Summer Ruins

by Trisha Leigh

  He nods, and I reluctantly let the two of them through.

  It’s ten minutes later, and the end of the line is barely in sight, when Griffin the rodent scampers back into view.

  “Greer!” I shout, noticing an ear is missing and blood rushes from a deep gash in his mouse flank.

  Kendaja appears, lightning quick, and pounces. Griffin struggles for a moment between her gleeful fingers, then gives up and morphs back into his Sidhe form.

  The Prime and Zakej are nowhere in sight.

  Griffin’s eyes meet mine, full of pain but steely determination. “They’re trapped, for now, in an elevator shaft. I can’t hold her for long—” He breaks off, hissing through his teeth, and my eyes drop to find Kendaja’s deadly fingertips sinking into his sliced-open side.

  Purple blood gushes out like a waterfall, soaking his sickly pale skin and coating her arms up to the elbow. Greer stops in her tracks, as unsure what to do as I am. If we try to attack Kendaja, it could only make her kill him faster.

  Lucas and Pax enter the tent with the rear of the line, scooting quickly to the front while assessing the situation with Griffin.

  I can’t take my eyes off Greer as she searches her brother’s face. She sees something there that I don’t and breaks down in a sob. When his eyes shift to me, I recognize his intention. Sacrifice.

  Not something I ever expected to see in his face, but it’s there.

  “Get her out of here, Althea. Close the portal.”

  “No.” Greer sobs. “I’m not leaving you. You never left me.”

  “Exactly. I should have left you—” He cries out as Kendaja’s hand slips into his abdomen up to the wrist.

  She pants excitedly at the display of pain, leaning forward to breathe in the scent of fear and agony that even I can smell. The last of the humans disappear through the portal, their faces pale and sweaty.

  I turn briefly toward the boys. “Go. I’ll bring Greer. Just… give her a minute.”

  “I should have… left you before, stubborn girl. You stubborn… stupid…” He’s gasping, trying to stay awake as his eyes roll back in his head.

  I take Greer’s hand, but she won’t move. I’m not leaving her here, though, and take her by surprise when I yank her toward me. It tips her off balance, but I’m ready for her weight. When it hits me I spin, using the movement to leverage her through the portal.

  The Prime and Zakej burst into the tent, covered in dirt and dust, and I duck through the shimmering hole. Greer’s in a heap on the Summer Celebration grass and concrete. “Lucas! Help me pick her up.”

  We haul her to her feet, and while he holds her steady, I pick up her hands and guide them to the edges of the portal, shoving it closed a second before Zakej’s arm can snake through and grasp her neck.

  The last thing Greer and I see is Kendaja pressing her lips to Griffin’s.

  I drop Greer’s hands and wheel around. My brain continues to force my body to function, even though inside I feel numb from everything we’ve seen today. The Prime and Zakej are out of the fight for now, but I know it won’t be long before they summon a Goblert or another mode of transportation and get back here to command their Others.

  The scene here has worsened, the ground littered with bodies covered with slugs or simply bloodied. Some people are tied up, and more than one of the unmoving injured are dressed as Wardens or Refreshers, but it’s not enough.

  The Others will eventually get up; the humans will not.

  I look at Greer, staring into the air where her brother’s face was a moment before, reminding me more of the catatonic girl she was when I trapped her in her mind than the angry girl ready for a fight I’d found in Ireland weeks ago.

  And that’s when it hits me. How to beat them.

  “We have to go into the hive. If we can find the Prime and his family’s sinums, we can trap them there. The way we did with Greer last spring.”

  “How are we going to find them? It could take weeks,” Pax argues.

  He might be right, but I suspect his hesitance has more to do with wanting to physically avenge Leah—and everyone else—than my plan not being the best we’ve got.

  “I’ll show you,” Greer croaks, her voice raw and dripping grief. “I know where they are.”

  “So do I,” Deshi bites out. His mouth and eyes are pinched as though he’s in pain. It must be hard for him, to witness what Zakej is capable of, but it’s better he see.

