A door opens in front of the boy. Two meaty guards step through, real ChumHeads, and they’ve got some poor woman with a black blindfold covering her eyes. Crusted blood mats her thin brown hair. She’s a walking skeleton.
“Please,” she says, and skitz, her voice is desperate. Raspy. She sways as the guards shove her forward and back out of the room. The door slams. “I’ll do anything. Anything, I swear.”
“Sit down,” the Leech demands. The woman twitches, but she does what he tells her to do, staggering forward until she’s cross-legged on the floor in front of the boy.
“Hello,” the little boy says.
“ . . . Aaron?”
“Why are you bleeding?”
The Leech cuts in over the loud speaker. “Because she doesn’t follow our rules, C87. Do you understand?”
The little boy nods. “I do.” He turns back to the blindfolded woman. She’s rocking back and forth on the floor like she’s going crazy. “I wish you would’ve followed the rules. They don’t hurt you if you follow the rules.”
The woman reaches up to her blindfold, but one of the Leeches barks an order over the speaker. “Not yet!”
She drops her hands. “Aaron . . . baby . . . is that you?”
“I don’t know any Aarons,” the little boy says. His voice is so honest. He really means what he says.
The woman starts sobbing.
“Don’t be scared,” the boy says. “The man with the voice is my friend. He says I’m a good boy. Do you think I’m a good boy?”
The woman crawls forward. “Aaron . . . ” Her hands fall on his smooth cheeks.
“Would you tell me a story about him?” he says, and the woman gasps, moves away.
“What have you done with my son?” She rips off the blindfold. She starts to scream.
“You said he was dead!” She crawls to the boy and pulls him into her arms and starts rocking him back and forth. “You said my son was dead!” She sobs over and over again. The boy just sits there, blinking slowly.
“Let him go!” She yells up at the ceiling, and I realize she can’t see through the glass.
I look down at the Leeches. They’re just sitting there, observing.
“All right, get it over with, man,” one of them says.
Oh, skitz, I know what’s about to happen. I watch in horror as the woman pulls away and stares right into her son’s eyes.
The second she does, he changes. His eyes turn to snakelike slits. He bares his teeth like some crazy feral dog.
“Do not resist,” he says, and the voice is horrible and deep. The woman’s mouth parts in shock.
The boy starts to scream. This is what I did to Meadow? She grabs my hand and squeezes it tight while we watch the boy twitch and writhe against his chains, struggling to break free.
The chains drop away. They slither back into the walls like snakes.
I want to scream. Tell her to snap out of it, turn and run. But she just sits there. She has no place to go.
The boy dives at her.
For a second, it doesn’t seem real. All I can hear are her screams. She and her son are tangled up on the floor. The glass wall starts darkening, going to black, but just before it turns totally solid, a splatter of crimson blood hits the glass. It drips like wet paint, down to the floor.
“You owe me five Creds,” one Leech says to the other. He leans back in his chair and kicks his feet up on the metal table. “I told you Natural-Borns would work just the same as the Test-Tubers.”
“I still say it’s a stupid plan. Let’s go eat. I’m starving.”
They leave the room, totally unfazed, like they haven’t both just watched a stolen son murder his own mother. As soon as they’re gone, their words hit me.
Test-Tubers.
They’re creating Wards in the lab.
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CHAPTER 81
MEADOW
We move from the air vent as quick as we can. All I can hear is Zephyr’s ragged breathing behind me. Horrified. Shocked. Disgusted. Once we get far enough away we stop and lean into each other in the cramped space.
“The boy . . . he . . . ” Zephyr says.
“I know.”
“His mother. It was his own mother. And he didn’t even know. . . . ”
I have nothing to say. I never should’ve let him see what we just saw. So instead of speaking, we continue to crawl. We come across another air vent, and this time I am the only one to look.
There are at least a hundred children lined up in the massive room. Training. Kicking. Fighting with weapons, their fists. Just the way my father taught me. It is exactly as he said. Is this the very room where Zephyr was trained to kill?
We keep going. I peer through another vent and this time it is a medical room of some sort. Rows and rows of clear criblike bins line the walls. Only these are much larger. Each one holds a kid not much younger than us. Tubes run from the bins into the walls.
Everyone is wearing a helmet, silver and polished, with a little screen on the front.
I can see images on each screen. Every image is different.
A child playing on a set of swings that overlook the ocean. A child on the boardwalk, watching the sun go down.
A boy eating ice cream. A girl, building sand castles on the beach.
A woman, singing a song.
So many images, flickering, but all of them like glimpses of a real life. A real past.
“My father was right,” I say, and my voice cracks.
“What?” Zephyr whispers. “What is it?”
How can I keep this from him? He deserves to know the truth.
