Zee feels for a pulse, shakes her head. “Lay her down.”
“No!” Johnny clutches her to his chest. “We can’t leave her—!”
“If you want me to try to save her, lay her down!”
He lays Smudge back down in the rot, and Zee locates the nearest corpse that hasn’t yet begun to decompose. With one clean swipe, she rips away the skin from the headless woman’s chest.
I pivot to vomit onto a pile of bones and blackened flesh. My pure white wedding gown is now a disgusting brownish-red. When I turn back, Zee has already placed the skin onto Smudge’s neck and traces the edges of the tear with two orange fingertips. She lays her palm over the spot, then closes her eyelids. Her hand glows blue, and then bright red. Then over Smudge’s heart, she places her other palm, which lights up green. She touches three fingers to her own chest, and Smudge’s body jumps. She repeats, then places an ear on Smudge’s chest, shakes her head, and blows a long breath into Smudge’s mouth before shocking her again.
Johnny kisses Smudge’s hand, held tight in his own. “Please don’t die.”
“I remember her,” Zee says. “One of his favorites.”
Johnny and I clutch each other as Zee repeats the process a fifth time, placing her ear to Smudge’s chest after blowing more air into her lungs. At once, Zee’s face lights up. “We have a pulse! It’s faint, but it’s there!”
“Oh thank God!” Johnny sobs, giddy and grotesque where he sits on a rotted body.
Speechless, my vision blurs and I swipe my eyes to clear the happy tears.
Zee stands. “We have to get her to the Refuge; they have medical equipment and doctors.”
Johnny lifts Smudge from the muck and cradles her, and we maneuver back to the ledge, where a steep climb awaits. Zee ascends with no trouble, then turns to help me. Johnny struggles to climb with Smudge draped over his shoulder, and keeps sliding down in obvious severe back pain.
Emerson appears behind us. “Hand her to me, we gotta move.”
With an effort, Johnny hoists Smudge up over his head, and Emerson leans over to grab onto her, with me, Zee, and Pedro bracing him so he doesn’t fall in. Once Emerson gets a good grip, he hauls her up and cradles her, while Zee and I drag Johnny up and out of the pit.
With a yank, Zee removes the top few layers of the bottom of her dress, leaving a more manageable getaway outfit. “We have to hurry. The OAIs will soon be recovered.” She tosses the ripped layers into the pit.
“How soon?” I consider doing the same with my own dress, but decide there’s no time.
“Less than ten minutes.”
“How long before we get there?”
“About ten minutes, considering how we are traveling—with Smudge, and the children.”
“Lead the way. I’ll move us along as fast as possible.”
“I’ll take her now.” Johnny opens his arms up to Emerson.
“You sure? Your back—”
“I’m fine. Please, we have to go.”
Emerson carefully rolls Smudge into Johnny’s arms, and Johnny holds her upright with her head against his shoulder so he can fit through any narrow crevices. He starts after Zee. A line of olders and youngers follow, then there’s someone attached to my leg. Several someones: Chloe, Pia, and Raven, all terror-stricken.
“We’re going to be fine, okay?” I tell them. “We have to move now.”
They hurry to get in line with the others, and Baby Lou wails from Serna’s arms. I take her, shush her, and the line inches ahead, Zee at the front and Johnny close behind. Emerson and another older boy take up the rear, while Mateo holds the hands of the three flower girls, who I’m sure may never let go of him again.
The crevice narrows to just wide enough for me to fit through with Baby Lou. Emerson’s broad chest is behind me, and I bet Johnny’s having one hell of a time with Smudge. That might be the reason for the line’s near-stop ahead of me.
“Everything okay?” I call to the front.
“Almost there!” Zee says.
The line begins to move again. Another couple of minutes along the dim passage, and it lights up and widens into a large cavern. In the center and before a large, metal arched doorway, sits a huge, strange vehicle with a smoky gray shell, giant black wheels, and a small, rectangular window on the side. Next to the window is a ladder leading up to the roof.
“Everyone follow me.” Zee darts up and opens a giant circular lid in the vehicle’s roof. “We have to hurry, the OAIs have been overridden. All but two.” She gathers Smudge from Johnny so he can climb up and in, then he takes her back and down into the vehicle. A second later, it lights up with a rumble.
