Marissa seemed to consider the question. She nodded.
“Can I do it now?”
Lena received another hesitant nod.
“Can you scoot forward a little?”
The little girl moved slightly forward. Lena smiled and gently pulled her a little closer. Marissa stiffened. Lena turned as the dusty hand of one of the teenagers reached past her to rub Marissa’s shoulder with reassuring fingertips.
A pair of dark, steady doe-eyes met Lena’s. Like Jackson, the teen girl’s caramel-colored skin and full lips spoke of a multicultural heritage. Under the matted hair, dust, scratches, and sharp angles of hunger, Lena could see she’d be beautiful. Now she was wary.
“It’s okay, Marissa,” the girl said, her voice trying for confident but veering into false bravado. “She wants to help us.”
Lena nodded. “Right. That’s right…” Her voice faded. She’d forgotten the girl’s name.
“Phoebe.” Her tone said she wasn’t surprised her name had been forgotten.
“I’m sorry,” Lena murmured. She turned back to Marissa, acutely aware now that they were all attuned to her actions. “Phoebe is right, Marissa. I want to help. Will you let me?”
The little girl didn’t answer, but she scooted forward a little more.
Lena might have started to believe she couldn’t speak if she hadn’t told Lena her name back at the Snake River. She raised her hands and settled them on the little girl’s neck.
Marissa’s body trembled as she fought not to pull away.
Anger spiked again at the jailers who had put the collars around these girls and at the Council who had ordered it. She added it to her list of acts requiring vengeance.
“It’s going to get warm,” she told Marissa, “but it shouldn’t hurt. I’m going to tell the Dust where to go and how to fix your cuts. It will burn the infection away and knit your skin back together.”
“Using your mind?” The little girl finally spoke. Her voice remained as faint and hoarse as it had been at the riverside.
Lena nodded. “Yep. Like you can do?” She guessed.
The girl frowned. She darted another look at Phoebe. “We’re not allowed.”
“You are now.” Lena was matter-of-fact and firm. “And I’m going to teach you.” She smiled. Then she focused, taking a breath and pushing out with the exhale. As she worked with the Dust, she could feel Marissa’s mind poking at it, too, tentative and furtive.
She eased back. “Okay, Marissa. Now it’s your turn.”
Marissa frowned again.
“I could feel you,” she whispered to the small girl, winking. “Did you understand what I was doing? Would you like to try? There’s one blister left.”
Marissa took a little breath. She gave Lena a searching look, then reached up and hooked her small fingers around Lena’s hand. She squeezed tight and another breath hiccupped in.
Lena felt when she let go of her fear and reached out. Not only could she feel the girl’s mind, stronger than any sense she got from the men, but she recognized the way her eyes glazed as she pushed away from herself and out to the Dust. Marissa was doing it.
Moments later, Marissa’s face brightened as she popped back into her own mind. “I did it?” She breathed the question.
Lena could hear relief and happiness in her own laughter. “You did it!”
“Just like that?” Jackson asked from the front of the train.
Lena nodded. “Just like that.” She snapped her fingers for emphasis, and then leaned in and stage-whispered, “Don’t mind him. He’s a little jealous. It took him two weeks to learn to heal.” She looked in Alex’s direction from the corner of her eyes, the smile playing over her lips answered by his own, “And he hasn’t learned to do it well, at all.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Jackson said, but he smiled again, finally.
Alex guffawed, but his gaze was intent. She could feel his warmth and pride from across the car. It felt good.
Marissa tittered. The small sound seemed to surprise even her. She bit her lip to contain her broad, proud smile.
Lena ran a hand over the hair of her first precocious pupil and grinned. She turned to the other girls. “Can anybody else do that yet?” Lena asked them.
Rose’s blindfolded face turned toward them as she listened intently. Heads shook.
The teenager next to Phoebe cleared her throat. A redhead with hair that shone a brilliant shade of orange, she didn’t share Lena’s freckles. Her pale skin was mottled and peeling from sunburn. “I think I might be able to now?”
“Okay.” Lena patted Marissa’s hand and stood. She crossed to the redhead. “Mmmm….” The girl’s name started with “M”.
