The others had obviously been here for a long time. Long before Moore’s company had supposedly broken ground and started building. Long before the supposed community’s model had sat on the table beside me as I spoke to reporters about the government’s tentative investment in the project.
It didn’t matter that I hadn’t been given the truth—I should have known to ask. To push. Instead, I’d bought into the lie out of hope, and I’d actively helped them spread it.
I needed to question everything. Even myself.
Maybe I wasn’t as guilty as the people who had conceptualized this place and now ran it, but I was still complicit—and that made me responsible for setting things right. I’d been so focused on finding Ruby and Liam, never mind clearing my name and getting justice for the people who’d been killed in the Penn State attack, but what about these kids? Why was it more important to prove my innocence than it was to get justice for victims of the same system I’d been trying to preserve my place in?
The system wasn’t broken. It was working at full steam—against us. I understood everything so clearly then. We were never going to be given reparations for what they did to us, unless we reached out and took them for ourselves. And we’d never have that opportunity if we hid in the woods, or tried in vain to work with the people who were slowly, steadily, quietly trying to erase us.
I didn’t know where that left us, but I was sure as hell going to figure it out. And when I did, someone was going to answer for all of this.
One of the older kids stepped forward, pacing in front of the others. She gave us the once-over, smirking. Roman tried to step out in front of both Priyanka and me, but I eased him back with my arm.
“You can try it,” I warned them. “But you’ll regret it.”
Places like this were ruled by a pack hierarchy. The strong rose to the top through will and viciousness, and those who recognized their own weakness surrendered control of their lives to the big dogs. Even with Caledonia’s rigidly controlled schedule and monitoring system, it had still taken root in smaller ways.
“That so?” the girl out front drawled. Under the splatter of black mud, her skin seemed naturally tan. She’d tied her long hair back into a mess of a bun. By her height and stature, I would have put her at sixteen, maybe seventeen.
A long strip of wood slid down into her hand from inside the sleeve of her uniform shirt. A tent stake, judging by the sharpened end. But my attention was on her hand, which was missing its ring and middle fingers. The knot-like scars over the bottom knuckles were evidence enough that she’d been born with them.
Once I’d recognized her old hurt, it was impossible to miss it in the other kids. They were covered in their own scars—nicks of skin missing from an earlobe, knocked-out teeth, an empty eyelid barely covered by a strip of cloth.
Priyanka did not look impressed.
“Would you prefer I ran this through your throat or spleen?” the girl asked, tapping on her stake.
Roman looked even less impressed.
“What do you think, Doc?” the first one asked, looking to another girl, her hair buzzed and her surgical scar still a vivid red. Doc stepped up beside her and tilted her head to the side, studying us.
“Break the little one first.” Her voice was sleepy, almost bored. “The others like her and protect her. They will do whatever you ask them to do if you threaten her, but she will only listen to you if you hurt her.”
“Um,” Priyanka began, “I don’t know what school of evil you graduated from, but everyone knows you wait to give the overly long explanation of your genius after your plan is in play.”
The first girl snorted, but when she opened her mouth, the words were drowned out by the clanging of bells.
The Psi circling around us broke ranks, sprinting in the direction of the tents behind them. Other kids swarmed out, joining the flow of bodies as they rushed toward something we couldn’t see.
“Come on, Cubby,” the sleepy-voiced girl said, hanging back. “Deal with them later. You know how the others get when they don’t see you there. Let the rooks live with the fear for now.”
“No one’s going to be afraid if you give them advance notice!” Priyanka said.
The girl—Cubby—resisted for a beat longer, then slid the stake back up her sleeve. As the fabric shifted, I saw how she had tied strips of cloth up her forearm to keep the weapon in place.
“Better listen to your babysitter,” I said.
The bell shut off as abruptly as it had started. Just before Cubby turned to follow Doc, she pointed at me, as if in warning.
I pointed at myself. “What? You want me to be your babysitter now?”
