Parched (45 page)

“And you never thought that person would be you,” he adds sagely.

I smile feebly. “No. But it is. Isn't it? It's me.”

He nods. “It appears so.”

I sit up straight and swallow hard. “How long would it take?”

His eyes widen a bit before he answers, “Twenty seconds. Not even.” I get to my feet. “Will it hurt?”

He rises too. “No.”

“But you . . .” I stumble. “You, wouldn't feel any differently . . .” I pause, shaking my head. “I can't ask you that. You have no idea how you'll feel after walking down my memory lane.”

His lips melt into a smile. “I do know. I know already.” Hunter raises his hand and traces one finger lightly down my jawbone. “There is nothing I could find out about you, that would change how I feel.”

I'm about to turn in the direction of the backyard. “Just be careful with me,” I tell him. “Afterward.”

“Of course,” Hunter says. “Of course I will.”

When Hunter presses a smooth, coin-sized piece of metal against each of my temples, all feelings of impishness vanish. I'm sitting at the tech table, attended to by Achilles and Hunter. I'm trying to stay calm, but I can taste bitter adrenaline in my mouth. It races maniacally around my insides like a caffeine overload. Naz, Bo, and Ling watch from the far side of the room with the fascinated, horrified expressions of people about to see open-heart surgery for the first time. The cool metal head-piece that presses into my temples is the conductor Hunter asked Achilles to bring. More wires are affixed to the inside of my wrists and the pulse point in my neck.

“Where do these wires go?” I ask, holding up the ends of what's attached to me.

In response, Hunter's fingers find the invisible button that opens the back of his head. Again, the flap of skin flips open neatly. Achilles
swears, joyous. Hunter pops the mirror matter out. It slides out neatly, and he hands it to me.

I snatch the sparkling tube in alarm. “It's less than half full!” Flying me to Izzy's used more power than I'd anticipated. “Are you sure you have enough to do all this? You can't recharge until after we blow up the dam.”

“It's okay,” Hunter reassures me. “Don't worry about it.”

Hunter gives the ends of the wires to Achilles and directs his excited assistant to attach them to various ports inside the circular gap the mirror matter fits into. He's talking to us both, explaining how the electrical surges send my memories to his singularix, but I can't concentrate. I'm about to show someone everything about me. Every embarrassing moment, every cruel act, every flaw, every fault. Every secret. Everything.

Suddenly I'm seized by the urge to rip the conductors from my temples and flee into the inky night. My eyes pull to Hunter's, panicked beneath a cool exterior. As if reading my mind, he stops his science babble and we share a moment of loaded eye contact. Without saying anything, he calms me down. I know what he is thinking:
You don't have to do this. I won't judge you. I care about you
. And just like that, my fear is back in check. I don't even think the rest of Kudzu noticed.

“Okay.” Hunter sits down across from me. “Just relax, Tess.”

I try to obey. My palms are drenched with sweat. I let go of the mirror matter, letting it rest on the table. I'm afraid of clutching it too hard once we start, and breaking it. “This is safe, right? You're not going to wipe me clean or anything?”

He shakes his head and smiles. “Worst-case scenario is it just doesn't work. Are you ready?”

It takes a second, but then I nod.

“Okay. Close your eyes.”

I do. The cool metal of the conductor starts to feel tepid. In fact, my entire head starts to feel warm, like I'm standing in the sun. I open my eyes. Hunter's gaze has turned inward, his eyes no longer seeing. Strange twitches jerk his face and arms. I flinch as his body spasms, seemingly beyond his control. The conductor changes from warm to hot, searing my skin. My nails cut into my palms.

Hunter starts speaking. But it isn't his voice. It's a little girl's. “Mommy! I want it!” I flick my eyes to Achilles in alarm, but Achilles isn't looking at me, he's staring at Hunter, open mouthed. Seconds later,
the girl's voice is older and less babyish. “But why?” The voice keeps aging, and I know, of course, that it is my voice. Now Hunter sounds about ten, and extraordinarily petulant. “Pink. Izzy said it had to be pink!” A peal of laughter becomes a pained cry. “All you talk about is Magnus!” I recognize the voice as my age now. Hunter screams, “Mom!” and I jump, with a sharp cry.
“Da, danke bolshoi.”
I sound guarded now, speaking with vigilance. Then words I remember quite clearly, recent words that run into each other without stopping: “How did you get my DNA he told me himself he'd quit Simutech it's so
beautiful
his name's Hunter we have to go back you've got three seconds to decide I think I want to kiss you too!”

