For someone who “only wanted to make things right” between us, she was being a total bit—
“Where are we supposed to go?” Gideon whispered back.
I shook my head. “I don’t know. But I won’t sit around and wait for the Docs to finish what they started. Whether or not Victor was really sorry, it’s dangerous for us to stay here.”
He dropped his chin to his chest and blew air through tightened lips. “Okay . . . should we go back to Erroris?”
“Why?”
“To look for survivors?”
I bit my lip. What I really wanted was to disappear into the wilderness with Gideon. He knew how to cultivate food and live off the land, and I could use my Knowledge to build us a cabin—we could be happy, if only we could disappear. I felt in my gut, though, that we weren’t the only ones left. But what would be the point of going back for the others? Why would they have stuck around?
“We need to keep spreading the truth,” he continued. “We’ll have a better chance of success if we aren’t alone.”
“We already tried to convince people of the truth. We failed.”
“So you want to just give up?”
I didn’t know what I wanted. If there were others out there, we couldn’t just leave them to die. Right? But would we have to keep fighting, too? Dropping my head into my hands, I pushed my palms against my eyes. “What else are we supposed to do?”
“I don’t know. But if you want to leave, I think we should go back to Erroris. We can talk about our plans on the way, and maybe someone else will have an idea.”
Someone else? Assuming we were able to find anyone else. “Alright,” I sighed. “It’s as good a plan as any.” I sat up and dropped my head onto his shoulder. “How did this happen?” As exhaustion began to take over, I shivered and began to feel sad again.
He kissed my forehead. “It’ll be okay.”
“I wish I could believe that.”
Freeing his arm, he slipped it around my waist. “Maybe it won’t be. But at least if we die, we won’t have to deal with this roke anymore.”
I lifted my head and looked at him in shock. He held his serious expression for another second, but then a grin flashed through his eyes.
“You’re an idiot,” I laughed, dropping my head onto his shoulder once more.
“That’s why they call me ‘Second,’” he said, resting his cheek on top of my head.
I smiled and allowed my eyes to close, feeling relaxed for the first time since we had arrived at the Doctors’ headquarters.
Chapter Four
The relaxed moment lasted no longer than a quarter of an hour before we were on the move again. Alone. It may have been reckless to head back into the wilderness without much forethought, but every minute we lingered was another opportunity for the Docs to find us. Or for Victor to betray us. I hadn’t ruled out that option yet.
Luckily, though, the suite was well-stocked, and it didn’t take long to gather enough supplies to fill two backpacks. Plus, we had a few things left from our last trip. Before three in the morning, we were out in the frozen open again, dodging from shadow to shadow as we headed toward the weird force field wall and the gate that would direct us back to Erroris.
“Do you think we’ll be able to turn off the electricity?” Gideon whispered.
I pressed my finger to my lips but nodded. While the Doctors had plenty of reason to keep people out, they had no incentive, as far as I could see, to keep people in.
Sure enough, there was a small panel near the place where Cameron had entered the premises. Trying desperately not the think about the last time I saw his demented face, I fiddled around with a few wires before successfully switching off the force field that protected the sanctuary of the Ten Colony Council.
And then we were gone.
Running down that long open road, we dashed toward the cover of the forest, but I wasn’t too worried; no one knew we were there. Only Victor would think to look for us, and he and Meghan were still fast asleep.
Once I reached Gideon in the trees, I slowed to a stop and grabbed my sides, trying to catch my breath.
“Keep going?” he asked.
I nodded, embarrassed that the run had winded me again.
“To Erroris?”
“Do you have another plan?”
He looked over his shoulder into the forest, back the way we had come just a few days ago. Back toward Erroris, back to the demolished Factory, and back to the bodies of the murdered rebels. “No, I guess not.”
The longer we stood there, the quicker the adrenaline keeping me awake would drain away. “Then let’s get the hell out of here.”
Nothing in particular—and yet, everything in the world—was waiting.
---
It was even worse than I remembered. The unseasonably warm weather had melted much of the snow around the rebel gathering place, and as I ogled at the skeletal, charred remains of what had once been a beacon of hope for the future, I actually gagged. Only a small portion of the Factory’s north wall stood intact, and the rest had crumbled into a heap of dust and rubble.
Worse, though, were the decomposing, burned remains of the rebel Thirds who had not been able to escape the blitz. They were unrecognizable as individuals, and I had no way of knowing whose bodies now littered the thawing ground.
The smells sucker-punched me right in the soul.
“I can’t tell who any of them are.” Gideon’s voice was tight and small.
“No. Me neither.”
He bent down and examined the pile of incinerated skeletons before him. “I wish I knew. Then maybe I could . . . I don’t know. Do something.”
The rebels hadn’t exactly been kind to him, but somehow I knew he wasn’t just concerned about the Seconds and Firsts who had also fallen victim to the Docs’ attack.
“Come on, let’s get out of here.” My stomach gave an alarming jerk, and I knew I couldn’t look at this scene for another second. The last time I was here, I had listened to the cries of hundreds of my allies as they were murdered. The last time I was here, I had seen my new home burned to a crisp. The last time I was here, Michael still had hope that we could change the world.