  I don’t have a modicum of sympathy left inside me. I’m going to kill him myself. For Leah. For Griffin. For every single person lying dead on these grounds.

  Greer gets up, closing her eyes and reaching out for my hand when her knees wobble. I hold on tight, stepping close to her side, amazed again at how often I’ve underestimated her and been proven wrong.

  The boys join us, our hands linking us and our power together. The addition of Greer’s heavy, old magic reminds me of the last time we did this with Griffin between us, and my heart aches. It spills sorrow and anger and the need for revenge through me until I’m hot enough to melt my own blood.

  I think it’s more because of Greer’s palpable pain than my own.

  In the hive, Deshi and Greer lead us downward. Deeper than her sinum, deeper than we’ve ever gone. It’s pitch black, no lights to lead the way, but she doesn’t seem to need any. We walk for over twenty minutes on a slope so steep I keep slipping before she stops.

  “Zakej,” she says dully, pointing to the sinum to our left. “Kendaja.”

  She jerks her head toward one of the two alcoves to the right.

  “Whose is in the middle?”

  “No one. They had a sister. She died a long time ago.”

  It’s curious that no one’s ever mentioned another girl, but I don’t really care at the moment. I cover Zakej’s alcove opening with sheets of metal, melting them together. Pax blows air into my fire, feeding it. I suspect I know why he wants to be able to get inside and turn to give him a piece of my mind about risking his life to beat the crud out of Zakej, but stop at the heartbreak ravaging his face. So much pain fills his gaze that I have to look away, stepping against his chest and wrapping my arms tight around him instead.

  After a moment a sob tears from inside him, as though it’s clawing him to shreds from the middle, and he drapes his arms around me. So much of his weight transfers to me that my knees nearly buckle.

  Lucas and Deshi exchange a glance, then cover Kendaja’s sinum in tandem.

  “I lost her. I left her alone and she died. I failed. Again, I failed.” His whispered anguish slices my heart like razor blades.

  No matter what I say, he won’t believe me right now. He was feet away when Leah died. I was watching through magnified lenses and feel as though I’ll never be right again, never forget her terrified face, so I can’t imagine how he feels. “We all failed her, Pax. Not just you.”

  I hold him another minute until he gets himself under control, until his back straightens and he’s able to look at me through clearer eyes. “She did not die for nothing.”

  “Neither did Griffin. Or Nat,” Greer spits out. “Let’s finish this.”

  We block off a few more alcoves as we go deeper, figuring the top-tier Others and Wardens are probably closer to the Prime. When Greer stops us in front of the Prime’s sinum, all four of us work together to build a wall that nothing and no one can ever knock down.

  Well, perhaps the Elements could. But they won’t.

  When we move to start filling all of the alcove doors, though, we start to see what looks like unconscious Others languishing in their sinums. They appear the way the praseodymium-poisoned Wardens at the Harvest Site did: awake, staring, steam wafting off their burning skin. Again I notice that under the flesh-toned human skin, they appear to be made of a black outer shell. “What’s happening?”

  “The altered injections must finally be taking effect.” Lucas’s eyes light up, excitement infecting all of us.

  “Why would it start working now?” I wond
er aloud.

  “Let’s get outside and verify,” Pax grunts. “If it’s working, this is over.”

  The five of us grasp hands, close our eyes, and share swirling power and scents and heightened emotions that could probably fly us all to the moon instead of simply outside our own minds.

  The sight on the grounds of the Summer Celebration punches me in the stomach, knocks me to my knees, but I can’t look away. People—mostly adults and kids we don’t know, but some we do—lie broken and bleeding on the ground. A little ways away, near the large black-and-white striped tents where the Refreshers would have purged doldrums tonight, the Prime and Zakej lie quietly, staring with empty gazes up at the gathering thunderclouds.

  Grass crumples in my fisted hands as the screaming anguish pours from me in waves of heat, scorching the green blades. Thunder rumbles overhead, promising relief from the humidity but not from the horror.

