We reach the doors and Kevin doesn’t pause, just pushes them open and walks out into the pale-gray predawn world.
We are in a parking lot with four-wheelers parked on top of faded parking-space lines. The cracked pavement hurts my bare feet. Kevin pulls me behind one of the vehicles, and we crouch. His eyes lock on mine, and I want to cry at the fear that is making his pupils huge and his mouth a hard line. “There’s this place,” he whispers, “where uninfected bees are alive. Where people are growing a new way of living.” A dog howls, and Kevin jumps and looks over his shoulder.
I’m too shocked to move. “Where?” I ask.
“In the Rockies—there are high-pressure pockets in the high elevations where the pesticide didn’t reach. Ward, Colorado, is one of them. People are there, hoping for a cure. Waiting for a cure. My sister—” Kevin jumps again and looks over his shoulder.
“You’re the Siren. You lead people to this place, don’t you? You get them away from the raiders and help them find these places.”
He nods.
“Did you ever meet a man named Dean Bloom? Did you take him to this place?”
Kevin nods and then looks down.
“Is he still there? That’s my brother! That’s who I’m looking for out here!”
“He brought an older woman up there to live—Abigail Tarsis—but he didn’t stay.”
“Why didn’t Dean stay? Where did he go?”
Kevin focuses on my face. “He said he needed to get back to Denver.”
All the hope I have been clinging to since the day my brother left fades away. Dean never made it back to Denver. He’s probably dead.
I think back to what Jonah said. “If you’re the Siren, did you free the raiders’ women?”
“Yes, but I had help.” He presses his palm to the side of my face. “You have to go now. Find Fo. She has the map I made for you. When you get to Ward, tell them I sent you, and tell them a cure has been found. Tell them I’ll try to bring it to them.” His hand drops to his side.
Every part of me freezes except my mouth, which drops open.
“Go!” Kevin grabs my shoulder and gives me a small shove.
“But—” I grab his shirt and pull him so close our noses touch. “Aren’t you coming with me?”
“No! Go! You only have . . .” He looks at his watch. “You only have four minutes before they switch out the watch. You have to go now!” He stands and pulls me to my feet. “Run!”
Slowly, I take a step away from him, staring at him so hard I might absorb him into my mind forever. And then I turn. I put one foot in front of the other. And I run.
Chapter 31
“Weight,” Mom said, setting the scale on the floor by the treadmill. I climbed on, peered between my feet, and watched the dial spin almost straight up.
Mom clicked her tongue. “One hundred and forty-four pounds.” She smiled, making dimples appear in her soft cheeks. “Now, onto the treadmill.”
I tried to tuck my hair behind my ears before I remembered it had been shaved off a week earlier. I stared at the machine. My brothers had brought it home, piece by piece, a few days before. They’d found it in the Sanchezes’ basement—something they had left in their house when they fled the city to get away from the approaching gangs.
“I’m fourteen. That’s too young to start exercising,” I whined.
“And I’m too old,” Mom snapped. “But that doesn’t matter. We need to be strong, Jack. And we’re not. So toughen up. If I can do it, you can do it.”
Mom set the treadmill at four miles per hour and told me I couldn’t slow it down until I’d run for ninety seconds. I gritted my teeth, balled my fists, and then tried to make my pudgy legs run. I could barely lift them. My thighs rubbed together. My body bounced with each step. Everything started to hurt. When I hit the sixty-second mark, I slammed my hand on the emergency stop button and clutched the sidebars, wheezing.
“Maybe you should dangle a doughnut in front of her,” Dean said, coming down into the basement.
“Do we have any doughnuts?” I asked, standing a little taller. Dean laughed. Mom swatted him and frowned.
Dean walked over to the treadmill and started it again, slowly increasing the speed until I was walking at three miles per hour. “The key to gaining endurance is starting slow and going long,” he said.
“Says who?” I gasped, forcing my legs to march forward.
“Coach Winward used to tell that to the guys on the team. Tell you what. If you can do that for twenty minutes, I’ll find you something sweet the next time I go scavenging. Deal?”
