by Amanda Witt
Sir Tom looked helplessly at Alice, and she stood up.
“Red,” she said, coming over to where I sat, kneeling on the ground in front of me. “I heard him last night. He sounds sincere. But you don’t really know him.”
“You don’t know him either.”
“That’s true. But I do know of him. And what I know is not good. He has done things in the past that are simply unspeakable.”
What else had Sir Tom told her about Angel, I wondered. And then I was back to the question of how could we be certain Sir Tom was reliable.
“Couldn’t I at least try to talk to him?” I said. “I don’t think Angel would hurt me.” I didn’t know how to convey the odd feeling of familiarity that he gave me, and I didn’t want to try to explain it, given the scorn on Cline’s face. If I gave him any excuse, he’d make me sound completely superficial and unreliable.
Alice searched my face. “Angel might not hurt you,” she said. “But what about everyone else? If he did agree to work with us, you’d be trusting him with their lives.” And she gestured at the rest of the room, at my friends who sat staring uncomfortably at us.
“What do you think?” I asked them. “Does Angel scare you?”
For a long moment no one spoke. Then Ezzie shifted, cleared his throat. He was alert and in his right mind this morning, and the cuts on his leg had stopped oozing and begun to scab over. But something about him worried me. He was a little too bright-eyed, a little too antsy. It wasn’t natural, not after the harrowing day he’d had, the injury, the restless night. The rest of us were dragging. Why wasn’t he? Maybe he still had a little fever.
“Angel scares me like a cobra,” he said. Everyone else nodded agreement with him.
Only Shawna, among the lot of them, even looked ambivalent. She lowered her eyes and put one hand on Ezzie’s calf, feeling, I supposed, for heat or swelling. Her eyes were puffy from lack of sleep. She had sat up all night with Ezzie.
“Cobra’s a perfect analogy,” Liza said, nodding approvingly at Ezzie. “Hypnotic and deadly.”
Again, the others nodded—all but Farrell Dean, who stared straight ahead. Taking no sides.
For a long moment I waited, but no one said anything else.
“All right,” I said finally. “I’m outnumbered. We won’t try to negotiate with him. But I don’t want you to kill him either.”
Sir Tom threw up his hands. “I don’t want to kill him either, Red Girl. Never have. Else I could have done it many a time, these long years past.”
So it was settled.
With a bit of muttering from Cline we worked out a plan to distract Angel, to draw him away from the stockade so we could snatch it up while his back was turned.
I would be the bait.
Chapter 31
“I don’t like this,” Farrell Dean said, looking down at the empty beach.
He must have been talking to Cline, because he sure wasn’t talking to me. It was early afternoon, and he hadn’t spoken directly to me all day long, had avoided looking at me or even being in my vicinity. I might have been invisible, except then he’d at least have bumped into me a time or two by accident. He was only with me now because Sir Tom’s plan demanded that we wait together in the woods at the edge of the beach. Some thanks for saving his life at the city circle, I thought irritably. What on earth was wrong with him?
“I don’t like Red doing this alone,” Farrell Dean said.
“She won’t be alone,” Cline said. “I’ll be watching, and Sir Tom and Ezzie are watching. If there’s trouble, we’ll step in.”
Farrell Dean looked over his shoulder at the dense woods, where filtered sunlight made uneasy, shifting shadows. “I hope the others don’t run into Jensen or the wild men,” he said. The others were stationed near the stockade, ready to occupy it while Angel was gone. “And I hope Alice is okay.”
Honestly, I had never in my life seen Farrell Dean worried, and now he didn’t seem able to stop.
“Alice is fine,” Cline said. “And it’s time. You’d better go.”
Farrell Dean nodded and turned to me, looking directly into my eyes for the first time all day. He still didn’t speak to me, but he looked so tense that my indignation evaporated. Maybe his peculiar behavior had nothing to do with me. After all, he’d been through a lot, and his back was probably hurting. And he had, as his mother had predicted, insisted on being the one to wait for me in Sir Tom’s hidden boat. The plan was this: After I distracted Angel awhile, I’d climb down the cliff to the hidden boat below—“escape down the cliff,” was how Sir Tom put it, making it sound as if Angel would try to grab me and tie me up, which I thought was unlikely. Then Farrell Dean and I would row up the coast, land, and rejoin the others at the newly retaken stockade.
