“What I am,” Siah’s says, cold and controlled, “is an abomination.”
I can tell by his tone that he’s closed off the conversation so I hurry back to my seat. Livy raises an eyebrow.
“Quiet,” I tell her.
“Alright.” Her smirk is one of mine. “For what price?”
“What do you want?”
“Carry my bag.”
“Fine.” I speak quickly, looking over the heads of Guardians and strays to see Siah come through the door. “I’ll carry your bag for the week.”
“The rest of the month or I’ll tell him you were spying on him.”
“Fine, whatever.”
Siah takes his seat. Olive’s grin is slick and smug.
“You’re such a brat,” I hiss so only she hears.
“I wonder where I got that from,” she throws back.
She glares. I glare. Stalemate.
I turn away from my sister to Siah. His attention is fixed on the corrugated metal of the ceiling. His hands are shaking. I cover the hand closest to mine and hold it tightly. A tiny breath seeps out of him, and then another, and another, until he’s calmer.
“I’m not telling you what that was about,” he murmurs.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
He nudges me. “I know you were listening. I always know where you are.”
Great. I’m carting Livy’s bag around for nothing. “What are you? Superhuman?”
“Don’t joke about that.” He says it too seriously, like I’ve just joked about dying from a Strain.
I feel my forehead crumple with confusion. “Why?”
He shutters his expression, covers it with a sardonic smile. He’s doing this way too often with me. He’s keeping something big. “Can you imagine how much worse this world would be if there were superhuman people running around?”
“You really think it gets worse than this?”
“Fair point.”
***
Honour
10:23. 04.11.2040. The Free Lands, Southlands, Plymouth.
We end up in Plymouth, right at the bottom of the island where the air is salty mist and the people talk with weird accents. There’s a buzz of excitement among the Guardians, whispered conversations and hesitant smiles. They relax for the first time since London, and I get the feeling that Plymouth is as safe as we’re gonna ever get. I notice nobody is watching the skies today.
I see intent stares from locals pressed up against their windows, desperate for a glimpse of us. I’m reminded of a different time in a different city, when we were investigated for the Strains, when the Officials thought we were in on John’s crazy plot to trace the President back through his timeline, when our neighbours sent us glares through windowpanes, thinking we’d killed John—thinking Tia and I had killed John because whenever something bad happened on our street we were to blame because we were black.
It’d be nice to think those days were behind us now but I’m sure half the hostile looks we’re given by Guardians, their families, and these strangers are because they’re white and we’re not. I haven’t heard the inevitable insults yet—we’re not settled down, so I don’t think anyone feels comfortable enough to be a complete asshole—but it won’t surprise me when I do hear them. I’d love for someone to say something nasty to Horatia though, and to watch them hit the floor from the force of Miya’s punch.
They’re stood together now, Miya and my sister. They have conversations of gestures and facial expressions, Miya’s huffed laughter paired with the nudge of Tia’s shoulder.
There’s future in this briny air or, if not the real thing, there’s the promise of it. It’s obvious in the casual way we stand around. Nobody’s in a rush to get anywhere, not now we’re in Plymouth. I remember what I promised myself: I’m going to make an actual effort to help the Guardians, to stop people’s suffering. And I think I know how to do it—not with words but with strategy and Dalmar’s help—but that will have to wait. This is the town John got Wes out to.
Today I will find my missing brother. Well—my other missing brother.
Word has been sent out to all the small safe zones dotted around Forgotten London, the ones people had escaped to long before the Fall. I can’t believe it when I’m told there are eleven of them in total. God knows how many people escaped to them. Even The Guardians have lost count. All those people living so close to us for years, all those safe places we could have run away to.
But if we’d have got out sooner, we wouldn’t know the Guardians, we wouldn’t be a real part of the revolution, and we wouldn’t have some of the friends we’ve picked up along the way.
I’d never have met Branwell Ravel. I don’t even want to think about a life without him—he means too much to me now. I don’t want to think about him going home, going back, either, but sometimes that thought strikes me viciously, the way it’s striking now.
