by Anna Silver
He looked at her, wanting so badly to explain, wondering why he felt such guilt over a little comfort. A thousand reasons passed through his mind, but every one sounded like an excuse, a fabrication. She would never believe them. He knew her well enough to know that.
When her eyes rose to meet his a second time, they were ebony shields.
He swallowed back the things he wanted to tell her: how much he’d missed her, how scared he had been, that he thought he’d lost her for good, that he loved her. He knew they would crash against those dark, armored eyes and fail.
Instead, as his voice finally found him, he stood and said, “London. You’re awake.”
SEVENTEEN
Raid
London tore through the blue flaps and stumbled into the dappled sun of the clearing without looking back. The sunlight made focusing impossible, and images blurred before her as though they were rushing by at top speed. An overwhelming sense of vertigo had her certain the face of the planet had just taken a hard lean to the left, and she fought to keep her balance against it. Still, she didn’t stop. If a blur of Outroader stood in her path, she whacked them aside with her good arm.
“London!” Rye shouted behind her, and she knew Tora was also back there, watching from the tent. In fact, it was likely that everybody was watching, not that she cared.
She felt exhausted, every step weighted with the drag of her fatigue, but she would not give him the satisfaction of seeing her cry.
“London, would you just let me explain!”
London’s heart sputtered in her chest like one of the city’s unkempt car engines. Yet she continued stomping in any direction that led her away from what she’d just witnessed, despite the stuttering thuds of her heart. She knew she was weak. She knew the dizzy spells, heart palpitations, and blurred vision were a combined result of low blood pressure, low blood sugar, partial dehydration, and overall atrophy. She didn’t know how long she’d been out exactly, but her body was screaming that it was days.
None of that mattered at the moment. She couldn’t be in that tent any longer. Not with them.
“London, goddammit!” Rye’s voice bellowed behind her. “You shouldn’t be up this soon!” He was only steps away.
She was too weak and too slow to outmaneuver him.
That’s when she slammed into the hard chest and bulging arms of someone who smelled remarkably familiar.
“Whoa there! What the? London, is that you?” Zen cried, wrapping his massive biceps around her, refusing to let her plow past him.
That did it. She buried her hot face against him and let the tears spill for a second before she wiped them hurriedly away on his t-shirt. By then, Rye had caught up to them.
“God, London! Are you trying to kill yourself?” he shrieked.
She spun to face him, Zen’s arms still protectively encircling her shoulders, and nearly toppled over. She felt Zen’s muscles tighten to catch her.
“Whoa, London. You need to sit down,” Zen said.
Instead, she pulled her right arm up over his grip and pointed an angry, accusing finger in Rye’s face, “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? If I just killed myself! Then you and your little forest groupie could be together!”
At this point, Kim had trotted up and was watching the spectacle with a mixture of confusion and amusement. Obviously, they were all glad to see London up and conscious again, but none of them expected her to pop up fighting.
“That’s ridiculous,” Rye snarled back. “You’re being childish, London. I sat by that damn bed waiting for you to wake up, sponging your lips, checking your temperature for days. So did Tora!”
Zen had now plopped London squarely down on a nearby stump, but he moved between her and Rye when the latter took a step forward. London knew he would never hurt Rye, they were friends. But she figured he didn’t want Rye to stir her up into doing more damage to herself than she’d already done. Not when Avery’s fate depended on keeping her conscious and getting out of the Outroaders camp.
“I’ll bet she did,” London snapped.
Rye threw his hands up in exasperation. “You two talk some sense into her, will you?”
Zen blinked, unsure how to proceed.
Kim shrugged. “We don’t know what happened, mate.”
“I’ll tell you what happened,” London began. “I woke up after being unconscious for—well, I don’t know exactly, but long enough—to find him and Plastic Button over there canoodling in the tent right next to my lifeless body!”
Rye rolled his eyes. “We were not canoodling. Can we please just get you back inside? To rest?”
