And of course there were also those people who simply chose not to be a part of New Caelum. As I stared at the mountains just beyond our walls, I wondered what had become of those people. Would it be possible to reconnect with them and the outside world again?
“I’d like to listen to some music.” My mother spoke over her shoulder. “Will you turn it on, please, West?”
“Music, Mother?” I studied the back of her head, her brown hair styled in a perfect short bob. She stood tall, her arms clasped behind her back. She hated music. Said it distracted her from her thoughts.
“Yes, music. It will relax me. Something happy, upbeat. Pop rock, maybe. And don’t be stingy with the volume.”
My mom was losing it. She hated rock music most of all. But I pulled my PulsePoint device from my pocket and began searching for the wireless connection to the room’s speakers. I scrolled through the library of music on my device and chose something “happy” and “upbeat.”
When the music started playing, Mother pulled her own device out of her pocket and began keying something into it. Probably something related to the election—it was all that Mother had thought about the last several weeks.
“Mother, what does this mean for the election?”
She raised her head as the glass windows on the other side of the room darkened, giving us some privacy from the nurses and doctors observing us from outside the isolation suite. She was still able to control some of our privacy from her PulsePoint despite the fact that we were officially quarantined. She walked over to me and spoke through the glass. “Listen to me, West.” She urged me to look straight at her. “This is a setup. I don’t know who would use Willow to hurt me, but it’s someone who wants me to lose this election, and they didn’t care who they had to sacrifice in order to do it.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It is no accident that someone close to me has this virus.”
“Why would someone do that? They’re risking the entire population of New Caelum. And even themselves.”
“I assure you, no one else inside New Caelum has the virus. And this isolation suite’s air ventilation is cut off completely from the rest of the city.” Mother threw her head back and laughed—but not out of humor, I didn’t think. “Hell, this city was designed with the best air filtration and purification system ever devised. Even if the virus were to make it briefly outside this room, it would be near impossible for it to spread any further without direct person-to-person contact. No—this is an attempt to get me out of the way.”
“Out of the way for what?”
“People are getting restless inside the city. There are a growing number of people who are ready to venture back into the outside world.”
“But you think it’s still too dangerous.”
“I don’t think we’re ready yet.”
I glanced toward Willow. Someone was willing to sacrifice my sister—for what? Political gain?
“Eventually, I think we should send scouts out to see what it’s like out there,” Mother said. “We know that there are survivors, and that they are flourishing in their own communities, but we don’t know what kind of crime is occurring or if they’re surviving all of the other illnesses that we’ve managed to overcome inside this city.”
She continued, not letting me get a word in. “We organized this city because so many of the lower classes of our society were draining our resources during the outbreak. They were depleting us of supplies and medicines, but were unable to pay for them. And we were dying. Bad Sam had a one-hundred-percent fatality rate. We organized the city in order to save humankind—so that we could become a strong country again with hopes of rejoining the rest of the world some day.”
“And you think someone wants to remove you from office in order to rejoin the outside sooner rather than later? Who?”
“Let me worry about who.”
“So Willow is going to die because someone didn’t want you to be president again?” There had to be more to it.
A tear leaked from Mother’s eye. She quickly shoved it away. “I am not going to let that happen. But I need your help.”
“Anything.”
“Someone has successfully gotten me out of the way so that they can send out scouts tonight.”
My back stiffened. “How do you know this?”
Mother cocked her head. “Please. I did not become president of this city based on popularity alone. I have spies and people who wouldn’t dare cross me. I have arranged for Ryder to leave as one of those scouts. He’s one of the newest and brightest coming up through the leadership ranks.” She smiled at me. “He will serve you well in the future. He is very loyal, and has agreed to volunteer to be on one of the trucks leaving the city later tonight.”
Ryder had said nothing to me about that. “What do you want from me?”
“I need you to be in the truck with Ryder. Your truck will go east, instead of west like the others. You will go in search of Christina.”
“Christina?” I stared at the woman who had raised my sister and me inside this city. Protected us year after year. Given us everything we could possibly want. And I wondered if my own mother have lied about the single most devastating event of my life? “Christina, Mother? I don’t understand.”
“Yes. Listen to me, West. I don’t have time to explain everything. Christina is with Dr. Caine Quinton. At least I hope she’s still with him. They’re in a settlement east of here.”
“Christina’s dead, Mother. You said she died.” But even as the words came out of my mouth, I knew that Mother had deceived me.
Christina was the sole survivor.
chapter three
Cricket
I hiked two miles up the mountainside to one of the few places where I could see clearly over New Caelum’s walls into the city. I found a tree stump to sit on. It was probably three or four o’clock in the morning, and people milled about outside the compound under bright lights like it was the middle of the day.
