“Anyone could be,” I said. “Me, you, her. I guess it doesn’t matter.”
“Unless you think someone did it on purpose.”
In my mind, images flashed with fire. The Association’s vids had blamed the destructive fires on the Resistance. They did it on purpose mingled with the roar of flames in my head. I found myself contemplating that vid more and more. I’d always believed it to be false—and I still did. I wished I knew which side was telling the truth, though. Because I’d lied. All Insiders lie.
Pics of the Resistance members flashed on my vision-screen. I dismissed each as it came up.
Jag? Definitely not.
Vi? No way.
Gunn, Raine, Saffediene, Indy, Pace? None of them.
Someone still living inside Freedom?
Trek Whiting? Hell would freeze first.
Starr Messenger? The sun would have to go black.
Based on what I knew about the people I’d been living with, none of them would betray the Resistance—or Jag—by blabbing to Director Hightower.
The only picture left was mine. A sudden, terrible thought struck me.
Could Director Hightower have come to claim me?
And even more horrifying: Do I want him to?
* * *
Our detour added three hours to the trip to Cedar Hills, which sat just south of a dead border in the foothills of an unnamed mountain range. I’d always wondered what had happened to the country on the other side of the border, but I’d never asked.
They’d likely died in the Great War or the subsequent fires, or the years of darkness and sickness and starvation that followed. Three out of every four people had died then, allowing the Thinkers an almost too-easy road to domination.
“Zenn?” Saffediene asked from beside me. We’d both settled onto our boards for the long flight. I sat, my legs dangling over the edges of my board in an attempt to enhance circulation. She sat, her knees tucked to her chest.
“Yeah?”
“Why do you always call Van ‘Director Hightower’?”
My brain buzzed. “Do I?”
“Yes,” she said. “You do.”
I scanned the horizon, as if it would hold the answer. “I don’t know.”
She hummed in her throat and didn’t say anything more, but in my head I heard, Maybe you hold him in higher regard than you thought.
And maybe I did.
* * *
Cedar Hills sat in complete blackout. The only reason I saw it was because it sucked in the light from the surrounding land. It was a void. Or a whole city trying to hide. From who or what, I couldn’t guess. The Association. Us. I had a hard time deciphering between the two at this point.
Saffediene led the way to the ground, and I touched down next to her in silence. I set about making a camp while she pulled blankets and extra clothes from the packs. I shivered and pulled on a second shirt and another sweater to ward off the chill.
We wrapped ourselves in blankets, and I asked her what she wanted to eat. After generating a bowl of steaming chicken chili for her, I ordered myself a stack of toast. The darkness and silence settled around us in thick layers.
“We’ll try first thing in the morning,” she said. “Maybe they’ve got the lights out to conserve energy.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said.
“Me neither, but I’m too tired to think about the real reason why.” She laid her head on my shoulder, and I gently lowered both of us to the ground. With her wrapped in her blanket and me in mine, sleep swallowed us whole.
When I woke up, the space beside me radiated a chill.
Saffediene was gone.
Both of our backpacks were gone.
Even my hoverboard was gone.
Jag
21. I blamed the evacuation on Thane. That solved all my problems. I already disliked him. And then I wouldn’t have to think about or deal with one of my own team betraying me.
We had enough hoverboards for everyone in the cavern except Indy and her team, who had arrived by transport. Our escape would not be fast or easy. The transport had been parked several miles to the southeast, hidden in a grove of trees. I sent Indy and her assistant, Lex, to retrieve it.
By the time they returned, the food was packed. Pace had the tech boxed up. Extra clothes and blankets had been bagged. Everything went through the emergency exit and into the transport.
I put Indy’s people in with the supplies and sent them off. “Vi, anything?”
“Thane definitely got a comm from Van, but I don’t sense the Director anywhere near here.”
I turned to Thane. “Could it have been a repeat? Sent earlier and you’re just now getting it?”
