That’s when it happened: a deafening, thundering crash. The walls shook. Dust spilled down from the ceiling. It was a short burst of an earthquake, over in seconds that felt like a lifetime.
I was still on the floor, halfway beneath the table with the necklace locked in my fist. Terror had seized my muscles. I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even breathe.
A high screech of twisting, tearing metal filled my ears. The flashlight’s beam vibrated against the wall. The sounds were coming from deeper in the tunnels. Somewhere closer to the remains of downtown. Somewhere near the Loop, where the meeting was to be held.
Where Chase and Sean and Tucker were all headed.
One more explosion, and I watched the ceiling crack open like it was paper torn down the center. I heard it grumble angrily and whine, and then vomit rock and dust. The walls, so solid in appearance, bowed, the racks broke and spit supplies into the center of the room.
The world went bright white, and then black.
* * *
THE pain receded. Not immediately, but in stages, like I had slipped into a hot, healing bath. My muscles relaxed. The fear dissipated. Soon the darkness seemed as natural as nighttime.
And then she was there. I don’t know how, or even when she came exactly. All I knew was that she was there, as real as I was. She crouched on her knees and then laid down close beside me, so that we were both staring up into the black.
“Hi, Mom.”
“Hi, baby.” Her delicate fingers wove between mine and our joined hands came to rest on the soft T-shirt covering her stomach.
“So I’m dead then,” I said. It didn’t seem so bad; I wasn’t scared. I wasn’t tired or angry or hungry. But even though she was here, I still had the strange sensation that something was missing. Some crucial part of me.
“I don’t think you’re dead,” she said.
I snorted at her uncertainty. Of all people, she should know.
She hummed quietly, running her fingers over the back of my hand. I sighed. For the first time in a long time, my mind was quiet, peaceful. I turned my face and smiled, and she smiled back, and I thought of how we had the same mouth. I liked that.
“I’ve missed you,” I said.
She was warm, but when I tried to snuggle up to her side a rock embedded into my ribcage. What was that doing here? Just a moment ago the ground had been soft. I released her hand to pull the rock out, but though I felt the rough edges, I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t even see my hand. All I could see was her.
My head began to throb, building to a hammering in the base of my skull that sent waves crashing behind my eyes. There was something in my other hand. A flat and round piece of metal. It was wet, and my fingers hurt from squeezing it so hard.
It reminded me of something. A silver ring, with a pretty black stone. But it wasn’t a ring, it was a coin.
“I knew he’d find you. He’s always been a good boy. Came from good people,” she said.
A sharp pain exploded at the front of my brain. Streaks of light appeared before my eyes, blocking her out for seconds at a time.
I remembered. I remembered everything. His black hair and calloused hands. His dark eyes, always watching me.
Please don’t be dead. Please.
“Mom, is he…” I couldn’t say it out loud.
“I don’t know,” she said with a small frown.
That little expression did it. I was torn. Ripped clean in half. I had to find out if he was dead so that he could be with us, but I couldn’t leave her. Not for a second. I’d never let her out of my sight again.
“Ember, sweetheart,” she soothed, pulling me close. But she wasn’t soft and warm. She was cold, and the light inside of her was growing dim. When I grasped for her she wasn’t there. My fingers connected with something hard and flat above me. Splinters dug into the beds of my nails.
“No, wait…” I sobbed. “Mom. Please. Stay.”
“You can’t have us both,” she said, her face pale. “But it’s okay. You know why?”
I gasped for breath. Pain jolted from my left wrist to my elbow.
“It’s okay because I got almost eighteen years with you. The best eighteen years of my life.”
“Mom…”
“Hush. Listen now. I need to say a couple mom things.”
Chase and I were sitting on the truck bed at East End Auto. He was telling me about his mother. About the spirit world. He was right. He was always right.
“Listen, because this is important. Eat more—you’re getting too skinny. And smile. Oh, and don’t believe anyone who says they’ll pay you back later; they never do.”