The grand city spread over a hundred acres of land, deep in the Appalachian Mountains. More than fifty buildings of varying heights had been joined together by airtight tunnels to create a fully functioning city, housing and accommodating the needs of more than a hundred thousand people, a population that was growing every day. Except for a few guards who checked the perimeter periodically and the people who hauled waste each week to the incinerator (the only building located outside the cluster of connected structures), it was also a population that almost never left the safety of the city buildings. Especially at night.
“Except for now,” I whispered. I’d been watching New Caelum off and on at different times of the day for the past few years, and I’d never seen this much activity in the predawn hours.
I lifted binoculars to my eyes and was surprised to find that the people below wore red hazmat suits. They were rolling bins of garbage to large dumpsters, which were then lifted by forklifts and emptied into the incinerator. An orchestra of sounds disturbed what should have been early morning silence: the loud banging of metal dumpsters, the beeping of forklifts, and the industrial blowing of the incinerator, which bellowed white smoke hundreds of feet into the air.
Eight years ago, when the virus had crossed over—from a disease that could be transmitted only through contact with contaminated bodily fluids, to a deadly airborne illness—the world as we knew it changed forever. Not only did anyone who contracted the Samael Strain receive a death sentence, but there was no longer any way to hide from the fatal disease.
If the virus had been gone from New Caelum for six years now, why did those people feel the need to keep themselves covered up out in the open air? Did they think someone was going to walk inside the walls of their fortress and sneeze on them?
Or had a new virus been born?
“Why the incinerator, boys?” I directed my binoculars around New Caelum’s perimeter—the area outside the airtight city buildings but still inside the tall brick and stone walls. A coup
le of guards stood at the gate in my line of vision, which was also rare. It had been years since anyone on the outside had tried to penetrate the city walls, and New Caelum had relaxed their security because of it. Also, they weren’t wearing hazmat suits. “What’s going on inside your fortress?”
Just as I was about to stow my binoculars, I caught movement next to a building on the eastern edge of the city. Two large rolling doors were rising upward.
And then everything around me seemed to go silent. The incinerator had stopped. The people in hazmat suits disappeared one by one back inside. I stared at the two doorways. The space just inside the rolling doors was dark. Time ticked by. I stood, my eyes glued to the empty spaces through the binoculars.
Suddenly, the roar of engines broke the silence, rumbling up the mountainside. The muscles along my spine and neck tensed. My knuckles turned white as my grip on the binoculars tightened.
The doorways lit up as if giant spotlights had been turned on inside.
Large army trucks came rolling slowly through the doors, two at a time. Four of them altogether, heading for the main gate.
In the years since New Caelum was built, when the elite people of this world, people who thought they had all the answers, holed up in an airtight complex behind their walls, not once had I ever witnessed people leaving the city.
They were protected inside the city. They had everything medical technology had to offer inside their own private cocoon. They didn’t need or want the resources of the outside world. Or so they had said.
Yet here they were.
The trucks formed a single file. They approached the gate that would allow them to cross over from their elite world into my ordinary one. As the electronic gate in the stone wall vibrated to life, so did my heart, rapidly pumping blood to my head, making me dizzy.
I watched with anticipation to see where the trucks would go once they got outside the gate. It didn’t matter that the roads outside the gates were overgrown with foliage and brush. The trucks would forge their own paths.
The first truck made a right out of the compound. The second followed it. The third went left. And the last forged straight ahead. And as they sped up, so did my pulse. I tracked the motion of the headlights as the trucks eventually went in four different directions. They were on a mission, and I was helpless to know what that mission was.
As if suddenly slapped awake, I jumped up. I quickly stuffed my binoculars into my backpack and threw the bag over my shoulder. I slid several times on the wet foliage as I made my way back down the path toward the spot where my friends slept.
We, of course, always camped off the beaten path, but not because we wanted to be hidden from passersby. After all, no one ever passed by. And the only beaten paths were our own.
Twenty minutes later, as I neared the spot where I had left my friends, I slowed, listening for anything out of the ordinary. The forest was silent except for the shifting of trees and the blowing of crunchy brown leaves that hadn’t yet fallen from the trees.
The leftover smell of campfire reached my nose. Of course my friends had thought I was insane for extinguishing the fire before I left, but they were used to my craziness.
Something stopped me from racing the rest of the way to the campsite. Something was… off. Allowing the trunks of the larger trees to shield me, I darted stealthily from tree to tree.
I spotted Nina as I took cover behind an overgrown rhododendron. She was standing without a coat, her pale-colored shirt almost glowing in the predawn light. I couldn’t make out the expression on her face, but she didn’t appear to be moving, and I could see the fear in her ice-blue eyes.
I saw no one else.
