Breathe (13 page)

“
They
recruited
us
. They promised us places in the pods. They found out what we was doing here and chose us because they thought we was merciless. And maybe we was. Anyway, killing the last of the trees was better than killing people.”

“You sicken me,” I tell Maude, and I mean it. I should never have listened to Bea’s bleeding heart. I should have left her back in the house to rot. Maude mumbles something I don’t hear. “What did you say?” My voice reverberates and comes back at me, bitterly hollow.

“I said, I—sicken—myself.” And what can I say to that? It shuts me up at least. Bea nods and moves closer to Maude. She doesn’t hug her, perhaps because the old woman is so filthy and decayed, but pats her hand gently. I don’t know where she finds the compassion.

Suddenly the ground quakes, and a noise like thousands of boulders being hurled at the station from the sky reminds us where we are.

As quickly as it began, the pounding stops and we hear what must be the tank rumble away. We stand in stunned silence for a moment. If Quinn hasn’t been captured, he is probably hurt. “Leave her here and bring the flashlight,” I tell Bea.

“Don’t leave me down here in the bloody dark,” Maude mewls as I bound back up the escalator two steps at a time.

“We won’t be long,” Bea says over her shoulder as she follows me.

For some reason the light doesn’t change and the only reason I can see is because Bea is behind me with the flashlight. When I get to the top, I stop and look around.

“Did we come down two levels?” I ask Bea when she catches up.

“No, the exit should be right there.” She directs her light at a pile of bricks.

She looks at me horrified.

“Quinn’s out there. We have to help him,” she cries. She runs toward the exit and frantically starts to throw rocks in all directions. But it’s pointless: the whole roof has caved in. It would take twenty of us days to safely move everything and forge a way through. I let her attack the bricks for a while. Then I go to her.

“We won’t get out this way. We’ll have to walk through the tunnels,” I say.

She isn’t listening. “I think I can hear him. What if he’s under
here
? Help me, will you? Help me!” I rest a hand on her shoulder while she tries to dislodge a metal pole from the pile.

“Bea,” I say softly.

“Quinn could be dead,” she says. “Quinn,” she repeats his name quietly. She loves him, that much is obvious. But he’s so oblivious he can’t see it. And maybe now he’ll never know how she feels. Does
she
even know how she feels?

“He probably got picked up,” I tell her, though I don’t believe it. They wouldn’t have been endlessly firing if they were giving Quinn a friendly ride back to the pod. “He’s Premium. Nothing ever happens to Premiums. And his dad works for Breathe. It wouldn’t be worth it to them to hurt him.”

“He ran. We saw him running. They started shooting. Why are you lying?”

“He’s fast. He’s probably halfway to The Grove by now. Don’t you think?”

“He doesn’t know the way to The Grove. How would he know the way?”

“He’ll find it. He’ll worry about you, and he’ll make it his business to find it.”

“No. No, he won’t. And anyway, he wants
you
. He’ll worry about
you
. He’s besotted with
you
. You know that already though, don’t you?” Bea looks at me searchingly, and I can see that she wants me to tell her he doesn’t like me, and that I haven’t noticed anything.

“He doesn’t even know me, Bea,” I say, which is true. An image of Abel comes into my mind: his square shoulders, the curl of a smile when he teased me. If Quinn is alive, I will tell him to stop looking at me. I don’t want anyone to look at me in that way again. “We won’t get through that,” I tell Bea, pointing at the wreckage.

After Quinn came back from peeing, I was going to pretend to do the same, but give them all the slip. Even as the tank began to fire at us, I thought about running in the opposite direction from Bea and Maude rather than trying to explain to Petra why I’d dragged along refugees. I couldn’t though, not with Maude tied to me. And now it seems that I’m stuck with them.

“It’s pointless staying here,” I say. Bea picks up a loose rock and throws it from one hand to the other. Then she lobs the rock as hard as she can against an old ticket machine.

“If he doesn’t make it, I’ll blame you,” she says. And so whether I like it or not I have to accept it: I now have Quinn Caffrey’s blood on my hands, too.

