by Tosca Lee
It’s soaked in blood. I’m instantly taken back to the day that Piper stabbed Braden. The blood soaking through Chase’s shirt as he pressed it to Braden’s neck.
“How bad?” I ask.
“Bad enough,” Chase murmurs, grabbing the pillow at the top of the bed and shoving it beneath Julie’s feet.
“Delaney, stay right there,” Rima says, snatching a pair of shears from a metal tray.
Chase backs out of the way, dragging his arm across his forehead as Rima starts to cut away Julie’s shirt.
“Wynter?” Julie says, her eyes shut, her face scrunched up in a grimace.
“I’m here,” I say, moving around Delaney. I grab Julie’s hand. Her fingers are sticky.
“Where’s Lauren?”
“The library.”
“Don’t let her see this.”
“I won’t,” I say, glancing back at the door, where Sha’Neal nods and slips back out.
“Everybody out except Delaney,” Rima says.
But I don’t want to leave her. My fingers tighten on hers.
“I’ll be fine,” Julie says.
Chase draws me back by my upper arm. I let her go. Stumble backward until he can pull the curtain, blocking her from sight.
I turn to look at him in a stupor. “How did you—what were you doing there?” I say. “Did you have anything to do with this?”
“Of course not!” Chase says.
“What were you doing in the kitchen?” I demand.
“I go to lunch late! Delaney leaves a plate for me after she puts the food away. I was there when it happened.”
The stairwell door opens, and I prepare to intercept Lauren. Except it isn’t Lauren who comes through, but Brit, who interns with Rima in between shifts.
She dashes past us and swipes the curtain aside.
Delaney emerges a few seconds later, hands held out before her, arms and sleeves covered in blood. Too much to clean off in a sink.
I leave with her, if only to make sure none of the kids see her on the way to the shower.
• • •
BY THE TIME Lauren and I get the green light to visit Julie, she’s got fifteen new stitches, a tube in the back of her hand . . . and she’s smiling as she slurs her words.
“Mom,” Lauren says weirdly, after lifting her head from Julie’s shoulder, where she buried it with a sob as soon as we arrived. “Are you high?”
“She going to be okay?” I ask Rima.
“Can’t you tell?” she says wryly. “She’s okay now.”
I give a slight smile, but it’s weird seeing Julie like that. So relaxed.
“She caught herself on her hands or she might have punctured her colon.” She pats me on the shoulder. “Don’t worry. She’ll walk out of here on Open Day.”
DAY 177
* * *
“You’ve got six days to get better,” I say, tucking the blanket around Julie’s shoulders.
She smiles slightly, her eyes closed. Her lips are pale.
She’s been shivering off and on for half an hour, seeming to forget at times I was there as Rima checked the growing patch of red skin around Julie’s stitches.
When I emerge from the curtained room, Rima draws me away so Julie can’t hear us. Not that I really think she’s listening.
“What’s happening to her?” I say. It’s been a week. She was supposed to be walking around by now.
“My only guess is that she punctured her colon after all. I didn’t see anything, but without exploratory surgery I easily could have missed it. In which case, it’s probably closed up now.”
“Then why isn’t she getting better?” I demand in a whisper.
“The wound’s infected.” She looks at me with those dark eyes of hers, and I think twenty years ago—before war tore her country apart and she took on the life of a refugee—she must have been beautiful. “I’ve upped her antibiotics, but what we have might not be powerful enough. If the infection reaches her bloodstream and she becomes septic . . .”
“Septic,” I say, not understanding. “What does that mean?”
“If that were to happen,” she says, too carefully, “her organs could begin to shut down.”
“You mean . . .” The heat drains from my limbs. “There’s got to be something you can do!”
“Believe me when I say I’m doing the best I can with what I’ve got.”
“Will she make it six more days?”
She bites her lips together, brows lifting over the bridge of her nose.
“I hope so,” she says, with a small smile. “You know Julie. She wouldn’t go without a fight.”
It’s enough for me to latch on to. Until she adds: “But you might want to prepare Lauren if things don’t improve.”
• • •
THE REST OF the ark is busy taking inventory. Of supplies. Of the food we have left. The number of days it will last.
Just in case the door doesn’t open.
The personal items they brought with them in case it does.
I sit in the silence of the infirmary, detached from the activity above us. Knowing there’s no way we’ll be able to leave when the door opens.
Unwilling to think of the consequences for Julie if it doesn’t.
DAY 179
* * *
Lauren dozes where she sits, arms folded beneath her cheek on the edge of her mother’s bed. Truly curls against me in her sleep on a bed in the next bay over.
We were supposed to be packing our few possessions. Anticipating our first breath of fresh air. The sight of the setting sun. The full summer moon.
Instead, I’ve just spent two hours listening to Lauren’s sobs. To her pleas for her mother to get better, her promises to be a better daughter. To take care of her. To make her proud.
Knowing, in days to come, I will have to convince her that there was nothing she could do. That none of it was her fault. Even as the old anxiety over my own mother’s death keeps me awake, heart drumming against Truly’s cheek.
