The Worlds We Make

by Megan Crewe

  A sleek red convertible, gleaming like it’d just been waxed, roared down the lane toward us. The driver brought the car to a halt when he saw us coming, abruptly but so smoothly the tires didn’t even squeal.

  “Nathan,” Marissa grumbled. “Show-off prick.”

  Connor rolled down his window to listen in. The guy in the convertible was leaning toward the Humvee, his mahogany-brown hair slicked to one side and a smirk stretched across his boyish face.

  “Coming in with your tail between your legs again?” he said to Chay. “You’re early—are you sure you even tried?”

  The edge in Chay’s voice suggested he didn’t like Nathan any more than Marissa did. “More than tried,” he said. “We caught the little fugitives. Bringing them to Michael right now.”

  Nathan’s narrowed eyes cut along the side of the Humvee to the station wagon. I shifted out of view behind the driver’s seat, the iciness of his gaze making my skin crawl. Suddenly I knew there were worse ways we could have been caught. Worse people we could have been caught by.

  “You’ve got the kids,” Nathan said, turning back to Chay. “How about the vaccine?”

  “They’re going to lead us to it, one way or another,” Chay said. “What have you brought Michael lately?”

  He rolled up his window before Nathan could respond, and gunned the engine. As we drove on toward the buildings, the convertible whipped into reverse, spun around, and raced past us, cutting Chay off to pull into the parking lot. We turned in after Nathan, coming to a stop amid an assortment of vehicles that included three transport trucks and, oddly, several police cars.

  “What the hell is this place?” Justin said. He didn’t sound as if he expected an answer, but Connor obliged him anyway.

  “Regional police training center,” he said. “Michael knows how to pick good digs.”

  “Shut up, Connor,” Marissa said. His shoulders tensed, and he shut off the engine and pocketed the key in silence.

  They prodded Justin and me out at gunpoint while Chay did the same with Leo and Anika. Leo sidled next to me.

  They hustled us toward the nearest building, a wide two-story structure of dun concrete. Nathan slipped in ahead of us. In his slim navy suit, he looked like he should be arriving for a business meeting, not to consult with the continent’s new warlord.

  “We do all the work, and he runs to tell Michael first,” Marissa muttered as soon as the door had closed behind him.

  “Michael’s not going to care who tells him,” Chay said. “He’s going to care that we found them while Nate was busy polishing his hubcaps.”

  “Would have been better if we’d gotten the vaccine too,” Connor said.

  “Thank you,” Chay replied in a voice laced with acid. “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  A man and a woman, both with rifles slung across their backs, looked up from their conversation when we came into the foyer. “Hey, whatcha got there, Chay?” the woman said, raising her eyebrows at us.

  “First-class delivery for the boss,” Chay replied. “You’ll want to come see this, I think. He in the usual place?”

  “As far as I know.”

  The two of them tagged along as we continued into a wide hall. The woman ducked into a few of the rooms that branched off from it. Beyond the doors, I glimpsed a row of tables scattered with ammunition in the process of being sorted, the glint of hanging pans in what looked like a kitchen, a line of shelves stuffed with fabric that could have been clothes or bedding. Each time the woman emerged, a couple more figures joined our group, murmuring to one another. A few of them looked to be around our age, but they all eyed us as if we were some alien species. One said something that must have been a joke, because the others laughed, with a warm sort of camaraderie that would have reassured me if I hadn’t known that we were the joke.

  An odd, salty-slick smell hung in the air, like gravy laced with machine oil. As we were marched deeper into the building, I noticed artificial light gleaming in the panels on the ceiling. They had electricity here. And they were smart enough to conserve it. Only one out of every three panels shone, dimly.

  From what Anika had said, Michael couldn’t have settled in here very long ago. He clearly knew how to get things organized fast. I wondered how many of these people had traveled from up north with him, and how many he’d recruited from nearby areas in just the last few weeks.

  Chay pushed ahead of the group to shove open a set of double doors. “In you go,” he said.