And now, he was dead.
We had come to search for survivors, but this ill-fated graveyard was suddenly the last place on Earth I wanted to be.
“Yeah. Okay.” He got to his feet and sighed. “I guess there’s nothing else we can do here.”
The fact that he wasn’t arguing with me made my heart ache all the more. “Let’s find somewhere to camp. Then we’ll look for the others tomorrow.”
“Right. Others.” His smile didn’t reach his eyes, but he nodded and followed me, hooking his thumbs around the backpack straps.
“We’ll find them. I know we aren’t the only ones left.”
“Maybe.”
Had Gideon finally lost his optimism? If that was the case, then what the hell was I supposed to do? Panicking slightly, I turned instead into the darkness of the forest and walked in front of him without saying another word.
Though winter had arrived late that year, it seemed to have ended early, especially since we had left the mountains where the Docs’ headquarters was located. As I walked along, melting snow dripped from the trees high above our heads, and my tired brain whirred incessantly. Bodies. Rot. Death. Failure. But what I kept coming back to was Gideon’s simple and dejected, “Maybe.” How could he have given up hope? Hadn’t he been the one to suggest we look for survivors? Hadn’t he been the one to suggest we keep fighting? Was it too late to disappear into the wilderness together? Live a peaceful life, far away from all this bullroke?
Even as I thought it, I knew that wasn’t an option. Gideon would never forgive himself if he abandoned the Colonies like that, no matter how defeated he felt now. He always strove to do the right thing, and it would be selfish of us to abandon the others. Because there had to be others.
I glanced over my shoulder; Gideon trudged behind me,
his eyes glued to his feet, and my chest tightened.
What were we going to do now?
Moving my gaze back to the undisturbed snow before me, I stubbornly made a decision: For perhaps the first time in my life, I would choose hope over doubt. Hope that we would find survivors. Hope that we would think of something. Hope that we would somehow be able to take down the Docs, so that all of those people behind us wouldn’t have died in vain. Hope that we could make things right again.
And I didn’t just have hope for me; I had hope for Gideon, too.
We walked for another half hour or so, paralleling the distant wall of Erroris, before finally stopping for the night. Cameron had carried one of the solar heaters with him through the wall of electricity, but the other still worked, and it was the focal point around which we set up our beds.
Gideon still hadn’t said anything by the time he cocooned himself in one of the large sleeping bags we had stolen from Victor.
“Are you okay?” I whispered before lying down myself.
“A lot has happened in the last few days.”
“I know.”
“It’s just a little overwhelming.”
“I know that, too.”
He turned his head and smiled tiredly at me again. “You know everything.”
“That’s true.” I shoved my feet into the bag and snuggled down inside it. “I also know that we’ll figure something out.”
“When did you become Ms. Optimistic?”
“I don’t know. An hour ago?”
He didn’t respond to that, and I realized how exhausting being alone could be. To have to be strong one-hundred percent of the time. Growing up, I could always lean on Meghan or Victor or Michael when I couldn’t do it anymore, and I guess I had always taken that for granted. But who did Gideon have?
Me. He had me.
Unexpectedly, the corner of my mouth twitched up in an almost-smile as I heard Michael’s voice in my head:
Barf! Sap-alert!
Whatever, I thought. I guess I love Gideon. Like, for real.
And it was pretty hawking sappy.
But I guess I didn’t care.
---
I wasn’t sure what woke me until my brain registered the sound of the car engine, not too far away.
“Do you hear that?” Gideon froze in the middle of rolling up his sleeping bag.
“Yeah.” I bolted upright and stared into the trees. “I think it’s a truck.”
Without another word, we urgently packed up our campsite.
“Should we check it out?” he whispered.
“Yeah.”
Even if we didn’t have a plan, we couldn’t do anything if we remained completely isolated from the rest of the world. I swung my backpack over my shoulder as Gideon strapped the solar heater to his own.
“After you.” He gestured quietly toward the noise, and I slunk off into the trees.
It was a group of Thirds dressed in brown tunics and orange vests. Judging by the eye-watering smell, they were members of Erroris’s sanitation team, taking the roke out of the city. Gideon and I got as close as we dared and hid behind two large trees.
“I’m so hawking sick of pulling double-shifts.”
“I know. It’s like, ‘hey, thanks for not being a glutty rebel, here’s twice as much work for you to do!’”
“If I wasn’t tempted to join them before, I am now.”
“Don’t be an idiot, Buchanan, there is no ‘them’ anymore. The Council blew the roke out of them days ago.”
“And now what? We keep working our asses off until the next group of hawking Thirds graduates?”
“We’ll do whatever the Council tells us to do.”
One of them—it sounded like Buchanan again—scoffed.
“If you don’t want to be blown to bits, I’d keep that attitude of yours in check.”
“Yeah, yeah. It’s just not fair.”
“Of course it’s fair. This is what we get for being Thirds. Knowledge was not good—it destroyed the world—”
“Forever, yeah, yeah. I got it.”
