Hesper yelled for me to come back, she even tried to run up the stairs after me, but Colden and I were much faster.
The Butler, whose name I had never caught, dashed down the stairs, wrapping himself in a robe. He yelled to us, asking where we were going, but we ignored him. I followed Colden down the long narrow hallway and out the front door.
"Come," Colden said once we had gotten outside. He led me to the line of Dunningham's expensive cars. "I got the keys . . . I just need to see which one fits." He tried the key in several of the cars until the doors of one unlocked. "Get in!" he yelled.
"Do you know how to drive?" I asked as I climbed in on the passenger side.
"Nope, but I've seen it done before, in the human world." He turned on the ignition, and we were off to a bumpy start. It reminded me of Bram's driving during our assignment.
I fell back against the seat as we rounded Dunningham's circular driveway. The gates opened for us, and Colden practically gave me whiplash as we made a sharp turn onto the road.
"Where are you taking me?" I asked as we sped past mansions that only looked like blurs. Lights were on in almost all the houses. Grims of the Upper Estates didn't respond during the sirens unless it was an absolute emergency, and we needed the back up. So far that had never happened. The lower-class Grims did all the dirty work.
"We're going right back to the Outskirts. I can't risk anything happening to you." Colden made another sharp turn, and I reached for my seat belt. I had to remember that it was possible for me to die now.
Once we reached the Farrington city limits, Colden slammed on the breaks. He didn't have a choice. The streets were filled with men, mostly Foragers, prisoners from Gattica and the workers in the Mill. Many of them had large sticks. They were busting out windows and kicking in doors. Two of them took a trash can and threw it through the window of a dress shop. They ran inside and began to wreck the place. Nowhere was in the middle of a full-out riot.
A fire had started in another building. I hoped they weren't doing this to the houses. Shots rang out. Some of the rioters ducked for cover and some of them didn't care. They continued on with their destruction. A man with a Mohawk punched our car's driver side window. Colden put his hands up. The Forager looked at him and then backed off as if he recognized him.
`"How am I supposed to get through this?" Colden asked.
I put my hand on the door handle. Colden looked at me and frowned, probably because he knew what I was thinking. "Don't!"
"I'm sorry. I have to know that they're okay."
He made a grab for me, but I yanked away. He cursed as I took off.
I stayed close to the buildings, hoping not to get hit by any stray bullets. I ran into a huge man with tattoos all over him and fell to the ground. He sneered at me. I scrambled to my feet before he could do anything to me and continued to run. I ran past Brickman's, where a group was inside tearing the place to shreds. I hoped Sullivan was okay.
When I got my street, a knot formed in my chest. I couldn't breathe. Grims whose homes had been invaded were scrambling in the street, looking for a safe place. Mothers clung to their small children as they ran, but there was nowhere to go. Doors were being kicked in, windows busted. I heard shots come from one house.
Kerrin, a friend of my mother's stepped onto her porch with a gun. "Who else? Who else?" Kerrin seemed to be doing a good job protecting her home. She looked at me with wide eyes. "Naomi, what are you doing out there? Get inside."
I shook my head and kept running. I was four houses away from my own. From where I stood, it looked untouched. Someone grabbed me from behind. I looked up to see a man holding me. He had the look of a Gattica prisoner—well built and muscular. He smelled like rotten meat.
"Please," I pleaded. "I'm one of you. I'm a hybrid." Those words seemed so wrong coming from my mouth, but they were true." I showed him my scar from where Dunstan had cut me. "See? Look?"
The man stared at the scar for a few seconds and then reluctantly let me go.
I darted through the yard and to the back door. It was locked, and I didn't have my key. I knocked on the door, knowing my family wouldn't answer unless they knew it was me. "Please, it's me, Naomi. Open up!"
"Yeah, open up!" said a deep voice from behind me. I turned to see a strange man. He pushed me off the stoop, and I landed on my side on the ground. The man began to bang on the door. This had been a mistake. Now I'd drawn attention to our home. When no one answered, he began to throw all his weight against the door. With his size, it wouldn't take him long to break it down. I remembered the knife I had hidden in my boot. I reached down for it, bracing myself. I had never hurt anyone before and there was a chance anything I did to him would be fatal.
I got back up on my feet. The man stopped throwing himself against the door. He had noticed the knife in my hand. Now, I had less than a second to make a decision. I thrust the knife into his abdomen with all my strength. Even though he'd seen it coming, he looked surprised. Blood trickled quickly from the wound. I twisted the knife, pulled it out of him, and turned to flee.
I slammed into Colden. He looked like he was in a trance. He shook his head. "Come on, let's go."
I followed him as we made a dash back through Litropolis and to the Outskirts. I hoped my family was hidden safely in the house and that Father and Bram were okay. The sirens continued to ring. It was going to be a long night for everyone.
