The Ward (44 page)

“My wife will be cured. I’ll be hailed as a hero for weakening the Blight’s hold on the Ward. And after you share the spring’s location, the United Metro Islets will return to the thriving, prosperous metropolis it once was, with freshwater for all.

“This city will never die again.”

With his pause, a hard, rotten pit of fear bursts wide in my chest. My body heaves, like it’s trying to get rid of something on the inside, but nothing comes out. The pieces that didn’t quite fit, the twinge in my gut that I was too stupid to understand—

All along . . . a lie?

“All that’s left: my location,” Governor Voss continues. “Today’s riot cannot happen again; I must have access to more. Aventine Colatura is waiting. Till then—

“Good night, Miss Dane.”

The line dies.

A lie. A trick.

Every choice I made in the past twenty-four hours—I want it back. I should have chosen Aven. . . . It should always have been Aven. Life is not a numbers game.
Just one, just one
.

Energy, raw and volatile, is all that’s left. I pull myself to the edge of the boardwalk, kick my feet over. Forehead pressed to the planks, heaving with an exhaustion I can no longer feel, I come to standing.

Face-to-face with the aeromobile, its spotlight cuts a hole in the night’s darkness like target practice. Each of my nerves is a lit, fraying fuse, begging for zero. Every cell is a bomb, and they detonate with one singular need:
do anything
.

In the air, the heli howls metallic death.

I run toward its light.

It’s waiting for me.

The beam scalds.

City dust tornadoes around inside it, shaken by the heli’s props, and simpler enemies, like wind. Everything moves in slow-motion.

I watch.

Somewhere in the subway tunnels of my mind, I know this makes no sense. And at the same time, it is the only thing that does. Nothing else is real. Every choice, false.

Shielding my eyes, I shout up at the sky to the mindless, gutless aeromobile.

“Take me! I’m immune!” I yell. “I’m here! I’m right here!”

My words fall to pieces, collide with the propellers and the water churning from the pressure. The man in the heli doesn’t see or hear me. And that feels right, too. Appropriate. I’ve become invisible, my choices no longer about me. I wave my arms. I throw myself up into the air.

I say it again. “I’m standing right here!”

Time stops. What was slow-motion is now freeze-frame.

Above, the heli circles and I catch a glint of metal. A man inside loads a net—this one for people—into a long-barreled gun. I’ve been here before. Three years ago, this same scene.

And so I know what happens next.

He loads the gun. Shoots the net. It’ll hit and it’ll hurt no worse than getting punched. You’re folded into its diamond-meshed wings and carried away, dangling through the air like any other package.

When the gun sounds, I hear nothing.

I see stars. . . .

The net’s twinkling border.

And then, hardness. In the way of hands gripping around my waist. In the planks that I fall onto, rough and splintering.

I’d expected the next minutes to exist in verticals—the net should be lifting me by now. Instead, everything is horizontal. Thick pylons lying on their sides. Nails and splintering wood. Close up on the chopping waves. No stars, no tossed-asphalt Milky Way. No beast in the sky.

Freeze-frame
—off
.

The shift hurts, makes no sense. Dust. Propellers. The water churning. My eyes are too slow, too small for the world. They can’t process. Even the smell, ocean salt and stale brack, hurts my nose. Sharp at the back of my throat.

Around my waist, nothing stings as it should. Not the way the nets should. There’s muscle there. Thick, unyielding flesh, forcing me out of the beam.

“Get in,” Derek’s voice tells me.

We’re dockside at a black Omni
—how did we get here?

“Let me go.” I push and pull, in a tug-of-war of arms and legs. Looking up, I again notice the slight freckling along his cheeks, eyes rusty-red and brown. The beam finds us. His hair becomes a straight shot of fire, sparking to life.

That last color—it sends me into overdrive, crosses all my wires.

I’m a schematic with no lines, I’m an ocean with no body, I’m words without letters. A numberless value. I am senseless and I am crying, holding on to and throwing back anything that comes too close.

Derek lifts me by the waist. I struggle, but can’t remember why. He lowers me down. The corner I sit in fits like a hard shell. He shuts the roof. I twist, I have a body of snakes. A pit of them. I forget to breathe. I cry. Too hard. My body breathes for me. Repeat. Repeat. I quiet.

