Resist b-2

by Sarah Crossan

  She stares at me like she’s trying to remember who I am. “The RATS killed Daddy.”

  “Vine isn’t going to bring him back,” I say gently.

  “Lance Vine was Daddy’s friend.” She goes to the window. “I want to be useful.”

  And I understand that. I want to be useful, too. But why must we be on different sides? Why can’t she see what’s happening?

  “You should go to bed,” I say.

  “I’m glad you’re home,” Niamh says. She fills her water glass and strolls out of the kitchen.

  I’m fooling myself if I think I can convince Niamh that our father was responsible for his own death.

  And I can’t be her conscience; it would be pointless to try.

  PART III

  THE ESCAPE

  38

  QUINN

  Bea’s running, being chased by armed stewards, and my father’s at the head of the hunt, carrying one of those old-fashioned muskets. Eventually Bea falls and I’m there, too, rooted to the road and peering down at her. “Anything’s better than this,” she says, but before I can save her, Ronan is dragging her away. All I can do is retreat slowly into the shadows like a coward. She looks up at Ronan and smiles. Then she kisses him.

  I wake with a start, feeling penned in.

  Clarice has her arm draped over me. She’s snoring. I peel her away and sit up, untangling the airtank’s tubing, which has somehow managed to wrap itself around my neck in the night. I wish I’d stop having these nightmares.

  I get out of bed, bringing the airtank with me. I’m still in my pants, but pull on the sweater I left on the nightstand.

  Clarice stirs and turns over to face me. “This is a bit awkward,” she says through a yawn, which is the biggest bloody understatement ever. “But don’t worry. We’ll get used to each other.” She seems harmless, but I feel too guilty to go as far as to like her; it should be Bea lying next to me, and I would have put my arm around her waist and my face into her neck during the night. As it was, I lay dangled over the edge of the bed in case I accidently touched Clarice, keeping one eye open for as long as I could in case Vanya or Maks stormed in.

  “How long have you lived here?” I ask.

  “Four years. I used to live in the pod. Glad to be out of there. Especially now with what’s going on.”

  “Yeah,” I say. I go to the door, where two pieces of gray paperlike sheets have been pushed under it during the night. They’re identical apart from our names. I throw Clarice hers and read mine.

  SCHEDULE FOR QUINN B. CAFFREY

  STATS—Immunity: Level 7 Fert: Level A IQ: 152

  Ox Con: Excellent Blood Type: A+

  PARTNER—CLARICE BIRD

  6:30 am Meditation – Room #12

  9:30 am Academics’ breakfast – Annex

  10:00 am Cardio – Room #20

  1:30 pm Academics’ lunch – Annex

  2:30 pm Yoga – Room #7

  5:30 pm Study – The Main House library

  7:30 pm Dinner – Sitting 1 – Annex

  8:30 pm Shots – Room #4e

  9:00 pm Meditation – Room #12

  10:00 pm Lights out

  NO CHANGES SHOULD BE MADE TO THIS SCHEDULE WITHOUT DIRECT APPROVAL FROM VANYA. ANY PERSON UNABLE TO COMPLETE DUTIES SHOULD REPORT TO A SENTRY NO LATER THAN 30 MINS PRIOR TO A SCHEDULED START TIME. SICKNESS SHOULD BE REPORTED TO NURSE JONES, NURSE LAYAVITCH, OR DOCTOR MARCELA.

  ENDEAVOR TO REMAIN IN YOUR PAIR AT ALL TIMES.

  “What time is it?” Clarice asks.

  “Almost six,” I say, looking at the clock above the bed and wondering whether Bea’s made it back into the pod yet.

  “This is the only free time we’ll get all day,” Clarice says. She sighs and gets out of bed wearing only a short shirt. I make myself busy looking elsewhere.

  “And it’s hardly free,” I remind her. I scan the list of daily activities. Could I skip the study period without being noticed? I can’t spend another night in that bed. And Alina definitely can’t spend another night with Maks. We’ve all got to get out of here as soon as possible, if we want to help Ronan and Bea with their plan to take back the pod.

  “Sometimes, when people are disappointed with a pairing, they leave. Is that what you’re going to do?” Clarice asks, watching me. She piles her hair on top of her head and holds it in place with what look like chopsticks.

