Numbers Ignite (5 page)

She watched my gaze sweep over her and gave a wide smile. “So you see me now. You never noticed me before.”

I cleared my throat. “Noticed what?”

“It’s not important.” She tossed a water pouch into my cell, then pulled up a chair and sat so close I could touch her. She crossed her legs daintily and clasped her hands together. “Might want to drink that before they find out. They won’t waste water on a prisoner.”

I sat and clicked open the pouch, grateful that the guards had finally removed my cuffs. A whiff revealed nothing about the contents. I stuck a finger in and sniffed, then wet my lips with it. It was definitely water, and not the disgusting NORA kind, either.

“As untrusting as ever, I see,” Edyn said, swatting away a mosquito. “We only have eight days before your trial, and most of the settlers think you’re a traitor. We’ll have to change that.”

I took a long swig, then wiped my mouth with my sleeve. Blasted Mills. He hadn’t been lying about the settlers’ loyalties. Not only that, but he’d also had two weeks to spread rumors about my involvement in the attack before I even arrived. My ragged clothes and stubble as they paraded me down here probably hadn’t helped either. “We?”

“Of course. You and me.”

“And you would help me because…?”

She rolled her eyes, suddenly looking a lot more like the girl I’d known before. “Because I’m your lawyer, stupid.”

“You, a lawyer?”

“I’m the one who should be asking the questions, Vance. But, to satisfy your curiosity, yes. I’ve studied under Caralyn Kelly for the past two years. She’s too old and sick to help you, though, so don’t bother asking. Mills is the only other lawyer here, and he’s representing the prosecution, so you get me.”

“Hold on, hold on.” I held up a hand and tossed the empty water packet aside. “You’ve been studying the last two years?” If she had received her NORA assignment at age sixteen, she could have only studied law for a year. There was no sign of a Rating implant in her forehead, but it could have been removed and healed by now.

A little color swept into her cheeks, but to her credit, she met my gaze levelly. “I didn’t get captured.”

I sat back. “Impossible.”

“Quite possible. While everyone else was gathering, I climbed onto the roof and hid. I saw everything.”

With that, the horrible memories of that night came rushing back. Rutner, her father, had started evacuating everyone. When they reached the tree line, the NORA soldiers had attacked. I arrived as the first bodies fell. I didn’t know then that the NORA soldiers intended to stun everyone and bring them down the mountain. All I saw were people falling left and right to their silent weapons and the fire spreading behind us. Some of the stunned settlers never made it out. Their bodies were enveloped before the NORA soldiers could get to them.

Yelling to my people to run, barely feeling the rocky ground under my bare feet and fighting for everyone I loved, I had taken out soldier after soldier. I hadn’t known that NORA officials were watching.

They didn’t shoot me. I had thought I was the only one.

“Even if NORA soldiers missed you somehow,” I told her, “the fire spread too fast. Once it destroyed the settlement, it spread to the trees. It took NORA two days to contain it. There’s no way you could’ve gotten out of there alive.”

Edyn’s gaze wavered. “I found the body of a NORA soldier and stole her clothing. Nobody noticed when I walked away.”

She had walked away.
During
the fighting. I set my jaw, my anger fighting to the surface. “We needed everyone we could get.”

“I went for help.” She laughed bitterly. “Seems stupid now, I know, but I really believed I could talk the Romero clan into coming to the rescue. I walked all night and got there the next evening, but they had fled. Must have known about the attack somehow and relocated.”

I shook my head. “You just sat there. Hid and watched your own clan fall, one by one. Watched your own
family
get gunned down.”

Edyn jumped to her feet and began to pace, running a hand through her hair. She always did that when she was frustrated. “I watched you fight.”

“And that makes it okay?” I snapped.

She stopped pacing and looked at me, pleading. “I was fifteen, Vance. What was I going to do? People were being gunned down in every direction. But I didn’t dare look away from you. For some reason I thought that if you could stand against them, everyone would be fine. I watched you ducking behind things, stealing rifles from bodies and shooting, then ducking again. And then that last stand. You fought just like your father.”

I tried to hold on to my anger, to keep it from slipping through my fingers, but it began to dissolve. She was right. Edyn had no weapons, no training. Few of our settlers had. They had depended on my father and the circle to protect them. I couldn’t blame her for that.

“I’ve relived that nightmare for two years, Vance. Nearly every night. I see you out there, fighting for us like it was the last thing you’d ever do. Like you expected to be killed any second and didn’t even care.” She folded her arms and stared me down with a strange intensity. “But there’s something I don’t understand. After all that, they didn’t even shoot you. Everyone else ended up on the ground, but not you. Why?”

Suddenly weary, I sat back against the bars. “That’s irrelevant at this point.”

“If I’m going to represent you, I need to know why our clan hates you so much.”

“You already know the answer to that.”

She sat again and curled her legs beneath her. “I want to hear it from you.”

I didn’t answer for a long time. She just cocked her head and watched me as if she had all the time in the world. The prison that had seemed so empty before now felt too small. Edyn wasn’t going away until she had what she wanted. And, frankly, I had nothing better to do.

So I told her. The Demander and the deal he’d backed out on, the empress and her extermination order, Treena and her climb to the throne. I left out the more pleasant moments with Treena and the fact that I’d brought her unconscious body to the hospital. The memory of her peaceful expression, eyes closed in sleep, was as vivid as if it had happened this morning.

