The Lair (3 page)

“Maybe it’s not your job to protect me. No, wait. Hear me out, okay?” She waited until I nodded before she continued. “When you rescued me, you thought I was an
abductura
, you thought I had this amazing power to lead the human resistance and sway people’s opinions. Whatever. If I had been an
abductura
, then, yes, keeping me alive would have been more important than anything else. But I’m not that person. Which means you don’t have to work so hard to protect me.”

“Lily, that’s not the only reason I want to keep you safe.” The thought of her hurt, in pain . . . it drove me crazy.

But she waved aside my comment. “Maybe I can’t lead the rebellion, but I still want to fight. We’ve made it this far. I’m not going to turn around now.”

“Don’t you get it? If you’re not the
abductura
, then there’s no one to lead the rebellion. We don’t have a leader. We don’t have security. We don’t have shit. There is no human rebellion. Which is why you need to hand over the keys so we can just get out of here.”

“No.” Lily clung tightly to those keys. “As far as you and I know, this is the last outpost of free humans on the planet. Maybe there are still pockets of humanity in Canada or Beijing or Brazil or wherever, but as far as we know, for certain, this is it. Maybe the rebellion doesn’t have an
abductura
who can magically brainwash other humans into joining, but the rebellion still has a leader and that leader is you. It always has been. And you can’t just turn your back on these people. Not for me. Not for anyone. They need you.”

When Lily talked like that—like I was some kind of friggin’ hero—I couldn’t even look at her. The weight of her expectations was too damn heavy on my shoulders. All I wanted was to keep her safe. To just bury my face in her hair and hold her close and maybe forget for a few hours how completely screwed up everything was. But instead, I had to go save the world.

“Exactly how excited do you think they’re all going to be when they realize that after everything we’ve done to find to you, I was wrong?” She didn’t answer, just stared blankly out the front window. I followed her gaze and realized that up ahead, Merc had opened the gate and stood waiting. Watching us talk in the car. “Think about it, Lil. Those kids are terrified. They expect a leader. When they find out you’re not that person, they are going to freak out. There might not be a rebellion left to lead. The only thing holding Base Camp together is the hope that we can fight the Ticks. That we’ll be able to get more and more kids out of Farms and that someday we’ll be able to fight back. I think the Greens believe it because the guys from Elite believe it. The guys from Elite believe it because I’ve told them we could. Because I believed you would be able to lead us.”

“I’m sorry,” she said softly.

“Why are you sorry?”

She glanced at me from under her lashes. “Because I’m not what you thought I was. Because you thought I could be this great leader and instead I’m just . . . me.”

I reached across the console for her and cupped my hand around the back of her head so she looked at me.

Lily was crazy smart and determined. And she fought like a demon to protect the people she cared about. And I was crazy about her. Just the way she was. “You have never disappointed me,” I told her. “I don’t care that you’re not an
abductura
. Hell, in some ways I’m glad you’re not. But it’s my fault we’re in this situation. I’m the one who told them you could lead us. It’s my mistake. Not yours.”

She looked at me wordlessly, and I watched her swallow as she nodded. “Okay, then. We have to lie.”

“What?”

“If they expect an
abductura
and if Base Camp is going to fall apart without one, then we’ll have to lie and pretend I’m an
abductura
.”

“I’m not going to lie to them.”

“You may not have a choice. The reason civilization collapsed in the first place is because Roberto used an
abductura
to convince everyone the Ticks couldn’t be killed. If he can lie to destroy humanity, then we can lie to save it.”

I turned over her logic in my mind, trying to find the flaw. I didn’t want to lie to anyone. When had that ever worked out well? I’d lied to Lily when I came to rescue her from the Farm, and it had led to one screw-up after another.

“I don’t know,” I admitted. “People are going to wonder. They’ll have doubts. And I don’t see how a lie like this can stand up to the questions.”

“Yeah, if it was just the one lie, it wouldn’t stand. But maybe lies are like cards. You can’t ever get one to stand up alone, but you balance them against each other and they’ll prop each other up.” Her lush mouth twisted into a wry, sad smile. “Didn’t you ever build a house of cards when you were a kid?”