The pain in my arm was like fire in the bone. It whipped through my body to my spine, to my ankles, to the back of my head.
“And one more thing,” she said. “I have never loved one single thing in my life more than you. You were worth living for, and Ember, you were worth dying for.”
And then she was gone. And it didn’t matter how much I cried that I loved her back, or not to go, she was simply gone. There was only the black, and the rubble, and the walls of my silent tomb.
* * *
WHEN I woke again, it was with the acute understanding that I was alone. The rest returned slowly—the tunnels, the supply room, crawling under the table to retrieve the St. Michael pendant. My mother.
I screamed for help, but the sound slapped against the walls of the enclosure and made my ears ring. I reached up, feeling the underside of a flat board, less than a foot above my face. It angled down over the length of my body, trapping my shins and ankles. My left wrist seared with pain, and sent my fingers into spasms of prickling numbness. With my right hand and left elbow, I pushed upward on the barrier as hard as I could. It didn’t move.
I was trapped.
Okay, I thought. I forced myself to breathe, to try again. But the board didn’t budge.
A sudden panic seized me, and I twisted, throwing my shoulder against the board. My knees cracked against it. My cries were met with silence.
Nobody was going to come.
Nobody was left alive.
Everyone had died in the earthquake, or whatever it was. I didn’t even know how long I’d been down here.
After a while I became still, too scared to move. The seconds passed, one by one. I tried to count them, anything to quiet the scalding horror. When I passed one hundred, I stopped, realizing that I’d begun the countdown to the end.
I was going to die here.
I wasn’t even going to get to tell Chase good-bye.
I tried to hold on to what I could in my last moments. His rough, strong fingers intertwined with mine. His mouth tightening to hold back angry words, and the way his shoulders hunched when he’d gone too long without sleep. I knew the exact angle in which I had to lift my chin in order to kiss him, and what his laugh sounded like, and how a nightmare could make him, of all people, feel small.
I held his memories. Of when he’d gotten all As on his seventh-grade report card, and when he’d gotten grounded for fighting Jackson Pruitt in the sixth grade. Of how he fit into his family. Of how he fit into mine.
When I was gone, who would remember who he really was?
Stop, I told myself. I’ve lived through rehabilitation. I’ve escaped an MM base. I’ve survived a fire.
I am not dead yet.
“Help!” I whispered. And then my whispers turned louder, and louder, and my cry for help became his name. I shouted it twenty times. Thirty. All the while, I resumed my attack on that unmovable board.
My voice grew hoarse. My throat was on fire, closing with each frantic second. I would have sold my soul for some water.
I am not dead yet.
I summoned every fiber of strength in my entire body. I called upon every bit of determination within me. And I pushed.
The board tilted above me, and dust rained down on my face. I coughed and squeezed my eyes closed. My good arm had succeeded in dislodging the barrier. Now that I had enough room to move I
added my knee. Every muscle in my abdominals and back contracted. Whispered screams of exertion belted through my locked jaw.
And then I heard something.
I held my breath, fighting off the sudden burst of faintness.
“… think someone’s down there!”
A frenzied state of urgency took me, and as the light filtered in from the window I’d loosened, I fought like an animal. Every thought cleared from my head. I had to get out of here now.
I shimmied out before my rescuer pulled the board all the way off of me. Sweating and exhausted, I stared into the face of a green-eyed ghost. Not a ghost. His flawless skin was covered with white concrete dust.
Not you, I thought. Anyone but you.
Tucker shined a flashlight into my face. I wasn’t ready for the brightness. It burned straight through to my brain.
“Help me up!” My mouth moved, but no sound came out.
“She’s alive!” he shouted to someone behind him.
I shoved to my knees and jerked up too quickly, stars exploding in my vision. Tucker grasped my waist for support.
