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by K A Riley

  “Twelfth Night,” I say. “Act two, scene five.”

  “Your knowledge of Shakespeare is…”

  “Pointless?”

  Rain squints at me under the hot sun. “I was going to say ‘amazing.’”

  “Dad said all of life’s mysteries can be found in the works of Shakespeare. Besides, you know Shakespeare as well as I do. You’re the one who helped me teach a bunch of his plays to the Juvens.”

  “Sure. But I didn’t memorize every line, act, scene, stage direction, and punctuation mark.” Despite her obvious fatigue, Rain seems to have gotten a second wind and manages a little laugh. “Did Shakespeare ever say anything about being on the run?”

  I nod. “Now bid me run, and I will strive with things impossible. Julius Caesar. Act two, scene one.”

  “Now that’s impressive,” Brohn says as he skips across a four-foot wide fissure in the ground and strides up next to me. His lips are chapped, and the sun has darkened his forehead and cheeks to a half-red, half-brown medium-rare. But he still manages to look handsome and even succeeds in offering up a bright grin.

  I give him a withering smile. The truth is, it scares me to recall things with so much clarity—even the most trivial details about stuff I never thought I particularly cared about. All I can guess is that it’s my strengthening link to Render that’s enhancing this particular skill. The closer I get to him, it seems, the closer I get to some weird, hyper-talented part of myself.

  “It’s nothing,” I say to Brohn with a dismissive wave, trying my best to shrug it off.

  “Sure,” Cardyn pants. “If by ‘nothing,’ you mean ‘the most amazing thing ever!’ And I thought Manthy was the one with the real super power.”

  “I don’t have a super power,” Manthy whines, clearly annoyed.

  “Well, you sure talked to the tech pretty good back in the Processor.”

  “Are you accusing me of being a traitor or some kind of Modified?”

  “I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m just saying.”

  “Well, you can cram your ‘just saying’ up your—”

  “Manthy!” I snap. “Cardyn! Let’s focus on getting to that rock formation up ahead before it gets too dark out here. I promise, you can snipe at each other all day tomorrow if it makes you happy. We need to get through tonight. We can make it to the wooded area where we saw the smoke by mid-day tomorrow if the sun doesn’t kill us and if the two of you don’t murder each other first.”

  Card mumbles, “Okay, fine,” and hangs his head like I’ve just whacked him on the rump with a rolled-up newspaper. He apologizes to Manthy, but she balls up her fists and glares at him until he looks away. I can’t help but chuckle to myself. Manthy may not talk much, but when she does, it’s usually to bicker like this with Cardyn. They’re slowly devolving into squabbling little kids, and I’m turning into the exasperated mom, arms stretched out between them, trying to keep them from slap-fighting with each other as we struggle to survive the daily ordeal of our exodus. Brohn seems to enjoy my dilemma and grins every time he sees me fed up and ready to push Cardyn and Manthy down the nearest steep embankment.

  “Good thing they have you,” he tells me quietly. “Otherwise, they really might just kill each other.”

  “They’ll need to stand in line behind me,” I grumble. “I’ve got enough on my mind without having to worry about their pointless bickering.”

  “I don’t know what they’d do without you,” he laughs, reaching for my hand and squeezing it for a second before letting go. “Actually, I’m not sure what any of us would do without you.”

  “Let’s hope we don’t have to find out.” I’m trying to sound stoic, but the combination of Brohn’s touch and knowing that he worries about the possibility of life without me gives me tingles and a smile I can’t quite suppress.

  Cardyn turns his attention from Manthy to me. “Hey, Kress. Do you really think Granden was a…what do you call it…double agent?” He’s asked me this before. I think he’s waiting for me to change my answer. It’s like he can’t get his mind around the possibility that a person doesn’t have to be one thing or another, good or bad, innocent or corrupt, a prison guard or a helping hand. He can be all of the above.

  “Actually, yes,” I tell Card. “I still think there was more to him all along than we realized. Why else would he help us? And did you notice how he was the only one who ever really pulled us aside and talked with us one-on-one?”

