Текст книги "Requiem"

Автор книги: Лорен Оливер

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 19 страниц)

The city changes. Soon, the buildings thin out. At last the sound of the alarm, still wailing, is no more than a distant cry, and we sink gratefully back into an area where the streetlamps are dark. The moon above us is high and bloated. The apartments on either side of us have the empty, forlorn look of children separated from their parents. I wonder how far we are from the river, whether Raven and the others managed to explode the dam, whether we would have heard it. I think of Julian and feel a twist of anxiety and also regret. I’ve been hard on him. He’s doing his best.

“Lena.” Coral stops and points. We’re moving past a park; at its center is a sunken amphitheater. For a second, confusedly, I have the impression of dark oil, shimmering between its stone seats; the moon is shining down onto a slick black surface.

Then I realize: water.

Half the theater is flooded. A coating of scattered leaves is swirling across its surface, disturbing the watery reflections of the moon, stars, and trees. It’s strangely beautiful. I take an unconscious step forward, onto the grass, which squelches under my feet. Mud bubbles up beneath my shoes.

Pippa was right. The dam must have forced the water over the riverbanks and flooded some of the downtown areas. That must mean we’re in one of the neighborhoods that was evacuated after the protests.

“Let’s get to the wall,” I say. “We shouldn’t have any trouble crossing.”

We continue skirting the periphery of the park. The silence around us is deep, complete, and reassuring. I’m starting to feel good. We’ve made it. We did what we were supposed to do—with any luck, the rest of our plan went off too.

At one corner of the park is a small stone rotunda, surrounded by a fringe of dark trees. If it weren’t for the single, old-fashioned lantern burning on the corner, I would have missed the girl sitting on one of its stone benches. Her head is dropped between her knees, but I recognize her long, streaked hair and her mud-caked purple sneakers. Lu.

Coral sees her at the same time I do. “Isn’t that . . . ?” she starts to ask, but I’m already breaking into a run.

“Lu!” I cry out.

She looks up, startled. She must not recognize me immediately; for a second her face is vivid white, frightened. I drop into a squat in front of her, put my hands on her shoulders.

“Are you all right?” I say breathlessly. “Where are the others? Did something happen?”

“I . . .” She trails off and shakes her head.

“Are you hurt?” I straighten up, keeping my hands on her shoulders. I don’t see any blood, but she’s trembling slightly under my hands. She opens her mouth and then closes it again. Her eyes are wide and vacant. “Lu. Talk to me.” I lift my hands from her shoulders to her face, giving her a gentle shake, trying to snap her out of it. As I do, my fingertips skim the skin behind her left ear.

My heart stops. Lu lets out a small cry and tries to jerk away from me. But I keep my hands wrapped tightly around the back of her neck. Now she is bucking and twisting, trying to fight her way from my grasp.

“Get away from me,” she practically spits.

I don’t say anything. I can’t speak. All my energy is in my hands now, and my fingers. She is strong, but she has been taken by surprise, and I manage to haul her to her feet and pin her back against a stone column. I drive my elbow into her neck, forcing her to turn, coughing, to the left.

Dimly I’m aware of Coral’s voice. “What the hell are you doing, Lena?”

I wrench Lu’s hair away from her face, so that her neck is exposed, white and pretty.

I can see the frantic flutter of her pulse—just beneath the neat, three-pronged scar on her neck.

The mark of the procedure. A real one.

Lu is cured.

The past few weeks cycle back to me: Lu’s quietness, and her changes in temperament. The fact that she grew her hair long and brushed it carefully forward every day.

“When?” I croak out. I still have my forearm pressed against her throat. Something black and old is rising up inside of me. Traitor.

“Let me go,” she gasps. Her left eye rolls back to look at me.

“When?” I repeat, and give her throat a nudge. She cries out.

“Okay, okay,” she says, and I ease the pressure, just a little. But I keep her pinned against the stone. “December,” she croaks. “Baltimore.”

My head is spinning. Of course. It was Lu I heard earlier. The regulator’s words come back to me with new, terrible meaning: I don’t know how you lived with that filth for so long.And hers: It wasn’t easy.

“Why?” I choke out the words. When she doesn’t answer me immediately, I lean into her again. “Why?”

She starts speaking in a hoarse rush. “They were right, Lena. I know that now. Think of all those people out there in the camps, in the Wilds . . . like animals. That’s not happiness.”

“It’s freedom,” I say.

“Is it?” Her eye is huge; her iris has been swallowed by black. “Are youfree, Lena? Is this the life you wanted?”

I can’t respond. The anger is a thick, dark mud, a rising tide in my chest and throat.