  Others—Wardens, Refreshers, all of them—are splayed out across the grass and rubble. Some were injured and healing before the praseodymium took effect, but more seem unharmed except for the fact that their skin steams in the sweltering late-morning heat.

  For a few moments nothing moves in the stagnant air, and I think we’re too late. Everyone’s injured or dead. But then people start to move, to shift. Voices filter from the perimeter, where hordes of the newly unveiled humans escaped at the beginning of the skirmish.

  People sit up, struggle to their feet. And I know we’re going to be okay.

  Chapter 40.

  Brittany, Phil, Jordan, Ryan, Sophie.

  Those are the five from our original group that have survived. We’re huddled together, a little lost as to what to do next, when a husky voice rasps out my name.

  I turn, and my eyes fill with fresh tears at the sight of Mr. Morgan. Blood is crusted around a gash on his forehead, sticking his brown hair to his scalp, and he limps, not putting much weight on his right leg. But the smile under his mustache is genuine, and his arms are warm with relief when he wraps me into a hug.

  He pulls back, rubbing some dirt or blood off my cheek, and matching tears fill his eyes. “I always knew you were special. In here.” He taps his chest.

  “Weird, you mean.”

  “Special.” He hugs me again, then surveys the grounds. “You kids are going to need help getting things back together, and most of us that are lucid now have memories of how things were before, but… is this everyone? On Earth?”

  The question is guarded, as though he’s trying to shield me from just how many human lives have been snuffed out by the Others’ presence over the past twenty years. I nod my head. “It’s got to be close. I can’t imagine where anyone else would be hiding.”

  “Jeez Louise,” he breathes out, stunned. “There can’t be more than ten or fifteen thousand people here.”

  “How many people lived on Earth before the Others came?”

  “Seven billion.”

  It doesn’t even make sense, that number. I’ve never imagined there could have been so many, that there could even be enough room for all of us to breathe.

  Mr. Morgan shakes his head as though trying to clear it. “Let’s get everyone rounded up, get the Others secured, then we can talk, okay? Several of us have been putting our heads together on how to rebuild since Greer and her brother brought us up to speed at the Harvest Site. We want your input, of course.”

  I nod absently, unsure how to put things back together. The extent of our goal was to retake the planet, to take enough Others out of commission that we could unveil the population and find a way to get our alien overlords off Earth.

  We’ve kind of accomplished that. We need help, I know that, and the adults that recall how things ran before are more equipped to reestablish society than the four of us are.

  Except… after the books I’ve read, the places I’ve visited, and the general feeling of melancholy that drapes over this world’s past, maybe we shouldn’t just let them turn Earth back into the place it was before the Others.

  Four figures move toward where the Prime and Zakej are languishing, interrupting my train of thought. I recognize them the same moment Lucas shouts and starts walking toward them. “Hey! Don’t touch them.”

  It’s the Elements, and as the four of us draw near, they turn and smile.

  “Why aren’t you affected by the different praseodymium?” I ask.

  “Because we have the ability to regulate our own body temperature, obviously. As do each of you, or you wouldn’t have survived at the Harvest Site,” Pamant says in return, brushing us off as though we’re annoying him. He turns and addresses Fire. “Do it. Get rid of them.”

  Before we can ask what’s going on or think to stop her, my mother reaches out her hands. She places one on the Prime’s stomach and the other on Zakej’s, and calmly turns to the four of us. “You don’t have to watch.”

  My hands go instinctively to my face, but the boys stare. Deshi chokes quietly, the only moment of emotion he’s shown since he ran out after Pax. I pull him against me, turning his back to whatever’s about to happen to the boy he cared for, and feel hot tears wind into my hair.

  “He didn’t care. Not really.” Deshi’s words shake, tumbling down the back of my neck and chilling my spine. “Not really.”

  He repeats it like a mantra while my mother reduces the Prime Other and his horrible son to what appears to be black tar. It seeps through their dressy black-and-red uniforms, the ones that looked so new and shiny this morning.

