by Casey Hays
“From what? Nothing touches you. And if it does, you overcome it eventually.”
“Yeah,” he nods. “And you were never supposed to know any of that. This rule takes precedence over all the others. It is something the outside world would never understand. Healing?” He lowers his head. “We broke that one even before we left your village.”
He scowls, and I know he’s thinking of Jesse crashing through the wall of the shack. He thinks of Ian. But there’s no turning back to a time before this knowledge. He can’t erase what I know. Ian should be dead, but he walked up out of the Pit as if he’d only been sleeping. Justin is correct. I know far too much.
“Ian never should have mentioned the Serum. You didn’t need to know any more.”
“Didn’t I? How was he going to keep this from me?” I raise my chin stubbornly. “I am going to spend my life with him, Justin.”
Something solemn comes over Justin’s features. He purses his lips and keeps walking, big steps until he’s several yards past me.
I lose myself in thought as I trail behind him, digesting everything he’s been willing to share. There’s more to this; I sense it in my bones. But he won’t tell me. And it’s not his place to do so. I am not his responsibility.
But suddenly, something invades my understanding. Some knowledge that has been tickling the edges of my thoughts ever since Justin explained the purpose of the Serum. I stop in the middle of the road, and my mouth drops open as the answer forges itself inside my brain. Justin casts a glance at me over his shoulder, and I stare at him in wide-eyed astonishment. He halts, concern washing over his features, and turns.
“What?” he asks.
“Why would you still need the Serum?” I burn my eyes into him. “Why? Unless...”
My voice trails as my blood bubbles with a new fear, and the color drains clean from Justin’s face.
“Justin.” My heart pumps hard in my ears. I steady my voice. “Tell me the truth.”
The panic reaches my heart before he can answer, and it’s suddenly very loud as the blood rushes to my head. I teeter on my feet. Justin moves toward me, holds up a tentative hand to catch me, but I shove him away. I am sick to death of lies!
“Tell me!”
His eyes fill with a piercing guilt.
“Eden is still toxic,” he confirms. He swallows, a shadow crossing his face.
My hand flutters to my lips with my sharp intake of breath. And my every perception of the mysteries of Eden collapses in a cloud of poisonous smoke.
Chapter 11
Kate.”
The sound of my own name rings in my ears, as if Justin calls to me from the opposite end of a long, winding tunnel. He raises both hands in a non-threatening manner, but the pocketknife still gleaming from his fingertips sends a different message. I clench my fist, relax it, and wrap my fingers around the hilt of my own knife.
“Just . . . please let me explain.”
His gaze never leaves my face. He is the same unwavering Justin he’s been since that afternoon we spent alone waiting for Ian and the others to return to the campsite. The one who abates everyone else’s turbulence and keeps the world steeped in reason. And yet, I feel as if I’m seeing him for the first time. I step out of his reach.
“What can you say?” My fingers tighten on the leather handle. “What can you possibly say to make this right? You’ve sent Tabitha to a city full of poison without giving us warning. How did you intend to make her better?”
“We did the only thing we knew to do.”
The calmness in his tone so severely contradicts my anxiety that it confuses all of my thinking for a moment. I inhale through clenched teeth.
“That’s all you could do? You cannot be serious!”
“We have the best doctors in Eden because we have the best labs and the best medicines.” His voice beckons me to believe his words. “Every other village has only small-time physicians. Herbal remedies. Toxin or no toxin, Eden is her only chance. She’s really sick, Kate. Deathly sick.”
The knife handle is a solid presence against my palm, but his words stab into my heart more precisely than any knife. They carry death in his very breath.
“And what about me?” I strain to keep back the tears. “What about Diana?”
His mouth moves, as if he intends to answer, but then he clamps it shut as a tinge of uncertainty floods him. I glare at him, my heart climbing erratically until he finally and very tentatively speaks.
“Outsiders . . .” he hesitates. My shoulders tighten with new foreboding. “They can’t enter the city.”
