Extraction (36 page)

Another laser whizzes past. Eyes wide, I jump out of the way and trip over a body, landing hard on my knees. Blood pools in the hair of the dead nurse.

I gulp down the urge to vomit. I scramble to my feet.

The
zaps
and
pings
of gunfire ring loud in my ears, drowning out voices. The smoke makes my eyes water, and I blink fast, looking around wildly to tell where I am. I can’t see Logan or Beechy or Fred or Ella or anyone anymore.

“Logan!” I scream his name.

There’s a
zap
too close to my head, and I duck again and the laser hits the ceiling. There’s a loud cracking sound. A light shatters.

Shards of glass rain on my head. I shield myself with my hands and scramble out of the way, but I trip instead. There are so many bodies on the floor—and I can’t tell if they’re on my side or Charlie’s. It matters, but it shouldn’t.

A body crashes into me.

Ella stumbles, blood spilling from a hole in her chest.

The copper slips from my hand. I grab on to her to keep her from falling. Her eyes are wide. A strangled sound comes from her throat.

“No!” I cry.

A laser strikes her back. She falls limp in my arms. Smoke sizzles on her rags.

I’m crying and choking and I can’t move because I’m holding her. I can’t put her down. People will trample her. People will trip and get her blood on their hands, and they won’t even care, but they
should
care.

Someone touches my back, and I start to let go of her. I start to whip around to defend myself.

But it’s Logan. He says something I can’t hear. I can’t see him well through my tears and the smoke.

He eases Ella out of my trembling arms and transfers her bleeding body to his.

He’s going to carry her.

A laser flashes too close to Logan’s shoulder. My fingers fumble to snatch my copper from the ground. I turn and aim a shot into the steam. I don’t stop to see where it hits. We’re already running.

We scramble through the smoke, the dead bodies, the flashing lights.

There’s a hallway ahead. Cady is standing at the entrance firing a pulse rifle, gesturing wildly for us to head down that way, ahead of her.

Something hot grazes my shoulder. Heat trickles like liquid fire across my skin.

I scream and stumble, but I don’t stop running. The laser only grazed me. I’ll be okay.

Some more steps down the corridor, and there’s a doorway, a passage leading out into the night.

It’s too quiet out here. The wind bites my skin.

Green grass stretches at our feet, sloping to cliffs over the sea. We’re the only ones here so far. We’re the first ones out.

I double over, gasping for breath. Trying to focus on something other than the pain in my shoulder. Logan pauses to rest too, but he’s still holding Ella’s body. He’s squinting into the dark toward the sea cliffs.

“Clem, her body,” he says softly. “Should we…”

I swallow hard and follow his gaze to the sea. The ocean instructors told us about when we were young. The Surface camp and city are somewhere behind us, a hundred miles at least.

I know what Logan’s thinking. I don’t want to let Ella go, but I know we have to. And I think coming to rest in the sea would make her happy. So I whisper, “Okay.”

We walk to the edge of the cliff. Fierce moonlight sparkles on the water below, where waves crash on the rocks, roaring in the night.

Logan glances at me, his lips tight. There’s blood on his cheeks that I hope isn’t his.

“Should I do it?” he asks.

I glance at her frail, broken body. Red stains her rags. There are bruises around her eyes. I wish she could open them and laugh at me for thinking she’s only sleeping. I wish she’d tell me more about the handsome boy whose smile made the rain stop falling.

I wish I could tell her
Thank you for those nights
and
I’m sorry I couldn’t save you
and
I’ll kill Charlie someday to get back at him for this, I swear
, but I can’t.

“Here, I’ll help you,” I say, wiping my eyes.

I slip my arms under her skinny legs, gritting my teeth to ignore my throbbing shoulder, and Logan carefully holds her head up. We lift her body over the water.

I count: one—two—three.

And we let her go.

I watch her body splash in the water, barely missing the rocks.

Logan wraps his arms around me. I bury my head in his shoulder, blinking tears out of my eyes.

“I’m sorry,” he says.

“I’m sorry too. I’m sorry they hurt you. I’m sorry I left.”

“It’s not your fault, Clem.”

