by Pintip Dunn
He strides forward, and the gate closes. Something is not quite right. He doesn’t look like Scar Face. He looks like—
He seizes my arm, and I gasp, because I can finally see his face, and it’s not the guard, after all.
It’s Logan Russell.
14
My knees go weak, and the room spins like it did back in the lab. I must be hallucinating again. Clearly, my old friend isn’t in my cell wearing a guard’s uniform. The real Logan Russell is probably home in bed, resting up for a swim meet or a calculus exam or a hot date.
But oh, he looks so good. Can’t fault my hallucination for its attention to detail. Even in the shadows I can see his biceps bulge under the short-sleeved shirt, and the cottony material clings to his abs.
And then I see his expression.
It’s the same look he used to give me in class sometimes. During a lull in the teacher’s lecture, I’d feel the burn of his eyes on my skin. When I glanced up, he would avert his gaze quickly. Automatically. But not before I saw the yearning, as if he, too, scanned the skies every night, searching for a shooting star to wish our friendship back into existence.
Back then I was too shy to do anything about that look. But I don’t need to be shy now. He’s not even real.
I close the distance between us and spread my palms across his chest. His muscles are hard ridges under my hands, and his heart thrums against my fingertips. As soon as I touch him, the illusion Logan sucks in a breath and goes still, as if he’s been waiting for this moment for a very long time.
Can’t fault my imagination for its creativity, either.
“You feel amazing,” I say. Apparently, even hallucinatory Callie isn’t smooth.
My skin flushes, and my pulse is a too loud bass line in my ears. I should move away, but this is my hallucination, and I want closer. I want more.
I shuffle forward, and our toes caress through our sneakers. I trail my hand across his chest, over his shoulders, and then up, up, up until I touch his smooth, newly shaven cheeks. I rub my fingers back and forth, fascinated by the silky texture. He exhales, a puff of air that seems to contain all the frustration and yearning of the last five years.
I skip my hand to his lips. His soft, warm lips. The lips I so badly wanted to taste before I turned myself in to FuMA. The lips I’m daring myself to kiss now.
But even in my imagination, I’m not that brave.
He reaches up and covers my hand, his fingers locking around my palm like he never wants to let go. And then he moves my hand from his lips, slowly, reluctantly, as though it’s the hardest thing he’s ever done. “I can’t believe I’m saying this, but we don’t have much time.”
Wait a minute. Back in the science lab, when I hallucinated the flood, I couldn’t feel the raindrops. But I feel every bit of Logan, from his soft lips to the calloused pads on his palms. “You’re real?”
“As real as you can get.”
Oh. Dear. Fate. I snatch my hand away, my cheeks hot enough to set the air on fire. Was I really fondling his chest? Rubbing my fingers across his lips? What is wrong with me?
“What are you doing here?” I mumble to the floor.
“Rescuing you.” He lifts his hand, as though he doesn’t know what to do with it. The moment’s gone. The hallucination is over. He tucks the hand behind his back, and I’m painfully aware the connection between us was all in my head.
“It’s not what you thought,” he says. “You aren’t safe from your future here. The Underground told me FuMA doesn’t care about crime. All they care about is making the memories come true.”
“I found out the same thing a few days ago,” I whisper.
He stops. “Am I in time? Did your memory come true?”
“They don’t even know my real memory yet.” The saliva lodges in my throat. What would he think if he knew the truth? Would he still want to save me?
He waves a magnetic wand in front of the gate, and it slides open. The wand looks the same as the ones the guards carry, FuMA-issued, not available anywhere else.
My eyes widen. It’s finally hitting me that he’s breaking me out of here. “Where did you get that?”
“I’ll explain later. We need to get out before the sleeping draught I gave the guard wears off.” He guides me forward. I trip on nothing, and he catches me.
“What’s wrong?” He tightens his hand on my shoulder. “Did they hurt you?”
