Into the Abyss (28 page)

“How did you access it?” I repeat.

She forces her eyes back to mine. Swallows hard and composes herself, and then in a voice so low I can barely hear it, she says, “Promise you won't get mad?”

“No. I'm not promising that at all.”

She frowns, but keeps talking anyway. “The president . . . helped. She doesn't need to track your communicator to know where you are. Because when she rebuilt you, or fixed you or healed you or whatever, we wanted to make
sure you didn't go disappearing on us again, and without the regular memory uploads or any sort of remote access to your brain, we had to go with a different method.”

“What method?”

“Um, they sort of embedded a microchip locator under your skin.”

I stare at her, speechless and half expecting her to tell me she is kidding. I should know better than that by now, though. Of course it's true. Of course I never really escaped the CCA at all. I have been carrying them with me, everywhere I went since leaving.

And I am not supposed to be mad about that?

“You said we wanted to make sure,” I say, somehow managing a calm voice. “So you've known about this all along, and it never occurred to you to tell me?”

“I just figured it was a harmless chip,” Catelyn continues in a rush. “Anyway, so there it is, and it accesses the nearest network to function, to ping your location, and once I had the network address, I—” She cuts herself off with a sigh. “Look, I don't have time to explain this right now. There's a more important reason I went through all the trouble to reach you like this.”

There's an audible
thump thump
from somewhere in the background on her end, a knock on the door, maybe, muffled and unclear through her computer's standard microphone. She hears it clearly enough, though. It makes her talk even faster. “President Cross isn't the enemy here. You know that, right? We don't know who managed to hijack your tracking information and find their way to
where you were staying, but obviously we didn't mean for it to happen.”

The next
thump thump
from Catelyn's side seems even louder.

“What is that noise?” I ask.

She turns toward the door, and for the first time I notice the gun she is holding in her right hand. She lifts it and wipes the sliding button on its side. It starts a low, barely audible humming. Charging. “They'll figure out that electronic lock soon,” she says, more to the gun than us.

“Who will?” I ask, even though I could probably guess.

Seth and I are the ones who collected their names and faces, after all.

Catelyn lifts her eyes back to mine, but all she says is: “It's started.”

“You need to get away from there,” I say. “Now.”

“I think I might have waited too long for that.”

“Well, I'm coming to get you then.”

“No!”

It's not a thump that interrupts us this time but a low screech: the sound of a blade whining against steel. Apparently whoever is on the other side isn't bothering with figuring out any locks. They're simply going to cut their way through.

“No,” Catelyn repeats frantically. “That's why I had to reach you, to tell you that you can't come back here. You or Seth. They'll kill you if you do—that's what they want. It's why they came after you in the first place: They keep talking about wanting to make an example of you and
Seth, like a symbolic slaying of the old president's show of weakness or something. It's sick.”

I lean closer to the screen, wishing I could simply destroy it. That it would somehow destroy the distance between us at the same time. “I don't care,” I say. “I'm not afraid of them.”

“Well, I am. Listen: They aren't going to kill me. Not right away. They want to use me, and Jaxon and the president and now, I guess, Angie, too, to try to get you and Seth here. Don't let them use us like that. We'll figure out what to do in here, but for now, you have to stay away.”

A more intense buzzing of metal being cut. Sparks fly from her left. I hear footsteps, voices, someone whooping in success as a piece of the steel door falls in, flashes across the screen for just a moment before slamming against the floor with a metallic clunk.

Catelyn clutches the gun to her chest. With her other hand, she reaches and ends the video call.

“No!” My hand flies at the computer screen, hits it so hard, I am surprised it doesn't crack it. I want to grab her and pull her back. I want to be where she is. I want to fight whoever was on the other side of that door.

But instead, I am here and useless and shaking, cut off from her yet again.

“She's joking, right?” Seth says. He's come up so quietly behind me that I didn't even notice him. “About the stay away part, I mean. She can't seriously expect us to.” Somehow the words manage to break through to me, even
as my mind blurs with desperate plans and an intense hatred for whoever was on the other side of that door.

I don't answer him, though. I don't want to talk. I don't even want to move my fingers from where they are still splayed against the black video box on the computer screen, as if I could keep our connection going, so long as I refuse to let go.

Then, to my surprise, a connection attempt message actually appears beneath my fingers. But when I manage to click accept, it's not Catelyn who greets me.

It's Josh.

And several feet behind him, instead of his usual gang, there are two older CCA members. Between them is Catelyn, with her arms and legs tied and a strip of tape across her mouth. She looks dazed. A nasty burn covers a large strip of the right side of her face, blistering red welts visible even at the distance she is from the camera.

“Hello again,” Josh says. “Your sister tried to cut us off, like she didn't want you to see this happen or something”—he gestures behind him—“but it feels like it's been forever since we talked, doesn't it? And I don't think she relayed the message I needed you to get quite as clearly as I would have liked. I thought this might help clarify things.”

Seth puts a hand on my arm and gently pulls my fingers away from the screen. He lets his hand linger there, and for once I am glad for his touch, for the weight of it, because the urge to hit the screen is even stronger than before.

“Is that Seth behind you?” Josh asks. “Tell him I'm sorry Jaxon isn't here too. He and his mom are tied up elsewhere at the moment—which is a shame, right? It could have been this whole weird little family get-together thing.”

Seth's grip on me tightens.

“Let them go,” I say.

Unsurprisingly, Josh laughs. “We will,” he says, “when we're ready to. When we've made our point, and nobody else around here thinks it's a good idea to associate with the very things we're supposed to be fighting against. When nobody else wants to keep dangerous clones like you two as little pets, the way the so-called president of this organization was doing.”