“Hurry!” I help them up as fast as they can go, and they drop one by one into the Rover. Pedro gives me a quick squeeze and a kiss on the cheek. “And Joy does it again . . . You’re a badass chick, sis.” Then he ascends, and disappears to safety with the rest of them.
Finally, it’s Mateo’s turn. The three girls scamper up the rungs ahead of him like there’s a blazing fire beneath them, then Mateo turns from the hatch. “Here, I’ll take her so you can climb up.”
I lift her up to him and start up the ladder.
“Oh, my sweet wife . . . where are you going?”
To my despair, Lord Daumier stands at the entrance to the cave, one glowing red hand raised. Mateo drops inside the Rover with Baby Lou, and I dart the rest of the way up with Emerson at my heels. A blast of energy slams into Emerson’s back, he loses his grip, and I reach down, grab his arm. I yank him back up as Lord Daumier and his three Clergymen race toward us. We topple down the steps into the Rover, and Zee slams the hatch closed as Daumier springs to mount the roof . . . and a corner of his robe is caught inside.
Zee flips three large latches, then weaves her way up to the front, past the terrified children crammed against both sides. Red flashes through the window tell us Daumier is attempting to blast his way into the Rover’s top. But it’s no use. The hatch is impenetrable.
Zee straps herself into the front seat, then pushes a large, green button above her head. The door before us rises and blinding light pours in. Daumier’s Clergymen struggle to free his robe from the Rover’s hatch, but instead, they remove Lord Daumier. They abandon the robe and retreat to the rear of the cave, back into the shadows.
While we move forward . . . into the sunlight.
We see our outside world’s true colors for the first time.
Through the narrow, rectangular front window, tinted a slight gray, the dead Earth is a dark brownish-red, littered with the carcasses of old Tree Factory trees and other scrap metal objects. What might be the shell to another Rover sits charred black a few hundred yards from us, and in front of us, the red earth meets dark brown sand, which slants downhill and crawls toward the mouth of the sea a couple hundred yards to our right.
And the sky . . . ? Well, it’s blue. Blue like I always imagined it would be, like in the picture books my mother read to me as a tiny girl. Blue like the sky Smudge made for us in the transfer program; a stunning, infinite, soul-warming blue. A few miles to our left, that same blue grows dark and angry farther into Bygonne. I search for the Wall, but it’s nowhere on the horizon. We must be too far away from it still.
Everyone gapes in wonderment at the beauty of it all. Except Johnny. He sees none of it. Eyes glued to Smudge’s face, he’s caught up in silent prayer. He’s never been so full of despair and longing. He cradles her to his chest, fingertips in position against her neck for constant pulse monitoring.
“How is it?” I ask him.
“Weak . . . but there.” He kisses her cheek.
“She gonna be okay?” Pedro leans from his seat next to Zee at the front.
“She’ll make it.” Johnny chokes back a sob, stifling it behind a bluffed strength. “She’s a strong girl.”
One thing’s for certain: if Smud
ge dies, Johnny won’t ever be the same again. And neither would I.
“You’re right,” I say. “She will. She’s the strongest girl I’ve ever met.”
Second, Mateo says in my mind.
This wasn’t all me. Zee did most of it.
Still . . . you’re amazing. If you weren’t, I doubt she would’ve risked her life to help you.
I guess.
I know, he says.
For a moment, I regard all of the terrified children’s filthy faces peering back and forth between me and the front window, bracing for what’s next. Baby Lou grips my shirt in a tight fist and sucks the thumb of her other one, so tired and scared.
“Buh-byee?” She shivers.
“Yes, Baby, we’re going bye-bye.” I rock her, hold her snug against me. “We’re going to a safe place.”
“Pace?”
I kiss her nose. “Yes, sweetheart.”
“Where are we going, Momma Joy?” asks Raven, with Pia and Chloe held to either side of her.
“Somewhere Smudge told us about. We’ll be there soon.”
“Are they coming after us, Joy?” asks Serna.
“No.” At least not yet.
Emerson cringes with each bump.
“How are you doing?” I ask him.
