The Invisible (25 page)

The words bubble up in my head from politics class:
mob mentality
. Images from Dr. Tammany’s lecture, of piles of people all holding bats and sticks, their faces twisted in anger, the police nowhere to be seen, swirl in my head.

I contemplate climbing a fire escape and jumping along the rooftops instead, and then I notice an entrance to the tube. I cock my ears. Even with everything that’s happening, it seems to be running. I haven’t been on it in years, not since way before the tube gassing four years ago when 200 people were gassed unconscious and robbed of everything but their underwear. But it would be fast. It might be the fastest way to get there.

I take a breath and decide to try it.

I’m about to walk down the steps and into the Bankers Row tube station when someone barrels into me, lifting me and running around a parked car toward the street.

“Get off me!” I yelp, struggling. But the arms that hold me don’t budge. A second later, I’m deposited gently down onto the street.

“Easy, Green.” Those brown eyes. That teasing expression. “It’s only me.”

Just then, the building I was standing next to a moment ago sinks into the ground a few feet, shattering the glass in the lobby window and sending metal columns springing out of it. If I was still standing there, I could have been hurt, or worse.

“Thanks.”

When he moves to hug me, I let him. Even though he’s hurt me, I can’t help it. It’s good to see him, amid all this. To know he’s back. But then the memory of him saying good-bye—
I’m not asking—
falls over me, and I pull back a little.

“I heard what was going on.” His voice is husky in my hair. “I thought it was time to come home.”

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

..................................................................

“I’m sorry I . . . left like that. Abe told me you stopped by.” Ford’s eyes are filled with concern. Regret. And something else too. A new sense of calm, maybe.

“I missed you,” I say. It’s barely a whisper. My ears burn with the memory of how coldly he brushed me off last time we saw each other.

“Me too. More than you’ll ever know.” He looks at the ground for a minute, then back at me. “I’m sorry about everything, Anthem. I was . . . scared.”

“Scared?” He was the one acting scary. I was the one who should have been scared, but I wasn’t.

“The last thing I wanted to do was to hurt you. You’re . . . everything to me. You must know that, by now.”

I open my mouth, shut it again. Shake my head. But some part of me does know it. And can understand being scared of inhabiting a body you don’t understand. “How do I know this is the real you, not just another manifestation of the hot-blooded . . .”

“This is real. I swear to you. This is the real me talking. The person who’s under control. The person who wants to be with you.” And then he kisses me, a peck that is soft and tender enough to say everything. “I’m better now. I promise. Give me one more chance.”

I stare at him, loving being near him. Soaking this moment in, not wanting to spoil it with words.

“You really do seem better,” I say finally.

He nods. “I’m a lot better. All the synthetic blood has been absorbed into my system now, I think. I don’t feel so out of control. I guess Jax was right about that. It just took some time.”

Jax.
I need to tell him. I search his eyes, but he doesn’t seem to be thinking about Jax particularly hard. He must not have gone to the lab yet since his return.

“Listen.” I clear my throat. “I think I know what he’s planning. And I think I know where he is. That’s where I’m headed.” As soon as I say this, I wonder if I shouldn’t have. He’ll want to come. But a part of me already knew that. A part of me wants him to.

“Let’s go.”

“We need to get to the reservoir,” I say, scanning the packed streets. “Could be slow going. I was thinking the tube, but I’m afraid it’ll flood.”

“The reservoir connects to the river, right?” His eyes glitter with his old mischief.

I nod.

“Let’s borrow a boat.”

I think of how Ford likes to “borrow” cars by stealing them for a few hours at a time.

“You really are back to your old self,” I observe as we head to the marina.

At the marina, there aren’t many options. Just a rusted-out rowboat and a sailboat half-filled with water. But then under a lip of metal and a collapsed tree, Ford spots something. He moves toward the tree and pushes the leafy branches aside.

“Here’s our candidate,” he says, pulling something covered in gray canvas out from underneath a lip of metal. I come over to look and the white gleam of fiberglass and chrome of a speedboat hood twinkles in the waning sun.

