Legion Lost (20 page)

“You
know, Goddie’s been trying for years to turn me to the gay side,” he says in a
small, quiet mumble. “I was pretty sure that was never on the cards, until I
met you.”

He
looks at me, his bright eyes drinking in my face. It makes me feel nervous and
totally unguarded.

“I
don’t know what the hell I’m feeling for you, Raja, but I know it’s strong.”

He
reaches out, touching my chin with his warm fingertips.

“There’s
just something about you that I really, really like.”

I
want to tell him the truth. I can see how confused he is, and how every move
he’s making is made with total uncertainty, like he can’t quite admit what he
might want to do next. I can feel it in the way his fingers are urging my face
just that little bit closer to his, and I know that if I tell him now that I’m
really a girl, then that “something” about me will finally make sense to him. I
should tell him the truth, but I don’t. Instead, I raise my hand to his, slowly
pulling his touch away from my chin and holding his fingers in my grip.

“Now
isn’t the time to talk about this,” I say, and the words feel heavy on my
tongue.

Stirling
glances at his watch, and I can see the downward twitch of disappointment on
his lips.

“You’re
right,” he answers, in words that are almost a sigh. “We’ve got a Legion to
burn.”

The
dinner service is usually hard, but it’s nigh-on impossible with only two of
us. My only consolation is the hope that this will be the very last time I ever
have to do one. To make matters worse, it seems to me that Stirling is
deliberately avoiding cleaning certain portions of the canteen floor, like the
huge slop of wet tomatoes right by the exit doors, and the smeared rivers of
gravy that have trickled down many of the aisles between the tables. Even
though he seems to be making no progress whatsoever with his mop, Stirling
still holds it firmly in his grip, and I think I can guess the reason why.

The
cooks leave the kitchen once the last of the food is dished up, stepping
gingerly between the pool of tomatoes and the dark figure of Commander Briggs,
where he stands at the dining hall’s exit. Briggs’s steely eyes rove over the
final two tables of soldiers, only to find me looking at him beyond them. I cast
my eyes to the floor immediately, approaching Stirling with loud, clumsy steps.

“I’m
going to start cleaning the ovens,” I tell him, my voice unnecessarily loud to
ensure that Briggs hears it.

Stirling
glances up to the canteen’s high windows and I follow his gaze. The sun is far
below the opening, leaving thick black clouds to settle in at the highest part
of the sky. Stirling gives me a nod, and I work my way past the last tables to set
our plan in motion. As I move, someone kicks me hard in the back of my leg. I
stumble to stay on my feet, my teeth gritted with instant resentment.

“Scrub-a-dub-dub,
little reject,” says Berkeley.

It’s
a shame he wasn’t one of the raiders to meet a nasty end the other day
.
I shake the thought off quickly, shocked by my own cruelty, and shove a little
smile onto my face instead.

“Will
do, Scarface,” I shoot back.

Lucrece’s
nail marks still run down Berkeley’s cheek, leaving a raised welt there that’s
a different colour to the rest of his skin. He doesn’t approve of my choice of
nickname, so I rocket to the kitchens sharply, before he can start to respond. Alone
in the long, white room, the foul smell of grease invades my nose, and the lack
of colour brings out the filth all around me—the by-product of feeding several
hundred teenagers at once. Usually, I meet this view with contempt that it’s
become my job to clean it, but today, things are different. Today, the filth is
my friend.

I
move to the first oven, pulling it forward and examining the wires behind it.
Yesterday, whilst we were in here cleaning, Stirling explained to me how all
the ovens run on electric power. If the plastic-coated wires at the back of
them become damaged or exposed, they create sparks. In a kitchen coated with
this much grease and oil, a spark is all we need to start a blaze. The trick is
not getting electrocuted whilst I do the damage.

