Breathe

by Sarah Crossan

  “He probably got picked up,” I tell her, though I don’t believe it. They wouldn’t have been endlessly firing if they were giving Quinn a friendly ride back to the pod. “He’s Premium. Nothing ever happens to Premiums. And his dad works for Breathe. It wouldn’t be worth it to them to hurt him.”

  “He ran. We saw him running. They started shooting. Why are you lying?”

  “He’s fast. He’s probably halfway to The Grove by now. Don’t you think?”

  “He doesn’t know the way to The Grove. How would he know the way?”

  “He’ll find it. He’ll worry about you, and he’ll make it his business to find it.”

  “No. No, he won’t. And anyway, he wants you. He’ll worry about you. He’s besotted with you. You know that already though, don’t you?” Bea looks at me searchingly, and I can see that she wants me to tell her he doesn’t like me, and that I haven’t noticed anything.

  “He doesn’t even know me, Bea,” I say, which is true. An image of Abel comes into my mind: his square shoulders, the curl of a smile when he teased me. If Quinn is alive, I will tell him to stop looking at me. I don’t want anyone to look at me in that way again. “We won’t get through that,” I tell Bea, pointing at the wreckage.

  After Quinn came back from peeing, I was going to pretend to do the same, but give them all the slip. Even as the tank began to fire at us, I thought about running in the opposite direction from Bea and Maude rather than trying to explain to Petra why I’d dragged along refugees. I couldn’t though, not with Maude tied to me. And now it seems that I’m stuck with them.

  “It’s pointless staying here,” I say. Bea picks up a loose rock and throws it from one hand to the other. Then she lobs the rock as hard as she can against an old ticket machine.

  “If he doesn’t make it, I’ll blame you,” she says. And so whether I like it or not I have to accept it: I now have Quinn Caffrey’s blood on my hands, too.

  17

  QUINN

  It takes me a second, like a good second, and when I come to, I know I’m buried in bricks. I have a bloody mouthful of mud and dust, which must have somehow penetrated the mask. I’m so thirsty, I’d drink anything.

  Luckily I can breathe—the explosions didn’t puncture my tank—but can’t see a thing. I blink. Nothing changes—everything is blackness.

  I push rubble away from my face and manage to wriggle my body free, though the pain in every limb is searing. What feels like a large, flat slab of concrete is right above me. I lie on my back again and try using my feet to dislodge it. It doesn’t shift an inch. It’s prevented me from being completely crushed, but now it’s trapping me, and I can’t even be sure how deep I’m buried because it’s so dark.

  I lie on my back and wiggle my legs again just to be sure I can feel them. Although, maybe I am paralyzed. I’ve seen it in films—soldiers losing their legs in war and they’re in so much pain they can’t even tell when they’ve been maimed; they start talking about their wives and stuff. In fact, the calmer they are, the more likely it is they’re dead—legless or headless or whatever.

  It might even be possible that I’m dead. I haven’t thought about death very much, but if I try to imagine it, I think it would be exactly like this: a tight, lonely darkness.

  I hope Bea got away. I saw her running. I saw Alina, Maude, and Bea running. I hope Alina got away, too. I try calling out Bea’s name, but my voice is blanketed by the dust and I start to cough. I must be alive if I’m coughing, right?

  18

  BEA

  I don’t want to love Quinn. If I could love someone who loved me back, my life would be calmer and I’d be happier. I don’t want to ache for him every minute of the day. And now that he’s missing, that aching I feel for him in my chest has swollen up so that my whole body feels like it’s filled with poison.

  I don’t love him in the way my parents love each other—sweetly, almost wearily. When I’m with him I feel each nerve within me awakening so that when he touches me, when he brushes my arm accidentally, I shiver and I have to bite back an urge to cry out. I feel the ache everywhere: in my neck, in my belly, between my legs.

  But he’ll never know any of this because I’m too much of a coward to tell him the truth. I don’t want to have to see his expression as he tries to work out how to tell me he doesn’t love me in return. I would rather walk along next to him hoping he’ll turn and see me, one day, than be told once and for all that my love is hopeless.