“It’s the fumes.” The disorientation comes back full force. I can’t even tell where the door is. “They’re trying to draw my future memory to the surface. The side effect is dizziness. And seeing things that aren’t really there. That’s why I groped you earlier.” I should drop it. Pretend it never happened. But my mouth is no longer attached to my mind. “I thought you were a hallucination. I wasn’t trying to come on to you. Or cop a feel. Or molest your lips.” Oh Fates. Be quiet, Callie. Just close your mouth. “Sorry.”
“I wouldn’t mind if you came on to me.” He clears his throat. I guess real-life Logan isn’t so smooth either.
We stare at each other. Did he actually say he likes me? No way. He’s not interested in me. We’re not even friends.
And yet, we’re standing inches apart, and his breath is coming in quick pants. If I lean forward a little bit…
“We’d better get out of here,” he says.
Right. In the middle of a rescue mission here.
We shuffle forward, trying to blend our footsteps with the snores of the sleeping inmates. With any luck, no one is awake to hear the difference.
We take a total of ten steps when a voice sounds at my elbow. “Who’s there?”
I jump, but it’s just Sully, standing at the bars. She looks different. Her eyes look less hard against her bony face. The long, straight lashes that seem so intimidating in the light appear vulnerable when bathed in shadows.
“It’s me.” I wrack my muddled brain, trying to figure out the fastest way to explain. “Sully, this is the boy who used to give me the leaves. He’s breaking me out.”
She reaches through the slot and places something in my hand. One of the leaves I gave her in exchange for information. It’s dried and crumbling, but otherwise intact.
“Take me with you,” she says.
I look at Logan, and he shrugs helplessly. “We can’t. This wand is only programmed with the code for your cell. I have no idea where to find her code.”
I didn’t know this girl a few days ago, but now I wilt at the thought of leaving her behind. Just like the leaf dying in my hand. “I’m sorry, Sully. If I can find a way to come back for you, I will. But in the meantime, you’re safe here. You’re not aggressive.”
She presses her lips together, and a fissure opens in my heart. A few seconds later, though, not a trace of sorrow remains. “Go, hatchie. Fly this coop for both of us.”
She backs away from the bars. I tuck the leaf into the pocket of my jumpsuit, my limbs solid with regret, and trail after Logan. I feel like a carbonated bottle, filled to bursting. A single flick is all it will take to make me pop.
But then we reach the end of the hallway, and the entry stands before us, as imposing as ever. Inside the glass-walled room, Burly Whiskers slumps over his desk, bear-like snores shaking his shoulders.
The pressure leaks away. I can’t feel badly about Sully. I don’t have time.
I turn to Logan. This is where he needs to work his magic. “Let me guess. You’ve got the numbered code and have found a way to bypass the fingerprint, retina, and blood scans.”
“Afraid not. They change those codes on a daily basis, and to get those scans, we’d have to move three hundred pounds of unconscious guard.” He grimaces. “Not happening.”
“What then?”
In response, he opens the door across from the guard’s station, the mysterious one that was always closed. The room where they made Beks shoot and kill a man.
We walk inside, and it’s just a room. Four walls and a simple interrogation table. I don’t know w
hat I expected. Blood stains on the floor, the stink of a rotting corpse. Something to reflect the nightmares that took place here. Apparently evil can be washed out with disinfectant and a bottle of air freshener. Nothing remains but a cold, sterile canvas.
Logan crosses the floor and taps twice on the back wall. A panel slides away, revealing a locked glass cabinet chock-full of equipment. Everything we could possibly need to break out of jail. Tasers. Firearms. Cutters.
I swallow hard. This is his plan? Knees to the groin notwithstanding, I’m not much of a fighter. “Um, Logan? You should know my combat skills are a bit…marginal.”
His brow furrows in concentration. “How’d you do in the Self-Defense track?”
“I took the basic core and then opted out. Too busy learning how to cook manually.” I cringe. My former dream seems frivolous compared to the practical life skills I could’ve been learning. “But if your Meal Assembler ever breaks down, I’m your girl.”