  The sound of our boots hitting the wooden floor echoed through the huge room, almost as loud as the pounding of my heart. We’d come into a gymnasium. In the corner, a pair of guys was dodging each other as they sparred. Pipes crisscrossed the high ceiling around motionless fans. And at the far end of the room, beneath the blank scoreboard mounted high on the wall, stood a broad oak desk. A man sat in the leather chair behind it, bent over to study something spread on its varnished surface.

  This had to be Michael.

  Chay propelled us toward the desk. Justin stumbled, and Marissa grabbed his arm, dragging him onward. As we drew closer, the man in the leather chair looked up from what I could now see was a map.

  If Nathan had run ahead to share the news, Michael must have known who we were, but his manner was blandly casual. It chilled me. What was a life-or-death situation seemed to be no more than a momentary distraction to him. As his dark eyes contemplated us, he rubbed his thumb over the trim beard covering his jaw, the hair there the same gray-speckled sandy-brown as the waves that curled across his forehead. Then he leaned back in his chair and folded his hands on his lap. The sports jacket he wore obscured the shape of his upper body, but I could tell from the way he held himself that any bulk on him was muscle. He moved like a lion.

  I hadn’t expected the desk. I hadn’t expected that detached control. But after seeing the disciplined and coordinated operation he’d been orchestrating all the way across this country and ours, maybe I should have.

  The appearance of civility didn’t comfort me. A revolver with a wooden grip lay on the desk—off to the side, as if to remind anyone approaching that he had it, and that he didn’t need to keep it in his hand to be ready to shoot you if he decided to.

  It wasn’t until Connor jerked me to a halt about five feet from the desk that I registered Nathan leaning against a white metal shelving unit to our right, by the gymnasium wall. His lips were twisted into a smile that looked tightly amused. The shelves behind him were lined with thick hardcover books.

  He wasn’t the only figure hovering nearby. Two men with handguns holstered on their belts stood behind the desk by one of the corners of the room, and on the opposite side leaned a young woman with what appeared to be a submachine gun slung over her shoulder.

  Wardens continued to follow us in, a small crowd gathering around us. They gave us a wide berth, and no one strayed past the red gymnasium line that marked the floor in front of the desk. Not even Nathan. It was as if Michael’s “office” had invisible walls.

  Leo bumped his shoulder against mine gently. When I glanced toward him, my heart nearly stopped. Beyond him, in the midst of the spectators watching our capture play out, my gaze snagged on a familiar face.

  Drew. My lips parted, but I caught the name before it slipped out, yanking my gaze away from my brother’s worried eyes. I couldn’t give away that I knew him. He’d helped us escape from the Wardens twice. If Michael found out, I couldn’t imagine what Drew’s punishment would be.

  But why was he here? When we’d last spoken, Drew had been in Toronto. Had he spent the last ten days helping the Wardens track us down?

  Michael seemed to have finished his assessment of us.

  “What’s this about, Chay?” he asked. His voice was low and cool.

  “This is them, Michael,” Chay said, stepping forward. “The bunch with the vaccine. We caught them down the river, like I figured we would.”

  Michael regarded him steadily. “I don’t remember asking you to bring me the ki
ds,” he said.

  “Well…” Chay’s eyes flicked past us, I guessed to Marissa. Apparently getting nothing from her, he drew himself up straighter. “We haven’t been able to find the vaccine yet. They say they split up the materials, each of them only knows where part of it is, and none of them will talk. I’m not sure it’s even at the house where we caught them—Connor and I both searched the place and turned up nothing. I thought you’d want to handle things from here.”

  Michael’s expression didn’t change much—a twitch of his eyebrows, a slight tensing of his mouth—but I got the feeling what he would have wanted was for Chay to figure out how to find the vaccine on his own. His gaze slid over us again.

  “And even in the new world, it’s teenagers making most of the trouble,” he said. Then, to Chay, “There were only four of them?”

  “We figure the sick one must have kicked the bucket somewhere along the way,” Marissa piped up. I had to suppress a bristle at her flippant mention of Gav. “No sign of the tall white guy.”

