Struck

by Jennifer Bosworth

  I couldn’t put off asking any longer. “Katrina, where are we going?”

  Katrina’s gaze darted to me and then back to the road. She reached up to curl a piece of hair between her fingers and found nothing but nothing. “I think you already know. You were outside Uncle Kale’s classroom last night. You heard us talking.”

  All at once, I felt very sober. “Tell me,” I insisted.

  “We’re going to the Rove.”

  “Why?” I asked, my voice more air than sound. I felt like I’d been sucker punched in the stomach, even though I should have seen this coming.

  “The Rove attracts a certain type of person,” Katrina explained. “That type of person is more likely to have the Spark. It’s not just the Rove that attracts them. It’s the Waste. There’s an energy about the place, something magnetic, like … well, you’ll see.”

  “Oh, no I won’t,” I said, shaking my head. “Stop the car.”

  “But we’re almost there.”

  “Stop the car now!”

  I was surprised when Katrina calmly pulled off to the side of the road.

  This close to the Waste, the streetlamps were out. The windows of the surrounding buildings were shattered and dark. There were a few abandoned cars, but none that seemed to be occupied. No people anywhere that I could see.

  “You want to get out here?” Katrina asked. “Be my guest. These buildings may look unoccupied, but I’m sure you’ll find someone to help you get home. Granted, that someone will probably not be the type of person you want to be alone with unless you have protection, and I’m not talking about condoms.”

  Why hadn’t I remembered my pepper spray? I could have used it on Katrina and then commandeered her vehicle.

  “Turn the car around,” I said through my teeth. I could feel fire in my chest, and the whiskey must have loosened something inside me, because my control was slipping.

  As though she could feel the heat emanating from me, Katrina drew back against her door.

  “I have to tell you something, and you’re not going to like it.”

  A humorless laugh ripped through my throat. I tilted my head back and spoke to the car’s ceiling. “There’s more not to like?”

  Katrina nodded. “I promise, I didn’t know anything about it until it was too late, okay? I found out right before I came to pick you up.”

  She drew in a long breath and let it out slowly. I wanted to grab her and shake the answer out of her.

  “Your brother is there.”

  For a moment, everything in me went quiet. My heart held still. “You’re lying,” I said. “Why would Parker be at the Rove?”

  “He went with Quentin. He snuck out, same as you.”

  My heart began to beat again. Slow beats, reverberating like isolated explosions in my ears.

  “He wants to be a Seeker, Mia. He wants to help us.”

  My hands were stones in my lap. If I was still drunk, I no longer felt it. I remembered what Jeremy had said to me the day before. Don’t go to the Waste, Mia. Stay out of the Waste and away from the Seekers.

  I looked at Katrina and said one word. “Drive.”

  22

  KATRINA DROVE US as close to the edge of the Waste as the ruined streets would allow, which wasn’t far. The Puente Hills Fault was a blind thrust fault, which meant the plates did not move from side to side, but up. The whole of the Waste had been lifted by about ten feet, and now stood on a sort of huge plateau several square miles wide.

  When Katrina was within fifty yards of the edge of the plateau—a wall of broken asphalt, concrete, and busted pipes—she turned into a parking lot in the Warehouse District, where several dozen other cars were parked. Ramps had been erected in numerous places around the plateau, but even if those ramps weren’t guarded by armed sentries, it would have been unwise to drive a car without reinforced tires into the Waste. When the skyscrapers fell, downtown had been buried in the shattered glass that rained from above. Those mountains of broken glass still lay like drifts of snow after a blizzard. We’d have to walk the rest of the way to wherever the Rove was.

  A feverish tingle raced over my skin as I stepped out of the car into the night air. I checked the sky, but its starless surface was without a trace of clouds. There was only the warm lemon moon, flanked by the eye of a roaming helicopter beaming down onto some other part of the city. A typical L.A. sky. No sign of rain, but my skin was tingling worse than ever, aching with fever, as though the phantom storm I sensed was just over the horizon.

  Emerging from the driver’s side of her car, Katrina noticed my expression. “You feel it, don’t you?” She gestured widely at the destruction. “The power of this place. The energy. It’s like it’s bleeding out of these cracks in the ground.” She rubbed her arms, but her eyes were bright with excitement. “It’s all around us.”

  Katrina was right. I felt it, whatever it was, like a magnet with an opposite charge from mine, pulling me closer.

  We crept silently toward the plateau wall, staying in the shadows. When I spotted the gun-toting sentry walking the perimeter of the plateau wall, I decided my burglar outfit was a serendipitous clothing choice.

  “This is a bad idea,” I hissed in Katrina’s ear. “We should find another way in. I don’t want to get shot today.”

  “They aren’t real bullets,” she insisted. “It’s a tranq gun. Besides, it’s not like the sentries are actual cops. They’re volunteers. If they shoot at you, they’ll probably miss.”

  It was a testament to how bad things were that this made me feel better.

  “Don’t worry,” Katrina said. “I’ve done this before.”

  “How many times?”

  “Lots. I know what I’m doing.”

  We moved closer to the plateau wall and the sentry, and then paused in the shadows. I barely breathed.

