Parched (37 page)

Now I have your attention, don't I?

“Tess, go into my bedroom and lock the door.”

I rolled my eyes. “Mom, relax. It's fine—”

“Now!”

“Don't tell me what to do!”

“Tess, you are upset.” Magnus rose from my bed, far too big, far too tall
.

“Magnus, I want you to follow me downstairs,” Mom said slowly. “I'm going to take you back to Simutech.”

“I want to stay with Tess.”

Her eyes snapped to mine in shock. Smugly, I took a few steps toward him, folded my arms, and shrugged. “He wants to stay with me, Mom.”

“Magnus,” Mom said louder, looking directly at him. “I'm going to take you back to Simutech. I'm going to take you back there right now. Everything is going to be fine.”

“It's been more than fine, Mom,” I sneered. “I've been showing your little project the real world and he loves it—”

“Dammit, Tessendra!” Tears shone in her brilliant blue eyes. “This ends now, whatever it is! Magnus, get downstairs!”

“No. I want to stay with Tess.”

“I said, get downstairs!” In a furious panic, Mom hurtled toward me and tried to wrench me away from him. In one swift movement, Magnus latched on to her wrist. I heard the crunch of breaking bones. My mother gasped then cried in pain, a terrible, nightmarish sound
.

“Magnus, stop! Stop it!” He immediately did, standing upright, right beside me. Substitutes can't hurt people. But Magnus isn't a substitute. Magnus is something else
.

“Get away from Tess.” My mother gasped, clutching her arm to her chest, afraid to touch me. I stood stock-still, frozen by shock. Things were unraveling and I didn't know how to stop them. “Leave the room. Now. That's an order.”

“I will not. I love her. I love Tess.”

“Don't say that!” my mother cried. “This is wrong, but I can fix it.”

“But I am not broken.” His voice was changing. His words were coming quicker
.

“Magnus, come here!” Mom ordered
.

“No, Mom, stop!” I cried
.

“You cannot stop me from being with her—”

“You bastard!” The words ripped out of her, possessed by a force greater than all of us. “I'll destroy you myself if I have to!”

“No!”
Magnus shouted
.

“Magnus!” I screamed, hysterical and sick
. “Get away from my mother!”

But I cannot stop him from grabbing her. I cannot stop him from picking her up. And I cannot stop him from throwing her, sickeningly hard and fast, across my bedroom
.

The splintered crash of a mirror breaking
.

“Mom!” I screamed, falling onto my hands and knees. I crawled to her like a baby. I slipped in the blood. “Mommy!” I rolled her over and my heart stopped. She was broken. Her eyes were unseeing. There was so much blood. “No! No, no, no,” I whimpered. It was the only word I could say
.

And then, his voice
.

“No one will separate us. I love you, Tess.”

Three long, drawn-out words bring me back to the present. “How. Extremely. Interesting,” breathes Gyan.

I open my eyes to see everyone staring at me, dumbstruck. My cheeks are hot and wet—I didn't realize I'd been crying. I wipe at them with the back of my hand, which is shaking uncontrollably.

Now everyone knows the truth. But the truth has spared the life of someone in Kudzu.

Hunter sits next to Gyan, spine as straight as a ruler. Unlike everyone else, his face is as blank as a substitute's. If my story had any impact on him, I can't tell.

“Right,” Gyan announces. “Now that I finally have all the facts, I'm satisfied we can safely begin Project Aevum. Immediately.”

“No!” I gasp. “You can't!”

“Take them all to the Interrogation Room,” Gyan continues. “If they don't wish to divulge the real whereabouts of their coconspirators, you have authority to execute.”

“What? No!” shouts Abel, who is instantly restrained and gagged.

“What?”
I gape at Gyan. “You said you'd spare one of my friends. You said it!” I shout. “You just told me!”

Gyan places one hand possessively on Hunter's shoulder. He regards me as if I am an ant he'd take great pleasure in squashing. “I lied.”

Two Tranqs haul me out of my chair. The rest of Kudzu are in front of me, screaming and cursing. Gyan begins speaking with Hunter as if we weren't there. “I assume, Aevum,” I hear him say, “that you're expecting a one hundred percent success rate?”

