The Line Book One: Carrier (22 page)

Back in Central.

I blinked at the doctor as that sunk in.

It was over.

I’d failed.

I laid my head back down and tried not to show any emotion on my face, but my eyes gave me away. They filled. My lower lip quivered and I pressed my mouth closed to stop from sobbing aloud.

“Someone will be in shortly to expedite your release,” the doctor said.

“My release?” It came out as a whisper.

“From the medical center.”

“Can I leave after that?”

“That’s not up to me, though I’d heard they’re preparing quarters for you here.”

“In Central?”

“In headquarters.”

Then I knew for sure. They were planning to keep me there until I gave birth. I was a prisoner. After that, I’d wager I had little time left to live.

Failure.

Total and complete defeat.

I desperately wanted to be brave and not let the doctor and whoever was watching from behind the mirror in the wall see my fear, but my emotions got the better of me. The room blurred behind my tears and my throat and face ached from holding my sorrow inside. Then my resolve collapsed, and before long, I was crying.

I let the sobs erupt. I choked and heaved and wailed like a child.

I’d lost everything.

What was the point of pretending to be brave anymore?

The same thought kept coming to my mind.

It had all been for nothing
.

My retirement from the Line.

The boarding house.

The girl in the restaurant with her brother held captive in the back room.

Shirel.

Little Evie.

The clinic.

The weepy receptionist, Dolore.

Tym.

Sonya.

And Ric.

All for nothing.

They were taking the babies anyway.

My babies...!

I wept for them all. For each life touched and then smashed to oblivion.

For my failings and my wasted efforts.

My shoulders shook and my head throbbed with my wails of unencumbered sorrow.

Remorse.

I wanted to die.

I bellowed in unsupressed agony.

Why hadn’t I seen it coming?

Why hadn’t I stopped it?

This was
my
fault.

* * *

The doctor appeared physically uncomfortable with my bawling, so he took the tablet from under his arm and pushed a few buttons. Eventually, he approached and unhooked my arm restraints.

I suppose I should have kicked at him, scatched his eyes out, screamed and protested beyond all reason, but I didn’t see the point.

They’d won.

My soul had succumbed.

At some point, the doctor left and returned with a syringe.

I didn’t care. He injected me, and the whole time he was poking my ass with the needle, I was glad. Maybe they could put me in a coma until the babies were born. Then I wouldn’t have to feel this pain.

This pain was more than I could bear. It was worse than knowing my parents weren’t ever coming to get me from the Line. It was worse than my first appointment. It was worse than anything I’d experienced my whole life, and that was saying something.

This pain of knowing I’d had freedom and lost it, and that I’d lost everyone and everything I had ever cared about, it was vicious. It was beyond cruel. It physically hurt. It went down into my soul and ate away the very core of my heart.

I bawled, and wailed, and sobbed like a pathetic child, pressing my face into the gurney as if to shield myself from feeling more pain.

Then the drugs took effect, and thankfully, I fell into the dark.

* * *

I awoke dressed in clothes again, a loose T-shirt and drawstring pants. I was lying on a small bed. I had a raging headache like I’d never felt before in my life, and my eyes burned hot.

I swung my legs to the floor. I was in a mini-apartment with bare cement walls and floors. I assumed this was my home for the last months of my life.

There was a toilet, a sink, a viewing screen bolted to the wall on one side and a mirror on the other, and a table and chair, with a tablet sitting on top.

I got up and went to the tablet but saw no point in it. Did they want me to turn it on and play games for six months?

Forget it.

I noticed a slight breeze across my face and saw an air-conditioning vent up in the corner of the room.

At least there was that.

On one side there was a door with a wide slot in it, probably for food trays.

I sat at the table and stared at the blank viewing screen for a few moments, debating what was left of my life.

I think a coma would have been better.

Here I would surely die of loneliness and boredom.

I thought of Ric and my insides capsized.

