“Mark would be the best option,” he told me with a nod. “He’s an ace shot. He could make it quick and painless.”
“I don’t want you to ask Mark,” I repeated. “He’s barely holding on as it is. This will put pressure on him and he doesn’t need that right now.”
“He wouldn’t mind killing me,” Mykail said darkly.
“But I would mind if he killed you, and he knows that.”
“Have you told him that you want to turn yourself over to Dana?”
“Of course not.” I shook my head. “I don’t plan to, either.”
“You don’t think that will hurt him?” Mykail hissed. “You disappearing? He’ll know what happened. He loves you. He wants to keep you safe.”
“I want him to be over the border before I go to Dana.”
“So he can wait for you to never show up?”
I sighed heavily, looking at our linked hands.
“I don’t know what else to do…”
We sat in silence, caught in the turbulent storm that surrounded us, looking at one another with fear in our eyes.
* *** *
The no-longer revolutionaries were packing things to take with them. While the first group was getting ready to start the trek through the country, the rest of us were carefully moving certain essential supplies to the same area where the van was hidden. I helped Clark and Tori move tents, ration boxes, and weapons to the van as well as some surrounding holes Griffin and Cody had dug and covered for us to store supplies.
Everyone moved with somber faces and slumped shoulders. We had been beaten by cheap tricks and we felt that we had fought and sacrificed for nothing.
Mark was interacting with everyone more, but he also had the defeated look on his face.
On the third day, we sent the first five people out of the fort to start their journey to the Republic of Mexico. We were sending the regular humans first with one experiment to protect them if they ran into any trouble. This did lead to a problem of some groups being left without an experiment, but we carefully selected each group based on strengths and weaknesses of the members.
Mark insisted that Eun was in the first group. I had no problem accepting that, knowing that Mark wanted his little sister as safe as possible, particularly after what happened to Josh. Because of that, Rin was assigned to go with the first group.
It was sad to say goodbye to Rin, knowing I was going to turn myself over to Dana without her knowing. I hugged and thanked her all the same, telling her I would see her in a few months when I made the trip as well.
The lie almost stuck in my throat, but I managed to force it out.
And they started their journey.
One day later, as we were in the store room discussing what else we should take and what could fit in the holes we had dug, Mark jumped, startled, looking at his wrist.
“Mark?” Tori hissed.
The leader of the Eight Group ran out of the room, the rest of us following. Other members of the Eight Group were also darting into the main bunker, not sure what the cause for alert was, though all of their wrist cuffs were buzzing, warning of danger.
When I counted all sixteen remaining members of the Eight Group in the bunker, I began to get nervous, wondering who had set off the warning.
Rin was the only one who could have.
Mark, seeing the same thing I did, motioned several of the others to move in different directions, giving silent orders before quickly ascending the iron stairs to the spiral staircase that led to the Makay Power Plant.
He disappeared into the shadows and we heard a distant clang as he opened the door to examine what was going on outside.
“Gather everyone…” Griffin hissed.
Tori and I disappeared into the various rooms of the fort, trying to calmly tell everyone that we were gathering in the main bunker. With the recent events, it was impossible for them not to be worried. They moved hastily, looking at one another with silent questions, though no one asked out loud what was happening.
“We should get ready to evacuate,” Clark whispered. My stomach flipped over as I thought about what that meant.
Mark reappeared on the balcony. He lifted his right thumb and motioned it across his neck.
We had been found.
There was a dull roar of panic as people darted to grab their bags, which had been packed the same day that Chris had attacked Central, just in case we were raided. I ran into the bunk rooms with everyone else and grabbed my bag from under my bed.
Darting into the bunker again, I saw Griffin with Mark and Tori at the base of the spiral stairs, pulling on the bent and warped structure, causing the metal to groan and strain. Finally, the bolts at the top gave way and the spiral staircase fell to its side, a third of it hanging over the edge of the platform. All three of them quickly made their way down from the balcony and destroyed the next staircase, too, in an attempt to slow down the Commission.
I looked at those scattering to their particular exits. We had chosen six of the passageways to act as our escape routes, since they led to obscure areas where we were less likely to be spotted. However, we now had to crowd into five of those exits, since the one into the factory was no longer viable.
There were several people in the fort that I saw without their bags, standing in wait of the raid, having given up entirely.
Clark grabbed my arm sharply and pulled.
“Come on!”
“What about them?!” I snapped, pointing at the people who were waiting quietly for defeat.
“There’s nothing we can do!”
I wanted to protest, but before I could turn around, Mykail had grabbed my other hand and was pulling me away.
I forced my feet to move, only having the chance to glance back once into the main bunker before I was pulled to one of the lesser-used tunnels that would lead us into the foothills.
The hustle through the passageway was crowded and panicked, and many people were frantic as they tried to move faster only to be stuck behind more people. There was only a small group of people behind us, terrified at being picked off from the back, trying to push forward.
