He gazes back at me. “Sort of. I have bits and pieces of memories. It feels like a dream that I’ve half forgotten.” He pats my hand. “I’m sure my memory will come back.”
“Guys, this is taking too long,” Gadya says. “Speed things up!”
I have a sudden idea. Before I can think about it, I move toward Liam.
Then I lean in and kiss him.
He is startled at first. Hesitant. He almost pulls back from me. But I press my lips firmly against his. I have to help him find his way back.
If nothing else will help him remember me and our feelings for each other, then maybe this will. I can’t think of anything better to do.
We kiss for a moment and then our lips part. I lean back and look deep into his eyes.
And I see a flash of recognition.
“Alenna . . . ,” he says. “Yes, I remember something—” He stops talking.
“Tell me.”
His eyes suddenly clear, like a veil has been lifted. “I remember you! Oh my god, of course.” He grabs me and we hug. I feel tears in my eyes. “How could I not?”
It feels like we’ve been reunited for a second time.
He lets go of me. “I’m so sorry! Do you forgive me? It’s all coming back now . . . everything . . .” He looks overwhelmed.
“It’s not your fault,” I tell him. I’m filled with a degree of relief that makes me feel ecstatic. “I’m just glad you’re back!”
He leans in and kisses me again. This time it’s more passionate. It feels like Liam again, and not some stranger. I don’t want the kiss to end.
“I shouldn’t have worried about trying to protect you,” he says, holding me tightly. “In the end, you were the one who helped me when I needed it.”
“We help each other,” I say. “That’s how it’s always been.”
Gadya strolls over. She’s been listening, but she hasn’t said anything yet. “You remember me now, I hope?” she asks Liam. She looks at me. “Should I kiss him too?” I can tell that she’s kidding. I smile.
“Of course I remember you,” Liam says to her. “How could I have forgotten you, Gadya? It seems crazy. The memories are all back. Well, most of them.”
“Good to hear it.”
Gadya hands me her knife. I realize she doesn’t need it now that she has the gun. We can still hear the distant sounds of the battle.
Gadya inspects her gunshot wound. It has stopped bleeding. I glance down at mine.
Liam notices. “You’re hurt. Both of you.”
“It’s nothing,” Gadya and I say at almost exactly the same time.
Liam smiles. “You guys are hard-core.”
“You mentioned a surgery?” I ask him. “Do you know what it was for?”
He shakes his head. “No, but something bad. I helped lead a group of boys to try to escape a couple days ago. Then the guards took me, beat me up, and put me in that room. They hooked me up to the IV. After that everything becomes sort of blurry in my mind.” He pauses. “They’re doing things to kids. Making some kind of hybrid creatures by using drugs to mutate their DNA and turn them into monsters that will fight for the UNA.”
“We saw a mutant on a farm near where we found you. A boy that was, like, seven feet tall and deformed,” I tell him.
Gadya nods. “Genetic experiments.”
I realize that Liam doesn’t know yet that Rika is dead. There will be time to tell him about that later. I don’t want to overwhelm him yet, and Gadya isn’t saying anything about it either. Rika’s death is still hard for me to process. I don’t want it to be true.
I hear faint noises. Liam and Gadya hear them too. We all stop moving around and talking.
Liam gestures to our left. “Someone’s out there,” he whispers.
We draw closer together. Gadya swings the gun in the direction of the noise. I raise my knife.
A moment later I see a shadowy figure in the trees, moving closer. One of the guards must have followed us from the battlefield.
“Who’s there?” I call out.
“Show yourself or get shot!” Gadya ads.
A second later a person steps out of the trees. He’s carrying a gun, pointed right at us, and he has a feral look in his eyes. His face is swollen and bruised, but I recognize him right away.
Mikal.
“How did you find us?” I ask, startled.
“Friend of yours?” Gadya asks me warily.
“Yeah, do you know him?” Liam asks me, as Gadya keeps her gun aimed at Mikal.
