“Smart man.”
She lifted the towel to check the cut on her thumb. Blood still seeped from the wound, and she resumed applying firm pressure. “I guess that’s true for you, too. You did the best you could.”
He didn’t respond for a while, and when he did, his voice sounded heavy and distant. “I tried.”
She nodded. I know.
He reached a hand to her shoulder. His touch was soft and hesitant, like he was afraid of scaring her off or overstepping whatever boundaries existed between them. And for an instant, Zira did consider pulling away from him. But she didn’t. Maybe because she’d lost the will to punish him for all the things he’d done in the past, or maybe because she knew how guilty he felt about Aubreigh’s death. She’d carried that same, heavy ache with her every day since she’d seen the execution broadcast, and it was so overwhelming at times like this that she almost couldn’t breathe. Somehow, Jared’s hand on her shoulder made the burden just a little easier to carry. He didn’t just sympathize. He didn’t have to. He understood, because they’d both lost her.
“I keep thinking about her family,” she said. “I know I should reach out to them. She would have wanted to meet them, and they should know what kind of person she was.”
Was. Even a year later, the word still felt like cotton in her mouth.
“It’s okay if you’re not ready,” he said. “And if you’re never ready, that’s okay too. She would have understood.”
Zira reached up to place her hand over his, still resting on her shoulder. The feel of his skin against her fingertips sent a slow but comforting warmth through her entire body. She soaked it in with all his reassurances, but it wasn’t quite enough to convince her she wasn’t a selfish coward for keeping her memories of Aubreigh to herself.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
That night, Jared dreamed he was standing on top of a building looking out over lively city streets under a clear afternoon sky. Brightly-colored flowers bloomed in big, round planters that lined the sidewalks. Pedestrians called out cheerful greetings to each other as they passed by, carrying bags of groceries that were nearly full to bursting. Children got on school busses that drove over smooth asphalt and past newly renovated buildings. A feeling of easy contentment swelled in his chest as he watched them.
Then he smelled the smoke. He turned around to see that fire had spread across the entire roof. He turned back, thinking he might be able to jump down to escape, but now he was surrounded by the flames.
Black, billowing clouds choked out the blue sky, and his hands were chained above his head. He was back in his cell in the compound. Ryku injected something into his neck, and his skin started to burn with the heat of an erupting volcano. He opened his mouth to scream, but instead of a scream, he let out some inhuman, electronic sound, and woke up.
He blinked and rubbed his eyes as he sat up in bed. The fire alarm blared through the entire house, and the dry, oppressive scent of burning hung thick in the air.
Out. He had to get out. He grabbed a pair of shorts from the end of the bed and slipped them over his boxers but didn’t bother with a shirt.
The windows in his room weren’t wide enough for an average-sized adult to fit through, much less someone of his stature. He moved to the door and put the back of his hand on the knob. It didn’t feel excessively warm. He twisted it slowly and, when he didn’t see flames immediately outside his room, ventured into the hallway.
Orange light and harsh shadows danced violently across every surface. Across the hall, Tripp’s door was open to reveal that the room was empty and untouched by the fire. Jared turned to Zira’s room. A wall of flames expanded towards him. They lapped up the walls and had all but consumed the curtains. Some even fluttered across the ceiling.
Against all his better judgment, he took a step towards the fire. Her door was open, but he couldn’t quite see inside. If she hadn’t made it out in time….
He took a few more steps. The heat made him squint, but now he could see that her bed was empty, and the window on the far side of the room had been flung open.
Quickly, he threw himself onto his hands and knees and began crawling down the hall in the opposite direction. The muscles in his back and sides tensed as he coughed. He made it to the stairs but couldn’t even see the bottom steps through the fire as it spread upwards, devouring the carpet as it went.
How long had he been in here now? It felt like hours, and he almost expected to hear Ryku’s voice at any moment, berating him for betraying the Project and asking him questions he couldn’t answer.
He coughed again and fought back the urge to cry out. This was not the same thing. This wasn’t a hallucination like the fires he’d seen in his cell. That made it even more dangerous, but it also meant he could escape. He was not a prisoner. He could get out.
Focus.
He stood, climbed over the railing, looked down. Found clear space on the floor below. Jumped. Felt something cool against his bare back.
Behind him, there was a clear path to the open back door. He ran, coughing the entire way, and finally escaped the heat and the fire and the nightmares that had crept into his reality.
Once he was far enough away from the house, he allowed himself to fall forward into the grass. His body kept insisting he needed to cough while he tried to stop long enough to gulp in breaths of fresh air. His eyes burned and watered so much he could barely make out the face of the person who reached a gloved hand towards him and helped him to his feet.
“Come on,” said the firefighter. “Let’s get you to the ambulance with the others.”
Ambulance? Had someone been hurt? He tried to get the question out, but his body refused to cooperate. All he could do was cough.
“Don’t try to talk. Let’s just get you some oxygen.”
They walked around to the front of the house, where the orange glow from the fire melted into the red and blue flashing lights of emergency response vehicles. Two armored bots worked with half a dozen firefighters to extinguish the flames. On the street beyond them sat a police car, two ambulances, and two fire trucks.