  “’Course not,” I lie, and smile, lacing up my boots good and tight.

  “Phew,” she says, “because anyone who tries to escape usually ends up dead, and I really don’t want you to die. Not before we breed, anyway.”

  39

  ALINA

  Maks is with me every minute, making it impossible to plan an escape. And the only part of my day that isn’t hellish is trooper training. Running, punching, throwing, and dodging are things I’m keen to practice, and even Maks seems impressed when I shoot at cans and bottles suspended from wires, hitting every one. “Not bad,” he says. Maybe he believes I’m training to help Sequoia, but I’m just making sure I remember how to defend myself when we get back to the pod.

  Whenever I see Silas, Wren is a few feet away, gazing at him longingly, and when I try to speak to him, Maks physically drags me away. And Sugar is attached to Abel. He tries to get my attention at lunch, but Maks watches as I spoon each morsel into my mouth and gives Abel several baleful looks. Whatever Abel knows about what’s happening to Maude and Bruce, Maks doesn’t want me to find out. Which makes me even more worried.

  After working on our marksmanship in the morning, we’re given backpacks weighed down with rocks and forced to hike. Even the veterans are given airtanks. “Use them sparingly,” Maks warns, and leads a hundred troopers out of Sequoia and along a dirt track to a mountain dotted with rocks, dead grasses, and parched animal bones.

  We hike for hours in the pouring rain. Never slowing. Our clothes and shoes are soaked through. I turn up my oxygen, but even then, it’s too much: the new recruits, me included, fall behind. I’m alone at the back, Maks up front, when Abel hangs back. Sugar slows, too, but not enough to be right on top of us. Abel tugs on my sleeve and says something, but with the noise of my breath in my ears, the rain, and the thudding of boots, I can’t hear him. He holds on to me to slow me down. The group races ahead. We are side by side, and he lifts up his facemask. “Maude, Bruce, and Jo,” he says.

  “What’s been done to them?” I’m guessing that the body Silas and I saw Crab bury belonged to a benefactor. Do they all end up out the back in unmarked graves? But why?

  Abel lets his facemask spring back against his face and raises his voice. “I’ll take you to see for yourself tonight. We have to act quickly. Every hour that goes by is an hour too long.”

  I trip on a rock and let out a yelp. Abel catches me and Maks, who is almost a hundred feet ahead, spins around and stops. He allows the pack of hikers to pass him and waits until we’ve caught up. He hikes next to us.

  “Her gauge was stuck. She couldn’t get any air,” Abel says, sidling up to Sugar again.

  “Stay. With. Me,” Maks says, and yanks my arm. Pain shoots along it. I wriggle out of Maks’s hold, and he lifts his hand as though about to strike me, then thinks better of it. “That’s enough for today,” he announces to the group. He wheels around and gallops down the mountain.

  “Tonight . . . Wait for me in the hallway after you’ve had your shots,” Abel manages to mutter.

  Silas finds a seat next to me in the dining hall. “Where’s Maks?” he asks. I tilt my head toward the stage where Maks is sitting next to Vanya but eyeing me. “Stalker,” Silas says. He spoons a portion of cockroaches onto his plate. “So how are we going to get out of this place?”

  “Quinn told me there’s about to be a revolt in the pod. We have to go back and help.” I take a slice of protein bread and push it into my mouth. It’s dry and sticks to the back of my throat.

  “Is he sure?”

  “He seems to be. But there’s something’s else. . . . Mau
de and Bruce are in danger. Abel’s going to take me to them tonight.”

  Wren, who’s opposite Silas, leans in. “Huh?” she says, crumbs flying onto Silas’s plate.

  “Give me peace,” Silas snaps, and Wren sulks back, turning her body slightly away. Silas slides closer to me. “Abel was the one who told us to stay.” He thumps the table and our cutlery jumps.

  “Maybe he didn’t think any of us would become benefactors.”

  “You aren’t to go with him. I don’t want you to end up out back in a fresh grave,” Silas says.

  “Once we have Maude and Bruce we can go back and overthrow the Ministry. Isn’t that what we’ve always wanted?” It’s certainly what I’ve wanted.

