Fallen Firsts

by Jillian Torassa

  “Yes. I gave him a pair of your pajamas, a hot water bottle, and all the blankets in the apartment.”

  I turned to hug her again. “You did good, Megs.”

  She laughed, her face pressed against my shoulder. “So many things could have gone wrong.”

  Smiling, into her hair, I nodded. “That’s becoming our mantra.”

  “So, what now?” She pulled away and stared into my face. “I’ve been so worried about this step that I haven’t paid much attention to what comes next.”

  “Well”—I crossed to the refrigerator—“Gideon has to tell the citizens everything we know. Proof or not, people will be afraid of a vengeful ghost.”

  “You think so?” Meghan asked.

  “Maybe not Thirds.” She was a saint. There was an already-assembled sandwich waiting for me. “But the lack of Knowledge tends to make people a little superstitious. If it’s important enough for him to come back from the grave, then the others will want to listen. And they won’t want to cross a goul.”

  She bit her lip as I bit into the sandwich, turning to look at her again.

  “But—”

  “So many things could go wrong?” I finished her sentence for her, trying not to smile.

  A hint of a grin pulled at the corners of her mouth, and I shrugged, taking another bite.

  “There are too many computers to search,” I said through a mouthful of ham and cheese. “I’ve found nothing, and the longer we take, the more likely we are to get caught. We’ve got to try. Right?”

  She nodded.

  “You should be getting back to Galilea’s.” That was perhaps the smallest sandwich I had ever eaten, and my stomach begged for more.

  “I’ll go over in a couple of hours. You need to rest before you can take over Gideon-duty.”

  “But—”

  She turned her back on me and went into the bedroom with a shake of her head. “No. You rest,” she said in a whisper, so as not to disturb our patient. “Now.”

  She was right, of course. Meghan was always right. I had been awake and stressed for nearly twenty-four hours, not to mention the physical exertion of digging up a grave, dragging around an unconscious body, and then filling in said grave once more. My legs started to tremble as my mind ran through the list.

  “But only for an hour. You’ve got a First to go back to,” I said, falling onto the couch and throwing my feet up.

  “Hopefully not for much longer,” came her hushed reply.

  ---

  I had just had my tattoos removed. I was redeemed, and my first assignment as a Doctor was to visit a sick child at Wissen Schule.

  Grins showed no sign of recognition as he led me to the Schulemum’s office. He and I had never really gotten acquainted, but I wasn’t sure if that was the reason why. After all, he was still a Second.

  “The child is quarantined in the south wing of the school,” the Schulemum informed me politely. “Thank you for coming, Dr. Doe. We don’t want to put the other children in danger.”

  Because she truly cared for them. Because she wanted them to get a chance to redeem themselves. Because the “Ten Colony Council” only wanted what was best for us.

  I nodded and allowed Grins to lead me to the child. The halls were empty, as all of the students were in class, and we quickly reached the room they kept her in. It was frigid, dark, and musty, and the child was already dead by the time I bent down to examine her.

  She was small. No more than five years old with golden hair and pale, translucent skin. Skin that hadn’t absorbed enough vitamin D and an emaciated body that hadn’t absorbed enough of anything else, either.

  “Filthy Smart,” Grins said behind me. “Good riddance.”

  In my head, I thought, But Knowledge isn’t evil. You don’t know that, but that’s only for your own protection. Out loud, I simply looked at my watch. “Approximate time of death, 9:17 am, subject to change upon further investigation.”

  Why had I been so blind? Why did it take me so long to see the truth? I was a naive fool, but I would do everything I could to redeem myself. To really redeem myself. And without Michael or Jade, I had to learn to rebel all on my own.

  “Victor?” Meghan watched me with concern, her hand on my knee.

  I blinked at her, almost surprised that I wasn’t back at Wissen Schule, staring at the dead body of an innocent child. “I’m sorry, what?”

  Her fingers squeezed gently. “Gideon was just telling us about a potential contact?”

