by Malinda Lo
David ripped several pages out of the report he was reading and stuffed them into his back pocket, and she copied him. “Come on,” he said, “we have to get out of here.”
They went to the door and peeked out into the hallway. There was no one in sight, but the red light made everything look the same. Reese couldn’t remember which direction they had come from.
“It’s this way,” David said, going to the right.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes!”
“How do you know—” She cut herself off when she saw someone she recognized turn into the hallway up ahead. “It’s Agent Todd. I think he led those other soldiers away from us earlier.”
Reese headed toward him, but when two tall shapes came into the corridor behind him, she halted, and David bumped right into her.
“What the hell are those?” he muttered.
The two figures walked like humans, and their bodies had the same general shape, but their skin was metallic, and to Reese’s horror their heads appeared to have no eyes.
“You need to come with me,” Agent Todd said as he approached. “We only have fifteen minutes left to get out of here.”
Reese pointed at the creatures. “What are those things?”
“They’re erim—Imria soldiers,” Todd said. “They’re robots; you don’t need to be afraid of them.”
“They’re creepy,” she said, but she followed Todd down the empty corridor at a jog. The robots turned and fell in behind them, running so smoothly, it was almost as if they were gliding on wheels.
When they rounded the corner, Reese recognized the main hallway onto which the medical bay and the interrogation offices opened. The elevator that had brought them underground was standing open, the interior bathed in the same hellish red glow that lit the corridor. Reese and David entered the elevator, and the erim followed, standing at attention on either side of the door while Todd flipped open the cover to a keypad embedded in the wall. As he entered a code, Reese studied the closest robot. Her fear turned into curiosity as she realized it wasn’t eyeless, exactly. There was a band of some sort of darker metal circling the center of its head.
The doors slid shut, and the elevator began to move. “How do they see?” she asked Agent Todd.
“They don’t need eyes like you and me,” he explained. “They use a combination of infrared-heat sensing and radar.”
“They have eyes in the back of their heads,” David said.
“And in the front and the sides,” Todd said, smiling slightly.
Reese studied Agent Todd. There was something about him that reminded her of Dr. Brand. “You’re one of them, aren’t you?” she said.
He turned his gaze to her. “What do you mean?”
“You’re one of the Imria.”
“Yes,” he said.
“Where are the rest of you?” She thought of Amber. “Did everyone get out?”
“Yes. That’s why I was late coming for you two—there was a glitch in the security system, and I had to modify it somewhat. But everyone is out. When we get to the surface, a ship will come for us, but there may be some resistance from the Blue Base soldiers. You’ll need to stay with me. Do not veer off in any direction on your own.”
As the elevator slowed to a stop, the erim raised their arms. They held snub-nosed devices in their jointed metal fingers that looked like oddly cutoff handguns. David stepped closer to Reese, and she didn’t need to touch him to feel the tension radiating from his body.
The doors slid open.
They were in the same nondescript corridor they had walked through when they first entered the underground bunker three days earlier. Then Reese’s senses had been blunted by the sedative Agent Kowalski had injected into her. Now she felt as if every nerve in her body was vigilant. The sirens from below couldn’t be heard up here, and the relative silence rang in her ears. Daylight pooled along the floor from the window in the door at the end of the hall. She could smell the outdoors immediately, and after several days of breathing recycled, refrigerated air, she inhaled greedily as she stepped out of the elevator into the warm hallway.
The erim loped ahead of them to the exit. Agent Todd said something that Reese didn’t understand, and as the robots crouched down, she realized it was because he had spoken in a different language. One of the erim pushed the door open while the other swung outside, weapon raised. The sun glinted off their metal skin, and hot air rushed in along with the sound of shouting.
“Stay with me,” Agent Todd said, giving Reese and David a sharp look.
Heart racing, she followed Agent Todd out of the building.
