Into the Abyss

by Stefanie Gaither

  And I don’t know what that sound suddenly coming from one of the backpacks is, either.

  It’s a shrill beep beep beep, getting louder and louder—like a bomb ticking closer to its last seconds before it blows up.

  “Give it here,” Seth says, grabbing the pack and pawing through it. Before he can find the source of the beeping, though, it stops. New sounds distract us immediately: running footsteps. Gasps of heavy breathing. We think of bolting, but it sounds like only one, maybe two sets of footsteps. Few enough that we can easily fight them off if they do see us. So we hide instead. And from the middle branches of the closest tree, we wait, and we watch.

  I see the shadow, stretched long by the midmorning sun, before I see the person it belongs to. They are coming from the direction of the house, though. A stray CCA member? Someone we might be able to force answers out of? I shift anxiously on my perch. There might be more coming; it might be smarter to just stay put, but who am I trying to fool?

  I hate hiding.

  They run beneath the tree. I drop one of our backpacks directly into their path, and the second they stumble and slow to avoid it, I launch. I hook an arm across their chest as I fall on top of them, sending them crashing to the ground and breaking my own fall against them. They struggle, legs flailing and hands flying up to protect their throat and face. But their hands don’t fully cover their head, or the bright purple and blond strands of hair flying out from it.

  The adrenaline that launched me from that tree settles abruptly as I actually take a close look at the person beneath me.

  “Leah?”

  “Please don’t kill me,” she gasps.

  I think she is joking, but I still recoil, trying not to think about how many of her ribs I could potentially have broken just now. Seth drops to my side and helps her slowly to her feet. She manages to stand on her own after just a moment of leaning against Seth—but it takes her a painfully long time to catch her breath and start explaining herself.

  “All my weapons have trackers on them,” she says. “Including the one I loaned you and threw in one of those bags. So I locked on to its coordinates and followed them with this”—she holds up a device similar to the one Seth used that day we tracked Josh through the city—“hoping to find you guys. It should have been beeping a minute ago—I thought Seth would recognize the noise, and maybe realize it was me.”

  “You could have just answered your phone,” Seth says. “That’s how most people communicate, you know.”

  “Right, except that phone is with all the other stuff I had to leave back at the house. I only have this because it was in my hands when those CCA guys showed up in the doorway and started yelling orders and crap.”

  “What kind of orders?” he demands. “What happened? And where is Angie?”

  Leah suddenly seems out of breath again as she stammers for words. “She’s fine. Well, she’s alive, I mean. But she refused to cooperate with them when they asked where the two of you were. We all refused, mind you—but the rest of us got away before they got too upset. Angie refused to run, though. I think she thought she might be able to bargain with them, or at least buy the rest of us time to get away.”

  “And you just left her?” Seth asks.

  “You know how stubborn she is, Seth.” She falls back into her nervous habit of chewing on her lip ring for a moment before she adds, “Almost as stubborn as you, the way you ran back here like an idiot, even after she told you not to.”

  They’re both silent for a few breaths, but I can sense another explosion coming from Seth, so I try to direct the conversation away from Angie.

  “So the others are okay, then?” I ask hurriedly.

  “As far as I know,” she says. “We scattered when we ran, just in case we were followed. That way if I led any CCA to you, at least some of them might have separated and gone after the others. I think we’re clear though.” She glances over her shoulder, and then looks back at the device in her hand. “We’re supposed to rendezvous with everyone else in Eastside in about an hour—at the old church on the corner of Eleventh and Main—and come up with a plan from there. Were you guys able to upload the program?”

  I nod.

  Leah looks relieved for a brief moment about this, but Seth only turns and starts to walk away without looking back. Because I imagine he is thinking the exact things that I am, even if I won’t say them out loud: We took too long.

  Even if every clone in this city and beyond became completely docile, completely in control of itself overnight, it wouldn’t matter. The violence in the CCA has escalated too far to stop. Huxley’s clones have already done too much damage to them and the city outside.

  Everything seems to be hurtling toward catastrophe, and I don’t know how to make it stop.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “I managed to reach Zach,” Seth tells me as he walks in the room. “Jaxon and Cate are both fine for the time being. And, yeah, Angie is there; our purist friends have pinned some ridiculous accusations on her to justify keeping her there for questioning. Trying to get her to cough up information about me and maybe Huxley, too, I’m guessing. The president’s trying to fight it, but she’s getting overruled, and it’s just making things more unstable there. Zach thinks things are about to reach a tipping point, and he’s not the only one—apparently people are running away from that place left and right because they don’t want to get caught up in it when these two sides start really throwing punches at each other.”

  “And what about you?” I ask. “What are you going to do?”

  “It’s obvious, isn’t it?” His tone is sharp. “If the president can’t get them to release Angie, then we’ll have to go after her ourselves. I want her away from headquarters before things get completely out of control there. And Jaxon, too, while we’re at it—though I’m probably going to have to knock that moron unconscious and drag him out before he’ll leave his mom.”

  “Maybe he’ll follow Catelyn if I can get her to leave,” I suggest.

