by Tanya Lisle
Brady couldn’t catch his breath enough to respond, though he could feel himself crying. He pulled his knees up to his chest and buried his face into them. He didn’t understand what was going on and he was more scared than he’d ever been in his life. He came so close to death that he wasn’t sure he wasn’t already dead. There were still people wandering around and he’d nearly died again.
They thought he was a kid. He looked like a kid. He even acted like a kid. They were supposed to treat him like a kid. This wasn’t supposed to happen to kids.
His wrist vibrated and he screamed. He needed to get it off. He clawed and pulled at the thing on his wrist and threw it as far as he could. He didn’t know what it was, only that he couldn’t handle it right now. It was all too much. He couldn’t deal with this.
Brady didn’t know how long he stayed curled up and sobbing into his knees with his hands curled around his head. The fear wouldn’t leave him, but he started to calm down. He knew he couldn’t stay here. He needed to keep moving. If he didn’t, someone else might come across him. He needed to get back on his feet.
He kept trembling, but he could move. It was enough. He went back across the room and picked up the watch he threw. He didn’t dare put it back on, but he looked at it as he started moving again. There was a message on it from Liah. Only the Downstairs watches could do that.
Right. He got this watch from Downstairs.
Section V in the server room…
Brady could tell that there were more messages that came before it and more to this one, but he couldn’t make his hands stay still to navigate the small screen.
It was enough for him. He knew where that was and he could get there. His lungs felt like they were on fire, but he felt better running again. He was running toward something. Maybe his mother would be there. She would be mad at him for the trouble he’d caused so far, but at least he knew what he was in for. He couldn’t handle any more of whatever the rest of this was.
Section V was always a strange area. At the back was a workshop with it turning into an art gallery the closer to the front you got. From what he read on the many explanatory plaques on the walls, it was designed so that they could use the entire space as a gallery or museum at one time, but they needed space to create exhibits. They had rules posted about what they were allowed to do in the workshops, though it looked like no one working in the area ever paid the rules any mind.
The servers were near the very back. Brady found another body on his way in bleeding heavily from the head and looking like he was probably dead. He didn’t have a single dark mark on him, though Brady suspected that he once was covered in them like the rest. He didn’t linger long, heading right to the server room.
It was strange to hear it humming. The room had never been turned on before and he approached it with caution. He was already breathless, but he could run if he needed to and was ready to do so if there was a single person he didn’t recognize inside. Slowly, he opened the door and peered inside.
Ed sat with her head leaning back against the far wall next to an open computer panel, hair disheveled and covering most of her face with both hands around her bleeding throat. Her mouth hung open, breathing deeply and trying to keep her eyes open. Next to her, her phone buzzed and she ignored it.
“Ms. Ed!” Brady said, running forward into the room and kneeling next to her. She looked down at him and tried to say something but Brady shook his head. “No, don’t,” he said, carefully trying to pull at her hands. “Please, just for a second. I need to see.”
Ed hesitated before loosening her grip. Brady saw the blood on her neck and the very obvious stab that punctured Ed’s trachea. Ed started to gasp for breath and took hold of her throat once more, covering the bloody hole from Brady’s sight and gasping for breath. .
Brady froze at the sight of it. His mind went back to Kitty on that man, knife in hand and tearing it through his neck.
He couldn’t help himself. Brady turned away and retched, whatever was left in his stomach coming out of him in a flood onto the concrete. It tasted slightly of apple and was considerably soured by the acidic bile that reminded him of just how long it was since he last ate anything.
He could feel a second wave but forced it down, still panting as he wiped at his mouth. That was enough for now. He couldn’t keep falling apart like this. Even if his hands were still shaking and he was having trouble keeping himself together, he had to.
“Medical kit,” he said, getting back to his feet. By the door was a small emergency kit mounted beside a fire extinguisher. He fumbled with the strap that held it in place and brought it back. “I’ll just need the medical kit.”
He felt almost numb now, as empty as his stomach as he opened up the kit and pulled out everything he was going to need. He didn’t even know how to do this, but he could improvise. Whatever he came up with, it would have to do. He needed to save Ed. His mother wasn’t here to do it.
His mother probably wasn’t here at all anymore.
Ed looked at him worriedly, but said nothing as he tried to patch her up. She needed something to stop the bleeding and to close the hole in her neck. There had to be something in here. There was a small guide on how to use the materials inside but a look over it showed nothing about punctured tracheas.
Gently, Ed tapped Brady on the shoulder and passed him her phone. On the screen was an information page about neck wounds. Brady never quite met her eyes as he got to work, pulling materials out and following the instructions for how to patch up something like this. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking and he couldn’t pull as tightly as he needed to, but Ed tried to help where she could until she could at least breathe without a hand around her neck.
She took back her phone and tapped on the screen a few more times before turning it back to Brady. There was a message on the screen. Are you okay?