My legs wobbled, but could still support my weight. There didn’t appear to be any real damage to them, but the bruises must have gone straight through; they throbbed to the marrow. My wrist was another story. It was contorted to the side, and nearly made me vomit to look at. Had it not been so numb, I was sure it would have been killing me.
“That table saved your life,” Tucker said. “Good thinking getting under it.”
There was an absent, distant feel to him. The kind Chase sometimes got when he’d been left alone too long with his thoughts.
I glanced down to where he pointed. The table from the supply room had been tossed aside. The legs were broken on one end: where my ankles had been trapped. I shuddered; not allowing myself to consider what might have happened should the opposite legs—those on either side of my head—have collapsed.
Our half of the room was still standing, but the cave-in had taken out most of the opposite wall. All that remained was a landslide of rock, some pieces bigger than my body.
The exit was wiped out.
A dozen people were close, assisting the injured or shoveling away the debris. Crying voices. Moaning. A scream. I didn’t know why they weren’t running.
“Chase,” I demanded. Please let him be alive.
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
I spun, coming face-to-face with the boy with almond eyes from the supply room. He held a canteen, and taken by a force beyond my control, I snatched it from his hands.
I tried to drink only a little, but it soothed my aching throat, and I couldn’t stop. Soon more than half the canteen was gone. He didn’t seem to care that I gasped and sputtered, or that half the water dribbled down my shirt.
I grabbed his shoulder with my good hand and pulled myself close to his ear.
“Chase Jennings,” I whispered. “He came with me from Knoxville.”
The boy blinked.
“I haven’t seen him in the last hour, but he lived through the blast.”
Alive. But my stomach stayed knotted. I’d been down in that hole for more than an hour. Because of a blast. Had we been bombed?
“Where is he?” I mouthed.
“Sick bay.” He pointed in the direction of the airfield.
I shoved by him, still unsteady on my feet. I half walked, half ran through the gravel, tripping only once and then catching myself. I peered into every face, but no raven hair. No wolf eyes. My head was throbbing, and the lights from the hand-cranked lanterns and flashlights left comet trails across my vision.
The main tunnel was mostly empty, but I could see lights down the way where the train car with the medical supplies still stood. My eyes landed on someone thick, muscular: Truck.
I blinked, and kept moving toward them, pushing the St. Michael medallion that had saved my life into my pocket.
Truck was holding someone around the waist, struggling to contain him while his arms flailed. I recognized Sean off to the side. He looked so tired; his hands were on the knees of his dust-skinned pants and he was shaking his head.
And there, the person Truck was fighting. Chase.
Truck was hauling him away from the wreckage: the passage where the shower bags had hung had been consumed by a concrete avalanche.
“She’s not there!” I heard Truck yell.
Chase twisted and elbowed him in the side of the head.
“Chase!” Sean shouted. But he wasn’t looking at Chase, he was looking at me.
Chase turned. Our gazes locked. The voices, the crackling of rock, it all faded.
I ran forward, sobbing, limping, latching my busted wrist to my chest. He took three steps toward me and stumbled to his knees, as if his legs had lost their strength.
I collapsed before him, inches away. Blood was smeared across his cheek. Dirt and what looked like oil marked his clothes and skin. Sweat carved jagged lines down the dust coating his jaw. Until that moment I hadn’t thought what I must have looked like. I didn’t much care.
His hand lifted slowly toward my cheek, his eyes deep and afraid, his cracked lips open slightly. I longed for that touch, I craved it, knowing it would make me real again instead of some player in my waking nightmare. But he didn’t touch me. He couldn’t. When I glanced to the side, his bloodied hand was trembling, and he lowered it, wiping it on his jeans.
I could almost hear his thoughts. Or maybe they were mine.
Please be real.
With no more hesitation I grabbed that hand and kissed his palm and watched it dampen and fill with my tears. A strangled sob came from his throat, and then he grabbed me firmly by the waist and crushed me into his body so hard I gasped. Finally, finally I was back, locked within his sheltering arms, hidden within his bones.
