“You okay?” I ask.
Ducky waves me off like he gets tortured by space invaders all the time. “I’m just glad it was you this time,” he replies. “The last ten times, the guards didn’t think it was funny.”
I move to Ducky’s side opposite from Marnie, and we help lift him gingerly to his feet. All my friends are alive. I will count myself lucky.
“I don’t reckon I’ll ever understand yer particular brand of humor,” Marnie says, looking at the two of us as we step out into the hallway.
“After the world doesn’t end, I’ve got about a hundred flat pics for you to watch,” Ducky tells her.
“Elvie, what’s the plan?” Cole asks as he takes my place at Ducky’s side, shouldering the brunt of the weight. Cole examines my handcuffs, and then Bok Choy.
“Who’s this?” he asks.
“Cole, it’s Bok Choy. Little naked boy from the Echidna?”
“Holy shit,” Cole whistles. “You don’t still bite, do you?”
“I, uh, no? Not recently,” Bok Choy stammers.
“Can we trust him?” Cole asks me.
“We can trust him. We need to get out of here, see if we can find the ship. Hopefully it’s where we left—”
“Halt right there!” a voice shouts at us from down the hallway. Three Jin’Kai guards are running toward us, weapons drawn. “What’s the meaning of this?”
“Uh, prisoner transfer,” Bok Choy says, reaching to his belt. “I have the order right here.”
“Stay that hand, freak,” the lead guard says, sticking his weapon right in Bok Choy’s face. So I guess the prejudice against Marsden’s pet projects extends even to his own loyal men. I can see why he’s reluctant to have his superiors see his work before he has acquired the desired results. Bok Choy reluctantly moves his hand away from the blaster at his hip. The guard looks over his shoulder to the other guards. “Call it in. Let’s see what Marsden—”
Before the dude can finish, Bok Choy has knocked the gun out of his hand and fallen on him. Cole springs into action immediately, ditching Ducky and leaping at one of the other guards. You can just tell that all this imprisonment has left Cole aching for a good fight, because I don’t think he’s ever whaled on anybody so enthusiastically. The third Jin’Kai turns his gun on Ducky, who immediately crumples to the floor—which seems to confuse the hell out of the guard. He looks up at Marnie for a split second in his confusion, giving Ducky the opening I guess he was looking for. In a move way more bold and coordinated than I ever would’ve expected of him, Ducky jumps across the floor and tries to leg-tackle his would-be attacker. The guard is thrown off balance for a brief second, and in that time Marnie does a nifty jump-kick move, popping his gun out of his grip and onto the floor. The guard counters with a backhand slap that sends Marnie crashing into the wall, dazed. Then he pulls one leg free from Ducky and kicks him hard in the stomach, eliciting a pitiful yelp.
Cue Elvie’s turn to play the hero.
I lean down to reach for one of the fallen weapons—only to realize that the cuffs that I had loosely draped over my wrists have actually locked into place, the coiled metal bands giving me less than fifteen centimeters of leeway. My momentary hesitation gives the guard a chance to grab me by the arm and toss me hard at the wall. I land on Marnie—lucky for me but not for her. If she wasn’t out cold before, she certainly is now. I decide to pull a classic Ducky and feign my own unconsciousness, which seems to work. Through the slits of my eyelids I see the guard swivel in place, trying to remove Ducky from his ankle.
That’s when I spring up, jumping as high as I can and wrapping my manacled hands around the dude’s throat. With all my might I pull back, pressing the bands deep into his neck. He jerks back, instinctively reaching for the cuffs in an attempt to pry them away. I press my knee hard into his back, using the leverage to really go for gold. The guard’s gagging, unable to get any air, and his whole head goes red, the veins in his forehead throbbing.
It dawns on me in that moment that I am actively strangling another person, with the closest thing to my bare hands that I could get without leaving fingerprints on his throat. And I falter—just enough for the guard to get his fingers underneath the bands. Rather than thanking me for my momentary flash of humanity/mercy/what have you, once the Jin’Kai has a solid grip on the cuffs, he lifts them (and me) up, flipping me over his head and down hard onto my back.