I slide over and let him peer down into the room.
He inhales. A short gasp of recognition.
“Memories,” he says. “They’re . . . implanting fake memories into their heads.”
“Zephyr . . . ”
“Leave it, Meadow.” He turns and crawls away from me. I watch as he settles down and leans his head back against the cool metal.
I picture Zephyr, years ago, lying in one of those bins after they created him in the lab. Getting his own set of memories. And now he is finding out that none of them are really his.
None of Zephyr’s past is real.
We reach another fork, and this time we go left, following the map in my head. For a while, the only sound is our breathing.
We stop moving once the stench hits us.
It is like rotten eggs or milk gone sour. Like human waste spoiling for days and days under the hot sun. Only it is much worse.
It is coming from the air vent up ahead to our left.
This time Zephyr slides past me and takes the lead. I don’t argue, because I am terrified of what I might see.
Zephyr peers down into the room. He cocks his head, as if he is confused. Then he motions for me to join him. ”It’s all right,” he mouths, and he wraps his arm around my waist and pulls me close. “It isn’t them.”
I press my eye to the slat and look down. My breath catches in my throat and I force myself to breathe again. It is not my father. It isn’t Koi or Peri. It is a woman.
She is so frail. Gaunt, like a skeleton, her body reduced to skin and bones. Her skin is green, almost as if it is rotting, and she is covered in a thick film of dirt and filth, her hair dulled to a pale gray in the dim light of the cell. I do not have to be a doctor to realize that they are starving her to death.
There are three guards with her, sitting against the far wall.
The woman turns her head just in the slightest way, and for a moment I am scared it will fall off of her neck and roll across the floor. It’s almost as if she knows there is someone looking down on her. She freezes, and she is so thin I can see the pulse in her neck. I exhale when her shoulders relax.
But then she wheels around faster than I thought possible. She looks up at the air vent
high on the wall. At us.
Our eyes meet for one fleeting second before Zephyr and I duck down.
Hers are gray. Like the ocean.
Like mine.
My fingers claw at my thighs. As if they will help hold me in place when it seems like nothing else can. Not even Zephyr matters anymore.
Nothing does.
Because I know the dying woman with the silver hair.
“She is my mother.”
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CHAPTER 84
ZEPHYR
The only thing I feel is this awful, paralyzing shock.
Meadow turns to me. “We have to get her out.”
“What?” my mouth falls open. “Meadow . . . ”
“She is my mother,” she says.
“But she’s . . .”
I can see the shadowed outline of Meadow’s face, staring back at me like I’m the enemy.
“Meadow,” I say again.
Meadow isn’t even listening to me. She checks her gun. Three bullets. There’s only five arrows left on her bow. She stops and sits totally still. “Are you coming?”
When I speak, my voice is just a whisper.
“Please don’t make me choose.”
She makes the decision for me.
Darkness swallows me up as she snaps off the metal vent and drops into the cell.
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CHAPTER 85
MEADOW
I roll to my feet inside the small room.
I take out the first camera. Glass shatters and the guards scramble as my bullet hits the second one.
“The girl! It’s the girl!” one of them yells, and then I am on top of him.
I knock him face-first into the ground. Behind me I hear the other guards coming, but I slash with my dagger and am rewarded with the gushing sounds as blood splatters from the neck of one of the guards.
The third guard lunges for me, but I am too quick. My mind and body are two weapons that have melded together as one. He stumbles, and I take the chance. I wrap my arms around his neck the way my father taught me. And then I pull.
I feel the pop. It is satisfying, like removing the cork from the top of a bottle. He goes slack in my grip and I let his body fall to the floor.
Something hits me from behind. I crumple to the ground. Reinforcements. They collapse on top of me and I cannot move. I look across the room. My mother is pressed up against the bars of her cell, and I know this is how she will watch me die.
But then she smiles.
There is a gunshot, so close to my ears that the shock causes me to scream. Everything is ringing, swirling around me. Another shot. A guard’s face slumps against mine. A bullet hole stares back at me from his forehead, and the blood starts to trickle like a waterfall.
Someone heaves the bodies off.
Zephyr scowls down at me. For a second, everything is silent.
But there is another gunshot, from the doorway.
“I’m hit,” Zephyr moans, just once. He grabs his head.
He slumps to the floor.
I drown in my own screams.
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CHAPTER 86
ZEPHYR
The pain doesn’t come for a second.
There’s this tingling, tickling sensation that runs through my body, kind of like someone’s shocked me with a small volt of electricity.
And then it hits me in one solid wave.
Fire. White-hot fire.
I can’t hear anything. I can’t feel anything. Only fire.
I touch my head, and when I pull my hand away, it’s bleeding.
The Leech shot me in the ear.
