by Seth Fishman
“Brayden, my boy, I knew I could count on you.”
21
SUTTON’S NOT ALONE. HE’S STANDING WITH A HALF dozen of his soldiers, each unmasked, each armed with serious-looking firepower, big heavy machine guns that I’m sure have impressive-sounding names. As if they expected us to come packing heat. Or, more realistically, as if they were expecting to have to storm the place.
Brayden stares at the floor. Sutton ruffles his hair with affection.
I don’t have to ask Brayden to figure out what’s going on. All I want to do is scream, but first I need to hold back from vomiting. Really—my stomach is queasy, and I’m so hot all of a sudden I think I’m going to pass out.
“What the fuck?”
“Now, Mia,” Sutton drawls. “That’s no way to greet a friend.” He’s still in his jeans and fleece, like he’s never once changed since I first met him, which seems like so long ago. But something seems off about him, different. He appears aged by the ordeal—his skin has an unhealthy pallor, and his eyes are bloodshot. But his apparent exhaustion does nothing to dampen the enthusiasm in his voice.
“You’re not my friend,” I reply woodenly. Sutton’s troops fan out and take positions against the nearest greenhouse walls, then move to secure the room. One stays behind at the door, most likely to guard their entrance. Do they even realize how easy it’s going to be to take the place over?
“Little Kish, your father’s daughter. Where is he? Where is everyone?” He runs his hand through his hair like he did last time I saw him, his nerves shot.
I don’t answer. Why would I?
“Son?” he says, squeezing Brayden’s neck. He’s not his real father, so the term sounds creepy.
“I don’t know where he is . . .” Brayden speaks through clenched teeth. “Mia,” he goes on, his voice desperate, “I didn’t want to do this!” His cheeks flush, and his eyes plead.
I’m almost blind with anger. Brayden meant to betray me all along. That’s why he kept apologizing. That’s why he didn’t want me to come.
“Brayden.”
It takes me a moment to realize his name slipped from my lips. A whisper, almost inaudible. I can feel my own pathetic pain as I desperately piece the clues together. He was separated at the Manor, of course, working with Sutton. And that whole time, he was probably getting some medical help for the injury I caused when I kicked in his face. He probably was eating good food and Sutton was with him, whispering in his ear, detailing the Cave’s floor plan and his strategy. I feel manipulated and used, and I slap him. Hard. So hard that a mark is already welling on his cheek from my fingernails. My hand stings, but the pain feels good. He doesn’t say anything, just puts his hand to his face and takes a step back.
Sutton looks disgusted by the two of us, as if being in the middle of our squabble is beneath him. “Boy, did you find the vial?” he asks.
Brayden shakes his head.
“Shame,” Sutton replies. I feel the knife in my hand and wonder if I could pull it out and throw it at him. “I would have sent a soldier with you to help your parents.”
Why did Brayden lie? I wonder. Why did he give me the vial and the key card? What even is the point, if Sutton’s here to steal the water? Brayden’s staring at me, his expression blank, my hand outlined in red on his face.
Sutton glances at his man guarding the door and motions him forward.
“Keep him here until we’re back.”
“Yes sir,” shouts the guard. I realize, suddenly, that they aren’t wearing hazmat suits, as if they’ve given up pretending the suits worked. The guard’s a fierce-looking man, his uniform dark and imposing, and his helmet tight against his forehead and his body weighted with equipment. He takes Brayden by the arm and leads him to the exit. The other five soldiers return now, shouting all clear, and they take positions, creating a path and direction for Sutton to take.
“And you.” He points to another soldier. This one is short and dumpy, and I can see sweat through his uniform. But his eyes are intense and his expression serious, and I’m somehow more afraid of him than the others. “Bring her with us.” The soldier grabs my arm roughly, and I try to pull away, but it’s a steel grip, cutting off my circulation.
