"I'm sorry," he whispered, his voice carried by the breeze and pitter-patter of misty rain. "I should have stopped it sooner. I didn't know she was going to give it to you. I'd been there to save you, to save all of you, but I failed. And I'm sorry. I'm going to find your parents and I'm going to tell them you met a boy. I'm going to tell them you ran away with him to be free—that you found love and happiness before fate took you. You can keep your innocence, Iris. You can be free now, with the flowers that gave you a name well-deserved."
Twisting his wrist and tipping the urn, Elias poured the ashes onto the iris bush in front of him. I felt a hot tear drip from my eye and trickle down my cheek to my jaw. When it dropped onto my blouse, I wiped it away with the back of my hand and looked anywhere but at Elias as he took a moment of silence for the girl he'd failed to save.
When he'd paid his respects to Iris, he continued on the route back to the house. I followed him until I recognised the path that led to the village and, instead of standing with Elias and supporting him through the guilt that had stolen him from full consciousness, I walked away from him and into the woodland.
“Trixie,” Beatrice said, her quivery voice thick with surprise. “I didn’t expect you to be back.”
“How do you build your houses?” I asked.
Beatrice stared at me, one thin wide brow raising with suspicion. Why was the lady of the house enquiring about the construction of the village? I should have been sipping tea, reading novels or listening to classical music that, honestly, did nothing but lull me to sleep. I wanted to work. I wanted to do something other than sit around and wait to be fucked, or ordered to kill. This wasn’t the life I had imagined for myself, and I would damn well seize the right I’d been given to take advantage of my freedom here.
“With hammers and shovels, and a lot of time,” Beatrice answered finally, taking a step back to lower herself into her chair outside her house.
“How? How do you do it?”
“Why do you want to know, ma’am?” she asked, returning to the formality I’d hoped we’d gotten rid of.
“I want to know. I have a plan, and I need to know how the houses are built.” Beatrice shook her head. “Please don’t make me order you to tell me.”
I watched her jaw tick as she clenched her teeth and look around her for aid. No one would help her; I had chosen the perfect time of day, when the staff were switching over and the village was empty.
“They’re called crucks,” she said, pushing her feet into the ground so her chair began to rock back and forth. “They’re made of wattle and daub—wood and clay. Stray and hale bales insulate the walls, while the thatched rooves keep us warm and dry…until they need replacing.”
“Why so simple? Why not brick or stone?”
“Because with wood and straw, we can build a house in two months. We choose the simple life. We’ve chosen to revert to the way our ancestors lived. We don’t want to modernise our way of life with machinery and complexity.”
“Two months? Each house?”
Beatrice narrowed her eyes and studied me, stopping her rocking and sitting still to analyse me.
“What are you planning?”
“I’m trying to fix things. I’m trying to do something good.”
A smile ghosted her lips and I swore pride sparkled in her eyes. She may have chosen to live the way she did, but she wasn’t oblivious to what happened to the world out there. She knew what was going on and the way she suddenly warmed and smiled, and moisture glimmered in her navy blue eyes…she wanted to save the city as much as I did.
“How are you planning on fixing things?”
“How many people can you fit in a…” I looked up at the sky as I tried to remember what it was she’d called the huts. “Chuck?”
“Cruck,” she corrected with a throaty laugh. I laughed, too, thoughts of burning bodies and gunshots almost forgotten. “Crucks, darling.”
“Crucks. How many people can live in a cruck?”
“It depends on the purpose. Most of our houses are built to accommodate a family—two adults and two children. But they can be built into larger structures, smaller huts to accommodate one. They’re versatile, easy to build and repair, and the materials are all around us.”
“Can you build them? If I work out the numbers and draw some sketches, can you build them? Can you collect the material and erect the houses?”
“It’s not that simple.” Beatrice pushed out of her chair and took my hand, guiding me away from her cruck and through the village to the small lake. “We’re on record. We’re a government within a government. Every birth and death is recorded. Every bout of sickness and wave of the common cold is documented. We have jobs inside the house—it’s how we ensure our survival. What you are asking takes time and a lot of man-power. Man power we just don’t have.”
“There must be a way!”
“Mr Blackwood came to me once,” she said, taking a seat on a fallen tree. “It was about five years ago now. He’d asked about utilising the land. He wanted to build more houses for the army. He wanted to expand the number of warriors living on the estate, but it was not to be. Imagine the work that goes into sustaining a village within a city within a country that’s failing. The minute we open up Blackwood Estate, or any of the other estates, to people who have been offered to stay, we become the capital all over again. It won’t be long before the estate is shaken to its foundations and the underground re-emerges in the only place we’re all safe.”