  Michael tapped his lips with his thumb. “If I’m not mistaken, Huan’s team took down a ‘tall white guy’ around the place they got their tires slashed.”

  I couldn’t control my reaction to that information. Tobias would have been alone, unarmed, in the woods, maybe already drugged up on sedatives—and the Wardens from the Jeep must have shot him like an animal. I cringed, trying to shut out the image, and when I opened my eyes, Michael was nodding at us.

  “Do you really want to keep dragging this out?” he said. “You’ve only seen the beginning of how unpleasant I can make things for you.”

  “Bring it on,” Justin said. “You’re not getting anything out of us.”

  Even though Justin was the one who spoke, Michael’s attention zeroed in on me. Maybe Justin had glanced toward me. Maybe we’d tipped off Michael that I was in charge somehow before then. He leaned forward with his elbows on the desk, his eyes locked with mine.

  “These are your people, aren’t they?” he said. “You brought them here. Anything I have to do to them, any way they suffer, it’ll be on your head.”

  My skin felt tight. I fought to keep my voice from shaking. “It’ll be on my head if I give up, so you can just kill us,” I said. “We’re not stupid.”

  “This is stupid,” Nathan sneered, pushing himself off the makeshift bookcase. “Why are we even standing around talking about it? Get a knife, a cigarette, some pliers, and get to work. Look at them.” He stalked past us. Up close, I could see lines at the corners of his eyes and mouth that indicated, despite his boyish features, he was several years older than any of us. He brushed his forefinger along Anika’s jaw, flicked Leo’s chin, and swept around to face Michael. “Five minutes, maybe ten, and they’ll be foaming at the mouth to spill every secret they ever had.”

  “Thank you, Nathan,” Michael said evenly. “I’ll take your advice into consideration.”

  “What’s there to consider?” Nathan said. “Let me at them right now, and I’ll have the vaccine before the sun’s down.”

  Michael didn’t answer right away. His expression shifted from cool to cold and calculating. It occurred to me that unlike Nathan, Michael had been incredibly vague in his threats so far, as if even he wasn’t sure what he was going to do. Maybe he’d never had to arrange a torture session before. Anyone else who’d gotten in his way, who hadn’t bowed to his bribes or threats, he could have ignored or had killed. We might be the only people he’d faced who had something he couldn’t get anywhere else.

  But as sick as Nathan’s proposal made me feel, it seemed like the obvious answer. And Nathan’s words had held a challenge. If Michael rejected the suggestion without another plan, he was going to look weak, indecisive. As he stood up, still matching glares with Nathan, I braced myself to hear him agree.

  I never found out what Michael would have said right then. Because before he could speak, a childish shriek carried in from the hall outside. Every head in the gym turned, including mine, in time to see a tabby cat scamper past the open door. As it darted along the wall, a gangly girl with a pale bushy ponytail burst in after it. She skidded to a halt when she saw the crowd gathered in front of the desk, her cheeks flushing. A gray-haired man came running after her, panting for breath. The cat paused by the shelving unit to peer back at them. Its tail whipped back and forth, fur bristled.

  The girl walked carefully toward it, but her eyes were fixed on Michael. She pushed a curl that had escaped from her ponytail behind her ear. “Sorry, Dad,” she said, in a voice that sounded too calmly mature for her age, considering she looked only nine or ten years old. “I know you’re working. I didn’t mean for her to get out of the room—she’s really fast.”

  Dad. I found myself staring at Michael, as if there was any doubt about who she meant. His lips had curved into a crooked smile.

  “I’m in the middle of something right now, Samantha,” he said with a gentleness that surprised me even more. “The cat won’t go anywhere. Why don’t you go back to your room with Nikolas, and I’ll come get you when it’s a better time?”

  Samantha edged a little closer to the cat. “She might get out of the building,” she said. “What if she runs into the parking lot? Someone will hit her.”

  “It’s my fault,” said the gray-haired man, who I assumed was Nikolas. “Camille found the cat on the grounds and brought it in for Sam. We weren’t expecting it to bolt like that.”

