Potentially. Because they didn’t know exactly where they were.
The ruin sheltering them had once been a church, according to Dante. “I grew up Catholic. Trust me. I felt guilty the second we walked in to this place.”
Jacey’s teacher, the AI Socrates, had skimmed over the religions of the world, spending as little time as possible on what he called “popular mythology”: the Jade Emperor, Gilgamesh, the Greek pantheon. He spent slightly more time on Hinduism, Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, but he had focused on texts, not architecture. And even then, he’d insisted Jacey understand these faiths only so she could understand literature and history influenced by them. When Jacey had pressed him on which religion was true, he turned into a burning bird, crumbled to ash, and did not rise from it until the next class period. Afterward he laughed at her question and said, “Let me know when you find out.”
All that remained of the church were three stone walls overgrown with vines. Trees filled most of the interior, including one towering elm, its crown spreading over them like a leafy roof. The plank floor had rotted away long ago, exposing a stone foundation now covered with the soil of decomposed leaves, branches, and weeds. An alcove in one wall held a statue of a man holding a baby. Dante didn’t know who it was supposed to be. “Some saint or other. I was terrible at being Catholic.”
An abandoned bird’s nest, like a fairy-woven basket, sat between the statue’s feet. Far above his head was the opening of a sharply arched window. The glass had broken away, the opening covered over by kudzu vines.
Meow Meow had built a fire in the corner, a spot protected from the wind. Stars peeped through leaves of the elm. Quiet rested upon the land, save for the soft wash of the treetops swaying in wind.
The smell of damp soil and moldering leaves comforted Jacey. This was nothing like St. Vitus, but in the aftermath of the Chicago cacophony, the wilds of the barrens were a much-needed respite for her senses. She sat near the fire, its heat seeping into her. With it came a spreading sleepiness.
They’d left the main highway at dusk, following a weedy roadway through three abandoned towns, which Meow Meow took them through at top speed. When they spotted the forest, Jacey suggested finding a place to hide within it, remembering how she and Summer had eluded Senator Bentilius’s guards by fleeing to the rainforest.
Following ever-narrowing tracks, they’d gone deeper into the trees until Meow Meow was confident the limbs masked the truck from above. That had led them to this ruin in what had once been a small town.
Little remained of the town except a few concrete driveways and one relatively clear intersection. A few poles with dead lights mounted atop stood watch. One sign, dangling from a rusty bolt, announced Church St. A few brickwork buildings were in better condition, but Meow Meow was afraid of booby traps in them. “That’s just the sort of place I was taught to put them.”
Captain Wilcox’s supplies included food. Already Jacey had eaten two of the Ripcord Brand Chicken Hot Flasher meals. The tins featured a pull-tab that started an exothermic reaction inside the tin, heating the precooked contents. A whistle valve in the lid announced when it was ready to open. Inside were a chicken flavored, meat-like patty, green beans, and mashed potatoes, all smothered with “gravique,” which the package label claimed to be OUR PATENTED GRAVY-FLAVORED SAUCE—”GRAVIQUE IS UNIQUE!”
Dante finished his third tin, then slammed a can of Spasm, a sickly sweet fizzy drink that encouraged the drinker to SURVIVE, REVIVE & THRIVE, then patted his distended belly. “Nature calls, ladies. This might take a while.” He got to his feet and headed around to other side of the wall.
“Go downwind,” Meow Meow called after him.
He replied with an earth-shattering belch.
“Boys,” Meow Meow said.
“He’s a middle-aged man inside that body,” Jacey said.
“Like I said. Boys.”
They settled into a companionable silence, chewing, swallowing, staring into the flames.
This was Jacey’s chance to ask Meow Meow about the thing that had been bothering her for the past few hours. “You’re having fun, aren’t you?”
A little laugh escaped the girl’s nose. “Running for my life? Falling out of vans? Protecting the innocent from the evils of the world? That’s not what I’d call fun.”
Jacey just looked at Meow Meow. The pop star’s short hair had dried into a tousled mess. But it looked charming, in a boyish way. The makeup was gone now, having been wiped off courtesy of Wilcox’s stash of PRE-MOISTENED TOWELETTES. Meow Meow still had hollow cheeks and prominent cheekbones, but her skin was healthy and pink rather than the pale mask of product she typically wore.