A sob escaped me without warning and I realised reality had drawn my tears to the surface. Of course she was right. Of course all we would be doing was opening the estate up to the same fate as the city outside. But there had to be a way. There had to be. Beatrice wrapped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me closer, offering me the motherly comfort I’d craved for the past two and a half years. Finally, I wasn’t afraid of the person sitting with me. I wasn’t worried about her motives or if she would turn on me quickly with an explanation about the necessity of torture, or the beauty of death. She just held me, feeling my helplessness, my hopelessness, feeling me deflate further when I’d always been the woman to push through until I found a way. The truth was, I was broken. I began to notice it now, when I desperately wanted to allow her embrace to piece me back together—at least until I returned to the house—but I couldn’t locate all of the fragments. I couldn’t figure out what was broken, I just felt…empty. Trapped. Alone. I felt like a prisoner. Elias hadn’t needed to let me out of the cell in the Sector, because that was where I’d left the woman I suddenly began to miss.
“I’m going to find a way,” I sniffled into my hand as Beatrice handed me a hand-embroidered handkerchief. “I have to find a way to do something.”
“GRIT does everything it can,” she says. “Sometimes purging is the only cure.”
“You don’t think it’s coincidental? That every time they take someone from the underground, two seem to emerge to fight back?”
“I don’t find it coincidental. I find it promising. The more that emerge, the more will be caught, and the quicker we drain the city of the toxins that poison us. The sooner we can all go home.”
“Home?” I asked, pushing thoughts of toxins and poison and death from my mind. “You weren’t born here?”
She laughed. “Oh no, darling. I have no part of the story. I was offered a job here when I was a young girl, and I accepted. I found love, life and created a family within these walls, but I’m old. I lost them. I’ve got nothing left but the hope of seeing the ocean before I die.”
It was everywhere. Everywhere. Death. It stole our happiness every chance we got, either by stealing people from the world when they should have lived, healthy and happy, until it was nature’s time to take them—like my parents. And if death wasn’t upon us, the promise of its return was weaving around us, holding our happiness captive until the thought of extinction became a paranoid obsession.
“I’m going to take you to the ocean, Beatrice
,” I said, taking a deep breath and standing up. “Let me take you back to the village, I’ve got some planning to do.”
“You’re really going to do this?”
She reached for my hand and I took hers, tucking her fingers into the crease in my elbow as she held on and I guided her back to her cruck.
“I’m really going to do this. There has to be a way. I won’t stop trying until I find it.”
Cremation had never been my favourite job. I hated to see it all wasted, so much life and promise and…
“Elias.”
“Trace.”
I shook his hand but he pulled me into him with his hand on the back of my head. I held strong, wrapping my arms around him loosely and patting his back to signal for him to let me go. Trace had been through this, and he wasn’t half the monster I was. He’d had feelings for Katya; I knew what he did for her, his need to protect her, branched out further than him just doing his job. I’d felt nothing for Iris but sympathy and the sick remnants of my desire to inflict pain and draw blood. But I’d felt empathy for her; I’d felt her pain and I’d wanted to deliver her home to her parents myself. Now? Now I had to live the rest of my life knowing I’d failed a child. A child.
“How are you holding up?” he asked when I followed him into Ashford House.
My thoughts returned to Trixie—like they did every few minutes. I should have brought her here with me. She should have had the chance to see Richard and Mae, and spend some time in her childhood home. I’d left her home for two reasons; the first being that she wasn’t in the house. She’d been at the village. I’d seen her and Beatrice at the lake as Trixie sobbed into her neck with grief for the life she lived now. I didn’t want her in the village, but she was going to go anyway. All I could do was hope she’d return to me at the end of the day. I also didn’t bring her here because she’d demand to be taken to Sector 2, and I couldn’t allow that. Trixie was involved in this somehow—someone had involved her and, as long as the case was under investigation, she wasn’t to step foot near people who threatened her with things I couldn’t anticipate.
“I’m fine,” I lied, as we crossed the foyer and headed straight into Richard’s office.
I wouldn’t say it out loud, but I was glad Trace would go through this with me. I was glad my cousin would be by my side, interrogating, assuming, and discovering with me. I didn’t want to stand in front of striking blue eyes and white-blonde hair of the woman who frightened the fuck out of me with her eerie voice and unknown story.
“It’s okay not to be, you know,” Trace said, reminding me that he possessed far more humanity than I did.
I was more than happy to forget last night ever happened.
“I know. But I’m telling you I’m fine. It was one life to save fifteen. It was worth the sacrifice.”
“It’s not the life-taking that’s has bothered you.”
“Jesus, Trace.”
He laughed and I couldn’t help but laugh with him. He wasn’t the human polygraph like Ruby and Ambrose…he was the psychic. The one who could sense everything you thought and felt before you knew you thought or felt it.
“CompleXV,” I said, by way of explanation. The only one he was going to get, because just uttering the name of the drug brought the images of Iris’ death to the surface.
“Oh.”
“Yeah.” I stopped at the door of the cell. “Can we just get this over with?”
“I thought you’d never ask.”
