Finally, after nearly an hour has passed, and my legs are aching, I see a trail. “I think I’m here,” I say.
“Finally,” she mutters.
I pause on the trail, gasping for air. Old hatchet marks line the trees along the trail’s edges.
I glance down and see that the dirt looks like it has been trampled by many feet. The noises of the forest are loud around me. I swat insects away from my face.
“Take a left,” Gadya’s voice says in my ear. “I’ll meet you about three hundred yards down the trail, and then we’ll hike down to the cistern.”
“How far are we from it? I thought we were there.”
“No, I’ve been hiking this whole time so I could meet you partway.” I hear the smile in her voice. “I wanted to surprise you. The cistern is about another five miles away—”
“Seriously?” I burst out. I’m already exhausted, and my feet are blistered. I don’t want to keep racing full throttle through this treacherous forest. “I thought it was closer than that!”
Gadya doesn’t answer.
“Gadya?” I fiddle with the object in my ear. I only hear static, like I’ve lost the signal. “Gadya!” I call out again. If she disappears now, I’ll be completely lost.
Then I glance up and see an object moving through the trees ahead. A light, shining out from the darkness. I crouch, hiding behind a fallen tree trunk covered with lichens at the edge of the trail. I don’t know what this light is. It could be Gadya, or it could be a group of UNA police on the prowl.
“Gadya?” I whisper again, but there’s no answer.
I peer out above the tree trunk. The light is moving closer, in my direction, yellow and warm. It looks like the glow from an oil lantern. I want to run, but I’m afraid of making noise.
The lantern grows closer. I hide back down behind the tree trunk, holding my breath. I feel my pulse racing. I smell the damp earth, and feel the wet tangles of underbrush against my skin.
Then I hear a voice call out.
“Alenna, it’s me!” the voice exclaims, as clear as a bell.
I instantly stand up. “Gadya?”
I squint to see the figure beyond the lantern. Suddenly, the light shifts, as the person holding it hoists it up, illuminating herself.
“You look stressed out,” Gadya remarks.
“No kidding! Where did you go?”
“Signal failed.”
I rush forward toward her, scrambling up the trail. She heads in my direction just as rapidly.
I reach her and the two of us hug hard and tight. Then we part. She puts the lantern down on the ground. We stare at each other. She has bruises across her face and all over her arms, along with some fresh lacerations.
“We made it,” I say. “I can’t believe it! Are you okay?”
“Barely. But now I know why they call it the Hellgrounds. I got beaten and whipped a few times. Nothing I couldn’t take.”
I hug her again. I know she’s putting on a brave face. She winces as I touch her, so I let her go.
“Sorry. Still healing,” she says.
“Let me take a look.” I pick up the lantern and hold it up to her. I see that some of her wounds are surprisingly deep. “We need to get those cleaned.”
She shrugs off my concern. “I’ve been through worse.” She gazes at me. “How about you? You okay?”
“I didn’t get beaten, but I got attacked by this woman’s crazy son named Mikal. He wanted to come with us. He didn’t like hearing ‘no’ for an answer.”
“Nobody ever does.”
I take the earpiece out of my ear and slip it into my pocket. I don’t need it right now. Gadya does the same. I hand the lantern back over to her.
We begin hiking up the trail toward the cistern.
“Who made this path?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “No clue.”
We keep walking. The trail starts narrowing a bit more.
The whole time we talk about what we experienced when we were captives. We also make plans for what we’re going to do next. I still don’t tell her about what happened to David’s body. I can tell that she doesn’t know about his injuries—or what he’s done to himself. I’m not sure why I don’t tell her. Maybe I’m just not ready to talk about it yet.
I ask if she’s seen Liam, but she hasn’t.
“But we’re going to rescue him tomorrow,” she says. “David told me where he is. It’s not far.”
“Tomorrow? David told you that and not me?”
“Yeah. He said he didn’t want to make you emotional, or make you do something rash.”
“Great.” I pause. “Sometimes I feel like David is just jerking us around.”
“Oh, he is. There’s no question about that. But we just have to hope he’s doing it for the right reasons.”
“So Liam is nearby?”
“According to David, he’s at a UNA work camp for boys. I have the directions. We’ll go there when it gets light.”
My heart is racing faster. “Did David say if Liam is okay?”
Gadya shakes her head. “I don’t think he knows.”
As we hike, we pass a large granite rock with the mutated UNA logo painted on its surface in gold lines. Instead of an eye hovering over a globe, there are five eyes surrounding the globe. Lines connect the pupils of each eye to the globe.
I touch Gadya’s arm. “I’ve seen that symbol before.”
“Really?”
“Before I got sent here. I got called in front of someone named Minister Hiram. He was one of Minister Harka’s body doubles, but he was really creepy and seemed to be running New Austin. He kept some sort of giant mutant inside a glass prison in his office. The emblem was in his office too. I’m not sure what it means.”
“Me neither. But that sounds weird as hell. Let’s just keep going.”
I glance back as we walk. The rock quickly recedes into darkness.
“Soldiers are probably patrolling this area, now that we’ve escaped,” Gadya says, urging me forward.