“I thought you were dead.” His voice broke.
I closed my eyes for a moment, thankful to be alive.
“I saw my mom,” I whispered. “Maybe I was dead.”
His chest rumbled with a short, wet chuckle. “How did she look?”
“She looked like my mom,” I said with a smile. “You know, short hair. Big eyes. Little.” It was the same literal translation he’d once given me when I asked the same question. “I thought you went to the meeting.”
His breath whistled through his teeth. “I did,” he said, his voice still unsteady. “But you weren’t there. I ran into Sean on the way back. He said he’d seen you at sick bay.”
A sudden wave of drowsiness crashed over me. “I think my wrist might be broken.”
He jerked me back immediately, nearly giving me whiplash, and then cradled my arm with the gentleness that only a big person can summon. Sean crouched beside us.
“We ended hide-and-seek an hour ago,” he said. “Maybe you missed it.”
A smile cracked my lips.
He grinned reluctantly. “Glad you’re not dead.”
“Me, too.”
“Get the medic.” At Chase’s order, Sean rose and darted away.
“What happened?” I rasped.
He’d begun a full inspection, feeling my arms, forcing me to sit back, and then lifting my pant legs and cringing at the bloody bruises on my shins. He shifted to feel his way down my back. Any other time I might have laughed at the diligent expression on his face.
“Bombs,” he muttered. “I’m starting to feel unwelcome.”
Once was enough, but Chase had been here during the War, too, when the Insurgents had flattened the city.
Truck took a knee, wiping his brow with the back of his hand. “Someone gave us up. They bombed it from topside, sent the ceiling down near the Loop. Got fifty people, maybe more. Mags was there.”
His once carefree face filled with sorrow. The number was staggering, and somehow unreal at the same time. So many people gone, so fast. And Mags, their leader, wiped away just like Wallace.
“We have to go,” I said, suddenly aware of the still-prevalent danger.
&
nbsp; Chase’s expression was grim. “We’re blocked. There’s an exit near the barracks that lets out near the lake. Scouts are working on clearing it now.”
No way out. I shuddered.
“But what about the others?” I said. “I was trapped under a table, who knows how many people are still alive!”
“We’ll find them,” said Truck dutifully. “It’s not like the Bureau’s going to come down here anyway when the ceiling might buckle.”
In response to his words, I looked up, noting the way the dust sprinkled down like snow. We didn’t have much time.
The medic arrived a moment later, carrying a blue canvas FBR bag over one shoulder. He looked flustered.
“Thought you were toast,” he said. He felt around the back of my head and I hissed as a new bright pain ricocheted behind my brows.
“Keep the wound clean,” he said. “Let’s see that wrist.”
I held it out, and Chase’s jaw tightened.
“Look at that!” the medic shouted, staring over my shoulder behind us. The moment I turned my head he grabbed my hand and jerked it toward him, hard.
A crack as the bones in my wrist realigned. I gasped, then blinked, feeling nauseous and a little faint again. Chase supported my back. My fingers regained movement, although they now tingled painfully.
“Well, it’s not dislocated anymore,” the medic said, then disappeared without another word.
Chase held me for a moment while my vision cleared, and the sounds from the tunnels filtered back through the ringing in my ears. Then he pulled me up, sending a challenging glare toward the creaking ceiling. Truck left to help another group digging into the collapsed side of the mess hall with Sean.
“Can you stand?” he asked, the conflict playing over his face. And when I nodded, he said, “Then let’s get these people out.”
CHAPTER
18
MOST people were clustered together. I moved from group to group, hastening them to carry the injured toward the exit route immediately. That way when it was cleared, we’d be ready to evacuate the city. They grabbed what provisions they could carry—weapons mostly, but uniforms, blankets, and medical supplies, too. The thick scent of mud and sewer water hung in the air, gagging me in some of the more stagnant spaces.