by Tarah Benner
“I know. You took a bullet for me.”
He shrugged, wincing. “I’d do it all again.”
I squeezed his hand. “Just hang in there, okay? We’re going home.”
As I said those words, my heart sank a little because I had no idea where “home” was anymore. I forced myself not to think of the future — only about getting Amory to Shriver and getting us out of this city.
A few minutes passed with Amory slipping in and out of consciousness, and I heard the rumble of an SUV.
I flew out of the closet and ran outside. The Xterra was blazing toward the building through a huge swarm of carriers, mowing down any that crossed in its path.
Roman was white-knuckling the steering wheel, and Greyson looked as though he might be sick. I realized Roman wasn’t hitting the carriers on purpose — there was just no other way to get through the huge mob.
He stopped the car, parking parallel to the marble stairs, and Greyson jumped out and ran toward me. The look on his face sent a shiver down my back: sheer ruthless determination devoid of emotion.
Greyson was shutting down.
I followed him back inside. Without a word, he lifted Amory from behind the shoulders, and I grabbed his feet. Amory awoke, wincing in pain as we shifted him, and I forced myself not to look at his face. Roman was standing outside the SUV, fending off encroaching carriers with his fists.
Two stray carriers staggered toward me, and I dropped Amory’s feet for a moment.
My elbow jutted out and connected with the nearest carrier’s jaw. He groaned, and I stomped my boot down above his knee cap, bringing him to the ground. My arm flew out on its own again, my fist striking the second carrier. She wailed, and I grabbed her by the shoulders so I could lodge my knee in her gut.
Greyson was staggering under Amory’s weight, so I pushed the carrier aside and ran to help him hoist him into the backseat.
Greyson jumped in the car, and I called out to Roman.
He was no longer fighting, but five more carriers were ambling up the marble steps toward him.
“Roman!” I yelled.
He was in a daze.
“Roman!” I called again. He didn’t move.
I grabbed the rifle lying across the front seat and turned it on the carriers. The kickback stung my shoulder, and Roman seemed to come back to life. He kicked one of the carriers out of the way and threw out his fist to take out another. Then he climbed into the driver’s seat as I picked off the last two, his big hands shaking as he pulled on his seatbelt.
I dropped the gun and jumped in, feeling the bile rise up in my throat. I didn’t have the stomach for killing anymore.
“I have to fix this,” Roman groaned, putting the vehicle into reverse and pulling out around the dead carriers.
“What?”
I wanted to be patient — sensitive to the agony he must be feeling — but we needed to forget about hitting carriers and get the hell out of here.
“All this time I’ve been hating them.” Roman nodded toward a carrier that was bent over a dead officer, tearing at his jugular. “When I should have been trying to stop Aryus.”
I glanced over at him and was startled to see a muscle working in his jaw as though he might cry.
I looked away. I couldn’t think about Logan, all the people we’d killed, or all the people I would still kill just to get my friends to safety.
“You did stop him,” I said quietly.
Roman shook his head, reaching into his pocket to pull out the extra syringes. “It’s not enough.”
“No,” I sighed, staring down at my blood-soaked sleeves. “It’s never enough.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
After the last base fell, it wasn’t difficult to find the rest of the rebels.
They had taken over an enormous hotel far enough removed from the fighting to shelter the injured rebels and refugees who had fled the communes. There were guards stationed all around the block, fending off stray carriers that had wandered from the horde.
When Roman pulled up to the circle drive, two rebels toting a stretcher appeared to help us extricate Amory from the car. He was barely conscious by the time they lifted him out of the backseat, and I worried that the move had been too much for him.
We followed the men into the hotel lobby, and my eyes settled on an unusual sight. Rebels were sitting with escaped commune dwellers. People in white and black were bunched together between potted plants on the green loveseats, shaking, sobbing, laughing, and holding one another. They had tracked blood and dirt all over the polished parquet floor. The bewildered hotel staff were flitting around with carafes of hot coffee, setting out trays of bagels and cream cheese, and discreetly trying to mop up the foyer.