The conductor's temperature starts dropping from hot back to cool. I let out a breath I hadn't realized I was holding. Slowly, Hunter's eyes start to come into focus, as if he is waking up from open-eyed sleep. I'm staring at him. Frozen. He blinks, once, twice, and raises his hand to rub his eyes. He's back. And he has my sixteen years of life with him.

Naz's drawl startles me—I'd forgotten the others were here. “Well, that's the freakiest thing I've ever seen.”

“Did it work?” Ling asks.

Hunter's hand drops back to the table. He hesitates, just for a split second, then says, “Yes. I have the RPA.”

“You have it?” Bo repeats.

“You're kidding!” gasps Ling. “No way!”

“I can serf the Quicks,” Hunter confirms.

Achilles, Naz, Bo, and Ling explode with victory, their shouts and cries filling the small room. But I'm silent. Something's wrong. Hunter isn't meeting my eyes. I lean forward through the mess of wires and grab his hand. It feels stiff and unyielding. “Hunter, what's wrong?”

He shakes his head, voice low. “Nothing.”

“You look like you've seen a ghost,” I say, trying not to sound worried. “That pink phase was pretty unfortunate, right?”

His eyes finally rise to meet mine. In them is distance. Caution. Regret. He takes his hand out of mine, as unemotionally as if he were taking back a piece of scratch. “Let's get ready to go.”

My blood curdles in my veins. It's
my
worst-case scenario: Hunter's seen the real me, and he didn't like it.

He slips the conductor from my temples, which are now burning again. But not from the metal, which has turned ice cold.

When Ling suggests I practice fast-roping while the others finish packing, I do it without question. I am focused and efficient. But I'm faking it. In reality, I'm a mess. Hunter saw something in my memories that he didn't like. Was it Magnus? The feeling of my warm lips on his cool ones? Was it something to do with Izzy? My mom? How could I have been so stupid as to let someone in like that? It's more than anyone, human or otherwise, can handle.

As I scamper up and down Benji and Lana's thick old rope, I watch Hunter carry the four bulky backpacks to the buzzcar. His tall, slender frame moves with a sharp gracefulness through the darkened backyard, illuminated only by the light spilling from inside. But he doesn't look at me.

Because Naz can't rope down with only one arm, she won't be coming with us. Instead, Ling, Bo, and I will set the bombs on the dam wall, while Achilles and Hunter run security and tech. After we leave, Naz will run one final check of Milkwood before abandoning it for good. Then she'll meet up with the rest of Kudzu, who are already on their way to the Northern Bridge border crossing. If all goes according to plan, we'll meet them a few miles from the crossing before dawn. I'm disappointed to hear we're leaving Naz behind, a decision that was made while I was on my way to the South Hills. “Don't worry, Rockwood.” She smirks, handing me half a dozen air rifles. “You'll have plenty of time to piss me off when we're out in the Badlands.”

“Good,” I say. Having Naz by my side definitely makes me feel safer.

She looks a little thrown by my reply, and then her eyes widen. “Almost forgot.” She shoves her hand into her pocket and pulls something out. It's a Kudzu necklace. The little silver K on the bright red string. “Henny said to give you this.”

I rest the air rifle butts on the ground so I can tie it around my neck. “Thank you,” I say, looking her right in the eye. “For everything.”

She responds by brusquely clearing her throat. “You're all right, Rockwood.”

“You're pretty badass yourself.” I smile. “You know—for a chick with one arm.”

She's startled for a second, then her face relaxes and she actually chuckles. “Go put the rifles in the car before I show you how a chick with one arm fights.”

Ten minutes later, our little buzzcar is packed and ready to go. The backpacks belong to Ling, Achilles, Bo, and, surprisingly, me. “Gem
packed it,” Ling explains. “Otherwise you'd be leaving with nothing.” We also have all of Benji and Lana's roping equipment, a duffel bag of protective gear, the air rifles, some razers, and nine handmade explosives.

Ling's in the driver's seat to save Hunter's strength, although he'll still have to use his power to keep the car off-cycle. Bo sits next to her.