“He got me pretty good.” He leans away from the wall to reveal his tattered shirt and several layers of skin burned off in a wide circle across his right shoulder blade.
“That looks bad. Zee, Emerson’s injured.”
“We’ll be there in about fifteen minutes,” she says. “They’ll fix him up. I’ve already notified them we are on our way.”
Emerson chuckles, swallowing a wince and tugging on the corner of the white-and-gold-trimmed cloth caught in the hatch above. “But we’ve got this!”
“I doubt there’ll be much left of it when we get there,” I say.
“Doesn’t matter. Let it burn. Point is, he lost something. A lot of things.”
I find Mateo, who holds his sister’s hand. He also kept a few things.
We’ll get him back, he says. And Vila, too. Don’t worry.
That’s not all.
What do you mean?
They took . . . my baby. My son. He’s in a lab there—The Soul Room—waiting to become . . . an OAI.
“I’ll be right back,” he tells Pia, then gets up and comes over to me. “Oh my God, Joy . . . No . . .” He grabs a fistful of hair, shakes his head. “You’re serious?”
I give a sober nod, then I break down.
Mateo kneels before us, and I crumple in his embrace. “I’m so sorry, Joy.” He caresses my back, and Baby Lou cries with me, between us.
I fight to contain it, breathing slow and steady. I don’t want to upset her anymore. God knows what kind of torture she endured in that village.
Mateo brushes the scar on my wrist, traces the circular pattern. “What does this mark mean? I saw a few humans with it.” His attempt to distract me.
“Supposedly, it’s a ‘mark of purity’. . .” And I laugh in disgust, swiping wetness from my cheeks.
“It looks so familiar . . .” He stares at it for a moment longer, then shrugs. “I don’t know, maybe it’s nothing.”
I want to tell him about the MemTap program, about his father, and more about the Key, but decide to wait until we get to the Refuge. I inspect his scraped and bruised face, still spotted with dried blood from two days ago. “Wow . . . you look terrible.” My attempt to distract him.
He stares at his hands. “Yeah . . .”
“I’m sorry you went through that.”
He brushes my thigh, and I sense a great rage held back by a makeshift dam. “I’m sorry . . . you went through that.” His voice cracks, and he stares out at the ocean for a moment before returning to me. “You’re such a strong girl. Thank you, for everything you’ve done for us.” He kisses my cheek. “I’m so sorry about Jax, and . . . and your . . . I’m so sorry.”
Now, it’s me who shrugs. I don’t want to feel that anymore right now, either. “It could’ve always been worse.”
“True.” He rubs Baby Lou’s cheek and sniffs at the air around me. “They used the ceremonial perfume, didn’t they?”
“Oh . . . yeah. That’s why I recognized it. It’s the stuff Vila got from the Queen, right?”
“Yep. I’d recognize that scent anywhere.”
“Oh, and speaking of the Queen, now I see why Ms. Ruby seemed familiar to you.”
“Thought about that when I was chained up. I had a lot of time to think.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me when we were in the pool?”
“I didn’t want to spoil the moment.” He chuckles. “And I figured it was a coincidence. None of us knew the Queen had a younger sister. Apparently, there were a lot of things we didn’t know about her.”
In my arms, Baby Lou shudders, staring at the red, rocky Earth as we roll along over it.
“It’s okay, Baby.” Lifting her filthy dress, I inspect her body for cuts and bruises, but find nothing but a full diaper. I glance at Emerson. “Did they hurt her at all?”
“No,” he replies. “I was surprised they let me keep her in my cell. Gave me water, food, and diapers, too.”
“Really?”
“Yep. They fed us decent, too. Well, the Queen did. So strange, that queen. Mat’s right. She ain’t who we thought she was. Or maybe she just changed.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Well . . . every night, she came to check on us. She tried to sneak around, but I seen her through the bars, off in the shadows, like . . . like she was just makin’ sure we was okay. I never seen that side of her before, almost like losin’ her sister changed her. Maybe.” We hit another bump, and Emerson cringes with a deep inhale. “But then she threw me off.”
“What do you mean?” I glance out over the cobalt sea, heat ripples rising from it through the stifling air, creating a layer of steam right above the waves, mesmerizing, mysterious.