  I try not to remember that he could be dying.

  I try not to remember that if he is dying somewhere, he’ll be thinking of Alina, while I’m thinking of him.

  19

  QUINN

  How long have I been buried? It’s hard to get a handle on time when you have no sense of space and when all light has been pinched out. The pain has started now: a dull ache in my back and in my legs.

  I’ve been coughing since I was buried and I’m pretty sure I heard the armored tank rumble away a long time ago. If anyone was searching for me, surely they would have discovered me by now; they’d have heard the coughing. Wouldn’t they? Maybe they wouldn’t have heard anything at all because it’s so dark in here it’s possible I’ve been covered up by tens of thousands of bricks and cement blocks.

  I could rot away underneath this rubble. I might be a dry jumble of bones by the time anyone clears the devastation. I try to shout.

  “Bea!” It comes out as a chalky whisper. “Bea!” I try again, but my voice has been crushed, too. I cough and this time the cough is loud as my lungs try to clear themselves of dust. I cough and cough and before long the cough turns into panicked pants. I’ll die here. My airtank will expire before I do, and I suppose that’ll be for the best; I wouldn’t want to actually die of hunger or thirst. “Bea!” I call again. “Bea!” She must have hidden when the explosions started. Now she’s either trapped, looking for me, or dead. There’s no way she’d leave without looking for me, is there?

  “Bea?” I call, and then I cough. “Bea?”

  20

  BEA

  I have to keep reminding myself that the voices I hear are the echoes coming from connecting tunnels, that the muttering up ahead actually belongs to us. When I hear Quinn calling out, I have to remember that we are one hundred feet below ground and even if he were calling out, I wouldn’t hear him. Yet, I can’t stop imagining Quinn in trouble. What if he is calling me? What if he’s dying?

  I see Alina watching me as I dry my eyes and wipe my nose on my sleeve. Occasionally she asks me how I am. Sometimes she touches my back or squeezes my arm. “He’ll be fine,” she says, and after a while repeats, “he will be fine,” even though I haven’t contradicted her.

  And poor Maude is convinced the spirits of the dead live in the tunnels and she can feel them brushing by. “Serves you right,” Alina snaps. “You shouldn’t have murdered them.” Maude struggles to move forward as we follow the metal rails through the dank capillaries of the underground system. The brown water we are sloshing through is flavored with floating bones and covers our ankles so that even in boots our feet are ice.

  Maude wants to tell us about some of the people she “freed.” “I want to confess,” she says, but Alina won’t let her talk.

  “Save your air for breathing, old woman. No one wants to know about it.” Alina’s right. I don’t want to hear about all the people who chose death. I don’t want to hear about the despair. I need to believe. Without hope, what do we have?

  Finally we get to the next station. “Where are we?” Maude asks. I shine the light back and forth to get a look at the place. The walls are gray, but I can almost make out broken lettering surrounded by a large red circle. “Tottinghan ale?”

  Maude looks up at the shattered signage and groans. I guess this too must have been a Death Station. Alina is way ahead of us, still on the rails and almost at the mouth of the tunnel at the far end of the platform. “Alina!” I call out. She turns and shakes her head. “Alina, let’s go up,” I
yell. It’s taken a long time to get through the tunnel and I wonder how long it will take to pick our way back to Quinn. Alina clambers onto the platform and disappears under an arch. I boost Maude and climb up, too. We sit down on a bench tucked into the wall and Maude awkwardly starts to unlace her rotting, wet boots.

  Eventually Alina reappears. She moves toward us slowly and leans against the wall next to the bench. “Alina?”

  “I’m sorry, Bea, I really am. I honestly didn’t remember,” she says.

  “What’s going on?” I nudge her with the flashlight. “Listen, if you don’t want to come with me, I understand. I’ll go alone,” I say, hoping she won’t make me.

  “It isn’t that. Look around you.” I shine the flashlight on the walls again. “Don’t you see?”

  “What?”