Jared looked for familiar faces near the ambulances as they approached. He caught sight of two individuals with short-cropped blond hair sitting with their legs dangling out of the back of one of the vehicles. Tripp and Nova. They both looked up at him.
“Took you long enough to get out there,” Tripp said with a grin.
The fireman walked him past the first ambulance to the second one parked just behind it. Someone was climbing out the back end barefooted, one leg pale-skinned and the other black and synthetic. Zira. Her voice sounded a little wheezy as she attempted to give orders to a flustered paramedic. “Just move.”
“You need to stay still,” said the paramedic as she reached an arm out to hold Zira back.
Zira dropped her oxygen mask and ducked under the woman’s arm. Relief washed over her features when her eyes found Jared’s. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I—” He broke into another fit of coughing and had to flash her a thumbs-up to finish the rest of his sentence. She didn’t seem convinced.
The paramedic hurried over and began examining him.
“Found him in the back,” the firefighter reported. “He probably inhaled a lot of smoke.”
The paramedic nodded. “We’ll get him some O2 and do a full workup at the hospital. Is that everyone from inside?”
“Yes,” Zira said.
“Let’s go then.”
* * *
Several hours later, after hospital staff had run a variety of tests and procedures on all of them, they were gathered together in one of the rooms in the emergency department waiting to be discharged. Tripp had called Alma to let her know what had happened, and she now stood outside the room talking on what must have been at least her tenth call of the night. While Jared, Zira, Tripp, and Nova were being examined, she’d been communicating with the fire department and police still at the house. They’d managed to put out the fire, but
there wasn’t much left to go back to. Alma had insisted they all stay at her place until other arrangements could be made. She’d also strictly forbidden any of them from coming in to work that day, for which Jared was grateful. It was nearly five o’clock in the morning, and he’d only gotten a couple hours of sleep before the fire had started.
How it had started was the current topic of debate. They’d been going back and forth about it ever since they ended up in the same room together.
“Are you sure you didn’t just leave the stove on or something?” Tripp asked Zira for at least the fourth time. “We’d all understand if you did. It’s not like the Project taught you basic kitchen safety in assassin school.”
She threw a pillow at him, which he dodged. It went flying past his head and nearly knocked over a container of cotton balls on the counter. A nurse walking past outside the room rapped on their window and gave them all a disapproving scowl.
“You’re going to get us kicked out,” Tripp said.
Zira rolled her eyes. “I didn’t leave the stove on. If the fire had started in the kitchen, Jared wouldn’t have been able to get out through the back door.”
“Because you’re such an expert on fires? If I was the one who’d left the stove on, that’s exactly the sort of thing I would say, too.”
Nova observed without comment but smiled at their teasing. Jared just shook his head. He had no idea how they could both be so sanguine about the whole situation. They could have died, and they’d just lost almost everything they owned. Not that any of them had owned much to begin with, but it still wasn’t the sort of event most people joked about immediately afterward.
Maybe he was just overreacting. They were both used to living without, running from place to place with only the clothes on their back and whatever they carried in their packs. Jared himself had become somewhat accustomed to that transient lifestyle during the months he’d spent as a fugitive. He hadn’t been particularly attached to anything the flames had consumed, but he still couldn’t shake the unease that prickled at the back of his neck.
He was sure Zira had turned the stove off when they’d both finished making dinner last night. He knew because he remembered turning around to shut it off himself and finding it already done. Which meant something else had caused the fire.
Tripp and Zira continued their banter for a few more seconds before Alma came back into the room. Her face was grim, and they all fell silent as she looked around at each of them.
“That was one of my friends in the department,” she said. “They haven’t opened a formal investigation yet, and it wasn’t his place to tell me any of this, but he did because he thought it might be a safety concern for all of you.”
Jared glanced over at Zira, then at Tripp. A solemn expression had replaced the teasing spark in the man’s eyes, and he sat up a little straighter on edge of the hospital bed with his hands clasped together tight. He knew what was coming just as well as Jared did.
“Someone set that fire on purpose,” said Alma. “They found an empty gas can outside, and the neighbor who called the fire department reported seeing something thrown through one of the upstairs windows. They didn’t get a look at the person who did it, but they seemed to think it might have been a Molotov cocktail or something similar.”
“Ryku,” Tripp growled.
“That’s a possibility.”
“Who else would it have been?” he snapped back. “Our faces have been all over the news this past week. Maybe not mine so much, but these two.” He gestured to Jared and Zira. “It wouldn’t have taken much effort for one of his people to figure out exactly where we were.”
“I don’t think this was Ryku,” Jared said.
Tripp shot him a hot glare, but beneath it, there was only panic. “Of course it was Ryku.”
“No,” Jared insisted, feeling more sure of himself now. “It wasn’t. He’s known Zira’s been working with the Republic since the day you both went to the prison. I don’t think he cares—not enough to do something about it. If any of us died, suspicion would immediately fall on him. They’d start watching him more carefully. His freedom would be restricted even more than it is already. He doesn’t want that.”
“He wants us dead. You should know, since you were one of the bloodhounds he sent after me.”