I smiled at Farrell Dean, trying to look reassuring. His expression didn’t ease, so I reached out and laid my hand against his cheek. It felt rough, sandpapery under my fingers, because of course he hadn’t been able to shave, not for several days.
For a second or two he didn’t move. Then he reached up and covered my hand with his.
Cline cleared his throat impatiently and Farrell Dean released me and stepped back. Cline stuck out his hand and Farrell Dean started to shake it, but then they pulled each other into a brief embrace. What was that about? They weren’t acting like themselves. I wasn’t afraid of Angel, but they were scaring me.
“See you at the boat,” Farrell Dean said to me. Then he turned and walked into the woods.
We watched him go, the woods dappling the light that fell on him, glinting in his hair. He moved a little stiffly because of his injuries, glancing warily around him as he went, and my heart seemed to clench up. Something was going to go wrong. I could feel it. We had a good plan—I knew we did—but everything suddenly felt out of joint. The day felt false like the sunlight was false, unexpected and unreliable this time of year.
Farrell Dean vanished from sight into the shadows, and the instant he did, Cline rounded on me.
“Can’t you let him alone?”
“What are you talking about?” I said.
Cline smirked, batted his eyes, and reached out and touched my cheek, as I’d touched Farrell Dean’s.
I jerked away from his hand, and Cline dropped back into his normal cynical expression. “You should keep your hands off of him,” he said. “It isn’t right.”
“Isn’t right?” I said incredulously. “He’s my friend. You just hugged him, and I didn’t even do that.”
“Come on, you know what I mean,” Cline said. “You lead him on.” His voice was low but it cut like glass. “You’ve always led him on. You make him think he has a chance, but he doesn’t, not with Meritt around. Meritt, his friend. Couldn’t you even pick on two guys who weren’t buddies?”
“This isn’t the right time,” I began, but Cline spoke over me.
“I know exactly how you play him. Everybody knows. You encourage him just enough to keep him at your beck and call. Poor sucker probably thinks he stands a chance now that we’re out of Optica and Meritt’s dead—and Meritt probably is dead, regardless of what you want to think—regardless of what any of us want to think, because he was our friend too, not just yours. And how do you suppose Farrell Dean feels about that, being half glad that Meritt died? And died saving Farrell Dean’s life?”
My face felt hot and I was beginning to tremble. I’d known Cline disliked me, but this—he downright hated me. He thought I was a terrible person.
“And if Meritt’s dead and Farrell Dean ever does have a chance with you, you’ll make him pay. You’ll punish him for not being Meritt. You’ll make him wish he’d died instead, which is exactly what would have happened if the Watchers had had their way. He’d be dead—he was the one, you know? The actual guilty party.”
Tears welled in my eyes and began streaming down my cheeks, and still Cline went on.
“So maybe you’re thinking it’s his fault that Meritt’s dead, but it isn’t. If anything it’s yours.
Farrell Dean was always worrying about you going hungry, afraid you’d get sick, afraid you were malnourished. The food he took, he took for you. So if you want to blame someone for Meritt’s death, blame yourself. Don’t blame Farrell Dean.”
“Leave me alone!” I cried, and turning away from him I started to run, out of the woods, onto the exposed beach.
I ran toward the water, slanting toward the promontory, trying to control my tears, trying to block out the images of Meritt dying, of Farrell Dean avoiding my eyes, trying to forget the loathing in Cline’s voice, the accusations he’d thrown.
I got a stitch in my side—it must have been the crying, because I’d hardly run any distance at all. I stopped, gasping for breath.
It wasn’t true. None of it was true. I wasn’t responsible for Meritt’s death. I wasn’t responsible for Farrell Dean and his mother being put in the city meeting. I wasn’t.
