Kole.
I can’t feel my heart beating. I can’t feel anything except the crushing weight against my chest, the air frozen in my lungs. I watch him struggle against their hold, but there are too many of them and only one of him.
Out of the corner of my eye I see a blonde head, and for the tiniest second I look away from him, watching as an Officer kicks at the back of Lacey’s knees, and she drops to the ground and he’s raising his gun. What the hell is she doing out here?
A gunshot sounds from my other side, and before I understand what’s happening I’m bolting across the grass as my grip tightens on the gun, my mind screaming…
No.
No.
No.
Why am I doing this?
This is dangerous and stupid and idiotic and I’m going to get myself killed, but all I can see are their hands pulling and tugging at him, dragging him away from the house, away from us, and maybe I’ve tied too much of this new life in with him, with his existence, with his life but—
My gun goes off, sending a bullet into the back of one of the Officer’s heads, and another and another, and Jay comes up behind me, helping me, and there is all of this rage, everywhere and everything and at everyone, and I cannot believe they would do this.
The Captain of the troop, whom I recognise by the markings on his left sleeve, is in front of me. He pulls up a gun, but I am faster.
I pull the trigger, and there is this huge, monstrous thing rising up inside me because this is my home and this is my life and how dare they …
The Officer falls to the ground with a thud. Dead.
I spin around, the butt of my gun held against my shoulder, waiting, watching, ready, so ready, but—
Nothing.
They are gone. The clearing is littered with bodies, some of them Officers, some not. It takes me a moment to register that they have retreated. Once they saw their Captain go down, the rest fell back immediately. We are alone with the dead.
My eyes fall on a blonde head in a pool of red blood, and it’s happening again. As Lacey bleeds out on the gravel I watch her hair stain red, gulping back a hysterical laugh and I come apart, piece by piece, and my gun falls to the ground and I fall after it, my knees hitting the earth with a dull thud. Something like a scream is trying to claw its way out of me. I look over, and he is on his knees, his hand covering his mouth as he looks around him, some enormous, broken thing looking out from those dark eyes, and the tears in them push the scream back inside my lungs, because the pain in my chest is nothing against the look on his face. Like this is it, like the worst thing that could have possibly happened just did. Like something crawled out of his nightmares and into the real world, tearing apart everything he loved as it went.
Like this is his fault, and it is destroying him.
39
Kole pulled himself together faster than I did, than I could. He dragged up walls behind his eyes and picked himself up off the ground, coming over and kneeling down beside me.
‘You saved my life,’ he said. His voice was grave, with something else underneath it, but I couldn’t tell if it was just the remnants of the pain he was trying to hide or something else.
My hand was left against my gun, which was left against my leg on the grass, all the bodies around me so close, and I felt a sensation like fingers crawling up my back. I was shaking so badly I couldn’t answer him. I couldn’t do anything but stare straight at him, my brain chasing itself in circles.
‘We need to get you inside,’ he murmured. He stood up, pulled me up along with him, his arm coming around my shoulders, to hold me up or to hold me together I couldn’t tell.
As we walked back inside together, I tried not to see the bodies, lying around the clearing like broken things. I tried to pretend I didn’t see the ones in civilian clothes, the ones who weren’t Officers. The ones with blonde hair and blue eyes and soft laughs, the ones who trusted too easily but loved more than I ever could. I tried to pretend I didn’t know those were our people lying face-down in the dirt, shot to death by an attack I should have seen coming.
Once we are inside, Kole wraps a blanket around me, sits me down in one of the chairs. He turns quickly as someone comes crashing through the door, voice loud and insistent. And that’s how it’s been for the last hour. One by one they started clambering towards him, blaming him for everything that happened.
But they didn’t mean it. They just needed someone to aim their anger at. Somewhere to put all of the pain filling them up until they couldn’t contain it, until they couldn’t keep it inside of themselves any longer. All the fear clawing its way into the gaps between their joints, locking them in place as they stare around the clearing, at all of the dead.
‘There is nothing we could have done to stop this,’ Kole says quietly, calmly, to another one of his accusers, but there is the smallest tremble, the slightest hitch at the end of his voice that speaks of the effect it’s having on him.
‘We?’ An unfamiliar voice shouts. I look up and a man stands there, poised like he’s trying to keep from attacking Kole. I’ve never heard a word from this man before. He keeps quiet at meals, head down, with few friends. But this attack has done something to people – or maybe, more accurately, it has undone something in them. ‘We couldn’t do anything, but you should have. How does this keep happening?’
I’ve heard those words a lot in the last hour, How does this keep happening?, said with varying degrees of aggression.
Lauren has come downstairs, but she’s sitting in the corner, not looking at anyone, so no one looks at her.
‘Victor, this is the world we live in.’ Kole is a lot calmer than I would be, and I try to tune out the argument, because I can’t handle listening to it anymore.
I stare at my cup, full of tea that Kole made for me when the shaking got so bad he started getting scared for me, and I pull the blanket tighter around my shoulders. The tea doesn’t taste like it did the first day, and my ears are still ringing from the gunshots.
