“And I’m sorry that Carrington and Baalboden were destroyed, and that Lankenshire and Hodenswald live in fear.” She turns to the Commander. “What is your plan?”
“I know James Rowan and his military methods. He’s too aggressive on the front end, leaving his reserve troops and supplies exposed. I’m going to take a combined army from four city-states, bait him into an aggressive frontal attack, let Logan use their own tech against them, and then flank the reserves with superior numbers to finish them off and leave the attacking unit surrounded.” He sounds like his plan couldn’t possibly fail, but I can see pitfalls at every turn. Not that I have a better plan, but still. So much could go wrong.
Apparently, Tara agrees with me. She picks up her cup and swirls the water inside. “And what happens if the tech they have within their city is far superior to the tech you’ve stolen from them?”
“Logan can alter the tech. Boost it. Make it better. He’s good at that.” The Commander sounds irritated, and he glares at me as I stare at him in shock. I never thought I’d hear a compliment from his mouth.
“And if James decides to retreat to the river? If he has troops on the water? Supplies?”
The Commander opens his mouth. Shuts it. Looks at me like maybe I have a magic solution waiting in my pocket.
I don’t. But Tara does. She rises from the table and invites us to follow her upstairs. We climb a steep set of steps, past the second floor, past the third floor, and into a small, round room completely surrounded by glass walls. Frankie stays rooted just inside the doorway, but the rest of us approach the eastern wall with Tara. My skin feels clammy, like it did when I had to climb to the top of the tall metal-and-glass building in the ruined city, and my chest hurts when I breathe, but I force myself to approach the wall and look where Tara is pointing.
Her home is near the eastern edge of the city. Beyond her windows is another row of houses. Beyond that is a huge walkway that surrounds the city and separates it from the river. Small ramps branch out from that walkway every few yards and lead down to a collection of boats—no, not boats. Ships.
Silvery-gray ships as tall as a three-story house with graceful lines and tremendous sails line the water as far as I can see.
The Commander steps closer to the window-wall. “You have—”
“An armada. Yes.”
“None of the other leaders know this.” He makes it sound like an accusation.
“Of course not. The only way to see our ships is from the top floor of a house on the eastern edge of the city. I’ve always entertained other leaders in the bottom story of the town center in the west. One of the best ways to plan for any possible threat is to make sure those who might threaten you don’t know your true strength.”
We need her armada. If we could trap Rowansmark between an army on the river and an army at their wall, we’d have a much better chance of winning. The problem is, Tara doesn’t need to help us. We have nothing to offer in exchange. Still, I have to try.
“I can invent things,” I say. “I can build tech. Sonar. Tracking devices—”
“I don’t need those.”
“Well, maybe—”
“You can’t bribe me to help you.” Her voice is calm, but her eyes are fierce. “I’m helping you of my own accord. You owe me nothing for my trouble.”
“You are? We don’t?” I ask.
She meets my gaze and then looks at the Commander. “I hate bullies. I hate those who abuse their power and hurt the ones they should be protecting. And I believe that if I have the power to stop an injustice, and I choose to look away instead, I’m as guilty of that injustice as if I’d done the harm myself. So yes, I will help. It will take you two days to return to Lankenshire—”
“More like two weeks,” Connor says.
She smiles. “Not if you take a boat. You can disembark a mere day’s walk from the city. Then if you head west for another four days, you’ll reach the branch of the river that will take you straight to Rowansmark. I’ll send half of my armada to pick you up.” She looks at the ships. “It will be a tight fit, but we should be able to accommodate your soldiers.”
“Only half?” the Commander asks.
“If the battle doesn’t go our way, I’m going to need to be able to protect my people. Half for the battle, half for Chelmingford.”
“I suppose that makes sense,” the Commander says grudgingly.
“Of course it does.” Tara claps her hands sharply and turns away from the window. “So, two days to Lankenshire. Four days to the Rowansmark branch of the river. And another three days to reach their port. We’ll be at war in just over a week.”