“No. All I know is that they’re destined to fall down.” My childhood had been spent in the back wing of the house, playing video games and hiding from my parents, because if they forgot I was there, they were less likely to give me a hard time.

“Yeah. But we don’t need to convince everyone forever. We just need them to believe it long enough to come up with a better plan. Or find another
abductura
. Something. And the Elites are used to following you. If you say I’m the
abductura
, they’ll believe you. I don’t like it, but it’s better than driving off and leaving them here with no leader. Even if we could find safety—and there’s no guarantee for that, but even if we could—we can’t just walk away from this.”

“Lily—”

“She’s right,” McKenna said from the backseat.

Lily and I both whirled around to see her slowly stretching as she sat up. Hell, I’d forgotten she was even back there.

“We have to stay here,” she said.

Lily’s mouth twisted a little, like she wanted to smile but was too sad to really do it. “You just want to stay here because you think Joe might show up.”

“Duh. This is where he’ll go. So, I’m staying no matter what. But I agree with Lily. You need to stay, too. You’re their leader. You—”

“I can’t lead these people,” I protested.

“You’ve led them this far,” Lily said gently.

“Yeah, but that was the easy part. I had a plan: find you. Let you convince the rest of humanity to fight. Let Sebastian do the rest. I could do all of that. I can’t do this.”

“Sure you can,” Lily said. “All you need is a new plan.”

“A plan to lead these kids, who are terrified and starving? In the middle of winter, when we can hardly leave the mountain?”

“Okay, so that’s the first step in the plan: find more food. Stay close to the mountain. And then when spring hits, we go get more recruits from Farms. That’s what you were doing before, right? So that’s what we’ll keep doing.”

When she broke it down like that, it seemed doable.

All my life, everyone had treated me like I was a screw-up. My parents, my teachers, even Sebastian. They’d all expected me to fail, miserably. And all my life, that had pissed me off. Now, here I was, ready to finally live down to everyone’s expectations of me and along came Lily. And she didn’t expect me to fail. In fact, she expected me to save the world.

When she looked at me like that, I almost believed I could.

CHAPTER TWO

Lily

Lily’s stomach turned over as she climbed out of the passenger side of the Hummer. Carter had parked it right in the middle of the otherwise empty parking lot. The parking lot was separated from the surrounding forest by a tall, chain-link fence, and it butted right up against the side of the mountain. Set into the mountain was a door under a sign reading “United Underground.” Beside that was a pair of huge garage doors, one of which was slowly rising. Carter had told her that nearly a hundred people lived at Base Camp, but the collection of kids huddled just inside the door didn’t seem close to that number—maybe because they were all so thin. Or maybe they were just small compared to the huge, open space inside the mountain.

Lily rounded the Hummer to help McKenna climb out. They’d been cramped in the SUV for a long time. Even though it was big in there, she needed a minute to get her legs under her and suspected McKenna would, too.

She automatically put her hand under McKenna’s elbow. Not that she knew what it was like to be pregnant, but if her legs were stiff, she could only imagine how McKenna must feel. Besides, it gave her something to think about other than the hundred people staring at her. The guy with the gun—Merc, Carter had called him—led them through the open doorway without getting too close. Or lowering his weapon.

The doors opened directly into a huge loading bay, a cavern carved out of the mountain. The ceiling was twenty feet up and made of smoothed stone, like the floor. Columns, maybe five feet across, dotted the floor every forty feet. Though the area near the doors was lit by overhead fluorescent lights, she couldn’t tell how far back it went. The cave just slipped away in the darkness.

“What’s with all the RVs?” she asked in a whisper.

A row of maybe twenty vehicles lined the communal area at the front of the cavern. They were fanned out in a semicircle below the last row of fluorescent lights.

“This used to be a mine in the Before, a long time ago,” Carter said. “When the ore played out, United Underground took over. They used the space for climate controlled storage. They stored everything from legal documents to RVs and boats. When we first moved in here, the guys and I stayed up near the front, in United’s offices, but when we started bringing Greens back, we brought RVs up from the deeps for people to live in.”