The blast of heat on her face was a shock. She reeled back involuntarily, holding her arm up to block the midday sun. As her pupils contracted against the brightness, she saw dozens of people take shape like mirages solidifying out of the shimmering desert. There were soldiers—human ones in fatigues, carrying weapons—and civilians in lab coats and suits, and in the distance, a clump of people in orange jumpsuits. They were all running away from the building that still shadowed Reese. Straight ahead was a wide, paved area that abutted a hard-packed dirt road. She remembered climbing out of the Humvee onto that road, leaning against David while fighting off the last dregs of the sedative. Beyond the road was the brown, rocky desert. Heat rolled in waves over the dry ground. In the sky, at about two hand spans up from the horizon, a black object was approaching. It was too far away to see clearly, but the orange jumpsuits were striking out across the desert toward whatever it was.
A brown-and-tan military transport truck roared down the road, screeching to a stop in front of Reese and David. Soldiers poured out of the back and formed a line that blocked them from crossing the road to follow the orange jumpsuits. The soldiers all raised their weapons and began to advance on them. David reached out and grabbed Reese’s hand, dragging her back against him. Agent Todd had a gun too, and he was shouting something in that foreign language again.
It all happened so quickly that Reese barely had time to make sense of it. The erim lifted their snub-nosed guns and fired a series of short, sharp bursts. The human soldiers fell like a row of dominos, none having a chance to discharge his weapon. At the same time, the ground rumbled. Reese swayed on her feet, her fingers slipping out of David’s grasp. There was a giant shudder as if something deep underground had convulsed, and the desert floor itself tilted. A gust of wind blasted out from the building behind her, knocking her off her feet as if she were a paper doll.
She sprawled on the ground, hands and knees scraping against the asphalt as the force of the explosion shoved her forward. She hissed in pain and covered her head with her arms, stunned and breathless. The pavement was burning hot against her cheek. When the ground seemed still again, she raised her head carefully. She had been thrown almost to the edge of the pavement; the rocky brown dirt was only a few feet away. Her hands were bloody, the knees of her jeans torn, and she winced as she gingerly pushed herself up with her elbows.
David rolled onto his back a few feet away, blood trickling from his temple. She couldn’t see Agent Todd anywhere, but the erim were already standing. Behind her the building had not entirely collapsed, though the roof was severely buckled and the door hung on one hinge. She got to her feet, knees shaking. Someone was calling her name, and her ears seemed stuffed with cotton. She turned. A person in an orange jumpsuit was running toward her. Reese recognized the blond hair. Amber.
Beyond Amber, the black object in the sky had grown closer. It was triangular in shape, and it moved with an unearthly silence and precision. It did not appear to have wings or engines like a normal plane. Instead it traveled in an unnaturally straight line over the desert, rotating into position near the largest group of orange jumpsuits, and then began to descend. Clawlike landing gear emerged from the bottom as the craft floated to the ground. A ramp lowered from the shortest end of the triangular ship, and a squadron of erim began to march out.
As Reese stared openmouthed at the spa
cecraft, time seemed to slow down. It was as if the air had suddenly thickened, making every movement take twice as long as it should.
Amber was only a few feet away, sunlight crowning her head. Her hand was outstretched, and a plea was on her lips. She wanted Reese to come with her.
David was on Reese’s other side, and she heard him say something about soldiers and weapons. The urgency in his voice made her turn away from Amber. Another truckload of soldiers had arrived—where had they come from?—and their weapons were raised, fingers on the triggers.
Amber screamed at her. Get down.
Reese couldn’t move fast enough—her body seemed stuck in quicksand—and Amber leaped at her, shoving her down to the hard ground. She heard gunfire. Amber’s body fell, warm and heavy, against her own.
Pain exploded in her body. Her muscles spasmed in shock. She screamed, her voice hoarse and guttural as it tore out of her throat.
But she wasn’t the one who was shot.
CHAPTER 39
Amber’s body was weighting her down, muscles slack, limbs inert. Reese was dimly aware that the pain she was feeling wasn’t hers. It was Amber’s.