My legs were shaking from adrenaline and fear as we started up the sloped tunnel toward the exit. I tried not to look back, listening to the frantic urges in front of me as people told each other to hurry. I did not hear any shouts in the tunnel behind us to suggest that we were being followed by those raiding the fort, but there was no way we could take chances. We had to keep moving.
Ivo threw open the door leading outside when he topped the small ladder. While I was in the back of the group, I immediately saw the water pour into the tunnel from the torrential downpour outside.
We braved the weather and climbed the slippery ladder into the thunderstorm. Ivo helped everyone out as we crawled in the mud, struggling to get to our feet in the soaked field. Everyone followed the procedure we had practiced only twice before, running into the tree line and splitting up just enough to be able to see the person to the right and to the left.
Mykail got out of the fort and Ivo turned to him, nodding once as Mykail said something I could not hear over the wind. I followed Mykail, and as I pulled myself to my feet, fighting against the stinging rain pelting my face and hands and the wind threatening to push me over, Mykail spread his wings and let the gusts carry him upward.
“Where is he going?!” I yelled at Ivo.
“He’s going to see if anyone is nearby!” Ivo answered, helping Clark off the ladder. “Go! Lily! Get into the trees!”
Pushing aside my worry, I did as I was told, moving through the muddy field into the thin tree line, trying to blink away the drops of rain that fell into my eyes. The wind sent my teeth chattering as I tried to keep my muscles moving.
The spot it had taken us ten minutes to get to during our practice evacuations took everyone thirty minutes to get to from our group alone. I found myself shivering against the rocks as we tried to crowd around the bases of trees and the crevices of the hill’
s rock face to escape the rain.
My clothes were soaked and the canvas bag I was carrying was soaked on the outside. I was not worried about the contents, however, since the bag was lined with rubber. I looked at the terrified and cold faces of the others who had escaped with me. We could only wait until the others showed up and the rain stopped.
After ten minutes of turning my back to the wind and trying to cram myself closer to the rocks, someone pointed upward and shouted that Mykail was back. Mykail was slowly descending into the trees, also soaking wet. He finally landed at a safe distance from everyone and searched for me and Clark.
When he saw us, he quickly moved over and spread his wing over our heads to block the rain, his other wing being used as a brace against the howling wind.
“There are no Commission people coming this direction,” he informed us.
“What about the other groups?”
“Griffin’s and Mark’s groups are making their way here now. They should be here soon. Tori had a small group of Commission vans grab some of the people, but a majority of them got away.”
“What about Cody?” I pressed.
Mykail lowered his head and sighed.
“When I flew over to their exit…they were being carried away in the vans…”
“All of them?” I hissed, my eyes wide.
“I didn’t see anyone along their path.”
My chest ached at the thought.
The storm was still raging when the other three groups met up with us. Everyone was shivering, teeth chattering in the cold, but with the wind and the rain, it was impossible to light fires. Yi Lin, Hiroki, and Minsoo risked going to one of the places we had stored supplies and getting a few tents. Everyone pulled out their emergency blankets and wrapped themselves up, covering their heads and huddling together to combat the chill. Clark and I were huddled close together with our blankets. Mykail held his wing over us until he got tired. He then joined us under another crinkling emergency blanket, shivering and cringing in pain.
The rain did not let up as night fell. A few tents had been set up from what the three members of the Eight Group had brought back. They stated that they would get more the following day when the rain let up. Until then, as many people as possible crammed into the shelter of tents.
Uneasily, I fell asleep against the rocks with the musky air under the emergency blanket pulling me into uncomfortable sleep.
Chapter Seventy
When I woke, the sun was just peeking out behind the horizon, the departing clouds looking grey, silhouetted against the light, slowly being chased away as dawn grew brighter.
I glanced around the various huddled masses in the woods and against the rocks, trying to spot familiar faces to determine who was gone. Cody and his siblings had been taken into the Commission, but there were several other faces I did not see. I extracted myself from the blankets between Mykail and Clark, trying my best not to wake them as I stepped into the still-soft dirt, walking around the trees to count heads.
From one tent, Tori stepped out, holding some canteens.
“Lily,” she blinked. “I thought you would sleep more…”
I did not respond, looking around the camp.
“How many did we lose?” I whispered. She sighed and stepped closer, her eyes sad.
“The final count we got was seventy-six people,” she said quietly. “Griffin, Mark, and a few others from the Eight Group went out to look for any that might have gotten lost on the path. They’re also going to bring some supplies.”
Seventy-six people…
That meant we had lost sixty-six in the raid.
I looked at the ground and nodded slowly. Tori put a comforting hand on my shoulder and I sighed, swallowing hard and looking at her.
“…what do we do now?”
She pursed her lips and shook her head. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “They drove us north…so we have to find another place to send the groups south while keeping the Commission and the military off our backs.”