I stab him with shock-filled eyes. We face each other—me, a hand on my knife, him squeezing the wooden bird until I think it might break under his strength before he’s finished it. Except for the slight breeze that blows tiny strands of loose hair into my face, nothing else moves. In the distance, the boys’ voices float toward us, oblivious to the tension that rides on the wind just yards away. Justin drops his hands to his sides, and his mouth switches. Barely—almost imperceptibly—but I notice.
“We aren’t going to Eden,” he finishes.
It’s a flat, straightforward statement.
He hasn’t moved a muscle, but it feels as though he slaps me hard across the face. My pulse hammers in my throat as a stark reality ignites in my mind. He swallows, and the half-carved bird begins to crack in his grasp. He looks off toward the trees.
“Then . . . where . . . are we going?” I force myself to ask the question, all the time dreading his answer. My head spins, and I take another step back to steady myself. Justin chews on the inside of his cheek.
“A place called Jordan.”
He purses his lips and another puff of air emits from his nostrils. Just by sheer habit, he etches another feather into the broken bird’s wing, as if this might somehow conclude our conversation or teach him the correct words before they spring from his mouth. And I stand as still as a rock on the very edge of a cliff —a rock which will break free and tumble to the bottom if any more weight is added.
What is happening? One seemingly innocent conversation, and everything crumbles into piles of ruin and doubt all around me. And just like these barren places we’ve encountered, my hope lies in utter desolation.
This isn’t what I envisioned. Eden was my goal, my place of refuge, and in an instant, that security is taken from me. I press a clenched fist to my chest.
“Ian was finally planning to tell you yesterday,” Justin continues. “But then, things happened.” He stops carving, and suddenly and without warning, he angrily pitches the wood. The bird flies on a long arc until it is a tiny pinpoint. It disappears before it ever falls out of sight behind the trees. His face is red, but he checks himself, falls back into his characteristic composure. “Sorry.”
I’ve stopped listening. All the events leading up to this moment replay themselves in my head. For days before the whirlwind struck the Village and changed all of our plans, Ian begged me to leave with him. And even up to the very last day, he spoke of Eden. Not Jordan—Eden! Had he truly intended to tell me the truth in those moments before the rain stopped? After all of his stalling, had he intended to tell me anything at all?
The sharp sting of betrayal solidly sticks me, and I am not so certain.
“This has been the plan all along?” All my former tenacity begins to drain, but I boldly raise my shoulders to revive it. “Before we left the Village?”
“Yes, it’s been the plan.” His expression tightens, and the betraying knife digs deeper. “Ian should have told you—both of you—long before now. But he’s been stalling. And . . . that’s all he was supposed to tell you,” he adds with frustration.
“That was all,” I whisper. The words seem empty falling from my mouth.
“I think you’ll like Jordan,” he adds, hoping to somehow soothe the tension that stretches far beyond its limit. “It’s really . . .”
His voice trails under my hard scrutiny because it doesn’t matter. He could speak unt
il the skies had polka dots, and it wouldn’t change any of it.
“You lied.” I’m seething, my anger riding on waves of betrayal. My breath leaves my lungs in one disappointed rush of air. “All of you are liars!”
Why does this keep happening? How many times does Ian expect to regain my trust? How many times can I give it again before my emotions are spent?
My knees catch, and I am suddenly unsure whether my legs can hold my weight any longer. My heart seems to crack under the burden of these revelations. And Ian—whom I love and trust and who fought so hard to bring me out of my Village so that I could find a better way—is in the middle of it all. He promised to take me to his home where we could be together and where I could find peace. And now?
I waver; Justin reaches out to steady me, but I shove at him and crouch on the road, my hands covering my head. I am truly crushed.