“Move on, men. We have to hurry.” Sutton starts forward, but he’s stepping with a hobble. And then it hits me. He has aged since I saw him last. I reinspect his face and can see the ashen sag of skin, the longer graying hair. He’s infected. And since he’s older than us, things are moving quickly. Suddenly, I realize why the vial in my pocket is worth so much. Every second for Sutton is an exponential moment of his life lost.
“Sutton,” I call out, my voice singsongy, “what about Veronica?”
He stops and stares at me.
“Yeah, what are you going to do to her in your master plan? After you kill my dad? Are you going to kill her too?”
“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“She said they shouldn’t have let you go,” I say, repeating her words, bending her intent. Sutton’s face shows a stormy mixture of emotions. His hands begin to shake and his body looks smaller, hunched in on itself. They must have really loved each other once. He swallows, and his eyes slant. He’s going to hurt someone. It might be me. He takes a step my way.
I fight the panic off my chest and pull out the vial. “You looking for something?” I raise the glass above my head, as far away from the soldier’s reach as possible, and tell him to let me go. The guy looks about to break my neck, but Sutton shouts at him to release me. As soon as he does, the blood pours into my arm, making me woozy.
“Give it to me, Kish.” His voice is menacing. I have never heard it with such an edge. He pulls a gun from his holster and trains it between my eyes. “Give it to me now!”
“You listen to me,” I spit out, letting all the rage I feel at Brayden flow through my veins. “This is the last known sample of water from the well, water that can save your life, and you don’t know for sure if it’s coming back today or not. No one does.” I can only hope the bluff holds long enough to make this work . . . “So put your gun down and back off.”
Sutton’s men shift uneasily. He’s about to say something when he begins to cough, hacking hard enough to double over. He spits some blood onto the ground and groans. I never thought I’d be happy to see someone sick.
Sutton shakes his head, clearly restraining himself. His tendons bulge from his neck.
For a moment, I think he’s going to do it, have his men put their guns down. Maybe I could get them to back out the door. Without them here, we’d have a chance. I could get away and warn my dad. I could pull the knife that’s in my jacket and try to hurt him. But Sutton’s less of an idiot than I want him to be. He raises his gun again.
“No, little Kish. I don’t buy it. Give me the vial now, or I’ll shoot you and take it.”
He might or might not be bluffing. But there’s no way for Sutton to know, at least at this time and place, if I’m telling the truth about the water.
Brayden’s looking small. His face is still red, his scar standing out brightly against his skin, and he’s watching me from the exit. I look at him and can’t feel a thing.
“Screw it.” My words come out no louder than a breath. I bend my knees and launch the vial straight up in the air.
I take a split second to watch it twist, glinting off a light fixture, and try not to think about how Sutton should just shoot me before he tries to catch it.
And then I’m running.
I have maybe fifteen yards before I get to cover (what little there is behind a building made of glass). I run, literally feeling my feet push off the earth. There’s a loud crack and I feel something brush past my head. I duck and keep going, getting closer to the glass, and then, miraculously, I’m there. I can’t stop to look, that would be stupid, so I’m weaving through the greenhouses and final
ly, almost reassuringly, I can hear more gunshots and glass cracking all around me. They don’t know where I am, so they’re just shooting, and I run low, as fast as I can manage, pushing toward the tunnel.
I’m hoping that they actually caught the vial. That would slow them down, as Sutton would want to open it right there and drink it down. Or maybe it would be even better if no one caught it and it broke on the rocks and Sutton is even now licking muddy dirt from the floor. But there’s no way I’ll know. All I can know is that I have to run fast. I take a breath, turn my head and let it out. My legs begin to burn, but I just turn my head and breathe. My ski clothes are my drag suit, and my sweat the pool.
I hit the tunnel at full speed and am probably a hundred yards in when a pair of hands grabs me. I scream and flail out, but then I see that it’s Rob, hushing me, pulling me into a corner.
Jo’s with him, eyes panicky.
“What are you doing here?” I shout, almost unable to speak. “We have to go!”
Rob looks apologetic. “You never came back, so we went looking for you.”
“Where are Odessa and Jimmy?”
