The Murder Complex

by Lindsay Cummings

  “Meadow Woodson. Sixteen. Citizen. Blood type O. Rations Department.”

  “Take my blood.” I thrust the scanner back into the doctor’s hands.

  “That’s against protocol,” he says.

  “Screw protocol, take my blood! I’m not going to let him die!”

  “The boy is in good hands, Miss Woodson.”

  My head drops. My heart sinks. I will pay for arguing, but something tells me I should not let the boy out of my sight.

  A Ward is a Ward, and nothing more. This can’t be possible.

  “I’ll give you every Cred I have,” I whisper. “Just give him the damn blood.”

  He doesn’t even take the time to consider it, and part of me wants to smile because I have outsmarted him. He doesn’t know I’ve only worked once. Surely I haven’t earned much. “We have a deal,” he smirks.

  Peri will lose a day of rations. My father will be furious. Koi won’t speak to me for a week. My hands are shaking as I walk, and maybe it is from the shock of doing something for someone else. I like to think this is what my mother would have done.

  Suddenly the boy is hoisted onto a hospital bed, and a nurse is gripping my arm, pulling me along behind him as we twist and turn through a maze of white hallways.

  When we reach a room, and a needle slides into my vein, a part of me flows through the tube toward the boy.

  Ward. Essential. Impossible.

  I have to know what it means. I close my eyes and lay back on the cool metal table as a nurse silently stitches up the boy’s mangled wrist. He moans as the doctor injects something into his arm and sprays liquid skin over his wounds. They are so deep the doctor has to spray them twice. Sometimes, the nanites do not work fast enough.

  When I finally slip out the doors of the hospital, the world is coated in black. I consider running down the middle of the main street, along the train tracks.

  But speed isn’t always safe. So instead I walk silent and steady, keeping my breathing soft and slow. It is important to pay attention. To not miss a sound.

  Some say the murders happen all at once, in a single, bloody moment. Tonight I see nothing strange, other than a handful of people still out taking their chances. The smart ones are in hiding, candles blown out, windows boarded up if they are lucky enough to have them.

  I pass the Library, which reminds me of my father. I walk faster. I know he will be furious by now.

  I hear no screams for help. Whenever I check over my shoulder, I am not being followed.

  For the first time in my life, I feel afraid.

  The Shallows has turned into a ghost town.

  When I turn a corner I can see smoke rising from the street. A cluster of people sit around a crackling fire. I smell something cooking. That is the kiss of death. “Stupid,” I mutter under my breath. I make a big detour around the fire. In the distance, someone laughs.

  I am almost to the beach when I hear it. The sound is soft, just a thump, and it comes from the alleyway to my left, from the way I need to go to get to the beach the fastest.

  I hold my dagger in front of me. I walk on my toes, the way my father taught me to, and stick to the walls.

  It is dark, but the moon casts enough light so that I can see where I am going. The alley looks empty from here. I run my hand along the brick. The solidity of it makes me feel safer.

  Until I feel something warm and wet.

  Lots of buildings have leaks. Old plumbing, breaking down over the years. But this is like touching wet paste.

  I hold my hand up in the moonlight.

  Crimson, thick and bright, coats my fingertips.

  Blood.

  I stumble away from the wall. A dark substance, almost black in the night, drips down the side of the brick.

  I look up, slowly, following the trail.

  When I see the body, I almost scream, but I catch myself. It is a woman. The long strands of hair hang down over the side of an old fire escape. I see her arm, dangling.

  Suddenly I hear a scream, just behind me on the main road. It is high-pitched and awful, a sound that makes my hair stand on end. There is a splattering sound, like water hitting pavement, and the scream turns into a gurgle.

  I do not go to help him. I know he’s already dead. I hear footsteps, and a man steps into the alley.

  He sees me. There is a cut on his face. Our eyes meet, and he says one word.

  “Run.”

  I turn around and run, as fast as my feet can carry me, away from the City.