“We need to leave tonight,” I say, because she’s right. We have just over a week’s worth of travel ahead of us, and a week might be too long. I need to get to Rowansmark before James Rowan decides no one cares enough to ransom Rachel.
Before he kills her.
I meet Tara’s eyes. “We’re on a tight schedule. A messenger has been dispatched from Lankenshire to warn James Rowan. We have to leave now. Every moment counts if we want to have a chance to save . . . to win this war.”
She nods once, and within the hour, we’re on a boat sailing south toward the drop-off point closest to Lankenshire, and I’m once again alone with thoughts of Rachel. Of loving her. Of kissing her.
Of being too late.
UNCORRECTED E-PROOF–NOT FOR SALE
HarperCollins Publishers
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CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
RACHEL
I’m hungry.
I’ve been locked inside this cell for eight days now, and while I’ve been given water, I’ve received only two meals, both of which were half the size of what I’d normally eat.
I guess James Rowan doesn’t need to keep up the pretense of wanting me alive to trade with Logan when there’s no one but Marcus McEntire, with his incoherent ramblings and his strange humming, to see me slowly starve to death.
Twice a day, Rowan’s butler comes downstairs, inspects my cell, gives me water, and empties the bucket I use to relieve myself. He has no weapons I can steal. He watches me closely while my cell door is open. And the lack of food combined with my injuries ensures that I don’t have the strength to kick my way through one of the thin, crate-board walls while he’s gone.
I’m trapped. Unable to escape. Unable to fight. Unable to do the one thing I swore I’d do when I reached Rowansmark: disable the tech in time to save Logan.
I’ve spent my time alternating between resting and following Samuel’s advice. I’ve paced my cell. Stretched my arms above my head. Leaned down to touch my toes. I’ve cursed him, Ian, James Rowan, and the entire city of Rowansmark with every agony-laced breath I’ve taken, but I’ve done it. My scabs pull against my skin like too-small pieces of cloth stitched onto me with a needle and thread. I’m still unable to curl my right hand into a fist, thanks to Ian’s stupid fires. And the lack of food makes my head spin. But Logan is coming, an ambush is waiting, and I can’t let my body rest until I’ve done everything I can to save him.
As dawn sends weak shafts of sunlight into my cell, I flex my back, swallowing a whimper as my muscles burn. I haven’t seen Rowan since the day he ordered me whipped. I haven’t seen Samuel or Ian either, but considering the fact that Marcus McEntire—the man both Samuel and Ian believe to be dead—is locked in the cell next to me, mumbling nonsensical madness at all hours of the day, I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that James has ordered both of them to stay away from me.
It wouldn’t do to have two of his most faithful followers realize that he’s a liar.
Pushing myself to my feet, I shuffle toward my cell door, where the light from the hall’s window is the strongest. My head feels woozy, my thoughts sluggish. If I’m going to get out of here, I have to do it today. There’s nothing helpful in my cell, unless I count the sewage bucket, but what could I do with that? Throw it at the butler and hope the tw
o seconds it gives me are enough to let me outrun a healthy, well-fed man?
Reaching the cell’s door, I push against it. The chain that locks me in clinks softly. If I lean hard, I can give myself a small crack to look through. I scan what little I can see of the hall—past the empty cells beside me and to the foot of the dungeon’s stairs—but I don’t see anything that wasn’t there the last time I checked. Gray stone floor, bleached white walls, the splintery slats of wood that divide half of the room into cells, a water pump similar to the one I used to pump by hand to fill our bathtub, and beside it a half door set into the wall beneath the stairs.
A large pipe is hidden behind the half door, ready to carry the contents of the sewage buckets into Rowansmark’s main sewer line. In Baalboden, we’d haul the buckets to the far corner of our property and toss the contents into a deep hole. In Rowansmark, you can’t dig a deep hole without hitting water, and no one wants to throw raw sewage into the same water that also supplies the city’s wells. Instead, one of the city’s engineers devised a system of pipes—one for each house—that lead to a large main pipe that carries the sewage hundreds of yards into the Wasteland.
