Captive

by Aimee Carter

  The top drawer was small and full of pictures of girls I didn’t recognize—smiling faces wearing white jumpsuits instead of red, which I could only guess meant they were from a different section. My eyes lingered on a younger-looking Scotia, with longer hair done in braids and a wide smile. Part of me was stunned to see anyone looking that happy Elsewhere, but most of me was relieved Scotia wasn’t a heartless monster after all. She had people she cared about, too, and at least now I had some glimmer of understanding as to why she’d risked her own safety and a cushy position all to help out the Blackcoats. We all had someone we were fighting for, even if that someone was ourselves.

  I was careful not to disturb anything in the nightstand as I searched for the necklace. The second drawer was stuffed with an extra jumpsuit and wool socks, and among them I discovered a batch of folded notes bundled together with an old shoestring. I tried to make out the names on the top and bottom of each page, but the letters didn’t form any word I recognized. Not that that was hard. I bit my lip. Maybe if I took these, Scotia would be willing to trade.

  Or she’d kill me. That was a much more likely outcome.

  Without warning, the door to the bunkhouse opened, and I froze. For an instant, I couldn’t move as panic overcame me, but I forced it aside. The odds of it being Scotia were slim, but that was a chance I couldn’t take. As silently as I could, I shut the drawer and slid under the bed.

  Uneven footsteps echoed from the doorway, almost as if whoever it was couldn’t keep her balance. Underneath the edge of the curtain, I spotted prisoner-issued boots, and I silently willed them to walk away from the curtain. Just one step, and I would be able to relax.

  Instead they turned toward me, and a gloved hand pushed the curtain aside, revealing Scotia.

  I remained absolutely still, not even daring to breathe. Scotia’s coat and jumpsuit were soaked in fresh blood, and she stumbled forward, groping around until she reached the nightstand. She was only a few inches from my hiding spot under her bed, close enough for me to hear her labored breathing.

  Where had the blood come from? I searched for any sign of injury on Scotia, but all I could see were a few scratch marks across her neck. Nothing deep enough to cause that much blood to soak into her clothes.

  I spotted something else, too—a delicate silver chain hanging around her neck. I bit back a hiss of frustration. The most I could do at this point was yank it off her and make a run for it, but even in her condition, she could probably take me. I couldn’t risk it.

  Scotia stood with effort, crying out softly as she did so. She was hurt, and worse than it first appeared—maybe I could outrun her after all.

  Clutching a fresh change of clothes, she stumbled out of her room and to the left, toward the bathroom. Moments later I heard the shower running, and I cautiously slid out from underneath the bed. Nudging the curtain aside, I peeked into the bathroom, relieved to see Scotia’s bloodied clothes discarded on the floor.

  Her pile of fresh ones sat on the long counter beside a sink, and I tiptoed across the tile, careful not to make a sound. Sitting on top of a fresh shirt was the silver necklace Greyson had given me, half the face tinged red with blood.

  I snatched it from the pile and didn’t bother washing it off. Within seconds, I slipped through the door of the bunkhouse and out into the snowy street, careful to keep a straight face. Finally, something was going my way. I could sneak into Mercer’s office while everyone was asleep, get the codes, and deliver them to the Blackcoats. The thought of facing Scotia again after what I’d just done made me queasy, but if I had the codes, maybe she’d forgive me for stealing the necklace. If she figured out it was me in the first place.

  Feeling lighter than I had in days, I knelt beside a clean pile of snow a couple blocks from the bunkhouse and scooped a handful into my glove. I scrubbed the face of the necklace clean and pulled it apart to make sure the individual pieces were also free of blood. I had no way of knowing if the electric lock pick would still work, but I couldn’t imagine Greyson creating something this incredible and not waterproofing it. I hoped.