“I don’t know if it’s possible to send groups anymore,” I said. “I was thinking about the signal we got from the bands of the Eight Group. If Rin made it all the way to where she was supposed to go, the signal would have been out of range. I’m pretty sure they were caught…”
Tori sighed heavily and nodded.
“I’ve been thinking that, as well,” she agreed. “But don’t say anything to Mark, okay? He’s worried enough.”
“I won’t.”
I looked among the sleeping groups, my thoughts jumbled and frightened. We were out in the open and the Commission was after us. There was no way that we could travel as a group to the safe houses. Any large movement would be seen and we would be attacked.
When the people had supported us, even if they were not with us physically, I did not feel such an overwhelming feeling of helplessness when I looked at the odds of our success. Now, it seemed that it would be impossible for us to get out of this alive.
“Lily?” Tori asked, calling my attention. “What are you thinking about?”
I shook my head and forced a smile.
“Nothing, just…trying to think of the best move from here.”
Mykail was the only one who knew of my idea to turn myself over to Dana. Now that we had been chased out of the fort, it seemed like that time was even closer than I anticipated. As I was thinking over my plan, I began to wonder what exactly would happen to me when I was in Dana’s grasp. He had told me that he wanted to train me, that I wasn’t going to be a slave. I had thought many times that that meant I would be an experiment, or part of the Machine of Neutralization project, but there was no telling what Dana wanted with me.
Since he had sent Mykail to seduce me, I wondered if he was at all interested in having sex with me, or if sex was just a tool he used to control people. I had been afraid of my attraction to Dana when I was in the Commission, something he knew and commented on before. Now that he seemed so far away, looming in the shadows, waiting to crush us, the attraction was nonexistent, merely a distant memory of a time that felt like a nightmare.
My reality also felt like a nightmare. There was a dark cloud hanging over me, fogging my thoughts with the fear that we were going to lose and everyone I knew and loved from this idealistic revolution would be taken into the Commission or killed because I thought I could overthrow the most powerful man in the world.
Dana said that the game was over when he said.
I was choosing to take the first opportunity I could to surrender myself to him in the naïve hope that he would let the others live.
“Lily,” Tori said, grabbing my attention again. “There are a few things we need to be very careful of…”
“I would say more than a few things.”
“We need to leave here. If we get discovered, we are cornered against these rocks. We need to find a better place we can defend while we think of another plan.” She cleared her throat and looked at the faces of the people we had once rescued from the grip of the Commission only to put them right back in its palm. “And there is a big chance that we will start having deserters…”
I looked at everyone, huddled under emergency blankets, their unconscious expressions mirroring their fears and concerns about the day to follow. Everywhere I turned, people were troubled, even in their dreams.
“Maybe we should just let them go…” I whispered. Tori blinked at me, shocked.
“What are you talking about?”
“The bigger the group, the slower we are, the more strain on our resources, and the more likely we are to get caught,” I told her seriously. “If they think they can make it alone, then we should let them go.”
“Lily…these are people we’re responsible for…”
“And look at where we’ve gotten them.”
I walked away, deciding to climb the rocks and look over the surrounding area to see where we could stay that would allow us to see if the Commission or the military were coming after us.
> It was good for me to hike up the hill, carefully making my way over the jagged, slippery rocks and getting to a higher point, where I could see more of the area. The physical activity allowed me to clear my head and think of nothing other than where I was going to step next.
Unfortunately, the hill was mostly rock, which would not make it suitable, even if we could see what was coming our way. We would also be completely exposed on the hill. I glanced to the west and saw the tree line continue, heading further away from the bright lights of Central.
Maybe we could move in a wide sweep around the city and end up at the southern safe houses. I knew we could not go to the east, since that was where the national parks were and also tended to be where we got into trouble.
It took me an hour to make my way back down the side of the hill, the descent being far trickier. When I made it back to the camp, the group that had gone to search for our lost people had returned.
“We couldn’t find anyone,” Griffin shook his head when I asked him how the search had gone. “We also went searching for someplace to set up a type of camp, but we’re going to have to look west. There’s nothing safe in the east.”
“We’ll send some scouting parties and move as soon as possible,” I decided.
“We can’t bring the van up here,” Hiroki shook his head. “The roads are mud. It’ll get stuck.”
“We’ll bring it as close to our new camp as possible and trek the supplies from there,” Clark said, having woken up while I was on my hike. “But we should move soon.”
Tori turned to Mark. “I think the Eight Group is the best qualified to lead the scouting parties.”
Mark nodded once and motioned for the Eight Group to gather around as he started ordering them. Tori turned to the experiments and strong men and women who were awake, asking them individually if they wanted to be part of scouting groups. Many were interested, supporting the idea of moving around rather than sitting and waiting to figure out what we would do next.
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