It ends. It begins.

It ends again, and it begins again, because we think in circles.

And then, one final time, it really is over—

I’m over
.

51

W
hen the shaking stops, when I open my eyes . . . it’s like waking up to find that I’ve fallen off a map. The world I thought was round is flat, and nothing is as it was before.

A dull ache has taken Aven’s place inside my head.

She is gone, and so am I.

Under the canal’s surface, Derek steers the Omni east, high beams lighting up abandoned cars and buses. The waterways are empty like always. Even more empty now.

Vaguely, I feel the cloth of my leggings and the thick fabric of my vest holding in water from the canal. I think I’m cold. I
know
I’m cold, and for the first time, I understand what it feels like. Separate from the discomfort. I don’t care that I’m cold, or that my knees are scraped and raw and bloodied. Without feeling any of it, I watch the sunken city through the window. I remember Aven’s face at the Tank when she saw it all for the first time. Like the machines, in all their useless glory, were the greatest things in the world.

“Ren?”

Even my name feels far away, fragile in his mouth. He’s just as afraid of saying it as I am of hearing it.

I turn my head. That’s enough of a response.

“Where should I take you?”

For a moment, I forget that there was a plan. It all got so derailed. But there is a plan; it hasn’t gone away just because the governor was lying. “Garage,” I answer. Then, quieter, head tucked between the seat and the window, “I’m a fool,” I whisper to myself.

I know nothing
.

Except for regret. But for what, exactly . . . I’m not sure. Could I have left Callum, and all the others, to die? I don’t know. But somewhere along the road, I went left when I should have gone right. I made the opposite choice.

And so I regret. Something.

Not being a better sister, maybe.

“You and Kitaneh knew not to do it. You knew not to play into his hands.”

Derek looks at me. He shakes his head. “You’re not a fool. We had no idea that he wasn’t going to go through with it—so really, we had even more reason to have done something.” He sighs, leaning back in his chair. “
I
should have done something,” he adds, his voice heavy, and that’s how I hear them: regrets.

He has them too. And they have nothing to do with me, or
earning
me. They’re for his own sake. Which is all I could take right now—I don’t know if I feel worthy, or good enough, of being earned.

“I saw you out there,” I say, mustering something like sympathy. I’m too empty for this kind of talk, but I manage to add, “You did something.”

“I was too late. I couldn’t stop the others. My brother, he almost . . .”

“I thought he was you.”

Derek slows the mobile, begins bringing it up for air. “Kitaneh must have found out on her own that you were alive, then told him and the others.” His voice rises. He’s afraid I might not believe him.

But I do, and I tell him so, and then we’re silent. The Omni’s headlights cut lines of gold alongside the boardwalk as we break the surface.

“Did you know . . . the word
Tètai
in Lenape—Kitaneh’s native tongue—means
between
.”

He doesn’t need to explain. “Between life and death,” I murmur.

“Between life and death,” he repeats, glancing at me out of the corner of his eyes. Then, barely audible: “But not for long.”

“What do you mean?”

“I acted against my family, in opposition to the order.” He swallows hard, his jaw squared to the windshield. “Against Kitaneh, my wife by contract, and also my single remaining blood brother, Lucas. They’ll come after me. His wife, too. They have to. It’s our punishment.”

When I look at Derek again, I see him differently. No longer through the rose-colored lenses I once wore. He’s made mistakes . . . centuries of them. I see his history laid out in front of me. The same family keeping the same secret, forever.

I see what he’s lost tonight.

We’ve both lost tonight.

“Then come with me,” I say, and I push down on the button in the center console that opens the roof. I don’t want to move—I’m sluggish and heavy as we bob sideways in the black water. But a gust of wind sweeps through the pit, shakes me from my stupor, and I stand.

I just want tonight to end.

“I thought I was coming with you anyway.” In his voice, equal parts fear and hope. He searches my eyes with his. “We have to find Aven.”

I nod, letting him take my hand to help me out of the Omni. I can feel every ache and hurt my bones are carrying as I step onto Mad Ave. Derek lifts himself out after and rests his hand low on my back.