I grit my teeth, closing my eyes for a split second. I trip over my feet and slam back to reality. Plymouth. Waiting. Future.
The future. I breathe through my nose, picturing it, picturing being free.
By the end of the week all the people left in the safe zones will be here, and the republic army in Bharat will have sent us aircrafts. A way out. Three of the aircrafts they’re sending are fighter planes, loaded with every gun, canon, and bomb imaginable. A way out with the power to defend ourselves.
It’s happening.
I can finally imagine an end to this.
I’m barely off the aircraft before Dalmar closes a hand around my arm and drags me behind the aircraft.
He’s staring at me, furious, his skin flushed red and his pale hair a total mess.
“You haven’t told anyone have you?” he demands. “I knew you wouldn’t. You can’t pretend this is fine, Honour. I know it’s not.”
“What are you talking about?” I try to shrug off his grip but he tightens his hands on me to a painful degree.
“Your hallucination! Nobody knows about it, not even Timofei. I asked if there was any progress with you, and he looked at me like I was talking a foreign language. He’s a doctor, Honour! You should have asked him for help. Don’t you care? Aren’t you worried about yourself at all?”
I wrench myself away, walk a few paces away. “Are you serious? So I’m seeing things, so what? I’m alive, aren’t I?”
“That’s my point. You don’t know what caused that, or if it’ll happen again, or if it’s killing you.” He drags his hands through his hair, looking at the grey sky. It looks like it’s gonna rain. Good—it might cool Dalmar’s anger.
“You’re overreacting,” I say.
“And you’re underreacting.” He hisses, “Anything could be wrong with you. Anything, Honour. If what you said about Underground London Zone is true, they could have done anything to you. You might have a Strain, you might have an even worse illness. Those exist, still, no matter what anyone says. And that’s not even taking into account mental illnesses. Do you have any idea how many things there are that could kill you any minute now?”
“Dal,” I say, softer now. I know where this anger’s coming from—he’s worried about me. “I’m alright, really. I don’t think it’ll happen again.”
He looks at me for a long moment. “Are you sure about that?” He comes closer, a deep crease between his eyebrows. “Are you certain? What warning did you get last time? Is there something you felt, sensed, that told you it wasn’t real?”
My stomach drops. There wasn’t. There wasn’t any warning that it was fake. I thought it was real, but all that time I thought I was hitting out at Officials, I was really fighting Dalmar. I raise my eyes to his and my despair must be visible because he catches my shoulder, comforting instead of confronting this time.
“You see the problem,” he says. “It could happen again any time. And you’re right—it might be nothing at all. But we can’t know for sure.” His turquoise eyes beg me to be reasonable. “Will you let Timofei check you over?”
&nbs
p; I nod reluctantly. If there is something wrong with me—and of course there is, but if something other than being a carrier caused that vision—I want to know what it is and if it’s fixable. “Okay,” I say.
“Thank you.” Dalmar’s still holding onto me but I don’t feel too inclined to free myself.
“I’ll be okay,” I say, my eyes on the gravel under my feet.
“I know. I’ll make sure you are.” There’s a stretch of the wind and the hum of the still-running aircraft, and then he adds, “I’m not losing anyone else, especially not you.”
“No,” I agree.
“But I almost did.” At the break in his voice I meet his eyes. I press my palm over his hand on my shoulder, wanting to say something but not knowing what, or how. “In Manchester. You died. I’m sure you did, I saw it, I watched you. If Branwell hadn’t—you’d be dead now. You’d be gone.” He sucks in a ragged breath and says, with finality, “I’m never going through that again.”
“I’m sorry,” I mumble. I don’t know what else I can say. Nothing will make up for it, and even though I feel like it’s my fault, I’m not sure it is. Yes, I took the vaccine in Forgotten London, but I didn’t know it’d activate in Manchester because of a stupid civilian guard with a shitty gun. Still, I apologise again.