“You’ve asked me that four times. The answer is still no.” Thane alone seemed undisturbed by the flashing blue light and the flurry of activity surrounding him.
“Gunn and Raine, you’re on deck. Fly west. Meet up in Grande.”
“You got it, boss,” Gunn said, guiding Raine through the emergency exit first.
Five minutes later I sent Thane out into the wild with Indy and Pace with strict instructions for them to watch him closely. Pace saluted, but Indy glared. Vi and I were the only ones left in the cavern. I deactivated the alarm and stood in the shadows, waiting.
“I don’t think he’s here,” Vi said. “Honestly, I don’t.”
“Do you think he knows where this place is?”
“Possibly.” Her tension indicated that she had more to say, and that I wouldn’t like it.
“Then we can’t stay here,” I said.
“Raine should be scanned again.”
My arms felt heavy as I raised them to stretch. Exhaustion clung to me. Sleepless nights kept Vi from entering my nightmares, but I was paying the price. “Anyone who’s been inside city limits should be scanned again,” I said.
I motioned to her hoverboard. “After you. Use the solar portlet until the sun goes down.”
She climbed out, and I followed. I unfolded my board and set our course more toward the west than the south. Vi brought her board close and took my hand in hers. This simple touch ignited a fire in my blood.
We flew side by side, hand in hand, until the sun went down.
* * *
With true night closing in, I needed to find somewhere safe to spend the night. I touched down near a couple of trees, thinking we could use them for shelter. This excursion reminded me of the morning Vi and I had found refuge in an old shack in the Fire Region of the Goodgrounds.
I wondered if she remembered. What had been taken from her? I knew her memories of me were limited at best.
“I remember,” she said, landing behind me. “I remember everything now.”
“Nice,” I whispered, pulling her close. Her blue-green eyes were two bright spots against the reigning blackness.
She closed her eyes and kissed me. White noise filled my ears. I couldn’t bring her close enough. She couldn’t hold me tight enough, despite the twinges of pain from the healing skin on my back.
A low sound came from her throat, one I took to mean I love you, Jag Barque. I matched the moan, our mouths moving in sync. I would never tire of her lips, but I slid mine over her neck and toward her ear. She pressed closer in response.
The thin barrier of clothing between us was too thick. Vi’s skin felt searing hot.
“Jag,” she breathed, but it wasn’t her usual We have to stop. It was more like I want you to kiss me forever.
I was more than happy to oblige. Her hands slid over my shoulders and tenderly down my healing back, along the waistband of my jeans. My fingers tangled in her hair, and then pushed the collar of her shirt to the side, revealing her milky white shoulder. I kissed her there, desperate to hear her approval.
She gave it in a single word. “Jag.”
I wanted her to say my name again and again in that throaty, pleasure-filled voice. I didn’t expect what came next.
“Stop.”
I didn’t. I couldn’t. Or wou
ldn’t. They were the same.
“Stop.” This time her throatiness was replaced with urgency.
I stopped.
“We’re not alone,” she whispered, hastily adjusting her shirt with one hand as she clung to me, looking over my shoulder into utter blackness.
Zenn
22. “I am alone,” I said out loud, to myself, and the words disappeared into the endless sky, confirming their reality.
Jag
23. We’re not alone. Vi’s voice sounded in my head this time, spiking the panic already welling in my gut.
Zenn
24. I took three steps toward Cedar Hills and called Saffediene’s name. I changed direction and repeated this procedure until I’d gone in a complete circle. I reached out with my mind, desperate to find her lurking just over the hill.
She wasn’t. The closest person I could find was collecting water from a well outside the border.
A squeal pierced my ears and my left hand flew to my left ear to deactivate the cache. While it shut down and restarted, I recalled the basics of the mission to Cedar Hills.
Enter through the friendly northern border and proceed to Greenhouse Eighty. Cedar Hills was in the business of preserving and classifying species of flowers, trees, shrubs, and herbs.
