Even if I can’t see, though, I can still hear. And after a few blocks, it sounds as if the voices shouting after us have increased in number. Hard to say, though, whether it’s still the group that surrounded the warehouse or just the few people we’ve passed on the street—people who have to wonder what is going on when they see us, especially since it must be past midnight by now.
Without speaking, we both decide to risk speeding up a little, until the voices behind us grow more distant.
We turn a corner and I’m blinded by headlights. I stagger out of their beams, nearly tripping on a curb as my eyes adjust to the brightness. Once the spots in front of them clear, I see a truck parked in the middle of the street and at an odd angle. Like it just pulled in there, expecting us.
There are more lights, too, I realize—flashing blue lights coming up behind us, and more at the end of the street ahead.
“The police?” I pull the strings of my hood tighter and tuck the long strands of hair that have flown loose back into it.
“And knowing our luck, they probably aren’t on our side,” Seth says, and I nod, because I know you can’t trust anybody in this city. It was the first thing Catelyn warned me of before I left headquarters for the first time; both the CCA and Huxley have members in all sorts of occupations throughout Haven—from police, to government officials, to teachers and everything in between. It’s impossible to know who is working with an ulterior agenda and who isn’t. So it is simpler—safer—to just assume no one is on your side.
Not that I ever assumed that, anyway.
The truck doors open. Two people jump out.
“New plan,” Seth breathes, placing a hand on my arm. Before I can even ask him what he thinks he’s doing, he’s got another hand on my lower back, and then he lifts me into his arms in a single easy motion.
“This is not okay.”
He responds by pulling the hood farther down, completely hiding my face.
“I will murder you.”
“Okay, but it will have to wait,” he says. “For now, we’re going to pretend you’re an old, weak human, and you need me to help make a quick escape. So brace yourself.”
It’s muffled by the hood, but I hear the garbled sound of a man’s voice, telling us to stop where we are. To surrender. Seth doesn’t say anything back, he just bolts from his spot so quickly that it takes my breath away. I hear that same man’s voice shouting something as we blur past him, but we’re moving so fast that I don’t have time to make out any of his actual words. Within seconds they’ve faded into the night. All I hear after that is a barrage of city noises, coming and going just as quickly as those words.
It’s unnerving to not be able to see what’s making the noises. To not be able to see where we’re going. I try to focus on the movement, on each turn, each jump that Seth makes. On anything and everything except the way my body is crushed so completely against his.
Our escape takes less than a few minutes, but it’s easily the longest I have ever been in such close contact with somebody. My skin is crawling. Burning in the worst possible way. The second he stops, I push away so quickly that, between that and still not being able to see through this stupid hood, I end up landing hard and awkwardly on my side.
“Nice job,” Seth says in between attempts to catch his breath. “But you can stop acting like a weak, clumsy human now. We lost them, I’m pretty sure.”
“Be quiet,” I say, springing back to my feet and yanking the hood off.
Even with it out of the way, it’s still dark. We’re in what looks somewhat like the Electronic Transport Shuttle car that I rode in with Catelyn once, except it looks like no one has been in this particular car in a very long time. There are rows and rows of cracked leather seats behind me, stuffing exploding from some of the bigger tears across their backs. Most of the windows above the seats are broken or else missing entirely, but on one of the few bits of intact glass, I see a faded sticker advertising a yearly pass for the Inner City Light Rail. So this is a relic left over from the public transportation system that existed before the ETS system they have now, I guess. There are other cars scattered around us outside, all in varying degrees of rustiness and decay, lit by the only two street lamps in the area not burned out or shattered.
“Where are we, exactly?” I ask, sliding into one of the seats and using the sleeve of Seth’s jacket to clear a patch of condensation off the window. In the glass’s reflection I see him typing something into a communicator. Its screen goes black, and he waits until it lights up again—with a reply to his typed message, I assume—before he answers me.
“Close to the southern city-limits line,” he says. “In the neighborhood known as Newbrook. A charming place to commit a murder, or to get mugged, or participate in a drug deal. If that’s what you’re into, I mean.”
“Nice choice of hiding place.”
“We’re not staying here long,” he says. “Just until I’m sure we’re not being followed. There’s a safe house on the outskirts of town that we’ve been working on setting up for a while, with the help of some old friends of Angie’s.”
“More former Huxley employees?”
“Some of them, yeah. More of the good ones. We’ve been planning to move Angie there for a while, once everything is all set up. I wish we’d already done it, obviously.”
“Were you messaging her just now?” I ask, nodding to the communicator still resting in his palm. I feel strangely nervous about his answer. Much more invested in the fate of this woman I barely know than I should be.
“Yeah.”
“She’s okay, then?”
He nods.
Good, I think. But at least I manage to keep myself from saying it out loud. I still don’t quite know what to do with all these sudden attachments I seem to be forming to people, and until I figure it out, I at least want to keep them to myself as much as possible.