“I tracked you . . . ,” he says to me. His voice sounds thick from the beating I gave his face.
“All this way?” I sound as surprised as I feel.
He grins. It’s lopsided, and it makes him look demented. Many of his teeth are cracked and broken from my blows. “I told you I’d be seeing you again. . . . I know this land. . . . I grew up here. . . . I can track anyone and anything.”
“Mikal, you can’t come with us,” I tell him warily.
“I don’t want to come with you anymore,” he says, looking at me with tired, bloodshot eyes. “I just want to get revenge.”
He cocks his gun and takes a step forward. I don’t know where he got the gun from, but I assume he either took it from his mother’s farmhouse or found one along the way.
“Turn around and get out of here,” Gadya says, pointing the gun directly at his face, “or I will blow your brains out.”
“Go back home,” I tell him. “Back to your mom and your sisters.”
“I can’t do that, Alenna,” he says. Even with his swollen lips I see a mocking smile. “I burned down the farmhouse and left my mom and sisters to cry in the ruins. I’m never going back there.”
He has gone insane. I see his finger tighten on the trigger. I prepare to throw my blade at his chest. I know that Gadya is ready to fire.
Suddenly, Mikal stumbles backward with a loud shriek as Liam leaps forward. I don’t understand what’s happened at first. Then I realize that Liam has thrown a fistful of dirt right into his face.
“My eyes!” Mikal screams. “I can’t see!” He starts pulling the trigger of his gun and I flinch, expecting a barrage of bullets, but the gun doesn’t fire. It’s either empty, or it’s jammed.
Liam keeps rushing forward and tackles Mikal. He climbs on top of his body. Liam punches him in the head as hard as he can. Gadya and I rush over. I grab Mikal’s gun and yank it out of his hand. Gadya starts kicking him in the ribs.
There can be little mercy for Mikal. He would have shot all of us if he could. He is too unstable to trust.
Liam stands up. “He’s out cold. I hit him hard enough to crack his skull. He’ll be out for a few hours. Maybe longer.”
“We should kill him,” Gadya says.
“No need,” I say. “He’s not gonna get too far with a cracked skull. He’ll probably die out here anyway.”
Gadya strolls over to him. Suddenly, without warning, she stamps on his ankle. I hear the bones crack. “Just in case,” she says. “I don’t want him tracking us again.”
I want to throw up. I glance down at Mikal’s shattered face and cracked skull. There was no need for this brutality. He forced it upon us. We drag his body into the bushes and leave it there.
“So what’s the plan?” I say, swallowing hard, as we start walking again. I look at Liam.
“David gave me instructions,” he says. “He contacted me before I got sent here.” Liam looks from me to Gadya and back again. He exhales. “At this point, I guess we have to trust him, but you know I’m always skeptical when it comes to David. Telling the truth isn’t his strong suit.”
“Did you argue with him?” I ask, worried that friction between Liam and David will make it harder to achieve our goals. I know we don’t have much time left.
“No. I just listened. I thought he was crazy at first, but he spelled everything out for me. And now I’m telling you. Whether it’s true or not is for us to decide.”
“So we have to detonate a bomb o
r something, right? Something back at the lab?” I ask.
“No. The device is on board a satellite, a mile above us.”
“What do you mean?” Gadya asks. “Explain.”
“It’s complicated.”
“Try us.”
Liam stares at me and Gadya. “According to David, the UNA has nuclear warheads in space, small ones attached to satellites. They’re hidden there, so that its enemies don’t know about them. The scientists have figured out that if we detonate a handful of them at a certain exact time, then the resulting high-altitude electromagnetic pulse, known as an EMP, will wipe out all the UNA computers and technology. They call this thing a HANE. A ‘high-altitude nuclear explosion.’ The pulse will destroy all electronics and circuits.”
“Nuclear weapons?” I ask, confused. “That can’t be the answer.”
“Yeah, won’t that kill us?” Gadya asks.