The door to the stairway creaks open, and I hear Rima in whispered conversation. Lift my head just enough to see through the gap in the curtains that she’s speaking with Karam.
He nods to his mother, who has attended Julie around the clock the last three days, relieved by Brit only long enough to shower and catch a few hours’ sleep. And then he comes to stand at the break in the curtain.
“Wynter,” he says. “Can you come up?”
He was the first of the others to approach me in private, months ago, and say he didn’t know. That he was sorry for how everything went—and thank you. His dark brows knitting together as he asked if I’d like to meet him for dinner some night in the library. Which I did, once, for an awkward hour before declining his invitations ever since.
I want to say no. Want to give everyone who sent him the finger.
Instead, I slide from bed, careful not to wake Truly, and toe into my sneakers.
Before following Karam to the atrium.
DAY 180
* * *
The stars are falling.
After avoiding the atrium for months, the sight of that wall is a shock: entire blocks of screen gone dark. Others filled with nothing but static, so that the night sky looks like one of those tile puzzles revealing only clues of the picture beneath.
The others look uneasy, though they’ve saved a place for me. At least they won’t have to tolerate my presence much longer.
Chase gives me a quiet nod from across the room, his blue eyes more vivid than I remember beneath those well-formed brows—an effect, perhaps, of his new beard. Or perhaps of the hair that now curls past his ears. He’s leaner than he was—not thinner so much as more defined. But of course he is; he’s spent hours inside the gym every day.
Then again, so have I.
We’ve changed—all of us. Our chins are sharper, our skin paler, our arms wirier, and waists trimmer.
Only Rudy Bryant, CLU, looks the same, except that he now has a ponytail.
“Not well,” I say.
“I’m sorry to hear that. With hope, we can get her the help she needs on Open Day.”
“If she makes it that long.”
Gazes drop away. As they should. As I want them to, because I’m angry. Not at anyone specifically—except Chase. And myself. Because whatever happens, I should be nothing but grateful to have Truly with me. To have sheltered her these last six months in comfort and safety.
Instead, I feel robbed. Of the picture that we created and that I clung to those first weeks—not just of a new start in Wyoming but of a future I could look forward to for the first time in my life.
Someone coughs and the silence grows uncomfortable.
“With that day in mind,” Preston starts again. “We wanted to consult you on what the health protocol should be on our reemergence. If there’s anything extra you learned during your time with Dr. Neal in Colorado.”
“Assume anyone you come in contact with above is infected,” I say. “Wear your mask and gloves. Don’t accept blood transfusions from anyone who might potentially have been exposed—which is everyone. Try not to require surgery from a hospital that operated on someone infected. Which would be all of them. Oh. And know where your meat comes from.”
They sit forward as they listen. A few of them take notes.
It hits me then: time might have stopped for Julie, Lauren, Truly, and me, but Open Day is three days away. A matter of hours. Everyone else here is preparing to exit, making plans to continue life on Noah’s ranch above or to attempt a return home.
After months of knowing exactly what my life and routine will look like for the next week and month and month after that, I have no idea what my life may look like three days from now.
Except that we will not be able to leave until Julie recovers . . . or dies.
And I will never see Chase again.
“This raises a big question for me,” Ezra says. “Of how and when we want to go up. Because if there’s a chance of anyone other than Noah being up there—”
“We’d just come back and lock the door,” Nelise says with a shrug.
“Does it lock without engaging the time mechanism?” Brit asks. “We have limited supplies. We can’t go another six months.”
“I can’t go another six days,” Sha’Neal mutters.
“No,” Micah says. “It’s only designed to lock by agreement from inside and outside, both.”
“We have to leave eventually,” Preston says. “Do we know what time of day it’s supposed to open?”
“It should open the same time it closed,” Micah says. “Five p.m.”
Preston reaches over and stands up a whiteboard I recognize as the one we use for school. I can still see the chart I made to show the kids’ progress through a series of individual assignments just faintly beneath his swift erase job.
He writes 5:00 p.m. on the board. “Obviously, it’ll still be light out,” he says, and adds light beside it.
I get up to leave, step past several people sitting on the floor, who crane to see around me. I move past the pool table, averting my eyes from the spot where Braden died, and am about three feet from the exit that leads up to the time lock when I hear something.
I pause, gaze resting on the padlock Ezra installed after Braden forced the door open to tamper with the vault entrance above.
It comes again: a brief siren blast from above, like the one at the car wash Julie used to frequent, that told you when to drive in, and when to exit . . .
Or the alarm that sounded every five seconds before the time lock engaged six months ago until it was a single undulation of sound.
The discussion across the room grows louder, someone saying, “What if the strike on Hawaii wasn’t just a rumor—what if Jax was right and we walk out into nuclear winter?”
“What if it doesn’t open at all?” someone else says.
I move closer and then press my ear to the door as Chase comes over.
“What is it?” he asks.
“Listen.”
