Into the Abyss (9 page)

“Yes.” I know exactly what that phrase means. But like so many of the things filling my head, that meaning is cold. Sterile. A fact I can regurgitate but do little else with. What I really want to know is why that hand bothered to feed me in the first place.

But how to get that out of her?

“Emily hates me.” It sounds childish, the way I blurt it out. And it's not what I meant to say at all, but it's the first sentence that comes to my mind—and refuses to leave—when I start thinking about everything that has happened today. “They all hate me. Why did you bring me back just so everyone here could hate me?” I force myself to keep staring at her, to not think about Seth and how I couldn't answer when he asked me this same thing.

“ ‘Why' can be a dangerous question,” the president says. “Lots of people go mad trying to answer it.”

“I'm already mad.”

She glances toward the couch I threw her gun beneath. “So it would seem.”

“You made me this way.”

Her eyes flutter shut for a moment, and the bemused grin she's been wearing slips a little. She reaches up and absently rubs her shoulder. It's hard to tell if she's grown thoughtful all of a sudden, or if she is simply fighting a losing battle with sleep. “No, I remade you. Into a blank slate that could go this way or that.”

“Right. And then gave me an ultimatum.”

“You still have the free will to ignore it.”

My face grows hot. “But at what cost?”

She stares blankly at something behind me as she answers in a quiet, careful voice. “One of your new life's little paradoxes, isn't it? You're free to choose, but you aren't free from the consequences of your choices. Welcome to the human existence.”

The room feels like it is growing smaller, frustration and irritation pinching my field of vision and blurring it together. These are not the answers I came in here for. They aren't answers at all—just the sort of philosophical musing that I hate. And this is the reason I never bothered to ask her why before tonight.

Because questions like “Why?” only lead to conversations that circle, and I prefer straight lines.

I search for a question that's easier—something to keep the conversation going, to keep her from turning and locking me out again. “Is that really all you had to say to me earlier? You dismissed the entire room just so you could give me a halfhearted lecture?”

“No. I dismissed the entire room because I was tired of talking to them,” she says, still rubbing her shoulder. It doesn't sound like the sort of thing a president should admit to, but she doesn't seem to care that I've heard it.

But then, what CCA members would I repeat it to, anyhow?

None of them would be interested in anything I had to say about her.

“And the only reason I called you in at all was to hopefully prevent a riot starting over you.” The word “hopefully” seems to choke out of her, as though she isn't ready to admit that she is relying on that hope. “If you haven't noticed,” she adds, “my bringing you back and having you stay here has not been the most . . . popular decision I've ever made as president. And you certainly didn't do much to help my cause tonight.”

“Why did you do it?” There it is again. That question I can't help asking, even knowing it will lead to nowhere.

“Why, indeed?” She seems to be searching for an actual answer at first, but then the president's eyes refocus on me, and both they and her tone grow laser sharp once more. “It's late,” she says. “See if you can manage to leave more quietly than you came in, why don't you?” Her hand finally drops from her shoulder as she turns away from me.

And I don't move, and I don't answer, because I am too busy staring at the skin her falling hand revealed. I've never seen it so exposed as this; she wears only a tank top with her navy, uniform-style leggings. And where her back and shoulders are normally completely covered, by stiff-collared blazers or CCA-emblem-embroidered jackets, right now they are completely bare—except for the strange purplish marks on her skin. Like bruises, only raised and stretched and twisted. There are dozens of them.

“What happened to your back?” I don't know why I ask. I don't know why I care.

She stops walking, tilts her head toward the ceiling, and lets out a quiet sigh. “What does it matter?”

I stare at her until a realization surfaces in my mind. “Those markings. They're from the virus, aren't they?” The same virus that made Catelyn's parents decide to clone their two original daughters. Catelyn has told me about it, about how sick it made her mother and so many others, and the way it left these permanent, ugly reminders of itself on their skin. I have never seen them in person, though. Because so many of the sick sided with Huxley,
not the CCA. It was Huxley, after all, that promised cloning as part of a way back to a healthy population, a way to “fix” that sickness they were passing on to their children.

“Everyone knows that I am a former Huxley employee,” the president tells me. “But not many know why I worked for them. They don't know that I was once sick—quite desperately sick. And I would prefer they didn't find out.”

Even as she talks, I don't take my eyes off the scars she has revealed. I suppose she hid them to avoid reminding people of her sickness and her connection to Huxley, but it still seems strange to me, going to such lengths to cover up such a large part of her past. Although, maybe that's only because I find myself so desperately wishing I could uncover at least part of mine. Especially after today.

“So let's keep this our little secret, shall we?” For the first time since I broke in, the president's tone carries a low threat with it. And I know it isn't hollow.

There is something else in her voice too, though, something that moves me farther back than any threat ever could have. I understand threats. I've heard enough of them that they don't faze me much anymore.

What I don't understand, though, is the quiet sadness tangled in with her threatening words—and that is why I back away from it, leaving her alone in the darkness of her room.

I can't stand the thought
of going back to my bed, so instead I slip out and into the city above—though I go only as far as the ruins of the parking garage that sits above the CCA's underground headquarters. I'll admit that Seth's cryptic invitation to meet him downtown does surface in my mind, but I crush it away just as quickly. I don't want to see anybody else right now. Especially not him. I have too many questions for him, and if my attempt to get answers from him were to go as well as my attempt to get them from President Cross, there is a good chance I might actually go insane.

So for the moment, at least, I head straight for the stairwell in one of the garage's corners instead. Its concrete steps are crumbling and crawling with weeds, and broken and burned-out light fixtures make most of my upward climb a blind one. But I don't need to see. I have made this climb several times before.

