Summer Ruins

by Trisha Leigh

  “You need a place where we can either secretly swap your praseodymium for the real stuff, or kidnap an Other and inject it…” Griffin muses aloud.

  Greer snaps her fingers a moment later. “The Harvest Site. It’s more controlled, and I bet Deshi knows where they keep the stash there.”

  He nods, scooting to the edge of his mattress. “I do. They keep a small cache in the Prime family’s quarters and the rest in the extraction tent.”

  “Obviously the two of you can help us get there, but those tents are both monitored all the time. How are we going to switch it without being detected?” Lucas questions.

  “You four aren’t going anywhere. Greer and I can take care of it.”

  “But if all the Wardens at the Harvest Site are out of commission, the Others will realize something’s going on. Without the element of surprise, our plan won’t work.” Panic clenches in my stomach. We have one shot and we may never get another. We can’t let them figure out our plan before we have the chance to put it into action.

  “We have to test it, Summer. If we wait until the Summer Celebration and it doesn’t work, then what?”

  “I know, Pax. I just… We have to think of everything before we send them in there.”

  “Once again, Red, you underestimate my sister and I.”

  I look up to give Griffin a piece of my mind, but when I see two Lucases standing by the window instead of Griffin and Greer, my mouth falls open. “What in the… How?”

  They shimmer and shift, turning back into themselves, matching grins included.

  “How did we not know you could shift into people, not just animals?” Lucas demands, looking freaked out that two more of him were standing here a minute ago.

  Griffin shrugs. “You didn’t need to know. If you’d thought about it at all, the possibility would have occurred to you. Most likely.”

  “So you can mimic two Wardens, sneak in, and switch their shots when no one is looking. That’s good. But what if they all die, or it works like we think and they’re too sick to continue checking in or writing reports or whatever they do so the Prime knows everything’s working smoothly?” There are so many variables we don’t know, and all of them make me nervous.

  “The Harvest Site Wardens check in morning and night through the hive.” Deshi’s voice is sure and also filled with awe. “It could work. You two have access to the hive. Can you mimic the Wardens in there, though?”

  Griffin rolls his eyes at us not understanding his greatness again.

  Even his arrogance doesn’t bother me anymore, not since he’s been so careful with Greer. It’s not an act, exactly, but as he’s tried to tell me since we met, kind of inborn. He can’t help it, and the glints of the same egotism I’ve seen in Greer are just as genuine. In spite of how difficult they can be, I’ve grown very fond of them both, though I would never tell Griffin.

  Not that he would care.

  “So if our praseodymium does work, and it knocks them out of commission, you can check in for them so the Prime won’t suspect,” I reiterate, just to make sure we’re all on the same page.

  “Okay. Okay, this could work. Can you go first thing tomorrow, after they do their morning check-in?” Lucas asks, his eyes shining.

  “It’s almost seven at night there now,” Greer calculates. “Seven at night tomorrow.”

  “What?” Leah’s face twists in confusion. “How is that possible?”

  “It’s already tomorrow night there, trust me. Which means we should head down in about ten hours.” Greer checks with her brother for confirmation, who nods.

  “That’ll work. We’ll eavesdrop on their morning report in the hive so we know how it goes for the future.”

  “What about the people in the mines?” Leah’s face shuts down, her emotions buried, making me wonder how badly her time there affected her.

  “They’re going to know something’s up—usually there are forty or fifty Wardens running around. If there are only two, it’ll be obvious,” Lucas tells Griffin and Greer.

  They shake their heads in tandem, then Griffin takes the lead. “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it, yeah? We don’t even know if your little science experiment is going to work. Either way, they’re on an island made of ice on the other side of the world. They can’t hurt your plan in any way, even if things get out of control.”

  An idea plants itself in the back of my mind, something to do with all of those unveiled people, but I ignore it for now. I don’t want to get my hopes up about the praseodymium we’ve designed until we see if it works.

  “How often do they take the injections down there?” Greer purses her lips, as though she’s trying to decide what else they need to know before taking on this mission.

  I get the sense that she likes that we’ve asked for help, that we’ve given her a job to do that will keep her mind off Nat. It’s probably the real reason she decided to train us to fight.

  “I don’t know for sure, but not more than once a day,” Deshi responds. “They don’t get shipments all that regularly and because of the temperature there, don’t need them as often.”

  After another half an hour, the Sidhe seem convinced that they’re armed with every bit of information we have to offer. We walk over to the lab, where Laura, Katie, and Jordan are taking a turn fooling around with the liquid-to-powder ratio, and they hand over full jars, enough to fill fifty syringes.

  It’s everything they’ve made until now, and we’ll need triple that in the next couple of days. When Griffin and Greer leave, still intent on jumping from place to place so that the Others can’t trace them, Pax, Lucas, Deshi, Leah, and I don protective gear and start the arduous process of making more of our praseodymium.

  We might be wasting our time because if it doesn’t work on the Wardens at the Harvest Site, we’ll have to start from scratch. But if it does work, we’re going to need enough to swap out daily injections for the remaining two hundred or so Others at the Summer Celebration.

  It had better work. We don’t have a backup plan other than seventeen kids with questionable fighting skills, and time is running out.

