by Trisha Leigh
“No. I mean, besides the fact that they’re smart.” He pauses. “They don’t have powers like the species they abduct—that’s why they take them. But don’t underestimate their minds.”
Deshi’s statements trigger my sudden concern. “I think we’ve all learned not to underestimate anyone’s mind, but are there any hybrids that you know of that can track us?”
He thinks for a moment, and while we wait, Leah and Brittany drop back until they’re walking alongside us. Deshi smiles at Brittany, who returns it hesitantly, before he speaks again. “The Sidhe, obviously. But we don’t know where they are.”
“Even if the Prime has them, they won’t help him catch us,” I snap.
“We don’t think.” Lucas gives me a look when I make a noise that sounds like protest. “We don’t. Griffin’s always been an unknown—his motivations, his appearances. And Greer…” He trails off, but we all know what he’s thinking. If Greer has the chance to save Nat, she will. Even if that means handing us over.
My heart rebels against that idea. After everything Greer and I have talked about, all the things we’ve shared, and the look on her face when she talks about the Others, part of me doesn’t believe she would trade my life for Nat’s.
But there’s no way to know for sure, so in the end I just shrug.
“There was another hybrid experiment that could fly. Gargols. But I think we killed the last one in the Underground Core. It was trapped in one of the cages when they fell.”
“We killed?” I can’t help myself. Deshi made the stairs fall, dashed all of the beings trapped helpless in cages to the ground.
His honey skin tinges a sickly green, and he blows hair out from in front of his eyes. “I did. I didn’t mean for the staircase to crash, it just… I lost control of my power.”
“Okay, so no real way to track us. Pax, what are you thinking?” I drop what happened last spring. Deshi’s one of us now. We’ve all lost control, we’ve all done things we didn’t mean to.
I feel badly about bringing it up. None of us will ever forget those moments, and we certainly don’t talk about them if we can help it. Now those events are part of what fuels our determination to win, to return this planet to its owners, whatever that means.
“You and I take three or four people and we split up for the rest of the day, trek east and west, make trails as big and obvious as we can manage.” Pax motions to the group in front of us. “There’s no way to cover this up. All we can do is confuse them, and even if all we do is make them split up, the group that catches up with us will be much smaller.”
I nod. “Okay. Yeah, that sounds good. I’ll do it.”
“I don’t know if it’s the best idea for the two of you to leave the group, Althea. If the four of you are split up, will you be able to protect us? Or yourselves?” Leah squints at me, reminding me she and Brittany have been listening.
“We have to do it. It’s our only chance to get to Dallas without them finding us,” I tell her. “Plus if they don’t find anyone in a day or two, they might give up. After all, they only saw the four of us at the cabin. There’s no way for them to know how many people were there. They might think they took care of everyone earlier today.”
“They might not come looking at all. Chasing us through the Wilds isn’t their style,” Deshi says. “They’re more likely to find a way to lure us to them.”
Leah doesn’t look convinced, but after exchanging a glance with Brittany, she nods. “Okay. It’s just… Brittany and I have been talking, and I don’t think I should stay with you guys.”
“What?” Pax stops walking, forcing the rest of us to grind to a halt.
The rest of the group notices and stops, too, turning to witness the confrontation that’s brewing in our little group of six.
Leah steps over to Pax, taking one of his big hands in her two dainty ones. “Hear me out. Last autumn in Danbury, when the Prime’s son looked like… him.” She jerks her head at Deshi. “We spent time together, he suspected something had messed with my veil. Now the Wardens at the Harvest Site know I’m your friend, that you were willing to fight for me. The Prime knows you had a bunch of unveiled kids. If they catch us, and I’m with you, they could put two and two together. What you can do with our veils.”
Her words hit me like a punch in the face. I can’t believe none of us thought of it at the Harvest Site, how stupid it might have been to bring Leah back into this mess. Pax and Lucas both look as stunned as I feel, but it doesn’t take long until reason slithers under my fright.