I couldn’t see enough of the campsite to figure out what was going on, so I decided to take in the campsite from another angle. I moved right. I realized I would have to expose myself briefly in order to reach the next large tree that would cover me. I took in a deep breath, and just as I moved my foot, I heard movement behind me. I froze. I started to whip around to my left when the movement advanced on me too quickly for me to react.
An arm encircled my waist, and a hand covered my mouth. “Shhh. It’s me. Don’t scream,” Dax whispered close to my ear.
Every muscle in my body ached with tension as I turned in Dax’s arms, letting out the breath I was holding. “What happened? Something doesn’t feel right.” I kept my voice low.
“I woke about an hour ago and decided to go looking for you. When I returned, three men had cornered Nina and Dylan. I’ve never seen them before.”
“They’re from New Caelum.”
Dax jerked back like he been punched in the gut. “What are you talking about? What are they doing outside the city?”
“I don’t know. I watched them leave. Four trucks left the compound about thirty minutes ago, heading in different directions.”
He held a finger to his lips, warning me to keep quiet. Grabbing my hand, he pulled me away from the campsite. We circled around a wide perimeter and came at the site from the opposite side.
From a spot well hidden in thick forest underbrush, we could see and hear three men questioning Nina and Dylan. Nina stood with her hands hanging to her side. Her fingers shook, and she shifted her stance.
“Who else was with you?” a man with short dark hair asked. He didn’t appear especially threatening, despite Nina’s obvious fear. “The two of you were obviously sharing this spot when we got here.” He pointed to where they had slept. “Who do these two sleeping bags belong to?” He held up Dax’s and my sleeping bags.
Nina and Dylan traded glances. I knew they wouldn’t say a word about us. But I feared what the three men would do to my friends as a result.
One of them bent and sifted through Nina’s bag. “Ryder, I think I found something.” At the sound of the voice, my head popped up. Due to the lack of morning light, I had failed to notice that one was a girl. Her hair was short, and she was quite a bit smaller than the other two.
I squinted, studying the girl as she pulled what appeared to be the map Nina always carried around with her. We always teased that she’d get lost without it—which was true. I, however, had the entire area memorized—every tree, every body of water, every established community east and directly west of the city.
The one named Ryder grabbed the map and held it up to Nina’s face. “What is this? What’s it a map of?”
Nina remained silent. The third one, the one who hadn’t yet spoken, stood back, appearing to take everything in. Though it was still dark, there was something about this one… a familiarity of sorts. I wanted so badly to get a closer look at him.
“You don’t feel like talking? That’s okay.” Ryder opened the map and turned it in a few different directions until he decided on one. Almost as quickly, he folded it up. “We’ll take this.”
“Are we going to bring them with us?” the girl asked.
“I’ll make that easy on you,” Dylan said. “Over our dead bodies will we go with you. I don’t know what you want, but you won’t make it one day out here in the wild.”
Ryder smiled. “What makes you say that, pal?”
Dylan stepped up to him. “Well, pal, you’re obviously from the city. I’m going to guess you’ve been there a long time. The people on the outside won’t take to you very kindly.”
“Maybe they’ll take more kindly to us if you’re with us.” Ryder raised a hand slightly and pulled a device from his waistband. Next thing I knew, he had stuck the device into Dylan’s side, and Dylan collapsed.
Nina screamed and fell to her knees beside Dylan. “What did you do?” she yelled.
“He’ll be fine,” the girl said softly. “But we need you both to come with us. We have no intention of hurting you, but we need your help.”
Ryder scooped his arms under Dylan’s. The other man grabbed Dylan’s feet. They carried him away, in the opposite direction from Dax and me.
By now, darkness was lifting. The sky was brightening. Through the trees, I follow
ed the two men with my eyes until they reached one of the trucks from New Caelum. I could now see that they were younger than I had at first thought. Teenagers, probably. Boys.
The girl stood in front of Nina. She, too, was young. “I promise we don’t mean you harm. We’re looking for someone. A girl about our age. There are others from the city who are looking for other information, but we only want to find this person. You’ll be more protected if you come with us.”
Nina seemed to think about that. “Well, it’s not like I have much of a choice. I’m not going to let you just take Dylan.”
The nameless boy returned. “Ryder’s waiting for you. You’re going to go on ahead. I’ll search the area for the missing companions. I’ll contact you on the PulsePoint.”
Nina smiled. “You’ll never find them.”
“Either way, you can either go willingly with your friend, or we can force you.”
I could practically hear Nina’s brain processing the choice. Finally, she sighed and followed the girl toward the large truck.
I cocked my head and watched as the remaining city boy bent at the knees and picked through the rest of our belongings, standing when he found something.
I squinted my eyes to see what he was holding. When the small item came into focus, my hand flew to my neck. It was my necklace—a leather necklace, with exotic beads from my parents’ travels, and adorned with a small wooden charm, a gift from a friend.
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