  Chapter 34.

  We head back to Perkins Hall when Sophie, Ben, and Christian show up at the lab the next morning. The Goblert appears in our path in a cloud of sparkling dust once again, a daily nightmare none of us can hope to escape.

  The morning light brushes his pallid skin, and the dew clinging to my ankles sends shivers up and down my bare legs, despite the warmth. Dax stumbles and falls to a knee, bloodier than on previous mornings. Instead of getting up he lies flat in the grass, showing us the four names slashed into his back. They almost cover Emmy and Reese’s names.

  Garret Crawford.

  My heart stops at the name of Lucas’s Danbury father. It climbs into my throat until it blocks my ability to breathe, and terror that all of the Danbury people will be listed today pushes black clouds in front of my eyes.

  They clear and I find the courage to read the rest of the list. Anna Walters. Henry Jenkins. Mary Clark.

  Mrs. Clark. My Iowa mother, who fed me chickpeas at every opportunity and knitted me hats and scarves and gloves that always matched but never kept me warm.

  But no Mr. Morgan. Not today.

  I lean forward, pressing my hands into my knees while I try not to puke on the Goblert. I straighten up to see Lucas’s ashen face, and matching expressions of grief, anger, and guilt marching across Pax' and Deshi’s.

  Deshi kneels next to Dax, gently touching the names. As always, there isn’t anything we can do for him but feel badly. After a moment he lets us help him up, then he disappears.

  The clock in our room reads eight-fifteen. Griffin and Greer are in the hive right now, deciding when they should arrive at the Harvest Site and start switching out syringes. The earliest we expect to hear from them is after their check-in tonight, which Deshi says is at eight. Eight in the morning, eight at night. If I’ve calculated right, that should be just after 1 a.m. our time.
>
  “Let’s get cleaned up and sleep for a few hours, then we’ll go back and help in the lab,” Lucas suggests in a hoarse voice.

  “I agree with the sleep, but I want to check in with the scouts before we go back to the lab,” Pax says, digging fresh clothes out of the dresser and heading for the door.

  The people not in the lab spy on the site of the Summer Celebration, which I still haven’t seen in person. We need to know when the Others arrive so we can start trying to figure out where they keep their traveling caches of dymium. The Celebration lasts a week, so they have to bring some with them.

  We follow Pax out of our bedroom and into the cleansing room. I’m so tired that I wash my hair and shave my legs on autopilot. The thought of the bed, of closing my eyes on the pillow, sounds better than anything. But when I step into the room, intent on sleep, I find a crowd larger than the four people I’m expecting. It takes a minute to catalog their faces, but it’s Phil, Katie, and Jordan—the kids who were scouting.

  I glower at Pax. “I thought we were going to talk to them after we slept.”

  “I didn’t get them, Summer. They have something to tell us.”

  Phil’s bright eyes shine with a mixture of fear and anticipation. “The Others are here.”

  ***

  In the end, we decide to forgo the few hours of sleep and go check out the development ourselves. Phil and the girls said the Others must have arrived overnight because they slept in the old book depository building and when they went back to the site early this morning the Others were there unloading equipment.

  Worry tightens the muscles in my calves as the four of us make the two-hour walk to the site of the Summer Celebration—after all, now that the Others are in Dallas, they could be anywhere, and we don’t want to run into them. We take care to stay off the main roads, a decision I’m happy about when more than one rider whizzes by within hearing distance.

  I trust my friends since they’ve been to the site and I haven’t, and they lead me down a littered path to what clearly used to be a large, tan-colored building but is now a half-standing pile of tan-colored bricks and Sheetrock. A huge, white broken statue of a woman lies cracked and forgotten among chunks of plaster, vines and small trees crawling over her torso and shoulders. The front of the place must have been a huge window, because now it’s nothing but a gaping hole that used to connect the two halves. The right side still stands precariously, but the left spills tons of rubble into the surrounding concrete lots and encroaching nature.

  “What is this place?” I whisper as Pax leads us through the yawning chasm in the front of the building and to the intact right side.

  “Don’t know what it used to be, but now it’s a place with a good vantage point of the Summer Celebration.” Deshi smiles, and he looks better than he has in a few days. More sure of himself, somehow.

  At the top of six flights of rickety stairs, we enter a room with a high ceiling and another wide hole in the wall that used to house an impressive window, most likely. Evidence of our scouts’ intrusion blinks everywhere, from the discarded blankets to food wrappers and water bottles.

  Pax and Deshi flop on their bellies on one of the blankets, the sound of crunching glass beneath their bodies loud in the silence, and peer toward what must be the site of the Summer Celebration. Lucas kneels on the second blanket, and when he motions me down beside him, I join them.

  Far below and to the south, bright tents pop up from the ground. Their canopies are white with vibrant red strips, and smaller ones line the perimeter of a cleared expanse of grass and intact concrete. I’ve been told for years about the tents, of the food and fortune-tellers and games that make the Summer Celebration the highlight of everyone’s year but mine.