Ford moves efficiently around the dock, untying ropes in two places, while I pull the canvas cover off the boat’s hull. He jumps into the boat, bending to detach a panel between the two front seats, using a tiny pocketknife attached to his key chain. He hunches over it while I nervously pace the dock, watching as a few people scurry on the sidewalk edging the river, all of them looking distracted, nobody even glancing at us. The dock itself vibrates periodically, the same way the ground does.

“How long will it take?” I ask his back, covered in the same gray sweatshirt he’s always worn. It’s a comforting sight, but if the ground lowers much more, we’ll be too late.

“Nearly done,” he says over his shoulder. His cheek is stubbly. I wonder how it would feel to touch it.

He jerks back, I see a couple of sparks fly out onto the leather seat of the boat, and then the motor hums to life. Ford pulls the cord on the outboard motor, and the engine roars.

He moves aside and motions for me to get into the driver’s seat. When I hop in, my leg brushes his shoulder. Even with everything going on, the attraction I feel toward him is still magnetic. My feelings for him haven’t changed a bit. The way he looks at me tells me his haven’t either.

We can’t really talk over the roar of the motor. I settle into the driver’s seat and press the gas on the floorboard, and the boat hurls through the water away from the dock. I turn the wheel hard and a spray of water goes up beside us, the boat cutting into the green murk of the river so hard the nose of the boat seems like it might tip in. I ease up on the gas, and soon we’re shooting down the Midland, wind in our hair, heading toward the reservoir.

Twenty minutes later, we’ve stowed the boat as best we can, partially hiding it under a discarded piece of sheet metal laying near the riverbank. We’ve hiked through the overgrowth of gnarled bushes and skirted the edge of the reservoir—calm and serene as cut glass but for these weird ripples, as if someone’s throwing invisible rocks at it. It must be connected to the rumbling of the ground, the way things are sinking here.

My phone vibrates with another text from my mother:
Tell me you are okay.

I’m fine. See you soon
, I write back.

“Ford,” I whisper, stopping moving as he catches up behind me. “Where are the girls? Are they safe?”

“They’re home,” he says. “With my uncle.” He gives me a look like
why do you ask
?

“But what will they do if there’s an emergency?”

“People in the South don’t seem too concerned.” Ford shrugs. “Nothing’s changed over there.”

Of course. Invisible only wants to hurt the North. I nod and keep moving.

We skirt the trees, stopping when we hear shouts. I motion to Ford that we should cut in through the trees, go deeper in so we’re under thicker cover. Now that we know there are people nearby, I’m conscious of the snap of every branch we step on. The last thing I want to do is walk into a trap.

Through the branches, I count six people, all my age or a bit older, all moving with purpose at the edge of the dam that hems in the reservoir above and stops it from spilling out into the river. I lose my breath when I realize that one of them is Wall-eye, his face a mass of bruises and swelling. He must have regained consciousness and gotten away before the cops raided the drug lab. My fingers make fists as I stare at him—I won’t let him get away again.

I recognize another one of them, the blond boy from the control room at the arena.

“Roll it out,” Wall-eye yells at a guy with blond dreadlocks held back by a red bandanna, whose muscles bulge and strain under a gray jacket and who looks keyed up on extra doses of SoftServe, his movements robotic and his eyes dulled. He and an equally robotic-looking shorter boy start to pull a large bulky object—huge and flat, the size and shape of a twin bed, covered with a blanket—toward the dam.

“What is that thing?” I whisper.

“I don’t know. Let’s get closer.”

We begin to run along the path toward the dam. My heart kicks against my ribs as I try to develop a plan. Ford is faster than he used to be, and his step is lighter. He can almost keep up with me.

“What was in that blood, anyway?” I hiss when he catches up. I’ve stopped as close to the Invisible thugs as I dare, and now we’re crouched behind a scrim of trees where we have good coverage.

“Tiger DNA?” Ford grins. “Dunno, really. Jax started to tell me but I stopped her. Didn’t want to know.”

We stop about sixty feet away from the crew dragging the huge bundled object toward the dam edge. The edge of the dam is a three-tiered series of steps, each of them with four spouts where white streams of water are released, four thin waterfalls spraying the 200 feet down to the churning bottom, where the river starts. Each opening is held shut with a complicated-looking electronic lock.

