“What is it, Roan?”
Roan clutched the fabric of her nightgown and did her best to look terrified, staggering the last few steps toward the desk, biting the inside of her cheek. “It’s-I think I’m spotting, Mrs. Wight. I had the worst cramps, they woke me up.”
Mrs. Wight blanched and staggered up from her chair. “You’re sure? Did they just start?”
“It hurts, Mrs. Wight, I’m bleeding bad, I think I might pass out-”
Through slitted eyes she watched Mrs. Wight dig for her radio, backing away all the while. Just like she thought. They put Wight on overnights for a reason; she was as useless as she was lazy. Roan clutched the arm of a sofa and did what she thought was a pretty good job of swaying on her feet as though she was about to faint, while Wight barked orders into the radio. Good. She’d have the doctors out of bed, and Mrs. Poehlmann, who was in charge of the whole place, and by the time they got around to figuring out that Sammi was missing, she’d be long gone.
Sure, Roan would be in trouble, even though she’d dumped the plastic potty on her mattress and planned to pretend that she’d only peed the bed when cramps woke her. They might buy that-and she’d say she had no idea that Sammi meant to bolt, even though she was already slipping into the stairwell, one pale hand raised in a goodbye wave, and then she was gone, Wight never having noticed her at all.
Roan figured she’d probably have to go over to Tapp and spend the day being examined, but at least they were all so concerned about her baby that they’d treat her okay. By night she’d be back here, and some poor citizen would have changed her linens and cleaned up her room, and she could go back to waiting, waiting, waiting for the day she both longed for and dreaded, when her baby would be born into this stupid place.
All that waiting. Well, at least she’d caused a little excitement for once.
Roan slid down onto the couch and let her eyes flutter shut while Wight yelled.
35
CASS HAD FINALLY GOTTEN RUTHIE AND SMOKE into the cab, and had been about to head into the building when lights went on in the second floor and, seconds later, the third. She heard shouting through the open lobby door.
She took a sharp breath and turned the key with shaking fingers, and was reaching to put the truck in gear, to make their escape, when she thought of Dor again inside.
She couldn’t do it. She was armed, and she was able, and as long as that was the case she had to try. She pulled the truck around the corner, where it was hidden from the front of the building by the oleander hedge.
If she failed now, someone would find Smoke and Ruthie here. They would kill Smoke, but Ruthie was an outlier, and a child, and they would take care of her.
“I love you,” she mouthed as she slipped out of the car, and she had almost reached the entrance when a car came around the corner so fast that the tires shrieked, and stopped a few feet from the front door. Two men jumped out, leaving their doors open, and ran inside. Now that Cass had a view into the enormous high-ceilinged lobby that formed the entire ground floor of the dorm, bare except for a few clusters of furniture on a patterned rug in the center, she saw that a dozen girls and young women were gathered at the other end, hugging each other and screaming.
Between them and her, Dor was standing with his hands over his head, a short middle-aged female guard backing him toward the wall with a rifle that looked outlandishly large in her hands. Nearby a girl with long honey-colored hair was kneeling on the floor, a second female guard holding a gun to her head and yelling something at the two men from the car.
Cass didn’t think. She raised the gun Dor had given her and remembered sunlit afternoons when her father took her out in the field by the pond, setting up cans along the falling-down fence, the way he wrapped his arms around her when he taught her how to sight down the barrel.
Two dozen steps to the open doors and the woman never stopped yelling and Dor never turned around and the girl on the floor was the only one who saw her. As the guard behind her turned toward the two men crossing the lobby, the girl rolled out of the way and Cass took her shot.
The first man went down like a rock. As the other spun around and dropped, Cass fired again and again but he didn’t stop, he turned in a circle and came up shooting back at her. Cass felt the pavement at her feet break and splinter and she dived through the doors into the building, sprinting to the shelter of a sofa, her heart racing, ears filled with screaming. There was another shot, and another, and more screaming, and someone ran past her, out into the night. She peeked around the sofa and saw the shooter crouched low, crawling toward her, and even as their eyes met he took another shot but it went wide.
