Phoenix (9 page)

“They’re special orders for Centrum,” he says, winking at me.

My stomach churns when I realize what he means. The guards must have a nice little
sideline selling those kids to the highest bidder.

We’re ushered out of the cargo bay and down a long corridor leading to the prison
deck.

“I’ve not seen you around here before,” Victor says as we walk down the passageway.
He eyes me up and down. “I would’ve remembered someone as pretty as you.”

I smile, but inside I’m cringing. “I just transferred here.”

“Well, if you need anyone to show you around, I’ll be happy to do it,” Victor says.
“Maybe we can get a drink sometime?”

“Maybe,” I mutter.

Victor smiles. “Let’s chat later.”

“Can’t wait,” I say as he goes to the front of the group.

I hang back with Elijah and Stuart. I notice a steady drop-off in security as we near
the prison deck. It seems most of the guards are posted around the cargo bay—this
ship’s only exit. It’s good in one way: it’ll be easier to move around as we search
for Polly. Not so great when we need to make our escape.

“When we reach the prison deck, we need to head to the bow of the ship,” Stuart whispers
to me. “That’s where we located the signal.”

We head down a flight of stairs and enter the prison deck. This part of the aircraft
is dank and dark, lit only by a few amber lights hanging overhead.

We wait for our opportunity to escape. It comes a few moments later, when Victor turns
down a corridor to our left, momentarily losing sight of us.

“Now,” I say.

We peel off down another corridor, leading toward the bow of the ship, and immediately
come face-to-face with a group of Sentry guards leaning against the silver walls,
on their coffee break. Panic flares inside me.
Act normal.
I nod at them as we pass, praying they don’t notice how badly my hands are shaking.
They carry on talking, ignoring us. I let out a relieved breath.

“The signal was coming from around here somewhere,” Stuart says, pushing open a heavy
steel door.

We enter a small control room, crammed with digital screens, a com-desk, a key rack
and various filing cabinets. On one of the screens is an image of Polly tied to a
chair.

“Which cell is she in?” I ask.

Stuart hurries over to the com-desk. His fingers fly over the keys, pulling up files,
searching through the data, while Elijah waits by the doorway, looking out for Sentry
guards.

“Do you see anything?” I ask, my nerves building.

He scans through another file.

“Yes! Here!” he says, jabbing a finger at the com-desk. “She’s in cell two-ten. It’s
just down the corridor.”

I spin on my heel, ready to run. Elijah grabs my arm.

“Wait! We need to make a recording of the live feed first,” Elijah says.

“Yes . . . yes, of course. Sorry,” I say.

Stuart needs to record sixty seconds of the live feed, which he’ll loop and broadcast
so no one knows Polly is missing when they do the next hourly broadcast, which is
due in—I check my antique watch—five minutes!

“Hurry up,” I say.

I tap my foot, ball my hands into fists, do anything I can to force myself not to
run down the corridor to Polly.

Stuart stops pressing the keys on the com-desk and looks up at me, his face ashen.

“What is it?” I say.

“Can’t you break into the feed?” Elijah asks.

“It doesn’t matter. We’ll just grab her and go,” I say.

Stuart shakes his head. “It’s not that. I broke into the feed . . .”

“Then what is it?” I say, fear rising.

“The footage of Polly . . .” He licks his lips. “It already
is
a recording.”

The ground seems to slip from under my feet as it sinks in, what he means. I snatch
the cell key from the rack on the wall and rush out of the room, my heart racing,
not wanting to believe.

“Natalie, wait!” Elijah says.

I find cell 210 and unlock the door.

Red.

The floor, the ceiling, the walls.

Red as the rose painted on a burning wall.

And curled up in the middle of it all is a small ball of white, frozen in death.

I fall to my knees.

Somewhere in the back of my mind, I realize my sister has been dead for at least a
day.

NATALIE

I BARELY REGISTER
the others entering the cell. I gently lift Polly’s body and cradle her in my arms.
Cold leaches from her skin, seeping through my veins, turning them to ice. Her usually
glossy black hair is stiff with blood, and I carefully untangle it with my fingers,
knowing she’d hate looking such a mess.

Something is clutched in her pale hand, and I carefully pry her fingers open. A small,
rose-shaped silver medal falls to the floor. I only know one person in Black City
with a medal like that.
Sebastian.
I glance at her bruised thighs, and bile rises up in my throat, realizing what he
did. He tried doing it to me once. I wince as if a knife had cut deep within me, making
my insides bleed, pour out. The pain is unbearable.

Stuart stands by the doorway, his eyes fixed on his feet, while Elijah sits beside
me. His hand finds mine. Its warmth slowly melts the ice in my veins, bringing me
back to cruel reality.

“We need to go,” he says.

The thought of leaving Polly here makes my throat constrict.

“We have to take her,” I whisper.

“We can’t carry her. She’ll draw too much attention,” he replies softly.

He’s right of course.

“But she’ll be all alone,” I say.

“She’s not really here, not anymore,” he says.

I don’t know if I believe in a heaven, but the thought of her surrounded by our lost
loved ones makes it easier to let her go somehow. I lay her down and carefully arrange
her hair around the remains of her face. I whisper a promise in my sister’s ear.

