I hear Seth curse, and then he tells the rest of our group to lower their weapons. I glance back to see them doing it. It surprises me. Even this outnumbered, they were still planning to fight?
Should I keep fighting?
I could still kill Josh, at least. And likely I could take out a lot more before they decided how to stop me. Especially if they truly do want to keep me alive on the orders of Josh’s father.
“Go ahead and do it,” Josh says. His voice is still strained from my fingers pressing in. “Finish what you started,” he coughs. “You have a bigger audience now and everything.”
I want to. More than I ever did in the training room, on the roof, in that parking garage. And whatever uncertainty I had felt toward him the night we watched him at Huxley is gone. I know exactly what I want now.
Destruction. I thought it on the day I was born, and I am thinking it now. And I still think it is the easiest thing in the world, maybe. To destroy.
“I know you want to,” Josh says.
“Oh, I do,” I assure him. “But I am not a monster.”
So I let him go, and I step back and let the crowd surge over me and drag me away.
• • •
I’ve never experienced dreaming before.
There were things that woke me up at the safe house, of course—but they were never clear like this. I never saw them, or remembered them, and Seth had called them nightmares. This doesn’t seem like a nightmare. Not at first.
But I know I’m dreaming, because I can see myself. A much younger self that I never actually knew, but that I’ve seen before, in pictures and through stories Catelyn has tried to paint for me. And she is there too. Catelyn. Even younger than I am, with her hair in pigtails and dirt smudged on one of her cheeks. We’re both laughing at something like I’ve never laughed before, and the grass we’re lying on is brilliant and green and the sun overhead is blinding.
Then the scene reels and goes dark. My stomach seizes, and it isn’t a dreamlike gut wrenching, but a solid, wide-awake fear at the black loneliness around me.
“Come back,” I hear a voice say. My voice, I realize. Only the younger version of it again. “Come back, come back, come back—”
Then she does. We both do. A little older looking, but still Catelyn and me and that same soft grass. That same warm sun. We’re singing something. It starts out as a silly, high-pitched melody that we’re both giggling too much to remember the proper words to, but soon she starts to hit actual notes, and I go silent and just listen while she finishes. Her voice fades off toward the end, and the blinding light of the sun fades with it, and soon I’m back in that blackness again.
“Come back, come back. . . . I don’t want to be alone here.”
Something hits me in the side. Hard.
My hand strikes toward it, grabs on to what feels like a foot. My eyes blink open, and after a moment of sleepy confusion, I realize that foot belongs to Seth.
“You were mumbling a lot,” he says. “I thought you might have been having another nightmare.”
Was it a nightmare?
“It wasn’t all a nightmare, was it?”
I was wondering the same thing, but it wasn’t me who asked the question. It was Catelyn. I turn and find her staring at me, and I know it isn’t a dream anymore, because her face is still burned—covered partway with a ragged strip of cloth—and, other than that, she looks just like she always has to this version of me. Like brightness and warmth and green eyes glistening with tears that she could shed at any given moment.
“It wasn’t all a nightmare,” she repeats, “because some of the words you were saying . . . some of them sounded familiar. In a good way.”
“Words like song lyrics?” I wonder aloud.
She nods, eyes widening a little more. “From a song our grandma used to sing. I used to sing it while I sat with you after . . . when they were working on you a few months ago, I mean. You were still in that coma. I didn’t think you could hear me.”
I don’t remember hearing her. But there is no other explanation for why I would have been dreaming about those words, so I don’t tell her that.
“How beautiful,” Seth says. “Sorry I interrupted your singing, Violet. But you should know that you’re tone deaf.”
“Shut up, Seth,” Catelyn says. “Didn’t you say you were going to try to figure out that security panel over there?”
“I told you, it’s different from the system that used to be in here. It’s been a long time since me and Jaxon played the lock-each-other-up-in-these-cells game—we’re much more mature than that now.”
“One of you is at least.”
He ignores the stab. “And he was always better at actually escaping than I was, anyway.”
“Well, Jaxon’s not here, is he?” Catelyn says, her gaze dropping to the floor and her fists clenching. “So we’ll have to settle for you. The least you could do is give it a few minutes’ worth of effort, considering how long I spent trying to work on the stupid thing.”
“If you can’t break it, what makes you think I can?” Seth asks, not moving from his spot on the floor.
While they continue to bicker, I finally manage to take my eyes off Catelyn’s burned face. The three of us are the only ones in here, but it’s still cramped. A literal cell—no more than ten feet long, maybe three feet wide, with no windows and only one dim yellow light above. Just a vent of some sort on one wall, and the steel door with an operations panel on the other. Like most of the newer security measures in headquarters though, that panel is usable only if you can first put in one of the correct biometric codes—likely those of the programmer, the president, maybe higher-up heads of security. People who the CCA couldn’t afford to have locked up in the event of an attack on base.
Not us, in other words.
And no matter how many times Seth and Catelyn try to override the program, the status display still remains a stubbornly bright red declaration of SECURE.
