Resist b-2

by Sarah Crossan

  Resist

  ( Breathe - 2 )

  Sarah Crossan

  The sequel—and conclusion—to Sarah Crossan's Breathe. Three teen outlaws must survive on their own in a world without air, exiled outside the glass dome that protects what's left of human civilization. Gripping action, provocative ideas, and shocking revelations in a dystopian novel that fans of Patrick Ness and Veronica Roth will devour.

  Bea, Alina, and Quinn are on the run. They started a rebellion and were thrown out of the pod, the only place where there's enough oxygen to breathe. Bea has lost her family. Alina has lost her home. And Quinn has lost his privileged life. Can they survive in the perilous Outlands? Can they finish the revolution they began? Especially when a young operative from the pod's Special Forces is sent after them. Their only chance is to stand together, even when terrible circumstances force them apart. When the future of human society is in danger, these four teens must decide where their allegiances lie. Sarah Crossan has created a dangerous, and shattered society in this wrenching, thought-provoking, and unforgettable post-apocalyptic novel.

  Resist

  Breathe 2

  by

  Sarah Crossan

  Dedication To Aoife With love Always

  PART I

  THE JOURNEY

  1

  ALINA

  We didn’t think sailing to Sequoia would be easy, but we hoped for better luck than freezing rain and winds. The slightest miscalculation and we’ll end up at the bottom of the river.

  “Help me!” I shout, throwing my weight into my heels and tipping backward to keep the rigging from slipping out of control. The rain hits us horizontally, and makes ice of the deck. The boat creaks and lurches forward. The sails flap wildly as my cousin, Silas, stumbles toward me and grabs the cable. Almost effortlessly he pulls it taut, and I quickly tie a stopper knot to keep the sail from ballooning out and capsizing us. “That should do it,” I say, my voice thinned by the storm.

  Silas pulls up the hood on his coat. He hasn’t said much since we set sail. No one has. What is there to say now that The Grove’s a ruin—now that everything the Resistance ever fought for has been destroyed?

  At least the storm keeps us too busy to wallow in memories: the screams and blood; the tanks; soldiers rushing at us with guns; our friends lying dead. And the trees, our whole forest, shriveling while we watched.

  I can still taste the toxic foam in my throat.

  I follow Silas to the cabin where our tiny group of survivors is taking shelter from the squall. My hands burn from the cold. I rub them together, then tuck them inside my coat and under my armpits.

  “We did everything you said,” I tell Bruce. I never thought I’d be so grateful to have a drifter on our side, but whatever harm the old man caused on behalf of the Ministry all those years ago, doesn’t matter now. Without him, we wouldn’t have known how to get the boat going, let alone save it from the storm.

  “You young’uns did good,” he says, scratching his gray beard and keeping his eyes on the view out the filthy window, where the outline of city buildings on the shoreline is barely distinguishable through the haze of spray and rain.

  The boat dips and the wheel rips out of Bruce’s gnarled hands. My stomach reels. I adjust the valve on the airtank buckled to my belt, and the tank hisses as more air is released into the tubing. I inhale deeply through my nose. As Silas steadies the wheel with Bruce, I squat next to Maude. The old woman has a blanket wrapped around her like a shroud; only her head and one scrawny arm are exposed. “Did you manage to collect all the airtanks from the deck?” I ask. Without air, we may as well jump into the river—finish ourselves off quickly.

  “You think I’m some kinda nitwit? I put ’em over there.” She points to the corner of the cabin where the tanks are untidily piled. We have ten, and there are seven of us. How many days of oxygen is that? How many hours?

  A sob comes from the opposite corner. My fellow Resistance members, Dorian and Song, are bending over Holly, one of The Grove’s gardeners. I don’t know her well, but I’m glad for everyone who survived.

  I grab an airtank and go to them, keeping my stride wide to stay balanced. Holly is shivering so fiercely her teeth are clacking together. Although she lived at The Grove with Song and Dorian, and learned to survive on low levels of oxygen, her breath is quick and shallow. “She’s hyperventilating. She needs this,” I say, holding out the airtank.

