Burning Skies

by Kyla Stone

  Jericho hesitated.

  “She was one of us,” Willow said.

  “She’s right,” Micah said softly. “Let him go.”

  Gabriel glanced at his brother, relieved that he understood. He clenched his jaw, the muscle in his cheek pulsing. “Give me twenty-four hours. Forty-eight, tops.”

  Jericho finally nodded. He swiped his SmartFlex and studied the map of the city. “We can’t stay here, it’s too dangerous. We have to move, and we have to do it quietly and carefully, slipping from building to building if we have to.”

  He pointed to three different dots. “Within the next twenty-four to forty-eight hours, I expect us to reach one of these three points. Silas scouted the High Museum of Art and this office building, here. It appears to be clear. I’ve saved the GPS coordinates. Take my SmartFlex. The charge is low, but hopefully it will last you. I’ll use Amelia’s.”

  Gabriel nodded, every muscle in his body tightening. Jericho handed him the cuff, and he slipped it over his right wrist.

  “We can’t wait for you.” Jericho’s eyes were black and hard as obsidian. “I can’t endanger the group for one person. Getting Amelia to the Sanctuary is our most critical mission, even more than saving Elise from the Headhunters, more than saving any one of us.”

  “I wouldn’t expect anything less.” He didn’t want anyone endangering themselves for him. His life wasn’t worth it. As long as Amelia, Micah, and the others were safe, that was all that mattered.

  He would find Celeste’s body, bury her, and find his people again while avoiding aggressive rats, infected humans, and the Pyros, all on a deadline. He knew he was capable. He could do it.

  He turned to Horne. “Tell me everything you remember about where you were.”

  17

  Amelia

  When she awoke, Amelia couldn’t remember where or who she was. She was floating in a liquid gray haze, drifting in and out of consciousness. Over the next few hours, she remembered her mother and father but didn’t recognize the faces peering down at her.

  They were strangers. Her own mind was a stranger to her. Everything was distant and unfocused.

  Memories rose through the mist. She tried to grasp them—the bright spotlights blinding her eyes as she performed at one of her father’s galas; the way her mother brushed her hair, one long stroke at a time; Silas chasing her through a grand house of grand rooms filled with grand furniture that still felt empty; her shaking hands as she chopped off her own hair, the way the tendrils swirled like silk ribbons on her lap.

  Some memories turned solid in her hands; others fell through her fingers, slippery and insubstantial as ghosts.

  By the next day, she remembered Micah and Gabriel and Benjie and the Grand Voyager and Sweet Creek Farm. She remembered she loved dark chocolate and classical music and that ocean blue was her favorite color.

  And then Kane came back. And Simeon and her father and Gabriel. The Hydra virus. The Headhunters. Nadira’s death and her mother’s capture.

  Her muscles were shivery and weak. Her brain felt bruised. Her mouth tasted of copper, no matter what she ate.

  But she was alive. She held onto that as tightly as she could.

  She drifted off again, and this time, Kane invaded her dreams. She awoke gasping, drenched in sweat even in the bitter cold, her heart a frenzy inside her chest. She lay shaking, blinking back the awful images of his thick, meaty fingers reaching for her, clawing her neck, choking off her breath, that bone-crushing fear clamping over her throat.

  It wasn’t real. He wasn’t real. He was a ghost, a demon from the past, a stubborn memory that wouldn’t fade. Slowly, the day and time and place came back to her in bits and pieces.

  She was wrapped in a heated blanket on the floor of the High Museum of Art. A museum once visited by millions of people, people all dead now. People with no more memories to make, no memories to lose.

  The light wood floors echoed with Benjie’s muffled laughter as he dashed between life-sized marble sculptures from Greek myths. The high white walls held famous paintings, photographs, and holo prints, two- and three-dimensional artwork hung in antique gilt frames.

  Looters had slashed much of the art on the first and second floors, knocking over statues, pissing in corners, and doing whatever damage they could. But they must have gotten bored or tired, because little had been touched up here.

