by Tanya Lisle
“You let my three best workers go on maternity leave at the same time, so I could use anyone you can spare.”
“First choice?”
“Cas,” Tammy said without hesitation. “If you can pull Cas, that would be a huge help.”
“I should be able to swing that,” Liah said. “Everything else?”
“Business as usual,” Tammy said. “That all? I gotta get back.”
Liah nodded and Tammy was off, going to a small cluster of people who were chatting and yelling at them to at least work while they were doing that. These ones had baskets filled with vines that they were cutting off the walls and carrying away.
Brady tugged on Liah’s shirt with his bandaged hand. “Are those kids?” he asked.
Liah nodded and started walking again. “Down here, as soon as you can, we put you to work. We need all the hands we can get, so they’re out working when they don’t have classes. Not a lot of time to just hang out like they do Upstairs.”
“All of them?”
“All of them,” Liah said.
Brady tried to keep his excitement from bubbling over. He was supposed to be a shy and quiet kid, but the idea that he might be able to do something other than sit in the classroom all day with kids a fraction of his age and actually be useful was like a dream. At a physical six years old, they wouldn’t let him apprentice or do much of anything outside of that classroom. But down here, he could do anything.
He had to stay.
“You okay… what did you say your name was?” Liah asked.
He had a plan to bribe them. He’d forgotten all about the wine in his bag until now. He just needed to get her phone off of her, then find whoever was in charge down here and ask them directly. And probably take their phone as well. Hopefully, by the time they replaced their phones they would have forgotten all about Upstairs and Brady would be comfortably a part of whatever team he ended up on down here.
“Do you know who’s in charge?” Brady asked, looking up and trying to make sure his eyes were wide as he looked at her.
“I am,” Liah said.
Perfect. Brady let his bag drop down over one shoulder and reached into it, pulling out the bottle of wine and giving it to her. “If I give you this, will you let me stay?”
She took it from him, her eyes narrowing and then growing wide as she recognized what it was. “This is almost three hundred years old,” Liah said, looking over the label on the bottle.
“It is?” he asked, eyes wide as he leaned in to get a better look. He reached over into her pocket and pulled out her phone, shoving it into the back waistband of his pants and tugging his shirt over it. “That’s older than Ms. Ed.”
“Only by a little,” Liah said, a smile spreading across her face. “Where did you get this?”
“Found it. Please can I stay?”
Liah reached into her pocket. “We’re going to have to make sure it’s okay with your pare…”
She patted her pockets and looked around and back the way they came from. With a frown on her face, she shook her head and turned out her pockets. “Iris, run party exit.”
From Brady’s pants, Liah’s phone started to ring. Liah looked at him but didn’t make a move.
“Please don’t call Upstairs,” Brady said, backing away and his eyes looking past Liah. He saw a girl with a large basket on her back, full of purple fruits and carrying it away. She was no more than six. He had to be down here.
“I have to, kid,” she said. “We have a procedure. What are you so scared of up there? You get caught in the crossfire or something?”
“If I can’t stay, I want the bottle back.”
“You’re a bit young for this stuff.” Liah let out a sigh and shook her head. “It doesn’t have to get past Ms. Ed, but you gotta tell me what’s going on. At least give me your name. I’m not going to make you…”
Something moved out of the corner of their eyes, like a void suddenly opened and collapsed. They both turned to look at the woman lying on the ground, dark hair and clothing crumpled into a small heap on the ground and her body not moving.
Brady recognized Snow immediately and went to her side. So far, she was the only person he’d ever met who accepted he was actually seventeen without having to verify it, which made her one of his all-time favourite people. She was also one of his mother’s least favourite, which made it all the more important to find out what she was doing showing up here and falling unconscious before she could help him.
He rolled her over onto her back, pushing her feet out from under her with his walking stick so she lay flat. The blood running down her face wasn’t a good sign, especially when it was still wet to the touch. Grabbing the phone out from his pants, he leaned over with his ear by her mouth and watched her chest for the rise and fall as he tried to unlock the phone. When the first three tries didn’t work, he checked for the emergency functions of the phone, though there was no sign of a timer app on any of the screens.
“What do you think you’re doing?” Liah asked, coming closer but not stopping him.
Brady dropped the phone on the ground and waited until he could feel Snow’s warm breath against his ear. Her chest rose and fell very gently and a bruise started to spread over her pale, exposed skin. It wasn’t from a hit, he knew that much. No hit caused a bruise to crawl outward like that. This looked like lightning raced over her skin.
He put two fingers from his splinted hand to his own neck and quickly found her pulse, shallow though it was. Not only that, but even given how his own heart tended to beat quickly, Snow’s was much slower than it should have been. At least it was stronger, though it was still too slow.
“She going to live?”
“Her heart’s slow,” Brady said, all semblance of that shy child he pretended to be dropped. He felt along the back of her neck for anything out of place. “It’s already getting stronger, though. It’s just slow. And the bruising looks almost like it was caused by something electrical.” He gently patted Snow’s cheeks and shook her lightly by the shoulders. “Snow? Snow! Come on, Snow, wake up.”