  Dorian stands up and runs his hand through his hair. “She won’t take one.”

  I try to put a hand to her forehead. She swipes me away, scratching my hand with her nails.

  “She’s gone loopy,” Maude crows, rubbing a hard scab on her elbow.

  Keeping his hands on the wheel, Bruce peers at Holly from under his thick eyebrows with an expression that tells me he’s seen this kind of thing before. I’m sure he has. The Switch sent people mad as the oxygen levels plummeted and everyone slowly suffocated. And he and Maude lived through it. But maybe this is worse. What’s happening now feels like the end. “She’ll be okay,” he says quietly. Maude tuts, but she doesn’t contradict him; she isn’t that heartless.

  Holly mutters something. “What is it, Holls?” Song asks. He doesn’t touch her. Instead he presses his own slender brown hands to his heart like he wants to feel what she feels. His eyes are watery and filled with aching. Is it possible they’re an item? Romantic relationships between Resistance members were always forbidden, but maybe that rule was ignored more than I knew. Silas was with Inger, after all.

  “Air,” Holly moans. Song reaches for an airtank, but Holly shakes her head. She turns to the cabin door. “Fresh air,” she says, as though there’s such a thing.

  Dorian sighs. “We’re sailing through a storm.” The boat pitches backward in answer to his warning. At the wheel, Bruce and Silas grunt and struggle to keep us upright.

  “Let’s wait until it passes,” Song says gently.

  Holly gazes at her boots, which are flecked in hardened black foam. “I want to go out and feel the air.” She bites her bottom lip and picks invisible lint from her pants. “Then maybe we can go back to The Grove and take showers to warm ourselves up.”

  I envy Holly’s retreat. If I could pull away from reality a little bit, what we’ve seen might not hurt so much. “I’ll take her out for a minute,” I say. “Might clear her head.”

  Holly stands, pulling her hood over her short, frizzy brown hair. Her nose and ears are already red from the cold. “Where’s Petra?” Holly asks.

  I take her hand and lead her to the cabin door. “She’s back at The Grove taking care of the trees,” I say. It’s not untrue. Our leader clung fiercely to a doomed tree as we ran. Petra couldn’t leave behind her life’s work. And she paid the ultimate price.

  And then my throat tightens as I remember Jazz scampering up a tree to be with her. Jazz was only a child. She didn’t deserve to die. No one did. “Alina?” Dorian says. He’s behind me.

  “We’ll just be a few minutes,” I say, and force the door open against the wind.

  Holly and I turn our backs on the lashing rain and head for the bow. I let go of her hand and she clings to the rimed railing, leaning forward and smiling. She allows the biting surf to spray her face and water to trickle down her neck. The boat rocks against a heavy wave, and I grab the railing with my ungloved hands, but Holly lets go. Maybe it was a mistake bringing her outside. “Let’s go back in,” I say.

  Holly squints into the bleary distance, and her bottom lip quivers. “I knew we’d lose the war,” she says. Over the roiling of the waves and wind, it sounds like a whisper.

  I don’t tell her we haven’t lost because it would be a lie. We’re no better than drifters now, refugees heading for Sequoia and hoping they’ll take us in. All
we’ve been left with are our lives, and I’m not sure that’s enough anymore. As though reading my mind, Holly steps on the bottom rung of the railing, and hoists herself onto the other side, so she’s suspended over the prow like a living figurehead. I throw my arms around her.

  “Holly, what are you doing? Get your ass back on the deck.”

  The boat dips forward, and she begins to cry. “Let me go.”

  My feet slip. “Help!” I scream.

  Within moments, most of the others are on us and Song is helping me drag her back over the railing. Once she’s safely lying flat on the deck, he shakes her. “What the hell’s wrong with you? How dare you do that? How dare you!” He rests his head on Holly’s stomach and sobs. Holly strokes Song’s tight curls and gazes at the clouds.

  “We’ll carry her inside,” Dorian says. He glares at me through the driving rain.

  “How was I to know what she was planning?” I say.