Liam shakes his head. “Supposedly not if it’s done right. The bombs are so high up, we won’t be affected much by the radiation. But the pulse will fry anything electric, and all computer circuits. Cars will stop working, along with all the government computers and machinery. It will put the people on equal footing with the government.”
“I’ve heard about electromagnetic pulses,” I say. “They’re supposed to be bad things, not good ones. How is any of this going to help us?”
“Because the people will have a chance to rise up. The government won’t be able to control us. They’ll be taken off guard. According to David, the rebel cells are ready to take action. We’ll use primitive weapons to take back the country.”
“Wait, wait,” I say, trying to figure this out. “But how are we going to detonate these bombs? This sounds like a crazy plan, even for David. And who put him in charge of everything?”
“I don’t know. And I agree that the plan sounds crazy. But he had a lot of details to back it up. There are five nuclear devices. The scientists figured out which ones we need to detonate. They will create the most evenly spread electromagnetic pulse so that the government is completely wiped out. But it will be localized to the UNA. Other nations won’t be affected. The European Coalition will still be able to step in and help us.”
“And we’re supposed to detonate all five warheads? How?”
Liam shakes his head. “Just one. There are four other teams somewhere out here in the UNA with us. Made up of kids, and rebels and scientists. We just have to detonate one of the bombs, perfectly synchronized with the other teams at the exact same time, so the UNA doesn’t have a chance to stop the explosions.” He pauses. “And we don’t have long. David told me we had to do it by four p.m. tomorrow. That gives us about twenty-four hours.”
“What?” I ask, startled.
“Yeah, how the hell do we do that?” Gadya asks. “I mean, if the bomb is up on a satellite?”
“David said that you’d have a key?” Liam asks me. “And that he gave you instructions. An address that we need to get to?”
I pause. So do Liam and Gadya. “I have a key, but no address. David left it for me in an envelope.” I take the key out from under my bra where I have been hiding it. “Look.”
Liam and Gadya peer at the key.
“That doesn’t look like the key to a detonation device,” Gadya says, sounding puzzled.
“I know,” I tell her. “I don’t know what it’s for.”
Liam sighs. “So David gave us each part of the puzzle. Typical.”
“I’m guessing that he didn’t want to tell each of us everything in case one of us got caught,” I say. “Then the whole plan would fall apart if they used truth serum on us.”
“But what if you’d been shot back there?” Gadya asks me. “We wouldn’t even know about the key. It would have gotten lost.”
“Maybe there are more than five teams out here. There are probably some fail-safes,” I tell her. “In case we don’t make it.”
Gadya nods.
I glance down at the key again. Then I hold it up close to my face. I’ve inspected it many times before. “It just looks like a normal key,” I finally say. “Nothing more exotic than that.”
“So David didn’t give you an address?” Liam asks. “He lied?”
I shake my head. “Maybe he left the address with someone else and we need to find that person.”
“Let’s hope it’s not Rika or we’re going to end up just like her—” Gadya breaks off, remembering that Liam doesn’t know what happened to her.
Liam glances over at Gadya. “Rika? Is she here with us?”
I take his hand. “We didn’t want to tell you. But yes, she made it here and she fought bravely. If it weren’t for her, we wouldn’t have been able to get to you . . .”
My words trail off because I don’t want to start crying, and I’m right on the verge.
Liam keeps looking at me. “So she’s dead.”
I nod.
Liam sighs. I can tell that he’s upset. “Another pointless death. She never should have been sent here. She wasn’t cut out for this stuff.”
“That’s what I said,” Gadya adds. I can hear the quaver of emotion in her voice. “She should have stayed back on the island, where she was safe.”
“How could you not tell me about her?” Liam says to me. He almost sounds mad.
“I didn’t know how,” I say. “There wasn’t time.”
Liam looks at me closely. “Is there anything else you’re keeping from me?”
“No, of course not!”
Silence falls for a moment. There is nothing we can say or do to make her death feel any better. We carry the wound of her passing with us. I don’t want to fight with Liam.