We followed Amory’s stretcher into the grand ballroom, where twenty or so rollaway beds had been lined up to form a hospital ward. Most were already occupied by injured rebels, and Shriver was flitting from bed to bed, looking harried but completely in her element.
Doctor Carson was also bent over a bed, and it warmed my heart to see Shriver sharing the space with him. Despite their differences, they were fighting for the same thing.
When Shriver spotted us, a smile broke over her face. “I can’t believe it,” she said, coming toward us. “I never thought you’d make it. Honestly.”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” grumbled Roman. I knew the cure had to be taking hold because he looked a little nauseated.
“Amory’s hurt,” I said. “He’s been shot. Actually, most of us have been shot.”
“Where’s Logan?” she asked.
I swallowed. “She didn’t make it.”
Instantly, Shriver dropped her veil of cool efficiency, and she directed the men with the stretcher toward a table surrounded by a decorative bamboo partition.
I refused to leave Amory’s side as Shriver removed his bandages and extracted the bullet fragments. At one point, Amory passed out from the pain, but I held his hand and listened for the ding of metal on metal as the fragments hit Shriver’s tray.
Roman watched the operation slumped in an armchair, and Doctor Carson came over to treat his gunshot wound. I caught Shriver shooting Roman concerned looks. She didn’t know he had taken the cure, but it was written all over his face. He had witnessed Logan’s terrible recovery, and I knew he was anticipating the weeks or months of fever and sickness and possible loss of motor function.
After an hour, he fell asleep, his hand curled in his pocket with the extra syringes. I was grateful for the cure, not just because Roman wouldn’t turn, but because he now had a purpose that would carry him through the months to come.
Doctor Carson insisted on cleaning my wound, and once Amory had passed out from the painkillers, I looked around for Greyson. He was nowhere in sight.
I asked the Canadian teenager at the front desk, who told me he had given Greyson a room. When a new wave of rebels staggered through the front door and distracted the boy, I swiped the master key and went upstairs.
The hotel was eerily quiet away from the chaos of the lobby and ballroom. I found Greyson’s room and knocked softly on the door. He didn’t answer.
Fitting the key card into the lock, I tried to think what I would say to him, but there was nothing I could say. There were no words for what had happened.
The door swung open. It was dark inside the room, except for the light coming through the open curtains. The room had a window that went nearly all the way from the floor to the ceiling, and Greyson was lying in bed on top of the covers, staring out at the night sky.
I didn’t blame him. I didn’t like the room’s oppressively low ceiling, the nondescript walls, or the pristine burgundy carpet. After months of camping outdoors and living on the farm, the inside of a hotel felt fake — too clean.
I pulled back the covers and lay down beside him, watching a lone car speeding down the road. It was strange how few of the skyscrapers were lit up. Most had been overtaken by the PMC, and now they stood empty.
; “I’m sorry,” I whispered, not knowing what else to say.
“I should have been there, Haven,” he mumbled.
“No. There was nothing you could have done.”
“How did it happen?” His voice was overly accusatory, but I shoved down my guilt.
“It was Mariah,” I said.
I explained how she had been guarding Aryus’s chamber — how she had turned on him, only to return moments later to kill us.
“So she lied?” Greyson asked when I had finished. His voice was muffled and watery, and I knew he was crying.
“No,” I said honestly. “I really don’t think she was lying at all. We could have easily killed Aryus the second we walked through the door. He wasn’t armed.
“I think she realized she had been betrayed but had nowhere else to go. She couldn’t trust the rebels, the PMC, or Aryus, but she probably believed the rebels would lose, and she wanted to align herself with power.”
Greyson shifted to stare at the ceiling, and I watched a lone tear slide down the side of his face.
“Do you think she loved me?”
“Yes,” I said automatically.
