Silas goes to the window and opens the blinds. It’s already dark. “This place makes my skin crawl.”
“Silas has forgotten that real revolution means sacrifice,” Dorian says.
“And Dorian has forgotten that we don’t sacrifice our friends,” Silas snaps back. He tries pulling open the window, and when it doesn’t budge, he goes to the door and jimmies the handle. “Can you get me out?” he asks Song.
Song crouches down and examines the lock.
“Where you going?” I ask, joining Silas at the door.
“The zip came back, but Quinn wasn’t at dinner. Neither were Bea or Jazz,” he says. “I’m going to look for them. I want to know what’s going on.”
“You’re determined to get us in trouble,” Dorian says.
“Well, I’m sorry if I’m the only one who gives a crap about them,” Silas says.
“Hey!” I push him. If anyone’s worried about Quinn and Bea, it’s me; I know them better than anyone, and I’m the one who got them wrapped up in this mess to begin with. “I’m coming with you,” I say.
“Lemme help,” Maude says, springing up from the bed. She roots around in her hair and hands Song a pin. He straightens it out and sticks into the lock. We all watch and wait, and after a few minutes the lock clicks.
But Song isn’t the one who’s opened it. Wren, the girl we met at dinner with the icy eyes and headscarf, stands in the doorway. She’s carrying a heavy load of red fabric over her arm.
“I come bearing gifts,” she says, stepping into the cabin and throwing the folds of fabric onto my bunk. We gather around. She lifts up one and shakes open a long, red robe with snaps down the front. “For the ceremony. One size fits all.” She offers one to each of us. Maude and Bruce watch carefully. We haven’t told them about the Pairing Ceremony.
“Am I finally being made a dame? If so, I’d like to request a transfer to the royal chambers and a servant to do my gardening for me,” Maude says. “Also, I need a foot rub.”
Wren looks down at Maude’s knotted feet, frowns, and passes her a robe. “For you,” she says.
Maude beams and slips the robe straight over her head. Silas and I share a glance. If they’ve been invited, then it can’t just be about breeding. Silas’s face relaxes a fraction, and he holds his robe out at arm’s length to look at it.
“Did Maks and Quinn find anyone?” I ask Wren.
“Don’t think so,” she says. “All dead apparently. Murdered or something.”
“Even the girl? Even Bea?” Maude asks. Wren shrugs unsympathetically. I bite down hard and clench my jaw. Bea murdered? After everything she endured?
I don’t believe it.
“And where’s Quinn now?” Silas asks.
“He’s been taken to the lockup.”
“Lockup?” Silas pushes.
“Yep,” Wren says, and with no further explanation goes to the door. “I finally got a robe today, too. Can’t wait to meet my other.” She beams, showing her yellow teeth, pulls the door closed behind her, and locks it.
“Ugly-looking bitch,” Maude croaks, clutching for a joke. “I’m ancient. At least I got an excuse.” She returns to her bunk and flops down.
“We should talk about it, Maude,” I say.
“About what? I ain’t got nothing to say,” she whispers.
Bruce sits next to Maude and kisses the side of her head. “Maddie?”
“Jazz was a pain in the butt, but she was just a kid,” Dorian says, sounding more like his old self. He folds up his robe. “How many more of us need to die?” He’s speaking to himself, but we all nod.
“And now Quinn’s been imprisoned,” Silas says.
“Because Jazz couldn’t be found, and Vanya needs someone to blame,” I say.
“We have to speak to him. We have to find out what happened,” Silas says.
Song returns to the door. He tries again to pick the lock with the hairpin. When he can’t, he slumps on the floor. “It’s useless,” he says.
Maude is on her back. She points upward. “Go through the roof,” she says, and we all look up to see what she’s pointing at: the skylight.
30
BEA
Ronan and I are in a room on the second floor of an old hotel not far from the station. The floorboards creak, and the walls are ready to fall in on themselves. Ronan uses a finger and thumb to make an opening in the crooked blinds. “What can be taking him so long?” he wonders.