  Shaking my head quickly, I forced myself to come back to them. “It’s just something you said reminded me of something else. Never mind. Please, continue.”

  Gideon didn’t look at me. He rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, clearly still fatigued by his recent near-death experience. “The Second who helped me and Jade escape the first time. Salvador. He plainly had some issues, and I think he’d be susceptible to anything that Dead Me would have to say.”

  “Well, it’s a place to start,” I agreed. “If you can convince him, he can start talking to others. With any luck, rumors of your ghost’s personal vendetta against the lies of the Council will spread like—like—” I yawned, unable to think of an apt simile.

  “You need to get some sleep,” Meghan pleaded, squeezing my leg harder.

  “I’m fine.”

  “No, you’re not—”

  “—have either of you heard from Jade?”

  Meghan and I stopped arguing to stare at Gideon.

  “Um, no—” Meghan began, but I interrupted, feeling suddenly agitated.

  “We talked about this,” I said. “She was last seen on the northern island. Somewhere between Zerum and Quadri.”

  “But why—”

  “Gideon, we need you to focus. This is an extremely dangerous task, and you need to be all in.”

  I could feel Meghan’s inquisitorial frown driving into the side of my head, but I glared stubbornly at Gideon. He glowered back. I don’t exactly know why I lied to him . . . only that I needed him to focus.

  “Fine,” he conceded. “But you have to tell me any news you get of her. Understand?”

  No amount of teamwork with this Second would ever make me like him. “You just worry about talking to Salvador. We’ll worry about everything else.”

  He narrowed his eyes but didn’t push back.

  “Now, is there anything else we need to talk about before we get to work?”

  Neither Meghan nor Gideon said anything.

  “Then Meghan, you and I need to go about our business as usual. And you”—I nodded at Gideon—“stay hidden.”

  I could tell that neither of them appreciated being told what to do, but I was too physically and emotionally strained to be tactful.

  “We start at midnight.”

  Chapter Seventeen

  Jade

  I blinked. Walter’s car was parked in front of the old ale house, but I didn’t remember driving there. My fingers felt stiff, clutched around the steering wheel, and my numb brain felt oddly empty.

  Who dug up Gideon’s body? Why?

  Those two questions were all that coherently swirled through my otherwise disjointed thoughts.

  I must have sat there for 20 minutes, at least, before I realized that all of the lights were out inside the building, and that I couldn’t leave Walter’s car outside of it. Shifting into reverse, I pulled away and drove a little farther up the road, finding a nearby neighborhood to stash the vehicle.

  The rain came down even harder now, but I barely noticed as I trekked back, my hands in the pockets of the stolen tunic. This war with the Doctors had destroyed everything that had ever mattered to me. Because they feared an uprising by the most intelligent of us, I had been ripped from my mother and made to forget everything about her. I had endured years of punishment, torture, and near-starvation only to leave Wissen Schule to work for a bullying, violent sex-addict with a bad temper and a taste for hard liquor. The small hope that had taken root in my heart had taken beati
ng after beating, first with the deaths of Ransen and Roara during the ale house police raid, then with the gathered rebels, Michael, and now Gideon.

  I should have felt crushed. Dejected. Destroyed. In fact, most of me felt like if I were to simply give up—lie down right there and wait for death to find me—I might actually find some hawking peace. But that’s what they wanted. That’s why they kept coming back to end me; they were scared. Scared of what I could do. Scared of what I knew and who I would tell. Scared of what was coming.

  The Doctors had destroyed my life. I had nothing left—which meant I had nothing left to lose. And if the Ten Colonies found out the truth, those damned Docs would lose everything, too.

  I wouldn’t make it out alive, but I damn sure wasn’t going to lie down and let them win.

  Those Docs had no idea what I was capable of.