I’m about to reassure her when Pax takes the words right out of my mouth. “Maybe that’s true, but it doesn’t matter now. You’re with us. You don’t have anywhere else to go, and the Others are going to find out what we can do soon enough.” He raises a hand to her cheek and brushes his thumb across her lips, displaying a gentleness he rarely lets us see. “And I’m not letting you out of my sight again.”
Pax has been the tough guy, the rough-around-the-edges, full-of-playful-flirtation guy since I met him, and I love him for those things. But this is the Pax on the inside, the one daring to open up and care about someone again, even though he’s lost so much.
Leah’s eyes fill with tears as she nods, pressing her cheek into his palm.
We’re all staring, which is a little awkward, so I clear my throat. “They probably already suspect about the veils after finding a bunch of kids alone at a cabin in the Wilds with a dog, an injured Warden, and a couple of Sidhe, anyway.”
“Not to mention the fact that the four of us showed up,” Lucas adds.
Leah and Pax break eye contact, turning to face us with something new shining in their faces. It makes me want to smile and it also makes my heart ache, because every day we have more to lose.
“What’s going on?” Phil questions from the gathered group.
“You’re leaving us again?” Laura asks, her voice devoid of emotion.
It creeps me out a little bit, the way she sounds emotionless and uncaring the way everyone does in the Sanctioned Cities.
Before I can gather my wits and answer, Katie speaks up. “She’s not leaving anyone. None of them are. Just let them talk.”
Her voice wears a little thin in the middle, and she’s obviously struggling with walking on her leg even though Laura and Jordan help hold her up on both sides.
“Thanks, Katie. We’re going to go in different directions and leave some trails, try to throw off the Wardens if they try tracking us. We need some of you to come with us—people who are strong enough to move quickly.”
“How do you know you won’t get lost?” someone shouts from the back. I think it’s Mark, the boy we left in charge in Iowa.
“We’re familiar with traveling in the Wilds. The plan is to reunite before dark, but we can survive if we have to. Don’t worry if we don’t show up until morning.” Pax’s confidence spreads from his strong shoulders and threads among the group until everyone stands a little bit straighter.
Eight kids volunteer to help us. Four with Pax, and Sophie, Alice, Phil, and Ben with me.
“Okay. We should go,” I say.
Lucas pulls me into a brief, tight hug, and I press a kiss to his cheek.
Then Pax holds out a hand and I slide my palm against his, letting the warm sunshine of his touch calm my nerves. At his side, the smell of apples and cinnamon calms my thudding heart, even though the slight scent of burning leaves betrays his own trepidation at splitting up.
We stand still until our friends disappear from sight, then our groups separate, too.
Chapter 25.
The five of us don’t do much talking. We’re all jumpy but, after a month of never being alone at the Harvest Site, I try to revel in the peaceful day. Since it’s summery now, the sun offers more hours to traipse around trees and through streams and stomp trails into the grass. It’s easier to enjoy the warmth in the quiet when what feels like a million eyes aren’t staring at me, asking me what they should do so we don’t all die.
Alice, a petite blond with hair chopped to her ears and a way about her that says she’s listening even though she’s silent, stays close to my side, but the rest roam about snapping sticks, smashing tufts of grass, and generally making our presence known.
There are little indications of the season everywhere, but mostly the smell on the gentle breeze, the way it hardly breaks up the heat of the afternoon, tells me I’m somewhere new. We picked up the larger group’s tracks a short while ago, and we hunt our friends, following extra broken branches, footprints in the mud, and other slight indications of a presence in the Wilds that doesn’t belong.
The sun slips below the horizon, swiping pink and purple streaks in broad strokes across the sky. The sound of those bugs—cicadas, Lucas called them in that fake summer vision Cadi created once—fill the night with a strange chirping music that blankets the deepening evening.