  Once the disk was clean, I fastened the chain around my neck and paused, looking at the pink-tinged snow beside my boot. Now that my heart wasn’t in my throat, I realized I had no idea where the blood had come from. How had Scotia managed to get so messed up in the few minutes she’d spent with—

  Noelle. The edges of my vision went dark, and I scrambled to my feet and looked around, as if she would be right there waiting for me to notice her. But of course she wasn’t there. Whatever Scotia had done to her, it must have been bad.

  I ran through the street toward the dining hall, hoping against hope she would be there. As I passed the alleyway where I’d last seen her, I darted down the path in hopes of spotting her, or at the very least finding a trail of blood. I found neither, and after a minute of searching, I doubled back. The dining hall. She had to be inside the dining hall. If she was injured, she would have gone somewhere warm nearby, and in the sea of gray administrative buildings, that was the only option.

  I burst through the doors and searched the crowd. Several people stopped eating and stared, but I ignored them as I scanned every face in there. Noelle wasn’t with them. She wasn’t anywhere.

  I swallowed a screech of frustration before darting back outside. I didn’t feel the cold anymore, even with my jumpsuit still wet, and I hurried through the darkening streets, searching every building nearby with an open door. Bunks I didn’t recognize, buildings with cold entranceways and locked hallways—she wasn’t in any of them. And no matter how hard I searched, I couldn’t find the trail of blood that had to be somewhere.

  Just as I decided to head back to the bunkhouse and see if I could trace Scotia’s boot prints, an air horn went off, and my entire body went numb. This time it had nothing to do with the cold.

  I was one of the first to reach the railing around the cage. I found a spot where I had an unobstructed view of the rooftop where the Mercers and Knox had viewed the matches the day before, and I waited anxiously, fighting the fear that crept into my thoughts. It would be okay. Everything would be okay.

  At last the Mercers appeared, and it was only then that I became aware of the crowd surrounding me, trapping me against the railing. Everyone in the section was here, just as they’d been the night before, and they were all ready to watch someone else die.

  I looked up at Knox, waiting for him to notice me. He cast his gaze around the crowd, but at last our eyes met, and he shook his head minutely. I didn’t have to hear him to know what he was thinking: I’d missed dinner, and the Mercers weren’t pleased.

  I didn’t care about the Mercers right now. All I could think about was that cage, and as the trapdoors opened underneath, I held my breath.

  It would be okay. It would be okay. It would be okay.

  But as the familiar mop of floppy brown hair appeared, my blood turned to ice, and I knew it wouldn’t be.

  Elliott stood on trembling legs inside the cage, still in his guard uniform. And across from him, wearing a blood-soaked jumpsuit with no coat, knelt Noelle.

  XIII

  MERCY KILL

  “Noelle!” I screamed. “Noelle!”

  Even though she couldn’t have been more than twenty feet from me, she didn’t look my way. Her head lolled forward as if she were barely conscious, and her dark hair was matted with blood. Elliott knelt beside her, and for one terrible moment I thought he was going to kill her—until he wrapped his arms around her and buried his nose in her bloody hair, the same way Benjy had held me only hours before.

  Desperation clawed at me from the inside out, but there was nothing I could do. They were already inside the cage. Guards holding rifles surrounded the base, making it a suicide mission at worst to even try to get to them.

  But the crowd was dead silent. My scream had echoed through the stre
ets, and even Mercer had glanced my way.

  They could hear me.

  “They did nothing wrong!” I shouted, climbing onto the railing so the Mercers could see me, too. Hannah averted her eyes, but Mercer stared straight at me, his gaze unblinking. Beside him, Knox leaned in and whispered something in his ear, but Mercer didn’t react. No one said a word.

  “It’s okay, Lila,” said a small voice. I turned around. Noelle’s head was resting on Elliott’s shoulder, but she was looking at me, her eyes slightly unfocused. Her face already showed signs of bad bruising, and a gash ran from her temple to her chin. That must have been where most of the blood had come from. Even now, I could see it dripping down her cheek.

  Tears stung my eyes, and without thinking, I tried to climb over the railing. “No, this isn’t okay—Noelle, this isn’t okay. Knox!” A guard grabbed my waist, and I began to kick. “Knox, do something!”