“Marin,” Rose supplied from beside her. The woman had risen and crossed to stand beside Lena with her blindfold still in place. She reached out with a searching hand for the arm of Marin’s chair. When she found it, she crouched low, like Lena had before. “I’d like to try,” she told Lena brusquely, “so do I have to see to do this?”
“I don’t know,” Lena told her. “But there’s only one way to find out.”
She knelt beside her. The rest of the girls scooted to the edge of their seats, peering around Lena and Rose, stretching to see.
“So, I just—” Rose stopped, at a loss.
“Breathe. And when you’re ready, push your thoughts out to the Dust with your breath. I like to take it easy, a nice long exhale so I can reach out. But instead of feeling the space for the charge I’m going to leave in an object, I feel for the energy inside. The Dust in a body is warm and it…kind of pulses. Once I feel it, I show it what I want.”
“Show it?” Rose was doubtful. “Like, pictures?”
“Pictures, if I don’t have the words. Words, if I don’t have the pictures.” She smiled and put a reassuring hand on Rose’s shoulder. “The Dust wants to help us. It was made to talk to us. It’ll meet you halfway, I promise.” She glanced up and over Marin’s shoulders at Alex, watchful and silent.
Rose thought for a moment. “Like…with a new machine? I might not have seen it before, but it’s like my mind can sink down into it. And then I can see how it works.”
“Yes! Exactly.” Lena smiled. The smile faded when she remembered Rose wouldn’t see it because of the blindfold. “I push out and into it. You sink down and settle in.” She looked around at the girls. “Anyone else?”
One of the two hugging brunettes glanced at the other. “We see it as a reflection, like a mirror, and we …recognize it. But we’ve never talked to it.”
Lena noted the tiny trio of moles like a constellation on the right cheek of one and the left of the other. They were twins, no more than twelve or thirteen years old. Had they first learned to recognize the Dust in each other?
Rose nodded again. She reached her hands out to Marin, searching without seeing.
Marin took Rose’s hands and guided them up toward her neck. “I want to try, too,” the girl reminded Rose.
Rose nodded again. Rose’s fingers skimmed Marin’s neck in a touch both feather-light and thorough. When she was sure she’d found all of the broken skin, her fingers stilled. Her breathing didn’t shift.
Somehow Lena knew when Rose sank down, just as she felt the Neo-barb woman struggle.
“Rose,” Lena reassured her, “she’s just a machine. A living machine. And so is the Dust.”
The other woman hesitated. She began again. Marin’s skin knit together, healthy skin rippling across the wounds.
“Leave some for me!” Marin demanded.
Rose withdrew, both mentally and physically. Her hands dropped to her lap, and she took a shaky breath.
“Did she do it?” Alex’s gaze was sharp on the Neo-barb woman.
Rose’s chin lifted. “She did,” she told him with pride. She stood in one smooth, fluid motion and moved back to her seat. Even blind, she found it without stumbling.
“And so is Marin,” Lena reported, focused on the girl in front of her. Patience was not Marin�
�s strong suit, but healing was.
Marin healed the wounds on her own neck and moved on to her face and arms. Her sun-reddened, cracking, blistered skin smoothed. It became pink and shiny and then faded to her natural creamy paleness.
Phoebe made a low note of amazement deep in her throat. “Help me, Marin.” She tugged on Marin’s arm. “I can’t figure it out.”
Marin turned to her, and the two girls started working together. After a moment, she made it clear she not only understood how to do it, but she excelled at sharing how to do it, as well.
Lena settled back onto her heels and looked around. The twins had already turned to face each other, whispering and nodding in excitement. All four of the men watched with bemused expressions.
Their base camp agent, whose name Lena had never learned, looked a little shell-shocked. He asked Alex, “Is it supposed to be that easy for us, too?”
Jackson shook his head in small back and forth movements, chin tucked in his palm, elbow on his armrest as the girls easily practiced the skill he’d sweated and lost sleep over to master.
Alex chuckled. “No, I’m pretty sure they’re special.”
