The metal shuddering under my palms told me Leo and Quess were behind me, and I quickly netted Maddox.
I stayed behind with the stuff. What is going on? she demanded, the line connecting immediately. Should I call for backup?
No, I thought at her, pausing as a cross-breeze hit me, signaling that I was in a junction. I searched intently for a second and then plunged forward when I saw another flash of light. We found an undoc boy. I think he might be with a larger group, and I want to find out. They might be one of the groups your mom mentioned, and possibly know of other undoc groups roving around the Tower—like our legacy friends. The boy spooked when he saw me, but we’re in pursuit. Go ahead and get a loader to move those boxes. We’ll be fine.
Okay. I’ll gather a few nearby Commanders anyway, just in case. If it turns out to be nothing, I’ll tell them it was just an emergency response exercise.
I sent an affirmative and then killed the connection, focusing solely on following the flashes, which were beginning to draw farther and farther away. They were getting too far ahead, in fact, and if they didn’t reach their destination soon—and stop—I was going to lose them.
I stopped when another breeze hit me, this one cold and biting, and strained to find the light. My eyes blinked rapidly in the darkness, and I twisted my head around, searching for it. Panic curled around my heart as heartbeats passed with no sound or visuals, and then I heard something to the right, in the direction from which the wind was coming, and plunged after it, worried that Tian had gotten too far ahead.
I’d made it a few feet down this new duct when I suddenly heard her cry out in pain, the sound carried from somewhere deeper in the tunnel. I scrambled toward it and heard scuffling, followed by a masculine bellow of pain that was too deep to belong to the boy we had been after. It seemed the boy wasn’t alone. He was with someone—and they were hurting Tian.
Frantic to get to her before they could harm her any further, I surged forward. I had made it several feet—how many, I couldn’t tell—when the floor suddenly vanished, and I fell down a few feet into a small, curved shaft, my face smacking on the metal.
I heard Leo frantically cry my name again as I slid downward, my hands and face scraping along the metal until if felt like a line of fire was burning its way across my cheek. When I stopped, I blinked dazedly, wincing against the bright light that was shining just feet from my face, and then scrambled upright, adrenaline pushing aside the cobwebs.
“What was that?” an alarmed voice snarled, and a shadow crossed the opening. I coiled up as I realized it was a set of legs, already bending into a squat, and then launched myself forward through the hole, tackling whoever was on the other side. I didn’t care if there were twenty people behind him. If he was the one who had harmed Tian, I was going to break his knees.
I got a flash of blue eyes, and then I was plowing at him, my already-hurt cheek and chin slamming against his collarbone. He made an “oof” sound as I hit him hard enough to slam the air out of his lungs, and we went down.
I heard someone shout and tried to sit up—only to find my arm twisted up under the guy I had landed on. I started to jerk my arm free, my mouth already forming Leo’s name to warn him that there were more people here, but strong fingers grabbed my face and slammed the side of my head into the floor. I jerked back up, adrenaline surging, and pushed against my attacker, trying to get their hand off my face with my free arm.
I found the soft flesh of an elbow and clawed at it, but I was still pinned in place by the guy I had slammed into, and didn’t have much leverage. They jerked my head up and back down again, and this time the lights went out.
I lay there for several seconds, convinced I was unconscious. My vision was black, and I was spinning in circles that I could feel in my stomach. Then something pressed against my face. Fingers, strong and forceful. Something struck my cheek, but I barely felt it, and I heard a muffled “Hey” cut through the whooshing sound in my ears. I opened my mouth, but then my cheek began to burn where I had been hit. A hand was on my face again for a second, and I tried to lift my arms. One was trapped under something, and the other one might as well have been because I couldn’t seem to lift it. The fingers tightened on my cheeks for a second, and then suddenly went away. The weight on my arm followed, and needle pricks exploded in the deadened limb as the blood began to flow more easily, causing me to gasp.
So I was wrong. I was aware of every bump and bruise, and they hurt—which meant I wasn’t knocked out.