  Seth nods, but the movement isn’t especially confident. “Zach is going to organize a few people to help us out,” he says, and the words are softer, duller now. “He said to give him twelve hours.”

  The others agree, one hesitant mumble after the other.

  But I stay quiet, thinking and staring into the small fire we’ve built in this old metal crate we found in the church’s basement. It’s mostly dead now, because even with the windows open, it didn’t take long for the smoke to start to overwhelm. Only a few glowing embers remain. Just enough to warm my hands over.

  When I look up from the fire again, our little group has spread out. Leah is in the corner, wrapped in an old choir robe she found and bent over the computer one of the others stole on the way here, working furiously on something. Tori and James sit at the top of the steps that lead to the sanctuary, keeping watch. And Seth paces the length of the room, over and over, until I finally tell him it’s annoying. Then he comes and sits across the fire from me.

  “You don’t have to help, you know,” he says, stirring the smoldering fire with some of the tinder we gathered—a broken, ornately curved chair leg, it looks like. “I didn’t really mean it when I said this was all your fault; it’s at least as much mine, right? And I could tell by your silence earlier that you think me rushing into the CCA to save her is stupid, so you don’t have to follow me. You can leave.”

  “Catelyn is still there,” I point out.

  “It’s not like I’m going to leave her behind,” he says. “I mean, as long as I’m saving the day and all.”

  I shake my head. “See, that’s the other part of the problem.”

  “What is?”

  “If you were to somehow, miraculously, manage to save the day without me, then your ego might actually get even bigger than it already is. And I’m not sure the world could handle that.”

  He doesn’t say anything to this, but I think I see a trace of a smile—one close to what I used to see in my mind, whenever I t
hought of him. Just an association to remember him by, back then. That was all it was. Of course, now it feels . . . different. More complicated than it was before.

  But better, I think.

  “She wasn’t like the others, you know?” Seth says suddenly. “With the CCA, with President Cross, I mean, I was always this big secret. I felt like this embarrassment, almost, that she could never let out. It wasn’t that she didn’t try to make the best of things, and she treated me fine, whatever, but I wasn’t her son. My life was worth something to her, but with Angie, it wasn’t the same.” He flips one of the dying embers onto the floor and stamps it out with his foot. “If anything happens to her . . .”

  “She’ll be fine.” I have no idea where it comes from, because I don’t believe it at all.

  I just told a lie to comfort someone.

  What exactly have I become?

  Whatever I am, though, Seth apparently agrees with it, because he nods. “You’re right.”

  You have no idea whether I am right or not, I think. I manage to keep from saying it, though. Instead, with my eyes firmly fixed on the fire, I say, “I’ll help you. Because, Catelyn aside, you’d probably end up getting yourself killed if I don’t.”

  “You’re probably right,” he says, and then gets up and goes to the nearby closet, grabs a few more of the faded old choir robes like the one Leah is wearing, and tosses me one. If we had found these first, we probably wouldn’t have bothered with the fire. I’m glad we did bother with it, though, because its smoky smell is a much more pleasant one to focus on than the mothballs-and-dust scent of these robes.

  “So,” Seth says, plunking down beside me, “truce, then? You help me rescue her, I won’t throw any more guns at you.” He offers his hand. When I don’t take it right away, he extends his little finger instead. “We can just pinkie swear on it. It’s a little juvenile, yes, but less skin-to-skin contact if that’s what you prefer.”

  I finally give in and take his hand—his whole hand, because the situation seems a little more serious than pinkie swearing to me—and I shake it. “Fine. Truce.”

  “Good,” he says, and then lies back on the floor. “And now . . . nap time. Since I’ll be storming the CCA in about ten hours.”

  I stare at his closed eyelids, wondering how he manages to talk and joke so nonchalantly even now.

  He must feel me staring at him, because he cracks one eye open. “I know it’s hard for you to do when you’re around me, but please try to control yourself while I’m sleeping and vulnerable here. We’re in a church.”

  “I’ve managed not to murder you yet, haven’t I? So I’m not going to do it just after we’ve declared a truce.”

  “Murder isn’t what I had in mind.”

  “I know,” I say. “But it’s closer to what I was thinking of.”

  In spite of everything, he laughs. And then he turns over and falls asleep. Or pretends to, anyway.

  • • •

  I don’t sleep, not pretend or otherwise. I just listen to the whispered conversations of James and Tori, to the taps and clicks of Leah’s fingers across the computer, and eventually to her snores as she curls over the keyboard and still-lit screen and drifts off.

  The fire is long gone, along with its warmth and light. As it grows later outside, this lower room, with its few windows, is quickly swallowed up by shadows. There is an electric lantern in the bag at my feet, but I don’t bother with it; I feel more relaxed in this near-silent darkness than I have in days. The proverbial calm before the coming storm settling in around me, I suppose.

  The room is almost pitch dark when the storm starts.

  Not with a bang of thunder but with a high-pitched ringing from Leah’s computer. She jolts awake, and with a noise halfway between a yawn and a snort, starts sleepily mashing things on the keyboard.

  A few seconds later I hear a familiar voice say my name over the computer’s speakers.

  Catelyn.