The flora was then transported to other cities for the repopulation of the country’s greenery. Greenhouses covered the entire northern half of the city and nearly every Citizen of Cedar Hills worked in them.
According to Gunn’s dad, Greenhouse Eighty was run by Insiders. Meetings were held there, beneath vines and aspens. The foliage and soil of the outgoing plants contained coded messages.
The sun beat down on me, but I clung to my thin blanket, the only thing I had to my name at this point. As my cache came online, a red band flickered across my vision-screen, indicating I had unread messages.
I blinked, pulling up my comms. I had two from Saffediene, both flagged as urgent.
The first read, Zenn, I couldn’t sleep and heard people talking. I went to investigate and got caught.
Heard people talking? I thought. Out here?
The second message read, Zenn, I’m inside Cedar Hills. The Greenhouse is secure. Make your way here as soon as you can. Sorry they took your hoverboard. You’ll have to walk.
I knew immediately that the second e-comm wasn’t from Saffediene. Number one, she would never mention the Greenhouse in something as traceable as an e-comm. Number two, she knew I didn’t need a hoverboard to fly.
I dropped to a crouch, taking refuge in the tall grass while I thought. If the second message wasn’t from Saffediene, maybe the first wasn’t either. Sneaking off in the dead of night to eavesdrop sort of sounded like her, but at the same time it didn’t. Why wouldn’t she wake me to go with her?
On the other hand, if someone had taken her while we were asleep, why did they leave me? With a blanket and nothing else?
Nothing made sense. I stood up and walked straight toward the border—and the person still loitering at the well. As far as I was concerned, the plan had changed.
* * *
The boy lingered near the well, his job already done. A wet patch of dirt to his left showed where the well had been leaking. He’d likely been sent to repair the couplings or adjust the connections.
I couldn’t tell his height, crouched as he was, drawing in the dirt with a stick—a behavior that alerted me to his heightened thinking skills. The brainwashed don’t dawdle in their tasks, and they certainly don’t create art.
He wore the traditional clothing for a Cedar Hills Citizen: white long-sleeved shirt, brown cotton pants, a pair of rubber shoes, and a hat that blocked the morning sun.
His milky-colored fingers snuck out of the pool of shade created by his hat as he directed the stick this way and that. The boy seemed unconcerned that the gate lay a mere hundred yards away, and anyone could observe him breaking the rules.
I searched his mind and found his worries were few. That, or he’d learned to hide thoughts he didn’t want anyone to read.
“Hello,” I said in my most placating voice.
Instead of startling to a stand as I expected, the boy simply looked over his shoulder. “Hello.” He continued to draw.
“I’m Zenn Bower,” I said, advancing with deliberate steps. “I need to get inside your city.” I quickly catalogued all sensitive information and filed it away in the furthermost parts of my mind. Half of me thought he could probably read my every thought, and the other half wondered if he was mentally slow.
The boy stood up, dropping the stick on the ground. He brushed his hands on his pants, obliterating the picture in the dirt as he shuffled his feet. At his full height, I could see he was no boy. In fact he was probably a fair bit older than me.
“Can I get through the gate with you?” I asked, willing him to say yes.
“Yes,” he said in a hauntingly low tone. A brainwashed tone.
“Perfect,” I said. “Tell me your name.”
“Greene Leavitt.”
My pulse jumped. Greene’s name was listed in the journal. “How old are you?”
“Twenty.” His answers came quick and sure. He stared at me—no, almost through me. I couldn’t tell the color of his eyes because of the shade of his hat.
“Why are you out here alone?”
“I was waiting.”
“For what?”
His shadowed eyes shifted, then found mine and held them. “For you.”
I took an extra breath before continuing. “Well, you found me. Let’s go.”
Entering Cedar Hills turned out to be crazy-easy. With Greene by my side, I simply walked through the gate and into a world of glass houses. The very air seemed to be holding its breath. The streets were paved with packed dirt, barely wide enough for Greene and me to walk side by side between the Greenhouses.