  “Fire,” Maude croaks. I look at the walls. They are thick with black grime.

  “The staircases and escalators are gone. There’s no way up,” Alina says.

  “But we can get up through the next station,” I say. Alina looks away. “Well?” She takes the flashlight from me and shines it on the gauge of my tank. Then she shines it on her own tank.

  “It would take several hours to get back to Quinn. And then we’d have to find him. We need to refuel. We won’t make it otherwise.”

  “We have enough,” I say. “We could move more quickly. We can run.” I know that it’s a stupid plan, that we’ll use up even more air if we hurry. Alina takes me by the arm and we walk along the platform away from Maude.

  “There is a way you could do it,” she whispers. “If we had an extra tank of air, maybe we could find him.” When I turn to look at Maude, she is tipping her boots upside down to get the water out. “It’s her or Quinn, Bea. And it’s your choice.” I am too stunned to speak.

  Maude looks over at us. “I’m hungry,” she says, so I move back to where she’s sitting and open my backpack.

  “Here’s a nutrition bar.” She snatches it from me, tears it open, and stuffs half the bar into her mouth.

  “Take my tank,” Maude whispers.

  “Maude, I—”

  “Yeah, I’d be happy kicking around for another few years, but I know what you two was muttering about. And I know there ain’t enough air for us all to get out of here alive and save your boyfriend.”

  I don’t know what to say. So I say the first thing that comes into my head. “He isn’t my boyfriend.” Maude blinks and stuffs the other half of the nutrition bar into her mouth.

  “Last meal. I would’ve enjoyed a glass of bubbly and a plateful of chocolate truffles, but, oh, this will do.” She unhooks the tank from her side. “Go and find him. If you like him, he must be all right.” She pulls off her facemask and hands it to me. I am amazed. I am amazed and I am broken by Maude’s kindness. But I haven’t the right to swap her life for someone else’s, even if that person is someone I love.

  I push the mask back onto her face and without thinking, throw my arms around her.

  “Get off me,” Maude mutters.

  “Are you out of your mind?” Alina shouts and runs to pull me away from Maude who, despite her protest, is clinging to me as tightly as I am to her. “Who knows what she’s got living in her skin. What the hell are you doing?” Alina screams. She looks at Maude with disgust, until gradually, her face changes and her look turns from hateful to sad. And when I let go of Maude, I see why: she is crying inconsolably, and in the dim light looks so human, so beautiful and vulnerable with her tank still held out as an offering, that it would take a monster not to pity her.

  21

  QUINN

  I’m pretty sure no one’s searching, or if they are, they must be giving up the search by now. There’s no point in calling out, so I’ve stopped. And I’ve stopped trying to find a way out. It only uses up more air.

  I never really thought much about my life before, and it’s kind of sad that the first time I am actually thinking about it is probably the last time I ever will; it’s likely I won’t survive more than a day, and all the regret and gratitude I have churning around in my head will be wasted because there’s going to be nothing I can do about any of it.

  I can’t stop thinking about my brothers—Lennon and Keane—and even though they do drive me up the wall sometimes, I love them. And I love my parents, too. I don’t like thinking about it, how much I love everyone and how I won’t see any of them again, to tell them that I love them. I wish I’d been nicer, you know, like actually talked to my family from time to time.

  I don’t know why Bea didn’t tell me to get lost ages ago. The number of times I blew her off because I got a better offer from some girl I’d met an hour earlier. And later, when I realized that girl was as boring to kiss as she was to talk to, I’d be on the pad to Bea complaining about my disaster of a life. My life? And there she was with two parents who couldn’t afford to let her breathe too much, let alone make out with someone. If I survive, the first thing I’m going to do is apologize to Bea. I imagine her face, forgiving me. I imagine her eyes blinking away tears as she comes toward me and we embrace.

  22

  BEA

  Maude, Alina, and I are all sitting on the dirty platform with our legs dangling over the edge. I open another nutrition bar, which Alina and I share, taking turns so that we can keep each other’s masks on.

