The Ward

by Frankel, Jordana

  Now at a standstill, I glance over my shoulder. The two Omnis—can’t lose sight of ’em. Scanning the quadrant, I find them five bridges southeast. Two black mobiles and a fountain of orange sparks. One races over the planked suspension bridge, the other hovers alongside. Every time one Omni jerks forward, makes like it’s about to head west—for me—the other mobile cuts them off.

  Derek’s been keeping the other Omni away.

  In the sky, spinning propellers remind me that I’m a sitting duck. But I don’t move, yet. I watch them there—one by one I count the ways in which I hurt. The thick skin of all my angers turns hot. Fighting that cloud, not stopping—it’s about more than just tonight.

  It’s about my life.

  And not just mine, all of ours. Being told we’re getting a cure when, in fact, we are getting a death sentence. Funneling rainwater from our rooftops, when across the Strait, the wealthy buy fresh black market.

  It’s about being hated for no reason.

  I face the cloud. I won’t give up, not now.

  Flooring the pedal, I shoot toward the swarm. My fingers shake as I grip the wheel, and I can feel the burn at my cheeks.

  Just as I meet the end of the roof, a high beam grazes my side. They’ve seen me. My headset shakes static in my ear. I hear a click-click-click-ing, like someone changing stations, then more static, like all the other channels have died.

  Leaving only one.

  “It’s over,” Chief growls through my earpiece.

  Throwing my wheel right, dodging out of the beam’s way, I see my heading for the next is now out of whack.

  My Rimbo careens over the building’s edge, and Chief’s voice is back in my head. “Tell your boy Kent that Governor Voss would personally like to thank him,” he says.

  “I don’t understand. . . .” I whisper into the mic, stomach muscles cementing together, and not just ’cause I’m currently sailing over a boardwalk. “My boy Kent?”

  “He called you in, told us you were alive.” Chief snorts. “Wanted to see that his father got the stuff. Didn’t exactly turn down the reward money, either.”

  Of course not.

  I imagine pulling him to pieces, limb from limb. We were never on the same team. Stupid of me to think that we were.

  Then, steely through the comm, “Last chance, Dane. Where can the governor locate another spring?” Chief Dunn asks.

  It’s a question I’ll never answer.

  “I’ll take my last chance,” I say into my mic, looking ahead.

  Why haven’t I landed already? Right, left, I look . . . and I see nothing. No roof to catch my fall. Not even a building facade that I could aim for. I’ve completely overshot my next roof.

  I’m in free fall.

  Buildings tower past. They grow larger. Wider.

  Punching my fist to the steering wheel—it’s over. It’s over. I can’t make the other drop-offs. A curling, constricting rage forces its way out my throat. How do you know when to give up? How can this be the end?

  Like yawning forever, I’m thrown down into the center of the earth. My stomach wants out of my body so badly, the drop has made me sick. I can’t even relax my jaw; my tongue’s latched to the roof of my mouth. This is the longest jump I’ve ever made, and still I’m falling.

  When my Rimbo finally hits Broad Walk, it thuds and screeches, clobbering the planks. They groan and smoke under my tires, and the sharp, coated smell of rubber wafts in, even though the weight chute is closed.

  “Have it your way,” Dunn says.

  A spotlight pins me. I’m a fly needled to a wall.

  I watch a heli carve through the black and glance at my water tank—almost empty, but I floor it anyway. Under my tires, the wood rattles and shakes, not made for mobile travel. Jamming on the brakes, I spin the wheel to face east again, closer to Mad Ave.

  I need to hide. Right now, I’m just too easy a target.

  As I’m wheeling down the boardwalk, time turns to sludge. The seconds rush by, but minutes take forever. Then, the first net falls.

  I remember from when they netted me before. The edges flap like impatient wings. Electronic, motion-detecting pulses keep the nets open, and magnets woven into them are attracted to any mobile’s steel frame. They’ll jam your props if you get caught.

  I turn the steering wheel left and push RETRACT, folding the wheels into the underbelly. My Rimbo hurtles in an arc off Broad, and within moments it’s living up to its name. It skips along the surface of the water, and I flip on the propellers to give a boost.