“You two are distressingly good at making enemies,” Roman said as we watched the two of them follow the same path through the tents.
“We’ve got to keep you entertained somehow,” Priyanka said. “So what are we missing here?”
The question was tossed to me, as the resident—and only—expert on the workings of Psi camps.
“No clue. The only time we had alarms at camp, it was to wake up and—”
Oh.
“What?” Roman prompted.
“Meals.”
At Caledonia, blocks of rooms rotated through the commissary. We’d walk in a straight, silent line up to the kitchen window and receive a Styrofoam plate of mushy food. Even if we finished early, we’d remain seated until the bell rang to dismiss us, then we’d walk our plates and plastic cups to the trash cans positioned at the exit. The rooms on clean-up duty for that week would stay behind to mop and disinfect the table under the watchful eyes of PSFs. It was as neat and orderly as a military operation.
Mealtime in this hellhole was…not like that.
“What is happening?” Priyanka managed to get out. “Am I hallucinating this? Is this a rage dream?”
Near the center of the main cluster of tents, there were four large trapdoors in the ground. We arrived just in time to see those doors bang open, sending a spray of mud into the faces of the kids eagerly gathered alongside them. Elevator platforms cranked up, bringing crates of what looked like the UN’s prepackaged rations. The same ones they had distributed in cities right after they took control of the country.
Cubby pushed forward to the front of the crowd. Before she could reach the closest crate, a small girl darted forward and snatched a ration, bolting through the legs of the Psi clustered nearby. A few more tried it, but all were blocked by the same kids we’d seen at the entrance.
All those assumptions that they were somehow trying to help us flew away.
“Now, who do I hate least today?” Cubby said, climbing up onto one of the crates. She bent to pick up a ration kit. They reminded me of the old-school lunch sets you could buy in the grocery store: mystery meat that didn’t need to stay refrigerated, stale bread, freeze-dried fruit, and packets of instant soup and oatmeal I doubted were very popular.
She tossed one ration to her nearest friend, who laughed, shoving back a boy who looked thin enough to be carried off by a strong breeze. One by one, Cubby’s friends received their share—multiple shares, in some cases.
The others seemed to be wilting in front of our eyes. It was their blank faces that worried me—the apathy that had somehow overpowered any humiliation and anger at being placed in this situation. They looked like they barely had enough strength to keep their bodies upright, never mind the energy it would take to fight back.
The camps and places like this relied on that resignation. That final surrender of your dignity in exchange for routine. Survival in these places often meant accepting the path of least resistance to food, water, safety.
Meanwhile, the hired guns up on the rafters watched, doing nothing to stop it. If anything, they were entertained. Laughing, pointing out the smaller kids who stood at the edges of the crowd.
“This is disgusting,” Priyanka said. “Everything about it. It’s appropriate that they’re feeding them like caged animals, because they’re watching them l
ike this is a goddamn zoo.”
I swallowed hard. The dryness in my throat reminded me of how long it had been since I’d had any sort of water. There seemed to be faucets of some kind along the right wall. Three girls had taken the opportunity to quickly wash themselves while everyone else was occupied. With their uniforms clinging to them, I could count their ribs.
Next to them was a line of bathroom stalls that looked and smelled like they were little more than holes in the ground. While there was some measure of privacy from the ground, there was no ceiling over them. The patrolling soldiers could easily watch everything happening inside. In fact, there were a number of men up there now, leering down into the stalls.
That silver thread uncoiled in my mind, searching for something to connect to, some way to transform my anger into the explosion it demanded.
I wanted out of here. I wanted everyone out of here.
“Should we split up to try to find him?” I asked. “There’s got to be a hundred Psi here, maybe fewer. It shouldn’t take too long.”
Roman shook his head. “I don’t think that’s going to be necessary….”