As we walk toward Benny’s garage, I reach for my necklace out of habit, just to make sure it’s there. Attached to the chain, my two pennies—from Aven, and from Callum. Without looking at them, I can’t tell who gave me which.

And then I think of her.
Alone
. I see where I made the wrong choice.

“We have to,” I whisper, watching the stars overhead, slowly tracing their paths through the night sky. All of them alone on their orbits, together. All of us alone on our orbits—together, too.

EPILOGUE

7:00 A.M., MONDAY

“A
s of two a.m. this morning, Governor Voss has successfully eradicated the HBNC virus in approximately seventy-five percent of the Ward’s sick population. Unfortunately, the remaining twenty-five percent of the sick population was not administered the cure due to a pharmaceutical recall in a number of the shipments. An unknown percentage living in private homes also remains uncured. Until further notice, the Ward will remain under quarantine. Entry and exit regulations will not change, nor will laws regarding Transmission of the virus. A city-wide celebration will be held at the following times in the following quad—”

This is what I wake to: a radio crackling the news in Benny’s garage.

I’m not allowed one moment of forgetting.

Even in sleep, there was a far-off hurt that I couldn’t place. But I could feel it everywhere.

I shift on the spare cot Benny set up for me in the office. It’s a small room; I’ve only been in here once or twice; it’s barely bigger than the cot. I like the smallness right now, I realize, and I pull the cool, white linens closer.

When I shift again, this time the springs lodge themselves between my ribs; I groan. In the other room, all voices go silent.

“You think she’s up?” I hear Callum ask after a moment.

“We should wake her.”

“Let’s let her rest.”

“She should see it, though. . . .”

See what?
I wonder, but the voices are too muffled, too far away for me to tell who else is speaking. Now I’m curious. Swinging my feet onto the cool, concrete floor, I inhale. Prepare myself to meet the others.

As I stand, the radio transmission starts over from the beginning. It must be on a loop.
“As of two a.m. this morning, Governor Voss . . .”

I take a few steps forward. Too achy for a lot of movement, I step slowly into the garage, find Benny, Derek, and Callum huddled around the radio, their faces drawn and tired. Terrence and Jones are sitting in the Cloud, docked—and floating—in the open pool Benny had built into the center of the garage. He made it so you could exit under the boardwalk and ride out onto the canal.

“What will I see?” I ask, and every guy in the room meets my eyes.

Except Jones.

He looks a bit like he feels he shouldn’t be here. Keeping himself too quiet, gaze flicking around the garage, landing anywhere but my face. If I had a friend like Kent, I’d be feeling guilty too.

If it hadn’t been for Kent calling the Blues on us . . .

“You really think it’s smart to be here right now? After what your best friend did?” I glare at him, shaking my head. “I wouldn’t be able to look at myself in the mirror if I were you.”

“Jones didn’t know—it’s not his fault. . . .” Terrence jumps outta the Cloud. He blocks off Jones like he knows how close to the edge I am.

“He didn’t know his friend is scum?” I scoff. “I thought everyone knew that—”

But then, faintly, in the background:
“As of two a.m. this morning . . .”

My eyes get hot. Tears start to build, and next thing I know, Ter’s got his arms around me. I don’t want to fight anymore, especially not Ter, so I just drop my head to his shoulder. I can’t see the others; everything becomes blurry, but all I want is to turn around and run back to the cot.

I don’t want to see anyone.

“We failed. . . .” I say. Ter rocks me side to side, cradling me tight, his palm brushing what’s left of the hair on my scalp. I’m no different from an infant right now.

“She needs to see it,” Callum says, and something in his voice makes me turn.

“See what?”

Callum lifts himself from the chair and walks over to me. Places both hands on my shoulders. “We didn’t fail,” he whispers, trying to catch my gaze as I look away. “Not even a little bit.”

With that he strides over to the garage door, and lifts.

The air is thick with sunlight. It falls into the garage like a blanket, making all of us warm. Even me, almost. For a moment, we watch the Mad Ave crowds go about their business like usual . . . but nothing is like usual. The colors. The clothes. A young girl in a torn lavender tutu runs past, holding the hand of an old man. He’s grinning and sporting a shiny black suit with a bow tie around his neck.