by Caroline Wei
A light flashed on in my mind.
9
MALCHIN
Alle woke with a gasping start, chucking my chin, which was on her head. Quickly, I unraveled my arm from behind her back, cradling her as best I could.
“Are you okay?” I said dumbly, because I had pretty much figured out that none of this was normal within five seconds of Alle’s passing out.
Her hands thrust out and grasped my face, tripling my pulse. “Don’t hurt her,” she half-shrieked. A group of people near us looked up at the noise.
“Shhh, everything’s fine—”
“No it’s not—” Alle jerked out of my arms and pushed herself, trembling, to her feet. She took in a deep breath, hand to her forehead. “Wait. Yes, it is. No, it’s…” The clouds in her eyes cleared, the sun peeking through the storm.
“Malchin!” Alle grabbed my shoulders. “I think I know what the cure to the potestrine is!”
Her hands were warm. “What is it?” My mind started spinning into overdrive. If Alle could figure out a cure, we could help Clarice, and not only that, we’d be able to help all the other people who were bitten.
“It’s daisies.”
My swirling thoughts came to a halt. “Daisies?”
“Yes! I promise you! I know it sounds really dumb, but listen. Clarice, right before she told me it was too late for her, said ‘daisy, daisy.’ That can’t be a coincidence.”
I was less than convinced, and Alle must have seen it in my face, because she sat back on her heels, obviously disappointed. “You have to believe me, Malchin. I’m so sure of this—I—I can’t explain it. It’s almost like… a memory. I saw it, just now.” Her eyes sparked with a faraway look. “The cure is a daisy. We have to get Clarice to eat one.”
I didn’t want to question the conviction in Alle’s voice, and she had basically just told me that her unconsciousness had transported her to the past. Envy beckoned as I felt the yearning to remember—remember anything at all—as strongly as ever.
“How are you so sure?”
“I told you, I heard it, I saw it, I was there! A woman was talking about potestrine, there was a Garden of Eden, she was my mother—” Alle’s voice cracked, and her eyes filled with tears. She swiped at them angrily. “I’m going outside so I can get one.”
I could feel anger brimming beneath the surface of my skin. “Absolutely not. We are not risking your life based on your—lapse. There’s not enough valid evidence that it would cure Clarice, or anyone else, for that matter! You can’t go outside into a crowd of bloodthirsty savages just to pick a flower.”
I wanted to show Alle how ridiculous she sounded, but her face was only reddening. “I’m just trying to help! I’m telling you with every ounce of my being—if we get Clarice to ingest a daisy somehow, we’ll be able to bring her back. We will.”
I crossed my arms. Alle came up to my shoulders, and I could feel her hair brushing against my forearms because she was so close.
“No. We’re staying here until we configure a good plan, and hopefully by the time we get out of here Trial Three will be over. Otherwise we’ll have to go out and fight it. You will die if you go above ground, Alle.” She was mad again. I could tell—but I was mad, too. “Don’t risk everything based on your faulty conclusions.”
“Thinking you would step out of your self-centered bubble and help me was a faulty conclusion,” Alle spat. She spun on her heel and walked off.
10
ALLE
I couldn’t get their faces out of my head.
Her pale face, her sharp nails, her frosty lips. The smell of burned flesh and charred hair.
His tanned skin, his deep laugh, his dimple. A crown of daisies.
She was my mom. She was a queen. And for some reason, my father was not in the picture.
I had a family.
This in itself was too overwhelming, and too powerful, for me to contain. Feelings that I was not familiar with—contentment, sacrifice, nostalgia, love that hurt—leaked out of me in the form of tears. I wrapped my arms around my knees, folding myself into the dark corner outside of Clarice’s room.
The person who had locked us into the Cube was my mother, and she was a cruel woman—though she hadn’t always been. And she looked so, so familiar…
Bitter anger surged up in my chest, and I mashed my face into my open palms, saliva mixing with salt. What kind of parent would subject their child to this pain? And why drag a bunch of innocent people into it?