I would have given anything to have him sitting at the table across from me, holding his coffee mug backward and flicking his bangs out of his eyes as he read a tablet, absently tapping the screen like an old-fashioned magazine.

The time I’d kept him at arm’s length now felt foolish and infantile.

I wanted to take it all back. Start over. But that was impossible.

I’d blown it.

After a few minutes of sitting and staring at nothing, I heard a click on the floor. With nothing better to do, I walked toward the noise and found a screw on the ground. I picked it up, stared at it a moment, then realized two more were on the floor next to it.

What on earth...?

After a few seconds, a fourth screw seemingly dropped from the ceiling and clinked to the floor.

I looked up.

The screws appeared to have come from the air vent. Each corner of the vent had empty screw holes, which meant it could be easily removed from the wall.

I glanced back at the mirror, figuring it was a two-way and someone might be watching. I wondered if they were playing a trick on me.

Perhaps this was some sort of scientific experiment on human behavior.

If faced with the chance to escape, would I take it?

Seeing nothing left to lose, I took the chair from the table, stood atop it and pried the air vent cover off the wall, then dropped it to the floor.

“Hi!” whispered Sonya.

I nearly fell off the chair as my hands flew to my mouth. “Sonya!”

“Shh!” she hissed. Her dusty face peered at me from inside the air vent. She was disheveled and wore the same black clothing she had on the day of her disappearance. But she smiled broadly, and I almost kissed her right then and there.

She waved me in. “Come on.”

“I thought you were dead!”

“Funny thing about Auberge,” she said, winking at me. “They never thought to search
inside
headquarters.” She reached her hands toward mine in an attempt to pull me into the airshaft. “Get the lead out.”

I hopped up and down a few times in failed attempts to crawl into the vent. Eventually, I managed to get my torso in.

“Quietly!” Sonya whispered. She slid backward and gave me room to enter. “Wait. Go back and bring the vent cover and screws.”

“Oh. Okay.”

I slithered back out, almost tipping the chair over as my bare feet searched for it, then gathered everything up and hopped up again.

Once I had my torso in the shaft, I used my feet to crawl up the cement wall and pulled with my arms against the smooth metal. It helped to use my hands and feet as traction. By the time I made it inside, my limbs shook from the effort.

The vents felt tight and claustrophobic, but it wasn’t the coma room, so I figured it was a vast improvement.

“This is crazy,” I said. “How are they not seeing us on the security cameras?”

Sonya turned back at me a moment. “Funny how temperamental security cameras can be,” she said. “Always blanking out for a minute or two, then turning back on. You’d be amazed at how long I’ve been chewing this piece of gum.”

“But how will we get out of the building?”

“Leave that to me,” she said.

She waved me halfway down one vent so she could get past me to reattach the air vent cover, then she came back and led me through a series of shafts. I followed.

Left.

Right.

Then down, which we did feet first.

Left again.

Along the way, Sonya would stick her piece of gum to a tiny security camera on the wall, then scuttle forward, reach around and remove it, popping it back in her mouth once we were past.

“Where are we going?” I asked as quietly as I could, though everything sounded as if it echoed in the metal shafts.

“We’ll swing by and get Ric, then hightail it out of here,” Sonya said. “I’ve got a plan.”

“Oh, Sonya. Ric is dead.” The words sounded foreign to me and tasted sour on my tongue. They hurt on a level so deep I was sorry to have voiced it.

Sonya didn’t seem too upset by the news, however, because she continued crawling. “I just left him a few minutes ago. He’s fine.”

“No. I heard a gunshot.”

“He’s wounded, mind you. They shot him in the shoulder when he tried to make a run for it. The idiot. And they beat him up pretty good too. They have him in a cell on the detention block.”

“Really?” I touched her foot for emphasis.

“Yep,” she whispered back. “I just talked to him a few minutes ago.”

I wanted to burst into tears of happiness right then and there but stopped myself. Emotions would have to wait. Besides, I wasn’t sure all my emotions would fit in the air shaft with me barely squeezing along. Sonya made it look easy, but it wasn’t.