  Minutes passed, and finally the sentry moved on down the perimeter.

  “When I say go, we run. Climb the wall as quickly as possible.”

  “But what if—”

  “Go!”

  Katrina took off at a sprint toward the plateau wall, running silently in her spiked-heel boots over a thick carpet of gray cement dust. I rushed after her, my heart pounding so hard it was all I could hear. I smelled the sickly stench of dead flowers, and looked down to see dried petals scattered over the ground, the remains of wreaths and bouquets people had left to honor the dead. They softened the impact of my boots, muting my hurried steps.

  We scrambled up the plateau wall, using broken pipes like ladder rungs. I didn’t dare look back. Didn’t dare look anywhere. I imagined I could hear the sentry running toward us. My heartbeat became the sound of his boots, of his tranq gun firing at us.

  Katrina climbed like a monkey, even in her hot pants and corset. I was not so graceful and came close to impaling myself on jagged shoots of metal.

  We reached the top of the plateau without getting shot. Katrina took a quick look around before choosing a direction. She headed up Olive Street, toward Pershing Square, still keeping to the shadows.

  I breathed. We had made it.

  I hurried to catch up with Katrina, scrambling around hills of debris, tripping on the fractured pavement. Parts of the street jutted at haphazard angles, like pieces of a broken iceberg tilting into the ocean. It looked like a nuke had gone off in the heart of downtown.

  Katrina and I walked in silence. The only sound was glass crunching underfoot as we made our way along broken streets, avoiding rifts in the asphalt. I had to force myself to keep my eyes on the ground, on the street sparkling with glass dust, like new snow under moonlight. It was so quiet here, like a museum of the destruction rather than the real thing.

  “The sentries only guard the perimeter of the Waste, right?” I asked, keeping my voice down.

  Katrina shrugged. “Mostly.”

  I swallowed hard and tried to ignore the crawling feeling on my skin, and beneath it, too. The energy was under my fingernails, on my scalp, behind my eyes. Everywhe
re. The farther we traveled into the Waste, the more intense the feeling became, like some alien insects had dug their way inside me.

  Thirty minutes later, we were approaching Pershing Square, which looked like a construction crew had taken a hundred jackhammers to the cement grounds. The area was located one block south of where the skyscrapers used to be, so the whole place glittered with glass dust. But Pershing Square’s most distinguishing feature, a huge lavender column about the size of a small apartment building, still stood proudly among the ruins.

  We entered the square, climbing carefully over the shattered cement. Suddenly Katrina stopped, pressing a finger to her lips. “Shhh.” She tilted her head to listen, and I heard the slightest shuffling of footsteps.

  A voice from behind the purple column called out, “I do not find The Hanged Man.”

  I froze, looking around, but before my mind could finish running through all the scenarios of what was about to happen to us, Katrina called back, “Fear death by water.”

  A figure emerged from behind the column and came straight toward us. He wore black cargo pants and a black flak jacket and carried the tranq gun of a sentry.

  I tensed for the impact of a tranq dart.

  “It’s all right,” Katrina whispered to me. “He’s an usher.”

  “An usher?”

  “He’ll tell us where the Rove is.”

  “Oh.” I remembered the couple I’d eavesdropped on in line at school. The guy had said his brother’s friend was an usher and knew where to find the Rove.

  Katrina approached the usher, and he whispered something in her ear. Katrina nodded, her eyes getting bigger. Then the usher stepped back behind the purple column and Katrina returned to me. Her dark eyes were shining.

  “Let’s go,” she said, and headed up Fifth Street toward the Financial District. Again, I had to rush to catch up with her. My boots were so much more sensible than Katrina’s, and my legs were longer, but somehow she always managed to stay a few steps ahead of me.

  “What was that about with the hanged man and death by water?” I asked.

  “Rove protocol,” Katrina said. “If you don’t know the pass phrase, you don’t get the location of the Rove. It’s always a corresponding line from that poem, The Waste Land. T. S. Eliot. Ever read him?”

  “Poetry’s not really my thing.”

  “That doesn’t surprise me.” She smiled without teeth. “You don’t strike me as a person who likes to look below the surface of things. Too scary under there.”

  “Do me a favor,” I said. “Stop pretending you know me.”

  As we walked, I couldn’t take my eyes off the silvery-white pillar ahead of us, the Tower spearing the sky. I remembered what Jeremy had shown me; remembered standing atop the Tower as a storm gathered above me.

  And then I remembered something else he’d shown me.

  Me: walking through the Waste, stepping into nothingness and falling, falling, falling.

  I lowered my eyes in time to see the chasm I was about to step into.

  My reflexes raced to catch up to my awareness, but it was too late.

  I was going to fall.

  And I was going to die.

  23

  I WAS ABOUT to be murdered by gravity, but time slowed enough for me to feel a world of regret for the things I had done wrong, all the bad choices I’d made, the people I’d hurt.

  Maybe it was better this way. Easier for everyone if I disappeared into darkness. At least then I wouldn’t do the terrible thing Jeremy claimed I was going to do.

  My heart and my stomach stayed where they were as the rest of my body began the plummet.

  “Mia!”