“What happened to you?” Jacey asked, keeping her voice low and soft.
Meow Meow’s pouty lips twisted into a sneer. Jabbing the fire, she sent a spray of sparks floating skyward. “I had the sickness when I was eleven.”
“What sickness?”
“The sickness. You know, the reason they built the fence? The plague that kills ninety-nine out of a hundred? You know. Infection by our friend Yersinia pestis with a Sarme-Trione mod. The little buggers scavenge glycogen right out of your blood so victims go into permanent ketosis. Kills appetite and the body has to use fat for fuel.”
Seeing Jacey’s blank look, Meow Meow said, “It started as a weight loss treatment. People would get infected on purpose, lose fifty kilos, then go on antibiotics for a week. But the modified bacteria, being the living organism that it is, mutated into several varieties. Some became super strong bubonic plague types, others went pneumonic. My immune system managed to get on top of it . . . after eight months in a refugee hospital bed. Wanna know who paid for my treatment?”
Jacey shrugged.
“The Charles and Jacqueline Buchanan Foundation for Victims of the Sickness.” Meow Meow stared into the flames, and poked aimlessly at the embers with her stick. “I know of two others who survived the sickness. Everyone else died. Everyone.”
“So that’s the reason you’re so . . .”
“Skinny? The world thinks I have an eating disorder, which I do, in a way.” She waved at a tin of Ripcord Brand BBQ PORK RIBS. “My metabolism is wrecked. I can’t burn carbs hardly at all. I have to have fat. But I’m never hungry. Ever. So I have to make myself eat. I once got up to 52 kilos and the gossip pundits called me fat. A music critic wrote a blog titled: ‘Meow Meow to Bow Wow, What’s Turning Hot Kitty into Miss Piggy?’ Can you believe that? It was weird, though. I look like my dad when my cheeks are fuller.”
“So you still have it? The disease?”
“It’s not contagious in me, if that’s what you’re worrying about.”
“No. I was worried about you.”
Firelight caught wetness in Meow Meow’s eyes. She blinked it away. “Thank you. The feeling is mutual.” A bit of the girl’s old lasciviousness returned, and she gave Jacey a sly look. “You sure you only like boys?”
“I’m sure.”
“Too bad. Well, watch out for Dante, because he’s hot for you.”
“He’s hot for anything with a pulse. Didn’t you just hear me say there’s a middle aged man inside there? And that body he’s wearing was my friend.”
“Then how can you stand to be around him?”
“He’s been helping me. Or he was, until he tried to turn me over to Captain Wilcox. I should have known better than to trust him.” In fact, she had known not to trust him. Circumstances had thrown them together and he’d helped her escape from Elizabeth’s island and then kept helping her. Expediency had overruled her disgust and distrust. And in truth, she had become accustomed to this new Dante. There were times when she forgot he was a Progenitor.
“He didn’t try to turn you over to that stupid mercenary,” Meow Meow said. “That truck caught up to us. It was Lily who pulled over. Dante just . . . He didn’t think we had a chance, so he was willing to give you up to save his own skin.”
“Can’t say I blame him,” Jacey sai
d, annoyed. “I’m farther from my goal than ever.”
“I know. I know. You want to save this kid friend of yours. You want to save all the other carbos. But you have to face reality. You are wanted by the IPA and every private citizen in the world who thinks they can make a buck off of you.”
“Am I supposed to give up? Just hide forever? I couldn’t live with myself if I got to safety and left Livy and Humphrey and all the others to die. That’s not what Socrates taught me. That’s certainly not the person Sensei shaped me to be.”
“I don’t know who Socrates and Sensei are, but isn’t it odd that you had teachers like that? What was this Dr. Carlhagen guy thinking when he hired them?”
“He thought that if we perfected our minds and bodies the Progenitors who overwrote us would receive some of the benefit. Gauging by Dante’s behavior, that’s been a mixed result.”