Brady wouldn’t meet her eyes. He was so tired, but there was still probably work to be done and he didn’t trust himself to sleep right now. “D’you need anything?” he asked. Even his voice sounded shaky.
Ed pointed to the closet in the corner. Brady went over to it, opening it up and finding very old computer equipment inside. When he looked back, Ed had opened another panel underneath the computer. “What do you want?” Brady asked.
Ed made a few gestures. Monitor, keyboard and mouse. Brady plucked them up one by one and brought them to Ed, checking that they were the right thing before she plugged them into the wall panel and set them up in front of her. Brady sat beside her and watched, keeping an eye on her as she continued to breathe with her mouth hanging open. It came out ragged and laboured, but he didn’t know what else to do for her now.
Brady looked at the monitor and watched as Ed’s fingers moved across the keys. She opened up the cameras to look around at the carnage left behind and the very surprised looking people still standing and carefully picking their way through the rubble for their fallen. He couldn’t even recognize what sections they were anymore, so much of it in pieces and the haze from the wasteland creeping in.
Ed’s phone rang beside her and she moved her finger to answer it, not even looking at the screen as she opened her mouth. A raspy breath came out and she shook her head. She winced immediately at the action and slid the phone toward Brady, putting it on speaker.
“Hello?” came Mac’s voice on the other end, sounding exhausted. “Ed, you there?”
Ed moved one of the cameras around to find him in the wreckage. He sat against a wall with a building pool of red forming around him. Even from this angle, Brady could tell that his back was soaked in blood and he left his phone on his lap. He curled over it with an arm over his stomach. His other arm was nowhere to be found.
“Ed can’t talk right now,” Brady said. His voice sounded steadier now, but he kept it small. “Something happened to her neck. I think she’s gonna be okay, but she can’t talk.”
“Who’s this?”
“Brady Greenwood.”
Mac paused and
his shoulders shook. “Ask Ed what happened.”
“She can hear you,” Brady said, looking up as Ed turned the screen toward him. She pointed at one corner of the screen with a small text box. “She says it looks like they’re all down. Either they collapsed on their own or we managed to kill them all.”
“Collapsed,” Mac said. He let out a cough. “They’re still alive. That mountain still out there?”
More clicking of keys followed by a new window opening on the screen. Ed brought up the view of Regina on the horizon, still looking like ruins. Through the haze, there wasn’t even the shadow of something looming over it. Ed kept typing, moving between active windows.
“It’s gone. Ed wants you to get medical attention.”
“I’m already dead, kid,” he said. “Save that for anyone with a chance.”
Ed stopped typing at that, her eyes looking between the phone and the screen.
“Tell me, kid,” Mac said, another cough shaking his shoulders. “You could see those marks, right? The ones that showed up on people that started all this? You see them anymore?”
Brady looked at Ed, though he couldn’t for long. It felt like a private moment and he was intruding. “They’re gone,” he said.
“Then it’s over.” He took a deep, unsteady breath. “It’s been good, Ed. And I’m…”
The phone was still on, but Mac said nothing more. On the screen, he stopped moving. Slowly, Ed made her fingers move back over the keys. Brady sat next to her, knees pulled up to his chest and not looking up.
Chapter 26
“We got it, Ed,” Lenny insisted. “You can go.”
Ed relented, putting down her hammer and patting down the dirt on her clothes. It had been almost a month since the attack had ravaged the Janus Complex and the progress of rebuilding it was slow. On top of the holes in the walls and the sections which were unsafe to even enter, there was also the fact that a plane had crashed into the Medical Wing. It would take a long time to even remove that, much less repair it.
Ed sent Liah a text to let her know she was coming and took the elevator down. While the tunnel had been cleared in the attack, it wasn’t deemed safe yet and Ed really didn’t want to walk that far down. Her throat was healing fine, but Liah always gave her an earful when she found out how much she pushed herself to try and get everything done.
She fixed her hair, carefully continuing to drape her bangs across her bad eye, and tried to make herself look like she hadn’t been hammering in support beams all morning. She didn’t want to spend too long Downstairs if she didn’t have to, though there were a few things she needed to check in on.
Liah waited for her at the foot of the elevator, smile a little too wide and a haggard look in her eyes. With all these people Downstairs who didn’t want to work the fields and still expected residence while Upstairs was being rebuilt, she was having some trouble negotiating with her own people to tolerate them until they could get them back Upstairs.
“Please,” Liah said. “Please tell me you’re taking them.”
“Hi Liah,” Ed said. Her voice was still gravelly, but slowly getting better as her throat healed. “We’re still working on it. We should be able to get more people moved back Upstairs next week.”
“Do you have to keep moving the useful ones?” Liah asked. “You keep taking all the ones that actually work. I’m going to have a revolt on my hands if you don’t leave a few of them behind.”