“Well, you better not forget.”
“Why? You gonna tell on me?”
“Will you two shut up?” Another voice cut in. “I just want to get this done and get home.”
“But do we have to pay penance for their sins, too?”
“Buchanan, I swear—”
The group must have moved, because their voices faded and I couldn’t hear them clearly anymore.
Gideon nodded his head after them in a questioning sort of way and I shrugged. Should we follow them? Could they possibly know anything that would prove useful to us? And if they did, would they discuss it out in the open like this?
He nodded again, this way in the opposite direction. I silently agreed and followed him back the way we came.
“What do you think?” he whispered once we were about a hundred yards away.
I shrugged. “I don’t know. It’s weird that people are still spewing that doctrine. I mean, I haven’t heard it since we escaped Liminis.”
“It’s surreal that the rest of the world hasn’t changed, after all that’s happened.”
“Well, it sounds like it’s changed a little. Extra work for everyone who was left behind? Maybe it won’t be so hard to stir up a rebellion, after all.”
He rubbed his neck with a sigh. “Yeah, but where do we start?”
That was the problem: I had no idea. “I guess we just start looking. Comb the area for a few days, and if we don’t find anyone . . .”
His eyes grew wide as he stared over my shoulder, and I whipped around to follow his gaze.
I couldn’t believe what I saw. If I hadn’t been so rigidly science-minded, I would have thought I was staring at ghost: she had appeared from nowhere, was silent as a vacuum, and her face was pale and thin.
Cece.
She was alive.
And she beckoned wordlessly for us to follow.
Chapter Five
Though I was bursting to ask her a million questions, Ms. Cece Phillips (one of my teachers from Wissen Schule) put her finger to her lips.
“But—” I ran to her, embraced her, but she wouldn’t let me speak.
“Not here,” she whispered. “Come with me.”
I looked at Gideon, and he nodded. We had come to find survivors; a survivor had found us.
Cece.
She was alive.
Stuffing all of my questions inside—saving them for later—I contained my joy and curiosity in the name of security. Gideon and I followed Cece, who was our trusted and beloved mentor, in silence for several hours, skirting the Erroris wall as we traveled toward the north end of the city.
Where is she taking us? Are there others? How did she escape?
My brain buzzed, longing for the answers.
Before long, though, I found my concentration shifting. It took me awhile to realize that we walked along a cracked and overgrown railroad track, and our progress was slow and laborious, even after we left the cover of the forest.
It took all of my focus just to traverse the treacherous path.
We followed the track until it hugged the side of a hill, the ocean lapping hungrily below us. The salty sea breeze played with the end of my braid, and as it whipped up into my face, I resolved to chop it all off as soon as I got the chance. It was a tie to the past; it would give me away; it was an unwelcome reminder of where I came from—who I came from.
Walter’s brutish face suddenly popped before my eyes, and I had to grab the wall of earth beside me in order to steady myself.
Gideon’s hand touched my back gently, but I regained my balance quickly. I threw a smile over my shoulder to let him know I was alright, but I felt embarrassed that I had reacted so skittishly to a fleeting memory.
It was just that I hadn’t thought about him in so long.
His big fist, flying through the air toward my cheek. His cruel grey eyes. His desire—no, his need—to see me dead.
Maybe I would dye my hair, too.
And then suddenly there were more important things to think about: The ground dropped out from beneath the tracks, and only a thin, ten-inch strip of dirt existed between the mountain and the one iron rod that wasn’t dangling precariously over the ocean.
As though she had done it a million times before, Cece pressed her back against the hill as she sidestepped carefully onto the miniscule bridge.
How was she going so fast?
The look I threw Gideon was filled with panic this time, but his eyes were glued to the fifteen-foot drop below us, and they were wider than I had ever seen them.
“Are you alright?” I said over the crash of the waves.
With what appeared to be a huge amount of effort, he dragged his gaze away from the water and let it land on my face. “I—I don’t like heights,” he said shakily.
My own fear quieting slightly, I grabbed his sweaty hand and squeezed his trembling fingers. “Come on. It can’t be too much farther now.”
His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed, and then he took a small step forward.
It was as though the sweat on his palm had been a topical bravery serum, and I followed Cece first with mostly-real confidence, hoping it would give Gideon the boon he needed to get across.
A fear of heights was irrational.
A fear of falling, however . . .
The cold ocean spray actually tickled my legs as I inched across the bridge, trying to ignore the nasty images (like my skull exploding all over that sharp rock, for one) that pulsed against my brain. My heart pounded in my chest, and the muscles in my calves started to quiver as I gaped at the water below, my confidence quickly disappearing again. Focusing on my balance, I tried not to think about the powerful sea that could obliterate me against the cliff if I lost my footing.
Once the path widened again, my chest collapsed involuntarily, as though I had forgotten to breathe. Cece was just ahead, peering beyond a bend in the road, so I shook my head quickly, trying to get a grip, and then turned to hold my hand out encouragingly to Gideon. He was still about ten feet away, and it looked like he was frozen in place.
Fallen Firsts (Rebel Thirds Book 3) Page 4