  Samantha took one more step, and the cat dashed away. It squeezed under a rack of basketballs. The girl crouched down, gazing at it longingly. “I’m not going to hurt her,” she said. Her voice quavered. “Why won’t she let me look after her?”

  For the first time since Chay and the others had burst into the house, I saw a problem I could fix.

  “Get her some food,” I said, before I could second-guess the impulse. “A can of tuna or salmon, if you have it. But you’ll have to let her come to you if you want her to trust you.”

  Samantha straightened up, regarding me with large brown eyes. I felt her take in our handcuffs, the awkward way Justin was standing, Leo’s bruised face. Her brow knit.

  “Who are they?” she asked her dad.

  “Some people it’s very important I talk to,” Michael said as Nikolas rested his hand on Samantha’s shoulder. “Go check the storeroom—we’ve got to have some canned tuna. And then wait, until I say it’s a good time. The animal must be even more scared now, with all these people around.”

  She bowed her head. “Okay.”

  When Nikolas had ushered the girl out of the room, Michael turned not toward us, but to Nathan. Mr. Slick had visibly deflated with the appearance of a child in the room. He raised his sharp chin.

  “So? Are you going to deal with them?” he demanded.

  “I’m going to let them cool their heels and consider their options for a while,” Michael said. Nathan opened his mouth to argue, but Michael cut him off. “You know what you get with the kind of torture you’re talking about? Unreliable rambling from people who can’t even think, they’re so desperate for you to stop. We’ve waited weeks to get our hands on the vaccine—I’m not going to lose it because of your impatience. We’ll find out what we need to know.

  “Chay, Marissa, Connor, take them to the jail room,” he went on. “I want a rotating guard, two at a time, switching off every four hours. If one of them decides they want to chat, radio me immediately. Otherwise, I’ll be by when I’m ready.” He swept his arm toward our audience. “The rest of you, get back to work. I know you’ve all got something to do.”

  I’d hardly comprehended that our interrogation was over before Connor started tugging me away. He pushed me and Leo ahead of him, Chay stalking along beside Anika, and Marissa resuming her grip on Justin’s arm. I had the urge to glance back, to find Drew again amid the crowd, but I squashed it as quickly as it rose up. I didn’t know why he was here, I didn’t know what he’d been doing since we last spoke, but he was the best chance we had of finding
a way out. I couldn’t jeopardize that.

  Chay’s group marched us down a flight of stairs, into a drab beige basement hallway even more dimly lit than the hall above. We turned a corner to face a row of three barred cells, each of which held nothing but a plastic wastebucket.

  “The girls in one, the boys in the other,” Chay said. Marissa and Connor hustled us forward.

  “Should we leave the cuffs on them?” Connor asked.

  “Cuff ’em to the bars,” Chay said. “One at a time!”

  My arms were so numb I couldn’t have put up much of a fight anyway. Connor detached the cuff from my right wrist and snapped it against one of the vertical bars that formed a wall between the cells. When we were all similarly restrained, Chay locked the cell doors with a key he then shoved into his pocket.

  “You and I’ll take the first shift,” he said to Connor. “Marissa, you grab one of your friends and be down here in four hours.”

  They all stepped back into the hall. Marissa’s shoes tapped against the concrete floor as she strode away. But I could see the edge of Chay’s shoulder through the doorway. They were giving us the illusion of privacy while staying within hearing range.

  “Well, fuck,” Justin said, slumping down on the rough floor. His cuffs clanged against the horizontal bar at waist height, forcing him to keep one hand raised. He propped his elbow on his knee. I rolled my shoulders, trying to work the pins and needles out of the muscles. Trying to focus on that rather than the possible horrors Michael might be planning for us right now.

  Leo was cuffed to the opposite side of the same wall as me. He leaned his head against the bars, his bruised cheek tipped away. I could reach just far enough to brush my fingers over his.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “I guess nothing’s broken,” he said. “I can still breathe all right. So it could be a lot worse. Hurts, though.” He raised his free hand to his cheek. “I’ll have to avoid smiling for a while.”