Mark comes in after checking on everyone upstairs, followed shortly by Clarke. Her eyes are bloodshot and puffy, as if she’s been crying, but her mouth is set in a hard line, the look in her eyes as murderous as it’s ever been. She’s only in the room a moment before she turns on Victor.
‘Get out,’ she snarls at him, before Mark steps between them, gently reminding Victor that everyone is just trying to cope with their loss. He eventually leaves, slamming the door on his way out, but he doesn’t forget to remind Kole, before he storms out, that this should never have been able to happen.
There is an eerie silence in the kitchen when he’s gone. Kole collapses into the chair across from me, leaning his head against the table.
‘Kole?’ Mark sounds scared, but everyone sounds scared. Everything is crawling with fear.
‘I’m fine,’ Kole grunts, but doesn’t lift his head from the table.
Mark pulls up a chair to the table, and we sit quietly, watching Kole, because despite everything, we expect him to give us an answer. A solution. Something.
Clarke leans her back against the door, as if to block anyone else from entering, her face completely blank.
‘I don’t know,’ he says, as if he can read our minds. ‘I don’t know what to do.’
‘How did they find us?’ Mark looks angry. ‘It’s only been a matter of weeks. How could they have found us so fast when we’re so far into the forest, so far from the Wall?’
‘I have no idea.’ Kole raises his head from the table, a desperately helpless look on his face. ‘I have no idea.’
Jay comes crashing through the front door, back from a search of the perimeter.
‘Nothing,’ he says, throwing himself down in a chair. He is seething with anger, every muscle taut with the need for revenge.
But we’ve killed all we can today. Anyone who escaped is long gone by now, and those who didn’t are lying outside with bullet-holes in their heads and their hearts, piled up in the middle of the clearin
g, waiting to be burned.
‘What do we do now? Do we move again? Stay? How are we supposed to fight them when there are so many of them and a few dozen of us?’ The questions come pouring out of me, and my fist hits the table, as if that’s going to do anything.
Eight of our own died today. Lacey died today. And almost everyone who was fighting is injured in some way. Lacey died today. I can’t even think the words without feeling faint, so I press my knuckles against my temples and try to push the thought from my head.
Kole looks at me, or more like through me. I can’t see any solution, and I can’t see how he could either, but we wait, as if still expecting him to pull something out of a magic hat.
‘We need to find out how they’re tracking us,’ he says, which is true, but impossible.
‘How?’ Clarke pipes up. ‘The patrols are foot-soldiers, nothing more. They probably have as little an idea why they are attacking as we do.’
‘Kole,’ Mark says, his tone a warning. ‘No.’
‘What?’ I look at her, at him, at Kole, but he’s just staring blankly at Mark.
‘We don’t have any other option,’ he says wearily.
‘Kole, you’re going to get yourself killed,’ Mark says, and I can nearly taste the fear in his voice.
Kole stares at the table, but I can see a determined set to his shoulders, like he’s made his final decision. ‘We lost two dozen people last month, and eight tonight. There are less than thirty of us left. This can’t keep happening. We’re not going to survive it. We will all be killed.’
‘What are you talking about?’ I demand, forcing Kole to look at me.
‘It’s something we talked about before,’ he says with a sigh. ‘We dismissed it as too dangerous, but there’s a point—’ he cuts himself off, grinding his teeth in frustration. ‘There’s a point where enough is enough,’ he says with a forced calm. ‘We have to go to the source. We have to infiltrate Oasis and find out how they keep finding us. That’s the only way we’re ever going to be safe. We need to know how they operate, how they track us, and then, how to evade them.’
‘Kole …’ My stomach drops, but immediately I see the sense in it. It’s barely sense, but I don’t see any other way forward.
Everything in Oasis has a system. A set of rules and regulations by which every element of its function runs on. And tracking us, finding us, killing us, that will be no different. But if we could find that information and use it against them, we could be safe. Really, truly safe.
‘You’re asking me for an answer,’ he says, standing from his chair. ‘I’m giving it to you. This is my answer. I’m going back to Oasis, and I’m going to find out how they keep doing this to us, and I’m going to stop them.’
40
We don’t sleep that night.
They stayed in the kitchen for another hour, arguing, saying the same things over and over until they didn’t mean anything. I made eye contact with Jay across the table, the only other person who wasn’t saying anything, and I knew by the look in his eyes he was thinking exactly the same thing I was.
That this is our only option. That this is our best chance.
But after that, there were bodies. Bodies of people I had known. Not all of them well, not all of them like Lacey. But as Jay and Mark and Kole and some of the others dug holes in the ground, I watched from a distance, unable to come closer. They worked for hours, as if it was nothing, but it wasn’t nothing. I could tell by the sweat dripping off them and the strain of their shoulders, but most of all by the glassy look in their eyes.
No one really knows how to bury someone they love. You simply stumble through the motions in the hopes of doing it right, doing them justice, all the while feeling like you’re turning yourself inside out, bleeding yourself dry as you do the one thing in the world that feels totally impossible.
Back in the Outer Sector, people died all the time, and it didn’t matter. Crematorium workers would turn up in white suits to bring the dead bodies away, slinging them into the back of huge trucks as if they were waste, and no one ever saw them again.