Lu’s voice drops to a silken whisper, like the noise of a snake through the grass. “It’s not too late for you, Lena. It doesn’t matter what you’ve done on the other side. We’ll wipe that out; we’ll start clean. That’s the whole point. We can take all that away . . . the past, the pain, all your struggling. You can start again.”

For a second, we both stand there staring at each other. Lu is breathing hard.

“All of it?” I say.

Lu tries to nod, and grimaces as she once again encounters my elbow. “The anxiety, the unhappiness. We can make it go away.”

I ease the pressure off her neck. She sucks in a deep, grateful breath. I lean in very close to her and repeat something that Hana once said to me a lifetime ago.

“You know you can’t be happy unless you’re unhappy sometimes, right?”

Lu’s face hardens. I’ve given her just enough space to maneuver, and when she goes to swing at me, I catch her left wrist and twist it behind her back, forcing her to double over. I wrestle her to the ground, press her flat, force a knee between her shoulder blades.

“Lena!” Coral shouts. I ignore her. A single word drums through me: Traitor. Traitor. Traitor.

“What happened to the others?” I say. My words are high and strangled, clutched in the web of anger.

“It’s too late, Lena.” Lu’s face is half-mashed against the ground, but still she manages to twist her mouth into a horrible smile, a leering half grin.

It’s a good thing I don’t have a knife on me. I would drive it straight into her neck. I think of Raven smiling, laughing. Lu can come with us. She’s a walking good-luck charm.I think of Tack dividing his bread, giving her the largest share when she complained about being hungry. My heart feels like it’s crumbling to chalk, and I want to scream and cry at the same time. We trusted you.

“Lena,” Coral repeats. “I think—”

“Be quiet,” I say hoarsely, keeping my focus locked on Lu. “Tell me what happened to them or I’ll kill you.”

She struggles under my weight, and continues beaming that horrible twisted grin at me. “Too late,” she repeats. “They’ll be here before nightfall tomorrow.”

“What are you talking about?”

Her laughter is a rattle in her throat. “You didn’t think it would last, did you? You didn’t think we’d let you keep playing in your little camp, in your filth—” I twist her arms another inch toward her shoulder blades. She cries out, and then continues speaking in a rush. “Ten thousand soldiers, Lena. Ten thousand soldiers against a thousand hungry, thirsty, diseased, disorganized uncureds. You’ll be mowed down. Obliterated. Poof.”

I think I’m going to be sick. My head is thick, fluid-feeling. Distantly, I’m aware that Coral is speaking to me again. It takes a moment for the words to work their way through the murk, through the watery echoes in my head.

“Lena. I think someone’s coming.”

She has barely spoken the words when a regulator—probably the one we saw with Lu earlier—rounds the corner, saying, “Sorry that took so long. Shed was locked—”

He breaks off when he sees Coral and me, and Lu on the ground. Coral shouts and lunges for him but clumsily, off balance. He pushes her backward, and I hear a small crack as her head collides with one of the stone columns of the portico. The regulator lunges forward, swinging his flashlight at her face. She manages to duck, barely, and the flashlight crashes hard against the stone pillar and sputters into darkness.

The regulator has thrown too much weight into the swing, and his balance is upset. This gives Coral just enough time to break past him, away from the pillar. She’s swaying on her feet, and obviously unsteady. She staggers around to face him, but clutching one hand to the back of her head. The regulator regains his footing and his hand goes to his belt. Gun.

I rocket to my feet. I have no choice but to release Lu from underneath me. I dive at the regulator and grab him around the waist. My weight and momentum carry us both off our feet, and we hit the ground together, rolling once, arms and legs tangled together. The taste of his uniform and sweat is in my mouth, and I can feel the weight of his gun digging against my thigh.

Behind me, I hear a shout, and a body thudding to the ground. I pray that it’s Lu and not Coral.

Then the regulator breaks free of my grip and scrambles to his feet, pushing me off him roughly. He is panting, red-faced. Bigger than I am, and stronger—but slower, too, in bad shape. He fumbles with his belt, but I’m on my feet before he can get the gun from its holster. I grab his wrist, and he lets out a roar of frustration.

Bang.

The gun goes off. The explosion is so unexpected, it sends a jolt through my whole body; I feel it ringing all the way up into my teeth. I jump backward. The regulator screams out in pain and crumples; a dark black stain is spreading down his right leg and he rolls over onto his back, clutching his thigh. His face is contorted, wet with sweat. The gun is still in its holster—a misfire.

I step forward and take the gun off him. He doesn’t resist. He just keeps moaning and shuddering, repeating, “Oh shit, oh shit.”

“What the hell did you do?”

I whip around. Lu is standing, panting, staring at me. Behind her, I see Coral lying on the ground, on her side, her head resting on one arm and her legs curled up toward her chest. My heart stops. Please don’t let her be dead.Then I see her eyelids flutter, and one of her hands twitch. She moans. Not dead, then.