Now I’m the one with the wind knocked out of me. Free from Ducky’s grasp, the guard dashes to pick up his gun. But as his hand brushes across the weapon, he is tackled from behind by Bok Choy. Unfortunately for our plucky little gang, the guard is low to the ground, and Bok Choy comes in too fast. The guard easily uses Bok Choy’s momentum to slide past him, scooping up the weapon and spinning around to line up a shot.
The crackle of energy sings through the air, and sends the guard flailing from the wound in his chest. I look up from my spot on the floor to see Bok Choy’s savior—expecting it to be Cole, or Marnie, or perhaps Ducky (hey, anything is possible). Instead I see everyone in our little melee, including the remaining two Jin’Kai guards, frozen in place, staring at Chloe, her weapon still raised, standing only a few paces away.
The girl sure knows how to make an entrance.
“What are you doing?” one of the other guards asks. Not the most famous of last words, but they’ll have to do, because with two more dead-on shots from Chloe, that’s the end of our last two adversaries. Well, original adversaries.
“Chloe?” Bok Choy says, hunched in a crouched position amidst the pile of dead Jin’Kai. “Put the gun down, Chloe.”
Chloe does not comply. Instead she shifts her aim and points the gun right at me.
“You,” she says. Her voice is as still and cold as ice. “If I let you go, you’ll take him with you? You’ll be able to help him?”
Everyone looks between the two of us. Except for Marnie, of course, since she’s out cold. I stand up very slowly. It’s still hard to breathe, and I take little gasps in an attempt to build up a reserve of air.
“I . . . don’t . . . even know . . . what they . . . did . . . to him,” I say. When you’ve got an unstable person pointing a gun at you, the truth is usually your best strategy to remain unshot.
Chloe straightens her gun arm, making her gun more pointy-at-me’d than it already was. “Will you help him?” she asks again.
“What are you talking about?” Bok Choy says. He’s edging carefully toward Chloe, probably in an attempt to put himself between the two of us.
“I’ll try everything I can,” I say. “I can’t promise any more than that without being a liar.”
“Everything in your power,” Chloe presses.
“In my power, and in the considerably greater power of my friends.”
Chloe lowers her gun and turns back down the hallway from which she came. “Come on, then. Let’s get going.”
Bok Choy gives me a curious look, then trots after Chloe. Cole has picked Marnie up off the ground, with Ducky uneasily supporting her head in an attempt to be helpful.
“What was that all about?” Cole asks me.
“Not now, Cole,” I say.
“But who does she want you to help?”
“Not now, Cole.”
We all make it to the end of the hallway, but then Chloe breaks left as Bok Choy heads to the right.
“Wait,” Bok Choy tells her. “This way.”
“Their ship is up on the factory subhangar,” Chloe replies, looking over her shoulder but not breaking her stride. “Marsden gave it to the Governor as payment for my shooting his men.”
“Well, at least it’s closer than we thought,” I say.
But Bok Choy still won’t move. “Chloe, we have to get the others,” he says.
“There’s no time,” she answers.
“Wait,” I say, stopping dead in my trac
ks. “What others?”
“There’s no time. We have to go now.”
“What. Others?”
Chloe harrumphs and folds her arms across her chest in a pretty dead-on me impersonation. At least it would be if she realized she were doing it. She looks at Bok Choy expectantly.
“The other girls,” Bok Choy tells me.
The words hit me like a ton of bricks. The other girls. Could it possibly be the girls from the Hanover School? Ramona. Natty. Maybe even . . .
“Where are they?” I ask Bok Choy. “How many of them are here?”
“You’re wasting your time with that lot,” Chloe says. “It’s too risky. Not worth it.”
I take a few steps toward her and jab my finger into her chest to emphasize every crucial point. “Now, you listen to me, you little brat. I don’t have time to completely deprogram the Jin’Kai propaganda that Marsden’s brainwashed you with, but know this—Every. Single. Person. Is. Worth it. You follow? A human life—a woman’s life—whoever they may be, is every bit as important as those you’d risk everything for. Comprende?”