“Well—” He takes a deep breath, readjusting his position to ease his pain. “At first, they was gonna sacrifice three boys, but . . . the night before the ceremony, I heard her talking to someone—Lord Ugly, maybe—saying the gods asked for the brown-skinned boy and the baby. Said she couldn’t unify the marriage in purity unless them gods got what they wanted.”
I contemplate this, gazing again at the sea. “She knew what was going to happen. Maybe she kept you close in case she needed to . . . protect you and Baby Lou?”
“I was thinking that, too. But it don’t seem right. I never seen her be that way before.”
“People can change, I guess.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t think they could change that much.”
There’s a sudden increase of temperature in the Rover. Sweat droplets form on my neck and collect beneath the tightness of the dress stretched across my chest. “Zee, are we almost there?”
An alarm beeps on the dash near her, slow, shrill, and repetitive. “Yes, and perfect timing. I’m unable to regulate the temperature any longer.”
Ahead and over the horizon rises a mountain of sand and debris with what appear to be windows peeking through the dirt in various spots. The closer we get, the larger the mound grows until it towers high above us. A sand-colored panel lowers to reveal darkness behind it.
“You sure about this, Zee?” I ask.
“Yes.” She drives forward, and the panel closes behind us. Red lights flash on the other side of the room, then switch to a steady green, while a smaller door slides open ahead. Two figures emerge, and I squint to get a better look. My heart skips a beat. They’re near-exact replicas of Smudge—a boy and a girl—the twin brother and sister she mentioned.
Zee cuts off the engine and makes her way to us and the hatch.
Johnny struggles under Smudge�
�s weight, but two older boys come to his aid. They help him up from the floor and cradle Smudge’s body between them.
“I’m scared, Momma Joy.” Chloe sucks her thumb in a sweaty heap with the other flower girls.
“It’ll be okay. We’re in a safe place.” I hope. “Now come on.”
Baby Lou grips me as they unpeel themselves from each other and stand. Zee hurries to open the hatch, and with a relieving rush of cool air, what’s left of Lord Daumier’s charred robe falls down into the cab. I kick aside the burned and melted skeleton. Too bad Daumier didn’t stay attached to it.
Zee lets the cover drop back with a bang against the Rover’s top, and we all jump. “We have three injured,” she calls out. “An AOAI in critical condition, and two stable human boys with superficial wounds.”
“Mine can wait,” Mateo says. “Take care of them.”
Zee moves to the roof of the Rover and Johnny climbs the ladder behind her with Smudge draped over his shoulder. The two Smudge look-alikes reach down through the opening to retrieve her. They pause, their eyes widen, and the girl’s fills with tears. They take their sister from Johnny and work together to carry her down.
“Come with me, everyone.” Zee helps Emerson up the ladder. Mateo and I with Baby Lou are the only ones to move, though. Everyone else seems too terrified. Zee leans down through the hatch. “It’s safe. I promise. There’s a mile of sensory explosives encircling us. If an unwanted guest arrives, we’ll know.”
“So, they . . . they turned them off so we could come in?” Mateo asks.
“Yes. Now come, please, don’t be afraid. Let’s get inside. You’re all going to love it.”
Mateo climbs out first and helps Emerson, then Serna, who takes Baby Lou so I can aid everyone else. The three flower girls tremble in their dingy white dresses as they climb up and out to Mateo.
“Joy,” Zee says. “Check the rear storage compartment. It’s the small black door to the left.”
The last of the youngers exits and the olders start up. A few crouched steps to the back of the Rover leads me to a small cabinet. I click the handle up. It pops open, and my heart thumps. My daddy’s bag . . . and his boots! Never thought I’d be so happy to see a pair of shoes. And I’d completely forgotten about the bag. I pull on my boots, melting into their familiar comfort on my worn-out feet. I yank my boot laces tight, tie them up, then sling the bag over my shoulder. As the last older boy climbs out, I start my own climb to the sound of Baby Lou’s wailing and Serna shushing her. With each rung, I step on this stupid, disgusting dress. Can’t wait until I can get rid of it and bathe, and wash my boots, too, because now they have corpse residue inside them.
The Soultakers (The Treemakers Trilogy Book 2) Page 25