“But it is.” At least part of it is. If I’d agreed to obey Charlie in the first place, they wouldn’t have brought Logan to Karum. They wouldn’t have electrocuted him or given him those bruises on his arms.

His arms loosen around me, and I’m sure he’s going to agree. I’m sure he’s going to say
I hate you for leaving
and
Why didn’t you save me?
There are a million “I’m sorrys” but I’m not sure they’ll ever be enough.

Instead, he turns me around gently. His hands have Ella’s blood on them.

“It’s not your fault. I promise,” he whispers. His starry-night eyes stare straight into mine, sending a flutter into my stomach. He holds me like I’m a shard of trembling glass. Like he’s sure he’s going to make a mistake and I’m going to break, but I’m waiting for it. I’ve wanted it forever.

He leans in, and our lips touch. Brushing, barely touching.

I close my eyes. I breathe in his smell that I know so well, and I lose myself.

His fingers tangle in my curls. Our noses touch, and our cheekbones bump.

Slowly, little by little, we figure out this newness. This mess of beauty that isn’t messy at all because there’s me and there’s Logan. The two of us and the stars flickering over our heads. I know him, and he knows me without saying anything.

And I forget what it means to be afraid.

36

The others come stumbling out of Karum, bruised and bloodied. Fred is alive. So are Beechy and Cady, and others I don’t know the names of. I don’t count how many of us are missing.

I try not to think about all the people we killed to get out of there alive.

“We have to hurry,” Beechy says, wiping the blood off a cut on his forehead.

Charlie must already be at the detonation site by now. I don’t know how we’re supposed to stop him from starting the detonation timer. But I hope we can make it. I hope we can try.

We scramble into a group of flight pods. They are parked in the grass at the side of the facility, where the rebel pilots land them earlier. Logan and I enter the smallest one with Beechy.

The copilot seat swivels, and Sandy’s sitting there. She gives me a nervous smile. There’s a small bump on her belly, where her baby grows inside. “Hey,” she says.

The last time I saw her, she stood back and watched while Sam held me down and a nurse stuck a needle in my arm. I learned she was the daughter of the man who ruined my life and Logan’s.

But I force my lips into a smile and take one of the passenger seats behind hers. She came here with Beechy, I remind myself. And Beechy just broke everyone out of Karum, going against Charlie’s wishes.

Unless he lied about that. I wouldn’t put it past him.

Logan slips into the seat beside me and fumbles for the seat strap. Beechy takes the pilot chair. He flips a switch on the dashboard and the interior lights dim. The door slides shut. The engine rumbles on.

I pull my seat strap over my waist and click it into the lock. Beechy pushes a lever forward, and our pod lifts off the grass, following the others into the air.

I press a hand to the wound on my throbbing shoulder and look out the window to watch us leave Karum. The massive steel facility looks lonesome. Abandoned. Its hallways used to be filled with the echoes of screams and the pounding boots of the guards.

Now they’re quiet.

“Cady, make sure you’re behind me when we reach the Pipeline,” Beechy says.

I glance at him, confused because Cady isn’t in here. But I notice he’s wearing an earpiece, so he must be talking to her through that.

He still hasn’t told me how he ended up a rebel leader, or why he didn’t tell me he was. Why he let Charlie throw me in Karum.

I wait until I’m pretty sure he’s finished listening through his earpiece to ask him. “Are you going to explain everything now?” I ask stiffly.

“What do you want to know?” he says.

I want to know a lot of things, but I start with the first thing that pops into my mind: “Sandy is Charlie’s daughter. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“That was my fault,” Sandy says, biting her lip and keeping her hand on her baby bump. “I told him not to. I was afraid you’d think badly of me.”

“Well, you did stand by while your father threw me in Karum.”

“I’m sorry about that,” Beechy says, running his fingers through his hair.

“We couldn’t do anything to risk our cover,” Sandy says. “He believes we’re on his side. That’s why we were able to come here and rescue you.”

“So, what, it was an act?” I ask. “Beechy pretended to be subdued when he and those guards chased me? You could’ve done something to help me—”

“I was half subdued.” Beechy fiddles with another lever on the dashboard. “I got my monthly injection, same as you.”

“What does that mean?
Half
subdued?”