“The deeps?”

Carter’s steps slowed and he pointed off toward the darkness. “Deep storage, farther in. There are hundreds of storage units we haven’t even broken into yet. Once we get out of quarantine, stay up here, where there’s light. You don’t want to get lost until you know your way around more.”

When that guy whom Merc told him about had started to become a Tick, that’s probably where he’d hidden while he was transforming. He’d slipped away into the darkness, which Ticks loved best. What had it been like for that guy? Had he known his humanity was slowly slipping away? Had the craving for blood been so strong he hadn’t cared that he was becoming a monster?

Lily suppressed a shudder and pushed aside her thoughts, concentrating on taking in her surroundings. When Carter had first told her about Base Camp, that there was a place where kids were banding together to fight against the Farm system and the Ticks, it had all seemed very romantic. Not glamorous, but noble at least. And better than life on the Farm.

But the other teens seemed worn and suspicious. Hungry. And this cave they lived in—it may be safe, generally, when there wasn’t a Tick trapped inside with them, but it wasn’t hospitable. It was dark and even though it was warmer in here than it had been out in the Hummer, the air was cool and damp so that it already seemed to be seeping through her clothes.

Still better than a Farm. Still better than “donating” blood to feed the Ticks.

Carter led her and McKenna over to a portion of a cave, which had been walled off, and through a door. This must have been United Underground’s business offices. There was a large reception area and then a hall with closed doors on either side. Merc came in behind them, his grip on his rifle relaxed.

“Where are you going to keep us in quarantine?” Carter asked.

Merc nodded down the hall. “Thought we’d use your old office. No one moved in while you were gone, so it’s still empty.”

“How long will we be there?” McKenna asked, following Carter down the hall.

She was wiggling a little as she walked, so Lily asked, “Is there a bathroom in there? Or can we go first? We were in the car a long time.” McKenna wasn’t the kind to bring that sort of thing up, and even though Lily didn’t have to go right now, she had no idea how long they’d be in quarantine.

“There’s a bathroom back there in reception—” Carter pointed down the hall. “But we can’t flush it without water, which we don’t have set up yet. There’s another office next to the one I stayed in. We’ll set it up with a bucket. Someone will come and empty it twice a day.” He paused to rap his knuckles on a door. “Merc will get it set up, right? And we’ll be here.”

Carter held open the next door so that Lily and McKenna could go in. A desk was pushed against the wall. A punching bag hung in the corner. It was windowless, of course, since it was underground. The walls were lined with bookshelves, most of which were empty except for a bunch of bobbleheads on the shelves right at eye level. There was a leather sofa, three chairs, a useless desktop computer. No sign, however, that Carter actually lived here— when he wasn’t out rescuing girls from Farms.

McKenna wrapped her arms around her chest and sat on the edge of the sofa, bouncing a little, like she was excited or really had to pee.

“Can you let us know as soon as you get the bucket set up?” Lily asked just as Merc was starting to close the door behind them.

She wasn’t used to feeling so protective of McKenna. She’d known her in the Before, although they hadn’t been friends. Not by a long shot. But she no longer had Mel to take care of, and watching out for McKenna gave her something to focus on. Something to think about besides the fact that there were a hundred people out there who expected her to lead them to greatness.

A few minutes later, Merc came back to tell them the bucket was ready. A few minutes after that, they were all back in the office, the next few days stretching out before them.

McKenna flopped back on the sofa. “Quarantine? This sucks. How long do you think they’re going to keep us here like this?”

Lily found herself looking at Carter, wondering the same question. “If it was me,” he said now, “I’d keep us in here for three days at least, watching for symptoms.”

McKenna groaned a little. “That’s obnoxious. None of us are sick. Besides, I thought you were their leader.”

“No. It’s smart,” Lily said quickly. She didn’t know for sure if Merc or anyone else was listening at the door. If he was, she didn’t want to rehash the whole issue of whether or not Carter was the leader—particularly the part about her not being an
abductura
. The longer they kept that under wraps, the better.