I looked at the timer on the treadmill. I had eighteen minutes and thirty-seven seconds to go to reach that goal.
“It will be a good treat,” Dean coaxed.
I turned my nose up.
“I’ll find you two treats, Jack. I know you can do it.”
“Oh, all right.” I thrust my chin forward and started swinging my arms as I walked. But I did it—twenty minutes.
After that day, I got on the treadmill three days a week, and each time I got on, I could run a little bit longer. Sixty seconds turned into one hundred. And then two hundred. And it hurt. Every single time, it hurt.
But after a month, not only could I run a whole mile in just under fifteen minutes, but my thighs didn’t rub together quite as much. After two months, I could run two miles in twenty-five minutes, and my body didn’t jiggle when I ran. After three months, I could run five miles in an hour. None of my brother’s old clothes fit because they were too big in the waist. Even his belt was too big. I sewed all the waistbands of his clothes to fit and gave the belt to a Fec. The fourth month, I started running six days a week, five miles a day minimum. Right before I fled from my house, I could run twenty-six miles in under four hours and thirty minutes. I had turned into a running machine.
I run away from Kevin, run toward the black mass of the Rocky Mountains, and it is like I’m the chubby fourteen-year-old again who could hardly lift her legs. My body feels like lead. My ribs feel too tight to breathe. My heart hurts so badly that I hardly notice the rocks and gravel bruising the soles of my bare feet. Tears start streaming down my face, turning the gray world into a colorless blur.
I’ve only been running a minute when I hear feet pounding the ground behind me. I glance over my shoulder. A man is chasing me. He’s thick and hefty, wearing big boots. There’s no way he can catch me, even with my bare feet. I veer toward a parked car and something collides with my chest, knocking my feet out from under me. I fall backward and slam into the ground.
My head seems to triple in size as it explodes with pain. Stars flash before my eyes and I can’t breathe. I cough and gasp for air. Slowly, the stars fade. Standing above me, framed by the morning sky, is a man with a baseball bat.
“Looks like Soneschen was right to switch up the patrols,” a gruff voice says. I blink at the man.
“What you got?” someone answers from farther away.
“I just caught the dog bait running toward the hills,” the man with the baseball bat says. He turns and starts walking away. “Take him back to the compound,” he calls over his shoulder.
Boots scuff the ground by my head. I am yanked to my feet and stare into the bearded face of a stranger. My gaze travels down his face and stops on his dingy shirt. Sweat stains have turned the red fabric nearly black under his armpits. The man flips me around, grabs the scruff of my neck, and starts marching in the direction I’ve just come from. My muscles barely respond, and I am too dazed to fight. In less than two minutes, a wide one-story brick building comes into view. Words are painted on the side of it. I can just make them out in the predawn light: Newhaven Psychiatric Hospital.
I scan the parking lot for Kevin, but he’s gone.
We walk to the building and enter the same glass doors I just left through. Instead of going straight down the hall toward the room where Jonah and Bowen are, we turn left and stop in front of the first door on the right. My captor lifts his hand
to knock, but he hesitates. His grimy fist falls to the door handle and he twists.
The door swings open on squeaky hinges, and dozens of candles flicker from the draft. A man is in the room, wearing an unbuttoned white dress shirt and sitting in front of a polished mirror, sipping something from a mug. “You’re supposed to knock,” the man says, never taking his eyes from the mirror.
Without a word, the bearded man pulls the door shut again. As soon as the latch clicks, he grumbles under his breath, “That son of a … Who does he think he is? When Flint was in charge . . .” And then he balls his beefy hand and pounds so hard I expect the door to break in two.
“Come back later.” The words are muffled. “I’m busy getting ready for the morning’s planned event.”
The raider’s hand tightens on my neck and he curses. He knocks again, but before the man on the other side can reply, my captor blurts out, “I caught the bait running!”
In two seconds, the door whooshes open and the candles in the room sputter. The man in the unbuttoned white dress shirt looks at me. His hair is neatly combed to the side, and his face is freshly shaved.
