James and Lily joined us up front. Melisa brought the pod around and hovered over to where Pol was pointing.
Pol bent over his control panel. He tapped an image and it blew up holographically in front of us. “The sign fell over, but the sensor’s saying it should be visible behind that building there.” He pointed at a crumbling building with cracks running all through its outer walls.
“Let’s land and check it out.” I went back and grabbed a keeper. “Maybe we can leave the pod in that park across the way?”
“Already going there,” Melisa said.
“Any sign of people out there?” I studied the streets and buildings through one of the windows of the pod.
“I don’t see anything.” James let his keeper slide down and hang at his back. Every Enforser I’d ever known did that.
Lily adjusted her keeper’s strap. “Me neither.”
Melisa landed the pod on a somewhat flat space, and the grass and vegetation was so thick it cushioned our landing. I watched James and Lily leave the pod side by side. It struck me that less than four months ago, he was wearing the matte black armor of an Enforser, telling young kids to slow down and reminding everyone it was better to be calm than dead. He had probably known the Enforser who caught me going so fast on my cycle that first day.
I followed everyone out, checking for the fourth or fifth time that my keeper’s ammo was full. I wasn’t going to get caught with a nearly empty keeper again.
I caught up to James and nudged his arm. Not the one connected to a wounded shoulder. “Do you miss it?”
“Miss what?” James scanned the area.
“You know. Ordering kids around. People being scared of you all the time?”
Lily stared. “What?”
“James was an Enforser,” I said.
“Not a Ranjer,” he said.
“What’s the difference?” Lily had put some space between her and us. Her eyes narrowed.
Drek, what did I just do?
James lifted his left wrist carefully. “For one, we wore Papas. Turns out Ranjers don’t.”
Lily’s expression was exactly what mine must have been when we figured that out.
“Yeah. Enforsers were fooled too, just like the rest of us,” I said.
“But you still enforced the Prime Administrator’s rules and laws,” Lily spat. “Just like a Ranjer, you were still a murderer.”
“Nope.” James kept walking and fell silent.
“No what?”
I broke in. “Enforsers never killed anyone, although they tried to with me.” Saying that brought the weird truth home. Wow, I got really lucky. “And they only tried to kill me because they were told I had a weapon that injected an instantly lethal dose of the Bug into people. And that Bren was my first victim.” My throat tightened a little. Would that ever stop?
“Bren?” Lily jumped off a rock and used her keeper to part some grass that was nearly up to our chests.
“My best friend.”
“His girlfriend’s brother too,” Pol said from just behind us.
“Shut up, Pol,” I said. “Be careful not to get lost in this tall grass.”
“Height jokes still?” Pol shouted a laugh. “No imagination.”
“Girlfriend?” Lily had one eyebrow arched. I wished I could do that.
“I guess,” I said. I had to fight not to glance at Melisa. I hoped she wasn’t listening.
“The point is that we were also lied to. Our job was to keep people calm and keep everyone safe,” James said. “The Ranjers are much different.”
“How so?”
“Since Ranjers don’t wear Papas,” Melisa said, “they must know the truth. And not care.”
I used a foot to clear grass from my path. It hit something hard and tall. I moved the plants away and found a pole shaped like an upside down U, with each end stuck in the ground.
“What’s this?”
“What?” Pol caught up to me. I showed him. “A metal pole.” Pol was helpful like that.
“Obviously,” I said. We poked through the grass and found four more poles, all arranged in a circle.
“We’re not here to study things, guys,” Melisa called back. She, Lily, and James had kept going.
“Come on.” I ran to catch up.
“So these guys, Melisa and Nik and the others, found out the Bug was gone,” James was saying. Lily had moved closer again.
“What’s he talking about?” I pitched my voice low to Melisa.
“I’m telling her how you guys ruined everyone’s lives,” James said.
“Some of us weren’t sure the Bug was gone,” Melisa added. “But it didn’t make sense that it was still in the air, so I went along with it. Besides, if it failed, Nik was the one who would die—” She cut the joke short, her smile fading.
I found her hand and gave it a squeeze. Bren had been important to her too.
“Maybe just one of us tells the story,” James said.
We’d been pushing through grass and trees for the last few minutes, but then we broke through and found ourselves on a relatively clear, green-carpeted road. This wasn’t grass. I bent and pulled some of the stuff up. It was kind of soft, but also tough and smooth. “What is this?”
Lily scuffed at the ground cover. She snorted a soft laugh. “Seaweed.”
Pol, Melisa, and I exchanged a glance. “It gets flooded enough for seaweed to grow?” Pol took a step back toward the pod.
“Obviously.” Lily pointed at the nearby buildings. “But if the tide comes back in far enough, we can just go up to a higher level in one of these. It helps that this part of the city’s kind of on higher ground.”
“Found your sign.” James had continued walking and was clearing long tendrils of seaweed off a metal pole that protruded at an angle from a street corner. We joined him. He used a sleeve to wipe dirt off a long green rectangle of metal. The letters were a little faded, but the word was clear.
“Grove,” Pol said. “It totally worked.”
