The Farm (14 page)

I touched his arm, then nodded toward the door. “Let’s leave it.”

He didn’t question me about why and I was glad of that. I didn’t know if he’d understand. I didn’t know if
I
understood. But somehow it comforted me to know that this machine was here, quietly chugging, doing its job. A silent monument to the culture that once was. It made me sad to leave its familiar red glow. It wasn’t like me to be sentimental about that kind of thing.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Lily

I thought escaping from the Farm would be the hardest part of my day. It wasn’t. When Carter suggested I try to get a few hours of sleep before dawn, I thought he was crazy. He wasn’t.

By the time we made it back to the closet in the science lab, I was starting to crash from all the sugar in the Dr Pepper, despite how jittery I’d been all evening. Or maybe because of that. Carter wedged the chair from his room under the door to the science lab. In our closet, he set the chair against the door and then sat down, his back to the door.

Suddenly I felt nervous being alone with him. Sure, I’d been alone with him all night, but this felt different. More intimate, because this was essentially my bedroom. Besides, now I knew the truth about Carter. He wasn’t just some crush from the past trying to charm me for his own questionable purposes. He was a hero. Maybe the bravest person I’d ever met. Or the stupidest, if there was a difference.

The room was lit with the single-bulb gooseneck lamp I’d snagged from Professor Bajaj’s office. It was funny. After six months of living in this building I felt like I knew all of these people.

For the first minute or so we were in the room, I didn’t quite know what to do with myself. I’d thought I’d already said good-bye to this room when we left it earlier. I’d never expected to be back here.

Finally I sat on the mattress Mel and I kept on the floor, before toeing my shoes off. I scooted into the corner, resting my back against the wall and crossing my legs. Crisscross applesauce, they used to call it in school.

“You should lie down,” Carter said. “Try to get some sleep.”

He’d stretched out his legs in front of him and crossed his arms over his chest, and his eyelids were drooping. Like he was nearly asleep himself.

“You should lie down,” I countered. “You need sleep, too.”

“I’ll be okay.”

“Military school,” I chimed before he could say it. “I know.”

Regardless of how much training he’d had, he was exhausted. For whatever reason, he was determined to guard the door. After a few minutes, I lay down, pulled the blanket up—the ratty one we’d decided to leave here—and flicked off the light, plunging the room into darkness. Lights off in a windowless room was really, truly dark. Sure, I’d gotten used to it over the past few months, but the night felt even more encompassing with Carter in the room with me. I could hear his breathing, which had slowed but not yet evened out. I heard every shift he made in the chair trying to get more comfortable. Every creak of the mattress as I tried to find a more natural spot.

“You’ll fall asleep faster if you stop moving around so damn much,” Carter said, his voice laced with laughter.

“I can’t help it,” I muttered. “This is weird.”

“Weird how?”

What was I supposed to say to that? Weird ’cause I wasn’t used to sleeping with a guy in my room. Watching over me, for Pete’s sake. But that would be admitting how aware I was of him.

I went for the half-truth rather than embarrassing honesty. “I haven’t slept in a bed by myself in six months. It’s weird not having Mel here.” Which was at least partly true. Mel slept sprawled out like a starfish and I’d gotten used to wedging myself against the wall. “And it’s cold.”

That part was wholly true. I hadn’t bothered to get out the other blanket or the sleeping bag from Joe and now I was regretting it.

Then I heard Carter shift again and the chair squeak. Four footsteps later, I felt the mattress dip as he sat down on the edge. I heard him take off his boots. And then the rustling of fabric that I assumed was him taking off his Collab jacket. “Scoot over.”

I literally couldn’t breathe. No air moved in or out of my lungs as I wiggled into the corner and lifted the edge of the blanket. He slid under the covers.

Even though he didn’t touch me, I was acutely aware of him lying there beside me. He must have been lying on the very edge of the mattress, because he left a gap of several inches between us. I could practically feel the energy bouncing off that no-man’s-land.

At some point I must have started breathing again, because his scent wrapped around me, seeming to sink into my very skin. His body just radiated heat. Suddenly the blanket enveloping us felt like a heavy down comforter.

Every muscle in my body was tense. There was no way I was going to fall asleep. Probably ever again.