Lu takes a step toward me. I raise the gun, level it at her. She freezes.

“Hey, now.” Her voice is warm, easy, friendly. “Don’t do anything stupid, okay? Just hold on.”

“I know what I’m doing,” I say. I’m amazed to see how steady my hand is. I’m amazed that this—wrist, finger, fist, gun—belongs to me.

She manages to smile. “Remember the old homestead?” she says in that same smooth lullaby-voice. “Remember when Blue and I found all those blueberry bushes?”

“Don’t you dare talk to me about what I remember,” I practically spit. “And don’t talk about Blue, either.” I cock the gun. I see her flinch. Her smile falters. It would be so easy. Flex and release. Bang.

“Lena,” she says, but I don’t let her finish. I take a step closer to her, closing the distance between us, then wrap one arm around her neck and draw her into an embrace, shoving the muzzle of the revolver into the soft flesh of her chin. Her eyes begin rolling, like a horse’s when it’s frightened; I can feel her bucking against me, shaking, trying to wrestle away from me.

“Don’t move,” I say in a voice that doesn’t sound like my own. She goes limp—all except for her eyes, which keep rolling, terrified, from my face to the sky.

Flex and release. A simple motion; a twitch.

I can smell her breath, too: hot and sour.

I push her away from me. She falls back, gasping, as though I’ve been choking her.

“Go,” I say. “Take him”—I gesture to the regulator, who is still moaning, and clutching his thigh—“and go.”

She licks her lips nervously, her eyes darting to the man on the ground.

“Before I change my mind,” I add.

She doesn’t hesitate after that; she squats and slings the regulator’s arm around her shoulders, helping him to his feet. The stain on his pants is black, spreading from mid-thigh down to his kneecap. I find myself hoping, cruelly, that he’ll bleed out before they can find help.

“Let’s go,” Lu whispers to him, her eyes still locked on me. I watch as she and the regulator hobble off down the street. Each one of his steps is punctuated by a cry of pain. As soon as the darkness has swallowed them, I exhale. I turn around and see that Coral is sitting up, rubbing her head.

“I’m all right,” she says when I go to help her up. She climbs to her feet unsteadily. She blinks several times, as though trying to clear her vision.

“You sure you can walk?” I ask, and she nods. “Come on,” I say. “We’ve got to find our way out of here.”

Lu and the regulator will give us away at their first opportunity. If we don’t hurry, any minute we’ll be surrounded. I feel a deep spasm of hatred, thinking of the fact that Tack shared his dinner with Lu only a few days ago, thinking of the fact that Lu accepted it from him.

Thankfully, we make it to the border wall without encountering any patrols, and locate a rusty metal stairwell that leads up to the guards’ walkway, which is also empty; we must be at the southernmost end of the city right now, very close to the camp, and security is concentrated in more populated portions of Waterbury.

Coral mounts the stairs shakily and I go behind her, to make sure she won’t fall, but she refuses my help and jerks away from me when I place a hand on her back. In just a few hours, my respect for her has increased tenfold. As we reach the walkway, the alarm in the distance finally stops, and the sudden quiet is somehow scarier: a silent scream.

Getting down the other side of the wall is trickier. The drop from the top is a good fifteen feet, onto a steep, loose slope of gravel and rock. I go first, swinging out, hand over hand, on one of the disabled floodlights; when I let go and drop to the ground, I slide forward several feet, thudding onto my knees, and feel the gravel bite through my denim. Coral follows after me, her face pale with concentration, landing with a small cry of pain.

I don’t know what I was expecting—I had feared, I think, that the tanks would have already arrived, that we would find the camp already consumed by fire and chaos—but it stretches before us as it ever did, a vast and pitted field of peaked tents and shelters. Beyond it, across the valley, are the high cliffs, capped with a shaggy black mass of trees.

“How long do you think we have?” Coral says. I know without asking that she means before the troops come.

“Not long enough,” I say.

We move in silence toward the outskirts of the camp—walking the periphery will still be quicker than trying to navigate the maze of people and tents. The river is still dry. The plan obviously failed. Raven and the others did not manage to disable the dam—not that it matters much, at this point.

All these people . . . thirsty, exhausted, weak. They’ll be easier to corral.

And, of course, far easier to kill.

By the time we make it back to Pippa’s camp, my throat is so dry I can hardly swallow. For a second, when Julian rushes toward me, I don’t recognize his face: It is a collection of random shapes and shadows.

Behind him, Alex turns away from the fire. He meets my eyes and starts toward me, mouth open, hands extended. Everything freezes, and I know I’ve been forgiven and I reach out my hands—reach out my arms to him . . .