There is a long silence between us then, one bursting at the seams with all the questions I want to ask him. It’s hard to choose the best one to break that silence, but in the end I settle for, “Why would they send so many people after just one rogue former scientist?”
“She isn’t just any scientist.”
“By which you mean?”
He tries to go back to the communicator, but I grab his arm and jerk his attention back to me. “We had a deal. I helped you, so now you’re going to start giving me some answers.”
He stares, eyes hard and searching me for something—for a sign of weakness, maybe, a chance that he might be able to get away with ignoring me one more time. I sharpen my gaze and make sure there’s no chance of him finding it.
“She was one of the head scientists in charge of designing the program that allowed Huxley to remotely control its clones,” he finally says, each word dragging slowly and reluctantly from his mouth.
Any concern I had for her well-being disintegrates in a flash of white-hot anger. “So she’s the reason for all the brainwashed clones? The reason I have to worry about my own thoughts being reprogrammed into plans and purposes I want nothing to do with?” I jump to my feet, nearly hitting my head on the train’s low ceiling in the process. “And what about you? Why are you helping her? What has she done to your brain to make you want to do something so—”
“That program was disabled in my brain a long time ago,” he interrupts, far too calmly, “after she’d realized her mistake, and right after she took me and the only perfected version of that program and ran from Huxley. Trust me: She wishes she hadn’t created it either.”
“That’s what she’s told you, is it?”
“She came out of hiding to tell me about it.” An edge has crept into his voice. “And she’s almost gotten herself killed several times because of that.”
“Why come out of hiding now?” I lean back against the seat and fold my arms across my chest, unconvinced. “What changed?”
He shakes his head. I refuse to let the question go unanswered though, and I glower at him until
he finally stops seething long enough to say, “I wasn’t safe where she’d left me anymore.”
“Where she’d left you?”
“Yeah.” He goes quiet again, and something in his tone—something I don’t understand, something I don’t want to understand—makes me hesitant to push him this time. He eventually continues on his own, though, and without looking at me, he says, “It wasn’t an accident that President Cross found me that night in the park. Because apparently she and Angie are like . . . BFFs or something, from the time they spent working together at Huxley. Which is why the president took me in as a favor to Angie. And probably because she felt obligated or whatever.”
The way he says “obligated” almost makes me cringe.
Had she felt obligated to bring me back too? Is that the only reason I am alive—because of some sort of misguided attempt the president was making to atone for her sins?
“Anyway,” Seth continues, “they’ve kept in touch, just the two of them, and so Angie knows about all the crap that’s been happening at the CCA lately. She was worried that things were getting out of hand there, so she decided it would be a freaking brilliant idea to show up and try to convince me to leave the city and run someplace far away with her.”
“But you didn’t think it was a freaking brilliant idea?”
He gives a short laugh. “Look at you, figuring out how to understand people after all.”
“You aren’t what I would call subtle.” His emotions have always been loud and simple, and maybe that’s part of why I liked him better than most of the people back at the CCA—because I prefer loud and simple.
What now, though?
Now he doesn’t seem so simple at all, but full of quiet, unspoken things I can’t make sense of, things that are making his eyes glaze over and his usual confident posture slump as he says, “What should I have done? Just left the city, and the only two people I’d ever thought of as family, without knowing what might happen to them? I don’t remember anything about the time I spent with Angie before the president found me. We were close, apparently. I have her last name—but what the hell am I really supposed to do with that?”
“You’re asking the wrong person about family,” I point out. But my stomach gives a strange lurch as I say it, because even though I don’t want to, now I’m asking myself the same questions as Seth.
Because I share Catelyn’s last name too. There is precious little else of what we were in my time before this life, but there will always be that, and I’m fairly certain she will never stop reminding me of it—as though I could actually forget it. I may not fully understand family, but I know enough to realize that she is the only thing I have that comes close.
And, just like Seth, now I am wondering what might happen to her if I don’t come back.
Seth is watching me closely, curiously, as if he is thinking about asking me what is going through my head. But thankfully he doesn’t. “Yeah,” he eventually says with a slow nod, “I guess you’re even more screwed up in the family department than I am, aren’t you? I should pick better, more useful friends.”
“I am not your friend.”
He sighs. “Case in point.”
“So what now?” I say. “Do you plan on spending the rest of your life trying to hide Angie from Huxley? And what about Jaxon and the president? If you’re worried about what’s happening at the CCA, then what are you going to do about it? You have to go back there, right?”
He runs a hand through his hair, lets it drop in a defeated sort of way back to his side. “You have greatly overestimated the degree to which I have figured things out,” he says.
“Perhaps because you tend to act like you know what you’re doing, always. All the time.”
“It’s called faking it until you’re making it,” he says, pulling up the communicator again as it beeps.
“Are you sure it isn’t called arrogance?”
“Whatever you want to call it, I’m really good at it.”
I frown. “And what are you going to do if you don’t make it?”