I feel around, and it’s not there anymore. The ChumHead shot my ear off.
I roll over and see Meadow sprinting toward me with a fury I’ve never seen before. At the last minute she leaps, her body crashing into the Leech guard that shot me. She pulls a feathered arrow from her crossbow. She thrusts the thing right through his eye and he falls to the floor, broken, like me.
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CHAPTER 87
MEADOW
I have dreamt of this moment for as long as I can remember.
Sometimes I picture my mother and me walking to each other across the sand. When we meet, the sky erupts into color. The sounds are electrified. We are together, and alive.
Other times, I stand by the train tracks, waiting for her to arrive. I wait for hours, and when she comes, she is as beautiful as I always knew she would be.
“Meadow,” she says. I don’t recognize the ragged voice that comes out of her mouth. “You look so grown up . . . you have no idea what I’d give to see you again.”
She thinks I am not real.
A hallucination.
“Mother . . . ” I say. “I am real. I’m right here. Look at me.”
Her hands tremble as they find my bloodstained shirt. She gasps as she touches me, lifts her hands to my face, my lips, runs her fingers through my hair. There are tears in her pale eyes. “I knew you would find me,” she whispers, and she pulls me close. Zephyr gasps. He stands up and tries to move. He wobbles, off balance, then falls against the wall.
My mother pushes away from me when she notices him. Her head is cocked, like a dog’s. Her eyes sparkle like she’s looking at a drug she has longed to taste for years. She reaches for a fallen gun and hands it to me. “Patient Zero,” she says. “He was always strong, but this won’t do. Put him out of his misery.”
I stagger back. “You . . . he . . . he’s with me . . . ”
“You do as I say, Meadow. This boy needs to die. It’s strange, isn’t it—pain?” my mother says.
She is insane. She wants him dead. I don’t know what else to do. I stand and point the gun at her chest. “He’s fine. Can’t you see that? I’ll pull the trigger if you so much as look at him. I swear on your life I will.”
She laughs, a cold, steely cackle that sounds nothing like I remember. “You don’t have the guts to do it, my darling.”
She’s right. I would never shoot my own mother. Instead I swing the gun across her jaw. She tumbles to the floor. “You’re sick.”
“You were always stubborn,” she says as she wipes blood from her face. Her teeth are black. Rotting. “If you only knew what I’ve done for you. I’ve saved your life more times than I can remember.”
She has never done anything for me but open up a world full of conspiracies, a world full of pain and lies and loss. I want to go back to the beginning. This woman is not my mother.
“He will only slow us down,” she snorts. “He’s dead weight.”
“They have Peri and Koi . . . and Dad . . . ”
My mother flinches. “I see . . . my God, what have I done? What have I done?” She starts pacing. Tearing at her hair.
And then, as the alarms begin to wail overhead, she regains control of herself. She stands up straight. She looks at the door. She could run now, run away from me. But she turns and our eyes meet. She is so frail. Her eyes watch me with a hunger that makes me squirm.
“You will do exactly as I say,” she says. “You’re still my daughter. So you do what we trained you to do. You leave no man alive.”
She crosses to a metal cabinet outside the cell and flings it open. There are guns. Rifles. Throwing knives. Clubs. I discard my crossbow, pick up a club and strap it over my shoulder. My mother tosses me a black handgun. I slide out the magazine. Fully loaded. I snap it back in place, grab another full
magazine, and tuck them both into my waistband.
She turns to me when she’s done strapping a rifle over her shoulder. “Ready?”
I feel like I am watching five different versions of my mother. Pain. Sorrow. Horror. Love. Evil.
“Meadow,” she hisses, chewing on her lip.
“One second,” I say, and go back for Zephyr. “I’m so sorry,” I whisper, but as I bend down to help him stand, his eyes open.
“No,” he says, and I back away as he clenches his teeth and rises to his feet. He sways a little, but I let him stand strong. “I’m fine now. I was just . . . .in shock.”
I hand him the club.
I draw my blade in one hand, my gun in the other, and hold them firmly. They are my sanity along with Zephyr. For one fleeting moment, I remind myself that my instincts should be my guide. Not my mother.
But when she steps out into the hallway and starts to miraculously run, I follow.
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CHAPTER 88
ZEPHYR
It happens when we’re only halfway down the hall.
One second I’m running along behind Meadow, trying to keep myself upright, trying to keep things in focus.
Then it comes.
It hits me like a fire poker inside my skull. I let out a piercing scream that bounces off the walls. I crumple to the floor. Flux, it’s too much.
Meadow rushes to my side. “Zephyr! What’s happening to him?”
I can hear the fear in her voice. I want to tell her I’m fine, that everything’s okay. But she feels like she’s a thousand miles away.
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