“Rika came here because she wanted to conquer the UNA,” I finally tell him. “I don’t know how she got here, but obviously someone thought it was a good idea. It was probably her. Despite calling herself a pacifist, she never shied away from a battle.” I pause. “And look. If it wasn’t for her, we’d be dead. She ended up being able to fight just as capably as anyone else. She saved our lives. She proved that she had every right to be here, just like you and me.”
“Someone should have stopped her,” Liam says.
“Remember when we hiked into the gray zone, back on the wheel?” Gadya asks him. “She came after us then to be a part of it. Nobody could stop her if she wanted to do something.”
“Yeah, she was a fighter,” I say. “No matter what she said, or what she looked like.”
Liam finally nods. “I can’t disagree,” he admits. “I just wish she were still alive and with us right now. I was friends with her for a long time.”
“Same here,” I say. I try not to think about Rika’s final moments. I choose to remember her as she was on the wheel—with her braided hair and freckles, and her sunny smile. That’s how she will live on in my heart.
Afraid that I’m going to start crying again, I take out the piece of paper that the key was wrapped in to distract myself from the pain. I kept this paper with me the whole time. For some weird reason it was in my clothes at the farmhouse. No one took it from me.
“What is that?” Gadya asks.
“The key was inside this paper, in an envelope,” I say softly. “But there was no message, at least that I could find.”
“Let me take a look,” Liam says. I hand it over to him and he scrutinizes it. Gadya leans in too. He turns it over and back again. Nothing.
He holds up the key. There are no numbers or letters on it. No information to identify it. It looks completely nondescript. The only reason I know that it holds any importance is the fact that David left it for me.
“Did you try to see if David wrote a secret message on the paper?” Gadya asks me. “Like invisible ink or something, so that no one could see it if you got captured?”
I shake my head. “I don’t know.”
“This sounds crazy, but remember science experiments in school when we were little kids?” Liam says. “You could make invisible ink with lemon juice or baking soda.
Or maybe he used something that’s only visible in ultraviolet light.”
“If so, we’re out of luck,” I say.
He holds the paper up to his face. “I don’t see anything.”
“It could be heat sensitive,” Gadya says. “The travelers used to do that kind of thing to send secret messages, and David was tight with them. The travelers would use langsat juice and write on leaves. It was invisible, but when it got heated, it would turn brown and you could read the letters.”
“We don’t have matches or a cigarette lighter,” Liam points out.
“Mikal does,” I say. I walk over to his body, followed by Liam and Gadya. I don’t even want to touch Mikal. He’s lying facedown, unconscious. I can see the outline of the lighter in his back pocket. I quickly reach in and extract it, and toss the lighter to Liam.
He catches it, flicks it, and then begins running it a few inches under the paper—so it heats the page up. Gadya and I help hold the paper flat and tight so it doesn’t catch fire.
We all stare at it. I’m startled to see very faint brown letters beginning to emerge on the page.
“Look at that,” Gadya murmurs.
We all crane in closer.
“It’s an address,” I say, as the words start appearing. “And then some.”
Liam reads the note out loud: “Get to Dr. Carl Urbancic, 700 Woodbourne Trail, New Dayton, New Ohio.”
Gadya holds up the key. “So it’s a house key?”
“Maybe,” I say. “Or perhaps it opens something inside the house.” I pause. “How are we going to get from here to New Ohio by four p.m. tomorrow? It seems impossible. We’re going to have to figure out a plan and then hurry.”
“Have you ever been to New Ohio? Have you ever heard of Dr. Urbancic?” Gadya asks me and Liam.
I shake my head. “I’ve never even heard of New Dayton.”
“There’s a large military base there,” Liam says. “I remember reading about it when we were stuck at Southern Arc. The base at New Dayton is a UNA stronghold.”
“Great. And we’re supposed to burst in there and do what exactly?” Gadya asks.
“Locate the device that detonates the weapon,” I say. “Who knows what else. Maybe David will meet us at the location on the paper.”
The Defiant Page 19