Skin so pale the bright sun damn near turned Max into a mirror, the glare of his confusion dazzled William. “Okay,” William said, “you want to know the truth of it? We did come here. We came here and we crept into the labs to try to get to you. Then we met a corridor filled with those things.”
“And what did you do after that, William?”
William ground his teeth. “Look, Olga, I like you. I admit, we made a mistake not telling you about Max, but”—he turned back to Max—“the reason we didn’t try to save you is because we thought it would kill one or all of us.”
Olga’s taut features settled. Although she opened her mouth as if she had a reply coming, she clearly thought better of it and let it die. A second later, she dipped a nod at William. “I’m sorry. I can see it wasn’t an easy choice to make. With the state of this city, we’ve all made some hard decisions. We’re expected to play God by deciding who lives and who dies.”
While scratching his head, William released a long sigh. “Look, Max, I’m so sorry we didn’t come up with a better way to rescue you before this. I also think it’s important you know the reason we’ve come back is because we need your help like Olga said. That changed our decision. We decided it was worth risking our lives for. I’m sorry that sounds callous, but it’s the truth. I mean, look around, you can see what the world has changed into since you’ve been in that cell.” The itch of tears spread across his eyes. “Olga was right to tell you, but please know we didn’t make the decision lightly. Will you help us?”
Instead of replying, Max turned his back on the three of them and returned to the skylight, disappearing into the labs. The lack of the creatures’ reaction screamed louder than their fury ever had.
After a few seconds Matilda said, “Where’s he gone?”
Chapter 51
“At what point do we accept he’s not coming back?” William said. They’d waited for at least ten minutes, watching the skylight as if Max would emerge from it at any moment.
“We don’t.” Olga’s face lit up as Max reappeared. He had blankets, a jug of water, and a cloth bag filled with something.
The bag had apples and some bread in it, which he passed around. “I want to help you, whatever it is you need. I don’t care how or why you got me out, and I recognise the sacrifice made to rescue me. Were it not for you, I would have starved to death, so for that I’m grateful. I’m not making a judgement on any of your previous decisions. But before I do anything, I need to go to construction to see if any of my family are still alive.” The wind tossed his hair as he faced his home district. “I’m not holding out much hope, but I need to check.” After a moment’s pause, he nodded at the folded map poking from William’s pocket. “What’s that?”
William pulled out the map, holding down two corners to prevent the wind from blowing it away. Max crouched in front of it and held the other two.
After studying it for a minute, Max traced the line separating the top two-thirds of the map from the bottom. “It makes more sense now.”
When no one replied, he said, “The woman I was in the cell with.”
“Where is she now?” Matilda said, and then added, “So much for that glass being hard to smash.”
“I don’t know. She was immune like me, so my guess is she’s left Edin. Why would she stay?”
The day they took her in had unsettled everyone on national service: a feral woman speaking a language none of them recognised. Where William had been a naïve child before, that day showed him just how ruthless Edin’s rulers could be. It would have pleased Hugh to know he’d contributed to her freedom. “Did you manage to understand her?”
Max shook his head. “Not really, but there were a few things we worked out between us. She talked about a wall. About war. About weapons. I’m not really sure what a lot of it means, but this here”—he tapped the map—“must be the wall. If she didn’t prove it already by arriving and talking in a language no one understood, I think this map shows us there’s a lot more to this world than just Edin.”
The conversation alone drained some of William’s already depleted energy. “We’ve got a long road ahead.”
“That’s for sure.” Max stood up again. “I will be back, I promise. I got the food and blankets so you have something. Besides, I’m sure you all need the rest.”
William knew Matilda as well as he knew anyone. If arguing with Max would get them to Artan sooner, she would have done it, but the boy stood strong and resolute. He hadn’t asked their permission.
“Give me an hour or two at the most. I promise I’ll be back. And thank you again. I don’t care how it came about, the fact is, you freed me. Whatever happens moving forward, we’re in this together. All of us. See you soon.”
As Max turned to walk away, William said, “Max?”
The boy halted.
William held up Hugh’s sword and sheath. “Hugh would have wanted you to have this.”
For a moment, both boys held the sword at the same time. William then let it go, withdrawing into himself while he saw Hugh’s kind face in his mind’s eye.
Chapter 52
True to his word, Max returned, poking his head through the skylight. Maybe two hours had passed, maybe longer, but despite his stomach locking in anxious knots, William had managed to keep his head straight and put faith in his friend from national service. Max had asked them to trust him, and after the decisions they’d made with his life over the past few days, they owed him that. Besides, they hardly had a choice.
While waiting for Max, they’d eaten all the food he’d brought up, drank all the water, and did their best to keep the conversation light. They were all tired and stressed, and if the others felt anything like William, one spark could erupt into an argument. And he couldn’t blame Olga for what she’d said to Max. He deserved to know. Maybe, with time, he’d be grateful to her for getting it all out in the open. Maybe.