  ---

  Though both the front and back doors of the old ale house were locked, the dingy window in the kitchen wasn’t. I snaked my way through the small room, out behind the bar, and then back into the storage room, which was adjacent to the kitchen. The thick metal door at the rear squeaked open alarmingly, but I wasn’t worried about being overheard. There was a reason Cece had picked this location in the first place—it was remote and run-down, and most patrons preferred the new, nice, clean ale house across from the Factory. Besides, the proprietor was easily bought off.

  My confidence soon waned, however, as I snuck down the familiar dark hallway.

  Were those voices?

  A spark in my chest caused my heart to start sprinting, and I slowed to a stop, listening hard.

  I had assumed that Cece and the others would reenter Liminis through this room, but what if I was wrong? Was it possible that the Docs who had set up the original raid would suspect the same thing? Was I about to walk into a trap?

  The longer I listened, however, the more I began to think I had imagined it all. The only sound I could now hear was that of my own breathing, so I moved forward again—walking on tip-toe to mask my footsteps, just in case.

  Then the door clicked.

  Someone was inside.

  And they were about to find me.

  I froze in my tracks, quickly trying to decide what to do or where to hide, when I heard a blessedly familiar voice.

  “Jade?”

  Exhaling sharply, I replied, “Cece?”

  She hadn’t turned on any lights, but I sensed her moving quickly down the hall, and soon I collapsed into a tight hug.

  “Oh, I hoped we would find you here. We’ve only just gotten back. How are you? How is Gideon?”

  “We?” I asked instead of answering. “Malek, Marsh, Christa, and Jaron? Or did you find others?”

  “Come,” she said without any hint that she recognized my evasion. “Let me show you.”

  She led me by the hand back to our old classroom, and I was suddenly overcome with the memory of my first excursion to this place:

  “Come. This way.”

  She led me down a short hallway and I followed willingly. When we reached the end of the hall, I could see another door, this one with a crack of light underneath it. She pushed it open, and I had to blink to help my eyes adjust.

  “Welcome to our humble abode,” she said, gesturing at the room we had stepped into. It was small but bright, stuffed full with tables and chairs. To my left, there ran a low counter with a couple of plastic bins sitting on top of it, and to my right, there hung an old green chalkboard with smudges of yellow chalk all over its surface, built up from years of being wiped clean, written all over, and then wiped clean once more. As I considered the words written across its surface—A Soul without Knowledge is not a Good Soul—my chest filled with a hopeful light.

  “It’s wonderful,” I said.

  And it had been. A symbol of courage and change, and the start of my new life, fully dedicated to rebellion. But things had changed dramatically since I had first seen that place; I had done and witnessed far more than I could have ever imagined, and I was different. Just as my beautiful classroom was different.

  As my eyes became accustomed to the dark, I saw that it was not how I remembered it. Other than the lack of dead bodies, in fact, it looked just like it had the night of the raid:

  The walls were covered with tiny, perfectly rounded bullet holes. There was a thick layer of black dust under my feet, as well as a plethora of empty ammunition shells. Tables and chairs had toppled all over the room, broken and upended as the occupants had made a hasty escape.

  Blood covered all of it.

  But even beyond that, there was one glaringly obvious difference between my original classroom and the space in which I now stood: it was filled with at least ten new faces that had never been there before.

  Ten.

  “You found them,” I whispered, all of my conflicting emotions fluttering inside my chest as my eyes stung dangerously with relief, exhaustion, and disbelief.

  Cece squeezed my fingers. “Yes. And they’re all ready for a fight.”

  They were all ready for a fight.

  And I didn’t know what else to say.

  ---

  Most of the survivors hadn’t gotten a good night’s sleep in weeks. The Doctors had no reason to believe that they were there, so they were relatively safe to hunker down in the old classroom and rest.

  But Cece couldn’t sleep, and neither could I.

  “I’m so sorry, Jade. He was a good man.”

  I had recounted the story of Gideon’s hanging—sitting next to Cece with my back resting on the far wall—like it had happened to someone else.

  “Yes. He was,” I whispered, wiping my nose with the back of my hand.