  Brohn says he didn’t really notice that. “But then again,” he adds, “I was too busy trying to earn points and not get shot.”

  “Ugh,” Rain half-groans, half-growls. “I still can’t believe they tricked us into performing like circus monkeys like that. Racking up points just to help them determine who to keep and who to kill.”

  “It’s embarrassing,” Card agrees. “I wish I could’ve been there with you when Hiller blew her brains out. Might have made it all worth it.”

  “It didn’t,” I say. “All it did was keep us from learning the whole truth. All Hiller did was give us a teaser. She made sure the rest of the secrets died with her.”

  “It was her last act of torture,” Manthy says, mostly to herself.

  We all nod in quiet agreement.

  “There are others out there,” I say at last, breaking the glum silence and pointing to the rising column of smoke that has become our magnetic North.

  “What kind of others, do you think?” Rain asks.

  “Not sure. Maybe others like us. Other escaped Seventeens. Maybe even Juvens and Neos. We need to get to them. We need to organize. We need to fight. After all, it’s what we’ve been trained for.”

  “No,” Brohn says. “We were being set up to get killed.”

  Rain shakes her head and begs to differ. “No. From what you told us Hiller said, we were being created as weapons by our own government. They were going to train us, brainwash us like they did to Terk, and turn us loose on our own people.”

  “You’re both right,” I say. “About every bit of it. But the bottom line is that we were trained. Let’s not forget that. We know more now than we did before. We can do more than we ever could. They didn’t expect us to get to use our training, especially not against them. They figured we’d be dead or else totally under their control by now. It doesn’t matter why we learned to fight. It’s up to us to decide what to do with what we learned. Just getting away isn’t good enough. We can’t be the only ones who know what’s going on. There’ve got to be others out there who know what the Order really is. Or, rather, what it isn’t.”

  “And if not?” Kella asks. Her voice is weak, barely a whisper. I think it’s the first thing she’s said in three days. “If no one else knows? If no one else is out here?”

  “If not,” I say, “then it’s our job to expose what’s happened. The people, our people, need to know the government is also the enemy, that they’re trying to infiltrate us at our most vulnerable, going after kids in isolated towns, and that they’ve been doing it for ten years now.”

  “At least ten,” Cardyn says.

  “That’s true,” Rain agrees. “We may have solved one mystery, but there are a lot more out there we need to figure out.”

  Cardyn plops his freckled hand onto Rain’s shoulder. “Mysteries are your specialty,” Normally, he’d say this in a teasing way, but he says it like a compliment. And he’s right to do so. Back in the Processor, Rain got us through most of the puzzles in the Escape Rooms and pretty much saved our lives a dozen times along the way. She’s a born problem-solver with a mind made to figure things out.

  “Either way,” I say, “we can’t do this alone. We need help.”

  I tip my head in the direction of the smoke rising above the treetops. “Dad used to say, ‘Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.’”

  “Did your dad happen to mention anything about how going toward fire is good way to get burned?”

  I give Cardyn a hard glare over my shoulder, and he holds up his hands in surren
der. I hate to admit it, but he’s right. I’m just hoping that this time, where’s there’s smoke, there’s also salvation.

  Card is right about something else, too. I also feel embarrassed about the Recruitment. All I knew for so long was that I wanted to a member of Special Ops, rise through the ranks, win the war, and be celebrated as part of the Cohort that finally expelled the Eastern Order and restored our democracy. Instead, I got tricked. We all did. It’s like one of those experiments we learned about from a psychology textbook in the Valta. We thought we were the scientists. Instead, we were the rats in the maze, scrambling around on a greedy hunt for a piece of cheese that didn’t even exist. The fact that the embarrassment is shared with my fellow Seventeens doesn’t make the whole experience any less humiliating.

  We keep walking for another hour until we reach the outcropping I’d seen before.