Now, on top of that, Malchin wouldn’t believe that daisies, something so simple, could be the cure to something as complex as Clarice’s condition. Yet as clearly as I knew my own name, my thoughts, my heart—I knew that this was true.
I couldn’t explain it, but when my father gave me that daisy garland, when my mom held up that very flower in her hand as she talked to the workers in that chemical room—it was so clear. Somehow, potestrine allowed some memories to slip loose. It was the leak in the dam—so obviously Clarice hadn’t lied. She didn’t have enough of her wits about her to do something like that. As the words ‘daisy, daisy’ left her mouth, something in me just rolled into place. It was the key in the lock that opened the door to a whole stream of memories.
That night, there was almost no food. Galen tried his best, and although everyone was hungry, no one complained, not even the little ones. The only respite we had for our growling stomachs was the little water Victoria had figured out how to retrieve. She taught everyone to hollow out sticks and push them deep into the ground, where there was enough moisture for people to suck up.
As the others around me stabbed the ground with their sticks or chewed on tiny bits of food, I refused to look at Malchin, furious that he didn’t believe me. My whole head hurt.
In the middle of the meal, a pile of sparkling metal in a corner caught my eye, and I made my way towards it. A young boy sat next to it.
“Excuse me, but what is this?” I asked, pointing at one of the crumpled scraps. They looked oddly familiar.
“Dead schpiders,” he said. His mouth was full of leaf. “The flying shilver ones from Trial Two. Shum of ’em got into the tunnels buffore Malchin could close it up”—I bristled at his name—“but we managed to kill them. You can look at the things eff you want.”
“Thanks.” Tentatively, I poked one of the gleaming bodies, my mind wired to be scared of them. When I realized they were well and truly lifeless, I picked one up and sat down, running my fingers over the metal. It was smooth, pearly, and refined—the work of lots of money, technology, and energy. Probably lots of brains, too—courtesy of my mother’s resources.
I bit my lip. How would I tell everyone that she was the one responsible for this whole mess?
Brushing the uncomfortable thought away, I studied the cameras in the spider’s head. Black, with a lens and screen, it was covered with deep cobwebs. I turned the spider over and that’s when I saw the image printed on its belly.
It was nanoscopic, so small that you had to pay close attention to catch it. In the metal, there was an etched line connected with a circle that morphed into a bunch of slender ovals. A flower.
I jerked my head up. If Malchin still wasn’t persuaded by this, I didn’t know what else I would do. There wasn’t much evidence, other than my unconscious trip to the past and Clarice’s delirious mumbling, that I could crank up for my certainty that this infection’s cure was a daisy.
“Malchin!” I waved him over, and though he seemed reluctant at first, he eventually jogged over and sat next to me.
“Yeah?”
“Look at this.” I jabbed my finger at the picture. “It’s a daisy. On the underbelly of one of these.” The spider’s crumpled legs swung out as I held up its body. “If that isn’t proof enough, I don’t know what is.”
Malchin exhaled through his mouth. “It’s not.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s not proof enough, Alle. It’s a drawing. It could mean anything. What Clarice told yo
u could have meant anything.”
I struggled to keep from bursting out at him like I did last time. “And what I clearly remembered could have meant anything?”
“You can’t be sure what you saw was real. We can’t trust them. So what makes you so sure that having Clarice eat a daisy could make her sane again?” He had his arms across his chest but looked genuinely curious.
How was I supposed to tell him that I knew it as surely as I knew the sun rose in the east? How was I supposed to tell him that trusting the creators of the Cube didn’t matter, that this was just a solid fact? How was I supposed to tell him that I was confused, that I thought we all had amnesia, but this was so obviously a memory?
You didn’t.
So I stood up, frustrated, and walked away from him, holding my spider. I talked with Galen and met with Adisa, and by the time I started helping Victoria with the injured, I had made up my mind. I would escape tonight, under the cover of darkness, whether Malchin liked it or not.