My eyes are still watching Catelyn, so I see her blink into an almost awareness—aware enough that she is able to look straight at the computer screen and start to struggle, screaming words that are only muffled by the tape.

Josh holds up a small tool that blocks my view of her; I would guess it is the same one that burned through the door and left that mark on Catelyn's face, because he walks over and presses the tapered nozzle of it against her other, unburned cheek. Her eyes widen at the sight of it, and then close tightly, bracingly.

“This is a useful thing,” Josh says, digging the nozzle around in her skin. “As good at shutting mouths as it is at opening doors.”

“Don't.” I mean to shout it, but it comes out as a horrified whisper instead.

“ ‘Don't'?” He pulls the tip away from her cheek, lets it hover just a few inches from her face. “I wonder: How many people have said ‘don't' to you in the past, and you didn't bother to listen to them? You weren't a very good listener before Cross brought you back here, you know.”

“I'm different,” I say quietly.

“You look the same to me.”

“Don't,” I say again, as close to begging as I think I've ever sounded, which he seems to find amusing.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay. I won't. So long as you understand what is going to happen next.”

I want to guess that what happens next is I come to the CCA headquarters and rip his disgusting throat out, but I don't want to make him angry, because I know he would only take it out on Catelyn. So instead all I say is, “I'm listening.”

“Good. Here's what you're going to do,” he says. “Both you and Seth—you're going to come and hand yourselves over to us within the next twenty-four hours. And then it's going to be the way it should be: The humans get to live, and the monsters get to die. Just like in every story that's ever ended with ‘happily ever after.' ” He walks back to the camera, and I allow myself the first decent breath I have taken since he moved closer to Catelyn. “I'll see you soon, then?” he asks, leaning in so that I can't focus on Catelyn, or on the room behind him, or on anything except for his eyes, which are shining as if he has already beaten me.

“Very soon,” I promise him. “And you will regret every second of this call.”

“Doubt it,” he says with a smile. Then he cuts the connection, and this time the screen stays black.

“You two are both insane,”
Tori says. Again.

“We know,” Seth says, taking the steps in a few long leaps and bounds. He pauses at the top of them long enough to glance at his communicator, and then he is disappearing into the sanctuary above as he adds, “Somebody was just telling us that. It was you, I think?”

I follow him upstairs without a word, ignoring Tori as she sprints to catch up with us.

“It was bad enough that you were planning on going back there when things were just tense,” she presses. “But now there's a full-scale uprising, and they're expecting you two, and—”

Seth stops so abruptly that she slams into the back of him. “You saw the video.” He spins around, brings his face level with hers so quickly that I think she is going to trip trying to get out of his way. “It's not like we can wait this out and see if things somehow shift in our favor.” He doesn't elaborate past that, but I know he is thinking the same thing I am: Josh said we had twenty-four hours, but there is no telling what they might do to their hostages during those twenty-four hours.

Thinking about it makes me want to hit something all
over again, so I am glad Seth dealt with Tori. Because I honestly don't want to hit her. I have actually been growing sort of fond of her.

“You two are going to get killed,” she says, her voice a little quieter as she warily watches Seth turn his back on her and keep walking.

“Well,” Seth says drily, “at least we're no strangers to death.”

•  •  •

We move as quickly through the city as we can while still staying discreet. It's just Seth and me now. We decided it was too dangerous, with the way things have escalated in these past hours, to bring the others. Tori halfheartedly argued with us about that—and forced me to sit still long enough to at least figure out a way to block the signal from the tracker embedded in me—but she finally agreed to let us go alone, once Leah insisted there were other things they could do to help us from the outside. I don't know exactly what Leah had in mind, because there was no time for her to elaborate; when we left, she was back at her computer and working just as intently and furiously as she had been the night before.

Zach meets us several blocks away from headquarters, with a handful of CCA loyalists in tow. “There's another team of us inside,” he tells us, “waiting to create a distraction so we can lead you guys to where we think they're keeping Catelyn. And then to the others.”

“The others,” meaning more loyalists who have managed to get themselves locked up. Zach claims he wanted
to help us, but he can't exactly stop in the middle of this uprising and focus on freeing only the ones we've come for. So he agreed that he would help us out in return for our help breaking these others free—more quid pro quo, as Seth called it. Though I think Seth partly agreed because he feels more loyalty toward the president, and the ones still following her, than I do; my main concern is Catelyn, though, which is why I insisted we free her first. Once I get her out, then I'll focus on these other people—but not before. My single-track mind working once again.

I don't care, though, because that track is going to lead me back to her.

I trail a little ways behind the group as we approach headquarters, only partially listening to the hushed conversation Zach and Seth are having. I feel like Zach should be a little more focused on the task ahead, but he doesn't seem to be able to stop giving Seth strange looks.

“Still having a hard time believing you're . . . you know,” he finally says as we make it to the edge of the parking garage. “You look the same.”

I hear muffled laughter from Seth. “That's kind of the point,” he says. “That I look the same as a human? It's like . . . Cloning 101.”

“You know what I mean. I've known you for a long time, and you were a human as far as I knew or cared.” He shrugs—the smallest of movements, but it causes a light fluttering in my chest. A flutter of hope, maybe? That when this is over with, the more moderate CCA will prevail. That they really will be able to help the rest of the city
shrug off the old mind-set toward clones as easily as Zach has accepted the truth about Seth.

Maybe we weren't fast enough to prevent what is happening tonight, but things won't end here.

I keep telling myself that as we huddle around Zach's communicator, listening. It's linked to the communicator on the wrist of his distraction team's leader, so that even though we can't see everything going on in the base, we can still hear it.