“We need the people who can actually build to keep the project moving,” Ed said. “Otherwise it’s going to take a lot longer to get everyone back Upstairs. Rebuilding all these sections for housing is-”
“I know,” Liah said. “I know.”
“And we need to convert one of them into a new Medical Wing for all the new long term patients.”
“But you might not even need to keep it like that for long, right? So maybe just take them all and they can be a bit uncomfortable somewhere that’s not here for a little while? It’s not going to take that long for them to find us, right?”
Ed gave Liah a look and shook her head. Ed spotted the planes first, flying off in the distance through the haze. When they started to loop back around, Ed figured they were likely trying to find the crashed plane. The idea that the outside world might find them again was a whole matter that she didn’t even want to think about yet. They still had so many repairs to do.
“At least talk to your people, then” Liah said. “Make them do something. At the very least, make them do the simple stuff and don’t be stupid about it. I swear, they wouldn’t know what was ripe if it broke into a musical number about how ready it was to pick.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” Ed promised her. She’d talk to the section heads, at least, and see if they could do anything about the rest. She looked around and spotted several people sitting under the one green tree in the orchard sprouting the yellow fruit. “Can we continue in a bit? I need to talk to someone.”
“Stay for dinner,” Liah said, smiling and patting her on the back. “You know we got space for you. Oh, and try one of those apples. They might be good for your eyes.”
Ed nodded and headed off. Kitty rested under the tree with Clyde to one side, deep in conversation with Brady. She didn’t listen, eyes looking up through the leaves and taking in a deep breath. She looked down and caught sight of Ed, waving her over.
“Just go talk to her,” Clyde told Brady. “She keeps looking at you. You might as well give it a shot.”
“I don’t know if she’s too young or too old, but either way it’s weird,” Brady said.
“So you are interested.”
“He didn’t say that,” David said, leaning forward in his wheelchair to smack Clyde lightly upside the head as Brady went a light shade of pink. They managed to keep him alive, but there was no way to give him back the use of his legs again. Even his arms didn’t quite move the same as they did before, but David tried to adjust.
“Ed!” Kitty said, shutting the guys up. She threw an apple at her. “Here, have you tried one of these yet?”
Ed didn’t catch it. She picked it up off the ground and cleaned it on her shirt. “Shouldn’t you be working?”
“I did my hours already,” Kitty said. “I’m supposed to take it easy, remember? Stabbed in the back. Crushed. Generally getting the shit kicked out of me. Going to take a while to recover from that.”
“You look fine.” She really did. Even after a month, there should have been some sign of injury left on her, but there was nothing. She moved with all the ease she once did. Come to think of it, a lot of people who should have been hospitalized for a very long time were already up and moving. “How are you fine?” Ed asked.
“Mr. Greenwood?” Kitty asked, smiling as she looked down at him.
Brady looked much more comfortable than Ed had seen him in a long time. “I’ve been working with Shavir on it,” he said, none of his normal inclination to childishness in his words. “The apples on this tree do something to help people recover a lot faster. Kitty and David and a lot of other people all volunteered to test out a few theories, but we’re starting to figure out exactly what they do. It’s a bit technical, though.”
“Kitty completely recovered,” David offered. “And they can’t bring back my legs, but I can almost feel my hands again. I can move them if I’m looking at them, but they think it’s going to get better. And then there`s Brady.”
Ed stayed quiet, turning her attention back to him.
“The Greenberg’s going away,” he said, unable to contain the smile on his face. “I’ve grown an inch already. I might start getting older soon. Mom wouldn’t be…. well, it doesn’t matter anymore, right?”
Ed went quiet, as did everyone else. They lost many people, though Miranda Greenwood’s body was never recovered from the wreckage. Even though she was never found, Brady seemed certain that she was dead and never coming back.
“Can I talk to you for a minute,” Ed asked Brady.
Brady look
ed back at the rest of them before he got up and fell in step beside Ed. “What did I do?” he asked.
“That’s Snow’s tree, isn’t it?” Ed asked, looking down at the apple.
“Yeah.”
“With her gone, don’t you think it’s a little weird that the tree’s still there?”
Brady looked back up at her as if he was trying to figure out if she was kidding. “Have you looked in a mirror recently, Ms. Ed?” he asked. “No offense, but if you’re asking what I think you’re asking, then you should really already know the answer.”
“What do you think I’m asking?”
“I think you’re asking if Snow survived and she’s pulling strings, or if something else happened and this isn’t really over. You want to know if she is going to be mad at us and going take her revenge somehow for what happened to her while she was here.”
“And what do you think?” Ed asked. “You spent more time with her than anyone.”
“I think she appreciated her time here and she’s returning the favour,” Brady said, rolling up his sleeve. On his arm there was the dark shadow Ed knew as a mark of fate. It matched the one Ed still wore over her eye.