With
my hand covered by a rubber cleaning glove, I start ripping wires out of the
walls behind the whole row of ovens. There are a dozen in total, and by the
time I reach the last one, the first has already started to spark and splutter
with volts of energy. I grab hold of every grease-soaked rag and oily container
I can find, throwing them closer to the sparks to let them catch the flame. A
trail of filth leads the slow-burning fire back towards the sinks and surfaces,
where more of the flammable substances wait. The cooks have always ensured that
they leave the kitchens as nasty as possible for us rejects to scrub, and now
it’s finally done us a crucial favour. The fire is beginning to blaze fully as
I burst back through the kitchen doors.

“Help!”
I shout, flailing like a weak and frightened child. “Fire, sir! Commander
Briggs! I don’t know what happened! It’s a fire, sir!”

Briggs
looks thoroughly unimpressed with my pleas, until a sudden bang from within the
kitchen makes the other soldiers jump in unison. Stirling is already slipping
past Briggs’s broad back as the commander reaches me. With a single hand, Briggs
picks me up by the collar, lifting me clear off the ground as I pull against
the hold. His teeth are bared close to my eyes, and he speaks through their
gritted grimace.

“If
I find out that you’re to blame for this, reject . . . ”

He
leaves the threat hanging, dropping me to the ground so that he can clap his
hands together loudly.

“All
right soldiers, firefighter formation. Keep the pack tight and let’s get this
little blaze under control.”

Stirling’s
earlier laziness has paid off, because the startled soldiers have a hard time
getting into any kind of formation, their feet slipping in the goop left on the
floor. As they stumble into lines, Briggs rolls his eyes and marches past them
all in irritation, opening the kitchen door to inspect the damage for himself.

“Backdraft!”
Stirling shouts in warning, and I can tell what he means by what happens next.

When
Briggs exposes the tightly contained kitchen fire to the oxygen in the canteen,
a huge wall of flames shoots out towards him. The blast makes a deafening sound
and engulfs the commander in flames at once, sending him flying into the air.
He crashes into one of the dining tables, which shatters beneath him as his
soldiers stare on in shock. The blaze is too big for them to fight alone, and it’s
starting to spread into the wide canteen.

I
feel a hand grip me, turning just in time to see Stirling smash his fist
through the fire alarm on the wall.

“This
is it! Come on!” he shouts.

We
race out of the dining hall doors, closing them again as Stirling shoves his
mop through the door handles. I glance at the panicked soldiers now trapped
inside, then back at Stirling with a questioning stare.

“Do
we have to trap them in there?” I plead.

“We
have to trap Briggs, at least for a little while,” Stirling replies bitterly.
“Someone will get them out soon. That’s more than my people got.”

He
yanks at my hand and we burst out into the compound. At the sound of the alarm,
the cabin-loads of soldiers have all emerged to see what’s going on. As we pass
every one of them, we shout the news that Briggs and the others are trapped in
the fire, and soon everyone is rushing for the dining hall.

Everyone
except us. Stirling leads me towards the Bastion tower and we run under its
central arch, just in time to see Apryl flinging two automatic guns in our
direction. I catch mine and hook it around my neck, shocked to see Goddie
holding his to Sheila’s head. The tall woman is reduced to a crouching heap,
her neck locked under Goddie’s powerful, muscular arm. Her face is as stern and
unmoving as ever whilst Goddie drags her towards the exit and the medical
building beyond it.

“A
hostage?” I shout at Stirling. “You never said anything about taking a hostage!”

“We
need her,” Stirling says, a deep seriousness in his eyes.

He
isn’t wrong. The doctors in the white medical building have been alerted by the
alarms too, but when they see Goddie holding a gun to Sheila’s head, they back
away from us with wary, fearful glares. The only one to stand in our way is Dr
Bartlett, who blocks the central exit with his short, stocky body. His solid
frame is bathed in fluorescent light, the darkening wasteland shadowed behind
him as he gives us all a shady smile.

“Come
now, children,” he says in a false, soothing voice. “You don’t really want to
hurt anyone, do you?”

The
gunshot rings out in the same moment that the doctor’s words end. Bartlett
crumples to the ground, clutching a bleeding wound high on his thigh. Stirling
and I are the first to leap over him, then I turn back to help Goddie get
Sheila past him too. It’s now that I see the tip of Apryl’s gun smoking. She
narrows her eyes at the doctor as he writhes on the floor, giving him a
powerful kick to the ribs.

