“Are you sure you want to?”
In reply, I raise the tube of mirror matter to the opening and begin inserting it as gently as I can. It’s no more than an inch in when I feel a slight pressure. The tube is sucked from my fingers, disappearing inside. The flap of skin rotates back in place, and suddenly the hole is gone. I can just make out the thin circle of its edge, but it’s no thicker than a piece of hair, and you’d have to really be looking for it to see.
Hunter turns back around to see me grinning like an idiot. “You liked that,” he observes, eyes shining.
I nod enthusiastically. “I did.”
The air around us is warm with the memory of sun. Hunter stares down at me, a funny little half-smile on his mouth, and cocks his head to one side. The sight of it makes my heart leap like a gazelle and a little noise escapes my throat; I am thoroughly and completely undone by the gesture. It’s all I can do to resist throwing myself at him, hungry to feel those soft, dark pink lips press against mine. But instead I make myself say, “We need to get back to the others.”
He nods, looking disappointed. “Lead the way.”
“I always do.” I smirk at him, which becomes a laugh as he rolls his eyes at me. I taught him how to do that, I think proudly.
Ling has called an immediate meeting, so we all jostle into the front room. Hunter and I take the last two seats, which I realize with a sharp pang are Benji and Lana’s. Ling runs over the plan we’d invented in the buzzcar, and announces the first point of order is procuring the blue scratch. We decide that Hunter will fly me to Izzy’s in the buzzcar we stole from the Three Towers. A floater would take too long and I can’t fly—I’d left for the Badlands before I was old enough to learn.
“Be as quick as you can,” Ling emphasizes. “We’re running out of time.”
Ling turns to address Gem and Kissy brusquely. “You guys will need to make some modifications to the Kudzu stream. Explain what Project Aevum was, and change the stuff about artilects being so dangerous. Work with Hunter.” The sisters nod, glancing at Hunter a little nervously. “Right,” Ling continues. “Explosives. I need Bo, Achilles, and Naz. And I’ll need maps!” As I appear to be dismissed, I leave the others and steal five minutes to bathe in Moon Lake.
It’s with wild joy that I ease myself out of what I’m wearing: the white hospital shorts and shirt I woke up wearing in Gyan’s quarters. They are stained in shades of brown, yellow, and red: an artist’s canvas of filth and pain.
I wade into the river naked, cupping clear water to splash my face and arms. Soon I’m deep enough to duck under. Emerging for breath, I sigh with happiness. The water is cool and clean. The lake is still but not silent. Birds call from the trees surrounding the edges, keening and plaintive. In the distance I hear soft splashes: fish jumping or herons landing.
As I swim, I rub at the dirt on my skin, watching it disappear. The stitches in the cut on my forehead and at the back of my head have finally dissolved, leaving two ragged scars. After a few minutes, I head back to the shore. I dry myself with a thin cotton towel and change into a simple khaki top and pair of blue-gray pants Henny found for me. The pants are a little long. With a start, I realize why. These are Lana’s clothes.
A flood of memories whirls around me: Lana and Benji lighting up whenever I arrived at Milkwood, cheering me on as I took the obstacle course. Lana roping into Simutech, quick as a spider monkey. Benji helping me to do the same. Lana grabbing my hand as I slipped on the glass. Lana, eyes wide, being held by the Quicks. Her body crumpling to the ground.
My breath stumbles in my throat. Tears prick my eyes.
“Tess?”
I spin around to see Hunter standing at the entrance of the path back to Milkwood. He’s changed his clothes too, now in a black T-shirt and pants. “They sent me to find you. You have to leave now to meet the buzzcar. Ling doesn’t want it landing anywhere near here.”
A tear runs down my face, and I swipe it away quickly. “I’m coming,” I call unsteadily.
Hunter lopes through the grass. “What’s wrong?”
Another tear rolls down my cheek. “You’re very hard to hide things from,” I chide him shakily.
He studies my face with bewildered anxiety. “I want to understand you,” he says plaintively. “I care about you.”
He says this with a sincerity that reminds me of Benji and Lana. I bury my face in the towel and start to cry.