  Once I’m closer to the end of the gutter, I risk looking behind me: about a hundred feet up, and one block over, I watch the net float down, looking for motion from my Rimbo. When an easy wind sways the suspension bridge, the net gets caught on the zigzags, its motion sensors confused. Don’t watch—go.

  I steer left under the Mad Ave boardwalk, so I’m out of the helis’ sight. Since the walkways were built with tides in mind, the canals are high. My Rimbo skips under the walk, leaving me a good foot of clearance between the roof at its highest skip and the planks. Can’t keep this up though—it’s not made for so long on the water. I weave through two pylons, and check to see if the air is clear. Tonight, though, everything is bright. Two flashlights shine on the Ward: the moon, and that heli’s spotlight flooding the canal with light.

  My Rimbo’s bounces begin to fall short, each one closer than the next. It slows even as I steer, rallying the bullet blood in my veins. I need to dock it fast—

  Forget it. Just get out.

  I’ll have to go by foot from here. It’s my best chance for avoiding the heli above. My Rimbo slows even more. When it makes its final skip, I pop the roof and reach up. Clutching the support beams on the underside of the boardwalk, I climb out, dropping into the water.

  I don’t have a chance to feel the cold.

  “Miss Dane—” a voice crackles in my ear.

  Not the chief—this voice is too subtle, too many undercurrents. Governor Voss.

  “Since you are not willing to share the spring’s location with me, I thought it only fair to withhold a location from you. Something equally valuable. Do you have any idea what I’m talking about?”

  The hairs on my neck know what he’s about to say before my mind makes any sense of it. “No, sir,” I answer, still clinging to the boardwalk’s beams. But my stomach knows the feeling before the drop. Before the downhill.

  “One thing of value for another. Only fair.” The governor pauses, and I hear him tapping. “I’m referring to the girl you call your ‘sister.’”

  The edges of my eyesight go black. “You have Aven,” I whisper. Like burning, the black curls at the periphery, working its way in, until all that’s left is the memory of what was there. My body tries to extinguish itself, but no amount of salt water will ever be enough. “You can’t hurt her. . . .”

  “But clinical research is so important to understanding the spring’s exact properties. Recall my ancestor’s letter. Entire limbs . . . regrown. I imagine it’s painful—the loss, and the regeneration.”

  He wouldn’t. . . .

  Behind the smoke and blur, I look for her. Where are you? Where are you? My only answer comes from the wailing heli as it hovers, waits, and the animal noises I make that have no name.

  Outside of me, I hear tapping. The governor—through the comm. “Well, well, well. It’s nearly one a.m.. The evening has been . . . very successful,” he says lightly. “You, Miss Dane, have exceeded all my expectations.”

  I shake my head. Where are the squadrons? “What do you mean . . . ?” I mumble, pressing my fists into my eye sockets, fighting them.

  “What do I mean . . .” he repeats, like a riddle. “Honestly, Renata. Democide? Really? Hardly the best way to win over the people. Especially not after this morning’s riot. I’d thought, this time, perhaps the Tètai would try and stop me. They did not. Smart. You, however . . . you accomplished for me far more than I ever could have on my own.

  �
��My wife will be cured. I’ll be hailed as a hero for weakening the Blight’s hold on the Ward. And after you share the spring’s location, the United Metro Islets will return to the thriving, prosperous metropolis it once was, with freshwater for all.

  “This city will never die again.”

  With his pause, a hard, rotten pit of fear bursts wide in my chest. My body heaves, like it’s trying to get rid of something on the inside, but nothing comes out. The pieces that didn’t quite fit, the twinge in my gut that I was too stupid to understand—

  All along . . . a lie?

  “All that’s left: my location,” Governor Voss continues. “Today’s riot cannot happen again; I must have access to more. Aventine Colatura is waiting. Till then—

  “Good night, Miss Dane.”

  The line dies.

  A lie. A trick.

