Unbreakable (Unraveling) (31 page)

Suddenly Barclay smiles. “We’ll all go.” Then he looks at Elijah. “Not you, you’ll stay here.”

“Why the fuck do you think I’d stay here?”

“If we don’t make it, we need someone who can portal the Unwilling back to their worlds,” Barclay says. He doesn’t say that Elijah’s leg is messed up or that he’s been shot, but he doesn’t need to. We all know that.

“We’ll go in as two teams. Janelle and I will approach IA from the front entrance,” Barclay says. “Ben and Cecily from the back. We’ll each have a route, and everyone will have to memorize a few passwords, but it gives us two solid chances. I can even set up a com link between us.”

Cecily must see the look on my face and know what I’m thinking. “Don’t even, Janelle. If you think I’m just going to sit here and wait for you to either pull this off or end up dead, you’re out of your effing mind.”

“Cee—”

She shakes her head. “Don’t even try to placate me. I was minding my own business, and some asshole with terrible breath grabbed me, stuck me with a needle, and pulled me through a black hole.
A. Black. Hole
. And then they put me in a cage. There are portals and other worlds, and an Interverse Agency, and all I want to do is go home.

“But I’m not going to feel safe there if I’m always worried about someone else grabbing me and abducting me into
slavery
!” She takes a deep and shaky breath, blowing the air up into the strands of hair that fall into her face. “I am a part of this whether you think it’s safe or not.”

I look at Barclay because he’s the one everyone is going to listen to—at least usually.

Our eyes meet briefly, then he looks at Cee. “I say she’s in. She’s right, but more than that, we need two teams. It’ll throw security off and give at least one of us a fighting chance. And Elijah should stay here.”

“She’s never used a gun,” I say.

“Neither had Ben or Elijah until recently,” he says. I open my mouth to say more—that she’s never run from the law or had to do something this dangerous—but Barclay cuts me off. “Look, I’d rather have three agents with tactical training and experience at my back, but I don’t. I have three people who have a lot to lose, and it might not be ideal, but it’s going to work.”

Now that he has a course of action and a purpose, his determination is back.

I look at Cecily and my eyes sting. This was never supposed to happen to her. She should be planning more movie nights, taking care of people in Qualcomm, bossing Marines around and making them fall in love with her.

But she’s here now, and I don’t have the right to take her choices away from her. She’s smart and she knows how dangerous this is going to be. The best thing I can do is make sure she’s prepared.

“All right,” I say, and I’m not sure who I’m saying it to or what I’m talking about. But it’s what everyone needs to hear.

Barclay takes a deep breath. “So here’s how we’re going to do this.”

He knows IA headquarters inside out. Now he just has to teach it to us.

Before time runs out.

W
e’re up the rest of the night, going over the specifics of the plan, anticipating how we’re going to deal with the various things that could go wrong, and memorizing the layout of IA headquarters.

When we break for a few hours of sleep, sunlight is peeking over the corners of the horizon. I wander the halls aimlessly. Time has been draining away, we’ve only got about a day left, and if things go wrong when we break into IA, I won’t make it out alive.

Maybe none of us will.

I’ve only made it about ten steps when I turn down a hallway and find myself face-to-face with a teenage girl about the same age as Jared, with long, wavy blond hair and big green eyes.

She’s startled at first, and she flinches away from me.

The sight of her—doe-eyed and flinching—makes me feel like I’ve just been punched.

“I’m sorry,” I say, and I want to add something else, but I don’t know exactly what I’m apologizing for. For startling her, for not being able to get her home, for this happening to her in the first place—it’s all a blur.

I give up and move around her, still muddled in my own thoughts, and when she’s safely behind me, I hear her say, in a soft, tentative voice, “Thank you.”

I look over my shoulder to see if I heard right or to say “of course” or ask “what for” or something—I’m not sure what—and I realize her eyes are glassy and she’s smiling.

Her face is flushed, and she hugs her arms around her body. “I thought I was going to die in that place.”

She’s not, but she might end up dying here if we can’t figure out how to get her home.

