“He seems harmless,” Taren said. “I think he was just curious about this place.”
Eden raised her brows. “He must not have liked what he learned. He tried to leave.”
“Why not let him go?” Taren said.
Eden stared coolly at Taren, clearly unused to being told what to do.
We have to think of something to turn this around.
Ransom lifted his head, signaling to Lake. He threw his glance toward Eden and mouthed, Her sister. Lake followed his gaze to the locket Eden wore, a globe of tarnished gold. She’d seen Eden’s hand flutter to the tiny globe when she’d said the word sister a moment ago. Ransom was trying to tell her to get Eden talking so Lake could find a way to wake her from the sim.
But what about you? Lake wanted to ask Ransom. I can’t wake Eden until I get you out of here.
If she woke Eden and closed the Battery with Ransom inside …
What will happen to you, Ransom? Will you go into shock? Will you survive?
Taren nudged his shoe against Lake’s, prodding her to speak. “If you don’t have enough supplies for us all,” Lake said to Eden, “then we can leave.”
Taren jerked his head around to look at her, stunned. Obviously, that wasn’t what he’d had in mind. He wanted her to wake Eden.
We’ll have to come back and try later.
“We have plenty of supplies,” Eden said, scowling. “For those who are welcome here.”
“She only wants to take care of her sister,” Ransom cut in, and alarm flared through Lake again.
Please, Ransom, I’m trying to keep you safe.
The iron in Eden’s eyes softened. “I tried too, to take care of my sister. But she wasn’t chosen to survive.”
Guilt stabbed at Lake. Everyone on the ship had been chosen over someone else.
Even Lake.
And it didn’t make sense—none of them deserved what they’d been given. Not the survivors on the ship, and not the ones who’d been left behind.
“Now I choose who survives,” Eden said.
Lake shivered.
She and Eden weren’t so different. Eden had lost her sister and created a stronghold where she’d never again be powerless. Lake had lost her sister and set herself to tearing down strongholds like Eden’s.
Eden deserves to wake. She deserves to survive.
But then, didn’t Ransom deserve the same thing?
“You choose,” Lake said to Eden, agreeing. “You choose who comes to the Battery, and who leaves. You can let us go. We won’t ask for your supplies.”
Next to her, Taren was shaking his head. He gave Lake a questioning look.
We can try again later. But she knew what Taren would say to that: There is no later. The ship is failing now.
“I can vouch for them,” he tried again, putting his hand on Willow’s shoulder and then pulling back again, as if remembering she was only a figment. “They tried to help me deliver tar, but we were attacked.”
Eden smiled. Her eyes gleamed. “Oh, I know about the tar.”
Lake’s nerves lit up. Something about Eden’s catlike smile.
“Do you know who this girl is?” Eden asked, leaning forward to catch Taren’s full attention. “Who you’re so eager to vouch for? I do.”
Taren clutched Lake’s hand.
“A girl who can look like anything,” Eden said. “Who often travels with her younger sister.”
Lake kept herself from looking over at Willow. But Eden already knows. She guessed it, just like Ajay did.
“Around here, we call her the Angel,” Eden said.
The boys leaning against the walls stood straighter, shoulders bunching.
Eden sat taller on her misshapen throne, a queen about to pronounce judgment. “The Angel of Death.”
Lake trembled. “We only came here to—”
“When you show up,” Eden cut in, “people disappear.”
The boys glowered at her. The red mud covering the walls, glowing in the light, tinted their skin so that they seemed bathed in resentment.
“What do you want?” Lake asked Eden. “You want us to leave? We’ll leave.”
Eden’s smile was gone. “I know where you came from. I know why you want to be rid of us.”
She knows? She remembers about the ship?
“You guard the location of a lost world,” Eden said.
Lake stared at Eden, stunned. “A lost world?”
Blue trees growing next to a river.
“She means the ship,” Taren said under his breath. “She’s ready.”
Lake frowned. I don’t think that’s what she means at all.
And Lake had another idea. Plan B.
