The Death Code

by Lindsay Cummings

  “Woodson,” Sketch says, taking Meadow’s face in her hands. “Woodson, what’s the signal? We’re here. We’ve made it. We have to alert them now.”

  Meadow shakes her head.

  “Not without him,” she whispers.

  Peri is sobbing in Koi’s arms, and Tox is mumbling something about the Green, and right now it all seems so stupid.

  In a world without Meadow, there is no Green.

  She can’t die. Not like this. Not ever, not in Lark Woodson’s world.

  CHAPTER 109

  MEADOW

  “Give the signal, Meadow,” Zephyr says. He kneels in front of me, beside Sketch. “We have to give it now. They’ll come, and they’ll save you. They have to know a way.”

  But I can’t tell him that there is no way.

  This is how it was always going to end.

  I look around, at all the faces of the people who have come so far with me.

  Sketch, with her defiance, with her ability to bring laughter to a world where darkness is more common than light.

  Saxon, who welcomed us into his tribe, defied the ways of the Ridge because he trusted my brother and father.

  Peri, who sits a foot away, while Koi whispers soothing words to her. Rubs her back and kisses her on the forehead. They are soft in a place that demands survivors to be hard as steel. But they have survived. They have made it, and that is their way of denying the world.

  “Meadow,” Zephyr says. “I know it’s hard to think, right now. But we have to give the signal.”

  He touches my cheek, gently.

  His green eyes are so bright, so soothing. I could sink into them and find peace, and maybe that’s what I will do when it’s all over. Maybe death is green, instead of black, full of light summer breezes and soft grass on bare toes.

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper.

  I think of everything we have been through. The pain, the wins and the losses, the journey we’ve taken to get to this moment in time. Hoping for freedom. That is all I have ever wanted, and now I am going to give it away, to him.

  To all of them.

  There is a jolt of pain, then the pressure of relief, as the switch happens. The number on my cuff slides down, down, until it reaches a C again.

  Zephyr is smiling, holding me to his chest, and Sketch is shouting that I’m okay, that we’re going to give the signal now and get the hell out of here.

  But I won’t be with them. I can’t be.

  My mother’s secret whispers into me. Once you leave the Shallows, Meadow . . . you will die.

  There is a Needle in the ground, fallen and forgotten, beside me. I slide my fingers toward it. Wrap my hand around it, tight, and Zephyr only notices when it’s too late.

  “Meadow, what are you . . .”

  “I’m sorry,” I whisper, and as I say it, I look at him and Peri and Koi and Sketch, and my heart swells with that one horrible thing I always ran from.

  Love. But it’s enough, the sweetest thing in the world, and for the first time in my life, I welcome it.

  Then I plunge the Needle deep into my chest.

  “No!” Zephyr screams.

  My heart slows.

  My vision wanes.

  Zephyr falls in front of me, his hands turning me over, hauling me into his lap.

  His body is warm. And I am so, so cold.

  “No,” he says. “No! I love you.”

  I try to answer.

  But my lips won’t move. I see everyone rushing over, sprinting for me. Sketch rips the Needle from my chest and tries to stop the blood, but I know it won’t stop. Peri screams. Koi screams along with her. They are shouting my name, sobbing.

  It’s my final offer, the General said to me, the morning we left for the Ridge. You die, the Murder Complex dies with you, and they’ll never be able to replicate it again. Either you go in there and die, or you never come back out. If you die, I’ll give them all a good life. I’ll set them free. The choice is yours. Death is the signal, Meadow Woodson. The question is whether or not you’ll send it our way.

  I didn’t have to make the choice. Leaving the Shallows did it for me. Now death calls to me, a song that whispers in the wind.

  It sucks me under, the one thing I’ve tried so hard to escape. But as I die, I realize this is what I was always meant to do.

  Live for a while. Then die, for peace. The Murder Complex will die with me, forever fade, impossible to replicate now that my mother is gone. The New Militia will come and break down the walls, and the war will begin. The Initiative will fall.