It took for Max to climb out onto the roof before Olga said, “Damn, what’s happened to you?”
Dripping in blood, Max moved closer, his steps slow and lethargic. “I thought I’d thin the herd, you know?”
“You look like you’ve slaughtered the entire city,” Olga said.
“If only! But I think with my immunity, I have a responsibility to chip away at the numbers when I can.”
The roof shook beneath Max as he slumped down. He ran a hand through his blood-soaked hair. While fixing on the tiles in front of him, he cleared his throat with a wet cough. “I killed one of my brothers. I went to my family home. I should have walked away the second I saw it. It looked as wrecked as all the other homes in the district. I didn’t need to see any more. But then a diseased stepped out. It came at me like it knew me. To every other diseased I’ve been invisible, but I’m certain this one recognised me. It was Drake. He was the youngest of my four older brothers and the one I was closest to. He …”
Max stared off into the distance and heaved another heavy sigh. “The way he looked at me … he knew who I was. I hadn’t killed any diseased until that moment. I stabbed him through the chest and kicked his head until I didn’t recognise him anymore. Those creatures have no right wearing his face.”
As Max talked about what he’d done, William noticed the chunks of flesh and white flecks of bone on his boots. The blood on his face had cracked from where it had dried, and parts of it flaked away like old paint.
“I left soon after,” Max said.
Olga shifted closer to Max and put her arm around him. “I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
“We’ve all lost people, right?”
A moment’s pause, Olga said, “I always liked Hugh.”
Were it not for the touch of Matilda’s hand on his leg, William might have reacted.
“It wasn’t ever about me not liking him,” Olga went on. “It’s more that he scared me. A lot. When I trained him, I could see how damaged he was. We rarely spoke. Well, I spoke.” She laughed. “I shouted at him frequently. But he never
said anything in return. At the end of every session, he didn’t even say thank you. Instead, he’d hug me, squeezing me so tightly it almost hurt. And he’d hold on. Not to the point where it felt uncomfortable, but just long enough to share his vulnerability with me. I came to cherish those hugs. They were an intense squeeze of humanity in a situation where we’d all nearly lost ours. But I didn’t see that Hugh anymore.” She looked out across the city. “Every time he came close to me, I yearned for one of those hugs. Just a sign to know the boy I’d trained with remained.”
While Olga talked, Matilda moved closer to William. He relaxed because of her proximity. “Thank you for telling us that, Olga. He was a great friend. One of the best.” The attention of the others burned into him as he focused on the hole his friend had gone through. “Just before he went in there, he told me he was done. He had no fight left in him and he didn’t want anyone to die because his actions were putting people at risk. I made him promise me he would come back up again; otherwise, I wouldn’t let him go. I said if he remained down there, I’d jump down to save him—and I nearly did—but I knew it would kill us both.”
Matilda shook her head. “If only he knew we were all here for him. We would have helped him through.”
“I told him that. But he’d had enough. I could see that. He couldn’t keep the crazy at bay anymore. I always thought suicide was selfish, but I suppose it’s selfish of me to want him to stay alive for my sake. He was done.” The world blurred in front of William. “He was done.”
Maybe a minute passed before Max looked up, tears having cut two tracks through the blood on his cheeks. “So what do you think? We have maybe two to three hours of daylight left. I’m not confident we’ll achieve much moving through the city at night. So do we try to get to the arena or stay here until the morning?”
“I can’t wait any longer,” Matilda said. “Artan’s been in that cell for months already, and I don’t know when he was last fed or given water. The wait is driving me insane. I appreciate we’ve all lost people and you can’t make a decision just for me, but if you can see any way of at least getting to the arena today, then I’d like to try.”
William nodded while she spoke, and it didn’t take long for Max and Olga to follow suit, Olga adding, “Even if we just get closer to the arena, that’s something, right? But if we’re going to go, we need to do it now.”
When they’d entered the labs earlier that day, they had to run into the district to get past the tall wooden fences. Now that they were leaving, though, they headed to where William had climbed up where the fence and the end of the labs were closest together.
While staring across the wide road, the diseased everywhere, Max said, “This has to be the best place to jump off. It gives us a shorter distance to travel.”
“I’ll make the noise for the diseased,” William said. “Are you okay chaperoning the girls, Max?”
William was as good a candidate as any of them to wait behind, and maybe they saw that, because neither Olga nor Matilda argued with him. He kissed Matilda, and when they pulled away, he stroked some of her hair behind her ear from where the hummingbird clip hadn’t caught it all. “If anything happens, meet me in the arena.”
“Why would anything happen?”
“I’m sure it won’t,” William said, “but in light of what’s already happened, I’d say it’s better to plan for the worst.”
They were all far enough back from the edge of the roof to be hidden from the diseased. Before Matilda said anything else, William clapped his hands and made loud noises as he marched to the spot where they’d made Goliath wait the first time they came into the district. To imagine his horse standing there robbed him of his voice, but he swallowed his grief and shouted again. It wasn’t the time to be thinking about the noble creature.
