The Cross (Alliance Book 2)

by Inna Hardison

  THE CAGE

  Trina

  [Crylo, May 14, 2233]

  She loved him from the first moment he looked at her in a grown up way. They were standing outside the school, and Brody offered her one of the smokesticks he stole, likely from his uncle’s warehouse, only these were old looking, shorter, all the dried grass wrapped in paper. She took it from him, and he touched her hand when he lit it. She felt that touch in the pit of her belly, a warmth and a sharp ache. He must have felt it too, as he looked at her with those gray blue eyes of his, so full of suns in them, so full of light, and she knew she wanted this boy to like her. She blushed when he asked her if he could walk her home, and nodded, hoping he couldn’t see her blush through her dark skin.

  That was a year ago now. She loved everything about him, even when they fought on rare occasions, there was a sweetness, a tenderness to him, even through that hard facade he put on for everyone else. For Riley, and his uncle, and Mr Sanders. As if he didn’t care about much, but she knew him better than anyone, and care he did, deeply. She caught him sneaking bits of what little food they were given for lunch into his bag and handing it to Spartan, the scrawny stray that followed them home from school. Brody would always give him a bit of something he’d saved, and talk to him, soothingly, as if he were talking to a little kid. He seemed embarrassed the first time she saw him do it, but didn’t seem to mind after that.

  She loved how he’d always bring a few sweet smelling blooms to her mother in the Spring or Summer, whenever he came by, and how he’d help her put the dishes away, and listen to her talk. He had a way of making you want to tell him things, secrets even. A way of listening without judging.

  She loved that he didn’t rush her into anything. He didn’t want to hurt her or scare her, he said, and when they finally did kiss, it was her doing the kissing, at least at first. She’d been wanting to kiss him for so long, she couldn’t help herself, so she took his face in her hands and watched his eyes get darker, all gray now, and she kissed him, her hands moving up to his neck and then going all the way down his back, and she felt him freeze at her touch. She let go then and he stepped away from her, his face flushed, and he looked at her with so much fear, she hoped she didn’t hurt him somehow.

  “Are you sure? I need to know this is for real for you. Because I couldn’t bear it if it wasn’t,” he said quietly, not letting go of her eyes.

  She walked up to him then and threw her arms around his neck, nodding, whispering that it was for real, that she’d been wanting to do it since the first time they met, and that she was pretty sure she’d want to keep doing it for the rest of her life.

  She sat there, in the Zoriner Council’s chambers, thinking about all of it, about Brody, and what would happen to him if they find him, and to her. She hoped she could somehow convince these strangers that she broke it off with him right after she saw the feed with the traitors, his parents on it. She was pretty sure there were cameras in the room, recording her, and tried to make her face look calm. The doors slid open and a smallish woman came in. She looked older than her mother, by a few years at least, creases around her dark brown eyes. She had a large screen with her and was typing away on it as she sat down.

  “Trina, right?”

  She nodded, timidly, she hoped.

  “You and Brody were a couple, I’m told, for about a year. Is that correct?”

  She nodded again. It seemed easier to nod than to speak.

  “I need to know how he felt about Zoriners and the Alliance. Conversations you had, all of them that could give us a glimpse into his thoughts.” She was looking at her, openly, waiting.

  She shook her head, “We never talked about that. It just never came up. Not until after the feed from his parents, but I broke it off with him as soon as that happened, so we didn’t even talk about it then.”

  The woman got up and walked right up to where she was sitting on a hard metal bench against the wall. She looked at her, kindly, she thought, and nodded her head, “It is very, very unfortunate then, I’m afraid. You will be transported to an Alliance center at dawn. I suggest you say your goodbyes now,” and she handed her a screen she could use.

  She didn’t understand why they would do this to her. Zoriners didn’t give up their own to the Alliance; at least she’d never heard of them doing it. She couldn’t think of anything she could type to her mom and dad. Couldn’t think of anything to say to anybody that would make it all right. So she simply typed “I love you,” sent it to her house and handed the screen back to the woman. She needed her gone now, so she could cry in peace.

  “Can you please leave?” she hoped she sounded soft enough and polite enough, not angry. The woman put her hand on her shoulder and held it there for a bit, and then left the room, silently, except for the swish of the sliding doors.

  It didn’t make any sense to her that her people would try to punish the kids for something their parents did. Zoriners weren’t supposed to do this sort of thing. It sounded like something the Alliance would do, not them. She couldn’t wrap her head around it. They had been looking for Brody all over Waller. Zoriner soldiers. They had asked her a million times if she knew where he was. She didn’t. She told them she hadn’t spoken to him since after the feed, that they broke up, that she broke them up. She wasn’t lying, they could see that much. And now they were going to use her as bait. It didn’t make any sense. She knew she hurt him, deeply, when she broke up with him. He wouldn’t come looking for her. He probably hated her by now. The way he looked at her when she handed him the little necklace back. There were tears in his eyes then. He knew what it meant. He took the necklace from her hand, and flung it hard into the woods outside the school, looked at her crying face and whispered something she couldn’t hear or read on his lips. He leaned in and kissed her on the top of her head, turned and walked away from her, quickly, not once turning around. That was the last she saw him.