“I’ll show you the entrance to the lost world.” The pocket Taren made not far from the Battery gates. “If you let him go.” She pointed at Ransom.
Eden’s eyes gleamed. “Done.” She gestured to her soldiers and they moved toward Ransom.
“Lake,” Ransom said, his voice uncertain. “What…?”
Just trust me. She kept her gaze on him as a couple of soldiers pulled him toward an alleyway.
“Well?” Eden prompted.
Lake watched Ransom vanish through the mouth of the alley and tried to feel relief. He’ll get out, at least.
Will we?
“It’s not far,” Lake told Eden, speaking slowly, trying to give Ransom time to get out of the Battery.
“You’ll show me,” Eden said, rising from her stone mount.
“It’s here in these hills,” Lake said, still stalling. “Near a grove of new trees.”
Eden froze. She sank back onto her throne. “A grove of new trees,” she echoed.
Anxiety knifed through Lake.
“You would lead me there?” Eden asked.
Lake looked to Taren, but he seemed just as confused as she was. “We’ll take you to the lost world,” Lake told Eden. But Lake could sense it—Eden suspects something’s off.
A poisoned smile spread slowly across Eden’s face. Lake knew then: she’d failed. She wasn’t going to wake Eden. She wasn’t going to lead her out to the pocket Taren had created. This wasn’t working at all.
Lake had wanted to save Ransom, and she thought she had probably managed that.
But at the cost of saving all the sleepers in the Battery.
She looked at Taren. I’m sorry, she mouthed.
He frowned, confused. He was gripping her hand hard, just as nervous as she was about Eden’s fuming silence.
But now his grip loosened, and understanding came into his eyes. He knew Lake had been stalling and that they’d lost their chance to wake Eden.
Eden’s voice rang off the cavern walls: “You would lead me to the same grove of trees next to where you hid this?” She gestured to someone in the shadows, and the girl-guard from the gate used her metal rod to push a box into the shaft of sunlight.
Inside the box, the tar was a mass of shadows.
“My soldiers saw you hide this in the hills,” Eden said.
Lake went hot all over. Next to her, Taren shook like he remembered his legs had been mostly immobile for decades.
“You stole our tar,” Eden said, “and brought it here to use against us.”
“No.” Lake’s voice shook. “I came to help you. Please, the tar is dangerous. You have to get rid of it.”
Eden snapped her fingers. The girl who had dragged in the box of tar now dipped her metal rod into the dark mass. She held it out, her stare fixed on the wriggling nothingness clinging to the end of it.
“Please,” Lake said, shifting her gaze from the tar to Eden. “You don’t understand what this is.”
Eden stepped forward. “I know where it came from: blown out of hell by a nuclear weapon.”
She nodded to the girl, who stepped toward Lake, holding her weapon out before her.
“Listen to me,” Lake said, backing away from the tarred rod, pulling Taren with her. “I’m not some Angel of Death.”
Eden watched, eyes l
ike glassy stones. “Whatever death-touch you possess has no reach like this does.”
A thrill went through Lake’s heart at the sight of the tar coming toward her, and of Eden standing in triumph. You and I, Lake wanted to say to her, we’re both doing what we have to do.
“Wait,” Taren said, his voice so sharp it rang against the cavern walls in the same way Eden’s had. “Listen to me, Eden. You’ve been living underground for months now. You made a city beneath a battery.”
Eden waited, transfixed by the same forceful tone that had Lake waiting for Taren to say more.
“But how can that be?” Taren went on. “This place was filled in ages ago. They made it impossible to get inside.”
Lake shot Taren an alarmed look. What was he doing?
“And now there’s a whole city under here?” Taren said. “Carved out of rock? Using—what tools?”
Eden swayed, reached out a hand as though to steady herself. The hard planes of her face softened, her confidence slipping.
“And where did all of the stuff come from?” Taren pressed. “All the food and cans and bottles? You think that stuff would survive nuclear winter?”
