It felt like ages, but it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds before we started reaching for our guns. Every one of them snapped to attention and went sprinting, faster than I had ever seen them go. They were a sea of blue as they ran…away from Sanctuary. Shots rang out after them and several of them went down as they escaped. But they were incredibly fast and they disappeared, up the stairs and out of Sanctuary, taking out guards as they left.
No one looked particularly eager to go after them.
Except me.. I wanted to follow them back to Sekhmet, taking each and every one of them down, but the pain in my chest came rushing back and I nearly passed out. I couldn’t see it but it was bleeding like crazy, running down my stomach. I knew it was too much. I felt lightheaded.
“Zoey. Jesus.” Ash grabbed at me, keeping me from losing my balance and falling to the floor. “Is it possible for you to get through a fight without getting torn to pieces?” He was trying to joke but I could hear the stress in his voice. He was ripping his shirt and pressing it against me but I could barely register the feel of the stiff fabric against my collarbone.
“Where’s the fun in that?” I mumbled.
“Is she okay?”
“Does she fuckin’ look okay, Liam?” Ash barked at him. I waved my hand uselessly at the two of them, wishing they would just stop fighting already but I was too tired to even open my mouth.
“We have to get her out of here, to the infirmary.”
I dimly remembered those words but they sounded faint, far away, and I slipped easily into unconsciousness.
THE DREAM WAS different than any dream I had ever had before. It wasn’t a nightmare, which was a nice change from the usual channel my brain tended to be on when my head hit the pillow. But it was definitely different, definitely weird.
I was in my mother’s farmhouse in Nebraska. It looked exactly the same, the way I remembered it except it was before the chaos of the Awakened, before the United States became a nuclear wasteland. The TV was blaring from the living room and I could hear my mother’s laughter. She didn’t laugh much the last time I saw her.
She was talking to someone in the kitchen and she was happier than I’d ever heard her, whilst I was lounging on the couch in the living room, watching a baseball game on the TV. The details were fuzzy and I wasn’t sure if I was watching my favorite team, the Mets, playing. I swore loudly at a bad play.
“Zoey! Language!”
I winced and shouted back. “I’m sorry!”
“Come on, its dinnertime. You and Ash get in here.”
I suddenly noticed Ash was sitting next to me. He lounged in the corner of the couch, looking incredibly relaxed, an arm thrown casually along the armrest. His legs were propped up on the coffee table and I knew that if Mom saw him, she’d scold him. Nicely, of course, because she adored Ash. He caught me looking at him and stole a kiss before I could even process that he was there. He was not the Ash I knew now. His brow was free of worry and his skin was smooth and scar free.
“Come on, your mom made lasagna and I’m starving.”
He helped me off the couch and I followed him into the dining room where my mom was setting a casserole dish of incredibly wonderful smelling lasagna in the middle of the table. She smiled as we entered and the smile I returned was easy. I can’t remember the last time I had given her a genuine smile and it felt so natural to do it. I missed it.
I slid into a chair and Ash immediately slid into the one next to me. His hand reached out to squeeze my knee before he served himself a heavy portion of lasagna. Cheese dripped all over the dining room table but Mom barely noticed as she checked the clock and frowned.
“Hey guys! I’m home!”
Mom brightened up. “Right on time.”
My heart pounded in my chest and I froze as I reached for the spatula. I knew that voice. I knew that voice better than I knew any other voice in the world. It was the voice I missed so much that it physically hurt.
Dad walked through the doorway, and seeing him in a police officer’s uniform with that trademark grin on his face was like a punch to the gut. I stared at him in wonder, as he crossed the room and laid a kiss on my mom that had her bent backwards and giggling.
They both came up, laughing, and Dad turned to us. “Hey, champ.” He nodded at Ash, who nodded back, his mouth full of blood.
My voice failed me and all I could do was stare at them, Dad’s arm wrapped tightly around Mom’s waist.
“Zoey? Zoey, what’s wrong?”