“He’s right,” Zen said gently, trying not to set London off again. “You shouldn’t be out here. You need to rest today so we can move out of here by morning.”
London cut her dark eyes up at Zen and nodded cooperatively.
“By morning?” Rye scoffed. “Are you off your rocker, man? She’s not going to be ready for that in a day.”
“London’s tough,” Zen argued. “She can handle it.”
“She almost died!”
“Well, Avery could be dead already for all we know! We can’t sit here any longer.”
Zen was chest to chest with Rye, his hulking six foot frame considerably heftier than his friend’s, but only a hair taller.
“Don’t worry about it, Zen. He’s just mad because he doesn’t want to leave his new girlfriend,” London said. She glared at Rye, “You can stay if that’s what you want.”
Rye ignored her.
“Give me a cigarette,” London gestured hastily to Kim. “I need a smoke.”
“Uhhh…” Kim hesitated, before slowly pulling one out of his front pocket. He hadn’t smoked nearly as much since they’d been at the camp. Apparently, the fresh air coupled with worry over Avery, and now London, was enough to keep his mind occupied.
“No way!” Rye fumed, snatching the cigarette from Kim’s hand before he could hold it out to London and crumpling it to a pile of dry, reprocessed shreds in his fingers.
“Hey!” Kim whined. “That was mine.”
“No, London, no smoking. You’re not well enough. You already sound like someone took a match to your throat.” Rye scolded her like she was his child.
“What the—” she started to protest, when a dainty eh-hem interrupted everyone.
Tora was standing just behind the guys, her eyes piercingly aimed at London, who crossed her arms defiantly.
“Well, look who it is,” London said with a heap of sarcasm.
“London, I…I just wanted you to know that Rye and I, well, what you saw back there, it…it didn’t mean anything.” Tora’s gaze was steady, but her words revealed how unnerved she was underneath. “He was just comforting me,” she added.
“Uh-huh,” London responded flatly.
Tora’s eyes darted to Rye’s, whose expression said plainly, You’re only making it worse, but thanks.
London rose a little shakily from her stump. “Look, we need to talk. The four of us. Alone.” She peered at Tora from beneath a layer of velvety lashes, willing her to take the hint.
“You can use my tent,” Tora suggested, an attempt at amends.
“I think I’ve spent enough time in your tent,” London snarled.
“We still can’t leave the camp,” Zen told her. “Not with everyone watching.”
“Move to the tree-line,” Tora said. “Everything just beyond the clearing is considered camp ground. I’ll follow you and stand watch. If anyone comes, I’ll warn you. If they think you’re making a go of it, I’ll explain that I was watching you.”
London did not look pleased, but the guys assured her it was the best they could hope for. Together, they moved quietly toward the southern tree line. With Tora among them, the campers didn’t dare interfere. As promised, she stood at the edge of the clearing while London and the guys found privacy behind a shallow screen of loblolly pine saplings and underbrush.
Betraying her weakness, London sat down among the fall
en needles and pulled her knees up to her chest. “I’ve just come back from the Midplane. I spoke with Han—, I mean, Degan. And I have a message.”
The guys leaned in with curious eyes, but before she could explain more, a tinkling noise in the distance distracted her, backed by a growing hum.
“Do you hear that?” London asked.
“Hear what?” said Kim.
“That! That sound. Like…like bells. Or music?”
Rye was craning his neck toward the forest to hear over the din of voices in the clearing. “I hear it,” he said. “Sort of.”
“What is that?” Zen asked now, hearing it as well. Kim’s expression shifted as the faint tinkles caught his ears too.
“It’s getting louder,” London noticed.
“There’s something behind it,” Rye remarked. “A hum almost.”
By now, Tora had turned and noticed them all straining to listen to whatever was approaching through the forest. She searched the trees and her eyes froze with fear. “Run!” she shouted at them.
“What?” London jumped up, nearly collapsing into Rye as she did.