I hear the larger group before I see them, although they’re not being loud. It’s just such an interruption from the semisolitude of the past several hours. Pax beat me back; he’s standing on the far side of the camp near a clump of fir trees, talking animatedly to Leah and Brittany. It makes me smile to see him so excited, and I wonder what he’s telling them. Maybe he saw an animal or something today, though I didn’t see anything but squirrels and birds.
Cold arms grab me from behind, snuggling my body against his chest, and the smell of frozen ground and pine needles sends shivers down my spine. It only increases when chilly lips press against the bare skin where my neck meets my shoulder.
I twist in Lucas’s arms, kissing him as lightly as he’ll let me. “Miss me?”
“Nope. Not at all. Why would I miss you?”
“That’s true, you don’t even like me.” I giggle, starting to pull away, but he tightens his arms.
“I love you,” he says, his eyes still sparkling.
I give him a longer kiss this time, enough to leave the taste of him on my tongue. “I missed you, too.”
It’s funny how even though I learned to enjoy being on my own, it’s not a lie that I missed Lucas this afternoon. Not that I need him to breathe or be happy. I enjoyed the day, every last minute, and it felt nice to spend some time with myself. But it’s better if he’s there when I want to reach out to touch him, or that I can meet his eyes and see his thoughts. It’s like I told him last spring while we were still unsure about whether the new versions of ourselves could find a way to fit back together: needing Lucas and wanting him are two different things. So, while I don’t need him by my side, I do want him there.
I love him, and he loves me. And being together makes even the little things better.
We gather with the rest of the kids and I notice Pax has joined the circle, too. I make everyone go around and say their names and where they’re from again, and promise myself I’m going to try really hard to remember them.
There is only one girl I don’t know, after today. Kerstin has honey-brown waves, a smile that lights up the circle, and blue eyes that are focused and smart. Add her to Brittany, Leah, Laura, Katie, Jordan, Alice, and Sophie, and they round out my fellow ladies in the camp. The boys are easier for me to wrap my head around—for some reason most of the survivors are from Danbury. I remember Mark from Des Moines because he was our first convert there.
We gather around a pile of logs and sticks that they must have spent most of the afternoon picking up in the Wilds, and they watch with wide eyes while the kindling catches under my palms. Pax and I share the details of our day, which was pretty uneventful, and we set a schedule for watches overnight in case the Others catch up with us.
The sounds of the summer night and crackling fire fill the air. It would be lovely, if we were simply friends out to sleep under the stars. If there were no Others pursuing us and no chance that when this is over we’ll all be dead.
“We’re making headway on the dymium.” Brittany’s face glows in the firelight, and her excitement is clear.
“What? How?” I ask, scooting forward so I can see her better.
“We pooled our knowledge on that elemental series and started breaking it down into compounds at the cabin. Christian and Kerstin are whizzes at physics, and Mark’s a chemistry nut. But we wouldn’t have gotten this far if Deshi hadn’t brought us a sample.”
I try to catch Deshi’s gaze, but he keeps it trained on the ground as though he’s embarrassed that Brittany revealed his help in the project. I make a mental note to ask him how long he’s been leaning toward joining us, and why he left us at the Harvest Site after he’d made a decision.
But maybe it doesn’t matter.
It makes my suspicion bubble toward the surface, but I ignore its annoying burn. “Great. That’s great. So if we can find a place to reassemble near Dallas, and a way to get materials, we might be able to produce a synthetic in the next… how long until the Summer Celebration, anyway?”
It’s strange to realize I have no idea what day it is. I’m positive it’s June, but exactly when is a mystery.
“Today’s May twenty-fifth, so just over a month,” Sophie answers as she glances into the woods, looking as though she expects a Warden to jump out and grab her for telling me the date. “We kept track at the cabin.”
The Summer Celebration is the first week in July.
“Pax, get those maps out, will you?”