“Outlier! I’m an outlier!” she screamed. “I’m putting down my gun and we can figure this out! Don’t shoot anymore. I’m an outlier!” She had to get to Dor, had to trade herself for him and Sammi. She could make this right. The Rebuilders would understand the trade they proposed-they would know that Mary would value her life far above the others’. Dor was strong and he was good. He was Sammi’s father and he was a good father, and he would make sure that Ruthie was safe. He would take Smoke and if there was a chance for him, Dor would find that chance. Everyone she loved could live, maybe even thrive, and all Cass had to do was stay here.
“Shoot me and Mary will know you killed an outlier,” she yelled. The girls clustered at the back of the room stared at her, holding each other and crying. She scanned their faces, frantically searching for Sammi. “Every girl here will tell them. They’re all witnesses. But if you let this man and his daughter go I’ll put down my gun. I’ll come without a fight.”
There was silence, and Cass took a deep breath. That was it, all she had to offer.
She came out from behind the sofa, standing up. The man in front of her didn’t lower his gun, but he didn’t shoot, either. Behind him, the gray-haired woman stared at her with fury. At her feet, the other woman guard twitched and moaned.
A low, guttural cough echoed through the still room. Cass looked around wildly for its source.
Then her gaze fell on Dor.
He knelt on the floor, clutching his head. Blood ran through his fingers.
Cass had been willing to strike a bargain with the Rebuilders-her life for Sammi’s and Dor’s freedom. But they hadn’t listened to her. They’d shot him. Once again they had taken what was not theirs, and this time Cass would not stand for it.
“Deal’s off,” she whispered to herself.
And she pulled the trigger.
The man was only a couple of yards away. Too close to miss, and he fell practically at her feet. Cass barely glanced at him. Instead, she got ready to take her next shot.
But as she tried to steady her shaking arm, tried to blink away the sudden blurriness in her vision, the female guard staggered sideways and fell, her final shot going into the ceiling, tackled by several of the women who’d been clustered in the back of the room.
One of them broke away from the others and kicked at the fallen guard, screaming, and the gun went spinning and sliding across the floor, coming to rest under a vending machine that had long since been looted of the last of its contents.
Cass surveyed the scene in stunned amazement. She longed to sink to the floor herself, adrenaline giving way to trembling terror, but now there was another girl who’d just made enemies of the Rebuilders.
Cass could shoot the two women guards. Up close, she saw that the one who lay spitting and gasping had the mark of the koru on her wrist. She was high-level Rebuilder. There was no reason to spare her.
“Where’s Sammi?” she yelled at nobody in particular. “The new girl? Where is she?”
The long-haired girl who’d been kneeling on the floor crawled away from the center of the room, then stood and ran toward her.
“Where’s Sammi?” she asked again. Up close, Cass saw that her wide, pretty face bore more anger than fear. A tiny diamond pierced her nose, and it flashed in the lobby lights. “She escaped.”
“Escaped-wh
ere?”
“Out there. Over the wall. Like, ten minutes ago. That’s where she said she was going, anyway. I helped her. I’m-I was her roommate. Roan.”
Cass’s heart sank. All the blood, all the dead, everything they had done to get here, and now Sammi was gone, and Dor was shot. Outside, in the truck, was her own daughter, and Smoke, near dead. How had this happened, how had so many people ended up depending on her? And what was she supposed to do now, when they had reached the end of her options?
Already tonight, Cass had killed twice and given away her innocence. Very little remained. Was it enough to take care of the people she loved? Cass had no idea. But it would have to be enough for tonight.
Do the next right thing.
Cass swallowed hard, and swiped at her eyes with her free hand.
“You,” she ordered to the girl who’d kicked the gun. “What’s your name?”
“Leslie.”