“Tess?” Hunter sounds pleading and agitated. “What can I do?”
I lift my head from the towel. “You can hold me.”
He reaches over and grasps one forearm firmly. “Like this?” he asks hopefully.
Now I’m laughing and crying at the same time. “No, silly,” I tell him between hiccups. “Like this.”
I drop the towel and wrap my arms around his neck, pulling myself close. His arms move across my back, stiffly at first, then softening into a hug. I close my eyes and rest one cheek against his shirt. I want to stand like this forever, holding the boy I care about, even if he’s not technically a boy.
But I know I can’t. Because now I have to convince Izzy to risk being banished to help me.
When I leave Milkwood, it looks as if someone has turned it upside down and shaken everything out. Half-packed boxes of clothes and gear and food are strewn around the backyard. Everyone’s scurrying, planning, trying not to panic.
A while later, I’m flying over the twinkling lights of Eden alone. Except I’m not alone. Hunter’s voice comes through the comm fitted snugly in my ear while he simultaneously flies the little buzzcar we’ve commandeered. I run my fingers over the blinking controls, wishing I could touch Hunter himself. But I am touching him. Sort of. He’s in the car. He’s inside its insides. It feels surreally intimate to know that part of what makes him alive is flying me now, in the power that surges beneath my fingers.
“I don’t understand how you can fly without seeing,” I say, pressing the black comm into my ear.
“But I can see,” he says, his voice tinny and distant. “There’s vision inside and outside your car.”
“So, you can see me too?” I ask, wiggling my fingers in the air.
“Yes. You’re doing something very strange with your hands. Ah,” he continues, as I hold up my middle finger. “And now you’re doing something rude with them.”
I grin and settle back, letting the familiar sensation of flying relax me for a few moments. Then I ask, “What’s it like?”
“What’s what like?”
“How you see things.” I gesture out to the traffic zipping around us. “Like the buzzcars. What’s it like seeing everything like you can?”
There’s a pause and for a moment I think I’ve lost him. Then I hear him say, “It’s like . . . It’s like the traffic is one living organism; incredibly complex but also beautifully simple. And I’m right in the center of it. I’m part of it, but also outside it at the same time.”
I close my eyes to chew this over, wishing—not for the first time—that I could see things that way. Be in the streams all the time, have every piece of knowledge at my fingertips.
Suddenly I notice that Hunter’s taking me the wrong way, heading toward Charity instead of straight over the Hive. “Hey,” I demand. “Why are we—”
“They’re checking cars ahead,” he replies.
“What?” I peer out into the mess of jerking lights. Far up ahead, there’s a blob of flashing blue hovering at the entrance to the loop we should be taking, stopping every buzzcar momentarily and consequently causing a long traffic jam. Guiders.
“Don’t worry,” he says. “I can get you there safely. We just won’t have as much time.”
My nerves are on high alert, but I’m not going to work myself into a panic. I try to think of something to distract myself. “My chip,” I say. “Do you know what it is? How it works?”
“It’s a silicon chip,” Hunter replies. “When activated it sends false messages of pain to your thalamus, which is then relayed to the
parietal lobe, the limbic system, and the cerebral cortex.”
I shiver, running my fingers over the long cut at top of my spinal column. “I hate it. And not just because it opens a can of whoop-ass on me. I just can’t believe they did something so dangerous. It’s my brain.”
“Neural circuitry isn’t particularly dangerous,” Hunter muses. “Doctors use the same principle to treat various degenerative disorders—”
“Hunter,” I interrupt, “I have a chip in my head. Right now I want sympathy, not a science lesson.”
“Understood,” he says, sounding pleased. “I am sorry this happened to you, Tess.”
He sounds so formal and obedient that it doesn’t sound like real sympathy at all. I shake my head, a confused smile on my face.
“What?” he asks. “That was sympathy, correct?”
“Yeah, but you have to mean it,” I say.
There’s a long pause on the other end of the comm. “I am beginning to think,” he says slowly, “that escaping the Trust will not be the most complicated task I am to undertake.”