“I was fighting it. It takes time to fight it, though I can fight it, and I do fight it. I’m not the only one, either—a good number of us in the Core just pretend to follow Charlie’s orders. He’d mark us as Unstable if he knew. I was going to tell you, but then Charlie announced his plan and … things got complicated.”

“And then you abandoned me,” I finish.

He sighs. “I’m sorry, Clementine. I made a mistake. I should’ve told you sooner.”

“Yes, you should’ve.”

“I’m sorry.”

I turn my head away, clenching my teeth, partly because my shoulder still hurts, partly because this isn’t fair. I get that Beechy made a mistake, that he had to pretend to follow Charlie’s orders in order to survive, but if he’d told me, I might not’ve ended up in Karum and had a million needles stuck into my skin. I could’ve told him about my allergy, and maybe he would’ve known how to help me not feel like I was dying after the monthly injection.

Maybe we could’ve come up with a plan to sabotage Charlie’s bomb much sooner, instead of waiting until the last second.

“Clementine, please forgive me,” Beechy says softly.

I stare out the window, refusing to look at him. We’re skimming above the ocean now. Pink moonlight shimmers on the black waves. In the cloudless sky, acid swirls on the surface of the atmospheric shield. It blocks too much of the moon’s surface for me to tell if Fred was telling the truth, if there really is a generator up there.

But I think I believe him. I know, at least, that I don’t believe Charlie.

“So you don’t support Project KIMO,” Logan says beside me, to Sandy.

Sandy shakes her head. “My father’s not in his right mind. He doesn’t know what he’s doing.”

“He’s obviously lying about the acid shield being broken,” Beechy says. “We would’ve corroded the second we stepped outside if things were really as bad as he made them sound. I wish we knew what his real aim is, but we don’t.”

I frown, glancing at Sandy. “He didn’t tell you?”

“He tells me very little,” she says. “His policies are strictly between him, the other Developers, and the army colonels.”

I chew on my bottom lip. She probably doesn’t know about Marden then, or the war, even. Does
anyone
know? Sam knew something about soldier training, but he thought it had to do with preparing for a rebellion in the outer sectors. That’s what Charlie told everyone except the Developers and the heads of his military.

I want to expose his lie. However, the bomb is more important right now.

“What’s the plan when we reach the explosion site?” I ask.

“Five of our six pods will land at the site.” Beechy nods at Sandy, who reaches into an overhead compartment and withdraws a folded piece of paper. She opens it in her lap, turning her chair.

I lean closer to see it, and so does Logan. It’s a sketch of the launch site, a flight hangar between Lower and the Core. The sketch shows the ship transporting the missile on the far left side of the platform and the spot where we’re going to land on the far right. Red dots show where Charlie’s men will likely be in position.

“Our goal is to take over the site and capture my father before he sets the timer on the bomb detonator,” she says. “The sixth pod is taking Colonel Fred and the other Unstables who are too old to fight straight back to the Core.”

“The other Unstables agreed to this?” I ask.

“They all seemed very eager to attack my father,” she says, and I notice there’s a slight unsteadiness to her voice. I’m not sure she wants him to die, even though she hates his policies.

“Anyway,” she says, “we have a few rebels undercover at the site already. There should be enough of us to overrun his people even if the Unstables don’t fight, as long as we get there in time. We’ve been training to overpower my father for a long time. We hoped it would happen under different circumstances, but there’s nothing we can do about that.”

She folds up the map and puts it away.

“What’s your backup plan?” Logan asks. “Charlie could very well have set the timer before we get there.”

He has big circles under his eyes and tension in his jaw. His fingers slip through mine, steady.

“Even if it’s been set, we’ll have some time before the bomb explodes to try and reverse the detonator,” Sandy says. “We just don’t know how long.”

“That’s our problem,” Beechy adds, steering our ship to the right to follow the other pods. “We couldn’t get our hands on the blueprints, so any attempt to reverse the timer and disable the bomb will be guesswork.”

“There is one other thing we could do,” Sandy says, her voice quieter. “A last resort. We could fly the ship that’s transporting the missile out of the atmosphere, to explode the bomb far enough away from the Surface that it wouldn’t cause any damage.”