Then why couldn’t I see? Had I gone blind?
Suddenly I heard voices that weren’t mine or Leo’s or Quess’s, and zeroed in on one of them.
“I got the lights,” it whispered, and I knew it. It was him—the man from the catwalk. I’d never been unconscious at all. They’d just shut off the lights in this section. But I had my hand light—it was still in my pocket. I flexed my fingers on my good hand and then tried to lift it. I had no idea if it was working, but a moment later I felt my limp hand thump against the front of my suit. “How did they find us?”
“She spotted me when I was grabbin’ breakfast,” came a younger voice, and I realized it was the boy. “I didn’t see nobody when I went in, I swear it, but I—”
There was a sharp smack followed by the boy’s soft cry of pain. “Idiot,” the man from the catwalk snarled. “The boss is going to do worse than tan your hide this time.” I felt a surge of anger at the guy. It wasn’t the boy’s fault he didn’t notice us. I fumbled my fingers around, searching for the pocket the light was in, and smiled when I felt the zipper tab.
“What do we do?” cried a feminine voice. “The boss told you not to—”
“You let me deal with the boss,” the older male voice snarled. “Run, quick. Her friends are right behind her.”
They were? I strained to hear, and had to wait for the sound of someone running away to fade, but then I heard the telltale rattle and thump coming from where I thought the vent hole was. I continued to work on the zipper, and finally made my wrist and hand force it down a few inches. Light spilled out from the gap, and I winced as the sudden brightness caused an immense pain in my eyes, pain exploding in my brain like pinpricks.
“What are you going to do about her?” the woman asked sharply, and I pressed my hand flat over the pocket, worried they were now looking at me. For a second, I wondered if they could even see me, but as I heard a shout go up in the distance, I realized that they had to have some way of seeing—because the sound of what must have been hundreds of feet running filled the air.
It was so loud that I almost missed the male’s response of, “Give me the bag. I’ll handle it.”
I didn’t hear what happened next. I was already moving my hand down to where my baton was in my belt. I’d gotten more control of my arm and hand, and I gripped the handle tightly and tugged up. My vision was still splotchy, but I felt the baton begin to slide free.
A second later, my wrist was seized by a strong hand, and I gasped as a gray patch of my vision suddenly cleared, revealing the man from the catwalk leaning over me, trapping one of my wrists under his knee. I tried to hit him with my other arm, but sensation hadn’t returned, and he caught it easily with one hand.
“Don’t struggle,” he spat, shifting his weight to one side to pull my hand out from under his knee.
“No!” I shouted, as he slowly lifted my hands over my head. I pressed against him, but he was impossibly strong, and my limbs still weren’t working right. The best I could muster was a weak shove. His jaw tightened, and then he slid his leg over my stomach, straddling me.
Panic burst over me, covering me with a dull sweat, when he reached between our bodies. A thousand nightmarish ideas as to what he was doing went through my head, but to my relief, all he did was pull the light out of my pocket, placing it on the ground next to my head after cranking it a little brighter.
“What are you doing?” I asked, my heart pounding in my chest.
I didn’t expect an ans
wer, but to my surprise, he started talking as he reached into a bag over his shoulder and awkwardly rummaged around. “Slowing your friends down. If they really care about you, they’ll stop to save your life.”
A second later he was pulling out a silver canister that I recognized as bio-foam—the pink foam used for sealing cuts—and a package of some sort. I watched, wide-eyed with terror, fearing what he had in store, and tried to will more strength into my limbs. He barely seemed to notice, just placed them next to the light and then looked over his shoulder again, all the while holding me firmly in place. I lifted my head, listening, and I heard them—Leo and Quess.
“Guys, here!” I shouted. “Over here! I—”
The man whipped around and backhanded me, and the impact felt like he had smashed right through my face. My vision went dark, and I gasped and gargled against the pain. For several seconds, all I could do was lie there in agony, my head splitting.
