Backs Against the Wall (Survival Series) (7 page)

I glance quickly at Ryan, feeling my checks burn with that irritating flush of embarrassment. He smiles smugly at me.

“I know that,” I grumble, feeling my ASP against my thigh and the press of the splint on my injured arm, both of which wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for him.
I
might not be here if it weren’t for him and Trent. I’m starting to owe a lot to a lot of people and I’m thinking that debt is another thing I lived without before all of this started. It’s also something I have to sink deeper into.

I level my gaze on Crenshaw, stowing my doubts, my girly blushes, and getting down to business.

“I’ll need more help than just Helios here,” I tell him, jutting my thumb at Ryan. “I’ve considered going to The Hive, but—“

Crenshaw leaps from his chair, his staff tossed aside carelessly. I have no idea where he got it from, maybe he conjured it from air and rage, but there’s a long gleaming dagger suddenly in his hand.

It’s pointed at my face.

“You will not,” he says, his voice sounding cavernous and strange, “talk about The Hive in my house.”

Ryan and I are on our feet i
mmediately, instinct kicking in. We’re whipping out our weapons before we can even think. Crenshaw pauses, looking from one weapon to the other, his breathing erratic.

“Master Crenshaw,” Ryan says calmly, as though he’
s not holding the Punch of Death pointed at the guy, “we have no quarrel with you. We never have. We want no violence. Can we all be calm? May we stow our weapons and sit again as friends?”

It’s nice to know it’s not only me. That I’m not the only one who has to slip into character like I’m reading from King Arthur’s diary in order to talk to this guy.
He watches Ryan for several long, tense moments before nodding his head and taking his seat.

“Please, sit. I apologize for my outburst. My tempers, they flare at the mention of the Zealots but they burn with fire eternal when I’m forced to think of
… the others.” Crenshaw takes a deep breath as we sit down again, both of us a little further back from the table than we were before. “You mustn’t go to them. Promise me.”

Ryan and I gla
nce at each other, unsure. I have no desire to break a promise to Crenshaw but if all else fails, I made a promise to the people in the Colony as well. If I’m not careful, I’ll end up betraying someone’s trust.

“Why,
Cren?” I ask him gently. “What are you so against us going to The Hive?”

He closes his eyes, takes a deep breath. “Can you not speak that name in this building? It is my home. My sanctuary.” When
he opens his eyes to look at me they’re tired and sad. “They have taken so much already. I do not care for them to ruin this as well.”

“Of course, yeah,” I agree, not understanding entirely. But I understand enough. I understand having a home and defending it at all costs. I understand having it taken. Invaded.

“We don’t want to go to them,” Ryan tells Crenshaw. His eyes are still watching the old man closely. His weapon is still in place on his hand. “We were hoping you could advise us on how to gather people together. To get more help. We could try to rally the gangs, but they don’t play well together. Not in a fight.”

Crenshaw nods sagely. “Each would wonder what was in it for them.”

“Exactly. There’d be so much fighting with each other, we’d never get around to fighting the Colonies. It’s why we wanted to go to the largest of the gangs, because they’re already united, but,” Ryan glances at me quickly, his face unreadable, “we’re pretty sure we wouldn’t want to pay their price.”

“Indeed you would not,”
he agrees softly. He looks at Ryan with eerily sharp eyes. Eyes that remind me of Trent. That feel too lucid to be my Gandalf the Gray. “Never take her to them. Never let them see her. Women in The H—“ He sighs forcefully. “It’s no place for women. Especially women like her.”

I frown, annoyed that I’m obviously being discussed as though I’m not sitting right here.

“What do you mean, ‘women like her’?” I demand.

“You lost someone to them,” Ryan says sadly.

Crenshaw nods.

“To who?” I ask. “To
The—to them?”

They ignore me again. I’ve gone full Casper.

Crenshaw nods. “She was her age. Just as bright. Just as beautiful.” He grins faintly. “Just as rough around the edges.”

Ryan smiles. “It’s part of the beauty.”

“The greatest part.”

“I’m sorry about your daughter.”
Ryan says, obviously gleaning more from this conversation than I am. What daughter?