It didn’t feel like a lie — even after what Logan had said right before she died. I truly believed that if Logan had lived, she and Greyson would have been together.
Greyson nodded, drawing in a shaky breath. “God, she was impossible sometimes.”
I smiled, thinking of Logan arguing with Greyson just to get a rise out of him. “She was.”
“I’m going to miss her so much. I can’t believe she’s gone.”
“I know.”
I stayed with Greyson for a long while, listening to the sound of his breathing and squeezing his hand when he cried. Taking part in Greyson’s pain was exhausting, but it gave me a purpose. I couldn’t stop to think, because when I did, I knew I would fall apart.
For the next week, I slept very little. I shuffled from bedside to bedside, administering Amory’s pain medication and forcing Greyson to eat. I watched the rebels draw out the last remaining PMC officers from Greyson’s window, and more commune refugees showed up.
They were pale and broken, and they brought news of the revolution. The carriers had been contained to one quadrant of the city. Ida was evacuating the last communes in the region and working with the Canadian government to grant them safety until they could return to the states.
I listened to the staticky radio in the hotel lobby, and I knew the rebels from the west were traveling to Sector X to drive out the last of the PMC there.
One evening, I was on the verge of dozing off in my favorite chair in the lobby, enjoying the cool, rainy breeze sneaking in through the sliding glass door.
I heard a voice calling me from a distant place in my memory — a home that smelled like summer.
I opened my eyes and saw the back of a woman standing at the front desk. She was clearly a refugee from the communes, but she was wearing a gray raincoat over the telltale white scrubs. She had a flimsy backpack slung over one shoulder, and the lanky little girl next to her had her elbows resting on the counter, watching the young desk attendant sort out the room keys.
As the woman turned, I caught a good look at the messy curls that framed her face and those warm brown eyes that were so familiar.
The girl was unfairly tan, considering it was early spring, with a long curly ponytail and huge chocolate eyes.
“Mrs. Frey?” I blurted.
The woman turned cautiously, and from the man’s confused look and her panic, I knew instantly she had used an alias to book a room. She studied me for a long second, her brain working to connect two very separate worlds.
“Oh my god. Haven?”
Before I knew what I was doing, I was out of the chair and launching myself into her arms.
I didn’t think about how I must look — tangled hair, borrowed clothes, and bedraggled from days without sleep — but she didn’t seem to notice. Her arms held me tightly with the gentle care only a mother can manage.
When I pulled away, she seemed unsurprised to see me in rebel black, and her eyes filled with tears.
“I know you,” said the girl with a voice like a bell.
“I know you, too,” I said.
“You’re Haven . . . Greyson’s friend.”
“That’s right, Dani.”
Mrs. Frey looked absolutely beside herself. She smiled weakly and let out two full breaths before asking the question I knew she had been dreading the answer to.
“Is he . . . Is he alive?” She spoke the word quietly, as though Dani’s eleven-year-old ears couldn’t hear them if she whispered.
“Yes!” I said, laughing with relief. “He’s alive.”
The look on her face was enough to make it all worth it — the revolution, killing Aryus, losing a part of myself in the process. For once, I did not have to deliver the news that a loved one was dead. I got to bring Greyson back to his mother and sister.
“Do you know where I can find him?”
I laughed again, the grin almost hurting as it stretched muscles in my face that I hadn’t used for weeks. “Yes! He’s here.”
Suddenly, Mrs. Frey’s look of joy was replaced by a quiet fear. After all this time, she was so close, and she probably didn’t want to let herself hope.
I marveled at how much she resembled Greyson. Their eyes were identical: loving but guarded. She had his unruly curls and caramel skin. An older Dani could have been his twin.
“Why don’t you go get settled,” I said, thinking of Greyson lying in the dark, completely dead to the world.
I couldn’t let his mother see him like that. Not after nearly a year apart. “I’ll bring him to your room in a few minutes.”
