by Ellery Kane
“What are you doing?” I asked.
Quin didn’t answer, but began moving aside some of the broken pieces of stone. The sky was almost dark now, concealing him in shadow. I saw him slip something into his jacket, then pick up another smaller object before standing to face me.
“You said that you couldn’t figure me out. That’s because you don’t know anything about me.” Quin took a step toward me, his hand extended. “This is something about me.” He handed me a book of poetry. It was so well-worn that its cover was soft.
“It was my mother’s,” he said. “Just like your book. This is the only part of her I have left. Before I joined the Guardians, I used to come up here a lot to escape from the world. Right after I went AWOL, I hid the book here. I figured it would be safer.”
I knew Quin had hidden something else here—something he had concealed in his jacket. But I bit my tongue, holding my question until the time felt right.
Just like my book, Quin’s book had a dog-eared page. I flipped to it: Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken.”
“Was this her favorite?” I asked.
Quin smiled. “No, it’s mine.”
“I never figured you for a poet,” I joked.
Quin laughed, but only for a moment. Then his face became serious. “There’s a lot you don’t know about me, Lex. I’m sorry that I haven’t … that I couldn’t … that I can’t … be more … open with you.” His face looked defeated as he stumbled over his words.
I shrugged, giving him a sympathetic smile. “You’re trying, Quin. That counts for something.”
He gave a half-hearted nod. I handed back his mother’s book, and he pocketed it inside his jacket.
“Have you ever taken Emovere?” he asked.
“Never,” I answered. I was surprised by the directness of his question. “What’s it like?”
He sighed. “At first, it’s exhilarating, freeing. You feel like nothing can stop you, like something heavy was lifted from your shoulders, and you can stand up tall again.”
Quin paused, choosing his words carefully, “With everything that had happened to me, it was a welcome relief. But after a while, you just feel numb, even after you stop taking it. The worst part is that it starts to feel good to be numb.”
I was surprised by his description. Even though my mother’s research had shown that Emovere could be addictive, no published studies had found any lasting effects once the drug was discontinued. I wondered if the pharmaceutical companies were experimenting with the drug’s composition. I made a mental note to ask Carrie later.
“That’s not supposed to happen,” I said.
“I know,” Quin conceded. “When I was recruited by the Guardians, they assured me I could stop at any time, that there would be no side effects. But there’s a reason no one else has left the Guardian Force. No one wants to stop taking Emovere.”
“Do you know why you were recruited by the Guardians?” I had to know if Quin shared my hypothesis that the Guardians selected vulnerable candidates, young people who had suffered trauma.
“I have a pretty good idea,” Quin answered cryptically. The tone of his voice was final, like the shutting of a door, and I knew that the subject was closed.
“It’s taken me a long time to want to feel again,” he said. “That’s part of the reason why I’m so …” He searched for the right word.
“Difficult?” I smiled at him, remembering the night that we met.
“I thought you were supposed to come up with a better word,” he teased.
Laughing, I turned back toward the city, placing my hands on the concrete railing. By now, the sun had fallen almost completely below the horizon. “How about complicated?” I offered.
As I spoke, I could feel Quin approaching from behind. He came close and then closer, standing directly behind me, but not touching me. The warmth of his body radiated in the space between us. I had a flash of my first kiss, my only kiss. I closed my eyes and stood very still, hoping that if I didn’t move, Quin wouldn’t either. One thousand one, one thousand two, one thousand three, and he was gone. The cold air rushed in behind me.
“Lex, we have to go.”
“I know,” I said, recalling Augustus’ verbal lashing after our last venture beyond headquarters. We began to walk toward the staircase.
“Hey,” I said, “what else did you put in your jacket?”
Quin chuckled. “You’re pretty hard to keep secrets from, you know.”
I raised my eyebrows at him with expectation.
“It’s something else about me,” he offered. “But I’m not ready to show you yet. One step at a time, okay?”