Dalmar squeezes my shoulder and releases me, taking a deep breath. “It’s not your fault.” Sounding more like himself he adds, “You have to tell your sister and the others, though. And if you don’t, I will. They deserve to know what’s going on with you.”
“Okay,” I mumble, brushing drops of rain from my brow. It did start raining after all. “I’ll tell them.”
Eventually.
“Good.” He nods, satisfied. “I’m gonna find Timofei and ask when he’s got time to see you.”
I don’t get another word out before he’s run off, vanished into the rain. Why does he always do that? I remember him doing the same thing back in Forgotten London. We sat in a tiny park in Hammersmith and he told me all London people had statuses, that ours was ‘Insentient’, and he was working on getting us away from F.L. to somewhere better. And then he just disappeared into the town.
It’s really annoying.
“I can tell you what you want to know.”
I spin around, heart lurching. “Cat ...?”
She was the last person I expected to see. I’d actually forgotten she existed. I’d feel guilty for that but she doesn’t look like she cares what I think of her. I wonder, not for the first time, what John was doing with her. How the hell did they end up sharing a hole-in-the-wall bookshop in Leeds? There’s something about her that’s just … unsettling. She watches you too closely, stares for minutes at a time like she’s analysing you for the best way to wreck you. A shiver trips down my spine.
“I can tell you what you want to know,” she repeats, coming closer. Her mousy hair is damp and curling, the ends dripping onto her tan leather jacket. The curls make her look younger, an edge of vulnerability I don’t believe. The shrewd, sharp look in her eye is the truth of Cat. I don’t need to know anything else.
It takes me a moment to fumble together a response. “What do I want to know?”
“What they did to you.” She leans nearer. Up close her skin is weirdly pale, almost translucent, though that could be because of the drops of rain speckled across her cheeks. This close, I can also see the flecks of colour in her eyes, the vividness of the hazel, the imperfection in her right eye.
I jerk back, not sure what I’m seeing. It looks like the colour from her iris has … bled out. The entire left side of the brown has leaked into the white of her eyes. I swallow hard, my heart speeding. I know what she’s going to say before she says it.
“They did it to me, too.”
I stagger back and catch myself against the slick metal of the aircraft. Cat was there. She knows what they did to me, what they did to Tia. “Tell me.”
“They made us … addicted.”
“Addicted?” My mind is numb. I thought she would say we were an experiment, some scientific fuck up. I’m about to open my mouth when she rushes on.
“They wanted us to be dependent on them, because they weren’t done with us yet. They needed us. I was … I was the same way when I escaped and your brother found me.”
Officials … made me addicted? “Addicted to what?”
“It’s a drug. Not a street drug. It’s a chemical compound but that’s all I know. I had hallucinations, too. I saw my friend but … he wasn’t really there. John snapped me out of it.”
I’m addicted to a chemical? This gets worse the more I know about it. Is Tia addicted too? I mean to ask but instead I say, “You’re good friends, then? You and John?”
“We are.” Even with the raw scrape of her voice I can’t see her as harmless.
I take a breath of rain and air and force myself to stay calm about this. There must be some way to ask the questions I need to without freaking out. “My sister,” I start. “She was in Underground as well. I need to know—is she addicted too?”
Cat glances away from me, fixing on the people carrying backpacks and boxes of supplies and equipment from the plane for five seconds. “We all were. But I know how to fix it. There’s a cure to stop it all—the hallucinations, the vomiting, the addiction.”
“Vomiting?”
She reaches to flatten her hair with fluttery hands but then drags them away, pasting her arms to her sides. Her face clouds over with anger. Weird. She says, “Everyone reacts different to the withdrawal, but every reaction is bad. And we can stop it. You can stop it, stop being a carrier too. There’s an organisation, people I knew back in F.L. who can help reverse what was done to us. We just need to get to them. In States.”
“States,” I echo. So there’s a magical way to fix all my problems but it just happens to be in enemy territory. I should have guessed that with my shitty luck it wouldn’t be easy.