  Silas looks around. Quinn and Dorian are seated across the dining room with the other academics, but Maude and Bruce are missing. “Fine, go with Abel,” he says. “And as for going back to the pod . . .” he begins, but a hush swims through the room.

  Vanya has risen. “I only have one announcement this evening.” She pauses and those still eating put down their knives and forks. “Our groundskeeper, Peter Crab, who is responsible not only for the land within Sequoia, but also for maintaining a semblance of order beyond the walls, is missing. If any of you see him, or have an inkling where he could have wandered off to, please inform Maks immediately.” Maks is scanning the room. Silas and I don’t look at each other.

  Not even a glance. We know without saying a word that our time is running out.

  I leave the lab feeling a bit twitchy from the EPOs. I haven’t swallowed the tablets, at least, and spit them out, hiding them underneath the runner in the hallway while I wait for Abel. He emerges from another room with Sugar, who is rubbing her upper arm. Her coarse blond hair falls over her face.

  “I’m skipping meditation tonight, Sugar,” Abel says. “I’m not feeling well.”

  “Really?” she says coldly. I don’t want to be jealous of her, but I can’t help it. She doesn’t even seem to like Abel, yet she gets to spend all day with him. And all night.

  “Hurt my neck. Must have been the hike,” Abel says.

  “Okay,” Sugar says. She looks at me suspiciously. “Feel better,” she says, and stalks down the hallway and out of sight, all the time rubbing her arm.

  “What about Maks? Where did you say you’d be?” Abel asks.

  “He has something to do for Vanya. He said he’d see me back in the room tonight. I’d say we have an hour.”

  “Right,” Abel says. Without wasting another second, we scurry along the hallway and down a set of steps. When we get to a landing, he fumbles with a huge painting on the wall until it clicks, and he reveals a hidden hallway. “Follow me,” he says. We slip through and Abel pulls the painting behind us. I wait for my eyes to adjust to the darkness, but they don’t. The light has been completely shut out. I reach for him and he takes my hand. This doesn’t mean anything, I remind myself. I won’t be taken in again.

  “Careful,” he says, and we start down the stairwell. My free hand slides along the brick wall, and I feel for the edge of each step with my feet.

  “It was hard when you disappeared. They said you were dead. It was on the news,” I say. It’s easier to talk to Abel now we’re in the dark. I can be more honest—less afraid to be myself.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, which is all I need to hear. But he continues. “My job was to learn as much about the Resistance as possible. Vanya heard you had developed new breeding programs, but the only breeding you lot were doing was with plants.”

  That mission to steal clippings from the biosphere was the first important thing I’d done for The Resistance, but it meant nothing to Abel. He was just along for the ride. And because of his cold feet, we were almost caught. And because of that I had to flee the pod and involve Bea and Quinn in something they knew nothing about. I could keep going, tracing everything that’s destroyed us and brought our group here from that moment.

  “So you never gave a damn about the trees.”

  “I believed in what we were doing,” he says. “Growing trees was giving people hope. After that day in the biosphere, I so badly wanted to tell you who I was, but before I could, I was picked up.” He squeezes my hand.

  “What did the Ministry do to you?”

  “Beat the crap out of me. They were still waiting for me to spill it when the riot started up, and some minister chucked me out and expected me to choke. By the time I found The Grove, it was a mountain of sludge.” He pauses. “We’re at the bottom. Come on.” We scurry along a tight passageway. The floor feels greasy, but Abel doesn’t slow down.

  “And Jo?” I may as well ask everything now, while I have the chance.

  “I found her at The Grove. She was trying to escape Sequoia and that’s why she’s a benefactor now.”

  But that isn’t really what I want to know. He lets go of my hand. A meager, gray glow fills the passageway and a gust of icy air rushes at me. “This way,” Abel says, and guides me outside and toward scattered splashes of light. The main house is at our backs, and Abel continually checks behind us. As we get closer, I realize that the spots of light are windows—narrow to the point of absurdity.

  Soon we’re hunkering beneath a row of windows. “Take a look,” Abel whispers. My stomach tumbles. Whatever is through this window can’t be unseen. I press an eye to the light.