Chloe looks at her feet and mumbles something.
“I can’t hear you,” I snap.
“I said all right,” she mumbles more loudly. “Jeez.” She turns to Bok Choy. “If we’re going to get them, let’s get moving already.”
“This way,” Bok Choy says, and we all follow. I bring up the rear with my bratty-ass daughter.
“Someday you’ll understand,” I tell her.
“Whatever,” she replies.
Teenagers.
Suddenly the floor rocks underneath us, and we find ourselves in complete darkness.
“Now what?” Ducky cries behind me.
As soon as the words are out of his mouth, backup lights illuminate the hallway in a dim, bluish hue. The hairs on the back of my neck stand up, tingling.
“A trick of yours?” I ask Bok Choy.
“No,” he says.
“It’s like before,” Chloe says. “When the other hybrid escaped. She sabotaged the security systems by overloading the power grid. It lasted only ten minutes or so, but that was all she needed. Crafty for a mule.”
“Don’t call her that,” I say, spinning around on Chloe. “That’s your grandmother you’re talking about. She’s not a mule; she’s an Enosi. And so am I. And so are you. If you want to call the woman anything, call her ‘grandma.’ Or ‘lying, double-crossing bitch’ works too. But never, ever ‘mule.’”
“Sorry,” Chloe tells me, rolling her eyes.
I look around in the dim light. “So who do you think’s trying to escape now?” I ask the group. “Besides us, I mean.”
“I don’t know,” Chloe replies. “But if it puts the whole base on high alert, then we’re in trouble.” She jerks her head toward Bok Choy. “Let’s hurry up and grab the ditzes so we can get out of here already.”
With Bok Choy in the lead, we make our way to the next detention area over, identical to the one we just left. There are five cell doors along the wall, but only one has a red “locked” light on. I follow Bok Choy directly to the door.
“I thought you said there were girls,” I say. “As in plural.”
“There are,” Bok Choy tells me. “Marsden keeps them all in here.”
Bok Choy punches the key code into the wall console, but nothing happens.
“It’s stuck,” he mutters. “The power, I guess.” He grips the door and starts trying to pull it, even though there’s no edge to grab. Cole lays Marnie gently down on the ground and lends Bok Choy a hand. Between the two of them, with their otherworldly alien strength, they manage to move the door exactly zero millimeters.
“Boys,” I say with a sigh. “Chloe, you have anything that could jimmy this panel loose?”
“Step back,” she says. And it’s a good thing I do, because before the words are even out of her mouth, she has unslung her gun and fired off one precisely aimed shot to the immediate right of the console, sending sparks flying and blasting a clean hole through the metal plating. I pry the remaining fragments away to create a gap, giving me access to the wiring behind the panel.
“Okay. One second,” I say, fiddling blindly.
“Careful,” Chloe tells me. “You’ll fry yourself.” She hands me a pair of thin rubbery gloves from the pocket of her uniform.
“Thanks.” I slip the gloves on and resume my work. Chloe slips in beside me, and together we piece through the wiring. I’m happy to learn that in addition to my smart mouth, Chloe has inherited at least a few of my other qualities.
“There,” I say as the light above the door surges with a vwoop! This time, rather than switching from red to blue, the light blinks out completely.
“Um, Elvie, the door is still locked,” Cole says.
“Wrong,” I inform him. “The door is still closed.”
Chloe and I exchange a glance and push against the door, much as Bok Choy and Cole did before—only, this time the dead door slides, with some resistance, into the wall.
“Voila,” I say. “Open sesame, and such.”
Inside, the room is completely dark. I peek inside.
“Hello?”
There is some low murmuring. Shadows flicker in the corners.
“It’s all right,” I say softly. “It’s me. It’s Elvie. We’ve come to rescue you guys. One more time, with feeling.”