I shook my head. Dad’s mouth was moving but the words weren’t coming from him; they weren’t even in his voice.
“Zoey? Zoey?”
I jerked awake, a cold sweat trailing a small stream down my spine. My hand went to my forehead, where a pounding headache was threatening to burst through my skin. I looked around and saw Ash looking at me, concerned. “Ash?”
“I’m sorry, honey,” he apologized, quickly, sitting closer to me. “You’ve just been out for a whole day and you were whimpering in your sleep. I was worried. I didn’t mean to wake you.” His hand was clutching mine, his thumb rubbing comforting circles across my skin
“It’s okay,” I said, my voice cracking. “I’m glad you woke me up.”
He raised his eyebrow at me. “Bad dream?”
“Not bad, exactly,” I answered, vaguely, trying to clear my mind of the weird dream. “I’ve been out for a day?”
He nodded. “They knocked you out. You were torn up, Z. Like usual.” He shot me a wry look and I rolled my eyes. The movement sent a searing pain through my sinuses and I winced inwardly. “I had to fight to be able to stay with you.”
I sighed. “Oh, I’m sure. Even though I was passed out for the most part.”
“This is very true. On the other hand, we got the most alone time than we had the entire time we’ve been here…”
“Your sarcasm is not appreciated at this very moment,” I told him, and he laughed. I lifted my hand to pull at my hospital gown but immediately dropped it. The pain was too much. “How bad is it?”
Ash stood up quickly, reaching for the collarbone of my hospital gown. God, even the damn hospital gown was black. What was wrong with a little bit of color in this place? Ash’s fingers brushed against my chest lightly and I sucked in a breath at the tingles it sent through me. He winked at me and I shook my head. I immediately regretted the action, as it sent pain shooting through me.
He pulled the gown far enough to reveal a large white bandage covering most of the left side of my collarbone. He peeled back the tape carefully, and took a step back, letting me take in the damage.
“They injected you with…something,” Ash explained. “Prevented you from any infection or anything. Apparently Sanctuary medicine is way more advanced than what we had.”
I could barely see the damage. It was incredibly hard to look at your own collarbone, but what I could see didn’t look pretty. There were a ton of stitches but they looked neat and clean and hopefully that meant it would heal much better than the scar on my face. The entire thing was a painting of black and blue and it made me sick just looking at it. “I guess I’m just glad to be alive.”
“Not funny, Zoey,” Ash said, dryly. “You lost a ton of blood. I’ve never seen you that pale, not even when that piece of shit Awakened cut up your face. I didn’t think…”
“I’m fine,” I cut in. I was about to continue when the door of my room slid open and Octavia walked in, looking…well, not exactly angry. She had the best poker face of anyone I had ever met in my entire life. But she definitely didn’t look happy.
A nurse had followed her in, clipboard in hand, as she checked the monitors that surrounded me.
“Zoey.” Just my name but it felt like a curse on her lips. She nodded at Ash in acknowledgment. “Mr. Matthews, I see you still haven’t left Miss Valentine’s side.”
“I don’t really plan to, Director,” Ash said. The words rang sincere but he was goading her though she ignored the bait.
/> “Even if that means dragging both of yourselves into something you should have avoided at all costs?” Her voice was even but there was a thin veil of anger there. Ah. That was why she was here. I highly doubt every injured Sanctuary citizen got a personalized visit from the Director. She was pissed at us.
“You’d rather we hid with everyone else?” I tried to keep my voice even but trying was very different to succeeding. The disdain dripped from my tongue as I looked at her from my hospital bed.
“You are a citizen of Sanctuary, Zoey Valentine.” Octavia’s voice was angry. I had never seen her lose her cool this way, and yet her face still remained smooth. “You are not a solider.”
“I won’t keep hiding, Octavia.” There’s a hiss of outrage from the nurse and I resisted the urge to hit her over the head. It wasn’t much of a resistance; I doubted I could even swat a fly away at that moment. Not that I had ever seen an actual fly in Sanctuary. “I’m tired of it. You guys might be content to just hide in a hole in the ground but I’m not doing it anymore.”