But here, it’s different. It does matter. We stand above the open graves with the moon hung low in the sky, and we lower the bodies one by one into the ground. Every one of them looks off, like themselves but not like themselves. Like a mirror reflection. The line of Kole’s mouth is tight, and he doesn’t look anyone in the eye. Kole and Mark lay boards over the graves for now, they will fill them in later. When each grave has received its body, that’s when people start talking about those who died. They talk about who they were, talk about their lives, their memories together.
I feel sick. I feel sick because as I watch thesm stand up and talk about these people they loved, I’m faced with the fact that I care about them, too.
And I let her die.
I stare at the hole in the ground where they’ve just laid her body, and I realise that I could have done something, and she wouldn’t be there. She’d be here beside me, heartbroken and crying, but alive.
I decided that Kole’s life was worth more than hers. I made that decision.
My stomach turns, and I fall backwards a step.
At Lacey’s grave, Kole stands up to say something. Suddenly the world feels like it’s collapsing in on top of me, and I stumble farther and farther away. A few people glance back at me, but most are too consumed in their grief to even notice.
Between one second and the next I’ve turned on my heel and begun running. I don’t stop when I hit the tree line, I just keep going. I continue in the dark, my path illuminated only every now and again as the moon peeks through the trees. I run until I’m out of breath, then I collapse into the dirt.
This is the mess that I’ve made. These are the bodies I leave behind me. Bea’s and now Lacey’s. Their blood is on my hands, no matter how much I wish it wasn’t.
I punch the ground, a scream escaping me as my tears fall onto the soil. But I’m not sad, I’m angry. I want to make a difference. I want to change this, all of it, the world we live in, the way we live, but all I seem to be doing is letting people die.
I return to the house after everyone has gone to bed, and when I step inside the front door, Kole is standing by the table, leaning the tips of his fingers against the tabletop. When I walk into the room he looks up at me, and the exhaustion in his eyes is painful.
‘You need to get some sleep,’ I say.
‘I was just making sure you got back okay,’ he says, running a hand over his face.
‘I’m fine,’ I whisper.
He bites his lip, watching me, but I can see he’s too tired to question me.
‘Go to bed, Kole.’
‘Okay.’
‘I’ll see you in the morning.’
I wake up an hour or two later to the sound of a door closing.
There’s an imprint of a number behind my eyelids.
7425.
I stand up, the sound of blood rushing in my ears as I creep outside and pull open the door to the kitchen.
7425. That’s Bea’s sister’s serial number.
The moonlight is spilling across the kitchen floor, but it immediately recedes as Lauren closes the front door. She looks up at me, her eyes wide as saucers.
‘What are you doing?’ I ask, stepping into the kitchen. ‘Are you okay?’
My eyes immediately jump to the wound on her shoulder, but I can’t see any sign of blood.
‘I needed air,’ she says quietly.
I’m so shocked she’s spoken to me I almost smile, but instead I just nod at her. She nods back and walks towards the door, closing it behind her before she walks back upstairs to bed.
I try to steady my breath once she’s gone, but my dream is still clinging to me. Leaning my back against the wall, I slide down until I’m sitting on the floor, my hands slung around my knees. I’m thinking about Bea and her sister, about how close to her I would be if we broke into Oasis. I could find her, wherever she is, and bring her back with me. Give her a
chance at a better life, out here.
Give her a chance at the life I took from Bea.
But I don’t know where she is. She could be anywhere inside Oasis. But Bea said she could find her using her serial number, so maybe I can too. I know Bea was at the South Dorms, which means her file is somewhere there. If I can find her file, I’ll find her family records, and that will tell me where her sister is stationed.
I stand up from the wall and begin pacing, my mind analysing and planning.
This is the thing that I can do to make up for everything else. I could save a girl’s life. Isn’t this what I wanted, to make a difference?
I can do this. I can find Bea’s sister and bring her here. I can do it. I have to do it.
I owe it to Beatrice. I owe it to Lacey. I owe it to myself.
41
I must have fallen asleep at some point, early in the morning, because when I wake up I can hear Kole arguing with Jay in the kitchen. I get dressed as quickly as I can, but when I leave my room, there’s already a small crowd in the kitchen.
‘I’m not bringing you with me,’ Kole says, pushing past Jay as if he’s trying to ignore everyone at the same time.
‘Well I’m not staying here twiddling my thumbs until you get back,’ Jay says, laying a hand on Kole’s chest to stop him. ‘You don’t get to decide if I go or not.’
‘I have to make decisions for the good of the group, not what’s best for me or you or anyone else. For everyone. I’m going in alone. This is the decision I’ve made.’
‘And I respect that, but this isn’t something you can do alone. Let me go with you.’
‘We need a team,’ I say, pushing by them and pouring myself a cup of water.
Everyone turns to face me at once. Clarke is there, as well as Mark, Walter, Lacey, Jay and several others.
‘You say breaking into Oasis is our only option,’ I say to Kole, to all of them. ‘Well if we’re going in, it had better work and it had better be worth our while.’
Oasis Page 17