“Where will we go once we get out of here?”

“Let’s cross that bridge
if
we get to it,” she answered.

I didn’t like the sound of that.

Finally, we came to a halt by a large air intake vent and Sonya peeped through the slats.

“Stay here,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

She popped open the vent and passed it back to me. Then she went out the vent head first, grabbing the edge with her hands, and lowered her feet to the ground while she held on.

When her fingers released their hold, I moved forward for a better look.

There was a long cement hallway with shiny metal doors on either side. Each door had a tray slot, just like the one in my coma room, and for a moment I wondered if Sonya had plans to slip inside the room from there, but even she wasn’t that skinny.

Sonya tiptoed down the hall then stopped at a door on the left-hand side. She pulled back the slat on the door and peeped through it.

I saw her whispering, but since she was all the way at the end of the hall, I couldn’t hear what she’d said. She nodded twice, then put the slat back down and tiptoed back to me at the intake vent.

“Change of plans,” she said. “You’re going to have to come down. Think you can do it the same way I did?”

“Honestly? No.”

Sonya frowned but nodded. “All right. Wait there.”

She tiptoed back down the hall to the door. Then, pulling a long, thin metal stick from someplace on her body—I couldn’t tell from where with how tightly her leggings and shirt fit; I found it amazing she had anything in her pockets at all—she picked the lock on the door and pulled it open by the handle.

Ric entered the hallway, looking black-and-blue from face to feet, wearing the same clothes he’d been wearing from before, with a large bloody stain on his right shoulder.

“Oh my God,” I gasped, my stomach hitting my toes.

He glanced up at the air vent and smiled weakly at me, but I could tell from the way he was standing that he was in a serious amount of pain.

I couldn’t wait any longer. I slithered past the opening for the air vent, backed into it feet first and dropped to the ground. When my feet hit the floor, my knees buckled and I fell back onto my rump.

Before I was on my feet, I heard the taps of footsteps upon the floor, then felt Ric’s arms around me.

“Are you all right?” he whispered into my ear. His breath was hot and his shirt was stuck to his chest.

I wrapped my arms around him and choked as I held back sobs.

Alive! He was alive.

And he was there.

It meant everything to me, and that scared me to death. Our bodies pressed together and I felt the undeniable urge to feel his skin against mine. I never wanted to let go.

“Um, guys...?” Sonya said.

Ric broke the embrace and pulled me to my feet with his good arm. I latched onto it with both hands. When we turned to face Sonya, she had a wicked grin plastered across her face.

“You two want a moment alone?”

“Sorry,” he said. I slipped my hand into his and he squeezed it. It felt warm and comfortable and I squeezed it in return to make certain it was there to stay.

Sonya shrugged. “Fine by me. I just thought maybe you’d want to escape first.”

“We do,” I said, trying to focus on the task at hand.

Sonya nodded wryly. “This way, then.”

* * *

We went in the opposite direction from the airshaft and entered a stairwell. I thought perhaps we were going to head up, but instead, we went down. Flight after flight, the three of us, none of us wearing any shoes, trampled down the stairs, stopping at every landing to make sure the coast was clear.

After what must have been ten flights, Sonya led us through a door and down a dark carpeted hallway. She moved ahead to see that it was safe, then waved us closer. We waited for a guard to pass around the corner, then Sonya took a coin from her pocket and flicked it down the hall in the opposite direction. She then yanked open the door behind her, and we crammed inside what appeared to be a dark storage room full of metal tables and chairs. We waited there as two guards pounded down the hall, I presume to check out the noise the coin had made.

“I’ll be right back,” Sonya said.

She slipped noiselessly out the door, into the hallway, leaving Ric and me in the dark storage room alone.

He was still holding my hand and squeezed it again. We stayed like that for a few moments.

“Ahem,” Sonya said.

Ric and I glanced up and over the door and I could just barely see the outline of her head poking out an overhead airshaft vent.

“Come on, Naya,” she said. “I need a hand.”