There was a long pause and I wondered if I had overstepped. Scratch that. I knew I had overstepped. No one talked to the Director like this, not even Patrick, her second in command.
“What would you have us do?” Her voice was so calm. I didn’t know anyone with that kind of patience. I definitely didn’t have it and it drove me insane. I wanted to be able to tell what she was thinking but it was nearly impossible. I didn’t know if she genuinely wanted to know what I would do in this situation, or if she was just humoring me. It could have been both.
“Fight.”
A loud laugh filled the room and the three of us turned to the nurse, staring. She immediately paled and ducked her head, wrapping a blood pressure cuff tightly around my forearm.
Octavia’s eyes narrowed on the nurse for a long moment, her lips pursed. The nurse pretended not to notice, but the tips of her ears were burning bright red as she studied my blood pressure before entering it on a chart.
Finally, Octavia looked away from the nurse and back over at Ash and myself. Ash had perched on the bed next to me, his hand resting gently against my blanket covered knee. “You say it like it’s so simple.”
I snorted and the movement jostled my body. The nurse glared at me but I ignored her. If she was going to laugh at my suggestion, I had no business giving her what she wanted. “I didn’t say that it was simple.”
“It’s definitely not simple,” Ash muttered under his breath, his fingers tracing the bandage over my collarbone.
“But come on, it has to be done! We can’t just hide under this rock and pretend that the outside world doesn’t exist, Octavia.” The nurse gasped again but I didn’t care. I respected Octavia’s position in this establishment but I didn’t think that she was so far above me that using her name was that taboo. “Maybe it won’t happen now. Or in the next year. Or even the next five or ten years but it is going to happen. Sekhmet will reach us down here. They already have. Ignoring them, pretending they aren’t there, its not working for you.”
Octavia folded herself neatly into the chair that Ash had vacated. Her brow furrowed, and not for the first time, she looked so familiar. I couldn’t place it. There was something about the wrinkles on her forehead as she thought and the curve of her full lips that jogged something in my memory. “They somehow got Liam to our entrance.”
“Yes,” I agreed.
“And have been dumping bodies of our patrols on our front doorstep like a taunt.”
My stomach sunk at this but it was nothing but the truth. Too many innocent patrolmen and women had lost their lives, been torn to pieces and dropped on our front porch like a cat bringing home dead mice. “Yes.”
Her voice shook as she continued. “They got into Sanctuary. How is it possible they managed to get in here with those…with those things?”
I sighed, relieved. I didn’t like anything about this situation. People were dying. So many people were dying and there weren’t a lot of us left, not after the US government bombed the crap out of their country. But Octavia was finally seeing it or, at the very least, was allowing herself to see it. Sanctuary wasn’t perfect. Even if it were perfect, it wouldn’t stay that way for long. People knew we were here and Sekhmet was coming. They’d been telling us that for months.
“We have to fight. We have to take them down. No one is safe with that institute still functioning. No one is safe with that crazy lady still alive,” Ash insisted.
Octavia’s eyes met Ash’s and she studied him. The two of them didn’t speak much, at least not to each other. Octavia always seemed to defer to me, and Ash usually ended up being with me, but they didn’t have a lot of one-on-one interaction with each other. It was interesting to watch Octavia regard Ash with such respect. “You sound very much like my father when you say things like that.”
Ash and I looked at each other and back at her. “Your father?” I asked, surprised.
She nodded, looking lost for a moment. We left her in her own thoughts for a few seconds before I made a huff of impatience. “Sorry. Yes, my father. Smart man. Great man. You’ve met him.”
For some reason, the grouchy old man, Peter, in the laundry room was the first person to come to mind. It made no sense. Peter was paler than the moon and Octavia’s skin was the color of milk chocolate…
“Bert,” Ash immediately said. “You’re Bert’s daughter.”
