Struck

by Jennifer Bosworth

  But all of it was background noise compared to the urgent voice shouting in my head, Find Parker! Find Parker!

  I searched the crowd, desperate to see him, but—

  I spotted someone I did recognize, moving toward the melee with a determined look on his face. I grabbed him as he passed.

  Quentin tried to jerk away. Then he saw my face and froze, eyes growing. “Mia? What are you doing here?” He looked at my hand on his arm and grimaced slightly, as though I were hurting him. I wasn’t gripping hard, but Quentin was a Seeker. If I really was emitting some kind of Spark, it must not feel good to him.

  “Where’s my brother!” I shouted at him. “Where’s Parker!”

  He shook his head, seeming dazed. “How should I know?”

  “You brought him here!”

  “No, I didn’t.” His head shaking became more insistent. “If he’s here, he didn’t come with me.” His eyes narrowed. “Who told you I brought him?”

  Realization was clearing out a space in my mind.

  “Katrina,” I said, and Quentin nodded.

  “Sounds like something she would pull.”

  She lied to me. Katrina lied to me. My brother wasn’t here.

  “Where is she now?” Quentin asked.

  “Hopefully getting kicked in the face by an Apostle,” I said. There was no real force behind the words. I was too relieved to be angry. “If you see her, tell her to go to hell. I found another way home.”

  I turned from Quentin to tell Jeremy I was ready to go willingly, but Jeremy was nowhere in sight.

  I clenched my fists, like I meant to join the fight. But there was only one person I wanted to punch right then.

  He’d ditched me. Jeremy had ditched me … again.

  I turned back to Quentin to ask him how he had gotten to the Rove and caught a glimpse of the back of his head before he dove into the fray.

  I was doomed to be reliant on Katrina for a way out of the Waste.

  I had started searching the crowd for her when Jeremy reappeared, and before I could say a word he grabbed me, threw me over his shoulder, and started for the stairwell door.

  I would have fought him.

  I would have kicked and beaten at him until he let me down.

  But almost immediately after he touched me and the heat of him swelled through me, my mind went brilliant white and then plummeted into darkness and then I was—

  —rushing through the Waste, with Jeremy at my side. Hollow buildings watched us with the empty, midnight eyes of their shattered windows. The wind was fierce, tearing at me like it would steal my skin.

  I held myself, bracing against the wind as it hurled cement and glass dust at us, coating our skin and clothes, trying to bury us.

  “Come on!” I said, grabbing Jeremy’s hand and running blindly.

  We sprinted through the torn, rubble-filled streets, eyes closed against the dust and the wind. I didn’t know how long we ran, and I didn’t know where we were going. The wind seemed to choose our direction for us, pushing and pulling us.

  Then, suddenly, the wind stopped, and I could see.

  “No …”

  We stood at the foot of the Tower. I craned my head to see to its top, and I heard music, thumping bass rumbling the whole building, like every floor was wired with massive speakers.

  But when thunder boomed, it drowned the Rove’s bass drive.

  Clouds. Thick and black as the sky, tall as mountains, seethed into being above the massive building.

  Thunder destroyed my thoughts. I felt the charge of the storm. The thrill of the storm.

  “It’s time for me to go,” I said to Jeremy, staring up at the clouds.

  I gasped myself back to the present. Or I thought I did. My eyes were open, but all I saw was a solid wall of black.

  “Mia, are you back?” It was Jeremy’s voice.

  “What did you do to her?” That was Katrina’s.

  Jeremy: “Nothing.”

  Katrina: “You can’t just go throwing girls over your shoulder and carrying them away. Who are you? Why did you run away from us the other day? Are you a spy for the Followers?”

  Me: “What’s going on? Where are we? I can’t see a thing.”

  I blinked and blinked. Shapes started to form in the darkness. I felt the ground. It was cold and hard. Cement. And the wall behind me, the wall I was leaning against, also cement. I reached up and felt a hard, rounded rod. Metal. A handrail.

  “We’re in the stairwell,” Jeremy said.