A voice was screaming at her, but she couldn’t understand it. All of her senses were overwhelmed by Amber’s pain. Reese felt as if she were battling through some kind of thick, fuzzy haze.
All of a sudden the weight on her lightened as Amber’s body was pulled away. Reese drew in a ragged breath and pushed herself up onto her elbows. She felt David’s hand on her shoulder—she knew it was him—and the gunfire stopped as abruptly as it had started.
Amber lost consciousness. Reese felt it as a sudden cessation of pain, and she looked up in confusion. David was leaning over her, his face smeared with dirt, and he asked, “Are you shot?”
“I’m—” She saw Amber barely a foot away from her, lying on her back with her arms flung over her head as if they had been used to drag her there. A dark red spot was spreading from her abdomen, and Reese sucked in her breath and crawled to her, pressing her hands down on the wound. “Oh my God, she’s shot!” Amber’s blood pulsed beneath her hands. Reese looked around wildly. The soldiers who had shot her had collapsed near their truck, their weapons on the ground. The erim that had emerged from the spacecraft stood in a line between Reese and the fallen soldiers, snub-nosed guns pointed down. Several of the orange jumpsuits had turned away from the ship and were running toward Reese and Amber.
“She’s shot!” Reese screamed. “Somebody help her!”
David knelt down across from Reese on the other side of Amber, and he pressed his hands over the wound as well. Amber’s blood leaked out over their entwined fingers, warm and slippery.
And then Dr. Brand was there, saying, “You need to move out of the way. You need to move!”
Reese looked up at her, dazed from the residual effects of Amber’s pain. Dr. Brand was wearing an orange jumpsuit, and a purplish bruise ran up her left cheek and into the shadows beneath her eye, as if she had been punched in the face. Blood trickled from a cut in her lip.
“Reese,” Dr. Brand said, “please—please move. She’s my daughter.” Two of the erim approached.
David scrambled to his feet first and reached for Reese’s arm, tugging on it gently. “Come on,” he said.
Reese pulled her hands from Amber’s wound and let David help her up. She watched numbly as the robots carefully lifted Amber into their gleaming metal arms and carried her across the desert toward the spacecraft.
“Come with us,” Dr. Brand urged as she headed back to the ship. “You can’t stay here.” But Reese couldn’t seem to move; she felt as if all her energy had drained out of her when Amber was taken away. Her feet weighed a million tons. She looked down at her bloody hands. David put his arm around her. He was whispering in her ear, but she couldn’t hear him. Is Amber going to die?
Dr. Brand turned back when she reached the ramp. “Reese! David!” she shouted. The command in her voice made Reese take a step away from David, but then Dr. Brand’s expression changed to one of shock.
Someone grabbed Reese’s arms, twisting them behind her. Something hard was pressed against her temple. “Don’t move,” said a curt voice.
There was a gun to her head. Terror roared inside her like an ice-cold waterfall.
“Let them go!” Dr. Brand cried, but the man holding Reese captive did not loosen his grip.
Reese felt her captor’s voice rumbling through his body and into hers as he said, “You can take your people and leave, but these kids are ours.”
Dr. Brand took a step away from the craft, and the gun at Reese’s temple clicked. She could feel every millimeter of the weapon’s nose as it slid against her sweat-dampened skin.
“They’re ours!” the man said again. “If you come one step closer, they’ll be dead.”
Dr. Brand stopped. Her face closed into a cold, angry mask. “You don’t know what you’re getting yourself into. When you want answers, you’ll come back to us.”
She marched up the ramp into the spacecraft, followed by the remaining erim. They moved swiftly and silently, backward, pointing their weapons in Reese’s direction the entire time. The ramp lifted into the belly of the triangular craft, and a moment later the ship floated up from the ground, the landing gear retracting.
Reese watched the ship spin soundlessly, and then it sped away, accelerating until it disappeared into the bright, blue-white sky.