He stands beside me, head tilted against the cold metal surface until it comes again.
“Hear that?” I ask.
He frowns and then straightens and gives a shrill whistle, startling the others to silence.
“Hey,” he says. “Anyone know how long the siren’s been going off?”
Micah comes around the edge of the group, looks from me to the door, and then presses his ear against it.
An instant later, he says, “Irwin, get the key.”
By the time Irwin returns, the siren has turned into one ongoing alarm. He removes the padlock and throws open the door.
For an instant, the sound is deafening.
And then it stops. The grind of gears fills the sudden silence, rumbling down the metal stairs.
Chase steps through the door onto the landing.
“What’s happening?” someone hisses as Micah brushes past me to join him, the two men staring up at the dark stairwell above.
A heavy click sounds from above.
Followed by the unmistakable slide of a bolt.
DAY 181
* * *
The echo of that bolt thunders down the stairwell as fluorescent lights flutter to life on the concrete walls.
Karam and Preston step past me to squint up through the four flights of metal grate.
“This—this isn’t right,” Micah says, backing into the atrium, obviously flustered. “It’s too early.”
“Maybe Noah calculated each month as thirty days,” I say.
“No,” Micah says. “I set the system. I built it for Noah, taking each month and even leap year into consideration—”
“Look,” Delaney says, pointing.
I follow her finger as Micah whirls around.
The LED wall is blank. Not just the malfunctioning sections, but the entire thing.
But all I can think about is Julie. Now that the door’s open, she might have a chance.
“I’m going up,” I say.
“Whoa,” Chase says, stepping back into the atrium. “Are you crazy? We don’t know what—or who—is up there right now.”
“Then we go out and look,” I say.
“It’s the middle of the night,” Karam says. “Our flashlights will be seen by anyone on patrol.”
“We don’t need flashlights,” I say, impatient. “We know the ranch well enough to get around.”
“And to risk getting shot by anyone up there not expecting us—including Noah’s own people!” Chase says.
“Julie is dying! She needs medicine we don’t have to survive!”
“I know!” He rubs his brow as though it hurts.
“Micah, is there any way Noah would know the door’s open?” Preston asks. I picture the barn directly above us and wonder the same thing; the silo entrance is concealed behind a nondescript wooden door at the end of a line of horse stalls.
Micah nods. “There’s in the systems control center an indicator.Assuming it works, he would notice that it’s off.”
“Where’s the control center?” I say.
“In the basement.”
“It’s late,” I say, too conscious of the minutes ticking by. As though time, ground to a sluggish crawl these last few months, began to accelerate the instant that door unlocked. “He might not see it till morning.”
“What was the Open Day protocol supposed to be?” Chase asks.
“Noah said he’d be waiting when it opened,” Micah says. “To let us know it was safe and escort us up top.”
“Then we wait for Noah,” Chase says. “Give him a chance to sound the all clear. Till then, we get a team in place to defend the door in case someone other than Noah comes through.”
“I’ll open the weapons locker,” Irwin says.
Ten minutes later I’m crouched behind the end of an overstuffed chair in the library with the pistol I checked in six months a
go, a clear view of the tunnel, and a round in the chamber. Straining in tense silence for any sound from above. For Noah to call out his Denizens.
Anyone other than Noah himself—or his men, Zach and Mel—will never make it past Chase, Nelise, and Karam, stationed in the atrium, their weapons trained on the door.
Five minutes.
Ten.
Twenty-five.
A soft shuffle in the atrium—someone shifting position. A knee pops. I straighten my legs, move my weight off my heels. A sibilant whisper drifts up through the spiral staircase six feet away from me, where several others crouch in the dining hall below. The rest wait in the closed stairwell a level below, ready to bar it with an ax handle if all else fails. The same ones so eager to leave an hour ago, driven back underground.
I glance at the library clock. Forty-five minutes.
“Wynter,” Chase says softly, his voice carrying through the tunnel.
I lean out far enough to see him kneeling against the end of the sofa.
“Get Micah.”
I pad over to the stairwell, grab the rail, and lean over. Point to Micah. Gesture him up.
I wait for him at the tunnel and, once he’s in, follow him through, not fully emerging into the atrium, but crouching right there at the end. I note Karam leaning out from the other end of the sofa, forearm on his knee. Nelise sitting against the panel connecting two of the pool table legs, her own legs bent in front of her, a shotgun across her thighs.
Chase straightens and nods toward the stairs.
“Is there any way we can lock the door from within?” he asks softly.
“No,” Micah murmurs. “And even if there was, I wouldn’t trust it—obviously something malfunctioned. Personally, I don’t even like having it shut like this.”
“You think it could reengage?”
If the lock reengages, Julie’s as good as dead.
We all are.
I move into the atrium past the pool table.
“Jam the bolt channel,” I say, grabbing a cue from the rack. I’ve refused to touch any of them since that terrible day. But now as I consider the cue’s graduated circumference, it seems like a thing redeemed. “Cut the right girth from this.”