“Don’t be sorry for me. Just do a better job protecting her than I did.”

“I swear it.”

“Good lad.”

“What the hell?” I mutter, looking back and forth between them.

They wouldn’t hear me with
Ouija board.

Crenshaw rises from the table slowly. It’s as though his outburst has drained him of everything he had. He’s hunched slightly, his movements labored. I have to remind
myself that as spry, lively and crazy as he seems, he is an old man. He’s got a lot of life under his belt and it’s not just bones that get tired.

He goes to a wooden box about the size of a toolbox sitting at the foot of his bed. After digging around silently, he pulls out a large piece of worn, white paper. I’m waiting anxiously to see what this
is. It could be anything. A spell book. A nude drawing of Tom Hanks. A cheat sheet to the 2009 SATs. Or something far more disturbing like a nude drawing of himself or a detailed chart monitoring his bowel movements. One never knows.

What he actually does lay out on the table both startles and amazes me.

It’s a map of Neverland. A hand-drawn, near perfection, detailed map of the Seattle area. Not as it was, because who cares? This is a map of what the city is today. Instead of zip codes, the city is broken up by gang territories. The stadiums are labeled as what they really are – Colonies. I eagerly search the outer edges to the south, looking to see if Cren knows exactly where the third Colony lies, but there’s nothing. Just a drawing of the shoreline with a topless mermaid out in the water, waving at me.

“Whoa,” Ryan breathes, stowing his spike hand under the table and leaning forward over the map.

Crenshaw smiles at him happily, his mood shifting dramatically. He’s proud and pleased to see Ryan so into his work. Excitement is written all over both of their faces.

“It is incomplete,” Crenshaw warns. He spreads it flat with gentle, soothing hands. “
I shouldn’t be showing it to you, Helios. Other gangs, other tribes, would be angry to know I’d shown you where their hideouts lie. But I have faith in you. I trust in your trueness.”

“Thank you, Master Crenshaw,” Ryan says with a small smile. He looks so happy. Flatte
red by the old guy’s admiration and I realize I’m not the only one who grew up without a dad. Who feels that missing piece of me.

“
I believe I have the names of each of the tribes correct, but of course I’m unsure as to what the true names of the Colonies are.”

“C-92,” I
deadpan, pulling my eyes away from Ryan’s smile. I wipe my sweating palms on my pants before pointing to the football stadium. Next I point to the baseball stadium right next door. “G-11. The one in the southeast is somewhere along the water but I don’t know where. The people I talked to didn’t either. It’s G-35.”

They stare at me in shock. I don’t know if they’re surprised I remembered the names or that I know them at all. I have a brief, paranoid and horrifying thought that they’ll think I’m a spy. That I didn’t ‘escape’ the Colony at all but that I was released to… what? Be socially awkward with a hot guy and help an old lunatic finish his map quest?

“Where were you held?” Ryan asks.

He’s looking at me, I can feel it. I keep my eyes trained on the table.

“The MOHAI,” I reply curtly.

“The what?”

I point to the spot on Cren’s map. The small area tucked in the harbor that felt a million miles away from here but now looks so close. Too close. And too small to house so many people. Too small to house a person like Vin.

“It was here. In the old museum building. I can’t remember what MOHAI stands for, but it was Colony A-36.”

Crenshaw quickly whips out a charcoal pencil from his box of goodies and begins filling in the information I’ve given him.

“Wh
y did they name them like that?” Ryan asks, watching Crenshaw’s simple, slanting handwriting scrawl over the pages. I expected something more somehow. Old English flourishes or Latin. Maybe Aramaic. These chicken scratches annoy me. “It seems so cold compared to what they’re always spouting on the billboards or over their intercoms.”

“Everything about them is a lie,” Crenshaw mutters.

“It’s to confuse people.” I point vaguely to the MOHAI. “The people in the building where I was held are pulled from all of the other Colonies. It’s what I told you about breaking up families. Every one of those people has someone in another Colony somewhere. Someone they care about. They all have something to lose.”

Ryan nods. “Makes sense. It’s a good way to control people. But why did these people get pulled away from their families to go here? Is it a new Colony? I’ve never heard of one up that way.”