I just lay there—I didn’t know how long—pressing my back against the wall and trying not to move.

“You’re still not falling asleep,” he muttered, his voice sleepy.

“I can’t help it. This is—”

“Weird?” he finished for me, his voice amused, despite sounding groggy.

“Maybe if you talked to me.”

“Oh, great.”

“Hey, you’re the one who said we should try to remember what we loved about the Before.”

“That’s true.” I heard a rustle I took to be him rubbing at his eyes. “I did say that.”

“So . . .” I prodded. “Tell me something you liked in the Before.”

He was quiet for so long I wondered if he’d fallen asleep. Then he said, “I liked sitting next to you in science.”

I gave his arm a little sock. “That’s so lame. Don’t do that.”

“Don’t do what?”

“That thing where you try to charm me to get your way. Just be honest.”

“Okay.”

“So? One thing you liked in the Before.”

“You always smelled like homemade cookies.”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, I never had anyone bake me homemade cookies, so I don’t know for sure. But you had some lotion or something, I guess, that made me think of cookies.”

“Brown sugar vanilla,” I whispered.

“Huh?”

“That was the lotion I used. And sometimes mango madness. But that wouldn’t make you think of cookies.”

“Yeah. I remember the mango, too.”

Was I crazy or could I hear his smile in his voice?

“And you were funny,” Carter said.

“What?”

“In class. You were always muttering crap under your breath. Giving Coach Ballard a hard time.”

“The man was an idiot,” I said now, partly to cover how surprised I was that Carter remembered these things about me.

“That he was. You were merciless.”

“He was barely qualified to teach P.E. Forget honors biology. Someone had to tell him how to pronounce all the stages of mitosis.”

“I think you made him cry once.”

“I did not.”

I heard Carter chuckle. “Yeah, I’m pretty sure you did.”

“Great, now I feel bad.”

“Nah. The guy was a jerk.” He was so tired he was starting to slur his words now. “Making him cry only made me like you more.”

Another one of those long, awkward silences passed. This time, I was sure he was going to reach for me—at least my hand. But then I heard his breathing even out. He was asleep.

I lay there for a long time, just listening to him breathe. It felt like hours before I relaxed enough to drift off, and when I woke up Carter was gone.

I jerked to a sitting position, then fumbled for the phone in my pocket that I kept charged just so I’d have a clock. Four twenty-three. I tugged my shoes back on. If it wasn’t yet time to head back over to the admin building, it would be soon. However, when I opened the door connecting the closet to the lab room, Carter wasn’t there.

Shoving my arms through the straps of the backpack, I all but ran across the room to go look for him. I flung open the door into the hall and ran headlong into Carter’s chest. I jerked back and we stared at each other in the dim light for an instant before we both spoke at the same time.

“Where did you go?”

“Good, you’re up.”

We each broke off, but he recovered first.

“I’ve been patrolling the halls. Good thing, too.” He wrapped a hand around my arm and started leading me out of the room. “Did you leave anything behind? Or do you have all your stuff?”

“No. Yes. Wait, what’s going on?”

“Collabs are searching the building. They’re down on the second and third floors now and working their way up. That’s not normal, is it?”

He’d been pulling me along the hall. I assumed we were going to the stairwell, but he stopped in front of the elevators. My brain was still foggy. “What? No. It’s not normal.” Collabs in the building? “They do inspections, but never in the middle of the night.”

“Damn it,” he muttered. “That means they must be looking for you.”

“How do you know they’re not looking for you?”

He sent me an exasperated look. “You wanna debate it now or do you wanna wait until after they’ve caught you?”

“I thought you had some sort of a deal with the Dean. I thought he was supposed to just let us walk out of here.”

“We did. He was.”

“So what changed?”

“I don’t know.” Carter sent me a thoughtful look. “If we’re lucky, he just decided he might be able to cut a better deal with Sebastian if he holds on to you. Once we get you off campus, he should lose interest.”

“And if we’re not lucky?”

“We’ll worry about that after we get out of here.”

“How did he even know where to find me?”

Carter’s eyes dropped to my shoulder.

Surprise made me clamp a hand to the spot where my chip was lodged. “They can track these even if I haven’t left the Farm?”

“Yeah. If they want to find a particular person, they use the GPS locator.”