As if she knows what I’m thinking, she adds, “No matter what happens, anything is better than that place. I’m glad you got us out.”

“Me too,” I say, and I mean it.

Looking into her face, I’m struck by how many
more
people like her are out there. It’s what I need. Energy manifests in the pit of my stomach with that realization and starts to spread throughout my body. I stand up a little straighter, I seem to lose some of the weight pressing down on me.

We have to succeed tomorrow. We don’t have a choice.

If we don’t shut Meridian down, thousands more people will become Unwilling.

I
head up to the roof and watch the sunrise. The sky is a mix of orange, gray, blue, and black. The world is still and quiet, and even though it’s completely different, it reminds me how I felt when I would go to the beach and stare out at the ocean.

I tilt my face to the sky and close my eyes, feeling the wind brush past my face and through my hair. I think of my double and how she chose to run away rather than help us, and of my dad and Alex, who are gone.

I wonder what Jared is doing right now—if he’s still sleeping late and complaining about how we don’t have milk for cereal, still walking younger kids to school, still reading and playing board games each night. I try not to think about how mad he must be that I’m gone, and I hope he isn’t sulking and giving Struz the silent treatment.

I need to get back to them.

I don’t belong here on this lifeless world. The wrongness makes my bones feel heavy and sluggish. Something about the stillness has made me numb, like I’m now this unfeeling person who’s running around with a gun, but that’s not who I am. It’s not who I want to be.

I want to go home and hug my brother and never leave.

But the thing is, I’m standing here, surrounded by what should be a waking world, and it hits me that this may be it. Shivering from the cold, I close my eyes.

I might not make it home.

On my way down, I find Ben.

There are a million and one things I could say to him right now. I could tell him I’m scared and restless about what we’re about to do, that I’m worried about losing more people I care about, that I’m afraid I won’t keep my promise to Struz. I could tell him that I’ve thought about him every day since he left, that I can’t picture the rest of my life without him, that I don’t want to be replaceable.

But I don’t say any of that. Instead I just reach for him.

My hand touches his shirt and I feel the heat of his body radiating underneath.

He pulls me to him and whispers, “Are you okay?” His breath is warm on my cheek.

I tilt my face to his, look up past the dark curls and long eyelashes, into those bottomless eyes. I almost tell him the truth—that I haven’t been okay since he left. But I can’t bring myself to speak.

Instead, I look at his lips and raise up on my toes so they’re only a millimeter from mine, then I lift my eyes to his.

His lips part. Under my hand his chest rises and falls faster than it should, and his heart pulses through his whole body and reverberates into me.

One of his hands slides behind my back, the other he lays over my fingers, and we stand there suspended in time, in the dark, with only the warmth of our bodies, and the sounds of our breaths.

“I’m sorry,” Ben says, and then his lips are on mine.

They’re soft, and he tastes minty, and the familiarity of it just feels so right. I kiss him back with everything I am, opening my lips, touching his tongue, remembering every inch of his mouth.

And everything that’s wrong seems to fall away. It’s like we’re somewhere else—like we’re back at Sunset Cliffs, kissing for the first time. My skin burns with his touch and my heart is slamming against my chest, and it’s like my whole body has just come alive.

The nervous energy we’re both holding inside morphs into something different, something more active, something a little dangerous. We grab at each other, a force behind our kisses that we can’t quite control. We’re not gentle or careful—we’re not thinking.

His arms pull me in tighter so there’s no room for anything between us. His hands slip under my shirt and are warm against my back, and a shudder moves through me.

“I love you,” Ben breathes between kisses. “Let’s never be apart again.”

I pull his lips back to mine and force him to kiss me. That’s all I want right now.

My thoughts are scrambled, my blood is tingling, and it feels like my skin is on fire. We’re just lips, tongues, hands, and skin—two people who have everything and nothing to lose at the same time.

I’m tired of the never-ending fear I can’t shake.

I don’t want to be afraid anymore. I don’t want to be numb. And I don’t want to die.

But somehow in Ben’s arms, when he kisses me, none of that matters.

Because I’m not alone.