I’m not alone. Not ever again.
The dark place inside Lena felt warm and honeyed with pride for the damaged, amazing, fast-learning girls, and she felt a little generous. “Not necessarily special,” she told them with a light shrug of one shoulder. “Just different.”
“No,” Alex replied, his voice soft as his gaze moved over her face. “You’re definitely special.”
Wh—?
Lena ducked her head, heat flaring across her cheeks and through her chest. She could feel her wide grin as she turned again to her girls.
Marissa had pulled her legs up to her chest and rocked, one dirty thumb tucked into her mouth.
Lena reclaimed her focus and scanned the girls. She’d forgotten the quiet, dark girl with hollow eyes who couldn’t be more than nine. She was overly thin with the coltish legs of a girl making the slow segue into womanhood but the still-round cheeks of childhood. She sat alone. The sense of loneliness radiating off of her miserable little person, though, had more to it than simply sitting alone. Lena searched her memory for the girl’s name. Hania.
She crossed the four steps to her. “Your turn,” she told the girl. She dipped down to squat before Hania and touched the girl’s arm with her fingertips.
Hania shook her head solemnly. Her irises were as black as her pupils, making her eyes seem both bottomless and full of grief.
“She can’t get better,” she said. “I shouldn’t get better, either.”
Lena glanced around. “Everyone’s getting better, Hania.”
Hania shook her head again.
“Lydie was her match.” The twin who spoke, either Constance or Charity, held tight to her sister’s hand.
A knot twisted in Lena’s stomach. “Her match?”
Rose turned her head toward them, her blindfolded face eerie with the streak of tunnel lights behind her. “They paired off girls they found,” she explained, her voice flat. “I don’t know why, or why we matched. The girls say we weren’t alone. They got rid of any who didn’t fit well, with each other, or with these girls. Supposed to be the same age, same power. Lydie was Hania’s match. They did everything together. The exercises. The….” She stopped and swallowed. “Everything. For however long they were there before you came.”
Her heart wanted to beat its way out of Lena’s chest. “You don’t have a match,” she pointed out.
Rose’s lips curved up in a dark smile below the blindfold. The movement held neither warmth nor mirth. “They talked about finding my other half,” she said. “Some girl in the desert. But she got away. Did they mean you? They were saying there’ll be hell to pay at the Council Meet this year.” Her next words were sing-song and malicious, although the malice wasn’t directed at Lena. “Someone’s in trouble.”
Lena’s heart stuttered. Lucas and the Councilor had strapped her to the table. What was it Lucas had said? They wanted to know her limits?
They wanted to know if she was a match for Rose.
The memories of that day in the room flooded back. Air on her naked skin. Pain and shame at her helplessness. The look on her mother’s face. The smell of the dust, thick in her nostrils.
They had been testing her, the same way they would have done if her parents hadn’t hidden her as a child. Lena’s stomach heaved, the spasms fighting against her tight throat. The same way they tested every high-powered girl Spark? The same way they’d tested all of these girls?
She gulped away the nausea. She looked at the girls, at Marin and Phoebe, holding hands without even seeming to be aware of the contact. The twins clutched at each other. She noticed Marissa, sitting alone, too. She shook her head to clear it of memories and fear.
“Look, Hania,” she told the thin girl before her, somehow even more desperate to make the girl let Lena help her, “Marissa doesn’t have a match, and she’s better now.”
Hania shook her head a third time. “She does. She got left behind.”
The bud of horror taking root inside of Lena bloomed, each petal unfolding, consuming the space in her chest her lungs needed to expand. She couldn’t catch her breath.
“What?”
“Jubilee got left behind.” Phoebe was too sadly matter-of-fact to be lying.
“What? No!” Lena shook her head at Marissa. “I counted. When you all came out, I counted!”
Marissa pulled her thumb out of her mouth. “She wasn’t with us. Her collar was breaking. They had to fix it.” The little girl’s eyes were too big, too wise in her toddler face. “She’s okay now. I can feel her still. She’s just sad to be alone on the boat.”
“Alex!” Lena whirled.