  The Dark Time has come.

  Tonight luck is on my side, because the dinghy is here, and the Pirates are nowhere to be seen.

  I paddle out to sea as fast as I can, not caring that my boots are soaked with saltwater, or that my chest is heaving for air. I cannot paddle fast enough.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid.

  I never should have stayed so late, never should have veered from my path to try and save some strange boy who means nothing to me, nothing to my family.

  It is about Peri. Peri and Koi and my father, our survival, and nothing more.

  I am terrified that my father will have started up the boat and left me behind, to teach me a lesson.

  But there it is in the distance, rocking gently.

  Home.

  The bow of the dinghy knocks up against the side of the houseboat, and I feel like I can finally breathe. But something’s wrong. Normally, the wire perimeter would be in place, and Peri would be waiting.

  Instead, there is nothing but the wind and the waves.

  “Hello?” I call out. I knock my fist against the sides of the boat. “It’s me!”

  The rope ladder appears then, unfolding itself like a snake. I start to tie the dinghy and climb up, but someone is coming down.

  It isn’t my father.

  It is Koi.

  “Move over,” he says, as he climbs down the ladder. I scoot back and wait for him. He settles down across from me. His face, so much like my father’s, is angry.

  “Nice of you to finally join us,” he says.

  “I got held up,” I say, looking at my knees. “I made it back, didn’t I?”

  “Peri thought you were dead.”

  The words hit me right in the chest, like a hard punch. There is nothing I can say to defend myself, because my brother is right.

  Koi leans forward and grabs the oar from my hands. I notice that the wood is stained with blood. “What is this, Meadow? Blood?”

  “It’s not what you think,” I say. “Someone was murdered.”

  “Of course they were! It’s the Dark Time!” Koi throws the oar down between us. He glares at me like he hates me, like he wants nothing more than for me to fall into the ocean and sink to the bottom. I have never seen him this way before.

  “Your work ends before sunset. You should have been home.”

  “I got held up!” I say, but he pounds his fist on the side of the dinghy.

  “You’re lying to me, Meadow. Dad wanted to come after you. What would you do if he lost his life because of your foolishness?”

  “He . . . he was going to come look for me?”

  “He loves you, Meadow,” Koi says.

  “He doesn’t love me. He doesn’t love anything but his training.”

  “That’s how he shows love. Don’t you get it? He lost Mom. He can’t lose you, too.”

  The little boat rocks. Our heads sway close together for a second. Silver and bright. Koi says nothing. He just sits there across from me and waits for an explanation. I do not want to tell him what I did. It is none of his business.

  But then I think of Peri, and I think of my father, and how hard we all work to stay together. Alive.

  “There was a Ward,” I start, choosing my words carefully. “He was bleeding out. I had to save him.”

  “He?”

  “You don’t understand, Koi. He was just lying there on the street. He tried to kill himself, and—”

  “Then you should have let him die.” Koi cuts me off. “
Why should some stranger mean anything to you? What should anything else in this world matter, other than your family?”

  “What is your problem?” I say.

  He is acting just like my father.

  I swallow hard. I try to explain. “The doctor scanned him, and it said he was a Ward. But . . . it also said he was Essential.”

  Koi just looks at me. His eyes are so dark. His eyes are not his tonight.

  “Don’t you get it?” I ask him. “A Ward is a forgotten person, not someone Essential, so the doctors brought him in, and I gave my blood to help save him, and— . . . ” I stop talking when Koi grabs me by the shoulders and slams my head up against the side of the houseboat.

  “What did you say?”

  I try to squirm out of his grasp, but Koi has always been stronger than me. “I had to,” I gasp.

  “You had to do nothing,” Koi spits. He presses my face hard against the houseboat. The metal is slimy and cold. “You could have been killed, Meadow. And then what would we have done? You would have killed Peri. Starved her to death.”