  Katrina grabbed me and yanked me back from the brink of the chasm. She was a lot stronger than she looked. She threw me like I was stuffed with cotton, and I ended up on my butt on a pile of rubble five feet away.

  I tried to catch my breath, but my heart seemed to explode every time it beat, eating up all my oxygen.

  Katrina was breathing hard, as well. “You’ve got to watch where you’re going! Some of these rifts go down for hundreds of feet! You could have gotten yourself killed!”

  “Yeah. Yeah, okay. Thanks. Really.” I stood to brush the powdering of cement and glass dust off my pants. I couldn’t look at Katrina as I said again, “Thank you.”

  “Just … try to be more careful from now on, okay? We can’t afford to lose you.” She reached down to help me up.

  Don’t go to the Waste, Jeremy said in my mind, while the image of me falling, falling, falling into the chasm rode past on a carousel.

  Together, Katrina and I approached the edge of the chasm and peered down into its black, fathomless depths. Katrina picked up a fist-sized piece of broken concrete and dropped it into the crack. We listened. And listened.

  We didn’t hear it hit the bottom.

  My legs were shaky as we navigated our way around the chasm and started up Fifth Street again. Both of us kept our eyes glued to the ground until I asked once more where we were going. Where the Rove had taken up residence for the night.

  Katrina pointed. My eyes followed the path of her finger.

  She was pointing at the Tower.

  Of course she was.

  As we neared the Tower, other people began to emerge from the darkness, joining us in our march toward the Rove. Our group grew until we numbered about thirty. It was a party on the way to a party, everyone talking and laughing, passing flasks and joints and pipes, seemingly unconcerned about the sentries that might be patrolling the Waste. Katrina informed me—which she should have done earlier—that many of the sentries doubled as ushers, winning themselves free passage into the Rove.

  Katrina moved among the rovers as though they were old friends at a reunion, flirting shamelessly with the guys, ignoring scowls from girls she cut in on. I noticed the way she touched people before she spoke to them, testing for the Spark. Though she kept talking and laughing as she made the rounds, her expression was one of extreme concentration whenever she touched someone new.

  I searched the growing crowd for Parker, but I didn’t see him. Maybe he was already at the Rove.

  Katrina made her way back to me. She gestured at the rovers. “Would it kill you to help me out here?”

  “You seem to be doing fine,” I said. “Besides, I’m not here to help you. As soon as I find my brother, I’m gone.”

  “Oh, yeah? How do you plan to get home? Walk? Call a cab?”

  She had a point.

  “Look, I’ll make a deal with you,” Katrina said, flipping her nonexistent hair back over her shoulder and then frowning as she remembered it was now an inch long.

  “You always have a deal in mind, don’t you?”

  She shrugged and adjusted her corset. Her boobs were dangerously close to freeing themselves. “Find me three people with the Spark, and I promise I’ll help you find your brother and I’ll take you both home. Otherwise, you’re stuck here until I say it’s time to leave.”

  I turned to my right and picked out the person walking closest to me, a blonde wearing peacock feathers tied into her hair. I held out my hand to her. “Hi, I’m Mia. What’s your name?”

  “Jude.”

  Her eyes widened as our hands touched. So did mine. I felt a subtle hum of static crackling off her.

  That was easy.

  She snatched her hand back. I stared at her with my mouth open.

  “You felt it, too, didn’t you,” she said softly.

  I forced my mouth to work. “Yeah. Yeah, I did.”

  Her eyes went to mine, wide and frightened. “There’s something wrong with me,” she said, keeping her voice low. “It started the day of the quake. I was downtown, you know … when it happened.” She bit her lip. “Now I come here every night. I don’t even know why. I just … I can’t stay away. It’s like something pulls me here. Is that how it is for you?”

  Her eyes begged me to say yes, but I didn’t want to lie to her. “There’s someone you should t
alk to,” I told her instead. “She’ll explain everything.”

  I caught sight of Katrina and started to raise my hand to wave her over when I glimpsed a mark on Jude’s shoulder blade, branching out from below her long hair, almost entirely hidden. She saw me staring and moved her hair over the veiny red line on her shoulder.

  “It’s called a Lichtenberg figure,” she said, sounding defensive, as though I’d looked at the mark with disgust. “I’ve had it since the storm. It should have gone away by now, but … it hasn’t.”

  “You said you were downtown during the quake?”

  She nodded.

  “Were you …?”

  “Struck by lightning?” she finished for me. “No, but the woman standing next to me was. She had a heart attack and died on the spot. I tried to give her CPR, but she was gone like that.” Jude snapped her fingers. “I felt a kind of jolt when the woman was struck, though, almost like I’d been stung. My doctor said the lightning might have struck me indirectly, jumped off her and landed on me for a second.”

  “Excuse me,” I said to the girl, and left her standing there, looking confused.

  I hurried over to Katrina, grabbed her arm and dragged her away from the guy she was hanging on.

  “What?” she asked, irritated.

  I nodded at the girl, Jude. “One,” I said.

  Katrina smiled. “That was fast.” She started toward Jude, but I wouldn’t let go of her arm until she shook me off, wincing as though I’d been pinching her.