Falls the Shadow (14 page)

It isn't the first time I've felt it either. It's just that I always try not to dwell on these kinds of thoughts, because they inevitably lead to bigger questions that I can't answer. Questions about what's really going on in this Violet's head, about why she really does any of the things she does. And all the questions I'm not supposed to ask, of course, like how different things would be if this grave wasn't here, and the first Violet wasn't six feet underneath me.

Not as different as the CCA and all of those news reports are claiming; I feel like I should be sure of that much at least. Because no part of my sister is a murderer. She wasn't before and she isn't now. She
can't
be.

I keep running these thoughts over and over in my mind, and soon they start to feel like lines I'm rehearsing, like I'm
trying desperately to force myself into character. I'm just not sure who that character is anymore. Who am I playing now? The loyal sister? The persecuted voice of truth? The delusional hero?

And if I can't get a read on this part, then how am I supposed to know how to play it?

The wind picks up a bit, and I absently reach for my arm, trying to smooth away the bumps that rise on my skin. The action makes me think of my mother. Of her constantly tugging on her sleeves, constantly trying to cover up her scars. It's no different, maybe, from the way they bury the quarantined so far away from the city—almost as if keeping things out of sight will make them less real. Or less scary, at least.

And now I find myself wondering, What if people are right to be afraid? What if I'm the one who's got it all wrong about everything?

What if I should be afraid too? Because if what President Cross said was true and I've inherited my mother's sickness, what happens then? My parents can keep trying to hide these things from me, but they can't stop them from happening.

The wind's grown calm again, but my skin still feels cold.

“Company,” Seth says suddenly. I hear him, but I'm still so focused on my sister's grave that my reaction time isn't what it should be. Jaxon takes care of that for me, though—by throwing his arm around my waist and pulling me to the ground with him. I break the fall with my elbows, the right one falling on top of a sharp rock. I ignore the
pain and lift my gaze toward the cemetery gates. A group of armed men are filing through them, the one in front giving orders in a loud, booming voice.

Seth drops down beside us a second later.

“See?” he says. “This is why I didn't leave all the guns in the car.” He leans over on his side, reaches into the cargo pocket of his pants, and pulls out something that looks like a small silver pen.

“I thought Mom took that away from you,” Jaxon says.

Seth shrugs. “I got it back.”

“Why would she take it away?” I ask. It doesn't look especially dangerous.

“Because it's an illegal weapon,” Jaxon says, reaching over me and forcing Seth's hand—which is already aiming the pen-weapon—to the ground, “and the laser in it is powerful enough to cleanly slice a person's arm from their body at a close-enough range.”

“Oh.”

“Key words there are ‘at a close-enough range,' ” Seth says. “It would only leave a little burn on those guys from here. Stop trying to make me look crazy.”

“Pretty sure it's not me that's making you look crazy,” Jaxon says.

The man shouts another order, and my gaze snaps back to him. And as if he can feel my eyes on him, he suddenly stops. Then he glances in our direction, and even from here, I can see the way his eyes narrow suspiciously. He lifts his gun and then uses his free hand to gesture for the others to follow him.

They're moving straight toward us. Fast.

“We can't fight all of them,” I say, terror filling my lungs and making it hard to even whisper the words. “I feel like we need to move.”

“And I feel like I agree with Clonie for once,” Seth says. I jerk my head around to tell him—for the millionth time—to quit calling me that, but he's already army-crawling his way toward the back side of the hill. The crawl quickly turns into a dramatic roll down the steep slope. We catch up with him at the bottom, regroup, and head for the nearby trees. Once we've weaved our way deep enough into the forest that we can't hear the men behind us anymore, I turn back to Jaxon.

“Who were those people?” I ask, my heart still pounding and the words coming in between sharp gasps for air. The question—and the sick feeling that Jaxon knows the answer—has been eating away at me since the second we left my sister's grave.

But I'm not surprised when he claims he has no idea.

“So they're not CCA?” I press. I can tell the question frustrates him, but I don't really care; I don't see any benefit in pretending to trust him at the moment.

Seth is watching Jaxon out of the corner of his eye, and when his brother doesn't answer me this time, he jumps to his defense. “If they were CCA, do you honestly think I would have been pointing a weapon at them? Ten to one says those were Huxley creeps—and who knows how many more we've already got chasing us.”

“They weren't exactly chasing
us
,” I point out. “We don't
even know that they were looking for us.”

“Right,” Seth says, his tone bitingly sarcastic. “My bad. They were probably just out searching for new friends. Should we go back and introduce ourselves?”

“She has a point,” Jaxon interrupts. “They could have been looking for her sister's clone, or for anybody, really.”

“Or hell, maybe they were just out for a leisurely stroll.”

“I'm serious, Seth.”

“Of course you are,” he says, glaring at me now. “You agree with her. Big surprise.” His chest rises and falls with an irritated sigh, and the tension that filled the car on the way here is suddenly back, suffocating us even in the wide-open space. I'm relieved when he turns and starts to walk away from us.

“Come on, Seth,” Jaxon calls after him. “Where are you going?”

“To get a better angle on the situation. I'll let you know when the coast is clear and we can get away from this place. Assuming those guys don't blow up the car on their way out.”

“Don't joke about things like that,” Jaxon says, sounding a little faint.

“Casualties of war, man,” Seth calls back, waving a dismissive hand behind him.

I wait until he's out of earshot before commenting. “He's pissed.”

Jaxon shrugs. “Give him thirty minutes and he'll be making inappropriate jokes again,” he says. He's trying to sound casual, but there's a note of brotherly concern in his voice that I can't
help but notice. And then it hits me the same as it did when he talked about Seth in the CCA headquarters yesterday: that feeling of something familiar settling between us. He knows what it's like to have to worry about someone else constantly, the way I do with Violet. Is that part of the reason he left the city with me, I wonder? Because he understands what that's like?