It takes me a second, like a good second, and when I come to, I know I’m buried in bricks. I have a bloody mouthful of mud and dust, which must have somehow penetrated the mask. I’m so thirsty, I’d drink anything.

Luckily I can breathe—the explosions didn’t puncture my tank—but can’t see a thing. I blink. Nothing changes—everything is blackness.

I push rubble away from my face and manage to wriggle my body free, though the pain in every limb is searing. What feels like a large, flat slab of concrete is right above me. I lie on my back again and try using my feet to dislodge it. It doesn’t shift an inch. It’s prevented me from being completely crushed, but now it’s trapping me, and I can’t even be sure how deep I’m buried because it’s so dark.

I lie on my back and wiggle my legs again just to be sure I can feel them. Although, maybe I
am
paralyzed. I’ve seen it in films—soldiers losing their legs in war and they’re in so much pain they can’t even tell when they’ve been maimed; they start talking about their wives and stuff. In fact, the calmer they are, the more likely it is they’re dead—legless or headless or whatever.

It might even be possible that I’m dead. I haven’t thought about death very much, but if I try to imagine it, I think it would be exactly like this: a tight, lonely darkness.

I hope Bea got away. I saw her running. I saw Alina, Maude, and Bea running. I hope Alina got away, too. I try calling out Bea’s name, but my voice is blanketed by the dust and I start to cough. I must be alive if I’m coughing, right?

I don’t
want
to love Quinn. If I could love someone who loved me back, my life would be calmer and I’d be happier. I don’t want to ache for him every minute of the day. And now that he’s missing, that aching I feel for him in my chest has swollen up so that my whole body feels like it’s filled with poison.

I don’t love him in the way my parents love each other—sweetly, almost wearily. When I’m with him I feel each nerve within me awakening so that when he touches me, when he brushes my arm accidentally, I shiver and I have to bite back an urge to cry out. I feel the ache everywhere: in my neck, in my belly, between my legs.

But he’ll never know any of this because I’m too much of a coward to tell him the truth. I don’t want to have to see his expression as he tries to work out how to tell me he doesn’t love me in return. I would rather walk along next to him hoping he’ll turn and see me, one day, than be told once and for all that my love is hopeless.

I try not to remember that he could be dying.

I try not to remember that if he is dying somewhere, he’ll be thinking of Alina, while I’m thinking of him.

How long have I been buried? It’s hard to get a handle on time when you have no sense of space and when all light has been pinched out. The pain has started now: a dull ache in my back and in my legs.

I’ve been coughing since I was buried and I’m pretty sure I heard the armored tank rumble away a long time ago. If anyone was searching for me, surely they would have discovered me by now; they’d have heard the coughing. Wouldn’t they? Maybe they wouldn’t have heard anything at all because it’s so dark in here it’s possible I’ve been covered up by tens of thousands of bricks and cement blocks.

I could rot away underneath this rubble. I might be a dry jumble of bones by the time anyone clears the devastation. I try to shout.

“Bea!” It comes out as a chalky whisper. “Bea!” I try again, but my voice has been crushed, too. I cough and this time the cough is loud as my lungs try to clear themselves of dust. I cough and cough and before long the cough turns into panicked pants. I’ll die here. My airtank will expire before I do, and I suppose that’ll be for the best; I wouldn’t want to actually die of hunger or thirst. “Bea!” I call again. “Bea!” She must have hidden when the explosions started. Now she’s either trapped, looking for me, or dead. There’s no way she’d leave without looking for me, is there?

“Bea?” I call, and then I cough. “Bea?”

I have to keep reminding myself that the voices I hear are the echoes coming from connecting tunnels, that the muttering up ahead actually belongs to us. When I hear Quinn calling out, I have to remember that we are one hundred feet below ground and even if he were calling out, I wouldn’t hear him. Yet, I can’t stop imagining Quinn in trouble. What if he
is
calling me? What if he’s dying?