  The temperature has dropped off a cliff, and we go from sweat-soaked to chilled-to-the-bone in what feels like just a few minutes. It’s too late and too cold to keep going. Kella is in bad shape, physically and emotionally. She’s been letting us help her along for weeks now, but I know she wouldn’t complain if we left her behind. Not that we’d ever do that. In her mind, I don’t think she sees the point in going on. I can’t totally blame her. I get those pangs of doubt in my mind, too. I’ve got two voices in my head. One asks, “Why bother? There’s nothing out there but more pain and more loss.” It tells me that every step could be bringing us that much closer to death. The other voice disagrees. It says that every step could be getting us all that much closer to life. Then there’s the third voice in my head. The one everyone else hears as a demonic kraa! That voice soars up ahead and calls on me to trust myself and to be the leader our Conspiracy needs right now.

  Guided by only the thinnest slivers of moonlight, we find a decent place to stop. We set up camp in a cave under an inviting rock formation. Fortunately, the cave is empty and not too deep, and the temperature inside is stable, comfortable even. We kick small rocks to the side to clear an area of the floor suitable for sleeping. A natural shelf running along one side of the cave makes a perfect perch for Render. He struts along the narrow ledge, his head lightly bobbing until he finds just the right spot. He tucks his head against his wing and, like us, settles in for what we hope is our last night on the run for a while. If we can get to that smoke, we can get to people. It’s a risk, but chances are that anyone out in the woods will either help us or else point us in the direction of safety. At least they’re not likely to be soldiers. Not out here.

  For right now, my brain is a baked and muddled mess. If I don’t get some sleep, I’m going to be beyond useless.

  While we’ve been on the run, we’ve been sleeping in a circle with our heads together like we did back in the Silo. Exhausted to the bone, we set ourselves up this way again. We tuck ourselves into our black military-style jackets. Brohn settles into a spot next to me with Rain just over on his other side. As usual, Rain is curled up tight like a potato bug.

  Brohn and I both sleep on our backs. When his hand touches mine, I look over, and he smiles at me through the gray gloom. I smile back and try to say something, but my lips won’t move, and my eyes start to flutter shut from exhaustion. His touch is comforting and gentle, a reminder that he’s still a protective force in my life. He somehow manages to make me feel small yet strong.

  But with all that’s happened and so much unknown left to come, my mind has been a constant, dizzying whirlwind of fear and doubt. Not just about our past or our future, but about our present. I can’t help wondering what we’re doing. Does Brohn feel the same way about me that I do for him? What do we do? How do we allow ourselves to get close when tomorrow might bring death?

  As his hand reaches for me, the whirlwind goes still. His fingers close around mine, and I suddenly feel like I’ve got an anchor in a hurricane. His smile and bright blue eyes are the last things I see before I drift off.

  I don’t know how much time has passed when the deep sleep I’ve fallen into is interrupted by a series of earth-shattering screams coming from somewhere outside of the cave.

  3

  Startled awake, I bolt upright.

  “There’s someone out there,” Rain says, leaping up to one knee, eyes wide and on full alert.

  Cardyn shakes his head as the rest of us clamber to our feet. “Sounds like there’s an entire army out there. Plus, some escaped zoo animals!”

  I glare at him and throw on my jacket as Brohn pulls out one of the pilfered knives. Just for good measure, he also grabs a fist-sized rock from the ground and inches along in a half-squat toward the opening of the cave leading back out into the desert. I start to follow, but he waves me back.

  “Let me just have a look first,” he whispers. He holds up his hand, palm out with the knife handle wedged against his thumb, and inches forward.

  Rain and I follow after him anyway, leaving Cardyn and Manthy to keep an eye on Kella who’s awake but looking half-dead. Not surprising that she doesn’t react. She doesn’t care if she lives or dies, so what does she care if something goes bump in the night?

  Slipping from the mouth of the cave with Rain and me just behind either shoulder, Brohn shuffles out into the desert gloom.