Achilles climbs into the backseat. “Guess I should sit in the middle,” I say to Hunter as we approach the car. “That way we're together.”

“Sit wherever you like.” His words are cool and detached, like they were when we first met. “It doesn't make any difference to me.”

I forget how to breathe.

As we take off from Milkwood into the jet-black sky, I can just make Naz out, waving goodbye, shouting, “Don't get smoked!”

We fly fast and low, following the silver curve of Moon Lake around to the north. Below us, Eden is dark and indistinct. Even now, jammed next to him with our hips and thighs touching, Hunter and I are apart. I keep screaming at myself,
It does not matter; it is not your focus right now
. But I can't stop thinking about it. My mind scrapes obsessively over my deepest, darkest secrets, wondering which one pushed him away.

We're in the air less than ten minutes before Ling takes us down to the banks of Moon Lake. Unlike the rich black mud that covers the riverbanks at Milkwood, here the water greets the land at a narrow strip of pale yellow sand. The vegetation is less lush. A forest of thin white birch trees only as thick as my arm crowds the shore. We are close to the white city walls—they loom over us, only a stone's throw away. The Three Towers are too far to see, and the handful of buzzcars above the Hive are no more than tiny darting lights.

In my mind's eye, I can see where we are: the northernmost tip of Eden, the only place where the lake just kisses the city walls, or used to, before the dam was built. I assume some kind of Divers built the dam, working from the bottom of the lake up. I picture their weird open mouths sucking out water from around the newly formed dam as it rose from the lake's murky depths like a tombstone.

We leave the backpacks in the car but take everything else. Ling leads the way up a narrow, sandy path through the trees—an animal track. It's quiet and still, somewhere between peaceful and sinister. The ground rises as we jog, and eventually we start to curve around so that we're no longer heading toward the white city walls, but are bending around until the walls are next to us. Finally we come out into a clearing
at the bottom of a small hill. The grass rises before us, too steep to see what's on the other side. We all know it's the dam.

“I'm going to use a white-noise frequency to scramble the Quicks' hearing,” Hunter says quietly to Ling. “That way they won't hear us. But let's stay out of sight for now. I won't start serfing them until we absolutely have to.”

“Good idea,” Ling replies. “Everyone, leave the gear here. We'll scope it out, then come back.”

We do as she says. Following Ling's lead, we get on our bellies and use our elbows and knees to snake up the hill. When we come to the top, I can see both the dam and the aqueduct.

The entrance to the aqueduct is set in the city walls—a huge, yawning oval hole. At first, the Trust tried to block up the aqueduct itself, but it wasn't structurally sound, so in the end, they built the dam. I remember the size of the dam from seeing it on the streams: one hundred feet high and fifty feet wide. Before the dam was created, the entrance to the aqueduct would not have been visible, as it is set below the water level. But now, water no longer flows through it. The tall, concrete dam stops the lake from entering the aqueduct. This is what we'll be scaling down, and decorating with red bombs.

Ling nudges me and jerks her chin toward the top of the dam. There, it is about ten feet wide. You could walk the length of it easily, with the lake on one side of you and the long drop down on the other. A sturdy waist-high railing runs along both edges of the top of the dam. She's pointing for two reasons. First, because this is obviously where we will tie our ropes in order to scale the dam face and set the bombs. Second, because one hundred and eight Quicks are stationed along it, their red eyes sweeping endlessly back and forth.

Hunter is studying everything carefully. He's chosen to watch from the other side of the group, putting Ling, Bo, and Achilles between us.

Ling snaps her fingers lightly to get my attention, jerking her head to the bottom of the hill. I follow her as we all slither down.

Back in the clearing, Ling nods at the collection of circular red bombs. “Show Tess the merchandise.”

Bo hands me one of the bombs, which I accept somewhat gingerly. It's maybe four inches thick with a flat surface on one side and a large handle, like the kind on a suitcase, on the other. “We call these Red Devils,” Bo says. “The Devils are armed by a two-phase system. Ling, you, and I will set the first phase.” Taking it from me, he lays it flat on
the grass with the handle running vertically. He begins explaining how they work, but I'm distracted by Hunter, who's sitting opposite me. How could he pull away like this? His words ring in my ears: “There is nothing I could find out about you that would change how I feel.”
Liar
.