He got up and walked to where Ams and Laurel stood, watching him. "I can't do it. I don't want to anymore. I thought I did, but now... You can if you want to. I'll wait."
He took a few steps back from the tree, watching the two girls approach the corpse and crouch. They sat there for a while not moving, and then Ams got up and kicked at the body, kicked at it hard, over and over again. He heard something break. Laurel pulled her away from it, talking to her, hugging her, walking her toward him, but Ams wouldn't look at him when they got close. They walked back in silence, all lost to their own secrets.
It surprised him to see Ams kick at a dead body like that, after what Drake said. He would have done it himself before, but her doing it after everything felt wrong. He couldn't make sense of it, that anger. Didn't understand it in her, and it worried him. There was a hardness to her since they ran, or maybe a little bit before even, a hardness that didn't go with everything else he knew of her. He would have to talk to her about it, he had to, and he knew that she wouldn't want him to, but he had to try.
Drake was alone by the fire when they got back. He stood up when he saw them approach, looking calmer now than he did when they left. "Ella is at the stream. She wanted to be alone for a bit. We should let her," he said quietly to them. He seemed to be making more tea, the kettle red hot on the burning coals.
He desperately wanted to be in the city by now, the not knowing getting to him. "Drake, I don't know if they told you about how Reston looks like nobody is in there, or what I told them I think it means, but I really want us to have enough daytime hours to search it, at least to find a safe place for the night." He hoped he sounded gentle enough for Drake to not feel bad about making tea and letting Ella run off to the stream. Something was going on with these two, that was clear enough, he just hoped that it was a good something.
Drake nodded at him and started packing up the dishes he'd rinsed already and collecting any garbage they left to dig into a hole.
Riley looked around for Ams, but couldn't find her anywhere. Laurel was watching him from the log.
"That way... There is a little clearing there, about fifteen meters in. That's where she went and sent me away." She pointed to the left of him, her voice sounding every shade of sad.
Riley ran to the clearing, worried that something was breaking for everybody now, and he didn't want anything to break for Ams. She was leaning against a birch, hands picking little bits of the bark off at her sides, the dark spots. She didn't move when he came right up to her, didn't look away either. Just stood there, quietly, looking so much smaller than she did when she was kicking Keller's ribs in.
"What is it, Ams?" he asked in as gentle a way as he knew how to, afraid to scare her from wanting to tell him.
She shook her head, not talking. He wished he could just let it go for now, and if it wasn't for going into the city, he would have.
"You have to tell me. For all of us, I need to know what it is, so I know how to handle it before we get to the city. We can't have any surprises there. I’m sorry, Ams, but you don't have a choice. You have to tell me," he said and reached for her hand, but she jerked it away from him, looking like she would burst into tears. He changed tactics then. "I wanted to kick him too, you know. Really badly, but I held it back. Didn't want you to see me do that...." He hoped he sounded convincing.
"No, Riley, you didn't. You are a lousy liar. I know what I did. I don't need you to lie to make me feel better."
He felt himself blush at that a little. They were wasting time. Impatience getting the better of him, he reached over and grabbed her head in both of his hands, and held it in place, her squirming at first, then the two enormous eyes just staring at him, angry or hurt, he couldn't tell.
"If you don't tell me what this is about, you can't come, Ams. I'll leave you here with Drake or Ella and we'll go to the city without you. I can't risk you losing it like that there. I just can't. I know you'll hate me for it, but this isn't about just you or you and me, Ams. It's all of us. I gave Ella my word I'd get her someplace safe, and Laurel, and hopefully you. Even if you don't ever talk to me again, this, you have to tell me." He let go of her, waiting for her to collect herself, to stop panting like she was going to explode, to not look at him with so much hatred now.
After a few minutes of this, of watching her stare at him in the way she only did once before, and that time at least he earned it, finally she nodded. "I don't want to go to the city with you, Riley. I would rather go back to whatever life I'm supposed to have with whoever I'm supposed to have it with than this. And I would if there was any way for me to make it all the way back by myself, but there isn't. So leave me here with Drake or Ella, or alone, I don't really care which," she spat at him and then quickly walked away from him, back to the fire, not once turning around when he yelled her name after her, and then her other, older name.
Everyone was packed and ready to go when he got to the fire. Drake was trying to talk to Ams, without much success, it appeared. Laurel sat next to her pack, crying into her hands. Ella sat on the log, looking at him with sadness in her eyes. He felt every kind of lost. He couldn't really leave Ams behind, but he never thought she'd actually want him to. What she just said to him, he couldn't make sense of it. He couldn't think of anything he'd done to her since the compound that would make her this angry with him. For days now they spent almost all their time together. They were happy, at least he was, and she certainly didn't seem even a little upset by anything until today, until she kicked the bloody corpse.
"Go ahead to the clearing by the edge, guys, just before the road. We'll catch up in a little bit," he told them and waited for them to disappear on the trail, thinking, trying to find just the right words in his head to talk to Ams. Nothing about this made sense. She seemed happy this morning when Drake showed up, genuinely happy, hugging on him in the way he'd only seen her do with Laurel a few times. It didn’t add up. Mind still entirely blank, he walked over to her. Ams was sitting on her blanket, head in her hands. He sat down next to her, and in his best Ella-soft voice tried again.