She nodded, wiping the tears that threatened to spill over with a shaky hand. Dani was jumping up and down, nearly pulling her mom’s arm out of its socket in her excitement.
I left them in the lobby and tore up the stairs to Greyson’s room. I shoved the key in the slot and barged in without knocking.
Greyson was still right where I’d left him: lying on his bed fully clothed, staring up at the ceiling.
“Get up!” I nearly shouted.
He turned his head to face me, intrigued by my breathless voice and the excitement on my face.
“Hurry!” I yelled, springing onto his bed and jostling him.
He rubbed his eyes lethargically, hair sticking up in the back.
I grabbed his arm and pulled him out of bed.
“Get in the shower! You won’t believe who’s here!”
He stood there, arms hanging limply at his sides, and I wanted to hit him. Yes, I knew he was grieving, and my heart broke for him every time I looked in those eyes. But he wasn’t the only one who had lost Logan — just the only one who seemed to have died right along with her.
His look of emptiness turned to irritation when he caught me staring at him, and he gave a heavy shrug and slumped back down on the bed.
“Go away, Haven. I don’t want to see anybody.”
“Yes, you do,” I said, unable to rein in my enthusiasm.
“No.”
“Greyson, your mom and Dani are here.”
He looked up at me, a wrinkle appearing between his brows. “Shut up.”
“Really. I was just sitting in the lobby, and they walked right in the front door.”
“I said shut up, Haven!”
His voice was angrier than I’d ever heard it, and I took a step back, bumping into the wall.
“I know you’re desperate to get me up and at ’em so you can stop thinking about Logan, but that’s just about the shittiest thing you’ve ever done.”
His words felt like a slap. Without thinking, without pausing to explain, my fist flew out and decked him across the face. He lurched backward, smacking his head against the fake hotel headboard, and looked up at me.
What was that gleam in his eye? Satisfaction? Amusement?
“I’m being serious. Your mom and Dani are getting set
tled in their room right now. I told them you’d come see them in a few minutes. But I won’t bring you to them like this. You look like shit.”
“Are they really here?” he asked in a scratchy voice.
“Yes.”
He tried to smile, but his shoulders sagged in defeat. He knew he’d been a ghost for the last week. He’d only eaten the food I’d shoved under his nose, and judging by the rank mustiness of the room, he hadn’t so much as showered since we’d been here.
“I’m sorry I hit you,” I said. “But you have got to pull it together.”
He sighed, and I continued. “We all lost her, Greyson. But Logan would kick your ass if she saw you moping around like this. This isn’t grieving. This is you wishing you were dead, too. She wouldn’t want this for you. She told me.”
Greyson pulled in a shaky breath. “Yeah . . . that sounds like her.”
He sagged against the headboard, his shoulders drawn in so tight that he looked like a little kid. I sank down beside him and put an arm around him.
Then the sobs came — horrible, dry sobs — and I realized how much Greyson had changed since he was taken from Columbia. Now the revolution was nearly over, and he had nothing to redirect his focus. He had suffered as much as I had, and he was broken.
But now his mom and Dani needed him.
I let him cry for a few more minutes, stroking his messy hair, and then I shoved him in the bathroom and went to round up some clean clothes from the donation bin in the lobby. They wouldn’t be his clothes, but at least they would be clean.
I fished out a well-worn pair of jeans and a light-blue T-shirt I thought he’d look good in. Then I waited outside the bathroom while he fussed over his clothes and his overgrown, shaggy hair. I called through the door that he should shave, and he muttered an irritated stream of words that sounded like reluctant agreement.
When he finally emerged, I swallowed down the urge to tell him how handsome he looked. There wasn’t much to be done to hide the dark shadows under his eyes or the strain to his smile, but he was clean-shaven, dressed, and up and about with a new purpose.
Secretly, I smiled because I knew Logan would wolf-whistle and cock her head to the side in the flirty way she always did.