I walk quickly with her. I tell her everything about my experiences with Minister Hiram. Neither of us knows what to make of it. Time passes quickly. Finally, the path broadens until it becomes a wide swath of grass in the forest.
“We’re almost there,” Gadya says.
The trees start thinning out on one side of the trail. I don’t understand why at first. Gadya moves over to them. I follow. The trees thin even more, until they disappear completely.
She holds up her lantern, and says, “Stop walking if you want to live.”
I stop—right as I realize that we’ve approached the edge of a cliff. It was obscured by darkness and by the trees. I’m confused. We’ve been walking at ground level. How can there be a cliff here?
Before I can ask her about it, Gadya walks over to the edge. Then she hops down and disappears, along with her light.
“No—” I gasp, thinking she’s just thrown herself over the edge of some deep precipice.
Then I hear her muffled voice drifting back up to me: “There’s a ledge here. Be careful.”
I inch my way forward.
And then I realize what I’m looking at. I’m not at the edge of a natural cliff, but instead, I’m at the lip of a huge crater dug into the earth. Like a gigantic, ancient bomb crater. Or something made by a fallen meteor. Gadya is standing on a wide ledge made from dirt and rock, about four feet below me, staring out into the abyss.
The giant pit sprawls out in front of us, at least half a mile across, and a hundred feet deep. At the bottom of it are some ruins.
“What is this place?” I ask, gazing down at the crater in awe and confusion. I sit down and scoot myself onto the ledge, my feet landing with a thud.
“I don’t know what it was. Something the UNA bombed, probably. But the bottom has an old cistern in it. Or at least what’s left of it. That’s where David told me to go and hide. And that’s where he told me to take you.”
I nod. “We better get down there
somehow.”
Gadya looks at me. “Getting down there is easier than getting back up. It took me twenty minutes to hike my way out of it.”
“So how do we get down?”
Gadya grins. “We slide.” She points to my right. “Look.”
I see a smooth section of dirt with minimal rubble. This will be our path down to the cistern.
“Ready?” she asks.
Before I can answer, she moves herself forward on her hands and feet, like a crab, and then pushes herself off. She slides down the smooth dirt on her butt, heading down toward the bottom of the crater.
I move over and follow, pushing myself off after her. I start moving quickly. The earth and rubble tear at my clothes. I hold out my hands for balance as I descend farther toward the cistern. Gadya isn’t far ahead of me.
Finally, the ground levels out and I come to a stop in a cloud of dirt and dust. Gadya is nearby, already standing up and brushing herself off.
“Pretty crazy, huh,” she says.
I nod, standing up and picking rubble off me.
I stare ahead. I see a large circular concrete building, half destroyed and turned into ruins, staring back.
“You sure this place is safe?” I ask.
“Yep. There’s food and water inside. I’ve already checked it out. I got here earlier in the afternoon.”
I follow her across the blighted landscape toward the building. It’s large and ominous, but with Gadya at my side I do not feel afraid.
“I’ve got more oil for the lantern in there,” Gadya says. “But we have to be careful about using it, in case anyone’s looking for us here.”
We keep walking until we reach the edge of the ruins. Gadya steps up onto the rocks. I follow her as she slips into a dark opening in the building.
Soon we are standing inside together. Gadya hangs the lantern on a hook on the concrete wall. The place is filthy. I gaze around at it. I see rat droppings in one corner, and spiderwebs and dust everywhere I look.
“I think I liked my bed back at the farmhouse more than this,” I joke.
Gadya smiles. “We won’t be here too long.”
I nod. “Tomorrow we find Liam. We’re still in the Hellgrounds, right?”
She nods. “This region is gigantic. We could walk for days and still be in it.”
“I wish we could go find Liam right now,” I tell her.
“Me too. But they lock the boys up at night. That’s what I’ve heard.”
“Are you still in contact with David?” I ask.
She shakes her head. “Only occasionally. It’s too risky for him to broadcast a signal this far.”
“What about Liam?” I ask. “You think he’s okay?” I try to suppress my worry about him.
Gadya nods. “I hope so.”
Then she turns and rummages around on the floor behind us. “Check this out,” she says.
She starts pulling up a brick from the floor with a grunt, and then another. I don’t know what she’s doing until I realize that the bricks are concealing a dark space within.
“What’s in the hiding spot?” I ask, moving over to help her. I start pulling bricks up with her.
Gadya glances at me and smiles. “Something that we need for tomorrow.”
I lean in to take a closer look. I help her get a few more bricks out of the way before I can see what she’s searching for. Then, in the hiding spot, I see the gleam of metal and I realize what’s hidden inside here.
“Guns,” I say, both slightly afraid and also relieved.
“Just two of them. And some bullets as well. I wish we had more. They were stowed here by rebels a year ago in case anyone ever needed them.”
She takes one out of the hiding place and gives it to me. It’s an automatic assault rifle. I feel its weight in my hands.
“These will definitely help,” I say, sliding the safety back just to check it. I know that two girls and two guns aren’t much compared to the army of soldiers that we’ll face when we go after Liam at the work farm, but it’s better than knives.
Gadya takes the other gun out. “They won’t expect us to have these. Not after we fled the farms.”