“Good job, Pol.” Melisa wasn’t even being sarcastic.
“Now what are we looking for?” James straightened.
“Scott said there was a building nearby that was nearly intact and had a basement.” I turned in a circle. We all took in the buildings in the general area. They were falling to pieces. Some of them had big chunks of rock strewn around their base. Most of them had wide cracks running in all angles through their outer walls. Gaping holes showed where windows and doors used to be and where walls had fallen.
“None of these looks particularly intact,” Melisa said.
“Is it possible the building has deteriorated since Scott’s friend was here?” Pol asked.
“I don’t think any of these went from somewhat intact to this state recently.” Lily walked down the seaweed-covered street a ways. “Maybe Dustin’s idea of nearby was not really all that close.”
“Could be another Grove sign somewhere,” James said. “We could get back in the pod and scan some more.”
“Let’s split up and look around first,” I said. “If this is a sign naming a street, wouldn’t the whole street be called Grove? And if the whole street’s Grove, then maybe there’s another sign close to here.”
“Good point,” James said. “Lily doesn’t have an EarCom, so she’s got to be with one of us.”
“Let’s have Lily, me, and Pol go together,” Melisa said. “I wouldn’t mind having a third girl around.”
“A third girl?” Pol said, indignation dripping from his voice.
Melisa and I burst out laughing.
Lily shrugged. “Works for me.”
James and I followed the street that paralleled the park, while the other three took the street that intersected ours like a T.
“Okay, so tell me the rest of this story,” I heard Lily say as they were walking away. “How did you prove the Bug was gone?”
“Nik used some glue to block the knockout in the Papas and made his heart rate go up,” Melisa said.
>
“That is incredibly stupid. What if the Bug had been in his system still?”
I didn’t hear Melisa’s response. I was sure it was complimentary.
James and I walked up our street, keeping up a good pace. I took one side while he took the other.
“You never said if you missed it,” I said.
James took a while to answer. “I don’t.” He pulled seaweed off another bent, corroded pole. “This one says something about parking.”
“I guess that’s good. That you don’t miss it, I mean.” I skirted some rubble and a dead car. “But did you ever wonder why we needed Enforsers—since the knockout was kind of a perfect one?”
“Yeah, sometimes.” James had gotten a little ahead of me. He was quiet again for a minute. “But it was a job, like you in the Enjineering Dome. We kept people safe, or at least we thought we did.”
I glanced behind us. We’d come a couple hundred meters. “Did you ever think that something was wrong?”
“Not really. My dad once said something about how the new Prime Administrator really looked almost identical to his father, but I never cared enough to think about it.” James slid his hand across a moldering car as he passed it. “People were basically happy, so why bother?”
People were basically happy. And I spammed it up.
I used my heel to scrape seaweed off what looked like another sign. Grove. “I was right!”
James spun at my shout.
“It’s another sign that says Grove.”
James jogged toward me. “So the whole street is called Grove.”
“I guess so.” I activated my EarCom. “Okay, the street we’re on is called Grove. So now we have to find an intact building.”
“On foot or on the pod?” Melisa asked.
“Now that we know that the entire street is Grove, the pod will be faster,” Pol said.
“All right. Let’s meet back at the pod.” Melisa said.
“Sounds good.”
We headed back the way we’d come. The seaweed and sand on the road muffled our footsteps. All around us, the gaping holes in the buildings looked like mouths and eyes. Like they were practically screaming at us. Some of the buildings looked like they might have once had apartments in them. Just over a hundred years ago, this street was probably really busy, with people living their lives and hurrying everywhere. Cars used to drive down this street. How loud had they been? Pods were pretty quiet. Had cities like San Francisco been noisy all the time?
I listened closely, hearing only a soft sound, almost like breathing. Was that wind? The sky was mostly gray, with a few blue patches here and there. Maybe it was going to rain.
“Uh, never mind,” Melisa said through the EarCom.
“What do you mean?” I tried to see them up ahead; we weren’t very far from the pod.
“We checked out this side of Grove street while we waited for you,” Pol said.
Lily stepped out of a building maybe a hundred meters past where we had left the pod and waved.
Melisa spoke again. “We found it. We found Holland’s office building.”
Chapter 22
James and I jogged toward the other group, both of us wincing. I’d almost forgotten the bullet wound in my side.
“This your first time getting shot?” I slowed to a walk; that hurt less.
Grimacing, James nodded. “I’ve been grazed before.” He waved a hand toward my side. “Like you, but this is the first time for real, yeah.”
“Grazed?” I pressed my side with one hand. “It practically took out a kidney.”
“A kidney?” He laughed. “Mostly skin.”
“Internal organs are skin?” I felt moisture seep into my shoe and looked down. A couple millimeters of water had suddenly risen and covered the road. I glanced around. “Is this the tide?”
We joined the others at a unique-looking building that showed no sign of imminent collapse. It gave a sense of sturdiness that the other crumbling ones lacked. Windows were broken, but the large, pale blocks that made up the exterior walls looked fine.