The butler empties our buckets into the pipe and then uses the pump to rinse the sewage away. The pipe is just large enough that I think I could fit, but only if I want to be dumped into Rowansmark’s main sewer pipe, where once a day a flood of water from the dam that holds the river at bay rushes through, sending anything inside of it gushing into the swampy mess that is the southern Wasteland.
As an escape plan, it’s useless. I’d be outside Rowansmark, unable to help Logan. Unable to destroy the tech that can call an army of tanniyn in seconds.
My other option is to break down part of the walls that hold me in, something I’ve already tried to do and failed. My first night here, I kicked the wall between my cell and the empty one on my right until part of a board splintered, but by then my back was a mess of blood and pain and weakness, and I couldn’t make enough headway to do any good. I’ve tried again and again, but the rough boards are stronger than they look, and every hour I go without food weakens my efforts further.
Besides, even if I could break out of my cell, where would I go? The pipe is out—I need to be inside Rowansmark disabling tech or, failing that, lighting all of the barracks, armories, and tech labs on fire. The stairs are out, too. I have no doubt that at least one guard is posted on the other side of the dungeon’s door. I’m weaponless and weak. Fighting my way to freedom isn’t an option.
That leaves the window beside Marcus’s cell, but it’s barred. I’m trapped, growing weaker by the day, and I’m no closer to saving Logan than I was when I first decided to stay on the boat instead of letting Quinn take me into the Wasteland—a decision I’m trying hard not to regret.
The door at the top of the stairs creaks open, and footsteps stomp down the stairs. Quickly, I lean against the wall beside my door, where I have the best chance of seeing the window once the butler enters my room, and wait.
In seconds, the chain across my door rattles, and he comes in carrying a mug of water. Seeing that I’m beside the door frame, he grabs my left arm with his free hand and pulls me away from the door. Spinning me toward my bunk, he propels me forward and then shoves me forcibly onto the bed.
“Think you’re going to just walk out of here, do you?” he asks, his tone brisk and impatient.
I close my eyes to stop the room from spinning and to keep him from seeing the tears that threaten to fall. “No,” I say quietly. “I know I’m going to die here.”
Something skitters along the wall between my cell and Marcus’s, like fingernails dragging along the wood. The butler turns his head and snaps, “Stop that!”
Marcus hums loudly, a wild, discordant tune that sounds worse than his fingernails did.
The butler mutters something under his breath and then gives me the mug of water. “Here. Drink.”
“Why bother?”
There is no way out. I’m going to die in here, and then Logan is going to be killed on a fool’s errand to rescue me, and no one will be left to stand up to those who’ve brought so much ruin to those who had no power to fight back.
“Giving up already?” the butler asks in a voice that says he really doesn’t care. “Took that one five times as long to lose hope.” He nods toward Marcus’s cell, where he is muttering what sounds like a complicated math equation over and over again.
“Did it take him that long to lose his sanity, too? Or did he snap when his own son was forced to whip him almost to death?” My words are bitter, but it isn’t just for Marcus’s sake. Every loss, starting with my father and ending with Sylph, every sacrifice, and every promise I swore to keep is all for what? So that the men who started this nineteen years ago could survive to rule the world at the expense of everyone else?
The silence within me shivers, tempting me to seal up the cracks I made in it when I grieved for Sylph. When I held Melkin’s baby girl. I could shove the desperation and the crushing sense of failure into that black hole inside of me and feel nothing at all as I slowly starve to death.
Or I could take a drink of water, move my back before my wounds stiffen up, and keep thinking of another way out of this.
Another way to make the losses and the sacrifices count for something.
The butler shrugs and starts to take the mug away, but at the last second I snatch it from him with shaky hands and drain it dry.
Maybe I am trapped. Maybe I’ll die here. But it won’t be because I gave up. Oliver once told me that hope is precious, and that it’s worth hanging on to even when all seems lost. I’m going to take him at his word.
Quinn is inside Rowansmark looking for me. Logan is smart enough to realize there’s an ambush here even though he has no idea how dangerous it really is. I’m a fighter, both by nature and by choice.
