Follow Me Through Darkness (32 page)

“It’s forever,” Thorne says, staring up at the bridge pieces. “Like we’re supposed to be.”

I’m not sure how long we sit there, me looking at people and him being silent,, starting up, but then he’s pulling me up from the bench. The wind is still. The sky is alive with color. The rhythm of the waves sounds like the song at home. I hum along with it in my head. Even if I had thirty more years, nothing would ever compare to this place and the freedom of it all. This place is good. Amy likes it here; maybe Neely could, too.

Shadows suddenly block the sunlight.

“This is a security check. Present your verification and security papers.”

Two people dressed in black like the Troopers stare down at us, hands outstretched. They are in black, but they aren’t Troopers. They don’t look heartless.

“We got word of some undocumented visitors. You understand,” the second one says.

My racing heart slows down half a beat because they’re not Troopers. They’re not working for the Elders. It should calm me, but I can still feel my heart pounding within me. It’s the first time I’m glad there’s a cage there to hold it in. Without the cage, it would be roaming around the air and the world, ready to kill everything that endangers it. I imagine it, a roaring lion, hungry and ready to devour, its only purpose to escape and capture and protect the thing that keeps it alive. The world knows no fury like a heart on the prowl. I can feel the pounding in my head, reverberating there and shaking my memories into each other.

“Amy,” Thorne says loudly.

All three of them are looking at me, a sea of eyes. Right, I’m Amy. I hold out my papers to the officers. Time stands still, and the lion trapped in the cage is ready to pounce. But nothing happens. They hand everything back to me and to Thorne.

“How are things in number eleven?” the second one asks.

I blink. Eleven. That’s the camp where we live.

“Fine. It’s all the usual really. Kids getting antsy, daytime restriction problems, lack of security measures,” Thorne says.

The officer offers. “I get it. Grew up in number forty-five.”

Thorne nods like he completely understands the whole thing.

“Good luck with your visit, Ms. Williams, Mr. Redding,” the first one adds. They move past us. I count to twenty, willing things to slow to a normal speed.

“What was that?” I ask.

“Sorry, you panicked. I didn’t think you knew,” he says.

“I didn’t.”

Thorne shrugs. “I talked a lot with Joe in El Paso. He said those were three of their biggest issues.”

I had no idea that Thorne had asked about the camps or how they work. When he told Asher he wanted to help, he’d already been gathering information the whole time. He’s a sponge when he wants to understand something. If he hadn’t come, I wouldn’t have been able to answer that question. I wouldn’t have been able to do so many things because of him. He saved me again.

“We should go,” I say.

DEADLINE: 8D, 10H, 14M

MAVERICKS HEADQUARTERS

AGENT NICHOLAS HANDLER’S
crystal-blue eyes stare at me behind his dark-framed glasses. Even sitting, I can tell he’s tall. Muscles bulge under his blazer, and he’s younger than I expected.

“What was your question?” I ask, completely sidetracked.

He leans back, and his chair makes this squeaking noise. He crosses his fingers in the shape of a triangle, tip to tip, and stares at me over his glasses.

“I asked, Miss Ambrose, what your plan was to save everyone?”

I swallow. “I don’t have one.”

He nods slowly. “And you, Mr. Bishop? Do you have a plan?”

Thorne shakes his head. Agent Handler nods slowly and rises to his feet. He moves in quick steps around his office, where every object is perfectly stacked and organized by size and color. “The thing is, it’s only nine days before the Elders transfer your people. That’s not a lot of time to make this happen.”

He’s right. It’s not a lot of time. “Xenith said this is what you do, so I need you to do it. Whatever it takes,” I say.

Agent Handler looks at me. His eyes meet mine for a second too long, and then, “What are you willing to lose to see this accomplished?”

I don’t look away from him, even though I feel Thorne’s eyes on me, too. I’d give up everything except him. But haven’t I already done that just by saying yes to Xenith? Wasn’t me coming here a risk of losing him? And me wanting something more than what we have? But he’s still here.

“Everything,” Thorne answers for me. I look at him. “She’d risk everything.”