  Every choice I made in the past twenty-four hours—I want it back. I should have chosen Aven. . . . It should always have been Aven. Life is not a numbers game. Just one, just one.

  Energy, raw and volatile, is all that’s left. I pull myself to the edge of the boardwalk, kick my feet over. Forehead pressed to the planks, heaving with an exhaustion I can no longer feel, I come to standing.

  Face-to-face with the aeromobile, its spotlight cuts a hole in the night’s darkness like target practice. Each of my nerves is a lit, fraying fuse, begging for zero. Every cell is a bomb, and they detonate with one singular need: do anything.

  In the air, the heli howls metallic death.

  I run toward its light.

  It’s waiting for me.

  The beam scalds.

  City dust tornadoes around inside it, shaken by the heli’s props, and simpler enemies, like wind. Everything moves in slow-motion.

  I watch.

  Somewhere in the subway tunnels of my mind, I know this makes no sense. And at the same time, it is the only thing that does. Nothing else is real. Every choice, false.

  Shielding my eyes, I shout up at the sky to the mindless, gutless aeromobile.

  “Take me! I’m immune!” I yell. “I’m here! I’m right here!”

  My words fall to pieces, collide with the propellers and the water churning from the pressure. The man in the heli doesn’t see or hear me. And that feels right, too. Appropriate. I’ve become invisible, my choices no longer about me. I wave my arms. I throw myself up into the air.

  I say it again. “I’m standing right here!”

  Time stops. What was slow-motion is now freeze-frame.

  Above, the heli circles and I catch a glint of metal. A man inside loads a net—this one for people—into a long-barreled gun. I’ve been here before. Three years ago, this same scene.

  And so I know what happens next.

  He loads the gun. Shoots the net. It’ll hit and it’ll hurt no worse than getting punched. You’re folded into its diamond-meshed wings and carried away, dangling through the air like any other package.

  When the gun sounds, I hear nothing.

  I see stars. . . .

  The net’s twinkling border.

  And then, hardness. In the way of hands gripping around my waist. In the planks that I fall onto, rough and splintering.

  I’d expected the next minutes to exist in verticals—the net should be lifting me by now. Instead, everything is horizontal. Thick pylons lying on their sides. Nails and splintering wood. Close up on the chopping waves. No stars, no tossed-asphalt Milky Way. No beast in the sky.

  Freeze-frame—off.

  The shift hurts, makes no sense. Dust. Propellers. The water churning. My eyes are too slow, too small for the world. They can’t process. Even the smell, ocean salt and stale brack, hurts my nose. Sharp at the back of my throat.

  Around my waist, nothing stings as it should. Not the way the nets should. There’s muscle there. Thick, unyielding flesh, forcing me out of the beam.

  “Get in,” Derek’s voice tells me.

  We’re dockside at a black Omni—how did we get here?

  “Let me go.” I push and pull, in a tug-of-war of arms and legs. Looking up, I again notice the slight freckling along his cheeks, eyes rusty-red and brown. The beam finds us. His hair becomes a straight shot of fire, sparking to life.

  That last color—it sends me into overdrive, crosses all my wires.

  I’m a schematic with no lines, I’m an ocean with no body, I’m words without letters. A numberless value. I am senseless and I am crying, holding on to and throwing back anything that comes too close.

  Derek lifts me by the waist. I struggle, but can’t remember why. He lowers me down. The corner I sit in fits like a hard shell. He shuts the roof. I twist, I have a body of snakes. A pit of them. I forget to breathe. I cry. Too hard. My body breathes for me. Repeat. Repeat. I quiet.

  It ends. It begins.

  It ends again, and it begins again, because we think in circles.

  And then, one final time, it really is over—

  I’m over.

  51

  When the shaking stops, when I open my eyes . . . it’s like waking up to find that I’ve fallen off a map. The world I thought was round is flat, and nothing is as it was before.

  A dull ache has taken Aven’s place inside my head.

  She is gone, and so am I.

  Under the canal’s surface, Derek steers the Omni east, high beams lighting up abandoned cars and buses. The waterways are empty like always. Even more empty now.