Just before we began our descent, I watched in alarm as across the city in small, random pockets, lights began to flicker.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
A BOY’S WEAKNESS
FOR THE SECOND TIME THAT week, Quin and I ran side by side, this time with urgency. Unlike before, I had no trouble matching his pace. Adrenaline was coursing through me, my legs fueled by panic. No matter how fast we ran, I knew the damage was already done. Once the power was restored, the silent alarm from the emergency exit door would have sent an alert straight to Augustus. He would be waiting for us.
As we turned the final corner toward headquarters, a voice stopped my heart. Twenty feet behind us stood a man, a Guardian. For a moment, I couldn’t feel my body. It seemed like my head had detached itself and was floating away.
“You’re under arrest by order of the Guardian Force.” The man’s voice sounded as flat as a cracker, but his lips were turned in an unnatural smile. Immediately, I wondered what combination of Emovere, Agitor, and Substance X had created his eerie mismatch of emotion.
The man continued walking methodically toward us, his gun raised and ready to fire. I glanced at Quin. His face was the same as the night we had met, tight and hardened. Just as the man was within an arm’s length, Quin turned suddenly, grabbed and twisted the man’s hand, and struck him in the face. The gun clunked down the sidewalk, and I ran to retrieve it.
When I turned back, Quin had pinned the man to the ground with his knee and was pointing his own weapon at the man’s head. Though he struggled, the man had no expression. He wasn’t fearless, which might imply that he was brave. Nor proud, which might imply that he was a martyr. Nor apathetic, which might imply that he harbored a death wish. He was simply a blank slate. I tried to remember the face of the man stepping from the ledge during my mother’s clinical trial. Had he been so expressionless?
Quin looked me, his eyes pained. “Run, Lex,” he said, in a quiet voice that was more suggestion than command.
I didn’t run, and I didn’t turn away. I readied myself for the gunshot that never came.
Instead, Quin hit the man across the face with the end of his weapon, rendering him unconscious. He stood and walked to me. “I can’t shoot him,” he confessed. He sounded surprised, as if he was observing some other, unexpected version of himself.
“It’s okay,” I reassured him.
“Is it, Ms. Knightley?” From behind us, another voice, this one familiar.
Augustus didn’t wait for my response. Without hesitating, he approached the Guardian and shot him, once, twice, three times. After the first shot, the man’s body contorted, and I turned away, flinching with each successive explosion. When I finally looked at Augustus, he appeared satisfied, but bored, as if he had completed some mundane activity, like drinking his morning coffee.
“I hope it was worth it, Ms. Knightley.” Augustus addressed only me, as if Quin was invisible. I knew his indifference would hurt Quin more than even his harshest words.
Augustus turned and pointed with intention back toward headquarters. We both began walking. He continued speaking, still addressing me alone. “Do you know how long it’s been since I’ve been forced to shoot someone? Is this the sort of thing you bring out in others, Ms. Knightley?”
We entered through the emergency door. Two armed members of the Resistance
stood inside, while a third exited. I assumed he was tasked with managing the body.
“Since your arrival here, you have compromised the security of this compound on multiple occasions. You have taken advantage of a boy’s weakness.” He glanced at Quin, waiting to see the stinging bite of his words as they made impact.
Quin looked pale. I was surprised when he spoke. “It’s not her fault, Augustus. I asked her to leave with me. It was my decision. Besides, no one forced you to kill him.”
Augustus pretended that Quin was on mute, but I felt a small surge of elation—Quin had finally stood up to Augustus, if only for a moment.
Augustus turned to the armed men. “Please escort Ms. Knightley back to her sleeping quarters.”