Lucas and I made sure to grab them while we packed up. They’ve been an invaluable tool so far, and since we’re walking into the unknown—again—it makes sense that they’ll be helpful now.
Pax spreads the map of the United States out close enough to the fire to reveal the names of places in the flickering light, but far enough away to avoid sending our assets up in flames.
Several of the kids crowd around, and everyone’s awake except Katie and Laura. They’re still hurting from the ordeal earlier. Justin and Ryan’s fathers are both Healers, and they bandaged them pretty well. Katie’s leg and wrist are both broken, but not badly. At least they don’t think so. The two of them fashioned a splint to keep her shin bones in place and wrapped her wrist tightly with fabric.
Laura and Katie have been out since Pax returned and suggested giving them both some of the expired painkillers we took from the cabin. There aren’t many left, so I hope we can keep the bumps and bruises to a minimum.
Mark’s the one who spots Dallas on the map, leaning into my back and poking at a spot farther south than I would have liked. We find Deadwood again, and trace through three bigger regions—Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma—before we get to the one labeled Texas, where Dallas resides.
It’s a long way, and for a moment we all stare. Then I nudge Pax, who for once gets my nonverbal cue and starts tracing the route he and I walked west from Des Moines. It looks pretty far, but I can see everyone’s faces lifting with renewed hope at the idea that if Pax and I could make it all that way, we can do it again.
While he talks I calculate the distance to Dallas in my head as best as I can, going off how far it was to Salt Lake City and how long it took Pax and me to get there from Des Moines. The estimate is sketchy at best. On one hand, this trip should go faster because it’s summer and we won’t be stalled by snowstorms. On the other, we’re trying to move eighteen people and a dog in a group, including a girl with a broken leg. That’s bound to slow us down.
“We’re going to have to push to make it there in time,” I tell them, explaining how I figured it out. “At least twelve hours a day. More would be better.”
I manage to get the words out in a buoyant tone, but my stomach sinks down into my toes. We’ll never make it. There’s no way Katie can walk twelve hours a day, and if we don’t go faster than that, there won’t be time to try to find a place with the necessary equipment and formulate a plan of attack.
It’s the best plan we’ve got, though. If we can walk twelve or more hours a day, then we can use five or six hours at night to work. Except without the equipment to break apart the dymium samples at an atomic level, we can’
t figure out how to beat the Others. And thinking and theorizing is only going to get us so far.
Everyone settles in for the night. Lucas, Pax, Deshi, and I circle a few blankets off to one side. It delights me that I won’t need to worry about keeping anyone, including myself, warm. A light covering will keep me comfortable all night.
It’s surprising that Leah drops next to Brittany, even though the two of them engage in immediate discussion and they’ve been separated for a while. I figured she’d be over here with Pax. I give him a look, waggling my eyebrows suggestively. He shrugs and looks away but I grab his arm and move around until I can see his face. “Are you… Pax, are you blushing? What is going on?”
“Oh, stuff a sock in it, Althea. She’s coming over after Brittany falls asleep, okay?” In spite of his tone he’s smiling, and I smile back, giving him an impulsive hug.
His arms wrap around me, squeezing almost painfully tight the way they always have, and when he lets me go it occurs to me that the two of us haven’t talked much lately. “Are you okay?”
“What do you mean?”
“With all of this, I guess. The ideas. The plan.”
“You mean the fact that it’s probably not going to work?” Trademark Pax skepticism flashes through his features, but this time it’s warranted.
Deshi and Lucas scoot closer, listening in, and I drop to the makeshift bed next to Lucas. Wolf presses warmth and happiness against my leg, leaning into my fingers as I scratch behind his furry ears.
“Yeah, that. I mean… I tried to make it sound good, but we’re just never going to make it in time to find a chemistry lab at one of the places Rita suggested, reverse engineer an element, figure out what about the dymium is essential to the Others, and use it to hurt them.” I check their expressions, see that none of them are surprised. “We need another week, even at twelve hours a day. At least.”