  She put her arm around me. “I know it’s hard, but the best way to cope is to find something else to occupy you.”

  “Like fighting the Doctors?”

  “That’s not a bad place to start.”

  I snorted, though I had never felt less like laughing. “I hate them all.”

  “I know you do.” She pulled me closer so I could put my head on her shoulder. “I do, too. But we’ll do everything we can to give them hell. I promise.”

  Squeezing my arms tighter around my torso, I nodded slowly.

  We sat like that for several minutes, and my eyes actually began to droop with unacknowledged drowsiness. Though I was exhausted, I didn’t want to sleep. Didn’t want to miss anything. But Cece made me feel safe, and I found myself drifting. She had become the only authority figure in my life, and I didn’t have to make all the decisions by myself anymore. It was a welcome change.

  Just as I was about to surrender, however, she spoke again.

  “Once we make our first move, we can’t stay here. It’s too insecure. Any idea where else we can go?”

  Blinking to wake myself up again, I pulled my head up and bit down hard on my lip. The pain helped me shake the grogginess, and I watched as the darkened room came back into focus. A few of the survivors were lying on the ground. Others leaned against walls or rested their heads on desks, and the sound of deep breathing filled the air. Someone snored, and I allowed a half-developed idea that I had had start to materialize. There was, in fact, somewhere that would be an excellent place for a militia to go. But it would be risky. Nearly impossible to take, and they would know exactly where we were.

  It would be a power play, for sure.

  And it wasn’t like we had much to lose.

  “I think we should take the Orchard,” I said.

  “What?”

  Pulling away from Cece, I situated myself so I faced her, my back to the rest of the room. “Have you ever been there? It’s surrounded by a huge wall, and there is only one way in and one way out. If we could capture it, we would have control of Liminis’s entire food supply.”

  “But they’d just bomb us again, like they did in Erroris!” Because of the dim light, Cece’s face seemed to glow brighter as it turned white. “It would be suicide!”

  “Everything we’re doing
here is suicide. Besides, they can’t bomb the Orchard without destroying the crops, and then the entire colony would starve.”

  She tilted her head slightly, considering my suggestion. “I suppose that’s true.”

  “Obviously, it would be risky. And we’d have to steal a lot of firearms. But if we succeed, it would be the first time we’ve had the advantage since starting this thing.”

  “It would be nice to be on the offensive for once.”

  And it would be nice to get my mind off Gideon.

  Her eyes seemed to flash in the darkness as a smile lightened her face. “We’ll talk to the others in the morning,” she said.

  I moved back to her side and dropped my head onto her shoulder again. “Thanks, Cece.”

  “For what?”

  But before I could form a intelligible response, my brain shut down and I was dead in sleep.

  ---

  “This way. Quiet!”

  There were two gun shops in town. The smaller one was closer to the old ale house, but we had been unable to convince Christa to abandon the bigger target. The approximately 1200-square-foot building was right in the middle of Main Street, straight across from the Factory. It had a concrete roof with two huge floor-to-ceiling windows as the store front and a glass door with the words “You don’t need Knowledge to Shoot a Gun!” painted in white across it.

  Not that anyone who lacked Knowledge could read it, anyway.

  Our small team included me, Christa, Malek, and another man I had just barely met, though I recognized him from the old Factory. He was about my age and his name was Alexander.

  I didn’t like the way he smiled coyly at me as he brushed his long, shiny brown hair out of his dark eyes.

  “The first thing we have to do is disable the cameras,” Christa whispered, leading us into the back alley. “Malek, you’ll have to do it. I’m too easily recognized on camera, because of my arm.”

  Trying to ignore Alexander’s gaze, I crept with them to the back door, where Christa was already picking the lock. Though any First could own a gun—they’d throw a fit if they weren’t allowed—firearms were more heavily policed than any of the other not-necessary-to-life products available on the market. The Colony had to be careful, though, not to look like they were policing them. The security cameras would be plentiful and well-hidden.