“
I
f it’s not tight, it will be hard for you to move fast,” Barclay says. I’m wearing jeans, sneakers, my bra, and a bulletproof vest that Barclay is helping me tighten. It’s lighter and thinner than anything my dad ever wore, and instead of having Velcro, it laces like some kind of crazy weapon-resistant corset.

But he’s right. Once the laces are tight and it’s fitted against my body, it moves with me, like it’s a part of me rather than something that will get in the way. I don’t tell him that, though. He’s got enough of an ego.

I do understand why I’m wearing it. The likelihood we’re going to get shot at while we break into IA is . . . well, it’s more of a certainty. Barclay grabbed both these vests—his and Hayley’s—from his mom’s house, along with the zip drives he used to copy the files. Wearing them, if we get hit, we’ll be bruised and achy, but we won’t be bleeding or dead.

I suppose that reduces the risk a little. I can pretend it’s like playing paintball and less like running from the law.

Unless, of course, someone shoots us in the head.

Someone clears his throat, and I look up to see Ben in the doorway. He isn’t looking at me, though. He’s looking at Barclay.

Barclay hands me my shirt and takes a step back. “See you in a few minutes,” he says, and he can’t fully suppress the smile.

“Did you get your earpiece?” I ask Ben as I pull my shirt over the vest.

“Yeah, Barclay showed me how it works,” he says.

Barclay only had two of them, so he and Ben will wear them. It will let us communicate with each other in case the plan changes or things start to go wrong.

Ben grabs me and pulls me into a hug, crushing me against his chest. “You don’t have to do this,” he says. “It could just be me and Barclay.”

Shivers run up my spine, and my legs feel too weak to support me. Here, in Ben’s arms, with the smell of mint and soap in my nose and the beat of his heart underneath my face, my resolve falters slightly. The thought of running away flickers through my mind. We could be together, on the move, living an adventure most people don’t dream of. But it’s nothing more than a momentary hesitation, an image conjured up by the fear that’s taken root in my mind. I don’t mean it.

Because no matter how scared I am, I
do
have to do this.

It’s the best plan we have.

Because we’ve got less than a day left.

“We can do this,” I say to Ben. Because I have to believe it. Because it’s our only option.

“I love you,” he whispers, and my heart flutters.

Knowing it deep down and hearing it out loud are still two very different things.

“If we make it through this . . .”

I shake my head against his chest. “
When
we make it through this, we’ll talk about it then.”

“But—”

I look up, my nose brushing against his cheek. “Remember when the world was ending?” I whisper.

He nods.

“We didn’t say good-bye or make promises then, and we’re not going to now.” It’s not that saying good-bye will be like admitting we might die. I know the odds we’re up against. I know we might not make it out of this. It’s more complicated than that. “I need something to look forward to.”

He doesn’t say anything, so I push back in his arms and look at his face. His eyes are glassy.

“Don’t worry about me. I have a lot to live for,” I say, and I mean it. Right now, it’s the truest statement I can make.

He nods, and I lead him, our hands intertwined, to the roof of the building.

Barclay is waiting for us. Cecily is there too. She’s showered and pulled her hair back. The circles under her eyes aren’t quite as dark, and I’m relieved that even though she was angry with me, she was at least able to get some sleep. She smiles at me. “Let’s get this party started.”

I give her a sideways glance. She’s a little too excited for someone wearing a bulletproof vest.

“Oh c’mon, J,” she says. “We are going to nail these guys.”

“Yeah, just try not to end up dead,” Elijah says as he comes in.

“Didn’t you see the sign?” Cecily says. “This room is positive-thinking only.”

Elijah just snorts.

“Enough of the bickering. Are we ready?” Barclay asks. I look at him—he’s wearing a small smile and cracking his knuckles, his body weight shifting on his feet. He can barely stay still from the adrenaline, and even though I can’t exactly describe what it is that he’s feeling, it’s contagious.

It starts as a nervous fluttering in the pit of my stomach, and it spreads through my body, becoming a restlessness in my limbs.

I take a deep breath and squeeze Ben’s hand.