Her physician had tried to usher me out several times, but something wouldn’t let me leave until I said good-bye.

And then her Rating had changed. One moment it was red; then, in a blink, it was green. In half a second she’d gone from the bottom of her society to the very top.

I knew then that it was a hopeless cause. She’d gotten what she wanted. I was a fool to stay. It was time I shoved my feelings aside and moved on.

“So that girl,” Edyn said slowly when I finished. “Treena. You helped her take the throne so our clan could escape under her direction?”

“Yep.”

“And that’s the only reason.”

“Of course.”

Edyn cocked her head at my tone. “There were no personal feelings involved there at all.”

“I’m not sure what you’re getting at.”

Disappointment filled her features. “We don’t have much to work with, then. It’s not like there’s any doubt you switched sides. Mills will have tons of witnesses to that effect. And you negotiated with my dad as a representative of NORA, trying to get us to help you and Treena.”

“Them,” I corrected. “Don’t say
us
. You weren’t there.”

Her lips pursed, but she didn’t argue. “We’ll have to hide the fact that you tried to run instead of letting yourself be arrested and tried for your crimes.”

“What I intended to do isn’t the point. I showed up for arrest like we always planned.”

“True. You’re here now, and that’s admirable. Idiotic, actually. But one thing isn’t clear. Why? What made you come back to the palace when the bomb hit?”

“I overheard two guards talking about Mills and a bomb that was supposed to hit the square. Our entire clan was headed that way, so I thought I could intercept them before it was too late.”
And I wanted to save Treena’s life.

Edyn’s eyes flew open wide. “Mills? They mentioned him?”

“You heard me. Mills arranged the attack. And now he’s trying to pin it on me. It won’t work, though. Too many people know the truth.”

She got slowly to her feet, shaking her head. “Mills never left here. If he arranged for a missile attack, he had contact with someone on the outside.”

“He spoke with me twice via the feed,” I pointed out. It had never occurred to me that the reason he didn’t have a Rating was because he lived outside the borders. I should have questioned that.

Edyn gave me a long look. “If you say so. Well, I have a lot of work to do. You managed to screw up a lot of lives along with yours.”

“Misery loves company. Can you find my mom and tell her I’m here? She hasn’t stopped by yet.”

The last time I’d seen my mom was on a tiny screen. Our conversation had been rushed, mostly an explanation of my deal with Mills and how he was going to smuggle them out. She’d sat huddled in an apartment building with gray walls, whispering, her tired eyes darting about the room as we spoke. She never did look me right in the eye. It was like having a conversation with a stranger.

Edyn hesitated. “I’ll tell her.” Then she turned to leave but paused. “Do you ever think—no, that’s a dumb question.”

“What?” I asked.

Her gaze looked haunted. “Do you ever wonder what would have happened if NORA hadn’t come? If you’d taken your father’s place?”

I snickered. “Not really. I would’ve made a horrible leader.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

I leaned back and stretched casually. I knew exactly what she meant. She was referring to the arrangement our parents had tried to set up, the one we’d both resisted. “It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Yeah. I know it doesn’t. I just wondered.” She pushed the door open.

“Edyn,” I called after her.

“Yeah.”

“Thanks for your help. It’s good to know there’s someone on my side.”

She shrugged. “I’m probably the only person right now, but you’re welcome.”

The hours crept by, then one day, then two. Coltrane took it upon himself to entertain me with stories. For a fifteen-year-old, he had a lot of them, and he rarely paused for breath. I half listened, picking out the interesting tidbits about this settlement. There were several hundred members, all of whom lived underground, and it took forty minutes to walk from one end to the other. Apparently there were far more boys than girls, a strange phenomenon Coltrane dismissed with a shrug.

Lillibeth and Coltrane left twice a day to eat at the cafeteria and bring me back my meal, which always included potatoes in some form—mashed, sliced, baked, seared. If I dared use all of Lillibeth’s nutrition pills, I would have asked for those instead. Somewhere in NORA, a young girl had been taken from her father and fostered out, all because of a potato. She had offered me her precious food, and I’d returned her kindness by having her arrested.

And now I had to eat them at every meal. It seemed the fates wanted to keep my wrongdoings squarely in the center of my mind.

If I could go back and help her, I would
,
I reasoned as I forced down the horrid, mushy food on day two.
That girl had probably found a foster family to stay with. She’d have a home and food, which was more than I could say for myself once I left this place.

By evening, when Coltrane finished telling me about the time a rabbit got into the ventilation shaft, Lillibeth came in to check my leg. It had begun to hurt again. After she injected the painkiller, I gave a long sigh of relief. She cleaned up and closed the medicine cabinet and gave her usual practiced smile. “I think your ankle has healed enough that you can travel a bit. Let’s have you take a short walk. Coltrane, would you mind grabbing the crutches?”

“You bet.” He bolted out of the room.

“Wait,” I said. “You mean outside?”

“Of course not,” she said quickly. “Just out of our dwelling and into the tunnel, down to the corner and back. Let’s see how the tissue is responding to the medication.”

“But—what if people see me?”

She gave me a long look. “Why is it a problem if they see you?”