* * *
When we arrived back in the Outskirts, Dunstan sat at his desk, looking at some kind of list. His front door was open and Jax was nowhere to be seen.
"Hey!" I shouted as Colden and I entered the room. "There's a riot going on. People are dying, your people, and you're sitting here reading."
He didn't look up. "Oh, I see you've made it back."
I kicked the back of the chair he was sitting in, and Colden pulled me back. Dunstan stood and faced me, wearing a scowl.
"You're just like your brother," I told him. "You don't care about anyone but yourself. You're using these people."
Dunstan took a deep breath and then sat back down. "I don't know what your problem is, but you need to calm down."
"You don't know what my problem is? Nowhere is being destroyed right now. My family, friends, and everyone that I know lives there. I understand why you guys are angry and that you've been treated unfairly, but this isn't going to fix anything. Your people are dying. They're being shot dead in the streets. Don't you even care?"
Dunstan's expression didn't change, showing me he didn't care. "The casualties of war. Everyone taking part in this knows what's at stake. They're willing to give their lives for the cause. And unlike my brother, I don't force them to participate. Now, I'm sorry about your family, but I have to think about my people who've been made prisoners in Gattica and slaves in the Mill when they've done nothing wrong."
"So what's next?" I asked.
"Nowhere will be flipped upside down after this. My brother will try to regroup and rebuild, but we have them outnumbered. We've weakened them. He'll be forced to negotiate. The prisoners and the Mill workers will be coming back here. Don't worry, we won't hurt anyone unless we have to."
"Why do you need me here? Why was it so important for Colden to bring me back?"
"You should get a good's night rest. You can sleep in my bedroom, I'm pulling an all-nighter," Dunstan replied.
He clearly wasn't going to answer my question, and I was too tired to argue with him. I turned to leave the room.
"By the way Naomi, you're never going back there. We're your family now." Dunstan closed the door behind me and he and Colden stayed in there talking for a long time.
Chapter 44
The next morning, I woke up early to take a walk. The place was flooded with new faces, all the prisoners and Mill workers who had survived the riots. I heard around seventy of them had been killed the night before. It occurred to me that the Outskirts or Litropolis had been their home to begin with. I imagined that many teary-eyed reunions had taken
place that morning.
I saw two men pulling a cart full of guns and other weapons."Where did those come from?" I asked Nigel, who stood on the road with me. I liked Nigel, and I was glad he had escaped from Gattica. He didn't belong there.
"The prison and Nowhere's weapon collection," he answered.
"Wow."
"We also got some lifestones, but not very many. They had the Mill pretty heavily guarded."
I would imagine so. It was the most important place in Nowhere. Lifestones—I could sure use a few of those. I'd never known that feeling before—the need to have the lifestones so I could live, yet it was how the Foragers felt all the time. I made a promise to myself that I would stop using the term Forager.
"If they try to come over that wall, we'll be ready," Nigel said.
I'd come to the conclusion that I wouldn't be going over the wall anymore either.
"So, we're just going to wait and see what happens?" I asked.
Nigel nodded. "Dunningham needs to negotiate. We haven't given him a list of demands. We only want one thing, to be assigned deaths so we can collect lifestones, too. It's our right. All we want is what we should have in the first place." Nigel patted me on the back. "So, this is home for you now. It's not so bad. You might even meet yourself a nice fellow."
I laughed even though that was the last thing I was thinking about.
"Naomi, walk with me," Dunstan said from behind us. I hadn't even noticed him approach. I said good-bye to Nigel and followed Dunstan.
"Where are we going?"
"I have something I want to show you."
As we passed, everyone stopped and respectfully acknowledged Dunstan. It was nothing compared to the way the Grims of Nowhere acted around Dunningham, but I could tell the people revered him. It occurred to me that this was the first time I'd seen Dunstan leave his cottage since I had been in the Outskirts.
Dunstan brought me to the same building Colden had brought me to the other day—the one with the dying hybrids. I had no desire to be in that place again, but I figured Dunstan might tell me more about this experiment he needed me for.
The stench of rot hit me as soon as we stepped inside. We walked quickly past the cots filled with the dying. A man in a white coat who was walking around checking for pulses greeted Dunstan and nodded at me. Dunstan returned the hello.
We walked into a part of the building I never knew existed, filled with all sorts of monitors and screens. Glass cabinets were stacked with medicine and medical supplies. It looked like the hospitals I'd seen in the human world. I had been to plenty of those.
Dunstan took some kind of card from his pocket and slid it through s metal object with a slit. The door slid open revealing a white, cold, and sterile room. Two beds with white sheets stood in the middle and several metal stands with bags hanging from them. It looked like a quarantine room.