“The Guardians are going there anyway. Eventually. We just have to go with them, find my people, and get them to treat the withdrawal and reverse the procedure.”
Ice cold rushes through me, my body going deadly still. I can’t look at Cat, can’t look at anything, when I ask, “What procedure?”
“Oh. I … thought you knew.”
I can tell by her voice that she’s telling the truth, but that barely pierces the horror moving through my body. I feel like I’m going to be sick—until I remember the memories that were taken from me. That must be the procedure. The procedure to make me forget. There’s no need to jump to conclusions and assume the worst.
“The procedure to wipe my memories?”
I have my answer when Cat’s eyes drop to the floor. “No, the one they did to us as kids. The one that made us … you know?”
“No.” I wipe the sweat from my palms on my jeans. “I don’t know.” When she doesn’t say anything else, I start to really panic. Full on breathing-fast, out of control panic. I wish for the days when I didn’t feel fear, when I never reacted this way. I was stupid to think I couldn’t be scared—I just needed something terrifying enough to kick the fear into me. “Did they do this procedure to Tia as well? Did they do it to my sister? Did they hurt her?”
Cat looks alarmed at my words, but downright scared when I grab her shoulders. My voice rises. “What did they do to my sister? What did they do to me?”
“Honour.” A smooth voice cuts through the hysteria and an out of place calm washes over me. Someone takes me by the arm. “I think you should leave,” says the voice and at first it makes no sense—why would they be gripping my arm if they wanted me to leave?—but then Cat says, “Fine,” and stalks away.
It’s a while before the panic totally leaves me and I can think clearly again. It’s a while before I open my eyes.
“Better?”
I blink in confusion at Kari, the woman from the aircraft, the only survivor of Manchester, Yosiah’s sister. Why did she make Cat leave? And how did she calm me when I don’t know her? Why
is she looking at me like she gives a crap?
“Your body remembers me, even though your mind doesn’t,” she says, pressing a handkerchief to my sweaty forehead. “You and I knew each other in Underground London Zone. We were … housemates.”
“Were we together?” I don’t know why that’s the first thing I could think to say. Possibly because my mind’s still messed up from my freak out. More likely because I’m an idiot.
“No.” She laughs, one side of her mouth tilting down and her eyes creasing. “You’re younger than my brother.”
“How old are you, anyway?”
Kari raises a dark eyebrow, but her smile is indulgent. “Twenty four. I was younger when you knew me but still far too old for you.”
I lift a shoulder up in a shrug. A warm feeling spills into my stomach. “I think … I remember this. Being your friend. Was I happy?”
“You were.” Her smile slips. “Sometimes.”
“But not others?”
“No.” Kari pats my shoulder, far too familiar and thoughtless to be faked. If I didn’t believe her before, I do now.
“That’s why you were upset with me. On the plane. You thought I’d recognise you.”
“Yeah. I didn’t think you’d forget me but remember Vian. That was an interesting turn of events.”
I tilt my head, an irritating habit that emerges when I’m confused. “Vian?”
“You call him Yosiah now.” She looks so thoughtful for a second that I don’t disturb her. In the back of my mind—or more like in the back of my feeling, which doesn’t make any kind of sense, but feels more accurate—I remember this, that Kari needs silence when she’s thinking, that interrupting her could derail her train of thought.
“There’s still some memory trapped in your subconscious,” she says. “There must be. How did you and Yosiah become friends?”
I was in the library closest to our home. I’d sneaked in after dark for the third time that week, to steal another book because I’d read the one I took before twice by then and needed another story. I liked books—they were the easiest way I’d found to forget everything around me, to pretend I was some place better. I came across Yosiah in a store room stealing food to survive. After minutes of tense glowering when we tried to work out if either of us was going to report the other—and realised we weren’t—we began talking. That’s not out of the ordinary. It happens. You meet people in weird situations and you become friends.
The Wandering (The Lux Guardians, #2) Page 26