“What happened to the others?” I ask, maybe out of some faint hope that they could have gotten away somehow.
“Other cells, I guess,” Seth says. “They blindfolded her,” he adds with a nod at Catelyn, “and I was knocked out as cold as you were before they brought us in here, so neither of us saw. I’m betting nothing good happened, though. They tried to help us, so likely the fanatics are going to call them just as guilty as us. That way they can burn them at the altar with us—because, you know, the more people the revolutionaries have, the bigger their flame will be.”
“Thanks for those cheerful thoughts,” Catelyn says.
“Just being realistic,” Seth replies.
This can’t be how it ends, I think.
I won’t let it end this way.
I jump to my feet and go to the vent on the wall, rip the cover off with an ease that surprises even me.
“We’ve already tried that,” Seth says. “But it’s the oldest escape trick in the book, so of course they’ve built against it. There’s no way we can fit through.”
I hoist myself up to peer inside anyway, but he’s right—the vent opening itself is large enough to climb into, but the channels that stretch out from either side of it are much narrower. I don’t bother reattaching the vent cover. I throw it as hard as I can at the corner of the cell, and it chips into the solid concrete wall with a metallic crash that reverberates through our tiny cell.
Over and over the sound vibrates through me.
Then it begins to change, into more of a tapping at first, and then a slamming that shakes the floor, travels up through my legs and all the way to the tip of my head, shaking in my teeth and sending shivers over my scalp.
My eyes shift from the dented vent cover to the door. There is a second slam against it. Catelyn jumps to her feet beside me, and Seth backs away from the panel he had been vainly messing with again. As we watch, that panel begins flashing, and we hear the taps and beeps of its counterpart on the other side of the door.
“Looks like the
y might be ready to start the bonfire,” Seth says.
I grab Catelyn and push her behind me, make her promise to stay close. Then I take a deep breath, brace myself, and face the door.
“You think you’re going to fight your way through them?” Seth asks.
“If we’re going to burn, we might as well go down in a blaze of glory, right?”
He shakes his head, but he’s smiling a little too. “You’re insane,” he says.
“I know.”
“I like that about you though.”
The panel on the wall flashes one last time. Then it glows bright green, and there’s a sound like air hissing out of a tire as the door in front of us slides open, blinding us with the fluorescent white lights on the other side.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
I’m not sure which one of us manages to adjust our eyes to the awful brightness first, but Catelyn is the first to move. She races past me, straight into the crowd of people blocking our exit. I’m a fraction of a second too slow when I try to grab her.
That same gut-wrenching fear from my dream tears through me again.
Come back.
I’m about to shout it out loud when I recognize a face a few feet back in the crowd.
“Jaxon?” Seth pushes past me and joins Catelyn, who now has her face buried in his brother’s chest. I feel like Seth’s voice is probably the only thing that could have torn Jaxon’s eyes away from the bandage on Catelyn’s face—and it does, though not exactly quickly. He is slow to focus on Seth, too. Slow and careful, like he is afraid of making the wrong move. The rest of the group Jaxon brought with him, who have to number at least as many as the ones who ambushed us in the north wing, all take a few steps back to give them some breathing room.
It’s Seth who finally breaks the silence that is bordering on awkward. “It’s about time you showed up,” he says with his trademark grin, offering Jaxon his hand.
“I am so incredibly pissed at you,” Jaxon says. But then he sighs, and he shakes Seth’s hand anyway. “You weren’t supposed to come, you idiot. And as soon as we finish dealing with everything here, I’m going to kick your ass for it.” The threat makes Seth laugh. He pulls Jaxon into a one-armed hug, which lasts until I clear my throat impatiently.
“Speaking of dealing with everything that’s going on,” I say.
“Right,” Jaxon says, “here’s the plan.” He glances over the crowd of us with a renewed, sharp focus as he talks, and it reminds me of the way his mother used to look. The way I thought she always looked, until that first night I saw her alone. And just like his mother, he delivers orders easily, sharp and quick and not leaving any room for protest—at least until he turns to me. “I want you to take your sister out of here,” he says. “Most of the rebels have been backed up toward the training rooms now, and we’ve secured everything in the north and east wings, so you should be able to sneak out that way.” Catelyn is in the middle of looking over a gun someone just handed her, but she is close enough to hear him, and she turns and answers him before I can.
“I’m not leaving,” she says, and holds up the gun. “I want to fight.”
“We have enough people ready to fight,” he says as the group around us disperses, heading off to secure the next areas they’ve been assigned to. “We don’t need you here, and I don’t want you here. It’s too dangerous.” Catelyn gives him a stubborn frown, but she doesn’t seem able to come up with a convincing excuse to stay.
“I was already planning on getting her out of here first,” I say, and I can feel Catelyn glaring at me, but I don’t take my eyes off Jaxon. “But then I’m coming back.”
“I’d rather you didn’t.”
“I have things to settle here.”