  Dorian shakes his head and puts his hand under Holly’s arms.

  Although the rain is still drubbing the boat, the wind has settled, making sailing smoother. Dorian, Holly, and Song doze in their corner. Bruce and Maude are whispering and caressing each other’s wrinkly hands. Silas is at the wheel. I go to him and stare out at the river through the cracked window of the cabin. Dilapidated buildings along the embankment have spilled into the river after decades of neglect. “You should have let her jump.” His voice is low.

  “Are you serious?” A lump swells in my throat. Are our chances of survival that slim?

  “Dorian claims to know where Sequoia is, but when I showed him the map, he was pretty vague. As far as I can work out, we’ve a search radius of around ten miles.”

  “We’ll find it. We’ve done harder things, Silas.”

  “I’m not sure we have. How long do you think our oxygen’s going to last?” he asks. I glance across at the stack of airtanks and then at Maude and Bruce wheezing in their facemasks. Maude looks up at me and, for no particular reason, scowls. Despite what we’ve been through together, we still aren’t friends.

  “We have a few days,” I say.

  “If that.” Silas keeps his eyes on the burnt sun.

  “Do you have a better idea?” I ask. I’m not being argumentative; I really hope he’s thought of something.

  He shakes his head. “Sequoia’s our only shot at not being drifters. If we find it, we can resume planting and make contact with the pod, with my mom and dad.” He stops and looks at me. His eyes are red-rimmed, though whether it’s from the foam the Ministry’s army used to destroy The Grove, tiredness, or despair, I can’t tell.

  I take Silas’s arm. “Harriet and Gideon are fine,” I say. Even if a civil war has broken out in the pod, my aunt and uncle are too smart to be dead.

  A blast of wind pitches the boat toward the bank and Silas pulls the wheel sharply to the left. I’m thrown off balance and fall onto my face. A thick, metallic taste fills my mouth.

  “Sorry,” Silas says. “You all right?”

  “Fine,” I say. I lift my facemask and wipe away the blood with my sleeve. Under the circumstances, it would be childish to complain about a split lip.

  Maude starts up. “Stop!”

  I am about to snarl at the old woman, tell her Silas is doing the best he can to keep the boat steady, and turn just in time to see Holly sneaking out the cabin door. I dash after her. “Holly, no!”

  She is already at the bow, climbing over the railing. By the time I reach her, she’s hanging over the water, jostling from side to side with the current. And she is smiling. Silas’s words rebound in my head—You should have let her jump. But I can’t. She isn’t in her right mind.

  “You’ll feel better tomorrow, Holly.” I hold tight to one of her arms. Ice chips from the freezing river nick my face.

  “Nothing will be different tomorrow,” she says. She turns briefly and catches my eye. “Everything’s gone.”

  “We have to hope,” I say.

  Holly laughs mirthlessly. “I’m all out of hope,” she says, and lets go. The railing bites into my chest as I’m wrenched forward. I hang over the railing, gripping Holly’s arm, but she’s heavy and my hands slide to her wrist. A violent spray from the keel drenches her. She gazes up at me with a look of perfect serenity. My fingers burn. “You’re hurting me,” she says. And then it happens: her wet skin slips from my grasp.

  Holly hits the water and is devoured. And all I can do is watch.

  Heavy footsteps pound the deck. “Holly!” Song cries. He leans over the railing and searches the waves breaking against the hull.

  But Holly is gone.

  I turn away.

  Everyone but Bruce is on deck, staring at me.

  “I couldn’t hold her,” I say.

  “Holly?” Song howls.

  Dorian puts an arm around Song, and pulls him back from the railing.

  “We’ll dock for the night,” Silas says. “Now everyone, back inside.”

  Silently, we file into the cabin. I slide onto the floor. One of Holly’s brown boots is lying next to the pile of airtanks, the laces loose and frayed.

  I will not feel guilty. I couldn’t hold her. It was her decision to die. I close my eyes and press my knuckles against the lids.

  I no longer feel cold. I feel nothing.

  “Poor girl lost the fight,” Bruce says to no one in particular.