I began walking down the long corridor, one man on either side of me. When we reached the door, I turned back to look at Quin before they shuffled me away. Augustus was facing him, speaking quietly. I couldn’t hear him, but I didn’t need to. Whatever he was saying had been carefully honed to a point, cold and sharp as a blade, each word a knife strike to Quin’s heart.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
WORST THING
IN THE THREE DAYS THAT followed, most of the Resistance began to subtly avoid me. I wasn’t sure what Augustus had told them, but the day after the blackout, there had been a meeting in the Map Room. I wasn’t invited. I was certain Augustus had used me as a distraction, a way to refocus the Resistance and quell their dissidence. I spent most of my time with Elana and Max, who thankfully ignored whatever lies Augustus had manufactured. I was concerned their loyalty might place their positions in jeopardy. But they reassured me that, in time, Augustus would forgive me as would everyone else.
Forgive—that word burned like acid in my throat. Though Augustus’ opinion was as useless to me as a single shoe, I had already learned the most important principle of my new home: So goes Augustus, so goes the Resistance.
Quin was avoiding me too, sort of. The day after Coit Tower, Max told me that Augustus had warned Quin about seeing me alone again. Augustus believed that Quin was changing and not for the better. I wondered what Quin believed. When we were in a room together, I often caught him looking at me. His gaze intense, but warm. He instantly pretended to be doing something else, avoiding my eyes. Max and Elana noticed too.
The three of us sat together in the dining hall. Quin several tables away, alone.
“Is it me or is Quin totally checking you out right now?” Max teased.
I blushed. As I slowly turned my head to look, Quin quickly got up from the table and left the room. Max and Elana laughed loudly.
“I’m glad you both find this so funny,” I said sarcastically, smiling at them.
“It’s just that Quin doesn’t act this way … ever,” Elana observed. I wondered if she was remembering her moment with sixteen-year-old Quin.
As she spoke, Markus walked up from behind her. His leg was wrapped in a thick bandage, still healing from his encounter with the Guardian Force.
“Hi, Elana,” he said, glancing over his shoulder and winking at her. Just as she had that first day I met her, Elana tensed. She was as still and watchful as a small animal in the woods anticipating the first sign of danger.
“Hi, Markus,” she said, not looking at him.
After Markus passed by, taking a seat at another table, Max spoke, “He’s not going to bite you, Elana. At least, not yet.” Chuckling to himself, he nudged her in the side with his elbow, and she playfully nudged him back, her uneasiness gone.
After lunch that afternoon, Elana asked if we could speak alone. We returned to my room.
“Has Quin told you about himself yet?” Elana asked.
“Partly,” I said, unsure if that was even true. “A small part.”
“Well, that’s more than he shares with most. It’s one of the things that Quin and I have in common. We hide our true selves, even from the people who care about us. That’s actually why I wanted to talk to you.”
“Okay,” I said. I was deeply curious. In some ways, Elana was more guarded than Quin, relying on her outer beauty as a convenient and glittering diversion.
“I have a theory,” she explained. “The Guardians chose me for a reason. The same reason they chose Max and Quin and all the others.”
I nodded, and Elana continued.
“When I was a little girl, I was a free spirit. I was always dancing or skipping or hopping, never walking anywhere. I loved horses. I rode every day.” Elana spoke slowly, as if she was sifting through stacks of old memories. “I was seven when my grandfather started touching me. At first, he told me it was a game. I loved games. While my grandmother was picking tomatoes, he told me to find him, and I did. He was in the bedroom. Afterward, he cried and told me I was so beautiful, the most beautiful little girl he’d ever seen. I thought that was the worst thing that could ever happen to me. Like everybody gets a worst thing, you know, and that was mine.”
Elana paused to look at me as if she was afraid of my reaction. I sensed she had told this story before, maybe more than once, to someone who didn’t understand. Her eyes were brimming with tears, but she didn’t allow them to fall.
“I was fourteen when it happened again,” Elana said. “Everybody says it’s not your fault, but when it keeps happening to you, you start to wonder. I was at a party, drunk. There was this boy I liked. He and his friends used their cell phones to video me doing stuff with them, sexual stuff. They posted it online. It was everywhere. After that, I thought there was no way I could live in this world, like I was an alien. Once I thought of jumping from the Golden Gate, just stepping right out into the fog and disappearing, but I couldn’t. That’s when I did this.”