He had already lunged to his feet. His look of horror mirrored her own, but more than fury and desperation lurked behind his emotion. She could feel his regret.
“No, Alex!” She could hear her voice crack, but she didn’t care. “We have to go back. She’s a child!”
He held up his hands. “We can’t turn around. That’s not how the train works. But I can, and I will, send agents back to watch and wait as soon as we get back.”
“To watch and wait?” What was he saying? “For what? She’s a child. Being sent who knows where by monsters. If we don’t go back right now, she’ll be gone up that river, and we’ll never find her.”
Alex took a deep breath. He swept a glance over the girls. “If we go back to get her now, we’d have to take an army.”
“Then take a damn army.”
“We don’t have an army. Not yet. We’re moving forward using stealth, not force. We’re taking Zones from the top, not the bottom. And we’re spread out. We don’t have the men available at Fort Nevada. It looks like we do, I know. But we don’t.” He ran his hands through his hair in frustration. “And they’ll be ready for a return force, anyway. We won’t accomplish anything. Until we have something, some way to fight that’s stronger than their bullets and numbers, we can’t.”
“We have me.”
“Until one sniper makes his mark. And then we don’t.” He nodded at the girls. “And neither do they.”
He was fighting dirty, and she could tell he knew it. They wanted her to train them all, and now they had her motivation.
“She’s a little girl. And she’s alone.” How could he not see?
“I know.” The thick emotion in his voice answered her own. He did see. The little boy who had refused to cry still lived behind Alex’s eyes. But the man he’d become could open up a compartment deep inside and put away the grief and rage and guilt. Once he closed the drawer, it was all gone. His face had simply emptied of it. In its place was Thomas’s perfect automaton agent, willing to do anything to further their cause.
When he spoke again, his voice reflected that brisk efficiency, and brooked no argument. “We cannot go back right now.”
All of the warmth Lena had felt moments before fled. It l
eft behind a cold void in her chest.
Remember this, Lena. This is why you cannot develop feelings for him. He’s not capable of feeling them back. Remember this.
He waited for a moment, but she had nothing to say to him. It surprised her when he spoke again.
“We’ll watch.” He promised, his voice soothing but his single firm nod conveying the intensity behind the words. “As soon as an opportunity comes to follow those supply barges, we’ll track her. We will find her.”
Perhaps he wasn’t quite the automaton she’d thought? It would have to do. She didn’t have any choice.
It’s about time to start creating my own choices.
“We’re going to find Jubilee, Marissa,” Lena said.
The little girl nodded. Why shouldn’t she believe? They’d gotten her out, hadn’t they? Lena turned to Hania and laid a hand upon the girl’s heavy black waves of hair, snarled with neglect.
“I’m going to make you better now, Hania.” Her voice trembled, and she cleared her throat as she knelt before Hania. When she spoke again, she was stronger. “I’m sorry I couldn’t save her. I’m sorry. But Lydie would have wanted you to be better.”
23
Lena prowled from room to room, checking on the girls, pacing the hall to keep them safe. She couldn’t sleep, so she patrolled.
They’d put Marissa and Hania together. She’d spent much of her time looking in on the two girls. Marissa had climbed into bed with the older girl and curled into Hania’s side. She slept.
Hania did not. Each time Lena cracked the door to look in, Hania’s wide eyes turned to her in silent regard. Lena didn’t say anything. Her own loss had taught her there wasn’t anything to make it better, especially words. The twins had told her that Hania and Lydie had been there together longer than any of the rest of them, including Marin and Phoebe, who had been shipped in separately from other places. It was no wonder Hania was shell-shocked.
Finally, shortly after her fifth restless patrol in the hours before dawn, Lena peeked in, and Hania had fallen asleep. Her thick lashes curled down over the dark hollows under her eyes, emphasizing her poor health. Lena had asked about their condition. It made no sense—if the Council had use for them, why the starvation and abuse? Rose had taken the blame for that. She’d refused to eat. The other girls, especially the older girls, had followed her lead. The guards had tried to force feed them. When that didn’t stop the small rebellion, they’d resorted to abuse.
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