He sits next to me on the bed and sinks into it. We aren’t using a flashlight in case an opportunistic drifter sees the light, but even in the gloom, I can make out the wrinkles in Ronan’s brow.
It’s freezing again and I can’t stop trembling or thinking about Quinn. I curl up to keep warm. “How will they escape from Sequoia, if it’s so terrible there?” I say. “And what makes Quinn think they can just stroll back into the pod to help?”
I wish I’d tried harder to persuade him to stay. I just watched him leave. And he never mentioned Maude. Does that mean she never made it to Sequoia?
Ronan rubs his eyes. “I don’t know, Bea. But what I do know is that Jude asked for Quinn, and what I’m giving him is a sick kid and his son’s outlawed girlfriend. Let’s concentrate on winning him over, and then worry about Quinn, okay?”
He’s right: If I’m going to be any use to Ronan, and if my parents’ deaths are to mean anything, I have to focus on what we’re about to do. “We just tell the truth: Quinn was here and then he left. Jude Caffrey knows what Quinn and I mean to each other, and he’ll know I wouldn’t return to the pod if Quinn wasn’t following.”
“You seem very confident,” Ronan says. He stands up and peers through the blinds again.
“I’m not,” I say. I’m terrified of returning to the place where my parents were killed and attempting to collude with a man responsible for countless deaths at The Grove.
But if I want to stop others from spending their whole lives under the Ministry’s iron thumb, I only have one choice—I have to throw my shoulders back and fight.
31
ALINA
Song gives me a leg up, but when I push on the hatch it doesn’t budge. “There’s a latch,” Song says.
I pull it to the left and the piston lets out a gentle puff. Then I haul myself up onto the roof and sit low in case a patrolling guard spots me. Down in the cabin, Song and Bruce are helping Silas. His two hands appear at either side of the opening and then he’s pulling himself up through it. He sits on the opposite side of the hatch. “It might not be true. About Bea,” he whispers into the night.
My stomach heaves. “I think it is.”
“Well, let’s wait until we talk to Quinn,” he says. “We can’t know that anything these people say is true.”
I don’t want to dwell on it. What’s the point? What does thinking ever change? I crawl to the edge of the roof and turn onto my belly. I dangle a moment before letting go and land awkwardly. No floodlight is activated, and I crouch in the stillness. Silas lands next to me with a thud seconds later.
We stay hunched and sneak behind the cabins. As clouds cover the moon, we’re bathed in complete darkness, and I feel Silas hold on to the tail of my jacket to make sure he doesn’t lose me. When we reach the last cabin, and our eyes have fully adjusted, we stop. The annex is to our right, in front of the main house, the other outbuildings to our left. Between the outbuildings and us is an expanse of open land, and if it’s protected by motion sensors, we’ll be discovered.
The clouds shift, and the moon dispenses a little light. Silas looks quickly from left to right. “That must be the lockup. Narrow windows,” he says, pointing to a squat building in the distance. He’s about to speak again when we hear low voices. We flatten ourselves against the wall as Vanya and Maks come into view. I breathe as slowly and quietly as I can.
“I’m sorry about your daughter,” Maks says.
“She was dead to me a long time ago,” Vanya responds.
“Well, maybe she isn’t. I don
’t trust any of them,” he says. “They’re too clever.”
Vanya smiles. “So what? How many brainy traitors have we buried?”
They are tittering when the area erupts in light. I pull my face around the corner and instinctively take Silas’s hand. He puts a finger to the blowoff valve of my facemask. Like he has to warn me to be quiet.
“What are those idiots doing?” Vanya says. “Go and shut down the floodlights.” Maks gallops away.
“It’s Vanya,” a new voice says.
“What are you playing at? What if someone sees you?” Vanya hisses, and the floodlights dim to nothing. I poke my face around the corner. Silas stands over me and does the same. In Maks’s place is a pair of men carrying a long object wrapped in plastic. They put down their load and stand panting.
“The buggy broke down,” one of the men tells Vanya. “Had to carry it ourselves.”