"Ams, I'm sorry. Whatever it is I did to make you angry, I'm sorry for that. But you can't stay here, and I know you know that. So what you’re doing, this punishing me for something, something I don't even know I did, you can keep doing it to me. You just can't do it to anybody else. Not to Drake, or Ella, or Laurel. I'm not going anywhere, so you'll have plenty of time, an eternity maybe, to get back at me for whatever it is I did to you. Any way you want, Ams." He got on his knees in front of her, rocked back on his heels, and took her hands away from her face.
She glared at him, eyes full of unspilled tears, burning into his face, and full of anger, anger at him. She looked like she wanted to hit him.
"Go ahead, Ams. Get it all out and get it over with," he whispered and clasped his hands behind his back, fists really, his own anger getting the better of him, and waited, hoping he was wrong, that this girl, the one who gently washed his back and stitched his wounds, the one who couldn't light the damn candle because it hurt him, the one who gave herself up to protect him, hoping this girl didn't want to hit him.
And then she did, hard, over and over again on his face, and then on his chest, tears spilling from her eyes, and she kept hitting him and he let her, until finally she seemed too tired to swing at him, and dropped her hands.
He got up off her blanket, grabbed his backpack, and turned away from her, waiting for her to get ready, not wanting to look at her now, not wanting to look at her for a very long time.
He heard her behind him after a while and walked onto the trail the others just made that would take them to the edge of the city, wishing he never met this girl trailing behind him. This girl who he was just starting to fall in love with and whose handprints he was wearing on his face.
He couldn't explain even to himself why it hurt so much worse when she hit him than Hassinger's whip. He just knew she broke something deep inside him, something that wasn't hers to break.
/> 19
Monsters
Amelia, April 26, 2236, Reston
He was the worst of the guards at the compound, everybody knew, this Keller, the one with the ugly mustache on his face, always smelling like those disgusting smokesticks. She had watched him sneer at the mutes and even at the girls, watched him humiliate Drake, in a way that made her blood boil, never quite seeming to care if anyone was around to see it, either. He was the worst of them, and she’d wished for him to drop dead from the smokesticks or just slip and fall on the freshly wet floor when he was stumbling half-drunk to his room at night, and break his neck. She saw in him the people who shot Riley's dog, the ones who took her away from her family, the ones who kicked at Riley's ribs while his hands were bound. She could see him having done all of those things as if she was just watching a memory of it in her mind when she crouched next to his dead body, and it made her so angry that he just lay there, unable to feel any pain, she kicked him, couldn't help kicking him.
She knew he was already dead and couldn't feel it, and that it didn't matter that she was kicking him now, but she just had to do it. And as soon as she was done, and Laurel pulled her away, she saw Riley standing there with that look in his eyes as if she was some kind of monster. Maybe she was. Maybe there was something she wasn't aware of about not kicking dead bodies. And all that stuff Drake said about how he died—it made him sound almost decent—but she knew full well he was never decent, and it just made her even more angry that Drake, of all people, seemed to feel pity for him. She didn't want Riley looking at her like that, or Laurel, for that matter, so she sent her back alone, needing to think, needing to figure out what she did that made them stare at her like that.
She almost had it in her head, how she would tell Riley, but not quite, and suddenly he was there, demanding it from her right then, but she wasn't ready yet, and then he lied, and she knew he was lying, and the lying brought all her anger back. She would have known he lied about wanting to kick dead Keller even if she couldn't see his face. When he said it, she just couldn't picture him doing it.
In the same way, she knew Riley couldn't have kicked dead Keller in the ribs, she knew that her doing it and wanting to do it made her something that Riley could never be, no matter how many horrible things happened to him. That's how she knew for sure that there was wrongness in what she did to Keller and that Riley and Laurel saw it in her, and that's why they looked at her like that.
That’s what was bothering her about all of this so much, making her feel so angry. She couldn't be who Riley thought she was anymore. Maybe she never really was that girl he liked, the one who couldn't shoot him, the one who took care of him. Maybe she was just too afraid to shoot at him then. Whatever it was, she felt like she was lying to Riley about something terribly important, and him liking her felt every kind of wrong after that. She had to stop it before it got her to a place she couldn't come back from.
It would stop eventually anyway, she knew it would. The next time she did something that was not okay, he'd like her a little bit less, and then even less than that, and soon he wouldn't like her at all, and she didn't want to be there for that, didn't want to be hurt by him not liking her. So when he offered himself up like that, she hit him, as hard as she could, and it almost killed her to do it to him. She could see the hurt in his eyes, not from the pain either. It was that same hurt she saw when she told him about Ella and how she gave up his name. This was like that, only there were no tears in his eyes this time, just sadness, as he watched her hit him. She hated him for not stopping her, for not grabbing her hands. He could have stopped her any time he wanted to, but then he wouldn't be Riley. Riley would take it for as long as she needed him to, and she hated him for that, too.
