Numbers Ignite (24 page)

“Did you find him?” I coaxed.

“I found him.” Her expression hardened. “He was in his office, but he wasn’t alone. A girl—” A sob caught in her throat, and she looked away. I wrapped an arm around her. She stiffened, but she didn’t pull away. “A girl was with him. They were—she was on his lap, and his hands were all over her. Her uniform was unzipped to her waist, and I could see her white bra from the doorway.”

I felt sick. “He bribed her.”

“He
threatened
her.” Ruby sniffed, but her eyes were hard. “An hour with him, and her Rating score miraculously rose ten points. I checked. If she had fought him—well, I imagine that’s where many of our ‘surprise’ yellows come from. I started looking into it. It took some doing since the girls never talked, poor dears, but I eventually uncovered several other Rater colleagues with the same ‘perks.’ So I gathered my evidence and went to the Rating Councilman himself, Herbert Montgomery.”

“And?”

“He fired me.”

“He
what
?”

“Said I was imagining things, making false claims, and said he’d reassign me immediately with a huge Rating reduction. He said I’d be sent to a work camp if I told anyone about my findings.”

I sat back and swallowed hard. NORA could never admit to their system’s faults, no matter how awful. For all I knew, girls were still being faced with that choice. I thought back to my Rating Day a lifetime ago and how desperate I’d been to score well. It had been life itself to me. What would I have agreed to? “No wonder you left.”

“That, my dear Amy, is just the point. The people who haunt my dreams are not those horrible men. It’s the girls. Those precious, scared girls who thought they had no choice but to obey their masters, those men who wielded fate in their filthy hands.” She turned to me, suddenly fierce and determined. “I can’t remember what my own mother looked like. But I remember every detail about the girl. She had beautiful brown hair, curly and long, and a round face. I’ll never, ever forget the look she gave me. The pleading in her large eyes, the desperation. She’s the one who comes to my dreams. She’s the one who haunts me.” A single tear trickled down one cheek, but Ruby didn’t brush it away. Her face was steel. “She looked to me, the only person who could have done something, for salvation. And I left. I
left.
”

“You tried, Ruby. You went to the councilman himself.”

“I was a coward,” she snapped. “I caught a glimpse of the difficult journey ahead, then gave up after a single step.”

I wanted to tell her she was wrong, that she was a good person, a victim of NORA just like anyone else. But that felt wrong somehow. Ruby had lived in torment for over fifty years. Nothing I said would change anything. Instead I wrapped my arms around her for a hug. She clung to me like my mother used to, and my breath caught at the warmth in her embrace.

“You’ve a long life ahead of you, Ametrine,” Ruby said. “I know you’ve seen more pain and darkness than a sixteen-year-old should.” She pulled back and turned determined eyes on me. “But I see greatness in you. Where I failed, you will continue until all is set right again. Leadership is in your blood.” She patted my shoulder. “Get some sleep. If you still want to leave in the morning, I’ll set aside some supplies.”

I couldn’t sleep. I finally sat up and looked around. The desert floor was dotted with black shadows, all settlers asleep with their families. A few guards stood at the edges, keeping watch, but I wasn’t sure what they were supposed to do if NORA came. They had no weapons.

With a grunt, I stood and headed toward the nearest guard, then blinked in surprise. It was Violet.

“Headed toward the latrine,” I told her, and she hesitated briefly before nodding. But when I made my way down the slope and around the hill, I stopped and hugged myself, rubbing my arms for warmth. I felt like I could breathe here, away from all the accusing eyes. This was the first time I’d been truly alone for a very long time.

No, I’d been alone for weeks. I’d just been surrounded by people. One of the two people who had shown unconditional kindness would probably never speak to me again, and I couldn’t blame him.

My thoughts began to grow fuzzy as I stood there, staring at the empty desert. I turned reluctantly back toward the camp—and froze, squinting. Some of the stars in the distance had just disappeared, then reappeared again in turn.

“What the fates?” I muttered. I followed the phenomenon in a line. There it was again, moving fast. Something dark against the sky. I strained to hear, but there was no sound.

I stared in the direction it had gone, unblinking.
It wasn’t a chopper. Some kind of scouting plane designed for stealth? Had they seen us? The aircraft continued on its eastward course, and then I lost sight of it in the darkness. If it came in for another pass, we were in big trouble. Panic welled up inside me, and I turned to run back and warn the settlers.

And bumped into someone.

“Amy,” someone whispered.

“Coltrane? What are you doing out here?”

“Well, I was going to use the latrine, but then I saw something really weird. Did you see it too?”

“Yeah. Was that the aircraft you saw the night you found me?”

“Maybe.”

“We have to warn them. That thing might come around again.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think so. It was moving too fast to be a scouting plane. Besides, it was headed straight for the next town.”

“There’s another city out here?”

“They’re all over the place.”

We strained to listen in the darkness, closely watching the sky overhead. My heart pounded so loudly I wondered if he could hear it. “Coltrane, I’m so sorry—”

“Don’t.”