Freedom had maintenance crews to clean every surface to a silver gleam, but here, a white film clung to the metal frames. A metallic square with a number hung from the top of each door. The Greenhouse in front of me bore the number thirty-nine. The soft sound of sprinkling water added to the peacefulness of the city.
“Are you ready, Zenn Bower?” Greene asked, tearing my attention from the decor. The way he spoke my name sent tremors down my spine.
“Yes,” I said. “But first I need to find another friend of mine. Maybe you’ve seen her? Saffediene Brown?”
Greene suddenly turned down another narrow path between two Greenhouses. I followed him just as plodding footsteps approached from a direction I couldn’t place. The sounds echoed between the metal and glass, making it impossible to pinpoint.
Greene strode away, his narrow shoulders brushing the glass of the flanking Greenhouses.
He ducked into Greenhouse Sixty-Four (how had we gone from Thirty-Nine to Sixty-Four?), casting a cursory glance at me as he did. Inside, the smell of soft roots and wet dirt hit me like a punch. I’d never seen so much disorder. Little shovels lay in a metal tray by the door. Muddy boots and coils of hose festered in heaps under the metal tables holding flower after bush after tree.
I’d only been in two Greenhouses, both of them on the roof of Rise Twelve. Neither of them looked like this. There, plants were laid in neat rows, organized by height. This seemed like someone had held a giant handful of seeds and simply dropped them. Wherever they landed, they grew.
Utter chaos, this gardening in Cedar Hills.
Greene stood a few feet down the first row, his back to me. The stillness of his body and the way he hardly spoke set my nerves on edge. And I was used to being the cool one.
“Eighty-Nine is one rung north,” he said, turning to face me. “Then go west until you get to Eighty. It’ll be on the left.” He removed his hat and wiped his forehead. “I believe Saffediene is there.”
I nodded, unable to look away from his face. Or his scalp, which was almost blindingly white and utterly hairless. His milky skin couldn’t hold pigment if it tried. His eyes, a strange shade of pi
nk, dared me to say something.
“Who are you?” I asked, wondering how his name had landed in the journal.
“I am a rescuer,” he replied. “Your friend shouldn’t have gone snooping.”
Worry caused a sharp snag in my airway. “Is she okay?”
“Minds had to be tampered with,” he said. “And that takes talent and energy, neither of which we have much of here in Cedar Hills.”
“Is she okay?” I repeated, disturbed by his oh-so-white eyebrows and color-of-cream complexion. And the way he held so deathly still.
“She is waiting for you in Eighty,” he asserted, as if that answered my question. “I must get back to the city center, Zenn Bower.” With that, he snapped his fingers and disappeared without a sound.
I hadn’t seen a ring on his albino fingers, so either Greene Leavitt was tampering with my mind, causing me to think he’d turned invisible, or he had access to tech that didn’t need to be contained in an object to be used.
I chose to go with the tech. Maybe he was like Vi and could control it somehow. I took a deep, cleansing breath and immediately regretted it. Dirt and rot and dung didn’t exactly make breathing pleasant.
Outside Greenhouse Sixty-Four, all was quiet. A wind blew across my face, hot and lazy. I stroked it with two fingers, whispering for it bring me a cooler draft. Wind shouldn’t be hot.
A moment later, the current dragging across my skin turned cold, almost icy. “Perfect,” I murmured. “Now mask any sound I might make.”
With the wind as my ally, I crept toward Greenhouse Eighty.
Jag
25. I twisted to protect Vi by shielding her with my body and shoved her backward when the screaming started. My ears rang with the sound’s depth of pain, even after it stopped.
A flare of light ignited behind me. I turned to find that Vi was on fire, literally. She’d somehow made her entire hand glow with unnatural flames. I stared at her fist, unable to tear my gaze from her pristine skin that wasn’t really burning.