  “If I gave you my tank would you go back for him?” I ask Alina.

  “You know I wouldn’t,” she says, and I do know that, but I have to ask anyway, to be sure.

  I try to tell myself that he’s okay, that he’ll be waiting for us when we emerge from whichever station Alina intends to use to get us out of the underground. I tell myself all this, though I know it’s more likely that Quinn is dead or that he will be soon.

  I make a promise to myself that if Quinn is dead, I’ll find a way to avenge his murder. I’ll find a way to make the Ministry pay.

  23

  QUINN

  I’ve given up all hope and am falling in and out of consciousness when a voice brings me back. Someone calls out. “Al-ala?” I wonder if it’s my imagination, if I’m so low on air that I’m delirious and starting to hear things. I cough. Then the voice rings again. “Al-aaala?”

  I try to shout, but my throat is so dry, all that comes out is another cough. I cough and cough and as I do, the bricks shift slightly around me and dust sprinkles into my eyes.

  “Hello!” I say, and it sounds like a real word. “I’m here!” I call, louder this time.

  “I’m coming!” Above me there’s a sound that reminds me of a tram pulling into a station. The voice disappears, but a crunching and thudding sound replaces it. After what feels like an hour, a gray sliver of light punctures the gloom and the concrete slab is at last hauled away, and a face peers down at me in the moonlight.

  “You’re not Alina,” he says.

  “I’m Quinn,” I tell him.

  “Okay,” he says, and continues to shift the wreckage so I can move. He frowns, his eyes dark and hard. And another figure appears over his shoulder wearing an even fiercer look. He helps to dig me out. “Can you stand?” the first guy asks when I’m free. I manage to sit up, but when I try to stand, my legs buckle and I fall. “Here,” he says, and takes a water canister from his companion. I adjust my facemask, take a long gulp, and hand it back. “I’m looking for someone,” he says. “I’m looking for a girl.”

  “Who are you?” I ask. They don’t look like they should be trifled with. The first of the two, the talker with the hard eyes, hands the canister back to the blond, who puts it into his backpack without speaking and looks up at the moon. It is full in the sky and there is a fierce wind whipping our faces. The blond pulls his hat down as a few flakes of snow start to float to earth.

  “You’re a Premium,” the first says. It’s amazing how quickly everyone spots this, like it’s the one thing they need to know in order to fully understand a person.

  “My name’s Quinn,” I tell him again, holding out my bruis
ed and bloody hand. He looks at it for a moment and finally puts out his hand, too.

  “I’m Silas,” he says, taking my hand and gripping it tightly. “And this is Inger. We’re looking for my cousin.”

  PART III

  THE RESISTANCE

  24

  QUINN

  “So what you’re saying is that you met Alina?” Silas asks, looking down at me warily. “You were traveling companions and you helped her? You?” Maybe this isn’t easy for him to believe. I’m covered from head to foot in dirt, my body is still sort of shivering from the shock of being buried alive, and I’m holding an old T-shirt to my face to staunch the blood coming from a gash above my eyebrow.

  “The drifter would’ve killed her if we hadn’t come along,” I croak, dust still lining my throat.

  “We?” Silas looks at Inger, who still hasn’t spoken. He is standing behind Silas with his hands on his hips.

  “My friend Bea,” I say. “She’s with Alina now. At least, I think she is. I hope she is.”

  Silas rubs his mouth and stubbly chin. He’s got the same unflinching frown as Alina, giving him the look of someone who’s lived a very long time. He’s eighteen or nineteen maybe, twenty at most. But unlike Alina, Silas doesn’t look like he’s about to punch me in the face when I speak.

  “So, why exactly did Alina decide to drag along the drifter?” he asks. “They’re dangerous.” Inger nods in agreement and folds his arms across his broad chest. I’m unnerved by Inger’s silence and explain everything again, right from when I met Alina in the vaccination line and then again at Border Control, and they listen carefully. When I’m done, and they’re just about satisfied I’m not lying, Silas throws my arm over his shoulder and hauls me up. “Can you walk?” he asks.