  She stared at the painting on the wall across from her—Claude Monet’s Autumn on the Seine, Argenteuil. Her father had a Monet in his collection. Not because he’d particularly loved art, but because he could. Because he liked to own beautiful things. He liked to control them. She looked away.

  In the two hours since they’d taken shelter at the museum, Willow had brought her food, Benjie showed her magic tricks with an old quarter Micah had found for him, and Finn cracked his usual goofy jokes, trying to get her to laugh.

  Jericho checked her forehead and fussed over her, his perpetual frown always on his face. She remembered his frowns, his sternness, and the concern that lay beneath his tough veneer.

  Silas was around, but he spoke little, prowling the halls of the museum like a frustrated ally cat instead. She knew this, too. How hard and cold he was, always keeping things inside, lashing out at everything and everyone.

  Then there was Micah, always hovering nearby, but never overwhelming or irritating. He was simply there. He was the one who carried her through the cold and snow for hours as they made their slow, painstaking way through downtown. She’d been groggy through much of it, which was a blessing. She hated the thought of someone cradling her like a vulnerable, needy child.

  When she was awake, he sat beside her, reading from a book of poetry or a novel, but always reading. He leaned against a magnetized, floating bench decorated with antique Coca-Cola bottle caps, a ratty paperback in his hands.

  She pushed herself into a sitting position against the wall and groaned. Her head still ached. Her whole body ached. Her muscles felt weak and watery. Kane’s vicious, viper eyes were still in her head. She needed a distraction. “What are you reading?”

  “My favorite. J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.” He smiled shyly at her, tucked a bookmark to neatly mark his place, and set down the book. Only Micah would care about bookmarks in the apocalypse. “Welcome back. How are you feeling?”

  “Better,” she said, half-lying. “Except for the ball of fuzz between my ears.”

  “Your memories aren’t back yet?”

  “Most of them. I think.” She tugged the leather thong from around her neck so she could hold the diamond charm bracelet. The cold metal was comforting. It had been a gift from her father for her thirteenth birthday.

  A memory flickered: a bunch of important senators and business tycoons smiling down at her, her father boasting about the quality-sourced diamonds, her brother kicking her beneath the table and rolling his eyes.

  She couldn’t remember her mother. Hadn’t she been there? She closed her eyes, focusing with all her limited brain-power. Her mother was in her memories, but it was like she’d been blurred out. Amelia couldn’t make out any distinguishing features, couldn’t recall her smile. “I can’t remember my mother’s face.”

  Micah gave her hand a squeeze and quickly let go. “Maybe once we rescue her and you see her face, then everything will come back.”

  “Maybe.” What if she’d lost some memories forever? What if she’d lost some elemental part of her?

  With every seizure, part of herself wouldn’t come back. What if next time she forgot how to walk or talk or how to play the violin? What if the next time she woke up, she was no longer herself? To lose yourself piece by piece was the most terrifying thing in the world.

  And how long until the next one came? Six weeks? Six months? Every seizure was potentially devastating. How long until she was permanently brain-damaged? A paralyzed vegetable? Dead? “I feel like I’m grieving for something that hasn’t happened yet.”

  “Don’t give up hope,” Micah said. �
��The doctors at the Sanctuary will help you at the same time they find the cure.” He picked up his book and held it out to her. “Rage, rage against the dying of the light.”

  She’d heard it before. She’d liked it then, but now she held it in her mind like a lifeline. “What’s it from?”

  “It’s a Dylan Thomas poem. It’s about the beauty and tenacity of the human spirit, about fighting against the inevitability of death. We know it will take us, but we’re going to fight until our dying breath anyway. ‘Do not go gentle into that good night’.”

  “It’s lovely.” She suddenly felt very self-conscious. Embarrassment flushed through her. And shame. Micah had seen her at her worst, helpless and ugly and disgusting. “Thank you for…being there. When it happened.”

  He jabbed his glasses up the bridge of his nose with his finger. His dark wavy hair was a little unkempt, as always. His face reddened slightly. “It was nothing.”