I returned to awareness slowly, the darkness clearing like curtains being drawn. Half my vision was filled with dark, corrugated metal, the other half the silver canister and package, telling me I was looking right. Even though my head felt like it weighed a thousand pounds, I slowly swiveled it to peer at the man above me.
“Liana!” Leo’s voice was close, but still felt too far away as I stared at the man above me.
“Are you the one who killed my mother?” I asked hoarsely. His blue eyes met mine, but he didn’t answer. A moment later, I felt something sharp press against my throat. “Wha—”
His hand went down, and something sharp punched into my throat. I gasped—but instead of pulling air, a wet, gurgling sucking sound erupted from my throat. I gagged as thick, hot wetness flooded my throat and I tried to cough it out. Dark red splatters landed on his face, and I realized that I had just expelled blood.
No, I was drowning in blood. Panic set in, and I began to struggle. The weight left me, and, working on instinct alone, I grabbed at my neck. Wetness, hot and thick, splattered against my hand. My blood, I realized. I clapped my hand over it, trying to stem the flow. Panic came over me as I continued to choke and cough, trying to clear the blood from my throat so I could breathe, but it didn’t work. The blade had gone all the way through the carotid artery and punctured my airway, and I was suffocating on my own blood.
He cut my throat, I realized belatedly. I needed help. Now.
“Le—” I tried to make the sound, but only coughed up more blood instead. I was gagging, choking for air, drowning.
Hands grabbed me, and I panicked as they reached for the hand on my neck. No, I tried to tell them. I have to keep pressure there or I’m going to die!
I was going to die. My vision was already going gray, and blood was still spurting from the hole in my throat, forced out by each beat of my heart. The very act of living was killing me… and I was powerless to stop it.
Anger slid into me—too little, too late—and I struggled against the hands, fighting them for every second of life. I thought about all the people I was about to leave, and told myself I couldn’t let them down, couldn’t—
The hands wanted me dead, it seemed. They pushed my own away, and the next thing I felt was the blade of another knife, sharp and cold, pressing into my throat. I wished I could spit at them.
My thoughts grew broken, then, and I thought of Leo. I wished he was with me. I wished he would hold me and tell me that I was going to be okay. I would know it was a lie, of course. I already knew it was.
And then I thought of my mother. It seemed I had been right: I was going to join her in Twilight sooner than I’d thought.
Then something was shoved down my throat, but I felt weightless now, untethered by my body, which was growing cold as blood poured out of my carotid artery.
Then I coughed—once, twice, a third time—and something wet and thick forced its way upward from my stomach and lungs. I was turned, and for several seconds, all I could do was retch out blood.
Then I reflexively breathed in. I coughed when I felt something wet crackle in my lungs, and then even more came out.
The hands held me and stroked my hair, oblivious to the blood covering me. I shook violently as soon as it was over, and then reached up to touch my neck. The area was wet with blood, but when I felt the skin there, unbroken and whole, my shaking intensified.
I turned to look back and saw Leo and Quess looking at me, their faces ashen. And then I saw the silver canister in Quess’s hand, and realized he had inserted it directly into the wound to seal the hole. The blood was on both their hands, blending in with the crimson of their uniforms. Their expressions were a mixture of horrified and worried, and told me how close I’d just come to death.
I pressed my palm against the spot the knife had gone in and broke down, sobbing as the reality hit home that I’d almost died. If they’d been even a second later, I’d have been dead. Nobody said anything, but Leo’s arms went immediately around me, wrapping me in a cocoon of his warmth and strength, and he stroked my hair while I sobbed against his shoulder.
24
I clung onto Leo, and he rocked me for what felt like forever, as I gripped the place where the blade had pierced my neck, unable to let go for fear of feeling that awful, thick gurgling when I took my next breath. Leo held me tightly, his hands smoothing over my hair, my face, my arms. I was glued to him like my hand was to my throat, unable to move or stop shaking.
I’d almost died. They’d almost killed me. They had cut my throat and left me to bleed out.
I would be angry if I didn’t feel so cold.