I'm the last one at the door, about to be shoved out by a Tranquil. “No!” I yell. “He's not!” Gyan ignores me, but Hunter glances in my direction curiously. “He expects a ninety-six-point seven percent success rate,” I gasp desperately.

Hunter's jaw loosens in surprise, his thick eyebrows drawn close. “How did you know that?”

Two Tranqs lift me to pull me from the room, but I grip the door frame, babbling frantically. “You told me, Hunter! You care about me, you know you do! You can't do this! You can't kill all those people!”

Hunter is staring at my arm, stock-still and almost trancelike. He's looking at the cell branding—the strange markings that don't look like the other prisoners'. My eyes flit from the branding back to him. His head snaps up to find my gaze, fast and almost desperate. For the first time since he entered the room, there's something alive in his eyes. Is it recognition?

“Hunter!” I scream, but it's too late. I'm out of the room and he's gone.

My feet skip and slide across the shiny floor as the Tranqs drag me along. Far off in the distance, I hear the horrible caw of a thousand crows. Then I realize it's the sound of Kudzu, yelling in protest. The long, low doglike moan is me, a sound I wasn't aware of making.

Shick
. The neat whisper of a door disappearing reveals white light and colorful scribbles of movement. The Tranquils let me go and I fall like a puppet cut loose from its strings.

Silence. No. Not silence. A soft and gentle fluttering.

“What the—” says Ling.

“Where are we?” Naz sounds nervous.

“They're not really going to kill us?” Achilles asks, petrified. “That's just rhetoric, right?”

“Tess?” Fingers pull my bottom eyelid down. A burn of white light. I flinch and pull away. Ling says, “She's conscious. Help me sit her up.” Hands try to lift me, my back slumping against a wall. “Where are we?”

“I don't know,” Achilles says nervously. “This is . . . weird.”

“C'mon, Rockwood. Don't be such a baby,” Naz growls.

I moan.

“There you go.”

I am sitting up. And because I don't want to be a baby, even now, I make myself open my eyes.

We are in a bright, white, square room, empty except for us. In the four walls that surround us, and yes, even in the roof overhead, are butterflies.

Hundreds and hundred of butterflies—iridescent green, black-and- yellow-striped, electric blue. Some are as large as dinner plates, some as tiny as moths. They are fluttering around what must be a huge butterfly sanctuary, open except for the cube of space we are in. Looking through the clear wall I'd been leaning against, I can see out about twenty feet before the sanctuary ends, but because the walls are all painted white, it's impossible to get a clear perspective on the space. Except for the butterflies, it is distressingly barren. No weapons. Not even a chair. And, like the rest of the Three Towers, it is absolutely freezing.

Naz pounds the white door we must've come through with her only fist, swearing. She runs her fingers around the edge of it, but the gap between the door and the wall isn't wide enough for even a pinky. She slams her fist into a glass wall. It is so thick, it barely makes a sound. “Hey! Let us out of here!
Hey!
”

Achilles massages his wrists nervously. “Not sure ‘let us out' is going to win them over at this stage. Besides, didn't your parents ever tell you tapping on the glass disturbs the animals?”

“My parents are stuck out in the Badlands, about to be killed! Just like us! I've got bigger problems than some stupid butterflies,” Naz snaps, kicking the glass hard. I flinch. That looked painful.

“That's not helping anyone—”

“Shut up, Zamata!” she says tearfully, kicking the glass again. “Shut up!” Another kick.
“Shut up!”

“Stop!” he cries. “You're just hurting yourself!”

Naz paces the room in circles for a few moments, then stops, huffing air. We wait, tense, expecting something to happen. Nothing does. After a few moments, Naz turns to me and scowls. “Quite a story you told back there, Rockwood.”

“You want to cut me down, Naz?” I hiss. “Go ahead. I'll even get you started. Disgusting freak girl who fools around with artilects—”

“Whoa, calm down,” Naz interrupts. “You got a 'bot hot for you to piss off your mom. Don't be such a drama queen about it.”