The dark would make it hard for the others to figure out I was gone. It’d also make it difficult for the infected outside to see me. They would think I was one of them if I acted insane enough.
Anyways, there had to be a daisy outside. The Cube was full of flowers and grass, full of beauty. I just wish the people who made it hadn’t filled it with so much death. Even now, I felt my hatred towards them bubbling, like an ugly pit of boiling oil. What did we do to them to come here?
Victoria worked steadily and was as stone-faced as ever, hardly saying a word, but when I caught her eye, she smiled softly and gave me a little nod. I thought of Clarice and her tortured eyes, then pulled up a mental image of her sarcastic smirk.
That would be enough to sustain me until nightfall.
~.~.~.~.~
Now that I was here, I rethought my decision.
Going outside would betray Malchin, and I really was putting myself in peril for a flower. Was it worth the risk? Was I willing to face the multitudes of people-turned-monsters waiting for me?
I could almost hear the faint churning of the river in the distance, and I forced myself to focus on the fact that we’d all have fresh water if we could get out of here.
That was that, and this was it.
I reached my hands up and pushed against the rock blocking the entrance to the tunnels. Slowly, so as to avoid too much sound, I shifted the rock away, until there was a hole big enough for a person once more.
Once I had climbed onto the soil, I pushed the rock back. I didn’t want any of the crazies to get inside to those slumbering.
There were a few moving bodies that I could see in the pitch black, hulking shadows that scraped and moaned. I crawled on my stomach, avoiding them, while my hands searched the ground for anything that held the shape of a flower.
My hands touched grass, lots of it, but no flowers. I almost screamed when my skin grazed dandelion fluff before I realized what it was, my heart settling back into its ribcage.
You’re going in, then back out, I told myself over and over. Just in and out, super quick, super fast, super secret.
My muscles strained with the effort of being smooth, of being stealthy, and absurdly, I thought of myself as a cheetah, stalking its prey in the wild savannah. Except I was really the prey, and I didn’t want the predators to notice me.
It was when the breathing started getting louder and louder when I figured it out. I stilled, trying to listen, and heard several loud breaths. Not from a single person, but from many. Air rattled in and out of multiple lungs, multiple throats, from multiple contracting chests.
I was in a field of sleeping crazy people.
There were dark bodies piled up everywhere, people sleeping on top of people, others dozing by themselves. Even so, this was extremely dangerous. If I woke one up, that would be the end of the line.
For a moment, fear seized my heart, turning my blood to ice. I should have listened to Malchin.
Then the feeling subsided, and I tried to move on. My hands trembled as I skimmed my palms along the ground, begging for a daisy. Please, please, please.
This was for Clarice. This was for everyone sleeping here. This was for Victoria, Carmen, Sabaa, and my family, who I never had a chance to know.
I touched a wrist and froze. It was a cold wrist, but I had felt the faint rhythm of a pulse underneath the skin. I tried to breathe. I tried to make myself still.
I was a statue. I was not alive. I was stone. I was air.
The hand grabbed my arm, the fingers curled like the talons of a vulture.
“I think I found a pretty,” a raspy voice said. No one around me stirred, but they would soon. “I want to eat. I’m hungry.”
I shuddered.
“Come closer. Just a little closer. You smell sweet, pretty…”
I yanked my hand away and started running. All sense of caring left me completely.
The shrieking started seconds after I left. It multiplied and multiplied until I was sure the entire Cube had woken up, the sound echoing in my ears.
Focusing on the sound of my feet slapping the dirt, I tried to gather my wits. I had to either hide or start blending in among them. That was my only chance of getting back underground safely. At the same time, however, my thoughts were tied in an adamant loop, reminding me that I needed to find a daisy.
I was beginning to get angry at my own brain.
Still, I knew its importance. I did need to find a daisy, no matter what Malchin said. I was positive it was what Clarice needed. I knew it was.