Trace grinned wickedly at me, the mask of a GRIT warrior slinking into place to sheath his eyes in deviance. I smiled back and when I handed him the mask, we pulled them over our faces before he opened the door and we stormed inside ready to debilitate and disable.
“I don’t know! God, I don’t know!”
He did know, the bastard. He did know. I could see his pulse spike, his pupils had dilated, and he couldn’t hold eye contact. Sure, it could have been from the water, the fear, and the premonition that it was almost over…but I knew he was lying.
“Have you got the buzzer?” I asked, hearing my own voice void of anything that made me human. Right now, I was a warrior.
“He’s got it alright,” Trace answered for him, tapping the back of the prisoner’s hand where the buzzer was nestled tightly in his fisted palm. “Remember to buzz when you’re ready to talk, mate.”
Trace shoved the cloth back over his face as I grabbed the bucket, refilled it with water and gave the prisoner a heavy splash, just to remind him what was coming. We hadn’t tipped him back; we didn’t want him to actually drown—yet. But what we had done was give him the sensation of drowning. We’d induced panic, anxiety, and vomiting, which Trace was at hand to deal with so he couldn’t get out easily by inhaling his own puke.
“Where did they come from?” I asked, tipping the bucket again so water soaked into the thin cloth. “How did you get them in?”
Trace hadn’t killed the drivers of the van that had brought Annabella and the other girls into the city. GRIT shot to kill, but in this case, I was glad Trace had missed. The two drivers already wished they’d died that night, after days of torture at the hands of my cousin. Yet they refused to talk, begging to be burnt alive instead of being made to suffer. It was laughable. They wanted to bring women into the city to be sold off to the highest bidder, but a little bit of water and they wanted to die.
The buzzer sounded and Trace whipped off the cloth. His instruction was to press the bright red button and let of an ear-piercing honk when he was ready to talk. We hadn’t planned on giving him any breathing time between faux-drowns.
“Are you ready to answer?” Trace asked, slapping his cheek and gripping his jaw to hold his head in place.
I leaned over him as he opened his eyes and tried to blink the droplets of cold water from his eyelashes. “How did you get them in?”
“I was just told to drive,” he said, coughing up a mouthful of water. “I was told to head for Checkpoint D and keep driving. If the gates didn’t open, we’d have all died anyway. But they did.”
Checkpoint D. I looked at Trace. Trace glanced at me and nodded to show he understood. Checkpoint D was closest to Sector 3, and it was no coincidence that the point of entry had been close to Beckett’s estate.
“Just like that? No signal? No phone call? No flashing headlights or honking horns?”
“No.” He coughed again, and Trace allowed him some relief, tipping the table upright. “If the mission had failed, it would have been a suicide mission.”
“You were prepared to die?”
The man’s lips clamped together, and he’d decided he’d said enough. He was done talking…but we weren’t out of water. What was the motivation behind willingly driving towards an uncertain fate? He’d been prepared to drive at full-speed into a steel-reinforced concrete wall.
“I’ve got this,” Trace said, slamming the table back with a crunch and tossing the rag to me. I handed him the bucket and smiled at the deviant glint in his eyes. “Let’s talk motivation, shall we?” He rounded the table to the other side as the driver’s gaze followed before I blinded him with the cloth. “A little bit of variation is good, don’t you think?” One splash. “I mean, I’m assuming this isn’t your first time trafficking women into London.” Two splashes. “So how many more have there been? Did you take women out, too? Have you stolen little girls from their mothers to take them outside to be trained?” Three splashes.
The driver twisted in the leather cuffs that pinned him to the table. I heard the crack of his wrist as he tore desperately, trying so hard to twist away from drowning that he broke a damn bone. I laughed. My cousin was a sick son of a bitch and I loved it. I loved letting loose in here with him.
“Oh, I get it,” he continued, delivering the fourth splash. The driver sucked air through the rag that only resulted in him inhaling water. He was drowning, a little deeper with every breath he took. “You took girls out, trained them in the art of submission, then brought them back in. You’re n
othing but a delivery driver. You may as well have been transporting frozen burgers.” Fifth splash. Another gasp. Another twist. Another bone snapping in two, although I couldn’t see which one. I was too focused on the fire in my cousin’s eyes. This had become more than interrogation. It had become about Katya. “Did they let you touch them? Did you get to sample the produce?”
The buzzer fell to the ground and when I looked at his hand, it was limp. Flopping back in the cuff with no resistance. His wrist was finished.
“No!” Trace barked when I bent to collect the buzzer. “No, he won’t be talking.”
I said nothing. Instead, I stood up straight and kept a hold on the rag. Interrogation over. The punishment had begun and it would end in execution. Trace stepped away to refill the bucket. I watched him as he filled it again and again and again, until the first of the two drivers had drowned in the product of his own stubbornness.
The Uprising (GRIT Sector 1 Book 2) Page 20