I nod. “How many bullets?”
“Six large boxes. Probably no more than five hundred total. We’re going to have to be careful with our shots, and save our ammunition if we can.”
“Easier said than done,” I point out. “When I got snatched at the rebel cell, and then taken to the local minister, there were hundreds of armed soldiers.”
“We better hope they’re not guarding Liam as well—and that they don’t know that we’re coming. I don’t plan on getting shot. I need to live so I can see the UNA get taken down. We’ve made it so far. We have to see it through to the end.”
I nod, hoisting the gun up to my shoulder. I practice taking aim at a large black spider crawling down one of the walls. “I feel the exact same way. We’re going to rescue Liam and then continue our mission,” I say.
For once, I feel almost confident that things will work out. But I know that it’s very dangerous to think like that. The UNA is like the wheel. Just when you expect things to go a certain way, they can take a dangerous turn.
I take the weapon down from my shoulder. “I can’t wait for tomorrow,” I tell her.
She grins. “Me neither. Feels like old times.”
That night, we take turns keeping watch. Gadya goes first, sitting up to stare out into the darkness with her rifle, while I curl up on the rocks and dirt, and try to get some sleep. It’s almost impossible. I’m too worried about Liam.
Halfway through the night, Gadya wakes me and we switch positions. I sit on a broken slab of concrete, watching and listening as I drink some water from a flask. Gadya goes over to the dirt and lies down. Within a minute, I hear her snoring.
I stare out in the darkness with the gun across my lap, searching for any signs of light. But I see nothing. It feels like we’re the only people alive out here. I fight the urge to fall asleep myself. Both Gadya and I are exhausted, but our journey hasn’t even really begun yet.
When the sky finally starts to lighten, as the sun prepares to rise, I go over and wake Gadya up. “It’s time,” I say, touching her shoulder gently. She nods groggily and sits up, wiping the sleep from her eyes.
“You ready?” she asks.
“Absolutely.” I grin at her. “I was born ready,” I joke.
She laughs.
I help her up. We gather the flasks and the guns. Our siege on the boys’ farm, and our rescue of Liam, is about to begin.
12 THE RESCUE
IT’S ANOTHER LONG JOURNEY on foot through the forest to find the farm where Liam is being held captive. It takes us about two hours.
The whole time I’m worried that we will be sighted. But this land is completely desolate, and the tall grasses and trees provide adequate shelter. Our guns are slung over our shoulders and we both carry flasks of water at our waists, next to our knives.
Gadya and I have been trained on Island Alpha to survive, so we maximize our ability to blend in with our surroundings. Occasionally, I think I hear the sound of people in the distance, or the rumbling of helicopters in the sky. Each time we stop and hide ourselves in the underbrush. But the noises never get close to us. If there are soldiers out there, they seem to have no clue about where we are headed.
Finally, Gadya pauses. “We’re almost there.”
“How do you know?”
“I just do. David told me.”
“You better be right.”
“I am.”
We keep moving slowly.
Finally, we reach our destination.
I can see a huge farm in a massive field, just sitting there in the middle of the thick forest. We creep up to the edge of the grass on our hands and knees, and stare out at the buildings.
This farm is much larger than the one I was on. In fact, it doesn’t really look like a farm. It looks more like some kind of strange high-tech laboratory, slapped down i
n the fields. Many of the buildings are made of glass and steel. It looks out of place here, incongruous among the farmlands.
“Are you sure this is the right place?” I ask Gadya.
“Yes,” she tells me. “And if it’s not, then we get the hell out of here and back into the forest.”
“Good idea.”
But in my heart I know that Liam is somewhere nearby. I can just feel it. I also trust that David has led us to the right place.
We lie there in the tall grass, peering out at the landscape sprawling in front of us.
There is no sign of Liam. At least not yet.
The main building is huge and cylindrical, surrounded by metal and chrome walkways. Large steel chimneys pump out white smoke. It reminds me of the specimen archive back on Island Alpha, except that this place is not deserted. I see men and women in lab coats moving around the property on concrete pathways.
“This place looks really weird,” Gadya mutters into my ear.
“Yeah, I was thinking that too. It doesn’t really look like a farm.”
We both keep watching, trying to figure out exactly what we’re staring at.
“Over there,” I say suddenly, pointing as movement catches my eye. A girl is being dragged across the grass by two soldiers. She’s wearing a white smock that looks like a medical gown.
“Where did she come from?” Gadya asks.
“Out of that opening,” I say, pointing. There is a large circular hatch in the side of a small square building, connected by metal stairs to the main one. This building doesn’t have any windows. A guard stands watch at the entryway, an assault rifle slung over his shoulder.
“I thought this was where the boys were being held?” I ask Gadya. “Maybe we really are at the wrong place?”
“I don’t understand either. This is where David told me to take us.”
We keep watching the girl.
The soldiers continue dragging her forward. Her hair has been cut short and ragged, as though someone has chopped it off or tried to shave it and failed at the task. Her face is badly sunburned and peeling.
She doesn’t struggle, but even from here, I can see the defiance in her posture and in the way she refuses to bow her head to look at the ground.
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