I stare at her, bewildered. “My mom's dead because of me.”

“You didn't know he'd do that,” Ling says. I look at her in surprise. She looks directly at me for the first time in what feels like forever.

“You're speaking to me?” I say without thinking.

“I can't condone your betrayal,” Ling says. “But telling the truth about Magnus in order to save one of us? That's honorable.” Her eyes explore the space carefully as she continues. “And as far as the whole Magnus thing . . . I mean, you probably shouldn't have done it—”

“Probably?”
I repeat in disbelief.

“Okay, you shouldn't have done it, but weren't you just”—she bites her lip, gaze still sweeping the sea of butterflies—“experimenting?”

I can't answer. I can't believe Ling is being so blasé about it.

Ling looks back at me evenly. “We're probably all going to die, Tess. You may as well stop beating yourself up.”

“And for the record,” Achilles adds absentmindedly, “Hunter? Yeah. I get it. That guy's serious boy butter. You know,” he adds quickly, “if he wasn't a technically advanced mass murderer.”

I look at the three of them in shock. “But don't you think that's gross? Being with something that isn't human?”

Around us, the whisper of a thousand butterfly wings. Ling shrugs. “There's just no point going to your grave with that on your conscience. There's nothing wrong with you, Tess. You're just . . . human.”

“Attention prisoners.”
The calm, modulated voice sounds as if it's coming from right here in the room. I move closer to Ling. Our fingers find each other, squeezing hard. “Where is the rebel group Kudzu?”

We glance at each other. My fingers move back to the bumpy cut at the back of my skull, heart rate rising.

“Screw you, we're not telling you crap,” Naz says loudly.

A pause.

I am sweating and shaking. Ling glances at me in alarm.

“Very well.”

A screaming wall of pain blasts inside my brain.

I lose control of my muscles and fall into a ball.

“Tess?
Tess!
” Ling's voice breaks in panic.

“Stop it! Stop hurting her!” Achilles shouts.

The only sound I can make is a strangled, choking cry, like an animal in pain.

“Where is the rebel group Kudzu?”

Tears break through my eyes, and I gasp. In blotches, my vision starts returning.

“Don't tell them,” I whisper through gritted teeth, forcing myself up onto my hands and knees. My eyes are watering and I wretch.

“We don't know,” Ling says uneasily.

“Very well.”

Another explosion. The pain falls on me like a building collapsing, crushing me flat to the floor.

“Dammit,
stop
!” Naz shouts.

“Where is the rebel group Kudzu?”

No one says anything.

Another burst of pain.

Then another.

Rolling attacks, like monster waves doggedly pounding the shore, one after the other after the other. Savage. Hateful.

Now I have no words left. No mouth. No voice.

“You're killing her!” Ling screams, the words tearing out of her throat.
“You're killing her!”

In the vastness of space, planet Earth is a speck of red dust on an endless desert plane. I understand this unfathomable hugeness for the first time. The idea of distance being measured in light-years and the size of the sun in comparison to the planets surrounding it suddenly becomes very clear to me.

I see myself, and the three people around me, and then my vision spins out and up—above the Three Towers, above Eden, above the Badlands, above Earth and then farther away, until Earth is no longer visible. I just keep traveling, farther and farther and farther away into the deafening silence of space. Into blackness. Into the void. And then, finally, thankfully, into nothing.

No feeling is final
. Except for your last.

Blackness.

And then, something.

Movement.

Voices.

“What's going on?”

“I don't know. Is she dead?”

The soft
shick
of the door disappearing. With enormous effort, I am just able to crack open one eye. Everything is dark, except for a figure in the doorway, standing in silhouette. Light streams in from behind it. It steps into the room and says, “Hurry. We don't have much time.”

Hunter.

Hunter
is here
. Is this really happening? Or are these the dreams of the dead?

Two arms scoop me up. They're strong and warm and when I'm pressed against his chest, I smell something sharp and clean. Mint and ash. My head pounds ferociously and I can't move my limbs. But I think this is real. I think I'm still alive.