“Tripp!” Zira hissed.
Jared didn’t take the insult personally. Tripp was just scared, and considering everything he’d been through, he had every right to be. “No, he’s right. But because of that, I know how Ryku thinks. And this wasn’t him. It was a stupid plan. Whoever it was didn’t even bother to disable the alarm, and there was no guarantee that we’d die in the fire. He might want us dead and he might even be thinking of ways to kill us, but he wouldn’t do it like this.”
Zira leaned forward and looked Tripp in the eye. “Jared’s right. If Ryku was really going to kill us, he’d be smarter about it.”
Tripp shook his head. His eyes were still wide and wild. “You don’t get it. It doesn’t matter whether he planned and ordered it himself. Someone tried to kill us tonight, and they did that because of him. Maybe it was someone from the True PRM who wanted to get on his good side. Maybe it was someone angry about the fact that their brother’s rotting in prison for something they did during Ryku’s reign while you two are free. Who really knows? But that fire was Ryku, even if he didn’t stamp his name on it.”
No one said anything for a few moments. Zira wore a stony expression, and Nova gnawed on her bottom lip as she glanced between everyone in the room. Jared tried to think of something to say that might help Tripp calm down, but even in his head, all his words rang hollow.
Alma walked over to sit down in the chair next to Tripp’s. She put a hand on his shoulder. “You’re safe. And I’m going to make sure it stays that way.”
He shrugged her hand off and stood up. “You can’t. As long as he has even tiniest scrap of influence, there are always going to be people out there willing to kill for him, whether they’ve been asked to or not. You should have executed him. I told you.” He turned around and headed for the door.
“Tripp, wait,” said Alma. She started to stand, but Zira reached for her arm to stop her.
“I’m going to look for the nurse and see if we can get out of here already,” Tripp muttered. “I hate hospitals.”
He yanked the door open and walked out before anyone else could respond.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
It took another hour for hospital staff to discharge all of them, and an additional twenty minutes for them to drive to Alma’s house. By that time, exhaustion was beginning to creep into Zira’s body, but with the morning sun rising, her mind didn’t seem to want to shut off yet. She kept running through everything Tripp had said, trying to figure out some way to make him feel safe. She and Alma had tried to talk to him when he’d returned to their room at the hospital, but neither of them had managed to get much out of him. As soon as they’d gotten into the car, he’d fallen asleep, or pretended to.
When they arrived at the house, Alma unlocked her front door and ushered them all inside. “I put clean sheets on all the beds before I left,” she said. “Tripp and Jared, you can have Javier’s old room straight down the hall. Zira and Nova, you can take mine.”
“Oh, you don’t have to do that,” Nova said quickly.
“I sleep on the couch most nights anyway. Please, take it.”
“Okay. Um…thanks.”
Alma clapped her hands together. “I’m starving. Does anyone else want breakfast?”
“I’ll take some,” Zira replied.
Tripp shook his head. “I think I’ll just go to bed.”
“Me too,” said Nova.
Alma looked at Jared. “Breakfast?”
“Sure.”
Nova and Tripp headed to their rooms while Zira and Jared followed Alma into the kitchen. She opened cupboards and drawers and pulled out pans, utensils, and ingredients, then set to work on the meal with practice
d speed and efficiency. Jared offered to help at one point, but Alma just waved him back to sit in the living room with Zira and kept working. She didn’t have a dining room table, and judging by the empty plates and cups stacked on the small coffee table in front of the couch, she ate most of her meals there.
A few minutes later, she brought each of them a plate of steaming scrambled eggs mixed with peppers, tomatoes, onions, and some kind of red-tinted sausage. She sat down on the other end of the couch and doused her own eggs with red sauce from a glass bottle, then passed it to Jared.
Zira passed on the hot sauce, but nodded her appreciation to Alma as she tasted the eggs. They were delicious. “Thank you for this.”
“Thanks,” Jared echoed.
“De nada. It’s nice to cook for someone besides myself once in a while.” She switched on the hologram projector on the wall. “We should see if your fire made the news.”
“I hope not,” Zira said. “I’ve had about enough of seeing my face on the news.”
She was relieved when she turned her eyes to the morning’s story and saw no sign of fire or the burned remains of their house, but relief became dismay when she read the text overlaying the bottom portion of the footage. Angela Yang admits responsibility for missing weapons believed to be in PRM possession.
When discussing the issue with Alma, Yang had suggested that informing the public about the unaccounted-for munitions was likely to stir up a panic, and based on the angry crowd the news footage showed, she’d been right about that. So she wouldn’t have told them herself. The information must have leaked some other way. In the end, it didn’t really matter how it had gotten out. People were angry and scared, and Zira couldn’t blame them for that.
A deep crease formed between Alma’s eyebrows as she watched the footage. “Another day, another crisis.”
On the broadcast, a news reporter stood in front of a crowd of protestors marching through the street behind him. Zira tried to read their signs as they passed in front of the camera. One bore the words, “Bring back true PEACE.” Another read, “Stop lying to us.” The broadcast cut to another location, where a group of protestors gathered around the Republic’s flag and set it on fire.
Survivors of PEACE Page 17