And I am getting out of this dungeon.
An idea hits me just as the butler is closing the door of my cell.
“Do you know Samuel?” I ask, keeping my voice breathy and faint. Not hard, since the water sloshing around in my empty stomach makes me painfully aware that I need food badly.
“I know several Samuels.” He shuts the door and begins lacing the chain through the lock.
“The Samuel who brought me here. Who whipped me. The one who arrived on the boat with Ian. He’s a tracker, dark skin and gray hair. Do you know him?”
The chain links clank together as he finishes securing my door. “I know him, girl, but that isn’t going to help you any. You’re a prisoner because you’ve wronged Rowansmark. No loyal citizen is going to want anything to do with you.”
“I know. I . . . please, wait.” My voice rises as he moves toward Marcus’s cell. “I’m dying. We both know it. I can’t go without food for much longer. Samuel is a good man. He respected my father. I want to tell him where my father is buried. That’s all.”
The man snorts. “And why would you do that?”
“Because I want to be buried beside him.” My throat closes and my eyes sting as I remember that cold, ash-coated plot of dirt. The white cross Quinn carved. The way everything in me emptied out while I lay across Dad’s grave and the way a shell of the girl I once was rose in my place.
I’m a liar. I don’t want to be buried beside Dad. I don’t want to be buried at all. Not yet. I want to get out of this cell. Stop the Commander, James Rowan, and Ian. Kiss Logan for a hundred years. And live out my days knowing that even though I was broken, I chose not to be lost.
“Will you ask him to come see me before I’m too far gone to remember what I want to say?” I ask in a quiet, pleading voice that does nothing to soften the butler’s reply.
“We’ll see.”
It’s better than a no. I wait until he finishes his tasks while in the cell beside me, Marcus hums his strange little melody and mutters to himself about wave function and thermodynamics. Once the door slams at the top of the stairs, leaving Marcus and me alone again, I lower myself to
the cold stone floor and crawl slowly toward the crack in the wall between my cell and Marcus’s. My head feels too heavy, and sparks dance at the edge of my vision as my stomach cramps in a miserable plea for food.
Laying my cheek against the floor beside the crack, I whisper, “Marcus, I’m going to die.”
His muttering stops abruptly.
“Rachel? Jared Adams’s Rachel?”
“Yes. I’m Jared Adams’s Rachel.” The words, following so closely on the heels of the memory of my father’s grave, are bittersweet.
“Dying? No . . . no.”
“Logan is in danger. I’m the only one left who can help him. I haven’t had anything to eat in days. They’re refusing to feed me. I can help Logan, but not if I starve to death first.”
“Don’t. Don’t die. Don’t. Logan? Ian? My sons?”
“Listen to me, Marcus. You and Ian invented tech that can call the Cursed . . . the tanniyn, remember?”
“Gave it to Jared. James knows. He knows.” His voice cracks.
“It’s okay. I don’t mean the device you gave to Jared. I mean the tech you and Ian built that can call an entire army of the monsters. Do you know what I’m talking about?”
He’s silent for a long moment, and I bite my lip as I pray that somewhere in the damaged morass of his mind, he can still grasp enough reality to help me. Then he says, “Summoners? Call them all. Summoners?”
A chill slides over me at the name. Summoners. “Yes. The summoners. James Rowan knows about Logan. He’s going to kill Logan using the summoners unless I can stop it.”
An eerie wail tears its way out of Marcus’s throat and bounces off the walls of the cell. It’s the sound of a wounded animal backed into a corner. If Logan dies, everything Marcus sacrificed, every loss he suffered, will be for nothing. I know the feeling.
“Wait! Marcus!” My voice snaps out with more strength than I realized I had left. “I can stop it. Do you hear me? I can save Logan. But I need your help. Okay? I just need your help, and we can save Logan.”
The wail tapers off, and I hear the swish-slide of Marcus scrambling across the floor seconds before his bright-blue eye blinks at me through the crack in the wall.
Deliverance Page 28