Open mouths, bleeding eyes, snatching and snapping arms below, William continued to yell while he reached down and ripped several tiles free from the lab’s roof. When he had a stack of them in his left hand, he lifted the first one with his right and threw it like a Frisbee. The stone rectangle smashed into the face of one of the diseased. The creature swayed, stunned from the contact.
As Matilda, Olga, and Max vanished off the edge of the building, he shouted louder than before and threw the next tile harder than the first.
William had been throwing the tiles for at least five minutes, and once he’d found his rhythm, he couldn’t miss, nailing diseased after diseased with the spinning projectiles. Another armful of them, he wound back for his next throw. But then he stopped. And a good job too. The only face free of disease in the mob, he waited for Max to pass beneath him into the labs before he spun the next tile into the baying crowd.
A minute later, Max appeared at William’s side. “What are you doing?”
“What else am I going to do? Like you said earlier, we might as well thin the numbers a little. Oh, and next time you might want to carry a white flag.”
“Why’s that?”
“You nearly got a tile in your face.”
“You would have missed.”
William smiled. “How are the girls?”
“They’re fine. They’re on the other side of the road, making as much noise as they can.”
“And getting them across worked okay?”
“How fast can you run?”
After throwing his armful of tiles from the roof, William walked with Max to the end of the labs and stopped a few feet from making himself visible. Large gaps had opened up in the road, most of the creatures over to the right at the feet of Matilda and Olga. They’d dragged them in the direction of the national service area, away from the arena.
“You should go first,” Max said. “If you lead, I’ll catch up and follow. Although they’re not interested in me, they’re interested enough to notice when I land in the street. We don’t want to prime them for you jumping down.”
“Okay.” They’d done this a few times already, and it had to be easier now they had Max’s help. They’d made it every other time, so why not now? Little point in dwelling on it, William took off, stepping from the labs to the top of the fence before dropping to the cobblestones.
William’s legs buckled when he landed, throwing him to the ground. No time to dwell on the shock to his body, he jumped back up again and took off towards textiles directly opposite.
About halfway across the road, Max a few steps behind, a mob of about two hundred diseased spewed from one of the large alleyways in front, creating an impenetrable wall between William and safety. It was like when they’d followed Hugh and Olga in laundry all over again.
“Where the hell did they come from?” Max said.
William changed direction, running away from the mob and the girls. The mob followed.
Max now beside him, William gritted his teeth and dug deep. They sprinted down the centre of the road, the small one-story buildings of textiles on their right. If they could get close enough, he could drag himself up. But more diseased appeared from more alleys. The girls’ crossing must have alerted them. They should have waited longer before he jumped down.
“Shall I try to hold them back?” Max shouted.
“There’s no way you can. There’s far too many.”
“What, then?”
The conversation dragged more air from William’s lungs. “We keep going.”
Now William ran with the creatures beside rather than beneath him, their roar and stench dealt an almost tangible blow.
As more diseased burst from textiles and then ceramics, they kept William in the centre of the main road. With woodwork on fire, he couldn’t go there. A roar then exploded from the burning district. More diseased appeared on their left. “We’re screwed, Max.”
Before William could come up with a plan, Max shoved him. He stumbled towards textiles and into one of the storage basements lining the road. Max slammed the doors shut behind them, throwing them into complete darkness.
Both of them fighting for breath, William wiped h
is sweating face. “What are you doing?”
“You think we had a better option?”
“You do! You can go where you like.”
“So you should be doubly thankful that I’ve saved your arse and decided to come in here with you.”
“There are diseased down here.”
“I don’t know if you saw, William, but there are diseased up there too. Hopefully we can get through these tunnels and come up somewhere safer. Somewhere closer to the arena. The fact that this place is a labyrinth should work in our favour.”
“The diseased will be as lost as we are? And what about Olga and Matilda?”
“They’ll meet us at the arena like we planned.”
His heart beating so fast it felt like it might burst, William’s entire body turned to gooseflesh when he heard the hellish shriek of the diseased. “Shit!”
“It looks like our grace period has ended,” Max said. “Let’s go before they find us.”
“That sounds like a solid plan, genius! All we need now is to work out how to see in the dark.”
Chapter 53
Another scream flew at William through the tunnels, and he spun on the spot as if it would somehow help in the disorientating dark. The only sense of his bearings came from the diseased in the street outside as they hammered their frustrations against the closed doors. Were there not so many of them crowded around the hatch, daylight might have revealed cracks, giving them a sliver of illumination to guide their way. But there must have been hundreds of them in the street. How long before the doors collapsed beneath their weight?
“What do we do, Max? You brought us down here, so what’s the plan?”
“You were going to die if we’d remained outside.”
“So you want me to thank you?”
An arm caught William in the face, throwing him off balance. As he raised his fists, Max placated him. “Sorry, that was an accident.”
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