Liah bent down next to him, grabbing her phone and watching him as he kept trying to wake her up. She stayed calm, unlocking her phone and texting Ed. Upstairs would want to know about their newest visitor, though she decided to leave any mention of the kid and just how Snow managed to appear out of it for now.
A soft groan escaped Snow’s lips as she started to come around. “What’s his name?” Liah asked as soon as Snow cracked open her eyes.
“What are you-”
“Brady Greenwood.”
“Dammit Snow,” Brady said, both relieved to see her awake and upset that Liah knew his name. “What are you trying to do?” he snapped at Liah. “Does she look like she’s in any condition to…”
As soon as Liah’s eyes met his, silently demanding obedience, he shrank back, away from both her and Snow. “I’m sorry,” he said, looking away and becoming that small child again. “I didn’t mean to.”
Confusion crossed Liah’s face. She wasn’t used to such a change in personality happening so quickly, but she also wasn’t used to the fear in Brady’s eyes. “Just keep an eye on her,” Liah told him, going to her phone. “If it’s anything like last time, she’ll be up in a couple more minutes.”
“It isn’t like last time,” Snow said, reaching up with one hand. She touched Brady’s good arm and closed her eyes once more.
Brady fell backwards, eyes open wide and looking up like he was seeing the sky for the first time. His breath caught in his throat and it took a moment to remember how to breathe. The ground was a good place and he couldn’t remember any of the other directions. His mind swam and he felt dizzy with the feeling of something that he needed to do, though he didn’t know what that was.
“Brady!” Liah called. She sounded very far away, but she came closer with every moment. “Come on kid, I can’t have you dying on me already.”
He blinked and Liah came back into view. The memory
of directions came back to him and he tried to sit back up. His wrist screamed in pain as he tried to put weight on it and he fell back to the ground, clutching at the bandaging.
“It’s okay,” Liah said gently, helping him up. “Up you come.”
“I’m okay,” he said. “I’m fine.”
“You are not fine,” she said. “We need to get you some help.”
Brady let out a deep sigh and let Liah help him to his unsteady feet. Around them, people were rushing to help, dropping their baskets and abandoning their fields. He would have liked to stay here, but he should have known it wouldn’t happen. “You’re going to send me back,” he said.
“Greenwood, according to your file you are seventeen. That makes you an adult as far as I’m concerned. If you can keep acting your age, I don’t have to tell anyone that you decided to move down here.”
Liah looked back at her phone and put it in her pocket. “Her on the other hand. We’re going to have a problem with her.”
Chapter 15
Ed’s plan for a quick visit before heading back to help organize the rebuilding of Section I was shot and killed as soon as she saw Miranda at the front desk of the Medical Wing. Miranda was on her feet at the sight of Ed, rushing over with apologies and determined to make Ed late for everything else she had to do today.
“Not right now, Miranda,” Ed said quickly. “I just need to talk to Mac and go.”
“But I feel awful about yesterday,” Miranda said. “I’ve just been so worried with Brady disappearing. No one can find him anywhere.”
“I’m sure he’ll turn up,” Ed said. As strange as it was for Brady to be gone more than a day, she didn’t have time to deal with any of this right now. “Security’s looking?”
“They haven’t found him yet, though,” she said. “He left his watch behind. I don’t even know how he got it off, but it’s like he doesn’t want to be found. Do you think it’s because of me? Did he run away because of me?”
“They’ll find him, Miranda,” Ed said.
“He’s never been gone this long. He’s probably angry at me.”
“I need to go, Miranda.”
“Are you still angry at me too?”
Ed was tempted to tell her yes, but walked past her instead. Of everything going on, Brady being missing was fairly low on her list. She was more concerned with dealing with the now missing woman who vanished into thin air in front of her, predicted incoming attacks down to the minute, and caused people to black out without touching them.
Worse, as much as every piece of evidence screamed at Ed that she was a major security threat, she just couldn’t bring herself to believe that Snow was dangerous. She just wanted to know how she managed to do it all when there was no sign of her having any technology or physical enhancements to assist her.
Ed knocked before she tapped her phone on Mac’s door to let herself in. Mac was still very much disliked for how much work he made for everyone and they still didn’t trust him not to seek out the prisoners for a secondary interrogation.
Mac wasn’t in bed. He was opening every drawer and leaving the cupboards open in his wake. On the bed, he’d thrown a few small tools, many of which looked like they would be excellent to murder someone with if he so chose, and he turned back to Ed with a look of relief on his face. On his forehead, Ed could see a dark shadow where Snow had poked him.
“Good,” he said. “Just who I wanted to see.”
“What are you doing?”
Mac smacked his left arm, his hand no longer covered by a glove as it usually was. The metal and machinery in it didn’t move as he shook it. “It stopped working.”
“Sit.” Ed went around the room and closed the drawers, putting things back where she could and keeping the rest out of the way. When she was done, she pulled a tray over for Mac to rest his arm on and looked up the schematics of his arm on her phone. “What happened?”