Meow Meow tossed her stick onto the flames and leaned onto an elbow. “Has it? If the original Dante was anything like you—so idealistic and damned honorable—maybe that explains some of why he’s helping you.”
It was Jacey’s turn to laugh through her nose. What a ridiculous idea. “The real Dante would never have turned me over to Wilcox. He would have fought to the death to prevent it.”
“Fighting to the death?” Dante said, walking into the glow of the firelight. “Count me out.”
He rummaged through a bin they’d carried from the truck. He pulled out another Ripcord tin. “I’ve got a craving for oranges. What I wouldn’t give for a couple liters of orange juice.”
“Don’t waste any of those tins just for two orange slices,” Meow Meow warned. “Besides, waste food will draw animals. There are bears and wolves around here.”
Dante tossed the unopened package back into the bin and settled across the fire from Jacey. His face did look a bit wan.
“So you didn’t call Wilcox and tell him where we were going?” Jacey asked him.
Dante looked up, dark brows lowering in consternation. “No. Why would I do that? Don’t answer that. I totally would do that if it was my only way out. But I don’t have a tablet, for one. And for two, I don’t have his number.”
No shame. Just matter-of-fact statement. Jacey shook her head in amazement at his audacity. The real Dante had been mischievous, but he’d never been so self-absorbed.
“It doesn’t matter now,” Dante said. “Wilcox is dead.”
“What?” Jacey shot to her feet. Meow Meow straightened, eyes intent.
“Did I forget to mention that earlier?” he said, smiling like he’d just eaten a whole cake without sharing a single piece. “Yes. I had to get the truck key fob from him. He was in bad shape. A piece of shrapnel from the van hit him in the neck. Lots of blood. I ended it for him.”
Jacey remembered seeing Wilcox kneeling on the roadway, hands covered with blood, drones strewn about him.
“You killed him?”
“The shrapnel would have done it. I just helped things along.”
So that path to Dr. Carlhagen was closed. Not that Jacey had wanted to turn herself over the man, but it was the only sure way to Livy she’d found so far. She folded her legs and sat heavily upon the stone floor.
Dante misread her weary collapse. “I thought you hated him.”
“I did.” Something about Dante’s story didn’t make sense.
She studied him across the flames. His face was open, handsome. The resting smile he always wore—had always worn even when he was a Scion—gave him a pleasant look. His button-down shirt was stained with filth and blood, none of it his. The white slacks were in even worse condition, his bare knees visible through ragged holes.
Bags hung under his eyes, dark and puffy. Two days growth of whiskers darkened his chin and cheeks. His lips spread, showing white teeth, under her scrutiny. A wolfish look.
Jacey knew what bothered her. “Why did you kill Wilcox?”
“He was suffering.”
“Since when do you care about people’s suffering?”
He leaned back onto his hands, shoulders hunching toward his ears. His mouth quirked down momentarily to show his disinterest in Jacey’s question.
“Why?” Jacey demanded.
“To help a guy out. I don’t know. I didn’t think about it. You might have noticed that’s a personality flaw of mine.”
She had noticed. Except she didn’t believe it for one second, not in this case. “Did you do it for me?”
“No.” His voice was flat. “I don’t like to witness suffering. But I don’t care if it’s happening where I can’t see, so don’t start thinking I’ve grown a conscience or some such stupidity.”
Meow Meow had been watching the back-and-forth with keen interest. “And why is having a conscience stupid?”
“Are we really having this conversation now? Shouldn’t we be deciding who has the first watch and setting up a perimeter and hobbling the horses? We already have the firelight and the camp in the creepy ruin. Meows should be sharpening her sword while I sing a bawdy song that Jacey disapproves of.”
“What’s he talking about?” Jacey asked Meow Meow.
“I think he’s read too many fantasy novels.”
Jacey didn’t understand. But she didn’t really care. Dante was trying to divert attention from something important. “I don’t get you, Silvio. You overwrite an intelligent boy—killing him in the process—so you can return to your youth. That’s abject greed by any definition. And yet you’ve been risking your neck to help me.”
“I tried to give you to Wilcox. Don’t give me more credit than I deserve.”