He smiles as though I’m a live comedian, and I want to kick myself. I’m your girl? What possessed me to say that?
“We’re not battling our way out,” he says. “This place is like a fortress. We wouldn’t get two feet.”
I scan the weapons in the locked case, stopping on an electronic pulser with more buttons than I have fingers. “Then why are we here?”
“It’s not what’s in the cabinet, but what’s under it.”
The cabinet hangs a foot above the floor. Underneath, I see the same concrete blocks that make up the walls of my cell.
Logan gets on his hands and knees and backs into the space. He inches backward until his body disappears into the concrete. One moment, he’s there. The next, he’s gone. Talk about being swallowed whole.
“Logan?” I blink. “I think I’m hallucinating again. I just saw you disappear.”
His head pops out of the wall, as though he’s a taxidermic animal. “You’re not hallucinating. The wall’s not really there. It’s a holographic projection.”
I crouch down. The concrete looks so real, as solid as any wall.
His head disappears again. “Come on, Callie. There’s an air shaft back here that will lead us to freedom. What are you waiting for?”
Nothing. There’s nothing for me here but a mad scientist who wants to experiment on my brain and a messed-up agency who will make me kill my sister.
I take a deep breath and back out the same way Logan did, straight through the concrete.
15
I expect my feet to bump into solid rock, but they move past the floor and dangle in midair.
“Slowly.” Logan’s voice comes from underneath me. “There’s a ladder. Swing your legs toward the wall and get your feet on a rung. I’ll catch you if you fall, I promise.”
Great. How far is the ground below us?
I scrabble for, and then find, the ladder. I ease myself down, one rung at a time, until my entire body is in the shaft.
I look down. I can’t see a thing. This shaft could go on forever. If I slip, I’ll hurtle through the air—but probably not forever.
My heart pounds. I can’t breathe. I can’t move. My heartbeat thunders in my ears, drowning out the ventilation fan, drowning out sensible thought.
Drowning. Everything.
“Callie?” Logan says. “You good?”
Sweat drips past my eyebrows, down my neck. I almost can’t find my voice in all that liquid. “I…can’t…see…anything.”
“I’m right here, Callie. You’re doing great.” His voice takes my jumbled nerves and irons them smooth.
He knows. Maybe I’ve told him the story of the woman jumping off the cliff. Or maybe he noticed when I refused to climb to the top of the rope during the Fitness Core. Somehow, he knows I’m scared of heights.
But more importantly, he remembers. I remember that his favorite candy is watermelon glass and that he’s always been terribly afraid of spiders. But I never expected him to remember a thing about me. He’s the one who forgot about our friendship, after all.
The thought warms my belly, and I manage to take a normal breath.
Below me, a light flicks on, and a thin beam cuts through the darkness. I see the hole I’ve come through and the room beyond. A small, black device, shaped like a spider, perches at the edge of the hole. This must be what created the hologram. The good news is that we’re both facing our fears tonight. The bad news is he seems to be doing better than me.
“You can do this.” He wraps his hand around my ankle, and his calloused palms pierce through my fear. “You went to prison to keep your future from coming true. You’re not going to let a little phobia stop you from breaking out.”
You can do this. You can do this. You can do this. I take a deep breath and then another. Quickly, before I free fall into oblivion, I take my foot from the safety of one rung and jam it up onto the next one.
“That’s it. One foot after the other. As easy as popping a pie into the Meal Assembler. That is, if you even use the Meal Assembler.”
I try to laugh proudly. Manual pies only for me. I will not think about how high I am. I’ll pretend the ground is five feet below me. Surely, I can handle five feet.
My palms are wet, my grip slippery. Rust or paint or dirt flakes off the rungs under my hands. In my mind, I see the bits falling, falling into the darkness below. With each rung I get higher, and the distance I have to fall gets farther. It is against my every instinct to keep scaling this building with him.
“Talk to me.” My voice shakes and echoes off the walls. I have to think about something else. I can’t keep imagining my imminent death. “Who put the hole and hologram here?”