“I don’t fucking know,” Mac said. “It wasn’t working when I got up. What happened?”
Ed put the phone down next to Mac’s arm and started trying to figure out where the problem was. “Snow poked you and you collapsed. Same thing that happened to me, I’m guessing. I’m guessing you woke up feeling kind of determined to do something, but you had no idea what it was?”
Mac nodded. “The best thing we could do is kill her,” he said, though he didn’t sound like he planned to follow through on it. “If we did, then she’s not our problem anymore.”
“I’m calling her your problem now, should she come back,” Ed said. She pushed one of the wires and his finger twitched. That wasn’t supposed to happen.
“I should want her dead,” Mac said. “Or gone. She’s dangerous. No one should be able to do any of the shit she’s been able to pull since she got here.”
“But?”
Mac let out a grunt. “She’s useful. But she knows too much.”
“Does she?” Ed asked. “A couple lucky guesses-”
“I don’t think they were lucky guesses. I just have a feeling.”
Ed touched another wire and a different finger twitched. “Does this have anything to do with that girl on the mountain stuff?” Ed asked, not looking up as she flipped through her phone for the next section of schematics. “It sounded like you knew what he was talking about with that.”
Mac shook his head. “I haven’t thought about that in a long time. I always just figured they were crazy. Or drunk.” He waited, but Ed said nothing, bending over his arm to get in deeper into the circuitry. “When they destroyed the shelter and took a bunch of us, they used to talk about how there was a little girl on a mountain that told one of the guys in charge where all the different shelters were in his dreams.”
“And the whole finding a woman on a mountain thing didn’t ring a bell?” Ed tightened one of the connections. “Try making a fist.”
Mac’s hand closed with a crunch and several heavy clacks. “It’s been a while,” he said. “It’s not like I took any of it seriously at the time. I had other things to worry about. Now that I’m remembering, though, I don’t think it was ever wrong. They planned everything around those dreams and they always came back with shit.”
“You’re not going to tell me that Snow is the same girl on the mountain from this guy’s dreams and the one Roland thinks killed his family, are you?”
“I don’t know, but it answers a few things, doesn’t it?”
“She thinks she’s a tapestry and says that the Fates tell her what to say.”
“She knew exactly when they were coming,” Mac said. He tried moving each of his fingers, the clacking still loud and causing his fingers to jerk when they moved, but his hand obeyed his commands again. “There’s just something unnatural about her.”
Ed closed the panel on Mac’s arm. “And?” she asked.
“And I don’t know if we could kill her if we tried without her seeing it coming. And I don’t think we can get rid of her if she doesn’t want to leave.”
“Because she’s the same girl from the mountain that Roland was talking about.”
“Do you know of any other randomly appearing mountains?”
Ed let out a sigh. “I’ll… fine, say she is. What do we do if she is? If all this is real and that Fates are really out to kill her and they’re going to send more and more raiders here until they finally kill her, then what do we do about it?”
“Then we find out as much as we — Wait, did she actually say that they were going to send more?”
“Yeah. After she got you.” Ed’s eyes looked up at Mac’s forehead and the dark smear across it. The fact that there were marks on people that no one else could see, she had to admit that was a point in favour of Snow being something else entirely.
“Then get Grace in here,” Mac said. “We need to be prepared for it.”
Ed didn’t know how to argue with him over this one. As much as she didn’t want to believe this fairy tale that Mac had pulled out about Snow, she couldn’t think of a way to conv
ince him that it was all in his head. The worst part was that it was starting to sound like a more logical conclusion the more she learned. Ed resisted the urge to touch the eye she hid under her bangs just to see if she could feel that dark mark there.
Kitty was visiting Clyde a few rooms over and got there in minutes. She’d been discharged with only a limp remaining and instructions to take it easy, which meant that she was anxious for something to do. She didn’t care to ask why and delved right into the hypothetical planning of how to keep on alert for another attack with an alarming amount of detail.
Between her and Mac, they knew the entire layout of the interior and exterior of the Janus Complex. Ed could offer the various points that Iris was capable of covering and scouting in place of actual people, dismissing messages on her phone as she went through all the points Iris could reach. People were divided into squads and given tasks in different scenarios and at some point, they created a training schedule and set aside time to check their supplies.
“Okay, so I need to ask,” Kitty said, taking notes on her phone as they talked, “is this all stuff we’re actually doing? Do I have to go start yelling at people?”
“Yes,” Mac told her. “We might have more incoming.”
“Finally on board the Snow train?” she asked, her smile spreading wide across her face.
Mac glared at her. “For now,” he said. “She’s been right so far.”
“And you don’t want her dead anymore.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Whatever,” Kitty said, turning to Ed. “But why are we going through all this if we have the information, then? She gave us the time and place last time.”
“She just said that more were coming,” Ed said, glancing up as she went through the messages on her phone. “I’ve been busy trying to get everything together to rebuild Section I that I haven’t had time to-”
“If someone is coming to attack us, make time,” Kitty said. “Section I can wait.”
“You’re both really going with this Snow thing, aren’t you?”