  I trip in the tangle of choir robes as I get to my feet and race to the front of the monitor. And there she is, confined to a video player in the middle of the screen. The room around her is tiny, cramped and overflowing with metal storage crates. There is a door to her left, and at the moment her ear is pressed against it, her eyes closed in concentration.

  What is she listening for?

  “How did you access this computer?” Leah is staring at the screen in astonishment that matches mine. Catelyn doesn’t answer right away, though, because at that moment she looks back into the camera and sees me, and all she seems able to manage is an odd little choking noise. Then she immediately clamps a hand over her mouth and glances toward the door, as if afraid someone might have heard it.

  “How did you access it?” I repeat.

  She forces her eyes back to mine. Swallows hard and composes herself, and then in a voice so low I can barely hear it, she says, “Promise you won’t get mad?”

  “No. I’m not promising that at all.”

  She frowns, but keeps talking anyway. “The president . . . helped. She doesn’t need to track your communicator to know where you are. Because when she rebuilt you, or fixed you or healed you or whatever, we wanted to make sure you didn’t go disappearing on us again, and without the regular memory uploads or any sort of remote access to your brain, we had to go with a different method.”

  “What method?”

  “Um, they sort of embedded a microchip locator under your skin.”

  I stare at her, speechless and half expecting her to tell me she is kidding. I should know better than that by now, though. Of course it’s true. Of course I never really escaped the CCA at all. I have been carrying them with me, everywhere I went since leaving.

  And I am not supposed to be mad about that?

  “You said we wanted to make sure,” I say, somehow managing a calm voice. “So you’ve known about this all along, and it never occurred to you to tell me?”

  “I just figured it was a harmless chip,” Catelyn continues in a rush. “Anyway, so there it is, and it accesses the nearest network to function, to ping your location, and once I had the network address, I—” She cuts herself off with a sigh. “Look, I don’t have time to explain this right now. There’s a more important reason I went through all the trouble to reach you like this.”

  There’s an audible thump thump from somewhere in the background on her end, a knock on the door, maybe, muffled and unclear through her computer’s standard microphone. She hears it clearly enough, though. It makes her talk even faster. “President Cross isn’t the enemy here. You know that, right? We don’t know who managed to hijack your tracking information and find their way to where you were staying, but obviously we didn’t mean for it to happen.”

  The next thump thump from Catelyn’s side seems even louder.

  “What is that noise?” I ask.

  She turns toward the door, and for the first time I notice the gun she is holding in her right hand. She lifts it and wipes the sliding button on its side. It starts a low, barely audible humming. Charging. “They’ll figure out that electronic lock soon,” she says, more to the gun than us.

  “Who will?” I ask, even though I could probably guess.

  Seth and I are the ones who collected their names and faces, after all.

  Catelyn lifts her eyes back to mine, but all she says is: “It’s started.”

  “You need to get away from there,” I say. “Now.”

  “I think I might have waited too long for that.”

  “Well, I’m coming to get you then.”

  “No!”

  It’s not a thump that interrupts us this time but a low screech: the sound of a blade whining against steel. Apparently whoever is on the other side isn’t bothering with figuring out any locks. They’re simply going to cut their way through.

  “No,” Catelyn repeats frantically. “That’s why I had to reach you, to tell you that you can’t come back here. You or Seth. They’ll kill you if you do—that’s what they want. It’s
why they came after you in the first place: They keep talking about wanting to make an example of you and Seth, like a symbolic slaying of the old president’s show of weakness or something. It’s sick.”

  I lean closer to the screen, wishing I could simply destroy it. That it would somehow destroy the distance between us at the same time. “I don’t care,” I say. “I’m not afraid of them.”

  “Well, I am. Listen: They aren’t going to kill me. Not right away. They want to use me, and Jaxon and the president and now, I guess, Angie, too, to try to get you and Seth here. Don’t let them use us like that. We’ll figure out what to do in here, but for now, you have to stay away.”

  A more intense buzzing of metal being cut. Sparks fly from her left. I hear footsteps, voices, someone whooping in success as a piece of the steel door falls in, flashes across the screen for just a moment before slamming against the floor with a metallic clunk.

  Catelyn clutches the gun to her chest. With her other hand, she reaches and ends the video call.

  “No!” My hand flies at the computer screen, hits it so hard, I am surprised it doesn’t crack it. I want to grab her and pull her back. I want to be where she is. I want to fight whoever was on the other side of that door.

  But instead, I am here and useless and shaking, cut off from her yet again.

  “She’s joking, right?” Seth says. He’s come up so quietly behind me that I didn’t even notice him. “About the stay away part, I mean. She can’t seriously expect us to.” Somehow the words manage to break through to me, even as my mind blurs with desperate plans and an intense hatred for whoever was on the other side of that door.

  I don’t answer him, though. I don’t want to talk. I don’t even want to move my fingers from where they are still splayed against the black video box on the computer screen, as if I could keep our connection going, so long as I refuse to let go.

  Then, to my surprise, a connection attempt message actually appears beneath my fingers. But when I manage to click accept, it’s not Catelyn who greets me.