“Run,” Tora yelled again, this time at everyone in the camp as she burst into the clearing. “Run! Trucks! It’s a raid!”
Suddenly, London’s mind began to piece together the panic in Tora’s eyes with the tinkling noises and growing hum. It was the sound of the trucks from Capital City. Not just one or two, but a fleet of them. The Tigerians were coming. And at the helm, Ernesto, the aging speaker system of his truck rattling off the twisted melody it was known for when it used to sell ice cream to children before the Crisis.
London turned to Rye to explain just as the first sounds of gunfire rang through the camp. In an instant, havoc took over. Outroaders took off in every direction, stumbling through the clearing and tearing into the bordering trees. Tora was screaming at the top of her lungs for everyone to run and calling in a panic for Reginald.
Rye ducked instinctively. Gunshots were nothing new to kids from their part of the city. He clutched at London as he bolted into the forest. But her legs wouldn’t work right, and the noise and chaos swam around her in a haze of lights and shadow. She’d already put her body through too much being out of bed this long.
Zen shouted to Rye as more bullets ricocheted off trees and Outroaders fell in the clearing, downed in the crossfire, “Now’s our chance! We have to go now!”
“She’ll never make it,” Rye countered, swinging London’s arm over his neck and hoisting her to her feet.
Zen’s face was torn with anguish, and London could see just well enough to recognize that he was choosing between her and his love for Avery.
She put a hand out to him and said as clearly and as forcefully as she could, “Go Zen, go find her! We’ll catch up with you later. I promise.”
It was all the permission he needed. He turned and darted through the trees.
Kim looked at London and she shouted with all the fierceness she could muster, “What are you, deaf? I said go!”
He opened his mouth as if to respond but thought better of it and took off in Zen’s wake.
London looked at Rye, who was holding her up as he simultaneously tried to duck. “You, too. Get out of here. I can take care of myself.”
“Like hell you can,” he spat. “I won’t leave you.”
Just then, Tora scrambled from the clearing. “I can’t find Reginald!” She looked from Rye to London and added, “What are you still doing here? You have to run!”
“She’s too weak,” Rye shook his head. “We won’t get far.”
A bullet whizzed past at such close range, London swore she heard the whistle of its passing no more than an inch from her ear, like the hum of a giant mosquito.
Tora took one last anguished look into the clearing for her brother and sprang into action, grabbing London’s other arm and throwing it over her neck as Rye had done, heedless of the still angry wound that was healing there.
“Come on,” she insisted. “I know where we can hide.”
~
They huddled together in the tight tunnel, fighting for air while the smell of damp earth, rust, and sweat clogged London’s nostrils. Tora wasn’t the only one to think of the tunnel as a hiding place. Apparently, the Outroaders had a habit of burrowing under the camp sites for various reasons. Several pits, like the one Zen initially fell into, were used to trap game such as deer and wild hogs for food. The tunnels provided a way to drag the game out after it had been shot from above. They were also used to hide out when the helicopters of the Tycoons passed overhead. The Outroaders called it “going soft.”
Though they weren’t extensive enough to fit everyone, they gave a lot of the camp a fighting chance in an event like this. After all, that was the Outroaders chief aim. There was no golden future for them, no shining cities, no glorious possibilities. There was just this: survival.
London eyed the myriad of items lining the tunnel wall. Half buried in the dark earth, only snatches protruded here and there. A plastic arm. A concrete face with soulless, staring gray eyes. Spindly wheel spokes, once silver, now packed and blackened with dirt. Bits of old brick, red and tan in the dark. Whatever they could find in the Houselands, heaped here in ordered chaos, built into something grotesquely new. She almost wanted to laugh out loud. How very similar the Outroads were to Capital City, with its underground maze, a Scrapper’s paradise.