“Oh yeah? What is?”
“Understanding you,” he replies sincerely.
It’s another half hour before we’re flying low over the South Hills, making us well and truly late. As we begin our vertical descent to Izzy’s street, sad, sweet nostalgia twists inside me. Summervale Drive, with its grand glass-and-steel houses, hosts a thousand memories of hot summer days and long summer nights.
“I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I tell Hunter after we land. “I’m going to switch the comm off now.” Having Hunter listen in would be needlessly distracting.
“Okay,” he replies. “Good luck.”
I switch off the comm and climb out. The door closes behind me, like a wing folding back down. The insides of the car go dark.
Izzy’s street is empty except for a distant figure walking a dog. Parked buzzcars catch silver light in their windshields from a bleached white moon.
The lights are all on in Izzy’s home. I don’t ring the doorbell in case her parents should answer. Instead, I climb over a side gate and steal down a narrow stretch of grass along the right side of her house. Like most of the houses here, Izzy’s front door is level with the street, with the rest of the house stretching out on top of tall poles that prop it up level on the sloping hillside. Izzy’s bedroom is toward the back of the house—toward the killer view. I can see her bedroom window about twenty feet above me.
I find some pebbles and start throwing them lightly at the window. The first one misses. So does the second. I curse under my breath, and take careful aim with the third. This stone strikes directly in the center of her window, cracking it soundly into a spiderweb of jagged lines.
Izzy’s head appears at the window, face screwed into anger. “What the f—” But she stops short, squinting down at me the darkness. “Tess? Is that you?”
“Shhh!” I put one finger to my lips, then point to the front door. “Let me in. Don’t tell your parents.”
Without giving her a chance to argue, I run back toward the front door.
I hover at the side of the house, waiting. A minute later, light spills from inside. Izzy creeps out onto the porch. “Tess?” she whispers.
I stay half hidden in shadows. “It’s me. Are your parents home?”
She nods, looking stunned. “Yeah, they’re in the lounge. What’s going on? Where have you been?”
“Can you sneak me into your room?”
She hesitates, glancing back inside.
“Please?” I say. “It’s important.“
“I guess,” she says, jiggling from one foot to the other. “But I’m not alone.”
Of course. It was naive of me to assume that. “Can you get rid of them? And turn off anything on-cycle?”
Izzy squints at me in disbelief. I know I’m being beyond a bad friend, but I don’t know what else to do. She exhales noisily. “Wait here. You so owe me.”
Another minute passes before the door opens again. I’m almost looking forward to seeing what poor dope Izzy has wrapped around her little finger this week, but when I do I almost yell out in surprise.
“Joey Lucas,” Izzy purrs at the boy in the doorway. “What can I say? You just know how to tire a girl out.”
“It’s not even nine,” Joey mutters sourly, all slouchy disappointment. He’s sprayed with acne and wears pants five sizes too big for him. That was the boy I let be my first kiss? Fail times a million.
“Need my beauty sleep.” Izzy pouts, reaching up to kiss him on the mouth. She lets her lips linger for an excruciatingly long moment, which I can’t help feeling is to make me jealous. It doesn’t work. “See you at education,” she says when they’re finished.
“Yeah, whatever.” He sighs, then lopes up the drive.
As soon as he’s gone, Izzy gestures at me furiously. “This better be good,” she hisses. But when I emerge fully from the shadows, her face transforms from irritation into alarmed concern. Her gaze travels around my bald head, my scars, and the many bruises that paint my skin in lurid yellow and purplish blue. “What happened? Who did this to you?”
I wave at her to be quiet, and point inside.
In her always messy bedroom, a single lamp sets a seductive mood. Rose perfume hangs in the air, a telltale hookup sign. I couldn’t count the nights we’d spent in here, tucked into furry blankets and scarfing down butterscotch ice cream until we both felt sick. Part of me aches to curl into those soft blankets right now and drift into the sleep that I so badly need. But I’m already late.
Izzy brushes her fingertips against the scar on my forehead.
“I’m fine, really.” I take a deep breath. “I need a favor. Sort of a big one.”