  I used the handrail to hoist myself to my feet. I kept my hand on the rail, felt the way it slanted upward. I could hear distant shouting from several floors above us, beyond a closed door.

  The Rove was up.

  Parker was up.

  I started to climb, and then remembered … Parker was not at the Rove. Katrina had lied to me. Manipulated me.

  I rounded on Katrina, though I couldn’t exactly see her. “Guess who I ran into upstairs? Quentin,” I said. “And guess what he told me? Oh, wait, you don’t have to guess because you already know, you lying—”

  “Mia, I’m sorry,” Katrina cut in. “I knew I couldn’t get you to come here unless I bent the truth a little.”

  “It’s called lying.”

  “I did what I had to do! We’re running out of time, and I needed you to feel how it is here, in the Waste and the Tower. I thought … I don’t know, that if I just got you here everything would fall into place, and you’d accept your destiny.”

  “Shut. Up.” There was a surprising lack of emotion in my voice. “Just shut up, Katrina. We’re leaving now.”

  “All right,” she said. “Fine, we’ll leave.”

  “Not you,” I said. “Jeremy and me. You can do whatever you want, as long as you stay away from me.”

  “What? Mia, no! You can’t go with him! You don’t know anything about him. He could be a spy!”

  “Are you a spy, Jeremy?” I asked.

  “No,” he said.

  “Then it’s settled. We’re leaving. Don’t follow me, Katrina.”

  “Mia, please—”

  “Let’s go,” I said to Jeremy’s shadow shape.

  I descended into darkness thick as paint, and heard Jeremy’s footsteps echo mine. A third pair of footsteps did not follow.

  25

  SIXTY-EIGHT FLIGHTS of stairs is a lot of stairs to walk down. It seemed like hours passed before we reached the ground level of the Tower. By the time we reemerged into the Waste, my legs were aching and my knees felt like they’d taken a few dozen whacks with a hammer, but that ache was nothing compared to the sensation of electricity crawling over my skin like a horde of biting insects that wanted to eat me alive.

  I held my arms, rubbing them like I was cold, willing the prickling to subside, but it refused.

  “Are you all right?” Jeremy asked, his voice heavy with concern.

  I couldn’t answer that question. I didn’t know what “all right” felt like anymore.

  “I should have listened to you,” I said. “I should never have come here.” I turned to him. “You’re not going to try to kill me again, are you? Can I stop worrying about that now?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I mean no, I’m not going to try to kill you. And, yes, you can stop worrying.”

  “And you’re really not a spy for the Followers, like Katrina thinks?” I asked, eyeing his white pants. “I mean, what kind of guy owns white jeans?”

  Jeremy shrugged. “They seemed Rove-appropriate. Besides, if I were a spy for the Followers, don’t you think I would have found a way to bring you to Prophet by now? It’s not like I haven’t had the chance.”

  I studied his face a long time before accepting his explanation. By the time I finished, I had every feature committed to memory.

  “Where’s your bike?” I asked.

  Jeremy had not parked along the border of the Waste, as Katrina had done, but had entered on one of the ramps and driven almost all the way to the Tower. He’d ended up parki
ng his bike in the Toy District, on the east side of downtown Los Angeles and only a few blocks from the Tower.

  There weren’t many tall buildings in Toy Town, but the district’s proximity to the epicenter of the quake meant destruction on a massive scale. Some of the buildings had collapsed entirely, but most only lost chunks of wall, leaving their interiors exposed. Stores had been picked clean of anything worthwhile. Venders in the Toy District did not deal solely in children’s playthings, but also in electronics, pirated video games, and all manner of designer knockoffs. The vultures had not been interested in cheap, fall-apart toys lovingly lead-painted in faraway lands. The ground Jeremy and I walked over to get to his bike was littered with broken action figures, headless dolls or bodiless doll heads, and torn stuffed animals that bled cotton.

  I spotted a black plastic machine gun, the muzzle crushed and flaking paint shards. I stopped to pick it up, feeling somehow more secure even with a toy weapon in hand. I tested the trigger. Rap! Rap! Rap! I nearly jumped out of my skin and immediately dropped the gun.