He pauses, his fingers hovering over the communicator and his eyes staring at a crack in the window for a long time before he answers.
“No idea,” he says, and his voice sounds oddly small and choked, and for the first time since I woke up all those months ago, I think I feel something like fear.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
After traveling some twenty miles more—mostly in silence—we reach a run-down shack of a building on the edge of a meadow buried deep within the woods outside of town.
I feel as if I am on autopilot, my mind more concerned with trying to make sense of everything that’s already happened than with paying attention to what is happening now. There is a blur of introductions between me and the four people inside the house, and I am vaguely aware of the suspicious looks that most of them fix me with, but that’s really all I notice about them for now. What little bit of focus I can manage is on Seth. I watch him move through the house with intent and purpose—more of his “faking it,” I suppose—as he checks monitors and all the other alarm and safety measures they’ve equipped this house with, and then as he pulls one of the four people aside and has a quiet, heated discussion with him in the corner. Once they’ve finished, the man heads outside, and a few minutes later Seth follows.
I sprint after him.
“You’re leaving already?”
“Angie is waiting for us.” He stops, but doesn’t turn around, just motions to the man he’d been talking to, who is now sitting expectantly behind the steering wheel of a gleaming silver car. “And so are a few other people who are going to help us out, back in the city.”
“And what about me? What am I supposed to do now?”
“I don’t know. You can stay here if you want. Or, hell, leave and go to California for all I care. I thought we’d already established that I really don’t have this all figured out? I got you out of trouble at the CCA. I just wanted to make sure you were far away from that place, for your own sake and to maybe, hopefully, calm things down a bit there—but that’s as far as I’ve got with my grand master plan.”
“I never asked you to get me out of anywhere. Or to be a part of any of your plans.”
“Yeah, I realize that.”
“Maybe you should have just left me there.”
He turns back to me uncertainly. Expectantly. I don’t know how to explain this to him, though—how I don’t know exactly what to do, now that I’ve paused to catch my breath, and my head is clear, and the only life and city I’ve ever known has faded out of sight. Now that I don’t have specific expectations. A set role to play. I thought I didn’t want those things, but in its own way, this freedom is almost more frightening than a lifetime of following orders.
Because following orders is what I knew.
That girl who was so obedient to the president for those first months . . . she was who I knew.
This Violet Benson? I don’t know this Violet Benson. This girl that is standing in the middle of the woods, surrounded by so many huge and complicated things. I don’t know what she is supposed to feel about those things. What—if anything—she is supposed to do about them.
It feels like I’m meant to do something, though, now that I’m here.
But what if I end up doing the wrong thing?
Seth is still staring at me. To avoid speaking a little longer, and because I’m tired of wearing it anyway, I slide out of his jacket and fling it back to him. He puts it on slowly. Shoves his hands, one by one, into the pockets. “Things are more complicated for you now, aren’t they?” he guesses. His voice has softened the tiniest bit, but that doesn’t make me feel any better—it sounds too much like pity, which I don’t want or need.
I don’t say anything back.
“It sucks, doesn’t it? Being caught in between like this.” He pulls the jacket’s hood up and turns to leave again. “Sorry about that. I figured this would be the best thing for you, but who the hell knows in the end?�
��
“I want to talk to Catelyn.” The words come out of nowhere. Just like thoughts of her so often do—surfacing when I haven’t tried to make them, or even when I’ve tried to stop them. In this case, I think she is the only sane reason I can come up with for why I care about having been ripped so unceremoniously from my life at headquarters. She is the only reason I would ever have for going back.
Is she safe? I wonder.
“Not happening,” Seth says.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t trust Catelyn, and I don’t trust you to not tell Catelyn everything that’s happened since you left the CCA. And the fewer people who know about this place, about Angie and everyone who’s helping us, the better.”
“I won’t tell her any of that. Why would I?”
“Because she is annoyingly good at getting things out of people? She would get you to talk.”
“Have you actually met me?”
“Yeah, and you aren’t as difficult to crack as you think you are. Especially when Catelyn is around.”
My face burns. I feel like I’ve just been insulted somehow. “You can’t keep me from contacting her. Besides, don’t you care at all about what’s happening at the CCA right now? What about Jaxon?”
“Of course I care,” he snaps. “But I can only focus on keeping one person alive at a time, all right? So just . . . I don’t know. Stay here, I guess? We’ll work something out when I get back, assuming you can go the whole time I’m gone without beating anyone up or violently setting anything on fire.”
“We’ll see.”
“I’ve told them to shoot to kill if you get unruly.”
“Then I’ll be sure to destroy their guns before I set the fire.”
“Good-bye, Violet.”
“Good-bye, Seth.”
• • •
Inside the house, I’m met with the same suspicious looks as before. But it isn’t as if I’ve never encountered this sort of thing before; if anything, I just feel like I’m back to my familiar life at the CCA. So I ignore the stares, and I sink down into a ratty old armchair that smells like dust, and I close my eyes.
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