“Please, Kate. You have to understand. Ian is afraid.” His voice is soft, hovering above me, and he hands me these words in the form of a confession that isn’t his to make. I don’t know why he defends Ian yet again, and his smile accompanies enormous hesitation as he tests the waters. “I guess you haven’t quite picked up on that yet, huh? He’s afraid of a lot of things when it comes to you.”
I glare up at him.
“I—" I close my mouth. I don’t care to discuss this with him.
“He can’t take you to Eden.” He raises his hands with a shrug. “He never could. But in that pit, he told you about it, made you believe in it, long for it. How easy did you think it was going to be for him to tell you that you’d never see it after all that?”
In my mind, this does not excuse Ian’s actions, and I am utterly disappointed. My heart drops another notch.
“I wish he’d said nothing at all!” I am bitter, and my voice reflects every bit of it. I stand and face him, my entire body quivering with a sudden hot anger.
“Me, too. He should have just said he was from Jordan to begin with,” he mutters. “That would have saved us a lot of trouble.”
“Oh, yes. Why not?” I throw my hands into the air. “There’s already a mountain of lies between us. What’s one more?” Fuming, I walk, leaving him standing in the middle of the road. But then, I whirl and march back to him. “And do you think so? Do you truly think he could have kept such a big secret?”
“We’re good at keeping secrets,” he says flatly.
Glaring, I spin and tromp off. “John tried to warn me. I should have listened.”
Justin follows. “Who’s John?”
“A friend.He’s been to your city.” I spit the words at him. “And Mona cut out his tongue for it.”
I walk a few more paces letting my anger stew. But Justin stops dead again.
“He’s been to Eden? How is that possible?”
“Oh, so Ian never told you? Why am I not surprised? And how would I know?” I growl. “It’s your city. You’re the one with all the answers.”
“What . . . did he tell you?” he asks, ignoring my biting tone.
The timbre of his question causes the hairs on my arms to rise one by one. I face him. He is wary, eyes glinting.
“He said Eden was dangerous.” I puff out my chest, and I don’t hide my resentment at being deceived. “And that—“
I stop myself, not wanting to repeat John’s words. To say them makes them true in my mind. I hesitate, look at Justin.
“What, Kate?” He moves toward me. “What else?”
“Nothing.” I jut my chin out boldly. “He said nothing else.”
He narrows his eyes. “I don’t believe you.”
When I don’t respond, he shakes his head and takes another step toward me.
“I’m trying to be as honest with you as I can be without breaking Code. If this friend of yours has really been to Eden, and he’s told you something, you need to tell me. It could be important.”
He pleads with me now, and still, I’d rather sew my mouth closed than let what I have to say leap from it. Then again, perhaps he should know. Perhaps telling him will expose all of our fears at once, and we can be done with it. I take a deep breath.
“He said that the boys of Eden would . . . kill me.”
The expression that crosses his face causes the last of my arm hairs to stand at attention, and I keep talking to control my own sudden uneasiness.
“I don’t believe him, but—”
“He’s right.”
I’m stung by the sheer flatness of his admission. He takes another step, and before I give myself even one second to think, I’ve whisked the knife from my belt. I hold it steady, pointed at his chest. He tilts his head, amused, and raises an eyebrow.
“You can’t really hurt me with that.”
I know what he says is true, but I raise the curved blade anyway, peering up at him along its sharp end. The point shimmers in the sun.
“I’m not going to hurt you. We’ve known each other a while now. Have I done anything that would give you that impression?”
I survey him. I’m losing this battle before it begins. I lower the knife and follow him.
“Then why did you say you could kill me?” I ask.
“I didn’t. I just agreed with you.”
“Oh.”
He’s impossibly irritating in his aloofness. It reminds me of the first time I met him. He was so casual about the Pit, as if the whole idea of it was simply a game. I have the same feeling about him now. Nothing shakes him. I poise my knife again, at eye level, just to assure him I’ll defend myself if it comes to it.
“What did you mean then?”