“Taren,” Lake said. She knew what he was doing now, why his gaze was roving the floor, the walls. “Stop.”
“We found a cache,” Eden said, but her face was lined with uncertainty.
“Even in a cache, food doesn’t last forever. Especially not the kind of food I’ve seen in your city. And what’s a city without food?” His head jerked in a way that told Lake he’d found what he was looking for. She followed his gaze to where a drop of tar trickled over Eden’s stone mount. As they watched, another drop fell onto the stone from the opening in the ceiling above, and then a slurry, thick as the mud dripping down the walls.
“You think you can keep all these people safe?” Taren stepped toward Eden, shoulders high like an animal cornering its prey. “That’s not what you’re doing at all. You drew all these people down here where there’s nothing to eat, no air, no life. You’ve trapped them.”
Eden let out a small noise, a shrill note of guilt.
“They’re going to die down here, and it’s all your fault.”
Taren pounced. He shoved Eden backward, toward the stone seat, coated now in the tar that dripped from above.
But Eden’s soldiers were quick. They dove for her, and one of them managed to throw her to the ground just before the soldier himself fell back against the tarry stone.
The boy cried out. The tarry nothingness bubbled and spread, eclipsing cheek, wide eye, gaping mouth. The next moment it was a veil, and then a cloak, and then a burial shroud—
And then the boy-soldier was gone.
Lake gaped, sick and shaking.
Taren stood just as still, his face reflecting the shock and horror that had shown on the boy-soldier’s face just a moment earlier.
Then the soldiers burst into motion, scrambling from the shadows.
Taren snapped into action before Lake could think what to do. He tore the metal rod from the hand of the girl-guard, who had gone stiff with shock. He turned and swung the rod, painting tar over the arm of the nearest soldier.
Lake found her voice. “Taren, stop! They’re not figments!”
But he was trapped in the middle of the brawl now, battered by sticks and wooden slats, and he could only swing the metal rod, flinging tar at the soldiers.
One by one, they fell, shrieking as they bubbled out of existence.
And Taren didn’t stop. He pushed into the fight, swinging the rod, painting tar over every arm and back and shoulder. Moving with a fury that said he’d waited too long for this, that he resented every person who held him captive—not only in this cavern, but in the crumbling existence he found himself fated to.
Lake pulled Willow away from the fray, toward a narrow alleyway. “The tar,” Willow said, turning back for the box.
She was right—they couldn’t leave the box of tar. It sat on the stone floor, guarded from the soldiers by Taren’s attacks. Lake seized it by its cord-wrapping. Then she turned back for the alleyway, praying the tar wouldn’t jostle over the sides and onto her bare hands.
Something caught her eye that made her stop in her tracks.
The rivulets dripping down the cavern walls were water no longer. They were tar, and where they tracked, they left wide cracks in the stone.
And through the stone—
Muted sunlight.
Lake stepped closer. She set the box at her feet while chaos reigned behind her. She pressed her hands against the walls, and the cracks widened under her fingertips, the stone falling away as dust.
A rush of cool air. A purple glow of light.
All around, shouts of horror and confusion rang against the walls.
“Come on, Willow,” Lake said, knocking more stone away with the heels of her hands.
“Lake?” Willow said, her voice full of uncertainty as she peered through the crumbling wall.
But they needed to escape.
So Lake grabbed Willow’s hand and pulled her through.
17
TAREN
Taren ran through the narrow passageways of the underground city, his ears full of the scrape of his shoes over rubble, the echoing clang of the metal rod he had dropped. His hands were stiff claws as he climbed the ladder, gasping and desperate for air not tainted by the smell of wet stone and sweat. Don’t think about their faces. Don’t think about them gasping at the tar creeping over their skin …
Somehow, he was at the hut under the trees. He wrenched the door open and stepped through to anywhere, anywhere at all—
A world of cold fog. Asphalt beneath his feet. Steel beams overhead, the orange-red of the Golden Gate Bridge. The paint was peeling, the metal beneath rusted, so that the beams looked scabbed.