I see Alina watching me as I dry my eyes and wipe my nose on my sleeve. Occasionally she asks me how I am. Sometimes she touches my back or squeezes my arm. “He’ll be fine,” she says, and after a while repeats, “he
will
be fine,” even though I haven’t contradicted her.

And poor Maude is convinced the spirits of the dead live in the tunnels and she can feel them brushing by. “Serves you right,” Alina snaps. “You shouldn’t have murdered them.” Maude struggles to move forward as we follow the metal rails through the dank capillaries of the underground system. The brown water we are sloshing through is flavored with floating bones and covers our ankles so that even in boots our feet are ice.

Maude wants to tell us about some of the people she “freed.” “I want to confess,” she says, but Alina won’t let her talk.

“Save your air for breathing, old woman. No one wants to know about it.” Alina’s right. I don’t want to hear about all the people who chose death. I don’t want to hear about the despair. I need to believe. Without hope, what do we have?

Finally we get to the next station. “Where are we?” Maude asks. I shine the light back and forth to get a look at the place. The walls are gray, but I can almost make out broken lettering surrounded by a large red circle. “Tottinghan ale?”

Maude looks up at the shattered signage and groans. I guess this too must have been a Death Station. Alina is way ahead of us, still on the rails and almost at the mouth of the tunnel at the far end of the platform. “Alina!” I call out. She turns and shakes her head. “Alina, let’s go up,” I yell. It’s taken a long time to get through the tunnel and I wonder how long it will take to pick our way back to Quinn. Alina clambers onto the platform and disappears under an arch. I boost Maude and climb up, too. We sit down on a bench tucked into the wall and Maude awkwardly starts to unlace her rotting, wet boots.

Eventually Alina reappears. She moves toward us slowly and leans against the wall next to the bench. “Alina?”

“I’m sorry, Bea, I really am. I honestly didn’t remember,” she says.

“What’s going on?” I nudge her with the flashlight. “Listen, if you don’t want to come with me, I understand. I’ll go alone,” I say, hoping she won’t make me.

“It isn’t that. Look around you.” I shine the flashlight on the walls again. “Don’t you see?”

“What?”

“Fire,” Maude croaks. I look at the walls. They are thick with black grime.

“The staircases and escalators are gone. There’s no way up,” Alina says.

“But we can get up through the next station,” I say. Alina looks away. “Well?” She takes the flashlight from me and shines it on the gauge of my tank. Then she shines it on her own tank.

“It would take several hours to get back to Quinn. And then we’d have to find him. We need to refuel. We won’t make it otherwise.”

“We have enough,” I say. “We could move more quickly. We can run.” I know that it’s a stupid plan, that we’ll use up even more air if we hurry. Alina takes me by the arm and we walk along the platform away from Maude.

“There is a way you could do it,” she whispers. “If we had an extra tank of air, maybe we could find him.” When I turn to look at Maude, she is tipping her boots upside down to get the water out. “It’s her or Quinn, Bea. And it’s your choice.” I am too stunned to speak.

Maude looks over at us. “I’m hungry,” she says, so I move back to where she’s sitting and open my backpack.

“Here’s a nutrition bar.” She snatches it from me, tears it open, and stuffs half the bar into her mouth.

“Take my tank,” Maude whispers.

“Maude, I—”

“Yeah, I’d be happy kicking around for another few years, but I know what you two was muttering about. And I know there ain’t enough air for us all to get out of here alive
and
save your boyfriend.”

I don’t know what to say. So I say the first thing that comes into my head. “He isn’t my boyfriend.” Maude blinks and stuffs the other half of the nutrition bar into her mouth.

“Last meal. I would’ve enjoyed a glass of bubbly and a plateful of chocolate truffles, but, oh, this will do.” She unhooks the tank from her side. “Go and find him. If you like him, he must be all right.” She pulls off her facemask and hands it to me. I am amazed. I am amazed and I am broken by Maude’s kindness. But I haven’t the right to swap her life for someone else’s, even if that person is someone I love.