  A second guard grabbed my flailing legs, and I stood no chance of fending off both. Their arms were strong and their grips unbreakable, and no matter how I twisted and moved, neither of them let go. I didn’t pay attention to them, though—instead I stared up at the rooftop where Knox and the Mercers stood, all three of them now pretending I wasn’t there.

  “Lila, please,” said Noelle in that same broken voice. “I don’t want you to die, too.”

  A choking sob escaped me. “I’m sorry,” I managed. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” she said again. “This is as good a way out as any. At least now we’ll be together.”

  Elliott held her tighter and turned away from me, and I forgot how to breathe. The defeat in Noelle’s eyes—she didn’t deserve this. She hadn’t done anything wrong.

  “This is your only warning,” boomed Mercer from the rooftop, and I stared at the pair inside the cage, unable to look away. Noelle whispered something I couldn’t hear in Elliott’s ear, and he shook his head, his arms tightening around her.

  It wasn’t hard to imagine what she had asked and what he had refused to do. Elliott looked uninjured, and with his physical strength, he could have easily snapped her neck. It would be painless—a mercy kill, and he would have another chance at survival. Maybe not as a guard, but he would still be alive. And by this time tomorrow, we’d all be free or dead anyway.

  But if it had been Benjy and I inside that cage, I knew without a doubt that neither of us would make a move no matter how close to death the other was. I’d already had a taste of what life would be like without him, and there was nothing in the world that could make me go back there.

  No matter how much sense it made for Elliott to kill her to save himself, he wasn’t going to do it. He loved Noelle more than his own life. And in that moment, I hated Scotia more than I thought I could ever hate anyone, even Knox.

  “I’m sorry,” I sobbed as Mercer raised his rifle. “I’m so sorry.”

  Noelle wasn’t listening to me anymore. Instead she focused on Elliott, her fingers tangled in his hair, her lips brushing against his ear, and her entire body molding against his, as if she were trying to be as close to him as possible. This was how she wanted to spend her last moments, and I had no place in it.

  I turned away. Two shots cracked through the streets, one right after the other, and then—

  Silence.

  It was over.

  There were no more fights that evening. Guards cleared Noelle’s and Elliott’s bodies away as the crowd dispersed, and the two men holding me set me down on the other side of the railing with a stern warning to get to my bunkhouse. I stood there for a long moment, as numb as ever as the world seemed to cave in on me all over again.

  “You shouldn’t have told her about the Blackcoats.”

  I turned slowly. If I moved too fast, everything would shatter, and my grip on the here and now was fragile enough already. Scotia stood two long strides away, her arms crossed loosely over her chest. Nothing about her blank expression or relaxed shoulders indicated she had just watched two innocent people die because of her.

  It was her apathy that made something snap inside me, and before I realized what I was doing, I crossed the distance between us and grabbed her jacket, shoving her as hard as my wrung-out body could manage.

  “I was trying to help her!” My voice rang through the empty streets. “She needed hope—she needed to know things were going to be okay, and instead you killed her.”

  Scotia tried to grab my hands, but I pulled back against her thumbs, releasing her grip. For several seconds we grappled for control, me trying to shove her again while she tried to subdue me. She lurched, and suddenly my feet disappeared out from under me.

  I hit the ground hard, and the air whooshed out of my lungs, leaving me breathless. I struggled to inhale, the pain and pressure in my chest making it impossible, and Scotia knelt beside me. She pinned my arms to the ground, and when I tried to kick, she sat on my thighs, pressing my legs into the freezing dirt. Her movements were labored, but she was still strong, and I went limp underneath her.

  “Noelle was the snitch,” she said, hovering over me. “She’s been snitching to Williams ever since she moved into the section. She was the one who ratted out Chelsea, and she’s responsible for another sixteen deaths in the past year.”