There’s no way Logan did it himself. The guy may have hidden depths, but come on. This job is the work of professionals.
His shoes squeak against the ladder. “The Underground.”
He mentioned them before. “You mean the secret community that set up that haven in the wilderness? The one made up of all those psychics?” We climb a few rungs. “How did they get this technology?”
“Most psychics have an aptitude for the sciences. That’s always been true. Newton, Einstein, Darwin—all those guys were psychics, although Callahan was the first one who admitted it. How do you think they made all those leaps of intuition?”
We settle into an easy climbing rhythm. Logan touches my ankle every few rungs, and each contact gives me another shot of strength.
“The Underground’s got a group of scientists inventing technologies we don’t share with ComA.” He brushes my ankle again, and this time his fingers seem to linger. “The holographic projection is one of them.”
The ladder dead-ends at a mesh silver screen. I try to swallow, but the saliva’s dried in my mouth. How long have we been climbing? How many yards do I have to fall?
“I’m at the top.” The words scrape out of my throat.
“You see the screen above you? Give it a good punch.”
Oh, sure. A good punch. I’ll slip right off these rungs as I wind up for the throw.
“I’m right beneath you, Callie. I’m not going to let you fall.”
He believes in me. He thinks I can do this.
I adjust my grip on the ladder and jam my fist upward with all my might. The screen blows right off.
A rush of night air greets me. We climb out of the shaft and find ourselves on the roof of the building. I could kiss the solid surface beneath me.
A zillion stars sparkle in the black sky, and the wind carries a scent of trees and soil. The full moon hangs like a perfect white orb, shadowed with craters. It provides almost as much light as the sun on a cloudy day.
A lump forms in my throat. The freedom is almost unbearable. “I’ve never seen anything so beautiful,” I whisper.
“This is where we part ways.” His voice is so heavy it pulls me back from the stars.
I realize how bare the roof is. No other ladders. No doorways. Not even a nearby building to which we can cross.
“What do you mean? How
am I going to get down? And where are you going?”
He guides me to the edge of the roof and I look down into white rapids crashing over enormous boulders. The river. Again.
“No.” I back away, horrified. “I can’t do it. I can’t jump off this roof.”
“You climbed up that ladder like it was nothing. You can do this, too.”
My heart sprints as though chased by an enemy, and the roaring is back in my ears. But he’s right. I did climb the ladder. Which means I’ll do this, too. For Jessa, I’ll do anything.
I take a deep breath, and it coughs and stutters out of me. “Okay. Where do I jump?”
He points to an area right below a rocky incline, where the river widens drastically. “Right there, where the current is weakest. There are no boulders for at least a hundred yards, so you can’t miss. When you get across the river, head south. Stick close to the water and look for some boulders piled in a pyramid. There will be a boat hidden underneath the brush. The Underground leaves it there for people like you. Inside, you’ll find a backpack with a laminated map that will lead you to Harmony.”
He gestures over his shoulder. “I’ll go back down the shaft and hide until morning. I’m sorry I can’t go with you. Underground orders.” His voice is thin and patchy with guilt. “The cliff doesn’t end for miles, and by the time we find flat land for me to cross back into the suburbs, the FuMA guards will be patrolling the city limits.”
“That’s okay. You’ve already done enough.”
I look at the water below, and the panic flutters in my chest again. Someone’s done his homework. This part of the river seems downright calm compared to the ferocious currents I’m used to seeing. If I’m going to jump, this is the place to do it. There’s only one problem. I can’t believe I didn’t think of it before.
“Logan,” I say. “I can’t swim.”
He gawks at me, a swimmer first, and then a rescuer. “How is that possible?”
“I don’t know. My mom never liked the water, so I never learned how.”
He wrinkles his forehead, thinking hard. I want to tell him it’s over. He went to all this trouble to break me out, never realizing I was such a pathetic escapee. Scared of heights. Unable to swim. My knees buckle and I want to collapse onto the hard cement. I’ve failed him. Failed Jessa. Failed myself.