The man who put the gun to Reese’s head was a stranger to her. He had gray hair worn in a buzz cut, and he was wearing a camouflage uniform like the other soldiers from Project Blue Base. He tied her wrists together with a plastic strap and shoved her into the back of a Jeep. David, who was similarly cuffed, was dragged away to another vehicle.
The desert seemed to bounce outside the window as the Jeep rattled down the dirt road away from the bunker that had exploded. All she could feel was a distant, frozen terror. She knew if she let herself go, she would break down into a complete mess, so she concentrated on the iciness that had descended on her as she was being led away. She could still feel the aftereffects of Amber’s gunshot wound: a phantom ache in her abdomen. It was the only thing that felt alive in her.
The Jeep pulled to a halt in front of a low, beige-colored building that she recognized. The plaque on the door read BUILDING 5—PLATO. She saw David climb out of a nearby Humvee. The wound on his head had bled spectacularly, leaving a delta of blood on the side of his face. The soldier in charge of Reese pushed her, and she stepped back into the hospital facility she had thought she would never see again.
She didn’t know if they put her in the same room she had been in after the car accident, but it was definitely the same layout. Bed, medical equipment, one window, one bathroom. They cut off her wrist restraint and locked her inside.
Knees wobbling, she slid down onto the floor, her back against the door. She bent forward to put her head in her hands but stopped at the sight of dark red smeared over her palms.
Her stomach heaved, and she lurched across the linoleum to the bathroom, barely making it to the toilet in time. She threw up until her throat was burning and raw.
Afterward, she went to the sink and scrubbed the blood off her hands, wincing as her fingers rubbed against the shallow scrapes on her palms from sliding across the desert ground. She was struck by déjà vu. How many times had she cut her hands since she had last been in this place? The thought made her dizzy, and she retreated to the bed, curling up on top of the blanket with her knees drawn to her chest.
In her mind’s eye, she saw Amber running across the desert toward her, the triangular spacecraft hovering in the distance. She saw Amber’s mouth moving, and she heard David shouting, and then Amber knocked her down, the thud of impact swallowed by the eruption of pain tearing through her body—no, it was Amber’s body. She had felt the bullet strike Amber just as surely as if it had struck herself. She had never been able to sense Amber’s feelings—not the way she could sense David’s. Had she?
She remembered the night in Dolores Park on the swing set, the way it felt as if she could breathe through Amber’s lungs when they kissed. The memory of it shot through her in a gut-wrenching pang. Everything with Amber had been so magnified. Was it because of this ability she had acquired? Maybe some of those emotions hadn’t been her own. That would mean that Amber truly hadn’t lied about the way she felt.
But as seductive as that thought was, something didn’t add up. The bullet tearing into Amber’s body—that had the same all-encompassing, wholly immersive feeling that she had with David, as well as that time with her mom. But the rest of her experiences with Amber weren’t like that.
No. All those feelings had been hers. Amber was still a liar. It still hurt.
Reese woke up with a start. The room was dark except for the marginally lighter square of the window. An unfamiliar sensation crept through her, like someone whispering inside her brain. She shivered.
She rolled onto her side, gazing toward the window. She wondered what time it was and how long she and David would be locked in these rooms.
David. She wished she could talk to him.
Last December, after they had won their first tournament as debate partners, they had hugged each other ecstatically on the stage during the award ceremony. Someone had snapped the photo of them that she had pinned to her bulletin board at home. She still remembered his arm around her, squeezing her close. She had felt his touch burning all the way through to her toes. That day she had dismissed her feelings as a fluke. But maybe the only person she had fooled was herself.
David. I hope you’re okay.
She heard it again: the whispering in her brain. Her spine went rigid.
Reese.
“Oh my God,” she whispered. The hairs on her arms stood straight up. David? She closed her eyes and tried to picture him in her mind: the shape of his eyes and mouth, the way his hair fell across his forehead when he turned his head. The rhythm of his heartbeat, matching hers.