  Vaguely, I feel the cloth of my leggings and the thick fabric of my vest holding in water from the canal. I think I’m cold. I know I’m cold, and for the first time, I understand what it feels like. Separate from the discomfort. I don’t care that I’m cold, or that my knees are scraped and raw and bloodied. Without feeling any of it, I watch the sunken city through the window. I remember Aven’s face at the Tank when she saw it all for the first time. Like the machines, in all their useless glory, were the greatest things in the world.

  “Ren?”

  Even my name feels far away, fragile in his mouth. He’s just as afraid of saying it as I am of hearing it.

  I turn my head. That’s enough of a response.

  “Where should I take you?”

  For a moment, I forget that there was a plan. It all got so derailed. But there is a plan; it hasn’t gone away just because the governor was lying. “Garage,” I answer. Then, quieter, head tucked between the seat and the window, “I’m a fool,” I whisper to myself.

  I know nothing.

  Except for regret. But for what, exactly . . . I’m not sure. Could I have left Callum, and all the others, to die? I don’t know. But somewhere along the road, I went left when I should have gone right. I made the opposite choice.

  And so I regret. Something.

  Not being a better sister, maybe.

  “You and Kitaneh knew not to do it. You knew not to play into his hands.”

  Derek looks at me. He shakes his head. “You’re not a fool. We had no idea that he wasn’t going to go through with it—so really, we had even more reason to have done something.” He sighs, leaning back in his chair. “I should have done something,” he adds, his voice heavy, and that’s how I hear them: regrets.

  He has them too. And they have nothing to do with me, or earning me. They’re for his own sake. Which is all I could take right now—I don’t know if I feel worthy, or good enough, of being earned.

  “I saw you out there,” I say, mustering something like sympathy. I’m too empty for this kind of talk, but I manage to add, “You did something.”

  “I was too late. I couldn’t stop the others. My brother, he almost . . .”

  “I thought he was you.”

  Derek slows the mobile, begins bringing it up for air. “Kitaneh must have found out on her own that you were alive, then told him and the others.” His voice rises. He’s afraid I might not believe him.

  But I do, and I tell him so, and then we’re silent. The Omni’s headlights cut lines of gold alongside the boardwalk as we break the surface
.

  “Did you know . . . the word Tètai in Lenape—Kitaneh’s native tongue—means between.”

  He doesn’t need to explain. “Between life and death,” I murmur.

  “Between life and death,” he repeats, glancing at me out of the corner of his eyes. Then, barely audible: “But not for long.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I acted against my family, in opposition to the order.” He swallows hard, his jaw squared to the windshield. “Against Kitaneh, my wife by contract, and also my single remaining blood brother, Lucas. They’ll come after me. His wife, too. They have to. It’s our punishment.”

  When I look at Derek again, I see him differently. No longer through the rose-colored lenses I once wore. He’s made mistakes . . . centuries of them. I see his history laid out in front of me. The same family keeping the same secret, forever.

  I see what he’s lost tonight.

  We’ve both lost tonight.

  “Then come with me,” I say, and I push down on the button in the center console that opens the roof. I don’t want to move—I’m sluggish and heavy as we bob sideways in the black water. But a gust of wind sweeps through the pit, shakes me from my stupor, and I stand.

  I just want tonight to end.

  “I thought I was coming with you anyway.” In his voice, equal parts fear and hope. He searches my eyes with his. “We have to find Aven.”

  I nod, letting him take my hand to help me out of the Omni. I can feel every ache and hurt my bones are carrying as I step onto Mad Ave. Derek lifts himself out after and rests his hand low on my back.

  As we walk toward Benny’s garage, I reach for my necklace out of habit, just to make sure it’s there. Attached to the chain, my two pennies—from Aven, and from Callum. Without looking at them, I can’t tell who gave me which.

  And then I think of her. Alone. I see where I made the wrong choice.

  “We have to,” I whisper, watching the stars overhead, slowly tracing their paths through the night sky. All of them alone on their orbits, together. All of us alone on our orbits—together, too.

  EPILOGUE