“We told them to split up and that we’d meet them back at the rec room. I have no idea where they are.”
“We don’t have time to find them. Sutton’s here, through the back door. We have to warn my dad,” I say, my voice frantic, my eyes shifting behind me.
“Where’s Brayden?”
“Not now!” I say, my voice acid.
Jo controls herself and doesn’t ask anything more. “Okay, Mia,” she says. “Let’s go.”
We move, sprinting from tunnel to tunnel, and I don’t hear any more gunshots or any boots behind us. But that doesn’t mean a thing. Brayden knows these tunnels better than I do, and they’ll be coming.
“Where’s your dad?” Rob calls as we go.
“At the well!” I reply, sure of it.
“Do you think they have guns?” Jo asks. “Can they protect themselves?”
I don’t answer. Nothing to do now but keep going. I’m worried about my dad, about Jimmy and Odessa and even Veronica—and Chuck, who might still be unconscious. But everything we ask now we’ll know the answer to soon enough. If, that is, we can beat seven grown men in a footrace.
And then we hear them. Calling behind us. Sutton and his men, all shouting my name. I have heard this before. It’s a memory I didn’t know I had. “Miaaaaaaaaaa! Miaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” Dad shouted it down the well when I first fell in. For some reason it sounds the same here, the voices echoing off the walls. Coming closer and closer. And now we can hear the boot steps, the running. What if Odessa and Jimmy are caught? What if Dad isn’t at the well?
So I scream, I scream to warn him and to make me move faster and to scare them behind us as much as they are scaring me. Rob and Jo prove their love for me and maybe also their own fear by screaming too. We fly like banshees down the mountain, waking up the sleeping rock itself. And that’s when we come to the fork in the path.
“Which way?” I pant.
“Left!” Rob shouts, and we have no time, so we go. I only hope they didn’t hear him shout our direction.
My lungs are about to burst, but suddenly we are there. A dead end.
“The elevator!” Rob points, and we hurry to the door, where I fumble with Chuck’s key card and then enter the code. I hope Veronica hasn’t come this way and changed it. I jump up and down on my feet. Come on come on come on. And a light beeps green, and the doors open. We hurry inside and press the button, sealing us in. There’s a slam as something rams into the door. Jo screams, and I almost barf my heart up. But the door holds, and the elevator descends. It moves slowly, again with no perceptible direction. When it dings and prepares to open, I have a horrifying vision of us having never moved, and the door opening to Sutton and his gun pointed at my head. Thankfully, we’re in the right place. My heart slinks back down into my chest, and we go running down the ramp.
“Jam the door,” I yell at Rob as I lunge ahead. He stays there, leaving his foot in the door, not allowing it to close.
The Cave. The lights are bright, and the well is full of water, the brightest blue water I’ve ever seen, as if there’s a lamp in the well, like in a swimming pool. Nothing is there but dead trees and huge water pumps, all shut off, and a strange buzzing to the air. No Dad. No Veronica. Jo and I hurry down toward the water, and I see that the buzz is actually from insects, many of them, flipping around the water, the liquid already providing life to some creatures. Where are Dad and Veronica? Maybe they heard the gunshots and locked themselves in a bunker for safety. Or they are in one of the dozens of rooms I haven’t seen, slipping on bulletproof vests and loading their firearms. But the fact that Dad’s not here, after all this time . . . it can’t be right. Something’s wrong. Something beyond the fact that Brayden is the devil.
“What do we do now?” Jo asks frantically. We’re at a dead end, standing at the edge of the pool. I try to think, but keep on taking in the water. There’s nowhere to go. No way to make sure we warn the others. Just a darn hole. A well in the ground.
“Mia!” Rob calls from the elevator. “They’re banging on the ceiling. I think they’re trying to get through! What if they drop a grenade or something!”
“I don’t know! Take off your shoe and leave it in the door and get away from there.”