“Put the knife down.” His command is full of exasperation. He knocks my arm aside with an easy swish of his hand. “And I meant exactly what I said. We could kill you—easily. Accidentally, more than likely, but you’d still be dead.”
And there’s his offhandedness again. My eyes are as wide as two full moons. I clutch my knife a little bit tighter against my thigh.
“Look at us, Kate.” He closes his own knife and shoves it back into his pocket. His tone lowers confidentially. “We all just . . . shifted. We’re babies at this, really. We’re careless and fumbling, and that makes us dangerous. Like me, tripping over that branch with Diana in my arms. We shouldn’t even be this far away from home. Right now, we can still get hurt. But you’ve seen what we can do, too. We’re deadly. Indestructible to a degree. And we’ll get stronger as we mature. Stronger, smarter with our skills—and more dangerous. And then no one will be able to surprise us like your people did. Like the Set-Typhon did. We’re a new breed.”
I’m overwhelmed by the information he’s divulged. I’m certain it’s more than he ever meant to share, but it bubbles out of him like a deep need. After, his shoulders relax.
“We won’t hurt you if we can help it,” he finally says. “Not on purpose. And that’s the truth.”
“What did you mean by new breed?” I ask.
He tenses, sighing once again. Today has become a chain of exasperated sighs from him as my persistent curiosity forces him to defy the Code again and again. But this time, his resolve is firm. He shakes his head, and there’s a glint in his dark eyes, as if they accuse me of using some sort of magic to lure information out of him.
“I’m done. No more questions.”
“And Tabitha?”
Justin purses his lips, concern lining his features. “We know it’s a risk, but Ian’s taking her straight to my dad at the lab. He saves the lives of babies every day. If she has any kind of chance, he’s the one you want treating her. And she’s young enough—” He breaks off.
I raise a brow curiously. “Young enough for what?”
He bites his lip. “To be given the first dose of the Serum to protect her from the toxin she will be exposed to. This is why we felt comfortable sending her there.”
I lower my knife another notch, my breath catching.
“And us? Can they give it to us?”
His forlorn expression answers my question. I nod.<
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“We can’t take you to Eden, Kate. You’re an Outsider.”
“And if they give Tabitha the Serum, and it works, she’ll be—”
My chest tightens. I can’t finish the thought, so Justin fills in my words for me.
“Like us? Yes. Eventually.”
A desperate pang jolts through my heart.
“It’s wrong to do this without Diana’s knowledge.”
“Do you think Diana really cares about that?” Justin’s eyes bore into me at the question. “If Tabitha lives, do you really think it will matter?”
He is so calm, so sure that as long as Tabitha lives, Diana won’t mind what they must do to save her. But is he right? Will she care?
It is an unfamiliar concept to think of someone intentionally saving babies. This was unheard of in my village. Sick babies died all the time. Babies found unworthy were killed. No one ever tried to save a baby. No. Babies were dispensable, as were all of us. If they were of no use to the Village, they were simply disposed of, and breeders were sent back to the Pit.
And so, I can’t answer for Diana.
“Tabitha is an Outsider,” I remind him quietly, disliking the word already.
“Well, technically babies aren’t considered Outsiders because they can be immersed into our way of life. I mean, it’s not like they can do much harm. They can’t talk yet. Or walk. They aren’t a threat.”
I frown suspiciously. “Oh? So babies unexplainably appear in Eden from time to time?”
He sets his lips in a tight line, and a clear resistance stages itself between us. “I’m done talking.”
But he isn’t; I won’t allow it. He walks ahead of me a couple of paces.
“Why? Why would your people choose to stay in that place full of poison? Why would they allow their children to be born there?”
“You wouldn’t understand.”
“And you base this on what? Your arrogant assumption?”
He halts, a huge sigh emitting from his lungs. “If you could spend even one day in my shoes, you wouldn’t ask that question.” His dark eyes find me. “Eden isn’t a prison. People can leave if they want to. But they don’t.”