  The sound of shouting and a serious scuffle rises up from behind a nearby sand dune. There are multiple voices, and my heart does a little tap-dance in my chest at the thought that the Processor goons might have tracked us down. No. It can’t be. Why would they be arguing loudly with each other if their mission was to hunt us down and kill us? Based on what we know and what we’ve seen them do, if their mission was to take our lives, we’d be dead by now. And if they wanted us captured, we’d be chained up and gagged in the back of a transport truck.

  I try to tap into Render’s mind, but he’s in a deep sleep. I could push myself in, startle him awake. But that would be counter-productive. Besides, by the time he got himself oriented enough to scout out the situation, whoever is making all this noise could decide to turn their attention to us.

  Brohn takes several more steps in the direction of the commotion. Like the sound of the voices and shuffling bodies, his footsteps are muffled by the sand but magnified by the stillness of the desert night. I follow him as closely as I can with Rain clinging to the back of my jacket as we go. With all the sharp rocks, deep crevasses, and generally unpredictable terrain, she’s wise to stay close. I follow as carefully and quickly as I can behind Brohn.

  He skids to a stop and peers around the sand dune and over a wall of serrated rocks jutting up from the ground like enormous crocodile teeth. Rain and I bump into each other as we come to an abrupt stop behind him. Together, the three of us peer around the rock formation into what turns out to be a small clearing. It’s still the dead of night, but there’s enough moonlight and enough stars out to give us a shadowy but otherwise fairly good look at the scene.

  Two men and a woman, probably about our parents’ age—or rather, the age our parents would have been—are shouting and shoving each other in a three-way free-for-all. Right in front of us and thankfully unaware of our presence, one of the men tackles the other man. The two of them slam to the ground, rolling and punching each other in the shoulders and ribs. Swinging her arms wildly, the woman leaps on top of both of them. In the dark and because of the flurry of motion, I can’t tell if she’s trying to pull them off of each other or if she’s trying to kill them both.

  The three of them roll around some more on the rocky ground, screaming, coughing, and kicking up clouds of dark red dust while we look on, baffled.

  Before I can stop him, Brohn leaps into the fray and grabs one of the men by the back of his tattered jacket, dragging him out of the pile. Even after all we’ve been through—the months in the Processor and the weeks we’ve spent on the run—Brohn is remarkably strong. For a second, he reminds me of Terk: large and in charge, slinging a full-grown man through the air like I might toss my boots across a room.

  Startled by B
rohn’s sudden appearance and intervention, the other man and the woman leap to their feet, their eyes wide with terror.

  “Who are you?” the woman asks. Her voice is broken and hollow, and she’s tucked her chin practically into her chest in an act of fear and submission.

  “We’re not going to hurt you,” Brohn assures her, his chest heaving slightly.

  He has more faith in our position and abilities than I do. I’m more worried that we might be the ones who end up getting hurt in this situation. My faith in my apparent skills hasn’t yet caught up to all the combat training I’ve done, and I’m not eager to test myself out on three strange adults who might be crazy enough or desperate enough to attack us without provocation and leave us for dead in the middle of nowhere.

  Brohn has dropped the rock he was holding as a weapon, but he’s got one hand tucked behind his back, so I know he’s ready to flash his knife just in case. He exchanges a quick look with me and Rain that says Don’t worry. We’re in control here. Rain and I nod our acknowledgement and follow his lead.

  Even in the near total dark, I can see now that Brohn has read the scene correctly. Now that we’ve taken measure of the situation, I realize the three adults are in no position to hurt us. They’re breathing hard and barely able to stand. Whatever we’ve been through while on the run these past few weeks looks like a summer vacation compared to the mess the strangers seem to be in.

  “We were captured by the Patriot Army,” the woman sobs. Her shoulders slump down in the resignation of total defeat. “We escaped and joined up with a Resistance Colony.” Her eyes are barely focused. Her hands tremble at her sides. “Back in Santa Fe. They tracked us all down to the St. Francis Cathedral where we’d set up headquarters. I don’t know how many of us they killed. The three of us might be the only ones who made it out.”