My eyes widened. Bert Washington was the man that had saved our lives when we had thought we would be at the hands of Sekhmet for all eternity. He was the man that took us in, fixed Ash when I thought he was going to die. He gave us food, and clothes. He brought us to Sanctuary. I remembered how he seemed to just have clothes that fit us and how that seemed to be a little too convenient. Now it all made sense. I had been wearing Octavia’s clothes.
I had to admit, this bugged me out a little bit.
“I didn’t know Bert had a daughter,” I finally said, breaking the silence that had fallen in the room. The nurse finished her examination, though it seemed to have mostly consisted of eavesdropping on our conversation.
“He did. He does,” Octavia explained. “He also had a son, my brother Marcus.”
I had not met a Marcus in Sanctuary at all. This also explained where the clothes for Ash had come from. “Marcus?”
Octavia sighed. “He died when he was just barely eighteen years old.” She didn’t elaborate more than this and I knew that the two of us were way too intimidated by her to ask her to explain. “But he was always the active one, the one to do things. He would have been much better at this.”
She always looked so careful, so calm and collected and it made her look much older than she was. Seeing her as she was right now with emotion on her face, talking about her brother, made her look younger. Instead of looking like an old, stressed out woman, she looked like the young forty-something she was.
It didn’t last long. She shook her head, dismissing the thoughts going through her mind. “That’s beside the point. My job is to keep everyone here safe. That is my main priority. I can’t go tearing into a facility like that. We weren’t built for war. We were built for sanctuary.”
A flash of irritation went soaring through me. “It doesn’t matter what you were built for. War came here whether you wanted it to or not. You can’t ignore that.”
Octavia stood up abruptly, smoothing her skirt out with her palms. “You’ve given me some things to think about,” she replied, diplomatically. “However, I will not have my people running into battle, no matter their experience. Only trained soldiers are authorized for this. I will have your word that you will not repeat this incident.”
I didn’t say anything. Neither of us could or would promise that to her. I wasn’t overly fond of the new marks that had added to the landscape of pain on my body, or the fact that I was attached to way too many monitors but I wasn’t sorry for going up there. I had stopped a lot of Awakened. I had contributed and it felt good to finally do something fo
r once.
“Very well.” The anger crept back into Octavia’s tone. She turned to leave but stopped just before passing through the doorway. “They left something behind. Sekhmet, I mean. They left something.”
Ash and I stared at her, and then exchanged quick confused glances.
“They left us a girl,” Octavia said, stonily. “A girl named Astrid.”
THEY KEPT ME in the infirmary for two more days, though that seemed to be overkill. True, my injuries had been pretty damn severe but I was alive. I was fine. And I was going absolutely crazy in that room, especially since they only let Ash stay with me one day before making him return to his normal schedule. I didn’t see him for the rest of my stay and I hadn’t seen Liam at all.
I also hadn’t seen Astrid.
Apparently they’d brought her into the infirmary, an improvement from when Liam was brought here. This place was huge though and every time I had the inkling to go searching for her, a nurse magically appeared and kept me in my room.
I was also told they hadn’t yet informed Liam that she was here. I didn’t know why. He had been losing sleep over her for weeks now and he deserved to know that she was here, and she wasn’t in the clutches of Razi Cylon anymore. I knew I had to tackle the “why” of her appearance soon but not yet. Not until I could tell Liam that she was here.
I woke up the morning I was being let out and after being cleared, nearly sprinted down to the cafeteria. My walk was brisk – and admittedly painful – but I wasn’t capable of running so it was the best I could do. I practically burst through the doors. A few heads turned but most people here had gotten used to my antics, or so it seemed, since they turned back to their food pretty quickly.
I spotted Corbin, Liam and Ash at our usual table. A smile stretched across my face and I headed over to them. My arms wrapped tightly around Ash from behind and felt his laugh rumble up and down his spine. “Hey, Z,” he said. “Welcome back.”
The Sanctuary Page 9