An awkward silence followed, and then I straightened. “I’m going to follow it.”

“You’re going to
what
?”

“We have to know what that thing was. Maybe there are soldiers ahead, setting up a trap for us.”

“And you’ll walk right into it and make a bigger mess of things.”

His words stung, but I shook my head. “I’m still going. You can come if you want.” I started walking.

“Fine.” He trotted up beside me. “But for the record, I think this is a bad idea.”

“You’re probably right.”

We walked for the next hour in silence.

I sat on a pile of blankets and old bandages and struggled to pull my boot on. It was still a little soggy, and the leather had shrunk. It refused to allow my foot entrance. Pain lanced through my shoulder as I pulled harder, and with a sucking sound, my foot finally slipped inside. I picked up the other one.

“There you are,” Edyn said, holding the flap of the tent open. “Mills is throwing a hissy fit. He thought you escaped.” She wore a pink blouse and black trousers that fit her curves perfectly. Her blonde hair fell in soft waves past her shoulders. While I’d been recovering from a gunshot wound, she’d been curling her hair. Typical Edyn.

“That’s the plan,” I told her.

“Hmm. Must be tough work, trying to get yourself killed. Need a hand with that boot?”

“Nope.” The second foot slid in without a problem. I shoved myself to my feet and ducked out of the shelter and into the sunlight.

“You’re going out like that?” she asked, following me out.

I looked down and remembered my shirt was gone, torn and discarded in the mayhem last night. The bruises from my run-in with the clan had turned yellow and brown, and my shoulder was heavily bandaged. “I’ve seen plenty of men go without shirts here.”

Her mouth curved downward into a petite frown. “True, but none of them look quite like you at the moment.” She gestured at my chest. “I’m not sure whether you’ll send women swooning or screaming.”

“As long as they’re out of my way, it doesn’t matter.” I wasn’t sure how I’d get to the rim in broad daylight, but at the moment I didn’t care. I started for the trail.

She jumped in front of me. “Where are you going, exactly?”

Selia was nowhere to be seen. Even the usual neighborhood kids were gone. I’d overslept. “I’m not sticking around until Mills figures out where I am. I’m going to find my mom and sisters.”

“And then?”

“Then we’re out of here.”

Edyn gave a dramatic sigh and folded her arms. “Someone tried to kill you last night. Aren’t you curious to find out who it was?”

I looked past her to the trail. “Everyone wants to kill me. Some are more patient than others.”

“Vance,” she said, grabbing my arms to keep me in place. “A few days ago I would’ve told you to run. But things are changing. We need you. I’ve talked to dozens of settlers in the last two days, and most of them are on your side. They respect you. At the very least they feel sorry for you.”

I chuckled. “Back home you always felt bad when we brought home meat for dinner. You’d go on about the poor elk or rabbit whose life had been snuffed out. But in the end you ate it anyway.”

She flinched. “I don’t eat meat anymore. I’m a vegetarian.”

“So you kill vegetables instead of animals. My analogy stands.” I started to push past her, but she put a gentle hand on my chest. Her expression had changed from irritated to open and vulnerable. Her lips were the same soft pink as her shirt, and I had to tear my eyes away.

“I want you to stay, Vance,” she whispered. “Please listen to what I’m saying. I think we can get you off for the murders.”

“I didn’t murder anyone.”

“I know that, and soon everyone else will too.” She leaned in, her body right up against my stomach. “There’s nothing out there for you. Your family has a comfortable home, Vance. I know you think our clan is being treated unfairly, but we can figure that out. Besides,” she whispered, her lips just inches from mine, her voice trembling, “now that I have you back, I don’t know if I can let you go.”

Edyn’s head tilted upward, and she slid her hand up my chest, carefully avoiding the bandage. Her fingers reached my unshaven jaw, then curved around to my hair. It sent a shiver down to my feet.

“You don’t know what I’ve gone through,” she whispered. “To spend years defending you, hearing horrible stories from refugees about what you’re doing in a place I’ve never been. All the nights spent wondering if you thought of me, hoping you didn’t find someone else but also hoping you weren’t alone. And now that you’re finally here in front of me, you can’t wait to leave.”

Edyn, Rutner’s daughter. This was what our parents had wanted. I still remembered my mother’s secretive smile when we went off to play and the way my father asked how she was doing at dinner, as if he hadn’t just seen her hours before. If NORA hadn’t attacked, we’d probably be a couple by now.

But that was another life. Even now I thought about Treena—the way she’d run, determined and unarmed, from a group of men twice her size. How she gripped her necklace when she was worried. At her orientation, she had tried to cover up the fact that she’d found smugglers. Treena, the successor to the throne, had chosen to protect a young girl she didn’t even know. In her first hour in the empress’s task force, she’d done what I hadn’t been able to do in two years.

Then I’d given her my heart, and she’d smashed it. Why was it so hard to remember that part? Treena didn’t care for me. She’d chosen bliss with Bike Boy.