An image of Cynda crossed my mind, her wink, her knowing smile when Farrell Dean slid something onto my plate. Did she think I was using Farrell Dean? And Shawna and Liza, that glance when he said I was persuasive—but they were my friends, and Cynda was my friend, surely they couldn’t be my friends and think terrible things about me?
Abruptly my surroundings came into focus. I was almost to the promontory where the boat was hidden; just ahead, on the last stretch of sandy beach before the rocks took over, I could see the two rocks that marked the trotline. Blast Cline! I didn’t have my net and bucket, no place to put the catch from the trotlines. Under the heat of Cline’s verbal onslaught I’d left them on the ground at his feet. Had I already screwed up the entire plan?
Looking around, I saw no sign of anyone. The thin strip of sandy beach was bare of footsteps, save my own. The tide was high; soon it would turn, the waves beginning to think about going back to their home in the sea.
What should I do now? Go back for the bucket? Lurk around here? Build a sand city? Sure. That would look real natural. But I had to do something to make me look credible when Angel showed up. If he showed up. What a letdown it would be, if we went through all this and then he didn’t even come. We’d have to come up with some other way to capture the stockade, or repeat this again and again until Angel finally showed.
The sun went behind a cloud and the wind kicked up, making me shiver. The sea was still beautiful, but it didn’t look welcoming any more. Without the sun it looked secretive, shifting, sinister.
“My poor child.”
I almost jumped out of my skin. I spun around wildly, looking for him—there, beside the big rock, wearing as usual his camouflage clothing. He was standing about twenty feet away, and his gun was slung over his shoulder.
“He doesn’t understand you at all.” Angel’s face was sympathetic.
My cheeks grew hot. Angel had overheard Cline’s accusations?
“Don’t be embarrassed,” Angel said. “You’re a beautiful girl, and men react to you. You can’t help that. You aren’t responsible for how they feel about you, for what they do for you.”
Behind him the trees swayed gently in the wind. I glanced at them, thinking of Sir Tom and Ezzie hidden somewhere, wondering who else had heard Cline’s words. When I looked back, Angel had come quite a bit closer to me. Startled by his sudden proximity, I backed away.
“Shhh,” he said soothingly. “Don’t be afraid. I only want to talk with you.”
I shot a glance up the beach; no one was in sight, just the sand and rocks, the tall trees and the shadows.
“He doesn’t understand you,” Angel said. “But I do. I know what you want, what you need. And I can give it you.”
“That’s quite a promise.” My voice broke on the words.
Angel shrugged. “It’s simple enough. You want Meritt. I can take you to him.”
The world spun wildly around me, trees and sky and sea in one wild tumult, then slowly grew solid again. Angel had not moved—if he’d come at me then, I couldn’t have moved in time.
“Is he alive? Where is he? What happened to him? Is he hurt?”
Angel laughed and held up a hand as if to slow my questions. “He’s fine,” he said. “Would you like to go to him now?”
I had taken two steps toward him before I thought.
“How do I know this isn’t a trick?” I said, stopping.
Angel studied me gravely. “You don’t,” he said. “But it isn’t. You’ll find the outcome well worth the risk.”
And why not risk it? Even if Angel was lying, if I went with him it would distract him long enough for the others to take the stockade. Wasn’t that what mattered? Even if he was lying it would just be me who got captured. Even if he killed me—which he wouldn’t—it would just be me. The others would take care of the old people, would change life in the city. They didn’t need me for that. Farrell Dean might miss me but, as Cline had said, he’d be better off without me tormenting him.
Then I remembered that Cline was watching, Cline and Sir Tom and Ezzie. I couldn’t see them, but they were there. And they had guns. They wouldn’t let me go with Angel, and they might kill him if I tried.
“I can’t go with you right now,” I said softly, and despite myself my eyes were drawn to the sunlit shadowy woods, to the figures I couldn’t see but knew were present.
Angel’s eyes narrowed, became cold and dangerous and unreadable, and sudden panic welled up in me. What had I done?