  I don’t recall anyone mentioning the skeletal remains of a group of hulking metal machines in the center of it all. The highest is a giant wheel standing upright like a rusted sentinel, little cages suspended from the spokes. Smaller machinery surrounds it, all twisted and rusted, indefinable but creepy, the way the Observatory Pod felt to me the first time the Others took me there. They seem alive, somehow, as though their metal bones will screech and creak to life any moment, reaching out to devour unsuspecting humans who wander too close to that weathered graveyard.

  All the way at the back, toward us, are a single black tent and a large communication device. An expanse of seats faces it, too many rows to count. That must be where they run movies or videos for the attendees. On the opposite side of the unused metal equipment sit two large tents, white with black stripes instead of red.

  “Now that I’ve seen it, can you guys tell me what goes on here?” I want to understand what I’m looking at so the logistics of the next few days make more sense.

  Pax doesn’t take his eyes off the ground below while he explains. “The red-and-white tents are where everyone stays unless the Others tell you to move. There’s food like you’ve never tasted—tons of sugar, stuff fried in grease—things they don’t let us have most of the time. And there are games in some of the tents, like tossing rings onto bottles or grabbing apples out of tanks of water with your hands tied behind your back. You get the idea.”

  Deshi picks up where Pax left off. “On the screen at the back they show a video about how the Others came to Earth and the people welcomed them. It’s about how terrible things were before, how their greater knowledge and technology saved us from destroying our own planet and annihilating our species. Basically what they teach you in Primer Cell but more intense.”

  I’ve never seen that video. I wonder if it would have made a difference all these years spent wondering how things were before—if I would have believed the story the Others are telling. “What’s in the black-striped tents?”

  “None of us has ever been in them, but we think it’s where they purge doldrums for the people on the summer purge rotation. They’re big enough to hold several cots at a time plus the mind-mapping equipment they need,” Lucas says, pointing as he shares his thoughts.

  The reminder of the purging and the purge schedule zips shivers down my spine. The mental image of the Others hooking up people’s brains to machines, of the silvery hats that changed Mr. Morgan’s and the Healer’s memories the night Mrs. Morgan Broke, makes it worse. It’s how the Others keep everyone from Breaking due to the emotions trapped behind their veils—they use the machines to drain all of the happy, the sad, the mad feelings that have built up over the past year.

  Humans would go banana balls without the purging, and according to Cadi many did, but it’s still horrible.

  “What about that little all-black tent off to the side?”

  “We don’t know. None of us have seen it before.” Pax picks up an object, something black and plastic, and puts it to his eyes. “Maybe it’s where they keep their own equipment.”

  “And their cache of praseodymium,” Deshi adds.

  “What is that thing?” I ask Pax, who’s staring down at the mysterious black tent through the weird contraption.

  “They’re like glasses, sort of, but they make everything closer.” Lucas chuckles. “We’ve had a heck of a time convincing Christian not to take them apart to see how they work, but we knew they’d come in handy once the Others arrived.”

  “Found them in a different part of the science building—biology,” Pax says, handing them over.

  Once they’re settled over my eyes, the scene below rushes so close I feel as though I could reach out and touch the tops of the striped tents. Breath catches in my throat when the first Warden comes into view, carrying a crate from an idling rider and ducking into the nearest tent. I scan the area and find it swarming with tan-and-black uniforms, all hauling paraphernalia here and there, intent on their duties.

  I sweep up toward the black-and-white striped tents and spot several white-clad Others, like the ones who are trained in refreshing. It looks as though the guys are right about the purging taking place inside those tents.

  There isn’t any movement around the sm
aller black tent as long as I watch. After a few minutes I tire of holding the contraption to my face and pass it to Lucas. “We need to figure out where they stay. I mean, that little black tent might be where they keep provisions during the Celebration, but they have to congregate elsewhere.”

  Deshi and Pax shoot me strange looks. “No one sleeps during the Summer Celebration. It last three days, but you’re never tired,” Pax says, his brow furrowing. “I never thought about it before, but they must slip everyone something in the food to keep us awake.”

  “How do you get here, though?”

  “No one knows. You go to sleep the night before and then wake up in the middle of the smells and lights and music. Same thing when it’s over. You’re playing a game or stuffing your face, then everything goes shiny, like it’s raining—”

  “Glitter,” Deshi finishes for Pax.

  The Goblerts. Huh.

  “Okay, so if they don’t rest the entire time, maybe that black tent is where—” I stop talking when Lucas sucks in a quick breath, the contraption hiding his eyes trained on the tent I was just talking about.

  I scoot to the edge of the opening, sunshine falling on my face and hair, and squint to get a better look. Four riders have pulled up behind the mystery tent, and eight Wardens are out and opening the back hatches. They pull out marble cages like the ones we saw at the Underground Core, made of the same thick, power-blocking bars that had held us captive.

  Inside are the Elements. I don’t know about the boys, but for the first time it hits me that whatever we decide—to banish the Others, to kill them, to let them suffer and die—will be our parents’ fate as well.

  Chapter 35.

  We watch the preparations for the rest of the day, talking softly on occasion but avoiding the topic foremost on my mind—if we should handle our parents differently than the rest of the Others. They’re still full-blooded Deasuprans and presumably still need the praseodymium as much as the rest.