I don’t watch to see if he’s following my order. My eyes are desperate, looking for a way out. Maybe a tunnel that leads farther into the mountain. Anything! Rob huffs up and immediately begins cupping a handful of water and splashing it at Jo. “Hurry—you too, Mia,” he calls. “It could help us, maybe, if we get shot.”
Not sure that’s how it works, or if that was a sentence I wanted to hear, but I’m not going to argue, so we all suck it down, the water as cold and refreshing as anything I’ve ever imagined. It’s like suddenly the panic in my body just disappears, and the ache in my legs and my feet and my lungs fades, and my breathing slows, and I can think, clearer than ever. My vision, even, I can feel my eyes sharpening, the room growing clearer, my hearing more sensitive, and I know they are arguing about what to do with the elevator. Even my sense of smell is sharper, and I feel the crook of my broken nose to find it straightened, the bump no longer there. I impulsively long for a mirror. Rob and Jo are going through the same thing, Jo rolling her right arm around in its socket, testing her chest, breathing deeply, a look of surprise and satisfaction on her face. Rob keeps squinting, and I lean over and pull his glasses from his face. He stares around with a look of awe. The water healed his eyes; he can see perfectly, and while I don’t have any superpowers—I don’t think—it’s clear that I’m firing on all cylinders. My body is in the best physical condition it could ever be. Despite what might be my impending death, I feel incredible.
And I laugh to show it. We all do. Just once—we aren’t crazy—but there’s a need to let this feeling burst forth, and we all revel in it, one huge guffaw before our time runs out.
“Not much longer,” Rob says, and we stand, looking at each other, ready for anything.
Rob is the one with the brains. He should be figuring this out, not me. I think about the map, and how the stick figure was activated. The eyes open. Staring at the moving water. The well. Jo the diver. Rob the brains. Baby Mia, who fell down the well.
The map. The shining gates. The brilliant city. The flowing water. The map.
“It’s not of the tunnels,” I whisper, realization dawning on me, spreading through me like the water did.
“What isn’t?” Jo asks, her eyes on the elevator. Just then, we hear a loud pop, and smoke comes gushing out from behind the door. Not a big bomb, they wouldn’t want to damage anything. Something small and careful and precise. They’ll rappel down the elevator shaft any second now. Things are slowing before my eyes.
“The map. It’s not a map of the tunnel. It’s a map of someth
ing else. Somewhere else.”
“Who cares, we have to find a way out!” she replies.
I remember the figures on the map. They were scattered throughout, eyes closed. Except for the one in front of the well, upside down, its eyes wide open. I hadn’t thought it truly connected, but it does. Jo’s face is a mask of confusion. In that moment, I imagine that she’s not thinking of her dad, dead, or her mom, alone in Fenton. She’s here with me, and unknowingly is providing me with the key.
Diving.
“Guys. I know this is crazy. But you have to trust me.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The well, the water, think about it. It has to come from somewhere, right?”
“I guess.” Rob nods, admitting the obvious.
“The water’s running now, so wherever that someplace is, now it is open, the way is clear.”
“I don’t get it,” he says, looking back over his shoulder at the elevator. “We have to hide!”
I shake my head. “No hiding. You have to trust me.”
“Mia, what are you talking about?”
“I’ll see you on the other side.”
And with that, I take all the fear that’s ever been part of me and push it into my feet so that they might be ready, and they are, because they push, hard, and then I’m diving, a dive to make Jo proud: I make almost no splash at all.
EPILOGUE
I FEEL THE ROUGH SURFACE OF THE WALL ON EACH side of me and have to fight the claustrophobia. The tunnel is too narrow—there’s no way I can turn around. Forward or nowhere. I keep swimming, down and down and down, my ears popping. My lungs pressing deep into my chest. I’m an idiot for diving in Odessa’s ski jacket, but I wasn’t thinking, and now it billows like a parachute, slowing me down. Behind me I hear two thumps. My friends risking death to trust me. I only hope the water stills before Sutton arrives. That he’ll think we disappeared down some sort of side cave, some small hole in the wall hidden in the darkness of the cavern.