Handler’s eyebrows raise, and he glances between us. I speak quickly. “Agent Handler, I don’t want to be like my father. I don’t want me or anyone else to be changed by the Elders or used by them. Surely, you can understand what this transfer would mean for me.”

He smiles-not in the funny way, but in some sort of way that puts me at ease. “Come with me,” he says. He removes a pair of silver keys from his pants pocket and opens his office door.

Handler leads us down the hallway to a set of elevators. We ride them down to the basement. It’s a long way down from the eighteenth floor, and the silence rests between us awkwardly.

DEADLINE: 8D, 10H, 10M

MAVERICKS HEADQUARTERS

WHEN THE ELEVATOR
doors open, there are groups of people in line along the walls. Some are in lines at the computers, and some sit in circles and examine blueprints. Agent Handler leads us around the room toward the back. As we pass, people look up at us, some longer than others. There’s a group of three people-one with green, pointed hair-encased in a glass room in the back, and they all look up at us when we enter.

The door hisses as Agent Handler closes the door. “Neely, Thorne, these are the commanders. Agents Carrigan, Mitchell, and Bane. They are my next in command.”

I feel dirty next to Agent Carrigan’s pristine white skin and blonde hair that falls across her ears. She smiles at me, her eyes sparkling, and greets us happily. Agent Mitchell, the one with the green hair, raises his eyebrows as he shakes my hand. Agent Bane, with his shirt really tight against his muscles, nods to us.

“What is all this?” Thorne asks, poking one of the buttons next to him. A screen changes, and Mitchell jumps in to change it back. Thorne stuffs his hands into his pockets.

Handler removes his jacket and leans against the wall. Even the white shirt is crisp underneath. A month ago I would’ve been like them, and now I’m more like a Remnant but not quite that either. I’m my own entity. A survivor.

“Those people out there,” he says, pointing beyond the glass, “are helping us by providing possible extraction routes and strategy plans. Each group works on a different piece of the puzzle, and we will put the best elements together as an action plan for unification.”

“Unification?” I ask. I’ve never heard of that.

Agent Carrigan is the one who answers, her voice high and light. “Everyone in the Compound is altered by the branding. It’s something the Elders mastered before the Preservation so they could keep control.” They mastered it before the disease even came, before they made a show of saving some. Carrigan points to my neck. “It changes the brain to subdue curiosity. The marking is made with an ink that contains a neurochemical compound. It’s constantly feeding low doses of medicine into the brain. Without curiosity, there are no questions. Without questions, there is no search for truth and no need for free will, for decisions.”

“It’s quite effective when you think about it,” Agent Bane adds, his messy brown hair sticking up all over the place like he’d been running his hands through it. He leans over the back of Carrigan’s chair. “When people like you come to us or when we save them, we remove the branding and then place them in our new society. Unification.”

“Why aren’t we affected by the branding? I’ve never had a problem asking questions,” I say.

I’m sure my life would have been easier if I had.

“The twin branding is different. In all cases that we’ve encountered, it created something new instead of taking away the curiosity. When the Lopez twins escaped, the Elders stopped the branding and separated all those who had received it before,” Carrigan says.

“How does it work?” Thorne asks.

Agent Handler crosses his arms. “Twins were given a prenatal treatment to help the Elders find immortality. They use a different chemical compound for twin branding-something that is supposed to complete the process-although our researchers haven’t been able to isolate the chemical. From what you’ve told me, Thorne had the treatment, but Neely did not. Her body was not properly prepared for the branding, so when they branded you two together, they created something else entirely.”

I stare sideways at Thorne. One little lie from Liv Taylor changed all of our lives, made us something else. Every decision has led us here.

“And I have a feeling they didn’t know what they’d created,” Mitchell adds. “I mean, if they had known, they would’ve made the two of you the biggest new experiment.”

Liv Taylor saved us from that. It’s why she lied to them. They’d suspected something after Cecily and Deanna escaped, after the branding effects were revealed. They wanted to make sure we hadn’t been altered since we weren’t properly branded, and her second lie kept us together.