  And when Riley came to see her, she knew that it was because of Brody, and she couldn’t bring herself to talk to him. Riley was just a sweet kid. She couldn’t tell him she had hurt his friend like that, so she slammed the door in his face, feeling ashamed of what she’d done to Brody, hoping someday he’d understand that she was just trying to protect him, trying to make him go, leave Waller, because she knew he wasn’t safe there anymore. Everyone knew that. But when she told him after they showed the feed at school that he had to run, had to leave Waller, he just shook his head at her. She knew he wouldn’t leave for as long as she was there, so she did the only thing she could to make him go. Nobody but her knew why she did it. So them taking her to Alliance now didn’t make any sense.

  She curled up on the cot by the wall, hoping they would change their minds. Hoping something would happen in the few hours she had left that would make them let her go home. But nothing did happen, and at dawn, two Zoriner soldiers woke her up, and tied her hands with metal ties, and then put her on the flier, all without saying one word to her. The youngest of them — he looked just a few years older than she was — seemed embarrassed by what they were doing. She could see the shame in his face, and she almost felt bad for him.

  The flier took off silently, as if running on nothing but air. She didn’t know how they worked, having never been on one before. She looked out through the triangle of the window as they flew over Waller and then the woods and the fields and some kind of empty looking land, with strangely colored hills on it, lavender hills on beige ground. It seemed unnatural for the ground and those hills to be that color. They flew over a stark blue bit of water after that. She couldn’t tell how fast they were going, so she had no idea how large the water was. And once they were over land again, she saw an enormous city in the distance, peaks of buildings visible over the walls of the fence, startlingly white. They flew lower now, and she knew that’s where they were taking her. She knew, too, that it was impossibly far from Waller. Too far for anyone without a flier to ever find her here, even Brody, if he ever wanted to find her again.
She closed her eyes, not wanting to see any more of this place, not wanting to know what they would do to her.

  Two Alliance women came up to her when they were on the ground and dismissed the soldiers with a nod. The flier took off silently. The women looked like twins, same light hair, falling in straight lines around their white faces, as if they’d never been outside. Same gray-blue eyes, Brody’s eyes, only without the suns in them, and without the kindness. They put a wide metal band around her wrists and walked her down a very empty street, with the impossibly tall white buildings on both sides, but no trees, no houses, and no kids or people of any kind. They walked for a long time, the women not saying anything to her. Finally, they stopped, and pushed her inside one of these big buildings that all looked alike to her, and shoved her towards the elevator. It shot up so fast, her throat dropped into her stomach. She had no idea how high up these things went. It didn’t matter. There was nothing she could do about that now. Nothing she could do about any of it.

  An older woman with white hair greeted them at the elevator with a nod, and pointed at something ahead of them. “Take her to the cage. Leave the band on,” and she walked on quickly ahead of them, disappearing down the hallway. The cage sounded ominous, but she had already given up on trying to wrap her head around any of this. She knew they would needlessly keep her here for however long it took for them to learn that Brody wasn’t coming for her. That nobody was coming for her.

  The cage was a glass box. The doors slid open and closed behind her, soundlessly. She looked around and her heart dropped. She was suspended at an insane height, looking down on tiny specks of people walking around below her, the box swaying lightly. She couldn’t not see how high up she was no matter where she looked, so she leaned on one of the walls, cautiously at first, but the wall was solid enough, and she closed her eyes for long enough to get her heart to stop pounding in her head. And when she could breathe normally again, she spotted a tiny cot along one of the walls, and a small sink with a toilet near it. There was nothing else. This was her home now.

  And finally, she was angry. Angry at Brody for looking like these people, angry at her own people for bringing her here, for giving her up like that, and angry at herself for not fighting while she still had a chance to fight, even if it ended up with her dead. She would fight now, would have to. Maybe get one of these sunless people angry enough at her to just shoot her with those buzzing weapons they all had. Anything to get out of this glass cage, before she went crazy. Before she became angry at herself for falling in love with a boy who wasn’t one of them.

  LEASHED

  Brody

  [May 6, 2236 Woods Outside of Reston]

  He hoped that Riley would be smart enough to know there could be soldiers there that simply had their regular comms off. Hoped this kid, the smartest person he knew, would choose something other than a straight line to get to where they were going. The boys he was teaching here were better trained than they looked, and there were 20 of them. If his crew ran into Riley’s group on their own, it would be over. Nothing he could do to protect his friend and still get his hands on one of the replenishers, and that he had no choice about. He heard him before he saw him, his little-kid-excited voice calling his name, his old name, screaming it at the top of his lungs. Not so smart then.