  I can feel it in my head. Almost hear the Murder Complex system screaming, as together, we turn and face the last Dark Time, the one that I have heard ends with pain and fear and unanswered questions, but that there is hope, and light, and love on the other side.

  The sound of my father’s voice carries me away, calls me forth into the unknown.

  Close your eyes.

  Relax your mind.

  Die fearlessly, Meadow.

  You are so, so brave.

  CHAPTER 110

  ZEPHYR

  I can feel the Murder Complex die with her.

  I can feel it like I feel my own heartbeat.

  It’s a pierce of pain in my skull. A gasp of my breath, a scream that comes from my lungs.

  And then it’s gone forever. And I’m free.

  But she isn’t with me. Nothing in the world can make this right, and I want the Murder Complex back, because when it lives, Meadow lives.

  I scream.

  Everyone screams with me. Koi and Peri hold each other tightly.

  Meadow’s eyes are still open, staring up at mine. Gray and soft and gentle, in death.

  My tears fall into them.

  And seeing them splash against her face, seeing how peaceful she looks . . . “Come back!” I scream. “You aren’t done with this life yet, Meadow. Please.”

  I press my lips against hers, beg them to feel warm.

  But they are only cold.

  “Come back! Don’t leave me, not like this!” I shake her. I sob, screaming her name.

  Someone arrives behind me, pulls me back. Sketch, I think. Koi and Peri fall over Meadow, mourn for her, but she is mine to mourn, too.

  “Meadow!” I reach for her, as Sketch hauls me backward, and Saxon helps. “No!”

  And I want to kill. Kill anyone, if only it would bring Meadow back, trade their life for hers. Why did she do it? Why did she leave me?

  I see the first memory I have of her when I was just a boy. It was like moonlight, falling on the face of a girl I felt like I knew.

  Her laugh, on the swings in Cortez.

  Her hands, skimming mine as we swam in the ocean.

  Her scream, as she told me to kiss her ass in the Graveyard.

  Her lips, pressing against mine as she sacrificed herself in the Leech building.

  Her blood, running through my veins.

  She saved me, a guy who should mean nothing to her.

  Now I am alive, and she is dead.

  The world rocks, as an explosion happens. Fire, blazing fire, then cracking and groaning. Behind me, the Perimeter falls. Rocks fly. People dive for cover, but I sit frozen, unable to move.

  Something hits my head.

  I fall against Meadow’s body, lie still beside her. Through the dust and the smoke, I think I see hundreds of pairs of black boots, climbing over the rubble.

  Someone touches me, lifts me away from Meadow. Another pair of hands grabs her, presses black paddles to her chest. They haul her onto a board and she’s out of sight.,

  Gunfire. Leech guards arrive.

  Shouts.

  “Meadow,” I gasp.

  I reach for her, but I can’t touch her. She is already gone.

  I fall into darkness, and my last thought is this:

  My moonlit girl is dead.

  CHAPTER 111

  MEADOW

  I am standing in a world of white.

  Fog drifts back and forth, all aroun
d me, dancing across the tops of my toes.

  It is silent, except for the lightest kiss of the wind on my curls. My hair is long again, tickling my arms.

  I look down.

  I have no sparring scars. No blood beneath my nails. No cuff on my wrist or wounds from Needles.

  I lift my arm, look for my fearless tattoo, but there is only fresh skin.

  “Hello?”

  My voice rings out, disappears into forever.

  And then, through the fog, my father emerges.

  He looks younger, stronger, and the first thing I notice is that his Catalogue Number is gone. His face is alive with the flush of life.

  “Meadow,” he says.

  I try to walk toward him, but I cannot seem to make my feet move. “Dad,” I say.

  “You were always so brave,” he tells me. “You fought hard.”

  “I’m tired,” I whisper. I want to sink to the floor, bury myself beneath the fog, and sleep for an eternity.