At the wrong moment, my foot caught on a piece of plant root, and I went collapsing down to the earth. The wind got knocked out of me, and now the sounds of crazed yelling were all too close. This was real.
I planted my palms down on the dirt, determined to get up and find a hiding spot, when I realized I had fallen on a bump.
It was a large bump, not a body, but rather, a mound that could fit a body.
A grave.
I forced breath into my lungs and tried to grab hold of my senses, but then my hand slipped and dug deeper into the dirt. I touched a face.
No no no.
I slammed my forehead into my arm, trying to crush the nausea washing over me in powerful waves. I knew that face.
It was the face of a boy with round cheeks and butterfly eyelashes, his skin still flushed with warmth when I buried him. It was the face of a child who died too young, life ended too short, before he had a chance to see the world, to eat a strawberry cake, to write a novel or become a father.
Suddenly I couldn’t think. My whole body screamed with grief, even louder than the oncoming voices of the infected. Tears burned like acid in my eyes, then streamed down my face in rivers, leaking onto the dirt. My muscles refused to cooperate. My hands, my feet, my legs—they all shut down as I shuddered with what felt like the heaviest weight in the world.
Someone clawed at my clothes, and another pulled at my hair. I felt teeth on my leg. They had come for me. I had lost.
Fight, my mind roared, alive once more. Fight, fight, fight! You want to live! You need to live!
But I couldn’t move.
My fingers stayed on the little boy’s face, feeling how soft the skin still was. If I could trade places with him, I would—just to give him a chance at life.
MOVE! my brain screeched before one of the infected slammed a fist into my cheek. I was flung away from the boy, my body racked with sobs.
My assailant kept coming, his knuckles crashing into my jaw, my cheekbones, my forehead, my eyes. My arms were weak defenses against him, but I crouched into myself, my head turned into my stomach. I didn’t want to fight, or hear, or feel. I just saw, in my mind’s eye, thirty-two burned bodies laid out in a grid.
A last punch struck the back of my neck before I heard several loud thumps. I didn’t raise my head.
“Alle!” Malchin’s voice. I could recognize it, smell his earthy scent tanged metallic with sweat. “You need to get up. We don’t have much time.”
>
The breath that I took in got stuck in my throat, and the smell of electricity seemed to fill the air. I could see it again. The screaming and writhing and two hundred horror chairs.
Malchin grabbed my arm and dragged me to my feet. This was the second time, maybe third, if you counted fighting off the old grandfather and blocking the tunnels, time he was rescuing me.
“Alle!” Malchin jerked me towards him. My eyes had adjusted to the dark, and I could see his eyes, glittering, fearsome, and determined. “I need you to get to your senses. Do you want to die?”
No! came my mind again. No! I want to live!
“Then you need to follow me, and follow me close. We are going to try to get underground again. We—” Malchin suddenly yanked me down, and I realized why when his fist shot out and someone collapsed to the ground. “Never mind. Just come with me.”
His hand never left my arm as he guided me through the field of lunatics, always shielding my body with his. His arms were spread out protectively, or they were plowing through people like battering rams. When he could, Malchin dodged them, trying not to hurt too many people.
I didn’t have time to admire this until he had hurled me into the hole. I hadn’t realized we’d gotten there so fast.
Malchin dropped in after me and slammed the rock back over the opening in one motion. He was streaming with sweat, his chest heaving so much I wondered how his lungs could take it. He turned to face me, his expression relieved, and then furious.
“What was that?” he snapped.
I realized that some of the sleepers had woken up and were peeking at us curiously. The danger we had just been in started to sink in, and I buckled to my knees. I couldn’t help it. My head was whirling, my body still shuddering from too much fear and too much running and too much, just too much.
Malchin dropped until he was level with me. His forehead was furrowed, but his eyes were stormy with anger.
“Alle!”
I choked on a sob. “I’m sorry—I—I went to the grave of that boy—I buried him, and I just accidentally fell on his grave—” I pushed my palms against my eyes. “Something happened, and everything just came crashing down. I couldn’t move.”