The thugs hit a tree root in the path and the blanket comes loose on the top corner and falls off to reveal a matte surface, black as onyx. Immediately, the one with dreadlocks raises his arm, the back of his hand drawn to the black surface, where it smacks and sticks. His watch is stuck to it.
A magnet
. Ford whispers it the same moment I think it.

The dreadlocked guy unbuckles his watch and leaves it attached. Must be very powerful, judging by the way he doesn’t even bother to try to get his watch back.

I remember learning about the dam in the engineering unit I had in school. The locks are computerized. Tamperproof. So why the magnet?

Then I realize. “Magnets scramble digital code, right?” Ford nods. “They must need it to unlock the dam,” I say.

“The dam opens, the river floods,” he finishes.

“We need to take them out,” I whisper. We’re moving closer as we walk, cautious but still moving forward. “Are you up to this?”

Ford nods. “Jax built us for this stuff,” he says under his breath, so quietly I almost miss it. He’s accepted his fate, I guess. Easier than I ever could. And the way he says “us” instead of “me” sends a tingle across my skin, gone as quickly as it appears.

“It’s all she knew to do to help us,” I say, the past-tense
knew
curdling on my tongue.

Ford nods. “I’m getting used to the idea that this is not going away.”

Meanwhile, they keep moving the magnet closer to the center crack of the dam. There are enough tons of water behind the dam to fill a Bedlam-sized basin.

“We need to go in,” I whisper. “Now. Two of them know who I am.”

“Let me go in first and confuse them. The guns won’t come out right away, I’m thinking.”

I nod, trusting that he has an idea. I move behind him.

When we reach the path they’ve used, Ford simply ambles out into plain sight. No element of surprise. I duck behind a fallen log and hang back, afraid to watch.

“Hey, y’all. Sorry I’m late,” Ford yells over the rush of the water. Without my sonic ears, there’s no way I’d be able to hear him.

“Who the hell is this?” Wall-eye shouts to the others, moving closer to Ford, his hand reaching for what I’m sure is a gun in his jacket.

“He didn’t tell you about me?” Ford grins, four, then three paces away from Wall-eye, who’s pulled the magnet onto the middle step of the three-tiered edge of the dam, each tier topped with a metal grate to walk on and a single metal railing to hold on to, more for balance than to prevent a careless person from falling off. It’s a long way down with nothing to grab if you fell, just the cement dam with the four waterfalls trickling down it, and then the white churn of water at the bottom surrounded by the quiet green murk of the river.

“Narrows, who the hell is this guy?” one of the others says, moving closer to Ford.

“I’m the inspector. He told me to come give a final look-see.”

“Inspector?” Wall-eye—he must be Narrows—swivels his bruised head around, as if checking to see if his boss is anywhere nearby. I follow his gaze but don’t see anyone else. “What for?”

“Technical specs, doofus,” Ford says, moving toward the magnet. There are buttons all around the bottom of it, along with red flashing lights.

“Like, come here and look at this. Why didn’t anyone check the rotator switch?”

“The what?” Narrows moves toward Ford. “I don’t—”

So fast I almost miss it, Ford’s hand is on Narrows’ neck, then he slams him against the magnet, hard enough so I can hear the echo of his skull bouncing against metal. Before I can breathe, he’s on the ground, rolling off the middle tier and landing with a thud onto the lower tier of the walkway, his arm hanging off it into midair, perilously close to slipping off below the railing and tumbling the hundreds of feet into the dam. His eyes roll back in his head, and he’s unconscious for the second time this week.

I’m up like a flash, running toward the group of them. There are four more of Invisible’s thugs there, and each of them will have guns pointed at Ford in an instant.

I leap from the edge of the path onto the nearest of them, surprising them enough to turn and look at me as I wrestle the gun from his hand and knock him to the ground. As I’m doing this, Ford has another of them, who’s been distracted. He’s on top of the younger guy with the blond dreadlocks, yanks his gun away, and almost gently—as gently as can be done with a gun—slams him on the temple so he’s out. There are two left, each with their guns out, and now Ford and I each have a gun.

“You know she can jump around bullets, boys.” Ford aims his gun at the two remaining minions. “It’s a thing of beauty.”