Bane points to a screen, and a few images flash by. They look like pages from Old World storybooks. He stops on one of a man bent over a spring. “The Elders love to experiment.” With a flick of Bane’s wrist, the images change to small spheres forming, moving, turning into babies. “With twins, the Elders saw an opportunity to examine the effects of genetic splicing and connections from conception. Identical twins were viewed as the ideal study subjects-natural clones. Fraternal twins, on the other hand, added power to the idea that two separate beings could still be strongly connected. Both of these things were of interest to the Elders, so they did whatever they could to find some answers. The tests have major side effects-morphing DNA into new abilities-but they didn’t notice those for centuries.”

“Like the way Cecily and Deanna could share dreams?” I glance toward Agent Handler, and he adjusts his glasses on his nose.

“Exactly.”

The images around us shift to pictures of children. Two in every shot-twins. Agent Carrigan smiles at me. Then she straightens up in her chair. “These are some of the identical twins from the last hundred years,” Agent Carrigan says. She pauses on a picture of two girls, one with brown hair and one with blonde. “What’s wrong with this picture?”

“They have different color hair,” Thorne says.

She nods and flashes another. Identical twins with hair or eyes that are different colors, one boy with freckles and one without. “The tests made small superficial alterations after a few generations. “Some were even stronger, smarter, and in tune with each other. There’s a study of twins who were placed in two different Compounds, and they could still communicate. Those effects, the mental more than physical traits, went to fraternal twins too-any children who shared a womb during experimental treatments.”

I wonder if that’s how it works for Thorne and me. We can’t communicate verbally or mentally, but emotion is a form of communication.

“But then, both kinds of twins started developing more significant traits, actual skills.” Agent Carrigan flashes through some more pictures. Each of these people could do something unique, and it’s because of the Elders. Pictures of children zoom through my line of view, and one with blonde hair makes me think of Delilah. I hope she’s okay.

The images pause on a picture. In it, the girls look identical, and it’s easy to imagine the lines in Cecily’s face now. Her eyes are the same shade of gray, but her hair is a dark shade of black.

“Cecily and Deanna Lopez were the first people who talked about what they could do, but I guess dreams of the future would cause that. There are others,” she says, flashing through pictures. “Twins developed enhanced mental connections that manifested in different mental abilities-moving things with their minds, sensitivities to sound and light-more things than we can categorize. For every set of twins that were altered and survived, hundreds more died.”

Everyone is quiet until Agent Bane shouts from across the room. “What do you guys do?”

Shouldn’t they know this? They seem to know everything.

“We share emotions,” Thorne says.

“But they’re not really twins, and the branding didn’t work the same way,” Mitchell adds. “Which explains that.”

Everyone in the room grows quiet, and Mitchell doesn’t even notice. I stare at him, waiting for something else. “What does it explain?” I ask.

“Sorry, he’s like that,” Carrigan says quickly.

Mitchell nods and stuffs a hand into his pocket. “Every record we have is of mental abilities-things controlled by the mind-and none of the twins were inhibited by the branding. But yours is emotion- based. Do you feel each other’s emotions in a physical manifestation?”

“Yes,” we both say. The fire, the intensity, the swirling in the head, the weight in my stomach.

“That’s because Neely wasn’t prepared for the branding. It makes your connection different,” he says. Agent Mitchell moves around the screens. His fingers move quickly, pulling up images. “You’re the director’s daughter, right?” I nod, and he rubs his hands together. I’m glad
someone
is excited. “Then your whole connection has adapted to each other because you have the gene. If you didn’t, you would’ve been branded with no problem or effects at all since you didn’t have the prenatal preparation treatment.”

“What are you talking about?” I ask.

Mitchell looks at me like a rock has been dropped on my head, and I cross my arms. This is the first I’ve heard of a gene, but my heart rate increases. I can’t help but feel like everything is about to change.
I’m
about to change.

Mitchell sighs, pokes around on the screen, and changes some images. “About a century ago, the Elders tried to change the branding to be a control source, rather than a blockade. They tested in small groups, and your family was one of them. Three families were tested in that first trial. Two families were successful; one was not.”