Something flickers behind her eyes. “A favor?”
If I had more time, I’d ease into this more delicately. “I need your father’s scratch.” I say this as simply as if I was asking for one of his shirts. “His Guider’s scratch.”
Izzy’s eyes pop out at me. “Right,” she says with a laugh. “And I need an unlimited Pleasure Allowance and a swimming pool full of chocolate.”
“I’m not kidding,” I tell her. “Can you help me?”
An uncomprehending expression fights its way onto Izzy’s face. Her huge, round eyes lose their softness. “I’m sorry,” she says slowly. “I don’t think I’m getting this.” She clears her throat, eyes now steely. “You disappear for a year. Then you come back, only to disappear again, then you reappear, finally, but you don’t want to see me, you don’t want to hang out with me, you just need a favor?” She starts pacing before me. “A favor, I might add, that’s against the law and could get me kicked out of Eden for good.” She stops to stand directly in front of me, both hands planted on her hips. “Is that right? Am I reading this situation correctly?”
There’s something undeniably adorable about Izzy, five feet two of nothing but cute, standing in the middle of her girlish bedroom with a narrowed-eye expression of pure fury. But to point that out now would not be a wise move. She is monumentally pissed. “Yeah,” I say feebly. “That’s about it.”
“Ten years of friendship, Tess. Ten years. For Gyan’s sake, does that mean nothing to you?” Her voice cracks, making her words sound more than a plea than an accusation. “Do I mean nothing to you?”
“No! Of course not,” I argue. “You mean a lot to me. That’s why I’m here, because I know I can trust you.”
“What’s it for? What do you need it for?”
I open my mouth but no words come out.
“You can’t tell me,” she concludes, almost smugly. “So, you show up out of the blue not to see how the hell I’m doing without my best friend in the whole world, but to use me, and you don’t even have the balls to tell me why? Wow.” She laughs coldly. “Way to trust me, Tess.”
“I can’t tell you because I’m protecting you,” I tell her urgently. I’m out of time. “Look, remember how I said I wanted to ‘do something about it’? ‘It’ b
eing . . . the unfairness of the world? Well, I’m doing it. But I need your help. And yes, the way I’m asking totally sucks, and yes, I am a bad friend. But please, please trust me when I say I’m only asking because I have to.” I take a step toward her. “If you’ve ever felt anything for me, please—can you get me your dad’s scratch?”
Izzy draws in a deep breath through her nose, then exhales. She takes a half step toward me. I can feel her breath, hot and sweet, as she smiles up at me. Then the smile becomes a snarl. “I would rather die than help you, Tessendra.” She pronounces my name as if it is venom, black and toxic. “I. Hate. You.”
I reel back, feeling like she’d slapped me. Izzy stares at me unflinchingly, mouth set in a hard line, eyes as cold as stones.
Blindly I reach for her doorknob, willing myself not to cry. I open the door quietly and check that the coast is clear before turning back to her. She’s still standing frozen in the middle of her room, watching me with a complicated expression that could be victory or could be anguish. “Well, I love you, Izzadore,” I tell her honestly. “And I always will.”
The night air is a welcome relief to my burning skin. I place both palms on the exterior of the buzzcar and try to calm myself down. I’ll just have to be professional. I’ll just have to get back to Milkwood and tell them the mission’s off. I imagine Ling’s face when I tell her we have to flee Eden not as heroes, but as victims. Because of me.
I pop the door open and find the comm where I left it on the dash. Gritting my teeth, I slip it back in my ear and switch it on.
“Hey,” I say. “I’m back.”
Instantly, the car’s displays and lights come alive. “Hi.” Hunter sounds surprised and unusually eager. “How did it go?”
I drop my face into my hands. My voice is muffled in my fingers. “I didn’t get it.”
“What? I can’t hear you.”
I lift my head, feeling dull and beaten. “I didn’t get the scratch.”
“Oh.” There’s a long, painful pause. “Oh.”
“I’m sorry,” I whisper. “I bet you’re all ready to go by now.”
“Yes,” he replies. “We’re waiting for you.”
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