  My jaw drops open so far it aches, and I step around Deshi to get a better look. A mixture of disgust and relief washes through me until I let my knees collapse and squat on the broken concrete. “Are they… dead?”

  It might seem like a strange question to the humans looking on, but we’ve never been able to hurt the Others badly enough to kill them.

  Pax snorts behind me. “I don’t think they’re going to heal from that.”

  “It’s the only way to kill them—to melt them,” Fire explains. Her eyes meet mine, blue pinpoints begging for my understanding. “You and I, Althea, are the only ones capable of truly destroying them. In the past, I assume you’ve tried burning them from the outside, which won’t do the trick. It must start in the middle and melt outward.”

  It doesn’t quite penetrate my understanding, but hopefully it’s never going to matter. I don’t plan on having to kill any Others soon. Or ever.

  The Elements, our parents, face us. They cross their arms over their chests, not touching one another but standing close.

  “What are you going to do with us, now?” Lucas’s father asks, his eyes filled with a mixture of trepidation and pride as he takes in his son standing beside me.

  “Why didn’t the switched syringes work until now?” It’s been bothering me, the idea that we missed something, that a miscalculation on our part caused all of this destruction. “When we tested it, the Wardens at the Harvest Site were incapacitated within two to three hours.”

  “You tested it?” Pax’s father asks, looking impressed.

  “The Wardens at the Harvest Site only take injections once a day, since their inventory is limited. At the Underground Core, and here, they get them twice. It probably took longer for your variation to gain control of their system since they had a higher concentration in their blood to begin with,” Fire guesses with a shrug. “I don’t know for sure, but if they reacted differently, that could have something to do with it.”

  “We’re going to sit down later with some of the adult humans. Why don’t you four come, and we’ll talk about where we go from here,” Deshi offers. “We have a few ideas that don’t involve any more death and violence.”

  The weak attempt at humor makes everyone but Pax and Greer at least attempt a smile. It might be a while before anything seems right or happy again, but we’re alive and we’re going to be okay.

  I turn to Lucas, exhausted. “Let’s go talk to Brittany and the others. They’re going to want to know what happened.”
>
  We leave the Elements strolling the grounds to check bodies and go to find Brittany and the rest of our friends. They’ve gathered in the midst of the creepy metal machines. They are covered in grime and blood, their clothes torn and their faces haunted by the things they’ve seen—probably the things they’ve been forced to do, too.

  Brittany sits on one of the swinging benches attached to the giant wheel, her shoulders so slumped it looks as though she’s going to bend in half. “I really want to go home, Althea.”

  Her voice is hollow, and the sentiment is echoed by four additional voices just as devoid of emotion. All of the horrible feelings will hit them soon enough, and I don’t blame them for wanting to be back in familiar surroundings when it does. At least Brittany has someone to go back to.

  I hope. They couldn’t have had time to check the bodies against the living, to discover whether their parents survived today. Maybe they’re not ready to know. Or they feel as lost and broken inside as I do, making it hard to breathe or stand, never mind speak to strangers or search for family. Sophie’s refusing to even look up from the weeds reaching through the cracked pavement.

  “We’re having a meeting this afternoon to figure out what to do with the Others, and how to rebuild society on Earth. Then we can all go home.”

  They can all go home, at least. We’ve never had a home.

  My eyes wander, finding Flacara. Is she home, after all?

  “Stop it! Let go of him, don’t hurt him!” The shrill pleas cut through the heat, high-pitched and desperate. It’s a little girl.

  It’s Jas.

  I recognize her voice the instant I take off running toward the sound, the boys and Greer right behind me. I race toward the building where I told Tommy to hide with Jas, and stop short in front of the little black tent where we switched the praseodymium the night before.

  Kendaja holds Tommy captive with arms still crusted with Griffin’s dried blood. Her iron claw of a hand snarled in the front of Tommy’s ragged brown shirt. Her black eyes snap to mine, more wild and crazy than I’ve ever seen them. She smiles, a string of drool dropping onto Tommy’s forehead and sizzling like acid.