“Okay. Pick up the guns. There-and there. Get his.”
After only a second’s hesitation the girl did as she asked, crouching down to reach under the vending machine. She jammed it in the pocket of her flannel pajama pants and scrambled to collect the rest of the weapons.
“You can’t stay here,” Cass said, holding out her hands for the guns. “You’re the enemy now. You have to come with us.”
Leslie nodded, handing over the weapons.
Cass took a deep breath and looked at Dor. Please please please, she prayed. Let him live.
“We need to go now,” she said. The last of the girls-seven of them, she saw now-had fallen quiet and backed up, away from the scene in the center of the lobby, against the wide glass window that looked out on a courtyard that must have once been pretty, and was now filled with the skeletons of ornamental trees. “Roan and Leslie, help this man. He comes with us. All of you can, too. But you have to come now.”
“No,” the gray-haired guard said, in a steely voice. “No one leaves. Leave this building and they’ll shoot you on sight. Stay here and we’ll guarantee your safety. You and your babies.”
“Babies they won’t let you keep,” Cass snapped. “Your choice. We leave now.”
Roan and Leslie crouched next to Dor and helped him to his feet. Cass could see the bloodied place on his skull, obscured by his long thick hair. He swayed, but the girls supported him, staggering under his weight, their pajamas already streaked with his blood. He stumbled, his ankle buckling, and for a second Cass anticipated him falling to the shiny waxed floor of the lobby and knew that if he fell, they would have to leave him. Already the guard in front of her was edging away, wriggling like a snake; Cass knew she had only seconds to decide whether to shoot her. Either way, she had to get out now, even if it meant leaving Dor here, injured and alone.
Her finger was tightening on the trigger, tears obscuring her vision, when Dor grunted and staggered two steps forward. In the split second after she shot the floor inches from the crawling guard’s face, she took a chance and focused on him.
His face was ashen and he leaned heavily on Roan, but he was moving, the girls half dragging him along. At her feet there was screaming, and Cass tore her eyes away from Dor to see the guard scrabbling at her face with her fingers, trying to dislodge chips of tile that had embedded themselves in her skin.
Cass flipped the gun in her hands and brought it down, holding tight to the barrel, as hard as she could against the woman’s skull, and she cried out and fell to the floor. Then Cass stomped with all her weight on the other guard’s hand, feeling the bones shift and break, trying to ignore the screaming.
She should have killed them. Should have killed them. The thought ricocheted around her brain as she jammed the gun in her waistband and ran, avoiding the corpses of the men she’d killed, their blood seeping slowly onto the floor. The girls had gotten Dor out the door, into the night, and Cass could no longer see them.
“Last chance,” Cass called, turning around in the wide doorway and addressing the girls in the back of the lobby. One of them ran toward her with a backward glance over her shoulder, and then a moment later, two more. The rest of them shrank against the window, some of them sobbing.
“All right,” Cass said, as the three followed the others through the door. “The rest of you, make them understand you had no choice. Tell them I was armed. We were armed. They’ll be here soon. And you-” she had to choke down bile when she addressed the two guards. “I may regret letting you live. I already do, in fact. But you’re not worth the hit on my conscience. Treat these girls well.”
She backed out into the night, the cold reaching for her. “You can’t have the future,” she added as she turned and ran, but her words were lost on the night air.
36
ROAN’S TEETH CHATTERED BUT SHE DIDN’T notice until she bit her tongue and tasted blood.
The truck jounced along, wheels screeching, taking turns hard so that she and the other girls slid and rocked, holding on to each other for balance.
Next to them, on the cold truck floor, was the man they’d dragged from the lobby. She’d barely caught him when he passed out, holding him so his head didn’t hit the hard floor. The blood flow had slowed-she thought it had, anyway, though it was hard to tell in the dark. And his pulse still felt strong to her, strong enough, anyway, as she pressed his wrist between her hands.
In her lap was the silver box. He’d given it to her before he passed out, and told her what to do with it.