  “I know you are,” my father says. He smiles, and the light explodes into his eyes. “But you’re not done yet.”

  He walks toward me, reaching out. His hands look soft and new, free of any scars from his fishing hooks or his years training me and my brother. “Wake up, Meadow. Live free.”

  He places his hand over my heart.

  And I become one with pain.

  I think I wake up, but I can’t be sure.

  The world feels far away. I can’t feel my body, only a strange heaviness all around. Slowly, the sensation of me returns. A tingling in my fingers, my toes. A numbness that shakes itself from me, until I know I am a body, instead of just a mind.

  There is a rocking beneath me. The steady hum of something.

  And the feeling of a hand, wrapped gently over my own.

  I try to open my eyes.

  They are heavy, so heavy, but I fight. Gently, light pours in, as I look at the world.

  And I see whose hand holds mine.

  Zephyr.

  He is sitting beside me in a chair, asleep. Snoring. We are inside a small room, and there is that strange rocking, rocking.

  A familiar feeling, the thing that used to finally lull me to sleep when the nightmares threatened to haunt me into staying forever awake.

  The walls and ceiling are silver.

  The bed I lie on is a cot. I look up, see the inscription in the metal above my head.

  US NAVY is scratched out. NEW MILITIA has been roughly carved above it; a new name. A new meaning.

  I want to sit up, but there is too much pain in my chest. It’s hard to breathe.

  A tube is in my arm, dripping blood into my veins. I follow the tube with my eyes, see where it leads.

  Zephyr’s arm. It is his blood in my veins, that brought me back to life.

  I feel myself smile. The smallest tug at my lips, but the effort is so much.

  I close my eyes and sleep.

  CHAPTER 112

  ZEPHYR

  Meadow’s signal was her death.

  She had to die, in order for the New Militia to offer to set us free. Maybe they’d planned it from the second they saw her, when Ray brought us to their bunker. They wanted a war.

  They just needed a reason to jump-start it. A reason to take that first step. When Meadow came in, with the key to ending the Murder Complex for good, the General took the chance.

  She offered to die to save us all. What she didn’t tell anyone, was that her mother’s dying words to Meadow were not to leave the Shallows.

  If she left, the system would kill her. She left anyways. Sacrificed herself for her family.

  We’re on a boat, an old Navy tanker, just off the coast of Northern Washington. After the attack on the Ridge, it’s where they took us. Where I woke up, screaming Meadow’s name, ready to kill the New Militia.

  It was the General himself who told me their deal.

  And it was on his orders that the moment they found her, they’d try to bring her back to life. It worked. Meadow’s a fighter, and she always has been, even in death.

  I don’t know what she saw on the other side. But she’s back with us, she’s here now.

  She just has to open her eyes.

  Sketch forces me to come down to the mess hall and eat. We weave through the metal halls of the ship. Close walls, low-hanging ceilings, metal ladders we have to climb to get from one floor to the next.

  Everyone is eating when we join them.

  The hall we’re in opens up to a wide room. A giant kitchen, and there are metal tables all over the place, filled with New Militia soldiers stuffing their faces.

  I look left and right. I don’t recognize any of the faces until I see one table, all the way to the left.

  Koi and Peri sit side by side. Soldiers stare at Peri’s Regulator, but she doesn’t seem to notice it anymore. Saxon is across from her, and Tox is nowhere to be found. Probably with the captain as he has been this whole time, holding his stupid walking stick. Trying to compare maps to the Green.

  “Let’s go,” Sketch says. She tugs me along the rows of soldiers, until we take our places at the table.

  “Zephyr,” Koi greets me with a polite nod.

  Peri looks up at me and waves. She’s clutching a doll to her chest, one that Ray’s wife Martha gave her. She’s also cleaner, wearing an oversize green T-shirt that’s more like a dress. She looks happy. Almost.

  It’ll take time for the smiles to come back. For all of us.

  “How’s she doing?” Koi asks. “Still sleeping?”