  And I am left to wonder: What are we fighting for, anyway?

  2

  BEA

  Sometimes I wished I believed in God, like people did before The Switch. Knowing there was a grand plan and that someone you loved wasn’t gone forever must have given them a lot of comfort. But even if my parents are in a better place, God couldn’t reverse time and bring them back and that’s what I want: the chance to hug my parents, to smell my mother and father again.

  When I pined for Quinn, I thought I knew what people meant when they talked about having broken hearts. I didn’t know a thing. Now, my insides are all eaten up. My heart pumps what little oxygen I have around my body, but the breath doesn’t make me whole.

  Even though it’s covered in slush and lumps of ice, Quinn, Jazz, and I are following an old railway line from The Grove into the center of the city. From there we’ll track the river west. I have the old map Gideon gave me before I slid out of the pod, and Jazz has fingered a place on it she thinks is Sequoia. We have to trust she’s right because we don’t have another choice.

  Quinn puts an arm around my waist and squeezes me. “Maybe we should rest,” he says. He must hear me wheezing through my facemask, but this isn’t a safe place to stop. The temperature is dropping with the sun, so we need shelter, but the graffiti-covered buildings around us look like they’re about to topple. I shake my head and without asking me, he turns the valve on my airtank to allow more oxygen into my mask.

  But there’s no knowing how long it’ll take to get to Sequoia. When he looks away, I turn it back to fifteen percent.

  “A tunnel!” Jazz chirrups, pointing at an underpass a few hundred feet ahead. She bounces away, kicking up the slush with her feet as she goes.

  “Be careful!” I call out. I pull the map from my coat pocket and unfold it for what must be the hundredth time. “There should be a train station after the tunnel. Saint Pancras,” I tell Quinn. He takes our moment alone together to hold me. Without meaning to, I stiffen.

  He steps back. “You all right?”

  “I wish we’d found more people alive,” I say, diverting his question. I don’t want him to worry, and there’s nothing he can do to sweep away the cinders of grief anyway.

  “We’re going to get through this,” he says. I nod, pull the beret Old Watson gave me over my forehead, and smile weakly.

  “Stop smooching and hurry up!” Jazz insists. She’s already way ahead. She pulls her facemask down over her chin—having grown up at The Grove and spent her life training her body to subsist on low levels of oxygen, she doesn’t need to wear it all the time. She spins
in circles, opening her mouth to the sky. Her spirally red hair, singed at the ends, blazes like fire against the snowy backdrop. You’d never know she was the one survivor we found in the rubble that was once her home.

  Quinn takes my wrist and forces me to look at him. “Against the odds, we got out alive and found each other.”

  “I just wish . . .” I think of my parents’ motionless bodies, their blood spreading across the stage as the fighting broke out. I was all they ever had and they worked every day of their lives just to pay the air tax, so I could breathe. Thank goodness I have Quinn . . . but I want them, too.

  “Do you think Maude made it?” I ask.

  “That scrappy lunatic? Of course. Jazz said as much, didn’t she?”

  I am about to say that Jazz can’t know for sure that anyone made it when there’s a shrill scream followed by a thud. We spin toward the sound. “Jazz?”

  She’s gone.

  In a second, Quinn is off. I trail after him, unable to keep up. He halts on the tracks and desperately glances around. “Jazz!” he calls. “She was right here,” he says, as I catch up. We stand and listen.

  Silence.

  We zigzag back and forth over the track, stopping when we reach a barbed wire fence on one side with old bits of plastic bags caught in it, and a procession of rusting train carriages on the other. Then we inch toward the tunnel, calling Jazz’s name into the dusk. After everything awful that’s happened, I brace myself for the worst.

  I pick a red hair from my coat, and it floats to the ground. “Let’s split up. We’ll find her quicker,” I say.

  “And lose each other? No way.” He takes my hand and we peer into the tunnel without going inside. The light at the end is a semicircle of gray.

  “Do you have a flashlight?” I whisper, so my words won’t rebound.

  “I don’t have anything.” He sighs, and I touch his hair with my gloved hand.