Lily was dragging a foot across the tiny bit of water, leaving a shallow wake. She must have heard my question about the tide because she nodded. “I think so. We might want to hold off going in until the tide’s back out.”
“How long will that take?” Pol stood just inside the building, late shadows painting funny shapes on his face.
Lily shrugged. “Probably several hours. I doubt it’s even all the way in yet, so like nine or ten hours.”
I caught Melisa’s attention. She raised her eyebrows. “I’d rather get in and out fast,” I said. Every second that Holland had my parents felt like a Ranjer was pointing a keeper at my head, finger on the trigger.
“There’s evidence of water at the bottom of the stairs,” Pol said. “The whole underground part might be flooded.”
“Well let’s at least check,” Melisa said.
“Yeah.” I stepped toward the building. “And if the tide comes in, we can get back to the pod really fast.”
“Or just go up.” Melisa pointed up. The building was about fifty meters tall, maybe more.
“Good point,” I said.
“Are we all going in?” James indicated the wide, empty road. “Maybe someone should stay out here to keep watch.”
“We could search faster if we all split up in there,” Melisa said.
“But he’s got a good point,” Lily said. “Outcasts might be out here.” She sighed. “Although they’re all pretty much cowards, so they shouldn’t be a problem if they show up.”
“I’ll go back to the pod and use it to monitor the entire area,” James said. “That way if the tide comes in, I can warn you too.”
A few minutes later, Lily and Pol led the way into the building. As we went in, I realized it had a strange shape. Outside, two roads met at something like a 45 degree angle, with the building inside that angle, making the building less of a square-ish block and more triangle-shaped. It started narrow at the front, then widened the farther back you got.
The doors had been made of glass, I guessed, and metal. But most of that was gone now, leaving a gaping entrance.
Melisa and I had our chest lights activated, even though there was enough light filtering in through broken windows to see well enough. The chest lights helped cut into some of the deeper shadows.
“Are you sure this is the one?” I asked.
Melisa glanced behind the tall counter in the first room we came to. “Well, no. But it’s the only building that isn’t falling to pieces. Besides, it was right near the Grove sign.”
“Yeah.” I checked a small room that opened off to the right. Empty except for some wood compartments that looked like they had been mostly beaten to pieces.
I called Lily and Pol over. “If I remember right, Scott’s friend made it sound like you had to go pretty deep in to find the pictures.”
We were back in the wide space at the front of the building. We’d checked all the adjacent rooms and found nothing. Now we had to check two hallways that stretched back from the front area, following the widening angle of the outside walls. Down a ways, it looked like there were elevator doors.
“Anyone think those elevators still work?” I joked.
“No electricity,” Pol said.
“I know,” I said. “I say we split up. Two down the left side and two down the right hall.”
“Works for me,” Lily said. “Pol, you and me. Let’s take left.”
“Guys,” James’s voice came through our EarComs.
“Wait a second,” I called to Lily. She needed an EarCom. “James, go ahead.”
“I’m at the pod. I had the idea to try and see if I could catch any communication from the Ranjers.”
“Nice!” Pol said.
“What’s going on?” Lily asked.
Melisa tapped her ear. “James has something.”
“And it worked. They must not realize we have a pod.” James sounded a little out of breath
.
“What did you hear?” I stepped closer to Lily. “He says he heard something from the Ranjers.”
“A bunch of chatter. It was a little hard to make out, probably because we’re kind of remote. But there was something about Wanderers getting together.”
“The gathering?” I asked. No. Lexi’s there.
Lily’s eyes went wide. “What? What’s going on?”
“That’s it. I caught like five seconds of good signal. Said they were on their way to the gathering.”
Lily must have seen my expression. “What about the gathering?”
“James, are you sure?” Melisa asked.
“They said they were on the way to a Wanderer gathering.” A beat. “That’s where they took Lexi, isn’t it?
Pol, Melisa, and I exchanged a terrified look. Melisa and I had seen what Ranjers did to Wanderers—and we’d told Pol about it. Devera might have told him more too.
“What else? Did they say anything else?” Pol asked.
“No, that’s it,” James said.
“What is happening?” Lily grabbed my arm.
I tapped my EarCom to include James in the conversation. “James caught a transmission on the pod about the Ranjers going to the Wanderer gathering.”
All the color drained out of Lily’s face. “Festering rot. No.”
Festering? “Do you know where the gathering is?” I started toward the street. We had to go. We had to warn the Wanderers. We had to get Lexi out of there. I should never have let her go!
“Yes,” Lily said. “And it’s tomorrow.”
Chapter 23
“Nik, wait,” Pol said. “What are you doing?”
I didn’t wait. No way were we going to let the Ranjers find Lexi. Or murder the Wanderers. I’d seen that and—No way. “We have to warn them, get Lexi out of there.”
“Yeah, we do. But we have to find your parents!” Melisa said.
“We leave right now,” Lily said. “Let’s go.” She turned, but I had stopped.
“Melisa’s right,” I said. I grabbed Lily by the wrist. “We came all this way; we need to figure out where Holland is. The gathering’s tomorrow, right?”
Push (Beat series Book 2) Page 14