  He had seen Alliance soldiers humiliate Zoriners they caught so many times, he knew what he had to do as if he’d done it himself before. He had to convince his crew that he was in charge and get rid of them. He had to do this, hopefully, without killing Riley. But when he obstinately refused to kneel, he wasn’t so sure he could keep him alive. At last his crew was gone, all but Anders. He didn’t care for Anders, that’s why he picked him. The kid was a bully. He’d have to find a way to deal with him.

  He had the replenisher tied up at a tree, only he wished it wasn’t the one who apparently liked Riley, the way she ran to him, but he couldn’t do anything about it after she did that. If he’d known about her and Riley upfront, he would have found a way to take the other girl, but it was too late now. This had to look believable to his crew. If Riley just got down on his damn knees when he told him to, this girl would have had a fifty-fifty chance. Now she didn’t. He was half mad at Riley for this, but it wasn’t his fault. He should have known that kid had too much pride in him, only he knew it wasn’t just pride. They had too much history. He didn’t think he’d kneel if he were in Riley’s place either.

  He had to make sure it was just the four of them. He could find a way to manage this, so that he got Trina back and didn’t have to kill Riley to do it. The girl eyeing him from the tree, he felt bad for her, but he knew they wouldn’t hurt her. Just make her do what they raised her to do, in comfort. She’d make babies with the unbroken genes for the Alliance. She’d never have to worry about anything for the rest of her life. It wasn’t so bad. They pampered these untouchable girls as if they were queens. In a way, he thought, they were. She would never spend a day in a tiny glass box. He knew that much.

  He was digging through the pile of screens his boys found on Riley’s group, and saw Drake’s name popup on Ella’s over and over again. Recent too. So Drake was somewhere around here. He remembered Drake, the soft-hearted giant, remembered him well. Rumor had it Drake was a guard at one of the compounds. It made sense for him to be with this group then, but it surprised him that Hassinger didn’t mention him. Drake probably arranged their escape in the first place. He didn’t think Drake would kill him, that he could kill anybody; just didn’t have it in him. And he knew Drake always had a soft spot for Riley, and not just because he was always in love with Ella. He had to get him to come out of hiding. Had to contain him somehow. He had to make him believe Riley would die if he didn’t. There was no other way.

  It was hard for him to throw the first punch at Riley, to see all the air go out of him like that, and his eyes looking at him, more hurt than in pain. He knew Riley would have never done what he was doing, no matter what, and it made him angry that he knew it with such certainty. In the same way it made him angry at Riley for not walking away from him when he needed him to, when everyone else in Waller had. For trying to comfort him after all the things he just heard Max say about his kind, calling them animals. It couldn’t have not hurt him, hearing it from Max, and yet there he was still, trying to make him, the bloody offspring, feel better. He never got over asking him if he’d walk away, trying to make him angry at him for asking, and the way he looked at him then.

  He should have done the rest of it himself, the beating, knowing that Anders actually enjoyed hurting people, but he just couldn’t bring himself to do it. Not to Riley. So he let this boy hurt his best friend, because he was too much of a coward to do it himself. Riley was looking at him, not Anders, not making any noise, just taking it. He heard something break in him, and it scared him, and he had to turn away from it, hoping Drake didn’t take much longer.

  He watched the face of the girl. She wasn’t screaming anymore, but pleading, quietly, her face wet. She was watching him, her eyes much too big for her face, and suddenly she looked surprised. He hoped Anders didn’t kill Riley. He spun around and for some reason couldn’t see him clearly enough, his vision going dark. He registered the swaying form of Drake hovering over him, pointing something at him, and hit the ground.

  He woke up to Drake pouring tea into his mouth and making him swallow it. It tasted of some kind of herb he didn’t recognize. He hoped it was poisonous, remembering how Riley looked when Anders pummeled him at that tree, and the girl screaming, but Riley just taking it, looking at him, looking right at him until he finally couldn’t take it anymore and turned away from him.

  He coughed and spat some of the liquid out, and sat up. Drake grabbed him roughly by his shirt and yanked him upright, and as soon as he was standing, slapped him hard on the face with his gigantic hand, making his ears ring.

  “What the hell is wrong with you, Brody? How could you? You, of all people? Your best friend in the whole world,
you son of a bitch. I hope he does to you what you had done to him when he wakes up, or worse. I’d shoot you right now if I could, Brody, I swear I would, and I’ve never shot anybody, before that animal you brought here, and even that was an accident. The damn dial must have moved to lethal in my backpack. So in a way, you are lucky I didn’t shoot you first,” he was shaking him roughly, screaming the words at him. He’d never heard Drake scream at anyone before, and then his voice went all quiet, “a part of me wishes I had, Brody, wishes I killed you, instead of that other kid, if only so Riley never had to look at you again.”

  He looked down, hoping again that whatever was in that thermos would kill him, “I wish you had too, Drake.”

  Drake looked at him strangely at that, as if trying to make sense of it.

  “Put your hands behind your back, Brody.”