  Jeremy shushed me. “The sentries could hear.”

  “Sorry,” I said, cringing. “I didn’t think it would work.”

  Jeremy turned down a dark alleyway, the kind that would have been scary to walk down if not for the fact that every street in the Waste was scary to walk down. “This way,” he said. “Watch your step. There are—”

  My foot came down on something living. It let out a screech and twisted until I leaped off it with a screech of my own. The rat and I scurried in opposite directions, but my foot caught on a crack in the asphalt. My ankle twisted sharply and I nearly fell, catching myself on Jeremy’s arm. The moment we touched, heat enveloped me, but didn’t wash away my consciousness.

  I looked over my shoulder to see the rat squeezing through an exposed pipe, its tail whipping like a spaghetti noodle when you suck it into your mouth. When it was gone, I turned back to Jeremy. The heat radiating off him made it hard to think, but I was still here. Still present. Not stolen away into some strange vision of the Tower and the storm.

  Although I had my feet under me, I continued to cling to Jeremy’s arm—nice biceps, I couldn’t help noticing. His hand rested so lightly on my hip his touch could have been a ghost’s. He wasn’t much taller than me, so our noses were almost in alignment. Inches of nothing separated our mouths. My heart pulsed fire and sent my blood boiling.

  I pulled away from Jeremy, even though I could tell by the rapid rise and fall of his chest and the intensity in his eyes that he burned for me, too. I was inexperienced when it came to this kind of thing, but still I knew he wanted to kiss me. That didn’t really matter, though, did it? If he knew what I looked like, what I really looked like, my body etched in red veins, his desire for me would stop.

  “Why didn’t it happen that time?” I asked.

  “What?” Jeremy sounded dazed, breathless.

  “You know. The visions, or omens, or whatever. They usually happen when—” I bit my lower lip.

  “When I touch you,” Jeremy finished, his voice low, a little unsteady, as though he couldn’t catch his breath. “Usually I can control them,” he said. “Other people don’t always see what I’ve seen when I touch them, not unless I want them to, but … it’s been harder with you.”

  “Oh.” Blood rushed to my cheeks, and various other places. The giddiness in my stomach was a momentary distraction from the crawling on my skin.

  Past Jeremy’s shoulder, I could see his bike parked at the end of the alley. I stepped past him and crossed the dozen yards to it.

  I stood there surveying the machine, and even though I knew nothing about motorcycles, I couldn’t help but be impressed. And terrified. The bike was black and shiny and compact. It looked barely big enough for one person to ride on, let alone the two of us. But Jeremy lifted the seat and removed an extra helmet from the compartment beneath. He handed it to me. I took it, but only stared at it dumbly.

  “Are you okay with this?”

  “I guess I have to be, don’t I?” I raised my eyes to his, chewing my lip. “What if—” I hesitated, uncertain how to proceed with the question. “What if the thing that happens, you know, when we’re touching … what if it happens while we’re on the bike? I could fall off the back.”

  “You won’t,” Jeremy said.

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I have to touch you with my hands for it to happen.” He raised his hands, palms up, as though in surrender. “As long as these stay on the handlebars, you’re safe.”

  “So I can touch you, but you can’t touch me?”

  He nodded, frowning. “For now,” he said, and the implication made my hot blood boil all over again.

  Moments later, I was clamped onto Jeremy’s back with the insides of my thighs pressed against the outsides of his as we hurtled through the Waste at a speed that seemed suicidal considering the state of the roads. But Jeremy handled the bike as expertly as if he’d ridden the chewed-up streets a hundred times before.

  I tensed when we reached the ramp that led out of the Waste, but there were no sentries standing guard and we sailed by without stopping.

  After that, I relaxed into Jeremy’s back as much as I could when we were driving at breakneck speed. I let go and enjoyed the warmth of him radiating against me, telling myself I had no other choice but to feel it, so I might as well enjoy it while I could, because this was as close as Jeremy and I were ever going to get.