Taren breathed in cool air, breathed out warm fog.
He was on the bridge, far from the Battery.
And Lake—where was she?
He thought he’d seen her step through a doorway in the cavern where there should have been no doorway. It didn’t make sense. He was losing it. He couldn’t stop shaking in the cold, but he felt hot all over. He tore off his jacket. The black stars tattooed on his forearm didn’t look right, and it made him feel sicker than ever.
Don’t look at it.
He looked around instead. At the tower of the bridge rising into oblivion. At the metal railing, and the glimpses of flat seawater below, gray like concrete.
But he couldn’t stop thinking about the tattoo. He clutched his arm, covering the stars with his palm. He’d changed them, rearranged the constellation that was meant to forever tie him to his brother.
What did I do?
Something inside him had changed too.
He turned away from the railing, wishing his brother were there to help him. We were trapped. There were so many of them. I had to get us out. Gray would understand.
A shadow emerged from the fog.
Taren stared, rooted to the spot.
The fog thinned. The shadow turned to form.
“Gray?” Taren’s heart thudded. His brother was here. A figment of his brother, but even so, he could help Taren make sense of things. Taren walked toward him, slowly at first, trying to read Gray’s furrowed brow and rigid shoulders. Then more quickly, as if compelled by the weight that had settled over him like the cold fog. He landed his shoulder under Gray’s and let his brother sling an arm around his neck.
“What’s going on?” Gray asked, almost laughing. He took Taren by the shoulders and tried to look into his downturned face.
“I went to the Battery,” Taren said. “I almost didn’t get out.”
“The Battery,” Gray echoed. “Waking sleepers?”
Taren hesitated. Nodded.
Were the sleepers waking? Or were they dying in their stasis beds even now, succumbing to the shock of their violent ejection from the sim?
“Why feel bad about that?” Gray asked. “It’s the only way
you’ll ever get home.”
Taren’s chest loosened. Maybe so.
“You woke them all?” Gray asked, his hands heavy on Taren’s shoulders.
“No. Not all.” The sweat on the back of Taren’s neck felt as if it were turning to ice. He hadn’t gotten to the dreamer, Eden. The one he most needed to wake.
Gray let go of Taren’s shoulders. Taren looked up to find disappointment etched on brother’s face.
“I couldn’t,” Taren explained. “I tried, but…” I failed.
Failed. He read the word in Gray’s frown.
“You can’t go home until you wake them all,” Gray said.
“I know.” Taren wished Gray would put a hand on his shoulder again.
But Gray was looking at Taren’s arm. He grabbed it and scrutinized the tattooed stars with confusion, and then disgust.
“I had to change it,” Taren said quickly. “So I wouldn’t forget where I was. I didn’t want to get trapped.”
The stars tattooed on Gray’s own arm were deep, inky black. Immutable. “But you aren’t going to forget me, are you? Or Mom and Dad?”
“No,” Taren croaked. “How could I?”
Gray let go of his arm with a skeptical sigh. He peered up at the bridge towers looming over them. “I can never go home. Never again.”
Taren squeezed his eyes shut. He couldn’t think about it.
“At least you have a chance at getting home,” Gray went on.
The chill of the fog relented a little. Taren opened his eyes, hopeful for more warmth from Gray.
But Gray frowned. “And what are you doing with that chance? Wasting it.” He shook his head. “Maybe you don’t deserve it.”
Taren’s stomach dropped.
“You survived and I didn’t.” Gray glowered at him. “Do you think that makes any sense?”
Gray, genius mechanic.
And what am I? Why should I survive if he didn’t?
“You don’t deserve it,” Gray said. “Not after what you’ve done.”
Dread seeped into Taren’s bones. “I attacked those sleepers.” How did Gray know?
His brother’s eyes held no sympathy anymore, only accusation.
But this was not his brother. This was a stolen face, and lines of code.
“I had to wake them,” Taren said through clenched teeth. “You’re the one who told me to do whatever it took.”
Strange Exit Page 12