  Inside is a bright hospital ward with metal beds down each side and people dressed in flimsy undershirts strapped to them. They all have tubes threaded through their mouths and noses, and IVs stuck in their hands. Everything is connected to hissing machines by their beds. A loud beeping fills the room, and a nurse jumps up from her desk and dashes to someone’s bedside, where she tinkers with knobs on one of the machines. The beeping stops, and a deep moan replaces it. The nurse looks down at the person impassively and goes back to her desk.

  I slide down next to Abel. “I don’t understand,” I say.

  “That’s the testing lab. Their oxygen’s being rationed and their organs are being monitored. Vanya wants to understand suffocation and what chemical conditions might prevent it.”

  I look again to see if I can spot Maude or Bruce, but everyone is uniformly skinny, and I can’t make out any faces. “How long are they kept like this?” I wait a long time for an answer, and then it comes without Abel having to say anything. I stare at him unbelieving. “They experiment on people until they die?” It’s what I suspected, but knowing it’s true is different. It’s too horrible. “But what reason does Vanya give for why they don’t mix with the others and are never seen again?”

  “You heard her in the orangery going on about benefactors dedicating their lives to meditation and how this energy mustn’t be contaminated.”

  “People buy that?”

  “Some do. Some choose not to think about it.” And why not? It’s no more far-fetched than the idea that trees will only grow in the biosphere. People believe what they’re told.

  “There’s more,” he says, and crawls to another window.

  This room is filled with cribs and playpens. A nurse sleeps in a rocking chair holding an infant. The children are crying, wheezing, or asleep. None of them are connected to tubes, but most are covered in Band-Aids and bruises. There’s a shriek and a toddler sits up in her crib, her eyes full of tears. The nurse opens one eye. “Hush,” she says.

  “They’re pumping the air in at fifteen percent,” Abel whispers, “and they keep lowering it until a child looks like he might suffocate. Then they hook him up to an oxybox. They’re training them.”

  I look into the room again. “Where are the mothers?” I ask. Does one of these babies belong to the girl we saw in the attic?

  “Vanya believes the kids are hers. The mothers stay in the main house. The older ones are upstairs. If they survive, they’ll be brought over when they’re twelve. Vanya’s only been doing this eight years. She thinks she’s creating a better breed of human.”

  “She’s mad.”

  A shadow bl
ocks the light coming from the window. “We should shut these blinds,” a splintery voice says. The light dims, as the window is screened over. I squash myself against the wall.

  “You brought Jo back here and you let us stay when you knew all this,” I hiss.

  “Jo needed to give birth somewhere. And I didn’t know the extent of things until Jo told me a couple of days ago.”

  “She knew?”

  “Maks took great pleasure in filling her in when she got back,” he says uneasily.

  “So now what?” I ask. The windows are impossibly narrow and we can’t simply saunter through the front door.

  “Maks has keys,” he says. “If we could get them. . . .” He trails off.

  “Are you joking?” He isn’t the kind of person to leave keys lying around.

  “There’s no other way, Alina,” he says. He sounds tough, but he would—it’s not his neck on the line.

  “Well, if we do this, we aren’t leaving any benefactors behind. And definitely not the kids.”

  Abel gapes at me. “What? No. We can’t take all of them. We’ll be caught.”

  I pause and listen to the cry of a baby. The cry gets louder and louder until it finally subsides and the night is silent again. “Did you think we’d help you rescue Jo and no one else?” Abel shakes his head. He looks guilty. And afraid. As he should. “Have you always been in love with her?” I ask.

  He sighs. “It isn’t like that. Jo’s my best friend. I’ve known her a long time,” he says. “You and me, we never had a chance to get to know each other. If we did . . .”

  I want to tell Abel to go to hell. If he thinks he’s going to get me to help him by promising something like that, he’s right—he doesn’t know me very well. “Let’s get back before someone notices we’re missing,” I say. “I’ll tell everyone tomorrow what we have to do.”

  We head through the door leading into the main house, and Abel clutches my arm. His touch still makes my legs wilt, and I hate myself for being so weak. “Why do you have to act so hard-nosed all the time? You don’t make it easy to love you.”