  My lungs burned, and I struggled to speak. “But—”

  “In this place, you’ve got to look out for yourself, and that’s what Noelle was doing. I’m not saying she didn’t have her good side, and I’m not saying I’m any better than her. But I am saying if she’d told Williams about the Blackcoats, Williams would have gone to Mercer, and everything would have been ruined.”

  My vision blurred, and I stared at Scotia as her words sunk in. “She wouldn’t have said anything.” I had to believe that as much as I needed air. “She—she wouldn’t have told anyone.”

  “And you know that for sure?” Scotia leveled her stare at me. “You’re willing to risk the entire rebellion on your opinion of someone you’ve known for a day?”

  “I—” I faltered, and although I hated myself for it, my eyes welled up. “She wouldn’t have done that to me.”

  “Yes, she would have,” said Scotia. “And she would have skipped all the way to Mercer Manor. You were her big fish. The moment she spotted you doing something out of line, you would have been in that cage, and she would have been putting on a crisp new guard uniform. The sooner you accept that, the easier this will be for you.”

  Hot tears rolled down my cheeks as a battle waged inside me. The rational part of me that could step back and see the situation for what it was knew Scotia was almost certainly right. Noelle herself had admitted that she wanted to be a guard, and she’d even told me exactly what she had to do to become one. I’d been naive to trust her as much as I had—it wasn’t a coincidence she’d befriended me, and as I ran through the past day in my mind, I couldn’t remember a single instance of her having a conversation with someone else. Everyone had known she was the snitch, and they’d steered clear of her. I hadn’t been so lucky.

  But the part of me that understood her—that looked at her and saw the person I would have been if I hadn’t been lucky enough to wind up in society despite being an Extra—that part of me had just witnessed my own death, mine and Benjy’s, and I couldn’t process it. Noelle hadn’t been a bad person to me. She’d been the only friend I had in this place—and even if her friendship had been a charade, it had felt real to me. It still did, and the pain of watching her die wasn’t lessened by learning the real story behind her warmth. If anything, it only made me feel worse for mourning someone who had caused so many others to die.

  No. Noelle hadn’t created the system. She’d taken advantage of it, but she wasn’t the enemy. She was a product of her environment, and all she’d wanted was the same thing I did—to be with the person she loved most.

  It was this place that was the
problem. It was Elsewhere. It was the guards, the Mercers, the Harts—they were the ones responsible for taking decent people and turning them into the worst versions of themselves. They were the ones responsible for this mass slaughter and waste of human life, and they were the ones who were going to pay.

  “Did she tell anyone?” I said tightly. Scotia’s grip on me lessened.

  “No. I didn’t give her a chance. I didn’t enjoy it, but better one life lost than millions.”

  I blinked hard. “It was the only life she had.”

  “This is the only life any of us have,” she said. “Noelle made her choices long before you arrived. She and Elliott both did. You messed up telling her, but you can’t take it back now, so there’s no point in feeling guilty about it.”

  But I did. No matter what Noelle’s intentions had been, I was still the one who’d told her. I was still the one who’d set the ball in motion, and now she was dead because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut. I had to believe she would have changed once she’d had her freedom. She wouldn’t have had to snitch on anyone anymore, and she would have had a real chance at a good life. Now, because of me, that was gone.

  Scotia stood and offered me her hand. I ignored it. Hauling myself to my feet, I shoved my fists in my pockets and trudged off down the street, guilt burning through me. No one was blameless in any of this—not Noelle, not Scotia, not me. But Noelle was the one who had paid the price.

  “Hey, Hart,” called Scotia. I paused, but I didn’t turn around. “I hear you’re staying at Mercer Manor now.”

  I tensed. The codes. After all that had happened, all she really cared about were the damn codes.

  As if she could hear my thoughts, she stepped in front of me, her dark eyes piercing. “Make sure Noelle and Elliott died for something,” she said as she touched a lock of my hair. “Not everyone gets to be so lucky, you know.”

  I jerked my head away, but she grabbed my shoulder and held my stare. A shiver ran down my spine. “I’m not your pawn.”