  26

  “WANT TO COME inside?” The words surprised even me, and I was the one who spoke them. I’d just climbed off Jeremy’s bike in front of my house, and I felt I had to say something, but thanks for the ride, see you later didn’t seem quite right.

  Jeremy removed his black helmet, leaving his hair wild and practically screaming to be mussed, but I managed to keep my hands to myself.

  “You want me to come in?” Jeremy repeated, and lowered his chin. “Even after …” He didn’t have to finish the sentence.

  I’d decided in the Waste it was time to put the whole murderous intent thing behind us, but the truth was … I didn’t want him to leave yet. My mom and Parker had turned on me. Everyone in the city had gone crazy. Jeremy was the only person in my life who was still on my side, at least when he wasn’t trying to kill me.

  “Weren’t you planning to hang around out here anyway?” I asked. “You know, to keep an eye on me?”

  He peered up at me from under the tangled fall of his hair and nodded so slightly I almost missed the movement.

  “Then you might as well be where you can actually see me,” I reasoned.

  I led him up the front walk, into our dark, silent house, and up the stairs to my attic bedroom. My stomach felt so light, it seemed to be rising in me like a helium balloon. I’d never had a guy in my room before, unless I counted the night when Jeremy broke in and tried to stab me, but I was trying not to think about that.

  I was about to close and lock my bedroom door when I heard Parker’s voice hissing up the stairs. “Mia?”

  My stomach dropped. “Parker,” I mouthed to Jeremy, and held up a finger before heading back down to the first floor.

  “What’s up?” I asked casually, as though there was nothing strange about me sneaking in at four a.m.

  “Where have you been?” Parker demanded in a whisper. “And who’s that guy?”

  “What guy?”

  “The one I saw go up the stairs to your room with you.”

  “Oh, that guy.”

  “He’s the one who ran away from Mr. Kale’s classroom, isn’t he? The Seekers told you to stay away from him, Mia. They said he might be a spy for the Followers.”

  “The Seekers say a lot of things that aren’t true,” I snapped. “Go back to bed and mind your own business.”

  Parker didn’t say anything. He shook his head at me, a silent admonishment. Then he turned and headed back down the hall, leaving me blinking in the dark.

  Jeremy wouldn’t take the bed, even
though I insisted I was too wired to sleep, so I made him a bed out of blankets and my extra pillow on the hardwood floor. He lay down with his motorcycle jacket still zipped to his chin and closed his eyes.

  I stretched out on my bed. Minutes passed. I imagined I could hear a clock ticking.

  I sat up, leaning on my elbow.

  “Jeremy,” I whispered. “Are you asleep?”

  He cracked one eyelid. “No. I’m like you. I don’t need much sleep. Most nights I stay up, reading.”

  “Me, too. I mean it’s hard for me to fall asleep, not that I read a lot. I’m more of a movie person. But I can read, and do, you know, sometimes. I’m not illiterate or anything. I like books.” Why was I still talking?

  “Jeremy?” I asked tentatively.

  “Yes, Mia?”

  The way he said my name, with combined formality and familiarity, made my thoughts go fuzzy. “Um … do you need anything? Food, water?”

  “I’m fine. Thanks.”

  “Okay.”

  He sat up, his wavy hair in his eyes. He pushed it away and removed his glasses, folded them and laid them on my nightstand. “Can’t sleep with these things on.”

  It was surprising how different Jeremy seemed without his blocky Clark Kent glasses. But I couldn’t see him well enough to get a good look at him. The only light in the room came from the pale moon, now low in the sky with the approach of morning. I was reminded of the other time Jeremy had been in my room, but strangely I wasn’t afraid of him anymore. Not even a little.

  “Jeremy,” I said. I liked saying his name. Liked it almost as much as I liked hearing him say mine.

  “Yes, Mia?” There it was again.

  I chewed my lip, reforming the question I wanted to ask over and over in my head. “How do your visions work? Do you ever know if … if something is certain? I mean, set in stone or whatever?”

  “I think of them as possibilities. Some more likely than others.” Jeremy lay back down, but his eyes remained open, staring at the ceiling. “The more often I see a particular vision, the more likely it is to occur.”