He pointed to a black teenager weaving through the crowd of kids on the other side of the crates. Blood vessels had burst in the whites of his eyes and mud splatter partially disguised the worst of the bruises on his jaw. There were open sores on his arms, a patch of rough skin on one of his cheeks, and he seemed to be limping.
“Oh boy…” Priyanka said. “He looks like hell.”
Almost as soon as I’d spotted him, Max Wendall had approached the second of the four crates and reached down into it.
The anxious chatter fell eerily silent. So silent, I could hear the crinkle of the plastic wrap on the containers in his hand from a good hundred feet away.
Max’s face was serene as he piled one rectangular box of food on top of the other. He ignored the looks of disbelief, the warning hiss of Cubby’s crew. He even managed to ignore Cubby herself, until she stepped over onto the crate and pinned his arm with her foot. “You got a death wish, Monk?”
Max calmly tried to remove his arm. Cubby leaned forward, putting her full weight onto it. She gave him a mocking smile, resting her arm against her leg as she watched Max struggle. The only sign of pain on Max’s face was the tightening of his lips as they pressed into a hard line.
Roman took a step forward, but Priyanka caught his wrist and held him in place.
Somehow, it played out exactly as I imagined it would.
Max refused to give the rations back. He turned his face away, just as Cubby released his arm, leaned down, and punched him in the side of the head.
It was like the gun at the start of a race. Her crew took off, jumping Max. He disappeared from view behind the crate, and for several horrifying seconds all I could see were the raised arms and fists of Cubby’s crew as they whaled on him. I jumped with each hit he took and had to force myself not to look away.
“Max, what are you doing?” Priyanka whispered. “Fight back. Fight. You know how….”
The soldiers, high up in their perch, hooted. Whistled. Clapped. Egging them on with every kick, every slap.
I saw my own cold fury reflected on Roman’s face.
Finally, Cubby waved them off Max. The rations he’d taken were redistributed to the kids who had helped take him down. The food supply dwindled quickly. The crowds of kids dispersed, some stone-faced and empty-handed. And, still, we didn’t move.
Neither did Max. We didn’t actually see him again until the elevators lowered back into the ground and the doors slammed shut. Then he was impossible to miss as he lay stretched out, facedown in the mud. Cubby leaned over, whispering something to him with a smirk on her face. When she and the last of the kids finally drifted back to the largest tent, Max pushed himself up onto his elbows.
Gingerly, he probed the skin of his temple and left ear. Blood ran down the side of his neck, where someone had come close to tearing off his earlobe.
His eyes landed first on Priyanka, then on Roman, before sliding shut again. Max sighed, and let his face fall back into the mud.
“I don’t know how he got you in here, but you need to get out of here. Now.”
“First of all, Maximo, it is lovely to see you again. I’m glad you took my drama lessons to heart,” Priyanka said. “I also like your, uh, hovel. Real nice.”
He hadn’t invited us to follow him, but we did anyway. His tent, if it could even be called that, had whole sections that were shredded, dangling into the cramped space. By the way other areas were knotted, I wondered if he hadn’t taken ruined scraps of other tents to try to repair it. He’d dug down into the earth, likely trying to cool off in the warmer months, and had carefully molded mud and other pieces of cloth into something resembling a bed. There was a single blanket and a few empty water bottles. Other than that, it was just the four of us crammed into a space the size of the backseat of a car.
The fabric of the tent flap brushed by my hair. I turned, only to be met with three smaller faces. Two girls, one smaller boy. It was impossible to tell where their freckles ended and the dusting of mud began.
Max’s face fell as he saw them. He shook his head.
“That’s okay,” the little girl said. “Don’t be sad, Max. You tried.”
“I still have these,” he said, reaching under the folded blanket for a slim package of prewrapped crackers. “Try mashing them with some water to see if she can get them down. Is her fever gone?”
I looked back at the kids in growing horror. The boy took the crackers with a look of such acute guilt that I felt it drive through me like a knife.