“That
was for Lucrece, you bastard,” she seethes.

Panic
sets in as I hear the other doctors running toward the compound. They’re going
for help, to find someone to stop us from escaping. I know that there’s nothing
but wasteland all around us, and the quickest path to cover is straight across
the minefield ahead. I rue Stirling for his stupid, reckless plan, running out
into the darkness with no hope of freedom. Hot, angry tears threaten to burst
from the corners of my eyes as I follow my fellow rejects, the weight of my own
hopelessness getting heavier all the time.

That
is, until my eyes befall the minefield. Stirling said we had to wait for
sundown before we could go, and now I see why. Someone has painted luminous
lines across the wasteland. As the plain grows darker ahead, the trail glows
brighter, leading us safely between the deadly mines with a clearly marked
passageway. It is long and winding, but it will get us to the other side.

“I’ll
lead,” Stirling shouts, already advancing on the path. “Goddie, keep Sheila at
the back of us so they won’t try to shoot.”

“Got
it, boss,” Goddie replies, and suddenly we’re off across the wasteland.

“How
did you do this?” I ask as we carefully follow the painted path. “Stirling?
When did you get outside to mark this up?”

Stirling
turns to me a little, his expression mixed somewhere between pain and apology.

“I
didn’t,” he reveals.

“HIGHLANDER!”

Briggs’s
voice booms across the wasteland, and I glance back to see the gargantuan man
standing at the wasteland’s edge.

“So
long, Commander!” Stirling shouts back with a wave. “I wouldn’t try to follow
us, if I were you. One shot at any of those mines, and you’re a dead man.”

“Unless
we blow you up first!” Briggs retorts. Soldiers are forming a crowd behind him,
many of them suited up with guns.

“Go
ahead,” Stirling answers, “but you’ll kill Sheila here in the process.”

Sheila
is our one bargaining chip. So long as her life is in danger, we can make our
way across the wasteland. We move on again, secure in the knowledge that Briggs
won’t endanger the Legion’s staff just to get even with a bunch of teenage
runaways. He isn’t that petty. He isn’t that foolish. He wouldn’t kill one of
his own people for the sake of his pride.

It
deafens us all when a mine goes off to our right.

“Ah!”

Goddie
cries out, and I spin on the spot to see him suddenly laid out on the ground.
Though the blast wasn’t close enough to kill him, its impact has ripped a
massive gash into his left leg. The limb is hanging off at an unnatural angle,
like the slightest tug would force it to break off altogether. Goddie stares
down at the wound with delirious fascination, and I have to hold my stomach to
control my reaction to the grim sight. A broken bone juts out of his flesh at a
fearful jagged angle.

Stirling
grabs a shocked Sheila by the arm, barking at us to drag Goddie along by his
shoulders. As I reach down to aid my fellow reject, I can see Briggs fighting
with his handgun on the perimeter of the minefield. It looks like he’s jammed
it, and I smile with relief as we start gaining ground again. Briggs looks up
across the darkening land, and I know by his snarl that he’s spotted me
laughing at him. I have made a crucial mistake, to be so complacent so soon.

“After
them!” Briggs demands.

I
watch for one, horrified moment as he bounds forward along the luminous path. I
try to speed up, but Goddie is too heavy, and I fear that Briggs will reach us
before we can get to the forest’s edge. These woods are our only chance to hide
now, our chance to conceal ourselves from the Legion’s fast-approaching guns. I
turn my head, eager to see how close we are to the safety of the woods. As I
do, I let loose a sudden, terrified yell.

Dark
figures race towards us from the trees, packed with the same ferocity and speed
of Briggs and his crew. This new pack of warriors cry out in a furious battle
roar, filled with sharp moves and savage expressions that leave me only one
conclusion as to who they are. The Highlanders have chosen this moment to make
their attack, whilst we are trapped in the middle of the minefield. And leading
the wild warriors is a face I know, and sorely wish that I didn’t.