“Elvie?” comes a voice along the back left wall—but it’s not said in recognition. It’s as if the girl has never heard my name before.
Oh God, I think. What have they done to these girls? Because the voice, it’s one I know all too well. And the name attached to it is certainly not one I’d ever forget.
“It’s me, Britta,” I say quietly. “We’re going.” Shockingly, I don’t even feel annoyed at the thought that Britta McVicker—world’s most obnoxious cheerleader and Cole’s former girlfriend—is alive and well. Score one for personal growth!
“Going?” says another voice from the other side of the room.
Another eerily familiar voice.
“Um, yeah,” I say. The hair on the back of my neck prickles once more, and I have not yet figured out why. “Come on, guys. Stop hiding back there. It’s all right. We’re getting you all out of here and going home.”
“Home?” says another voice straight ahead of me. Or was that Britta again? “What is home?”
“Give me a light,” I call to my friends behind me. The prickling has quickly morphed into nausea, creeping into my throat.
Behind me Bok Choy flashes a small LED lamp, chasing the shadows away with a harsh, cold light. And all at once I have an irrepressible need to puke my metaphysical guts out.
I am standing in a room, surrounded by more than a dozen girls.
And they’re all Britta.
Chapter Ten
In Which It Seems Everyone Has Something to Say about our Heroine’s Ex-Boyfriend’s Butt
It’s just a dream, I tell myself, eyes shut as tightly as I can force them. A bad dream. A really, really, really bad dream.
But when I open my eyes, they’re all still here. It’s not a dream, or a trick of the light, or some sort of stress-headache-induced hallucination. I am surrounded on all sides by Brittas. At least twelve exact duplicates of my least favorite person-who’s-not-actively-trying-to-kill-me in the world. This is a new low, even for a lunatic like Marsden. I mean, homicide? That’s bad. Attempted genocide? Not good at all. Imprisoning and torturing innocent young women? Really frowned upon.
But an army of Brittas?
The man must be stopped.
“What’s the matter, Elvie?” Ducky calls from the hall behind me. “Are you okay in there?”
“Who’s that?” a Britta asks, taking a tentative step forward and craning her head to try to see into the hallway.
“Are you taking us for more tests?” another Britta joins in.
“I just had my test,” pouts a third Britta. “Please don’t make me go back so soon.”
Another Britta feels the need to chime in. “Your hair . . . did you make it look that way on purpose?”
“Can’t we gag them or something?” Chloe asks me seriously. “Before we get permanently dumber from listening to them?”
Looks like my daughter and I might have more in common than I feared.
“We need to go, Brit—er, ladies,” I say, trying to reassemble the toppled Jenga tower that is my brain. “We’re getting you out of here.”
“What’s a britterlady?” one asks.
“Why are we leaving?” asks another.
“Who are you?”
“What’s wrong with your face? You look like you smelled something bad. Did you smell something bad?”
From there things turn into a cacophony of Britta babble, each of the identical hell beasts bombarding me with questions and accusations that weave in and out of one another so unintelligibly that soon I hear nothing but one long hum of shrill, entitled, and apparently amnesiac voices.
“Look, just shut up!” I finally shout. “We’ve got to go, like, now.” You’d think at this point I’d be more adept at explaining to a large group of imprisoned teenage girls why we need to get off a spaceship, but I find myself a tad flustered. And nothing I say stops them from whining at me.
That’s when Cole decides to step into the room to see what all the fuss is about.
“Elvie?” he says. “What is going—whoa.”
“Cole,” I say. He’s fallen into the same stupefied trance I just found myself in, but we really don’t have the time to play out these reactions one at a time. There’s still the matter of getting out of here un-murdered. I snap my fingers at him. “Cole!”
Suddenly I realize that the Britta Brigade has fallen silent. And it’s not because of my authoritative tone.
“Cole?” one of the Britta’s says, the question hanging in the air like a hopeful, half-remembered dream. Every girl is now staring intently at Cole, who manages to close his mouth just long enough for one comically perfect gulp.
The World Forgot Page 14