Desperately I tried to think of a way to keep his mind on me, not on the men in the woods, not on his now-vulnerable stockade.
“I’ll meet you later,” I said in an undertone.
“Where?”
“The western gap. Where we met last night.”
He nodded and his eyes went back to looking benevolent, but then he began walking toward me, holding one hand out as if to tame a wild thing.
“It would be better if you came with me now,” he said. “If Sir Tom suspects you are sympathetic to me, he will watch you closely. You might not be able to get away again, and then Meritt would wait and you would not come to him. Think how disappointed he will be.”
But I had seen the coldness, the calculation, though they were hidden now. Angel could shift so quickly.
Besides, how could this man possibly take me to Meritt? He had to be lying. Meritt was either dead or locked up in the prison, in the city, surrounded by wardens. I had almost sacrificed our entire plan out of stupidity, out of childish wishful thinking.
I backed away for a few steps.
“You think I’m lying to you,” Angel said. “And I can’t prove otherwise. I can’t prove that I can take you to Meritt, though in fact I can and will. But I can tell you why I want to take you to him.”
Something in his tone halted my retreat. He was no longer cajoling; he was speaking matter-of-factly, as if he had dropped the act and was now dealing straight with me.
“I’ve seen the two of you out in the dark together,” he said. “I know that you care about him and he cares about you, and I know that the Watchers won’t let you be together.” He smiled. “Believe it or not, I’m not too old to sympathize.”
“You watch us?”
He nodded. “Many a night I’ve seen you avoiding the cameras, slipping outside of the wall. He teaches you how to be invisible. You give him something to look forward to, after a long frustrating day.”
It should have been good news—he wanted to help us, and he was strong and not insane—but I felt chilled down to my bones, violated. Those were my most private memories, those nights spent running the dark streets with Meritt. They were the closest thing to freedom I had known. They were mine. And he had been watching us.
“But why?” I said. “Why did you watch us?”
Angel shrugged. “Old habits are hard to break.”
I stared at him blankly.
He spread his hands as if stating the obvious. “It was my job. Someone had to keep an eye on the experiment.”
The experiment.
The word seemed to grow in my mind, crowdin
g out everything else.
Angel’s expression changed. “You didn’t know,” he said, and now he sounded concerned. “Tommy didn’t tell you that Optica was a research trial?”
It took a moment to find my voice. “No.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I would have broken it to you more gently had I realized.”
His expression turned wry. “And I should have realized,” he said. “Of course Tommy didn’t tell you. He feels too guilty about the part he played. He wants to be the hero. He wants to save the city. Am I right?”
I nodded.
“Afterwards, that’s when he’s no doubt planning to tell you. After he’s paid his debt. When you’re so grateful to him that you’ll do anything for him, give him anything. Even forgiveness.”
I heard his words but they didn’t penetrate. All I could focus on, at that moment, was the term experiment. In school we dissected small animals, mixed chemicals in test tubes. That was what I thought of when I heard the word. How could we be that? In my mind I pictured an entire city in a petri dish.
“You don’t mean an actual experiment,” I said, groping for words.
“But I do,” Angel said. “State-of-the-art, if you find that any comfort. Cutting edge. No expense spared.” His voice was heavily ironic, and I didn’t know why, and I didn’t care.
“Tommy was involved from the beginning,” he said. “His job was security—keeping the subjects corralled, providing back-up for those pretentious paper pushers you call the Watchers, liaising with them and the administrators on the mainland. Now that it’s all gone sideways Tommy’s guilt-stricken—that happens, you know, when people discover they’ve backed a failure. They suddenly develop a conscience.”
“What sort of experiment?” I said.
But Angel was distracted now, frowning and glancing to his left, toward the bank of dark trees. I followed his gaze and saw movement. Sir Tom or Ezzie had blown their cover, I supposed. Well, at least that wasn’t my fault.
“There’s no time,” Angel said, and began to stride toward me. “Let’s go meet Meritt.”