Tora said the scraps provided structure, helped hold the walls up, kept the ground above from collapsing in on them. London wondered if Capital City’s tunnels weren’t the same. If the illegal trade in scrap was what held the whole thing together. Giving people something to hope for, to live for, beyond the bleak monotony of life after the Crisis, a lousy assignment, and a fistful of ration tickets.
This tunnel, far east of the clearing, had been abandoned for some time, since the Outroaders—who were constantly moving from one site to the next at the rim of the Houselands—had last used this area to set up camp. It was caved in on one side, where a pile of dirt and junk blocked out most light, and aside from Tora, only a few other Outroaders had remembered it in their panic, but it was small and they were crowded as it was.
“How long have we been down here?” London whispered to the darkness. They’d found the tunnel in the daylight, listening silently to the far away shouts and gunfire, afraid to breathe, much less speak. But darkness had long since fallen over the world outside, and whatever light danced at the sole entrance to the tunnel had been extinguished for what seemed like hours.
“I think it’s nearly dawn,” an Outroader London didn’t recognize responded, a man. He was older than her by several years. Heavy and afraid, the sweat dripped from his temples and puddled over his upper lip.
“How do you know?” Rye asked.
“Because of the quiet,” the man replied. “Everything settles right before the sun rises.”
He was right. The woods were still outside. No birds, no bugs. They heard the occasional crunch of leaves and, once or twice, distant voices, but the sounds of the raid were dying with the night. At one instance, a snapping twig sounded so close outside, London was sure they’d be discovered. If it had been a Tigerian searching for runaway Outroaders, they’d never know. More than likely, it was just an animal who strayed nearby.
London’s head buzzed with questions she couldn’t yet ask. First and foremost: Why? Why the raid? Why the Tigerians? What did they want with the Outroaders? She knew they had free use of the trucks, but she’d never witnessed them leaving the city before. Sure, a Scrapper like Ernesto could slip beyond Capital City into the immediate foray of forest and Houseland ruins in search of trade goods without being seen. But a whole fleet? She would have noticed that. This was farther out than she’d ever heard tell of a Scrapper straying before. And what use did they have for the camp? Why all the gunfire and carnage? How many Outroaders had been killed? Faces she knew and those she didn’t. Faces she once resented. Like Harlan’s.
Now
she felt differently. She felt sorry for them.
London rested her head against the soft earth of the tunnel wall. The walled cities were rotting fortresses in her mind, but this was no way to live either. Always on the outside looking in, skirting the cities and the Tycoons, on the run. Her eyes found Tora’s in the darkness, a steady green, burning with their own intensity. She smiled wanly, grateful, in spite of herself, for Tora’s help. She knew the girl had saved her life today. And Rye’s. And she knew she had sacrificed something or someone of her own to do it.
EIGHTEEN
Mercy Killing
“Raid’s over,” the fat man said, a large sweat stain spread down the front of his shirt like a shadow beard. “Time to pack up. Move on.”
It was late in the day, and the distant calls and shouts they were hearing now suggested the Outroaders, or what was left of them, were reconvening at the clearing. They scooted out slowly on hands and knees, caution in every movement, allowing those hiding with them to emerge behind them. The fat man was anxious to discover what and who was left after the raid and to lend a hand. Tora nodded him on, insisting she’d be there shortly. But Rye, London, and Tora were debating whether to go back at all. London wanted to move on, look for Zen and Kim, find Avery as they’d planned all along. This was their chance to break away.
Rye argued he’d never get far enough with her on their own. He reminded her that in their haste, they’d left without their backpacks or any supplies.
He was right about one thing, London needed food. She hadn’t eaten since regaining consciousness and had very little water. Her throat felt like cardboard. They needed Tora’s help if they were going to make it. And London knew that.
But Tora wanted to go back for her brother. Her anxiety over Reginald clouded her otherwise sharp expression, and she kept saying she had to know if he was okay. She promised that if they would just let her collect her brother and a few things, she could lead them through the Houselands to find their friends. Then, she and Reg could rejoin the Outroaders later at a new camp.