“Are you ready?” Elijah asks.

I try to stand, but the weight of my grief crushes down on my shoulders. Elijah places
a strong arm around my waist and takes some of the burden off me, lifting me to my
feet. We go into the corridor and shut the cell door, closing the lid on my sister’s
coffin.

“What do we do now?” Stuart asks.

“We’re going to free those kids we saw on the Transporter,” I say.

I stride down the corridor, not waiting to hear their protests. I’m a raging inferno,
fueled by anger, and nothing is going to stop me now. Purian Rose killed my sister,
and now I’m going to make him pay for it, one act of rebellion at a time, until Centrum
is nothing but burning rubble around his feet. That’s the promise I made to Polly.

We reach the corridor Victor turned down.

“Hang back here, out of sight. I’ll return in a minute,” I say.

I round the corner. The communal cell is packed with prisoners, their arms stretching
out of the bars, begging for water. There’s no air-conditioning on the prison deck,
so the heat is overwhelming, and many of the prisoners are swaying, ready to collapse.
On one side of the cell is a stack of dead bodies, mostly elderly people who died
from heat exhaustion.

I purposefully walk up to one of the armed guards by the cell doors. He’s a beefy
man with a goatee. I don’t feel afraid. There’s no room inside me for any emotion
other than blind fury.

“I have special orders from Centrum,” I say to him.

He grins and unlocks the cell door, escorting me inside.

“What are you looking for?” he says. “How about a pretty redhead?”

A teenage girl around fourteen years old stares up at me with luminous blue eyes.

“Yes, she’ll be good,” I say, scanning the room for the two little girls who were
on my Transporter. I find them huddled together, being looked after by the teenage
boy with the shaggy brown hair and green eyes. “Those three.”

“Really? Fragg, those Centrum types like them young, don’t they?” the guard says,
looking at the younger of the two girls. “She can’t be more than seven years old.”

“It’s not my concern, as long as they pay us, right?” I say.

He nods, idly scratching his goatee. “You tell Patrick that he still owes us for those
Darkling twins. It’s not my fault one of them died.”

“Sure,” I reply.
Patrick?
He must be the man sorting out all the deals in Centrum. I make a mental note to
hunt him down and make him pay for this.

I search for more children. There are so many. How can I choose who gets to live and
who dies? Impulsively, I decide to pick the children who don’t have their parents
with them, because they’re the most vulnerable. I end up with five more girls and
three boys. I want to take more, but that will start raising suspicion.

“That’s my quota,” I say to the guard, and he escorts us out of the cell.

The green-eyed boy with shaggy brown hair flashes me a thankful look.

I turn to the guard. “Give those people some water, will you? These kids are practically
dead—we’ll be lucky to get them to Centrum. Patrick’s not paying for corpses, you
know.”

“Yeah, all right,” the goateed guard says.

It’s not much, but it’s something, at least. I escort the children around the corner
and meet up with Elijah and Stuart.

“There’re so many of them,” Stuart says.

“I wasn’t going to leave them,” I reply. “Come on, we’ve got to go.”

Stuart takes the back of the pack while I take the lead, holding Elijah’s upper arm
as if I’m escorting a prisoner. The green-eyed boy, who tells me his name is Nick,
talks soothingly to the little girls, Bree and Bianca, trying to keep them calm.

“We’re playing a game,” he says to them.

“What game?” Bree, says.

“It’s called Prisoner. We’re all pretending to be convicts, and these are our friends,
helping us to get out of here,” he says. “The aim of the game is to sneak onto an
aircraft without getting caught. Can you do that?”

Bree looks at her older sister, then nods. “I’m very good at games.”

“That’s good,” Nick replies.

Bianca keeps petting Elijah’s tail, not that he seems to mind. He’s more concerned
with looking at me. I wish he’d stop. I don’t want his sympathy, because I don’t want
to be reminded why my insides are being torn apart.

We pass a number of Sentry guards in the corridors, but they don’t stop us. It must
be common to see children being escorted to the cargo bay, ready to be shipped to
Centrum. One guard, though, a woman with a thin face and a blond ponytail, slows down
as she passes by us. A flicker of recognition registers in her eyes as she looks at
me.

I lower my head and keep on walking, but the blood is swooshing in my ears.

“Natalie Buchanan?” the woman calls out after me.

I almost turn. Rookie mistake. Every part of me is screaming to run, the fight-or-flight
instinct taking over, but somehow I manage to keep my composure and carry on walking
at a steady pace. I turn my head slightly toward Elijah.

“Is she following us?” I whisper to him.

A faint nod is all the answer I need.

She must not be certain it’s me; otherwise, she would’ve raised an alarm by now. But
she keeps a watchful eye on us all the way to the cargo bay. I scan the bay for the
prison Transporter heading to Centrum and find it at the far end of the room. A row
of children are being ushered onto it by Victor.

The blond female guard goes over to one of her senior colleagues, casting another
suspicious look in my direction. I turn my back on her, not wanting to give them a
clear view of my face.

“We need to get out of here, right now,” I mutter to Elijah.