  There are tears in my eyes. I blink them away, because crying is a sign of weakness. “I had to know what it meant.” I sound like a child. I am a child, who made a foolish mistake because I got curious. “Let me go.”

  “Not until you swear you’ll grow up and do what you have to do. Nothing more.”

  He is right. He is. “Okay,” I say.

  He finally lets me go. My head is throbbing. The wind has picked up and the dinghy is rocking. I feel sick.

  Koi leans forward and lowers his voice. He looks right into my eyes. He looks exactly like my father. Cold and hard and angry. “If you make this mistake again, Meadow, I will find that boy and kill him myself. Do you understand?”

  I nod. He isn’t lying. Koi never does.

  We sit there, glaring at each other. And then Koi’s shoulders slump. He grabs my shoulders, and he pulls me into a hug, squeezing me so tight I can’t breathe.

  “I can’t lose you,” he says. “I can’t be the only one holding us all together.”

  I have not hugged anyone besides Peri in years, so when I put my arms around him, it feels stiff. Awkward. “I’m fine,” I say. “I can take care of myself.”

  “I know,” he whispers. “That’s what scares me the most.” He pulls away. “You’re becoming too much like her.”

  “What?”

  But he shakes his head.

  “Koi. Tell me. Who am I becoming too much like?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he says. I think . . . I think his hands are shaking, but he clasps them together and sets them in his lap. “Go find Peri so she knows you aren’t dead.”

  I climb up the ladder slowly, and when I reach the boat and haul myself on deck, she is waiting for me with tears in her eyes.

  “You made me cry,” she says, sniffing. “Koi says you’re an ass for making me do that.”

  “I’m so sorry,” I say. I fall to my knees in front of her and wipe the tears away. “It’s okay to cry, Peri.”

  “You never do.”

  “I do.” I tuck a stray curl behind her ear. “But I do it when you’re not looking.”

  “If you promise not to make me cry ever again, I won’t be mad at you anymore,” she says.

  I nod. And then, just like that, I am forgiven.

  I spend the rest of the night lying on the deck with my brother and sister, staring up at the stars. We tell Peri stories about our mother, and Koi teaches her about the constellations.

  When Peri falls asleep, Koi brings out his fishing hooks, and a bottle of black ink he still has leftover from his tenth birthday. It is precious to him. He has not unscrewed the lid in years. “I want to give you something,” he says. He takes my right arm and holds up the largest hook. The one with the sharpest, thickest point. I start to pull away, but his eyes find mine. “We’re different, Meadow. I can survive in this world. But you can thrive in it. I don’t want to know what you do out there. But you have to swear you’ll always do it, so you can survive. Not for me or you or our father. But for her.” He looks down at Peri. She is sound asleep. She is not having nightmares tonight.

  “Ready?” Koi asks me. I nod my head and grit my teeth.

  I hold back my scream while he carves the word fearless into my forearm. “Now you have a tattoo that isn’t from the Initiative,” he says. I watch as he puts ink on the wound, and wraps my arm with cloth. “You have to do what it takes to make it home,” he whispers. “You can never end up like her.”

  Nothing matters but these people, on this boat.

  Nothing matters but staying alive.

  I will be fearless.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER 18

  ZEPHYR

  When I wake up, I’m floating on clouds.

  I keep my eyes closed, feeling around with my fingertips. Stars, are these . . . actual pillows?

  I open my eyes. I’m lying in a hospital bed, in the middle of a stark white room that makes me feel small. My head spins. I look down at my wrist, and the memories come flooding back.

  There was a knife. And twelve cuts. Twelve lines of blood, dripping from my wrist, and Talan, carrying me through the city streets as I died.

  My wrist is marked with a light patch of skin that looks warped, like old scars. I touch it, and it feels fine.

  How did I heal so fast? How am I still even alive?

  “Welcome back,” a voice says. One that’s familiar. I look up so fast my eyes go out of focus. Standing in the doorway of the hospital room with her arms crossed over her chest is Talan.