“Just get this garbage out back where it belongs. And if I ever see you two trying something like this again, it’ll be you rolled up in plastic.” Vanya kicks the load violently and strides away, the men watching her go.
“Hormonal or what,” one whispers. The other snickers. As they reach down for their bundle, Silas pulls on my elbow. “We have to follow them,” he says.
“What for?”
“Do you want to guess what’s in that plastic or shall I?” he asks.
“What about Quinn?” We need to make sure he’s okay, and find out what’s happened to Bea.
“What if that is Quinn?” Silas asks. I stare at the bundle. If Silas is right, then it doesn’t matter what Abel says; we can’t stay one more day.
“You don’t think that,” I say.
“He wasn’t at dinner.”
“Let’s check it out.”
We follow the men at a distance, stooping low and sticking as close to the outbuildings as we can. They chat, back and forth, and groan under the weight of the load. “Should’ve waited ’til tomorrow,” the one says.
“Best get it over with.” Eventually we reach the back wall marking Sequoia’s border. Like the front, the top is garnished with broken glass. With a sigh, the two men drop the bundle and stand huffing and puffing. “Need air,” one says, coughing.
“Too right. Soon as we’re done with this, I’m gonna set up camp next to an oxybox.” He roots in his pocket and pulls out a heavy, jangling set of keys, which he inspects in the moonlight. “Got it,” he says, and shuffles to the wall with a tiny steel door built into it. He rattles the key in the lock, and the door opens.
The two men let out long breaths as they bend down to retrieve the bundle, and once they have it, they scoot through the door, one walking backward, the other directing from the opposite end.
We spring at the door as quickly as we can, glance around it to make sure the men have moved on, and creep out of Sequoia.
I close my eyes and take a deep breath. “Quick,” Silas whispers.
The men are already way ahead, plodding along the uneven ground and sidestepping heaps of junk abandoned on this side of the wall, where no one has to see it. The moon disappears again, which is fortunate, because there are no buildings to hide behind, only the odd boulder or rusting car, and if the men were to turn, they’d surely see us.
They stop for the final time, and we drop behind an upended, rotting wooden table. Silas nudges me. I lift myself up beside him. There is another figure next to the two men now: a scrawny man with a long beard and wearing a facemask. “The hole doesn’t look big enough,” one of the men complains.
“Gimme a look,” the bearded man grumbles, and knocks the bundle with the handle of a shovel. The men let it drop to the ground and unwrap it.
I lift myself higher to see, sprawled on the ground before us, lifeless and stiff, the body of a man. His head is swollen and his eyes are bulging. I slide back down behind the table and cover the blowoff valve in my mask with my hand.
Silas’s eyes reflect a sliver of light. “Not Quinn,” he whispers, which makes me feel a little better, but not much.
“He’s too wide,” the bearded man says. The shovel hits the ground as he digs a bigger hole. “I’ve another spade over there,” he says.
“You do your job, Crab, we’ll do ours.”
There’s a pause and one of the men speaks again. “Hungry?” he asks the other. We hear something being unwrapped and slobbery chewing. I gag. How can they bury someone and eat at the same time?
And that’s when I notice the ground: it isn’t naturally uneven—it’s become that way from the bodies buried here. And though some mounds have already been concealed by rocks and debris, and are almost flat, others are still plump, the earth barely sunken in next to the body.
I poke Silas. “Graves everywhere,” I whisper.
“Who the hell are they burying?” he says. We stare at each other, not knowing what else to say.
“There you are,” Crab says. We peek over the edge of the table and watch Crab throw his shovel onto the ground.
The two men who carried the body throw aside what remains of their food and stand. “You take that end,” one tells the other.
“Why should I touch the head?” his workmate barks.
“He won’t bite.”
“You take the head then,” he says, and the other man is forced to swap ends.
“One, two, three,” he says, grimacing, and they lift the man by his arms and legs, swing the body, and launch him into the hole where he lands with a crack.