I heard Leo’s chest rumble under my ear and tucked closer to it, too afraid to even listen to what he was saying. Scipio help me, I was so cold.
Leo stopped talking, and a moment later, he was gently pushing me away. I resisted that, but was so powerless at the moment that he easily won, and I looked at him. His mouth was moving.
“Liana?” His voice was muffled, but I focused on it and the concerned look on his face. “Can you hear me?”
I nodded, but my hand fearfully tightened on my throat, feeling skin that was smooth and unblemished but had been split wide open not too long ago. I was still terrified.
“Liana, you went into shock. Probably because of the blood loss and trauma. Are you okay?” I blinked and looked over at the new voice just over Leo’s shoulder, and saw Quess’s dark blue eyes gazing back at me, equally concerned.
I shook my head violently in answer to his question. I was most definitely not okay.
Leo reached up and cupped my cheek, dragging my gaze back over to him. “I understand,” he said gently. “But I need you to focus, okay?”
I couldn’t handle that idea, and lowered my gaze to the floor.
Bad idea. A dark red pool of blood—my blood—was beginning to congeal over the surface. I shuddered and looked back at him. Focus, he’d said. I’d focus on him if it meant I never had to see that much of my own blood on the floor again.
He smiled encouragingly, but I could tell he was scared. Scared for me. “Quess has to take the patch off.”
“Patch?” I repeated, confused. What patch?
“Patch,” he confirmed, lifting up his arm. I looked at it, and sure enough, his sleeve had been rolled back and a white patch had been taped over his forearm, a long tube connected to the center of it. I followed the tubing toward myself, and found an identical patch on my own forearm, the tube connecting the two. Leo was giving me his blood.
Wait, we were compatible?
“You lost a lot of blood, but Quess found the transfusion patch on the floor next to the bio-foam canister. We assume they left it so we would stop to treat you. Anyway, that’s not important right now. But we have to take it off now, okay? It won’t hurt.”
I nodded and lifted my arm toward him, trying to think. “We have the same blood type?” I asked, my voice hoarse. My vocal cords felt strange and tight, like they had been packed with tiny sharp rocks that weren’t painful, but were uncomfortable.
; He shook his head as he carefully pulled the patch back. The patch itself didn’t hurt, though the adhesive could sometimes sting when removed. But he took his time, making sure not to hurt me. “Grey is a universal donor,” he said with a lopsided smile that looked almost bittersweet. “It’s lucky I recovered the memory of him getting blood-typed. He saved your life today.”
“As the guy who applied the foam and the patches, I have to say: standing right here,” Quess said dryly.
For some reason, that made me laugh, though I snatched it back in almost immediately by clapping my free hand over my mouth, terrified that the new movement had torn something inside my throat. My hand gently massaged the tendons in my neck, icy fear washing away all vestiges of humor.
“Who did this, Liana?” Leo demanded gently. “Did you see?”
The man’s face—now impossible to forget—flashed through my head, and I nodded. “I did,” I replied in a whisper. “It was him—the man from the catwalk. The boy… He’s with them.” We’d stumbled into them completely by accident, I realized as I clutched Leo closer. I’d thought the boy could lead us to the undoc group, but instead it seemed he was a legacy. They all were. Everyone who had raced out of here while I was bleeding out on the floor was a legacy.
But then, why had they been up here?
Leo tsked angrily. “We should get her out of here and just let Dylan investigate the area,” he said sharply. “Tian’s already called her.”
“Where’s Tian?” I mumbled as I finished confirming that I was, in fact, still alive and not bleeding.
The two men exchanged looks. “She was unconscious and on the floor when we came in,” Leo said. “We saw that you were bleeding and were helping you when she woke up. She took one look at you, said ‘not again,’ and ran off to pick up your attacker’s trail. She called Dylan to help her. Now, we should go before—”
“Liana needs to see what we found before Dylan does,” Quess interrupted hotly. “I don’t even think Dylan should see this. It’s so… weird. Besides, Liana is going to want to see it.”
The Girl Who Dared to Lead Page 24