  “Hey,” I say. My voice is a raw croak. I need water, and my head is spinning. “What happened? Where am I?”

  Talan comes to my bed and pulls up a chair. “I hate you,” she whispers. Her bottom lip trembles for a moment. And then she starts to cry.

  The sound is strange, so out of place. She cries for what feels like forever. I let her lay her head on my chest and sob like a child, soaking my hospital gown with her tears. I don’t know what to do about it, don’t have practice with crying girls, so I just put my hand on her shoulder and tell her everything is going to be fine.

  “You were dying,” Talan gasps. “I didn’t know what to do, so I brought you here, and . . . ” The sobs just keep coming.

  “It’s fine now,” I say. “Calm down, Talan. You’re crying like a baby.”

  When she looks up at me, her blue eyes are rimmed with red. She looks like the girl I met so many years ago.

  “I’m really sorry, okay?”

  She smiles weakly, and catches her breath. “You’re a ChumHead, you know that? Pretty much half of me hates you right now, Zephyr James.”

  “Just half? Well, skitz. I’ll take it.” That gets me laughing, and before I know it, I can’t stop.

  After a while, a nurse comes in. She’s just a regular citizen assigned to the job, but she’s good at it. “Welcome back,” she says. She checks my vital signs, and Talan stands on the edge of the room, watching me like my mom used to do when I fell and skinned my knee. Like I’m some delicate kid, breakable.

  Maybe she’s right. But I feel better right now. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to die. Maybe I’m actually meant for something more.

  “Well, everything looks good.” The nurse holds up my wrist, the one that should look mangled and bruised, and nods her head. “Skin is doing just fine. It’ll be discolored for the rest of your life, but who cares, right?” She’s looking at me like I’m supposed to laugh.

  “Uh, yeah,” I say. “Sure. Can I leave now?”

  The nurse purses her lips. I’ve offended her. “You can leave. I’ll have the doctor come and sign you out.”

  As soon as we’re alone again, Talan comes back to my side. “You ready to explain yourself, or do I have to start crying again?”

  I smile weakly. “The
re’s nothing to explain. You’ve always said I’m an idiot, and now I’ve finally proven it. I was stupid. End of story.”

  She winds a strand of dark hair around her finger. “I’ve thought about doing it before, too, you know,” she says. That shouldn’t surprise me. Talan’s life is just as bad as mine. It’s probably worse, because of Arden. But when she talks about suicide, I flinch. I’ve worked my whole life to keep her alive, to keep her eating and talking and getting out of bed each day. “I’m serious, Zephyr. I’ve thought about just drowning myself in the ocean. No one would try to stop me.”

  “I would.”

  She shrugs her shoulders. “Not if you were already dead.”

  I don’t know what to say. I look down at my wrist with its new skin.

  “If you died, Zephyr, I’d give up. I gave up the day Arden died, but it’s you that’s kept me alive. It’s you that keeps me from dragging a knife across my own skin.” She smiles, something Talan doesn’t do all that much. “So let’s make a new promise. You want to kill yourself again, and you might as well do me first. Got it?”

  It takes me a minute for her words to sink in.

  I thought the world would be better without me. But I forgot about Talan.

  She needs me.

  I reach out my hand and shake hers. “Deal,” I say. “Now tell me how you managed to get a Leech doctor to save my life.”

  “Oh, then strap in,” Talan says. “This story is good.”

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  ..................................................................

  CHAPTER 19

  MEADOW

  There are not many belongings that I can call my own, other than my dagger and my boots. But there is one thing, so special to me that I know it’s the right gift for Peri.

  “I want you to keep this safe for me,” I say, unfastening the bracelet around my wrist. My mother’s seashell charm dances on an old chain that’s tarnished from the salt air, but still beautiful all the same. “It was our mother’s.” I smile as her eyes go wide. I have to wrap the chain twice around her wrist, but it looks beautiful on her. “When you miss me, just press it to your heart. I’m always right there.”