeding. That’s how I got shot. Helping him. After that, I couldn’t help him anymore, and I needed to run. Adam caught up to me by then. A few of the women who were involved in the rebellion took out the Mother who shot me.”
“That gave us enough room to run,” Adam said, picking up where Walt had left off.
“By the time we got to the woods, we could hear them on our heels. We knew we didn’t have too much further to go, but I was bleeding and out of breath,” Walt continued.
“So we ran for the bushes, but that didn’t work very well.” Adam ran a hand through his hair, shaking his head. “If you guys hadn’t come along….”
“It wasn’t an accident,” Mist said, turning around and walking backward a few steps so she could look from Adam to Walt and back again, not looking at Rain at all. “We were looking for you.”
“You were?” Walt seemed surprised. Adam didn’t look quite as shocked as his friend did.
Turning around so she didn’t trip, Mist said, “Yeah, of course. I knew Adam would be last because he was the leader, and no good leader would leave a man behind if he could help it. And I hadn't seen you yet, so, I figured you had to be with him.”
“How did you even know what he looked like, though?” Rain asked. “Had you ever seen him without his shadow sock on?”
“No,”
Mist said with a shrug, like what she was saying made perfect sense. “But I knew who Walt was the moment I saw him.”
Walt was looking at her the way that man on the book cover had been looking at the woman, except he was also smiling. Mist turned and grinned at him, and despite the fact that they were both carrying guns and Mist had a tracking device to keep hold of, they took each other’s hands.
Rain raised an eyebrow and then looked at Adam, who was laughing softly. When he realized she was looking at him, he turned a little red. His hand went to his hair again.
She looked away, not wanting to make him uncomfortable. Of course, she didn’t expect him to reach over and take her hand. That would be silly. It was obvious Mist and Walt had some sort of bond, that when they’d been together in IW, it had meant something to both of them. She didn't have that with Adam. He might’ve been her favorite, but it wasn’t as if they’d made some sort of spiritual connection or had growing feelings just because she mounted him more often than anyone else.
Still, he was here now, and she did think he was fascinating in many ways. She wanted to talk to him, wanted to get to know him better. It wasn’t every day she had a chance to talk to a man. “What did you think when you saw the sky for the first time?” she asked him, keeping her voice down and side-stepping slightly so that she was closer to him, just so she could hear him better. Not because he smelled so good or because his hand might accidentally brush hers this way.
“Honestly, it was so bright outside, I was a little surprised. I didn’t take too long to look up because, well, we were getting shot at, after all, but when I had a moment to look at it later, after we came out of the tunnel, man, it was one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen in real life.”
“One of the most beautiful things?” she asked, not sure what he meant. “What’s the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen?”
It was dark, and Mist’s light was ahead of them now, so it was hard to see, but she thought his face turned red again. “Oh, you know,” he shrugged. “This and that. Anyway, the forest is really pretty, too. It’s too bad we can’t slow down and appreciate it.”