“And you think the Dean wants me back badly enough to bother with that?”

Carter looked chagrined. “I think he must. He wouldn’t send all these Collabs to find you if he wasn’t serious.”

I thought about the scars on Carter’s back. Even though the thought made me a little queasy, I said, “Then let’s cut it out. Destroy it.”

Carter shook his head. “There’s no time. We’ve got to be across campus to meet Sebastian in less than an hour. I’m not cutting you open right before a car trip with a vampire.”

“You said he was safe. Would he—”

“No. But I don’t want to make it any harder on him than it has to be. Or to take any unnecessary risks. It’s better to leave the chips in for now.”

“Not if they’re tracking me with it.”

“At the other Farms I’ve been on, there’s only one tracking device. It’s expensive and kept in the Dean’s office. Most Collabs don’t carry walkie-talkies or sat phones or anything, so it’s harder for them to coordinate a search. Plus, he only knows you’re in the building. Not exactly where in the building you are.”

Carter sounded like he knew what he was talking about. I shut down the rest of the questions I wanted to ask. “How many of them are there?”

“I saw eight. I assume there’s at least one more pair on the first floor guarding both of the staircases.”

“Did they see you?” I asked. He was still in his Collab uniform and probably could have just walked past them.

He shot me a look like I was an idiot. “I made sure they didn’t see me. I didn’t want to risk talking to them.”

That sounded really serious. “Okay, what do we do?”

“Is there another way out of here?” Carter asked, his voice low and hushed. “We need another option.”

My brain seemed to stutter along at half speed for several long moments. Collabs. In the building. And here we were, trapped on the seventh floor.

Just then, the floor numbers above the elevator doors blinked to life.

Carter looked over his shoulder and saw it also. “Guess we won’t be taking the elevator.”

“Yeah. Not this one.” Then it hit me. “Come on,” I said, heading down the hall at a trot. “There’s a service elevator.”

I led Carter through the twisting corridors, away from the classrooms and lab rooms at the front of the building to the maze of tiny offices. I stopped at the wide swinging door that led into a room that was part staff room, part maintenance room. Barely bigger than our storage closet, it had a couple of tables. Some Green had taken the chairs long ago. One wall was lined with floor-to-ceiling cabinets. The microwave that had once sat on the counter was now in our closet. The far wall was dominated by the no-nonsense doors to the service elevator.

I reached out to punch the down button, but Carter grabbed my hand before I could.

“Hang on.”

I followed his gaze to see him staring at the line of numbers above the elevator doors. For a long moment, nothing happened, the glowing number one assuring us that the elevator was down on the first floor, where it had been these past six months. But then, just as Carter was letting go of my hand so I could push the down button, there came the unmistakable sound of the elevator cables creaking to life. The one blinked out and the two lit up.

Carter cursed under his breath, glancing at me. “Any other ideas?”

My mind raced from one ridiculous plan to the next. “Um . . . drop a bomb down the elevator shaft to cause a distraction?”

Carter’s eyebrows shot up. “A bomb?”

My cheeks reddened, but thankfully Carter didn’t seem to notice. He backed away from the elevator doors and started searching the room.

“My mom liked action movies. We watched a lot of those old Bruce Willis movies when I was a kid.”

Carter just smiled, barely paying attention to me as he opened the various cabinet doors. “I don’t know if I should be offended or glad that your violent streak isn’t limited to me.”

“Nope, not just you, apparently.” I glanced nervously at the elevator.

The two blinked out. The three turned orange.

“Um, have you got some kind of plan going on here,” I asked, “or are we just waiting until they get here and greeting them face-to-face?” He didn’t say anything, but tried the door to the broom closet opposite the cabinets. “It’s kind of short notice, but I might have time to brew some tea. Put out some cookies.” The door was locked. “Maybe some—”

Carter backed up a step and rammed the door with his shoulder. The wood buckled with a thunderous groan.

“Holy crap!” I exclaimed, jerking my hands up to my face, like if I blocked the noise from my ears then the Collabs wouldn’t hear it, either.

The doorjamb splintered but the lock held.

“You know, unless they’re deaf, they can hear that.”

“You have any better ideas?” he asked, stepping back so he could ram the door again.