Roan had trusted men before and it usually didn’t work out very well. She’d been pregnant before, but lost the baby before she got around to figuring out how to tell Darryl. Faking a miscarriage tonight hadn’t been all that hard, since she’d had a real one not even a year ago. That baby, she’d wanted, wanted desperately, even if she was only twenty-two and an art student with a coffee shop job and no way to support a child. When Darryl came home the night after she miscarried, he found her puffy-eyed in a darkened room and asked her what was wrong; she’d said it was nothing and he said he guessed that was right, she had nothing to be sorry about and she was lucky to live in a place he paid for and all she did was sit on her ass drawing like a three-year-old while he worked two construction jobs to support them, which wasn’t really accurate even besides the fact that she worked, too, because one of the jobs was just pickup work on weekends and the other hadn’t been full-time since the economy tanked-besides, Darryl left her anyway a couple of weeks later, almost like he’d made it his project to find something real for her to cry over.
Roan decided she wouldn’t date anyone after that so it was kind of fitting that the guy who got her pregnant this time didn’t even take his clothes off, he was just a doctor with cold hands and not much to say.
But the man lying next to her in his own blood on the floor of the truck was different. He was old enough to be her dad, but when he’d spoken to her his voice was gentle. Even as she and Leslie dragged him out of the dorm he’d tried to be considerate, tried not to lean too hard, had stumbled along as best he could, biting down the pain.
And he’d pissed off the Rebuilders and maybe that was enough for her.
She released his wrist and carefully laid his arm against his chest, and then she picked up the box and opened the lid and took out the small round thing. It was cool and squishy in her hand. They wanted her to trust them, the wounded man and the woman driving. Roan didn’t see why she should-but then again, she didn’t see why she shouldn’t. They hadn’t done anything to her yet, and that was more than Roan could say for the Rebuilders. And she was already involved, wasn’t she? The minute she decided to help Sammi, she was involved, she supposed. She probably should have just gone with her to begin with.
Roan rolled the cool, squishy ball in her palm for a moment. Then she crawled to the back of the truck and watched the road disappearing under the wheels. Outside the sky was gray. And there it was, just like he said, the building like a castle, with all the fancy trim around the top. Near the front there was a commotion, guards in their c
amo clothes yelling, others streaming from the doors. As the truck sped past she saw two of them raising their arms, holding weapons, trying to fix their aim.
She watched the building go by and then she flung the thing the man had given her, threw it as hard as she could and watched as it struck the castle wall and burst into a flame big enough to swallow the whole world.
37
THE SKY BEHIND HER WAS A FLOWER, YELLOW TO orange, a poppy unfurling across the night.
The explosion had rocked the truck as she drove and Cass’s instincts made her grip the wheel tight, made her press the pedal down. Nothing could shake her now. Nothing could stop her now.
Dor had done it-that much she was sure of. Dor had blown up the leaders’ headquarters. She didn’t know how. Knowing was a luxury for later, if they survived. When they survived, Cass muttered to herself, pushing the truck even harder as they tore across the savaged streets. The girl said Sammi’d headed toward the water tower so it was toward the water tower Cass drove. Ruthie had twisted around to watch, her mouth dropped open in surprise, but she didn’t appear frightened, which was a little miracle right there. Cass kept one hand on Smoke’s neck, and though it was cool and clammy and crusted with pus and blood, she could feel his pulse faint but steady.
He was alive, and alive was all she was asking for tonight.
Outside the wall, the run-down student neighborhood butted up close. Unlike the streets surrounding the Box, these were choked with weeds and trash; junked cars lay where they’d collided.
The Rebuilders made no effort to make the world outside their walled-off compound more hospitable. Cass supposed they didn’t give a damn about anything or anyone that they couldn’t leverage into more power for themselves, power with which to build their twisted dream society. They were content to leave the landscape ravaged and burning behind them after they plundered.
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