“It can’t be new. It’s too well developed. And a girl I talked to said it had been occupied before but there was a problem in the building. They abandoned it for a while.”

“
Who was this girl?”

I shrug
, sitting back with my arms crossed over my chest. “Just some chick angry at being there.”

“Another friend?” Ryan asks, grinning.

I shake my head. “I punched her in the face.”

“Typical.”

“And the ear. I almost knelt on her throat. Nearly smothered her with a pillow.”

“Now do you see why I have a hard time believing you made friends in there?”

“This young woman,” Crenshaw says suddenly, frowning at his map, “did she know if there were others? Other Colonies?”

“No, just the ones you have marked now.
”

He looks up at me, his face drawn. He’s disappointed. “It is a shame you could
not gain us more valuable information while you were there.”

“It is. It’s a
shame I didn’t do more sleuthing while I was there,” I say, my temper rising. “I should have gone all Sherlock up in that joint, but I was too busy trying not to lose my mind from all of the bright lights and bodies everywhere. Next time, I promise, I’ll do better.”

Ryan isn’t looking at me anymore. He’s watching Crenshaw carefully, probably worried I’ll upset him with my sarcasm. Part of me is worried too, but a bigger part is annoyed. Tired. Angry.

“What is this?” I demand, changing the subject.

I point to a dark area of the map, shaded in shadows with jagged strokes. It’s in the south, just a few blocks from the two stadium Colonies sitting side by side.

“Hmmm,” Crenshaw moans quietly. “That is a portal into Hell.”

“
Right.”

“The space between here,” he points to a narrow
corridor running between the dark area and the Colonies, “is the Valley of the Shadow of Death. One must never, never pass through it.”

“
Of course not.”

“But none of this is important, not right now. What I want to show you is this.”

Crenshaw turns the map toward us. He points decisively to a small area at the very bottom. It’s just the peak of a piece of land, nothing descript or defining about it at all. But written carefully over the top of it is the word
Elysium
.

“
And what is that?”

Crenshaw smiles at me, his eyes wild. “Heaven.”

“Oh, yeah,” I say faintly, squinting at the map. “I can see it now.”

“How is it Heaven, sir?”
Ryan asks.

His foot nudges mine gently under the table. I don’t know if it’s on purpose, if it’
s a warning or an accident. Either way I don’t like it and I move my feet away from him.

“It is an island in the south. It is completely and utterly wraith free.”

“That’s impossible.”

“My boy, in Heaven
nothing is impossible. This is where you will go to look for help.”

“To where?” I ask feeling frustrated. “What is this
? Who’s there? I’ve never heard of anywhere being Risen free, nowhere real. It’s all myth.”

“It is a place like no other. One must only believe, to have faith in—“

“Crenshaw, what is it?” I snap, exasperated.

My patience for this conversation has died. I
care about this guy, I really do, but I’m already pushed to my limits with everything else going on and now talking about the Colonies, being scolded for not getting better intel while I was in prison… I’m spent. I’m riddled with guilt and this ring pinching at my finger, growing tighter every single day, is dragging me down to the ground. I need answers. Real ones, not fairytales that will send me on adventures or journeys to strange mystical lands where I’m meant to ask for help from the fairies or the centaurs. If this is all the help he has, some slice of land in the south where he thinks he saw an angel once, then I have to get real and go to The Hive.

He looks at me in surprise, his eyes narrowing. “It is rude to interrupt, child. I thought you better than this.”

“Well, I’m not. This has been fun, but I need the real Crenshaw for a minute. Is he in there or am I wasting my time? Cause if he’s not in, that’s fine. I’ll go get my help elsewhere.”

He sits back in his seat, appraising me. “You mean the others.”

“I mean The Hive.”

“Joss,”
Ryan says quietly. His tone tells me that, yes, the foot nudge was a warning.

I ignore it and him.

“What’s it going to be, Cren?”

There’s a long tense silence in the small room. The smell of the onions is starting to give me a headache, the low light messing with my eyes and making them
burn. As he continues to stare at me, something in his face changes. He’s angry at me but there’s something else too. Something I’m not equipped to read or understand.