Victor waves a hand, and the Transporter’s hatch begins to close.
No!

“Wait!” I call out to him.

I shepherd the group of children across the hangar, toward the aircraft.

Bree grips Nick’s hand.

“Remember, it’s just a game,” he whispers. “But we can’t get caught, or we’ll lose,
all right?”

She nods.

We reach the aircraft just before the hatch shuts.

“Phew, that was close. Patrick would’ve had my neck if I’d missed the transport,”
I say.

Victor glances at the group of children. “I wasn’t expecting any more passengers.”

“We got the call when we were down on the prison deck,” I say.

Victor lets out an annoyed sound. “They keep doing this. All right, put them on.”

Stuart quickly herds the kids onto the Transporter.

I peer over my shoulder. The female guard and her colleague are walking in our direction.
My heart races.

“How much do you think we’ll get for the cat?” Victor asks me as Elijah climbs on
board after Stuart.

“Enough,” I reply vaguely. “I’m going to escort it to Centrum. We don’t want the creature
eating the cargo, right?”

Victor laughs.

The blond guard and her colleague are just twenty-five feet away.

“Stop that girl!” she calls out.

Victor turns at the sound, but I grab his arm, drawing his attention back to me.

“So when should we get that drink? I’m free tomorrow,” I say, furtively glancing over
his shoulder. The two guards are now running toward us. “Pick me up at nine?”

“Sure.” He grins.

“Great. See you then.” I quickly step onto the aircraft. The hatch begins to close.

“Hold on,” Victor says.

I turn, giving him my most winning smile.

The other two guards are now just fifteen feet away, and getting closer.

“Tell Patrick not to put in any more special orders unless they’re through me,” Victor
says.

“Okay, I’ll let him know,” I say.

I hurry to find my seat between Elijah and Stuart.

“I’ve been recognized,” I say to them.

“Stop!” I hear the female guard yell.

The engine starts up. The hatch is almost closed.
Come on! Come on!

Through the gap in the closing door, I see Victor talking to the woman with the ponytail.
He flashes a panicked look toward the Transporter. “Wai—”

The hatch shuts, and the aircraft lifts off. It speeds toward the Destroyer Ship’s
cargo hatch, the clouds and sky beyond it just within our reach—

A voice crackles over the pilot’s radio.

“Turn around.” Victor’s voice sounds over the airwaves. “There’s a rebel on board.”

The pilot doesn’t have time to register the order before Elijah leaps up and tears
open the mesh door in front of the cockpit. I’m stunned by his strength. He loops
an arm around the pilot’s throat.

“Keep flying,” Elijah says, baring his saber teeth.

We’re just a few feet from the cargo hatch.

“Turn around now! That’s an order, pilot!” Victor’s voice demands over the radio.

Gray skies fill the windscreen.

Stuart squeezes my hand and says a prayer under his breath.

Daylight floods the aircraft. We’re out.

We’re getting closer.

I say a prayer.

We’re out!

I rush out of my seat and join Elijah. I yank the radio out of the socket, stopping
any further communication.

“Land on Union Street,” I order.

The pilot steers the aircraft toward the rendezvous point, flying over the smoldering
rooftops of Black City. In the distance, I spot a distinctive white marble building.
It’s Sentry headquarters. We’re nearly at Union Street. We’ll have only a few minutes’
head start on Victor, so we need to be quick. I just hope Roach is waiting for us
as promised.

“They’ll know you attempted to rescue Polly,” Elijah says to me.

I nod, understanding his meaning. The dance that we’ve been playing with Rose is over.
He has no hold over me or Ash anymore, which means there’s nothing stopping us from
fighting back. He’ll have no choice but to kill us, and do it quickly.

The Transporter lands, and the hatch opens, revealing Roach, Garrick and the rebel
team, all pointing guns at us. Ash hangs slightly back, his eyes glittering in the
shadows of the alleyway.

“Some welcoming party,” Elijah says to them.

Roach lowers her shotgun, and Ash pushes past her onto the Transporter. He draws me
into his arms, and it takes all my willpower not to just break down there and then.
He suddenly pulls away.

“You smell of blood,” he says. “Are you hurt?”

“No,” I murmur, but that’s not entirely true. Inside I’m dying.

Garrick boards the aircraft, his head brushing against the roof. He searches the faces
of all the children in the transport.

“Where’s Polly?” he says.

My throat tightens. I can’t form the words.

“Polly’s dead,” Elijah says for me.

Ash inhales sharply. “Natalie, I’m so sor—”

“What the fragg?” Roach says, boarding the Transporter. “Who are these kids?”

“They’re coming with us,” I say.

“I don’t think so,” she replies.

“We don’t have time to argue. There will be guards crawling all over this place any
minute now,” I say.

We hurriedly take the children off the Transporter. There’s a pop of gunfire behind
us. Roach has just killed the pilot. I find it hard to care. We split into groups
and set off in different directions to make it harder for the guards to find us all,
agreeing to meet back at the Legion ghetto.

A few minutes later, there’s a low rumble like thunder, announcing the arrival of
more Transporters, but Ash and I are already deep within the maze of the city streets.
We reach City End, and the Legion guards help us over the wall.