“Where did you find him?” the man asks. I wrinkle my nose at the strange smell of his breath.
“He was running toward the mountains, Mr. Soneschen, just like you guessed.”
I take a closer look at the man standing in front of me, at his smooth skin, clean fingernails, and sharp eyes, which look left, then right, and then settle back on me. I feel fourteen again, standing at the wall, with a plate of scones in my pudgy hands. Heat floods my face—anger, not embarrassment. This is the man who wouldn’t let us live inside the wall.
“Who set him free, Bob?” Soneschen asks, putting his clean hands on his hips. His dress shirt falls open, giving me a glimpse of sculpted abs and tight pectorals, and a perfectly round scar over his pasty white ribs.
I feel the man behind me shrug, and a cloud of body odor hits me. Soneschen scowls and fans the air in front of his face. “You don’t know who set him free?”
“He was alone. Maybe he got out on his own.”
Soneschen eyes me from my bare feet up to my buzzed hair and shakes his head. “No. This kid isn’t smart enough or strong enough or brave enough to get out on his own.” He looks right into my eyes. “Who helped you, Jack?”
I swallow hard and clench my teeth together. He glares into my eyes, and it feels like he is going to steal the soul out of my body. I shrink and look away.
“Coward,” Soneschen whispers, as if proving his statement of a moment before.
“What do you want me to do with him?” Bob asks.
“Have you ever heard of Solomon?” When Bob doesn’t reply, Soneschen adds, “from the Bible.”
“I’ve never read the Bible.”
“Jack? Have you heard of Solomon?”
I glower at the floor and nod. “He was a king.”
“Not just a king,” Soneschen corrects. “He was the most brilliant king in the history of the world. When two women came to him claiming they were both the mother of a baby, what did Solomon do, Jack?”
“Threaten to cut the baby in half and give each woman half of the baby.” My voice comes out a shaky whisper.
“Correct. And what happened?”
I have no idea what this has to do with anything, but I answer, “The real mother offered to give the baby to the other woman.”
“That’s right. And why did she do that?”
I look at him. “Because the mother loved her baby so much that she was willing to give it up forever as long as it wasn’t hurt.” I think of my mother, that day at the wall, willing to live outside the wall as long as her precious children were protected. I ball my hands into fists and fight the nearly overwhelming urge to punch Soneschen in the face.
A smile splits Soneschen’s lips, showing slightly crooked white teeth tinged with pink. “Very good, Jack.” I breathe in his copper-smelling breath and shudder—I am smelling blood. He has blood on his teeth. He looks above my shoulder, at Bob. “Go tie him to the tree in the courtyard. We’re about to find out who loves Jack.”
Eyes the color of the morning sky flood my thoughts and all the air seems to whoosh out of the hallway. I can’t breathe. Soneschen slams the door in my face. Bob squeezes my neck and starts herding me down the hall.
I force my ribs to expand and contract. And then I duck and twist, wrenching myself out of Bob’s grasp, and sprint toward the glass doors. There’s no way he’ll be able to catch me. After five steps, when I am so close to the door that I lift my hand to open it, something flicks against my back, like a grasshopper jumping on me, and my whole body seizes up. My muscles contract as if they are trying to compress my bones into dust. I fall to the floor and slide to a stop beside the exit. My body lurches uncontrollably from the electricity sizzling through it.
Bob puts a Taser back into a little black leather pocket on his belt and then walks over and stops beside me. Pain consumes me, and I stare at the threadbare hem of his jeans and listen to the sound of my teeth rattling in my skull.
When I stop convulsing and sag against the floor, Bob grabs my left ankle and drags my trembling body down the hall. Too weak to move, I stare at grimy white tile as it passes below my cheek. We stop at a glass door and he opens it, pulling me outside.
I’m dragged over cement, then onto thin, brown, rain-soaked grass. The sky blazes pale blue overhead, and I blink up at the brightness of it, wondering how it can be so blue when the world is so vile.