She pointed to a scar that traced its way like a tiny river across her right wrist. I hadn’t noticed it before. I had always been drawn to her left arm, the one marked with the Guardian badge.
At that moment, I most wished I was my mother. If there was a right thing to say, she would have said it. Instead, I put my arm around Elana.
“Do Max and Quin know?”
“Sort of,” she said. “They know about what happened when I was a little girl. It seems so long ago, like it happened to someone else. I couldn’t tell anybody here about the other thing, but sometimes I feel like people know just by looking at me.” Elana’s shame was tangible. It marred her face like a corrosive acid seeping from her pores.
“Do you think the Guardian Force knew about what happened to you?” I was starting to reconsider my mother’s theory that the government monitored and mined electronic data to keep a close watch over its citizens. I had always rolled my eyes, dismissing my mother, but Elana’s story made me wonder.
Elana nodded. “When the Guardians recruited me, just like Max and Quin, they told me they had been watching me, that they knew things about me, that I was smart and brave. Of course, I wanted to believe them. But I think what they knew was that I wanted to escape more than anything else—not leave, like run away—but escape from everything inside me.”
I sighed. “Emovere.”
“Exactly.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
THE SECOND TIME
AFTER MY CONVERSATION WITH ELANA, my mind was on autopilot, replaying her story again and again. If Elana and I were correct, then the Guardian Force recruited only trauma survivors. They were especially vulnerable because Emovere suppressed fear and self-doubt in all its forms. If the recruits weren’t rejected by the Guardian Force when they failed to meet its impossible standards, by the time they wanted out—if they wanted out—it was probably too late. Elana had told me that, like Quin, both she and Max had experienced intense withdrawals from Emovere.
I headed to the laboratory to talk to Carrie, hoping she could support my hunches with something tangible, something scientific. When I knocked, Carrie hesitated, a look of concern on her face. She approached the door with caution as if I was contaminated.
“I’m not supposed to let you in here,” she said, her voice meek. “A
ugustus told us you put the Resistance in danger with your poor judgment.”
“Do you believe him?”
“Augustus doesn’t lie,” she said matter-of-factly.
I was beginning to wonder what sort of strange voodoo Augustus practiced. It seemed that his scheming was completely invisible, cloaked in equal parts by his charm and confidence.
“I don’t want to get in trouble,” Carrie whispered. “I’m already a bit of an outcast here,” she said, pointing to her Zenigenic badge.
I could see I wasn’t going to win this argument. “I don’t want you to get in trouble, Carrie. I just wanted to talk with you about a few things.”
We stood at the door while I told her about my theory about the Guardian Force’s recruiting strategy and what Quin had shared about Emovere’s lasting side effects. She listened intently, nodding as I spoke.
Before I finished, Carrie interrupted. Her voice suddenly sounded stilted and rehearsed. “I’ll have to talk to you later, Lex.”
Behind me, a man in a lab coat approached. Flanking him were two Council members, Vera and Dr. Bell. Their eyes darted between me and Carrie, then exchanged a look of concern.
“Later,” I agreed.
On my way back to my room, Max stopped me. “Lex!” he called out from the control booth, gesturing me over with his hand. “I was just about to look for you. I thought you should know that Quin is taking Artos for a walk in the tunnels … right now.”
“Why would I want to know that?” Quin had expressed no interest in talking to me in thirty-six hours.
Max said nothing more, but grinned and handed me a flashlight.
I walked to the platform. Ensuring that I was alone, I jumped down and headed into the tunnel. I walked quickly. The anticipation of seeing Quin was like a steady drum pounding in my chest. After about fifteen minutes, I saw a flashlight up ahead flick on and off, on and off, and on. Quin.
Artos bounded toward me, his wagging tail a giveaway for his pure exuberance.