That was true. But still, she’d seen his face when he’d kicked Siggy in the head back in the hotel room. He’d been furious. Surely, that meant he cared about her. “Meow Meow says you’re in love with me.”
The scrawny girl choked on a swallow of Spasm, sending a spray sizzling into the fire. Dante sat up and gave Jacey a queer look. “Love?”
He got to his feet. “I don’t love anyone but myself. I don’t care about anyone but myself. Everything I do, I do for me. I always have and I always will put myself first. Get it?”
“I get it. But there has to be some moral core in there, or you wouldn’t have done the good things you’ve done. You said yourself you felt guilty when you came into this church.”
“I was making a joke, darling. I haven’t been to church in 50 years. I don’t feel guilty about it, I feel free. Do you want to know why?” He tilted his head, waiting for an answer. When Jacey refused to ask, he went on anyway. “Because I know that there is no right or wrong. There is nothing to feel guilt about. Ever.”
“You don’t believe that,” Meow Meow said.
He turned on the girl, pointed a finger at her. “It’s the only thing I do believe. Nothing else.” Craning his neck, he faced the headless statue. “That right there is a lie. This whole place is a lie. When I was a kid I had to listen to priest’s lectures about morality, about all the things forbidden by God, and I said ‘Why does God even care what I do?’ And the priest told me because we are his children and we had to behave ourselves in order to get into heaven. And I said, ‘Where is heaven? Show it to me. Prove it.’ And the priest got angry and said I had to have faith.”
Dante spat, his face a mask of disgust. “That’s when I knew it was a lie. There is nothing in this life except this life. The morals people cling to are based on nothing. Kill if you want. Steal if you want. A cockroach is a rat is a boy when it comes down to it. Crush them beneath your heel and all you get is a bigger mess. It’s just a splatter of gooey molecules and nothing more. So when Dr. Carlhagen gave me the chance to be young again, I did not think twice. When I met the boy, I did not flinch.”
The pitch of his voice rose as he railed on. Jacey leaned away from him, horrified to see this side of her companion come out from hiding. Demonic in the firelight, he raised his arms to the sky. He laughed and capered and howled like a beast.
Suddenly spent, he collapsed, face vague and l
ooking more exhausted than ever. “I need sleep.” He lay onto his back and, seconds later, began to snore.
Meow Meow got up, came to sit next to Jacey. They sat shoulder-to-shoulder, quiet and deep in their own thoughts for a long while.
“Maybe he’s right,” Jacey said. “Maybe there isn’t any right or wrong. Maybe we all live by arbitrary rules. But at the Scion School, we had all sorts of rules. None of them mentioned having to love each other. And yet we do. We’re family. That’s why it feels so necessary, right here”—she bumped her chest with her fist—”to risk everything for Livy. For all of them. But in this outside world . . . everyone is so vain, so greedy. So false.”
“Ouch,” Meow Meow said. “I suppose I deserved that last bit. The wigs, the makeup.”
Jacey deflated, put her face in her hands. “I didn’t mean it like that. Not about you. You’re . . . You are a work of art. I think that’s different.”
The wet glimmer returned to Meow Meow’s eyes. She hugged Jacey with one arm and rested her head on Jacey’s shoulder. “That’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me.”
“I doubt that. Don’t you have millions of fans?”
“Fans, yes. Friends? Until now, I’m not sure I’ve had any.” She paused then held out her hand. “Jacey, my name is Kathryne Killusky. I was born in Topeka, Kansas.”
Jacey took Meow Meow’s hand, which was small and warm and strong. Meow Meow gave it a shake, then released it. She pressed her lips together, as if she was considering whether to say something more.
“What is it?” Jacey prodded.
“I—There’s something—Never mind. Get some sleep. I’ll take first watch.”
Jacey tried to get comfortable, fashioning a pillow from a thin wool blanket pulled from Wilcox’s supplies. She was warm enough with the fire. “Do you think Dante believes everything he said?”
Meow Meow shrugged. “I don’t think he knows what he believes. But in the immortal words of Hamlette, in an Oscar-winning performance by your Progenitor, ‘Methinks the boy doth protest too much.’”
Maybe that was true. Jacey hoped so. “Shouldn’t you sleep, too?”
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