“You're worried about him,” I say. It's not a question, but he nods anyway.

“He doesn't think it's a good idea, being out here,” he answers. “Being with you.”

“He might be right.”

“He probably is.”

“And yet here you are.”

His lips slide into a half grin. “Here I am.”

“For reasons neither of us can guess.”

He picks a stick up off the ground and starts absently stripping the bark from it. “Would you believe me,” he says after a minute, “if I told you I just prefer the view out here to the dirty, crowded city?”

“No.”

“Yeah. Somehow I didn't think you would.” He tosses the stick aside and glances up at me from underneath raised eyebrows. “So. Where to now?”

I don't answer him right away; mostly because I'm still trying to figure out the answer myself. If she was the one who put those flowers on the grave, then it means Violet did leave the city, just like I thought. And with everyone searching for her, and all of the police and everything
swarming around our house, something tells me she won't be in a hurry to go back anytime soon. I'm not really in a hurry to go back either—maybe because now I have even more questions than I had when I left. I want to know who those people in the cemetery were. Were they from Huxley? And are they hunting for my sister? What do they plan on doing with her when they find her?

I'm afraid to think about it. So I know there's no way I can stop searching for her now. I can't just go back to my house and wait, and listen to my parents' lies about how everything is going to be fine. Because I know they're lies now. Nothing about any of this is fine.

But thinking about my parents just confuses me more, because if those people are hunting for Violet, then who's to say they won't take their guns to my house next? I'm not sure what I would do if I was there, but part of me wants to go back anyway.

Jaxon is still looking at me expectantly.

“I don't know,” I say. “Maybe we should go back.”

His expression doesn't change.

“What?”

“You don't want to go back to the city,” he says. His matter-of-fact tone annoys me. Because he's right. I don't
want
to go back—it's more of a need. I just need to know my parents are okay.

“Seth doesn't think this is a good idea, right?” I say, diverting the conversation so I don't have to admit how easily he's managed to figure me out. “So maybe we should at least take him back.” And while we're there, I could
always check in at my house. It doesn't mean my parents have to see me, or even know I've been there; it wouldn't be the first time I'd gone unnoticed by them.

“He won't stay there if I'm still out here with you, so there's no point.” He casts an anxious glance back toward the graveyard. “Because I'm not leaving you out here—especially not with those guys running around, whoever they are.”

It would be stupid to argue with him now. He's proved useful so far, and as long as he's still willing to help me find Violet, I know I should take advantage of that. So I just nod and suggest we try to catch up with Seth.

But I trail a little behind him as we walk, my phone in my hand and my house number pulled up on the screen.

It isn't the same as seeing them. And I don't know what I'll say when they pick up the phone; I can ask them if things are okay back at the house, but I can't trust anything they tell me. They'll want to know where I am, but I'll have to lie to them. They can't know what I'm doing. Who I'm with. I can't tell them about any of this.

I might not even speak, I decide; just hearing their voices would be enough for now.

So I hit call. And I listen to it ring over and over, piercing the thick morning silence around us. I keep waiting. Keep listening. But no one answers. I try my father's cell next. Same result.

Mother's number takes me straight to her voice mail; no ringing, just her perfectly rehearsed words telling me to please leave a message after the beep. I remember her
standing in the kitchen in her shirtwaist dress and heels, re-recording that message nearly ten times and trying to get it right.

Maybe if I could run through all the things I want to say ten times, I'd be able to decide on the right words to use.

But instead, I just end the call with numb fingertips and slip my phone back into my pocket.

“Where are we?” I ask.

We've been driving for what feels like hours before we finally slow to a stop. My legs are cramped, my shoulders stiff. I'm not complaining, though. At least we still had a car to ride away in when those people at the cemetery finally left.

“On what used to be Main Street, Lenoir,” Jaxon answers. “Hopefully there'll be someplace safe to spend the night here.”

Lenoir. The name doesn't ring any bells, and the place looks completely abandoned—just one of the hundreds of other ghost towns the war left behind. The scarcity of supplies and the difficulty of shipping over the decaying road system meant that smaller towns like this often got overlooked, and after years of struggling to get by, most people just gave up and migrated to larger cities. There are a few that manage to self-sustain, but not many.

The sacrifice of towns like this has actually been part of the government's ongoing rebuilding efforts; with limited manpower and resources, the idea was to purposely focus growth and financial support in a few designated Restoration Cities, and to then allow the eventual outward
spread of population and commerce to occur naturally. It's a slow process, though. So while places like Haven—which is one of those designated cities—are currently bustling, most of the areas around it are far from lively.

And this town looks a lot like some of the pictures I've seen in Social Studies class: buildings with crumbling faces and weathered, barely readable signs; broken, dirty windows; gravel side roads that have been all but overtaken by weeds. It's a depressing scene. Because despite its run-down state, it's still obvious that there was once life here. If I squint, I can almost see people rushing in and out of its many shops, and in the low whistle of wind I swear I hear laughter and the chatter of gossip, the sound of someone crying, and maybe even someone singing nearby.

“This is your first time in one of these actual ghost towns, I'm guessing?” Jaxon offers me a hand and pulls me out of the car. “It's eerie, isn't it?”

I take another look around, watch an empty tin can roll back and forth in the wind. It clinks and clatters over the broken pavement, and the sound echoes between the buildings. It drowns out any laughter, any singing I might have been hearing. To think this is all that's left of the entire lives built here, that those people had no choice but to leave everything behind. . . . “Eerie” isn't the right word, I decide.