  He slides me a plate full of rations. The food’s the same, and I don’t have much of an appetite, but I eat it anyways. Otherwise, Sketch would tear me apart.

  “Still sleeping,” I say. “But she looks good. Her color is coming back.”

  Koi nods. “She’ll wake up soon. I know she will.”

  Sketch sighs, chugs down a metal cup of water. “I’m gonna kill her when she wakes up, for what she did.”

  I glare at her.

  “What?” she holds out her hands. “Too soon?”

  I’m about to tell her that yes, it’s way too soon, when the room falls silent.

  The General walks in. Everyone stands, salutes him.

  Our table is the only one that doesn’t.

  “At ease,” he says, and then he’s marching through the rows, heading for us. He stops just a few feet from me, arms crossed behind his back. “I’ve got good news,” he says.

  We all whirl to look at him, questions in our eyes.

  “She’s awake.”

  CHAPTER 113

  MEADOW

  I am too weak to ask questions. Too weak to ask what’s going on, where we are, as voices carry, and faces of people I love flood the tiny room.

  I let them come to me. Sketch curses at me, and calls me a ChumHead, and then she actually sheds a single tear.

  Peri and Koi stay with me for a while, talking. We share stories about old times. We don’t talk about our father. I don’t tell them that, when I crossed over, I saw him. That he was safe and at peace, and that someday, he will be waiting for us, ready to welcome us with open arms when we reach the other side.

  After a while, the Surgeon tells everyone I need to rest.

  Peri kisses my forehead and leaves her doll at my side. Koi squeezes my hand and places a carving of our father on the pillow next to my head.

  Everyone leaves, and I fall asleep.

  Later, I wake up to the sound of snoring that isn’t my own. I roll over, see Zephyr lying beside me on the tiny cot. I close my eyes, lean close, and listen to his heartbeat until morning comes.

  EPILOGUE

  THREE WEEKS LATER

  MEADOW

  The ocean is endless, at night.

  I stand on the deck, on the highest level of the tanker, watching the waves far below. They crash and groan against this great metal beast, whispering, calling to me, speaking in voices that only the sea understands.

  Footsteps come up behind me. I tense, but then I remem
ber.

  I don’t have to be afraid anymore.

  “Beautiful night, isn’t it?”

  I turn to look at the General.

  He is dressed in his usual uniform of army greens, pressed neat and clean. Even in this world, where we have almost nothing but what we need to stay alive, he manages to make sure he always looks in control.

  “It’s like any other night,” I say. “Cold. Dark. Somewhere out there, people are still dying.”

  “But not you,” he says. He stands next to me, leans against the railing. His breath comes out in a puff of white that is carried away by the wind.

  “No,” I say. “Not me, and not my friends or family. Like you promised. I’m grateful to you, for saving us.”

  I look down at the scar on my wrist, where the tiny tracker used to be. When my heartbeat stopped, it sent a signal to the New Militia.

  I have hundreds of scars. But this one is is my favorite.

  The General nods. “I’m a man of my word, and it seems that you are a woman of yours, too. Not many would have done what you did, Soldier.”

  He doesn’t know that my mother’s secret is the reason why I died. Because she wanted me to stay in the Shallows, so badly, that she rigged the system to kill me if I ever left.

  I should hate her.

  But lately, all I can do is remember who she used to be. Remember that once, she was the woman who gave me my name, who gave me my brother and my sister. I can love the memory of her, if I leave out the darkest parts.

  White flakes dance from the sky. Snow, something I had never heard about until I came here. It’s cold, and when it touches my nose, I shiver. I was not made for this place.

  But I can’t go home.

  I have no home.

  Not anymore.

  “What happens next?” I ask. Somewhere out there, my father’s ghost is watching me. I can feel him as surely as I can feel the wind, an ever-lingering presence that makes me feel safe. And there is always his voice, strong enough to carry me into each new day.

  The General shifts beside me. “The old man you brought with you.”