Bob lifts me to my feet and props me up against the rough, splintery trunk of a tree. I close my eyes and smell the deep, rich scent of damp wood as a rope is wrapped around my wrists and cinched tight. Bob grunts and groans as he hoists me up until I am dangling by my bound wrists from a tree branch, with my toes barely able to touch the ground and spasms of electricity still twitching in my muscles.
For a moment Bob studies me, and then he pulls a gun from his belt, from right beside his Taser. My stomach drops and I wonder if I am about to die. Without looking at me, Bob points the gun to the sky and fires. The sound hurts my ears and eats the morning’s silence. Dogs howl, and the gunshot echoes off the mountains and back, like rolling thunder. Bob turns and walks away, and I am alone, dangling in a slow circle. The branch I am tied to creaks under my weight.
And then the morning is filled with human sounds as raiders start massing onto the roof of the building surrounding me. I am in the courtyard I saw from my barred window.
Chapter 32
Two men walk into the courtyard, and I dig the tips of my toes into the ground, making the rope I’m attached to turn in the other direction so that I can see them. One is ex-governor Soneschen, his white shirt buttoned and tucked into a pair of fancy black pants. His eyes are riveted on me. The other man is a raider with a thick black beard and shoulder-length black hair. He’s wearing torn jeans and a dingy tank top that exaggerates his heavily muscled, scarred shoulders.
“If you guys will shut up, I’ll start,” the raider yells, eyes scanning the men on the roof. The hair on the back of my neck prickles. I know that voice. “I said shut up!” he says, even louder.
I squint against the morning sun, trying to get a better look at him, but the rope binding me twists and slowly spins me around so my back is to him. Aside from the muted barking of a dog, the morning goes quiet. I peer up at the roof, at the gathered men, and momentarily forget the raider in the courtyard. There have got to be more than a hundred men up there. And right in front stands Kevin, staring down at me like he couldn’t care less what happens to me.
The rope keeps slowly spinning, turning me away from Kevin, back to the two men in the courtyard. When I’m facing them, I dig my toes into the ground again and stare.
The raider is watching me now. His fierce blue eyes lock on mine. If the rope wasn’t holding me erect, my legs would give out and I’d be on the ground.
“Chest, head, chest,” I told my baby brother. “That way, if you miss twice, yo
u’ve still got a third chance to kill your target.”
I helped Chris lift the rifle to his shoulder. He wobbled under the weight. “It’s too heavy,” he whined. “I can’t do it yet. And I’m cold.”
“That’s all right. You’re only six. I don’t think you’ll actually need to learn to shoot for a few more years.” He nodded and stumbled through the thin layer of snow on the ground and into the house with the rifle.
I rested my rifle on my shoulder and peered down the street, looking for the Fec who came to trade ammunition for food on a semiregular basis. I don’t know why he still came. We stopped trading with him when he slashed Josh’s leg. And even though I was always armed with a rifle, and the Fec had only a knife, he scared me. He moved like a shadow in broad daylight, and he’d attacked me more than once for the scraps of food I carried in my pockets.
Dean had seen the Fec sneaking around right before sunrise, so I knew he was close by. I’d emptied my vest pockets before I started my watch. I wasn’t going to take any chances.
I pulled my wool beanie down over my ears and stared into the shadowed windows and doorways of the abandoned houses lining the opposite side of the street, but nothing moved. The dogs lay huddled together on the dead grass, completely unconcerned.
Around lunchtime my nerves finally settled down enough that I actually felt hungry. I glanced at my watch, calculating the minutes before Steve came out and took over the front yard long enough for me to eat something. When I looked back up, the Fec was standing in the middle of the road, a smile gracing his filthy face.
My gun was up and aimed before I had time to draw breath, before the dogs even started barking. The Fec didn’t care. He smiled even bigger and swung his greasy hair out of his eyes.
“What do you want?” I asked, loud enough that my voice would carry over the sound of the dogs.
“I brought you something,” he called. He lifted his thumb to his mouth and started nibbling the skin around his brown fingernail. The dogs stopped barking, but their chains were pulled taut, and they were all staring at the Fec as if they wanted to eat him for lunch.