  But it felt like more than nothing to Amelia. It felt like everything. “I’m sorry you had to see that.”

  “Vulnerability isn’t a weakness,” Micah said quietly as if he could read her mind. “It isn’t something to be ashamed of.”

  She flushed, grateful for his words even if she couldn’t believe them yet. The suffocating shame her father had drilled into her over the years—she was defective, and her defect was ugly, revolting—was hard to shake. She pushed the point of the violin charm against the pad of her pointer finger until it hurt.

  She glanced at Micah, about to say something else, but she caught a fleeting shadow flickering across his face. His expression was tense. She could tell he was chewing on the inside of his cheeks, his brow furrowed. He looked like he was taking the weight of the world on his own shoulders.

  She resisted the urge to grab his hand. “You’re worried about Gabriel.”

  “I shouldn’t be, but I can’t help it.”

  “He’s your brother.”

  He stared down at the book in his hands, frowning. “He’s doing a good thing, I think.”

  “He’s been doing a lot of good things lately,” Amelia said softly. She didn’t know how to reconcile the Gabriel who’d betrayed her, who’d given her up to the likes of Kane, who’d stood by and allowed it to happen, who’d bristled with unrestrained rage—with this new remorseful, penitent Gabriel, who’d nearly killed himself to rescue her from Cerberus, who’d thrown himself in front of the rats, who’d valiantly taken on the Pyros so they could escape.

  And now he’d put himself at risk to find Celeste’s body, one of the elites he’d so despised. It didn’t make sense. And yet. “Does that make up for…”

  “Everything?” Micah smiled grimly. “I haven’t decided yet.”

  Benjie dashed up to them, his wild hair sticking up all over his head. “Lo Lo says it’s bedtime, but she won’t sing to me because she’s on guard duty. She says she’s a terrible singer anyway and to ask you.”

  He clasped his hands together, his big brown eyes pleading. His voice was still wheezy from the smoke inhalation, but he seemed to have his energy back. “Pretty please, Miss Amelia?”

  “I’m not much better,” Amelia said, though she remembered those nights with Benjie in abandoned offices and houses and hotels, quarantined from the rest of the group while they waited for the Hydra virus to show itself.

  Benjie quirked his eyebrows and leaned in to whisper conspiratorially, “You’re better than Lo Lo. Way better. But no telling her I said so.”

  Micah laughed. “I have to check in with Jericho on plans for tomorrow anyway. See you later.”

  “He’ll be fine,” Amelia called to Micah. “If anything, he’s a survivor.”

  Micah adjusted his glasses with his thumb. “Yeah, I suppose he is.”

  Amelia patted the sleeping bag beside her. Benjie dove in, nestling against her side. “Where’s everybody?”

  “Guarding stuff or exploring stuff. I already saw every single exhibit.” He wrinkled his nose. “There’s lots of naked statues and paintings and stuff.”

  “What do you think about that?”

  “Totally gross.”

  Amelia smiled and tilted her head back against the wall. She hummed the classics, Peter and the Wolf and Brahms’ Lullaby, the familiar melodies more comforting than she could say.

  She hadn’t finished the third song when Benjie sniffled. Tears streaked his small face. “What’s wrong?”

  He sat up and wiped his eyes. “I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t be crying, Miss Amelia.”

  “Who said you couldn’t cry?”

  He sniffed.

  Amelia touched his shoulder. “You can tell me.”

  “Lo Lo always tells me to be brave and strong. I try as good as I can, I swear.”

  “But?” she prodded gently.

  His face collapsed. “I miss Mommy.”

  Amelia’s stomach twisted in iron knots. The poor kid. This was hard for all of them. She couldn’t imagine how awful it was for an eight-year-old. “You know what? I miss my mother. And I know Willow misses your mom, too.”

  She gathered his small body into her arms. He nuzzled into her like a puppy and wrapped his thin arms around her neck. His heartbeat thudded against her chest. She still wasn’t entirely used to physical touch. Her family was reserved, to say the least. But Benjie made it easier with his exuberant hugs, his sweetness, his unconditional trust.