Crab twirls the end of his beard around his finger. “Shall I fill it in?” he asks, nodding at the grave.
“Well, we don’t want it stinking.”
“Doesn’t seem much point if you’re gonna have another delivery for me any day.” Crab picks up his shovel and sticks it into the heap of loose earth.
“Not your place to keep track of these things, Crab,” one of the men says. Crab snorts and covers the dead man with earth. The two deliverymen head back.
“We should’ve run from Sequoia ages ago,” Silas whispers.
“The back gate gives us an escape route. We didn’t know about it until now.”
Silas rubs his head with both hands. The two men are out of sight. If we want to catch them and make it through the door before them, we have to run.
We pick our way through the junk, veering to the right to bypass the men. It’s so dark it’s difficult to see where we’re going, and we’re sprinting so fast, I stumble several times and my boots clank against old metal pipes. Finally the wall appears, and we slam against it, almost knocking ourselves out. I use my hands to feel for the open door. Silas points at it about fifty feet away, but we’re too late. The men saunter out of the scrub and seconds later slip though the door, slamming it behind them. We run and I try the handle. “Locked. We’ll have to climb over the wall,” I say.
“I’m not sure it’s possible,” Silas says, and I’m about to argue when there’s a bang and he crumples to the ground.
I scream and jump just in time to dodge the gravedigger who is aiming his shovel directly for my head.
“Drifters!” Crab yells, grappling for my facemask. I kick him in the chest with both feet and knock him to the ground, giving me a few seconds to grab his facemask. I pull it so hard the tubing comes away from the airtank, and he lashes out. But he isn’t as adept at breathing as the others, and after a few seconds he stops fighting, hacking instead, as the sinewy atmosphere attacks his lungs.
“Give me my mask, you dirty br-brat,” he sputters.
I dash to Silas, refit his facemask, and shake him violently. “Wake up.” I lift his head to see if he’s been injured, but I can’t see much in the dark, and suddenly there’s a rustle behind me and my own facemask is pulled off. I jump up and turn, and as I do, Crab, who looked done for only moments before, puts his hands around my throat. His eyes bulge as he squeezes.
Neither of us has enough air, and together we crumple to the ground.
His hands are clamped so firmly there’s no way he�
�s letting go. It feels like he might snap my neck. I dig my nails into his hands and scratch his face, fighting, fighting for life. And then a shadow appears above us.
Silas.
Crab releases me and tries to scurry away but Silas has the shovel. Crab covers his eyes with his hands, as though this will protect him, and Silas smacks the shovel against Crab’s head. Crab doesn’t utter another sound and drops to the ground. I shudder and stare at Silas.
Silas throws me his facemask, then retrieves mine and puts it over his own mouth and nose. “He’s dead,” I say.
Silas lifts Crab’s head. “Yes,” he says. A dark, thick liquid oozes from his head onto the earth. A stabbing of regret trickles into me, but I sweep it away: it was him or us. Right?
“No one can find him,” Silas says. He pulls me to my feet.
“What does it matter?” My throat is still stinging.
“They’ll suspect us. I don’t want to be next.”
I bend down and lift Crab’s legs. Silas takes his arms. Blood drips from the gravedigger’s fractured skull.
Quickly, we carry Crab to the hole he dug himself and throw him on top of the other body. “I’ll get the shovel,” Silas says. I stare down at Crab, lying cheek to cheek with the other dead man, their limbs bent all out of shape.
Silas begins filling the hole as soon as he returns, and when his muscles ache, I take over. We work like this until we’re done. “We’re murderers,” I say, wiping my sweaty hands on my trousers.
On our way back we use stones and loose earth to cover the track of Crab’s blood. “Let’s stash the airtank. We may need it later,” Silas says, leaving me by the wall for a few minutes while he finds a good hiding spot.
We still have the problem of how we’re going to get into Sequoia. There don’t seem to be any cameras at this rear exit, but there’s the glass on the wall; it won’t go unnoticed if we turn up to breakfast gashed to pieces from climbing over it.
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