“I’ve seen the way you settle things.” He steps closer to me, and for once the look he watches me with isn’t wary or guarded in any way; it’s just as it was a moment ago: focused, determined. He’s changed. Hardened, somehow, since the last time I saw him. I wonder what these past months have been like for him, while he watched his mother lose her grasp on the power they were both so used to. Is it why he feels as if he needs to confront me like this?
I feel something like sympathy for him, maybe. For the way he has had to inherit this war from his mother.
But I am not sympathetic enough to let it control me.
“If you’ve seen it,” I say, “then you should know better than to stand in my way.” I step back and go to move around him, but he stops me with a hand on my shoulder, shoving me back.
“You’re going to take her to her father’s,” he says. “And then you’re not coming back. I’m not letting you turn this into the same mess you made back at Huxley’s laboratory.” I resist the urge to return his shove, mostly because those last words catch my attention.
“What mess?”
“She didn’t make it,” Catelyn says quietly.
“Close enough,” Jaxon says, and suddenly all the CCA members who are still nearby seem to be paying attention to our conversation, and they are all either nodding in agreement or else watching me as if they only wished they had the courage to really tell me what they thought about me.
As if they needed to tell me.
Here I am, standing in the middle of who I thought were the tolerant ones, the ones I planned to help, and nothing has changed. I am somehow still on the outside of anything they could ever accept or understand. One of the few people I thought did understand—Seth—suddenly seems much farther away than the few feet he is actually standing. He looks much more torn about the issue than the others, but he also isn’t saying anything, so what does it matter? It feels enough like betrayal. From someone I never even wanted to care about being betrayed by. Which somehow makes it even worse.
“Fine,” I say. “I’m not coming back. Have fun trying to fight this battle without me.” Why should I help them, anyway? If this is the way it’s always going to be in the end, then why bother trying? I shouldn’t even have hesitated to just take Catelyn and leave and never look back; she is the only one who seems capable of remembering that at least some part of me is human, after all.
And when I grab the gun Seth offers me and turn to leave, she forgets her argument with Jaxon and follows me soundlessly. Of course, I feel like she is only going along with me now because she’s worried. Because maybe I can only take so many hurtful words and glares, and it was inevitable that one of them would eventually cause a break. And Catelyn is good at spotting broken things.
“They just don’t know how to deal with you,” she says as we turn down an empty hallway, our guns drawn as a precaution. “You’re just a . . . what’s the word? An enigma. Yeah. That.”
“Let’s stop talking and start paying attention to getting out of here alive, shall we?”
“I am paying attention.”
It’s hard not to let my own attention slip and my guard fall in these quiet halls, though. The few people we’ve passed so far seem like stragglers, more interested in trying to pretend they aren’t here than in trying to stop us; a few of them look like they might be thinking of following us, but probably only to escape themselves. Jaxon was right about this much: The fighting has been contained somewhere behind us. I still feel strange walking away from it, surrounded by this peace. Uneasy.
Because it may be surrounding me now, but something tells me it won’t last. Could it ever last? I wonder. The fight can be contained, maybe. But the anger and hate that is fueling it will still leak out, just as it always does, and make a mess of things all over again.
A mess of things.
Like Jaxon accused me of making at Huxley.
“What was Jaxon talking about before, exactly?” I ask Catelyn. “About what happened at the laboratory.”
“It doesn’t matter,” she says stiffly.
“It matters to me.”
“Well, it wasn’t actually you that did it.”
“It was the old Violet?”
“Yes.”
“The same Vi
olet with the father and the memories of us you wanted me to call mine?”
It takes her a moment, but then she gets my point. “God, you’re annoying,” she says. Because she can’t argue what we both understand now: that I can’t pick and choose which parts of my past to keep and which parts to get rid of—even if it would be easier to get rid of some of them, like Seth said. Real people can’t do that. So it doesn’t seem like I should be able to either. Not if I want to pass as one of those real people.
“Okay, you really want to know the truth?” Catelyn asks after a moment.
“I’ve never wanted anything but.”
“Most of the CCA thinks you had something to do with the fire that burned down Huxley’s laboratory. And a lot of them, even the ones that trust and are still following President Cross, were afraid you might end up doing the same thing here. It’s part of why the decision to bring you back was so unpopular.”
And this is one of those moments when my brain is a curse, because everything connects in it almost instantly, and suddenly I understand. Suddenly I hear so many things from these past months so much more clearly.
I see Josh, walking toward me on the rooftop.
They didn’t have to pay me for this. I’ve been planning this ever since you woke up.
I see his father, dragging him away from the gates at Huxley.
His mom was there. Her name was Michelle, I think.
I don’t realize I have stopped walking until Catelyn reaches the end of the hallway without me. Even then, the distance between us isn’t obvious right away.
Not until I see people I recognize—people who were there when Jaxon set us free. People who I thought were following his orders and had set off to secure other parts of the building.
Which is why the guns they have pointed at Catelyn don’t make sense.
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