  She gently stroked his back. “Willow doesn’t need you to be strong for her, Benjie. She’s a big girl. She can be strong for herself. And I’ll let you in on a little secret. Crying doesn’t mean you aren’t strong. Tears aren’t weak. Emotions aren’t weak. They’re part of what makes us who we are. We can be happy and brave and strong, but we can also be sad and worried and scared. So don’t wipe your tears away, okay?”

  He nodded. “What about my snots?”

  “You can totally wipe your snot. Just not on your shirtsleeve.”

  “Aww, nuts.” But he was grinning.

  “There’s toilet paper in the bathroom. Remember, just a couple of squares. And then you come back and snuggle and cry with me as much as you want.”

  The shadows lengthened around them as Amelia hummed classical music long into the night. She practiced the movements on an imaginary violin in her hands, her fingers moving with a memory that lived deep in her bones.

  When the tears came, she didn’t stop them.

  18

  Willow

  There was something lurking in the shadows of the pharmacy. Willow could feel it. The hairs on the back of her neck prickled. She turned, gun clasped in both hands, and faced the shattered door. She made her way inside, careful not to make a sound.

  They’d spent the last two days on high alert, staying as hidden as possible, traveling through alleys and side streets. They’d trudged in single file through the crusty snow, doing their best to step in each other’s footprints so they appeared to be one or two people instead of the group the Pyros were hunting.

  Micah had carried Amelia, who was still incredibly weak, slowing them all down. Gabriel wasn’t back yet. Silas and Willow had acted as runners, branching off into false trails and doubling back on themselves. It wasn’t near enough, but it was all they could do.

  Snow drifted down in lazy spirals from the dreary gray sky, but they needed a few more hours of heavy snowfall to completely hide their tracks.

  They’d gone several blocks out of their way to avoid a half-dozen infected people wandering around in the cold, blood smeared around their eye sockets, mouths, and ears. One was a teenage girl with short dark hair that made Willow’s chest constrict. She’d looked so much like Zia.

  Only a few blocks later, they’d had to backtrack to avoid two dozen dead laid out side by side in front of a burning, ancient-looking stone church sandwiched between two diamond-glass skyscrapers. The bodies were covered with a writhing, wriggling carpet of black fur. She glimpsed pink-scaled tails and sharp yellow teeth as the rodents chewed on rotting flesh. She’d nearly
vomited the meager contents of her stomach.

  “We’re going slower than a turtle stuck in molasses,” Finn had muttered, shivering as he untucked his hands from beneath his armpits to gnaw on a Twizzlers he’d scavenged.

  Willow was exhausted. All that work and effort, and they’d barely made it a few miles. Finally, around mid-afternoon, Jericho gave them the go-ahead. She and Silas scouted ahead to find a shelter for the night.

  Less than a half hour later, the first drone had appeared fifteen feet above the street, cruising silently between two buildings. She and Silas hid inside a liquor store, ducking behind the bar. The mirrored counters were smashed. Most of the bottles had been stolen, but a few were shattered across the floor. The scent of alcohol burned her nostrils. She crouched, heart beating in her throat, as several pairs of feet tramped past. The Pyros were still hunting them.

  They waited ten minutes before daring to move again. Before they’d left, Silas had grasped the neck of a bottle of bourbon that had rolled beneath the bar. He started to open it, already tilting the bottle toward his mouth. Willow seized his arm. “Oh, no, you don’t.” He’d hurled a few petulant insults at her, but they both knew it was half-assed.

  Now, she stared into the looted pharmacy, letting her eyes adjust to the darkness. She scanned the shadowy rows of mostly empty shelves, ripped prescription boxes and tipped bottles, pried open and long emptied.

  She gestured to Silas, a few yards behind her, and slipped inside, gun level, careful not to step on the glass shards littered across the floor. She inched around a corner. Was she just being paranoid? Had she just imagined the sensation that she wasn’t alone—

  A woman with a tangle of matted dark curls was bent on her knees, reaching beneath a shelf for something, her backpack and rifle on the floor beside her.