Aside from the few excursions I have made with Catelyn—to her house, once to the library, and to a handful of other places—I haven't seen much of the city that stretches below me. It's mostly silhouettes and shadows now. The nearly full moon is still gleaming overhead, even
though far in the distance I can see the eastern sky beginning to lighten. Bright streaks of blue reflect on some of the shinier steel buildings. The damp, heavy dew scent of coming morning saturates the air, and the city is already beginning to wake up, with the occasional quiet roar of the electronic shuttles over their tracks, and the rumble of jet-bike engines echoing between houses and businesses.

The safety walls along this top floor are in worse shape than the stairs, but I find a relatively sturdy looking stretch and hoist myself up. I creep forward bit by bit, until the toe of my left boot presses against the outer edge. Just far enough that it fires a warning through my brain. Then the other foot, just a little farther. . . .

I stop moving forward and straighten up. The wind seems to whip harder with every inch taller I stretch. I have excellent balance, but looking down—down, down, and farther down to the near-dead streets below—is dizzying. And I love it. All my thoughts from the past twenty-four hours weigh heavy on my mind, refusing to be filed away as neatly as I normally manage, but something about all the open air beneath me makes me feel lighter. Free.

What would it be like, I wonder, if I actually was free and able to go out into that city below? If people knew what I was, but it didn't matter? If I could be in that world below, instead of standing up here outside of it?

No more whispers, no more stares, no more questions.

On either side of my sturdy patch of wall, bright-yellow caution tape droops over some rougher-looking breaks in the concrete; but other than that, most everything else
around me looks as if it was given up on decades ago. I know there are city officials who are also CCA members, which is how I assume they keep this garage from being torn down even when its decrepit appearance probably makes most outsiders see it as a hazard at worst and wasted space at best. And there are others besides those officials, too, tasked with keeping unsuspecting civilians from wandering up and down these parking levels.

So I can usually count on being safe and undisturbed when I come here.

Which is why I almost lose my balance when something suddenly stings me in the back of the neck.

I spin around. Drop to a sturdier, crouched position and wrap my hands over the wall. At the top of the stairwell are half a dozen CCA members, led by two of the training-room group: Josh and Metal-Knuckles. On the ground below me is a tiny piece of chipped concrete that one of them must have thrown. Part of me is surprised they didn't try harder to sneak up on me and just shove me over the edge.

Part of me still wants them to try that and see what happens.

A taunt rises in my throat, but new warnings fire through my brain before I can get it out. I'm well past outnumbered. We're alone up here. They're likely armed.

There is something else stopping me too, as much as I don't want to admit it: my earlier conversation with President Cross. So much of her own organization is turning against her, at least partly thanks to her decision to have me stay here, and yet she continues to provide me
with food, with shelter. And tonight she led them all to believe that I would be punished, that she would treat me as the scapegoat they want me to be—only for her to then dismiss me with barely a harsh word. She called for no one when I cornered her in her room.

My stomach does an odd little flip, because here it is, happening again: a connection I don't need, to someone I don't want to be thinking about right now.

I glance behind me and over the edge, sizing up the distance between me and the next parking level, wondering if I could angle my drop well enough that I could roll safely into it. Probably. And perhaps I owe it to the president to not get in any more trouble than I can help.

Except I don't want to run. What she said about me having free will may be true, but running endlessly from this group still seems against something programmed deep in my brain.

“There's a rumor going around about you, you know,” Josh says, stepping forward.

I step down from the wall but don't answer him. My communicator buzzes at almost the exact same moment my feet hit the ground—Catelyn again, most likely. I ignore it, refusing to take my eyes from Josh's.

“People are saying you helped those clones earlier tonight,” he says. “That they saw you talking to them.”

I still don't believe “help” is the right word. But it isn't worth arguing.

“So they all expected you to run away, same as those others did,” he says. “Is that what you're doing up here? Or
are you thinking of doing the world a favor and jumping?”

He saunters toward the wall. I can't help noticing—with a grim, almost-satisfaction—that he makes certain to keep a wide berth between us. “Would it kill you then?” he asks, casually glancing over the edge. “A fall from this height, I mean.”

“Maybe. Maybe not.” I return the smirk he gives me. “But I have a feeling it would kill you. Would you like to jump together and see how we're both faring when we get to the bottom?”

Someone in the group lingering by the stairwell coughs something that sounds like “crazy bitch.” My attention snaps toward her before I can help it. I fully expect to see another of the training-room group—Emily—since it sounds like something she would say.

But it isn't her.

Because for once, she isn't here in her place among my regular tormentors.

And whether it is because she has simply dealt with enough clones for one day, or because she still mistakenly believes that I was thinking about helping her when I intervened earlier, I may never know. But it doesn't matter right now. The girl who did call me that has fixed a shaky but determined glare on me, and she is fumbling with something in her hands—a gun.

“Crazy,” I snap, taking a step toward her, “and yet I am not the one who thought following me up here and attempting to corner me was a good idea.”

“There are six of us,” Metal-Knuckles gruffly points out,
“one of you, and this time there's no one here to interrupt. No one here to witness anything, so there's no reason for us to hold back.”

No one else here,
warns that voice in my head again.
Alone, with no one to stop them.

But then a more vicious voice from someplace deeper answers it—corrects it.

We are alone, with no one to stop me.

“What do you plan to do then?” I ask. “Push me off the edge?”

“We could make it look like an accident so easily,” Josh assures me. “Alone up here, just a bunch of stupid kids messing around, sometimes things get out of hand.”