"What's this for?" I asked.
"It's for you," Dunstan said, "the experiment."
Nausea twisted my stomach.
"See, you have the perfect blood. No one else here does. Half Grim and half human, not just a small percentage."
"So?"
"We're going to be recruiting other Grims to live here, starting with the Grims in Litropolis. In order for them to be able to stay here permanently, they're going to need some of your blood."
I didn't understand. How were they going to get my blood? Before I could ask, Dunstan put his hand on the small of my back and pushed me inside. Pain shot through my knees as I landed on the hard tile. I turned to look at him just as the metal door slid shut, sealing me inside.
I stood immediately, despite the pain, pounding my fists against the cold doors. I screamed for Dunstan or anyone who might save me. I didn't stop until my hands were sore and my throat was raw. Giving up, I lay across the bed, looking around the room for a way out. The room was sealed with no possibility for escape.
* * *
For the longest time I lay on the bed thinking about random things. It was Keira's birthday. Her seventeenth. With all that was going on in Nowhere, I was positive her birthday would suck. I didn't realize I had fallen asleep until I woke up to someone's cold hands on my ankles. Through the eyelashes of my half-closed eyes, I saw someone in a white lab coat strapping my feet to the bed. I had flashbacks from the subtraction chamber. I struggled to move, but couldn't. My arms were already strapped down.
"Let me out of here!" I screamed at the top of my lungs, but the man ignored me. He walked away and returned seconds later. He felt the inside of my elbow with his index and middle fingers.
"What are you doing?" I demanded, but the man disappeared again without giving me an answer.
Dunstan appeared next to my bed. "We tried to get you to eat, but you wouldn't. This would be much easier if you had eaten."
When did they try to get me to eat? I vaguely remembered someone shaking me and pushing a bowl of soup in my face, but I thought I'd been dreaming.
I looked up at him, trying to appear as pitiful as possible. "'Please let me go."
"I will when we're done."
I looked past him. Someone laid on the other bed. Doyle. "What is he doing in here?"
Dunstan put his hand on my forehead, brushing my hair back. I wanted to push his hand away, but I couldn’t move. "You and Doyle are part of this experiment. He'll get your blood, and we'll see if that will enable him to stay in the Outskirts longer."
Doyle had a coughing fit. He had already been in the Outskirts too long.
The man in the lab coat came back. He wrapped a strip of rubber tightly around my arm, just above my elbow. It squeezed my arm. I looked at the area. I could see my green veins clearly. He wiped the area with a cotton ball and some kind of liquid.
Someone else rolled in a table filled with all sorts of different tubes. The man in the lab coat opened a package and removed a tube with a needle on the end.
"Mr. Dunstan, please. I've already been through so much," I pleaded weakly.
"I know, but this won't take long. We'll only take a pint at a time," Dunstan answered.
While I was focused on Dunstan, the man stuck me with the needle. I howled. I hadn't been expecting such a tiny needle to hurt so much. It was nothing compared to my branding and the year-subtraction chair, but it was still painful.
I watched my blood, crimson and thick, run into the tubes. A pint couldn't be that much, right? The man in the lab coat switched one filled tube for another until they were all filled. It felt like they had taken more than a pint.
"Her brother," Doyle said. "He's a troublemaker, but he has a lot of influence with the boys there."
"Good. That's what we need," Dunstan replied.
Bram? Why were they talking about him? They needed him for what? I wished Bram were there so he could help me, but I knew somehow I would have to save myself.
I closed my eyes as the man removed the rubber strap. Relieved, I looked down at my arm, which was bruising quickly.
"See that wasn't so bad," Dunstan said.
The man in the lab coat turned to Doyle. "Are you ready?"
Doyle looked afraid but he nodded and the two of them left the room.
I looked up at Dunstan. "Can you unstrap me now?"
"Not yet. We'll bring you something to eat in a few hours."
"A few hours?" There was no way I could stay in that room a minute longer. I felt like I was in prison again.
"Yes. It's imperative that we keep up your strength so we can collect your blood."
Reality hit me. This wasn't a one-time thing. Dunstan was using me for a blood bank. He had no intentions of letting me go.
"Please. You can let me go. I swear I won't go anywhere."
He stepped out of my sight. I heard the door slide open. "See, that's the problem with you, Naomi. You don't really follow the rules and do what you're supposed to, so I can't risk that."
"Please, no!" My voice echoed off the sterile walls. "Please, don't leave me here like this. I'll go crazy!"
/> But my plea fell on deaf ears. The lights went off and the door slid shut, sealing me inside. I was left alone with the darkness.
Naomi Grim: Complete Novel (Parts 1-4) (The Silver Scythe Chronicles) Page 6