The taller of the two girls shook her head, revealing a long scar where her hair hadn’t grown back. “But she was talking to us and asking for water.”
“That’s good,” he told them. “I’ll come check on Elise in a minute, all right?”
The older girl narrowed her eyes at us. “These are the rooks Cubby said not to help. She’s going to hate you more than she already does.”
“She only hates me because I don’t entertain her by fighting back,” Max explained. “Go on, guys.”
The kids dropped the tent flaps back into place, dimming the stark glow from the floodlights.
“Why is that?” Roman asked, finally. “You were trained to fight like the rest of us.”
“Because that’s not my life anymore,” Max said. “I don’t fight. I don’t kill. I made a promise to myself and the world I wasn’t going to add any more pain into it. I don’t get it—why would Mercer send you in to get me instead of coming himself? When did he figure out I was here?”
Priyanka made a sound of frustration, throwing up her hands. “How are we supposed to know? When you got out, we had to follow. We couldn’t go back to Mercer without you.”
Max looked momentarily stunned, as if he’d never considered that.
“Is that why you surrendered?” Roman asked, gently guiding him back into the conversation. “You felt like you deserved to be punished?”
Max looked up from where he’d been smoothing the fabric of his uniform over his legs. “Don’t I? Don’t we all?”
“I don’t understand you,” Priyanka said. “What were you thinking, letting them take you here?”
“I was thinking about the lives we destroyed!” Max said, finally breaking. “I was thinking about all the men and women and children that we’d be asked to kill just to satisfy a man who is never satisfied. I’m not like you—I can’t just forget it and move on!”
In the silence that followed, I heard the sound of the kids in the nearby tents, talking quietly amongst themselves. Someone’s labored breathing as they fought their way through the thick mud.
“I’ve never forgotten it,” Roman said quietly. “How could I? I was the one pulling the trigger.”
“I…I know that,” Max said. The shame in the words tore at me. “It’s not my life anymore. I won’t go back to it, and I won’t let Mercer take me next time he comes.”
<
br /> I was the first one to process this. “What did you just say?”
“Mercer comes here?” Roman said.
Now Max looked confused. “You’re not here on his behalf, and you’re not here to confront him…?”
“We’re here for you,” Priyanka said.
“Max,” Roman said sharply, drawing the other boy’s attention back to him. “Are you sure you’ve seen Mercer here?”
“You think I can’t spot that monster from a mile away?” Max rubbed at his face. “It’s a whole system. They set aside the Prodigies that come in for him, and, once a month, he comes with an armed guard and selects the ones he wants. I saw him myself. Twice. He was here two days ago.”
Roman swore, his hands curling against his knees. Priyanka’s mouth opened and closed wordlessly.
“Lana wasn’t with him,” Max said. “At least, I didn’t see her.”
“No,” Roman said. “She was tracking us.”
“Mercer must want you back bad,” Max said. He let out a humorless laugh. “You know the sickest part? The kids here think he’s some hero. They call him the Angel of the Pit.”
P.I.T. Fitting.
“Holy shit,” Priyanka said. “Moore has to know about this, right?”
“Mercer could have a direct arrangement with the security company Moore hired to oversee this place,” Roman said. “It would be easier to bribe an underling than a rich man like Moore.”
“No…” I said, my thoughts rapidly coming together. “No, this actually makes sense. Think about the types of companies that Moore buys out and collects. One of his biggest acquisitions in the last few years was a shipping company with both domestic ground service and overseas freight.”
Trucks. Cargo ships. Almost exclusive permission to cross through zone boundaries and enter seaports without much government oversight.
Roman’s lips parted, making the connection. I tried not to imagine him, or any of the other children who’d been stolen from their families and locked inside shipping containers. Here, in America, they’d only needed to find the kids who ran into trouble, or the ones who’d fallen through the cracks of our systems. The unclaimed. The unwanted.
The Darkest Legacy Page 35