Nobody said anything to her when they made it to the edge of the road and started into the city. Not even Laurel was talking to her, as if they all knew what she did to Riley. Maybe they did. His face was still splotchy and he still hadn't looked at her once. She almost ran up to him a few times when it was still just the two of them and told him everything, but she didn't have the words for it yet.
Laurel matched her steps to hers, glanced at her face, and decided to keep whatever she wanted to ask or say to herself. She was putting everybody on edge today. At least they weren't in the woods anymore. They entered into this enormous street, the one with insanely tall buildings, these statues of steel and glass, the windows so tall she couldn't think of how anyone could possibly wash them, but these had no paintings on them. They loomed darkly over them, barely reflecting their faces. There wasn’t a sound anywhere, except for their footsteps and an occasional rusty screech of metal awnings as they swung in the breeze. They walked down this street for a long time, Riley and Drake in front of everybody, guns drawn and buzzing.
They should have seen something by now, a dead body even, or a dog, or vultures, her implant reminded her, the birds that always descended on the dead or the dying, the ones probably pecking at Keller now. She couldn't take any more of this silence, so she turned to her oldest friend in the world, hoping she wasn't still angry at her for last night or for this morning. Hoping her friend at least could forgive her. Laurel was always quick to forgive everybody.
"What do you think we'll find here?" Anything better than this silence.
"I don't know Ams, but I don't like how it feels being here. Something about this is just wrong. It shouldn't be this clean and this empty if everybody here was killed, you know? There should be something, birds, animals, even wild ones, bugs, but there is nothing, and it scares me," she said in her little Laurel voice and the silence wasn't so bad after that.
Riley stopped ahead of them, waiting for them to catch up, looking anywhere but at her. She blushed, remembering the hurt in his eyes, the sadness she put there, and looked away from him. They were standing at the entrance to one of these impossibly tall buildings, and Riley was holding the door open. Drake went in first and Riley stayed back until everyone was inside, and then closed the door behind them and put a metal stick in the handles. The stick was a small signpost of some kind, now missing its sign.
The lobby was dark without the lights, even during the day. They got on the elevator and Drake hit the second to last button at the top, “22”. She didn't know buildings could be that tall or that elevators could go that high up, and was petrified it would break, and they would fall all these stories down in this giant metal box, and then it would collapse on top of them and squish them into the tiles of the floor, like ants. The thought made her shiver and she shoved herself into the corner away from everybody, as far as she could press, not looking at anybody, and hoping nobody looked at her.
Finally, the doors slid open with a ding that made her jump, and they filed out of this box and made for a large door all the way down the hallway. She stopped for a minute to get her breathing back to normal. She just needed a minute. She bent over, hands on her knees, forcing herself to breathe, in and out, and then she saw him standing there, looking at her, just not in the way she wanted him to look at her as if she were a small child who needed help using a knife or something.
"I'm okay, I just needed a minute," she said quickly, needing him gone.
He nodded and walked away, and it took longer than a minute now because of him being there.
They were all in the enormous room when she caught up to them, sitting on various furniture that looked entirely unlike the furniture she was used to. The couches and the chairs here all looked too large for a normal-sized person, and they looked comfortable. A large wooden table with eighteen chairs around it occupied the middle of the room, and there were paintings and photographs hanging on the walls. She sat in the chair in one of the corners, farthest away from where Riley was by the window. He was addressing everyone from there while looking out.
"This looked like the tallest building in this city, so we should camp out here for a little bit to try to figure out what happened. This should give us the best vantage point. We'll split up and k
eep watch on both sides of the building, so we don't miss anything. But we should be safe enough and comfortable enough here for a bit, provided we can find some food. Drake volunteered to go searching for some after we rest up a bit. I'm staying here with whoever wants to join me. We need two people at least on the other side."
She had to get out of this room, any room that had Riley in it, so she got up and walked out into the long winding hallway, not looking to see if anyone followed her, not wanting anyone to, not even Laurel. She followed it all the way around to the other side of the building and there it was, another enormous room with the same everything in it. She couldn't figure out why anybody would need two of exactly the same rooms that weren't bathrooms or for sleeping. It didn't make any sense to her. She walked over to the window and looked through the glass at the street below and it made her almost faint, this looking from so high up. She felt herself go dizzy and had to grab onto the windowsill to not fall.
"You'll get used to it, Amelia. The height. It's normal, what you’re feeling." He said it matter-of-fact-like, and she couldn't take it, this Riley, still helping her.
"Please leave, Riley." She hoped it came out less choked than it sounded to her.
"I can't do that. It takes at least two people to keep watch, and nobody else wanted to come, so it'll have to be me." He didn't sound angry. Just flat. And him calling her Amelia made her insides hurt.
She couldn't turn around to look at him, not until she was calm enough, but between him being here and looking at the world from this inhuman height, she couldn't do it, couldn't get her heart to stop racing. She heard him walking toward her and just closed her eyes, not knowing what else to do, feeling more afraid of what he'd say or do than she ever had of anything before, even Drake that night when she thought she got caught.
Alliance: The Complete Series (A Dystopian YA Box Set Books 1-5): Dystopian Sci Fi Thriller Page 14