“Lena!” Then Julian is sweeping me into his arms, and I snap back into myself, press my cheek against his chest. Alex must have been reaching for Coral; I hear him murmuring to her, and as I pull away from Julian, I see that Alex is leading Coral back toward one of the campfires. I was so sure, for just that one second, that he was reaching for me.

“What happened?” Julian asks, cupping my face and bending down a little bit so that we’re nearly eye to eye. “Bram told us—”

“Where’s Raven?” I say, cutting him off.

“I’m right here.” She flows out of the dark, and suddenly I am surrounded: Bram, Hunter, Tack, and Pippa, all speaking at once, firing questions at me.

Julian keeps one hand on my back. Hunter offers me a drink from a plastic jug, which is mostly empty. I take it gratefully.

“Is Coral okay?”

“You’re bleeding, Lena.”

“God. What happened?”

“There’s no time.” The water has helped, but still the words shred my throat. “We have to leave. We have to get everyone we can, and we have to—”

“Slow down, slow down.” Pippa holds up both hands. Half her face is lit by the fire; the other is plunged in darkness. I think of Lu and feel nauseous: a half person, a two-faced traitor.

“Start from the beginning,” Raven says.

“We had to fight,” I say. “We had to go inside.”

“We thought you might have been taken,” Tack says. I can tell he’s hopped up, anxious; everybody is. The whole group is charged with bad electricity. “After the ambush—”

“Ambush?” I repeat sharply. “What do you mean, ambush?”

“We never made it to the dam,” Raven says. “Alex and Beast managed to get their blast off okay. We were a half-dozen feet from the wall when a group of regulators started swarming us. It was like they were waiting. We would have been screwed if Julian hadn’t spotted the movement and given the alarm early.”

Alex has joined the group. Coral gets clumsily to her feet, her mouth a fine, dark line. I think she looks more beautiful than I’ve ever seen her. My heart squeezes once, tight, in my chest. I can see why Alex likes her.

Maybe even why he loves her.

“We beat it back here,” Pippa pipes up. “Then Bram showed up. We’ve been debating whether to go looking—”

“Where’s Dani?” I notice, for the first time, that she isn’t with the group.

“Dead,” Raven says shortly, avoiding my eyes. “And Lu was taken. We couldn’t get to them in time. I’m sorry, Lena,” she finishes in a softer voice, and looks at me again.

I feel another surge of nausea. I wrap my arms around my stomach, as though I can press it deep and down. “Lu wasn’t taken,” I say. My voice comes out as a bark. “And they werewaiting for you. The regulators. It was a trap.”

There’s a second of silence. Raven and Tack exchange a glance. Alex is the one who speaks.

“What are you talking about?”

It’s the first time he has spoken to me directly since that night on the banks, after the regulators burned our camp.

“Lu isn’t what we thought she was,” I say. “She isn’t whowe thought she was. She’s been cured.”

More silence: a sharp, shocked minute of it.

Finally Raven bursts out, “How do you know?”

“I saw the mark,” I say. Suddenly I’m exhausted. “And she told me.”

“Impossible,” Hunter says. “I was with her. . . . We went to Maryland together. . . .”

“It’s not impossible,” Raven says slowly. “She told me she’d broken off from the group for a while, spent some time floating between homesteads.”

“She was only gone for a few weeks.” Hunter looks at Bram for confirmation. Bram nods.

“That’s time enough.” Julian speaks softly. Alex glares at him. But Julian’s right: It is time enough.

Raven’s voice is strained. “Go on, Lena.”

“They’re bringing in troops,” I say. Once the words leave my mouth I feel like I’ve been socked in the stomach.

There’s another moment of silence. “How many?” Pippa demands.

“Ten thousand.” I can barely speak the words.

There is a sharp intake of breath, gasps from all around the circle. Pippa stays laser-focused on me. “When?”

“Less than twenty-four hours,” I say.

“ Ifshe was telling the truth,” Bram says.

Pippa runs a hand through her hair, making it stick up in spikes. “I don’t believe it,” she says, but adds almost immediately, “I was worried something like this might happen.”

“I’ll fucking kill her,” Hunter says softly.

“What do we do now?” Raven addresses the comment to Pippa.

Pippa is silent for a second, staring at the fire. Then she rouses herself. “We do nothing,” she says firmly, sweeping her eyes deliberately around the group: from Tack and Raven to Hunter and Bram; to Beast and Alex and Coral, and to Julian. Finally her eyes click to mine, and I involuntarily draw back. It’s as though a door has closed inside her. For once, she isn’t pacing. “Raven, you and Tack will lead the group to a safe house just outside of Hartford. Summer told me how to get there. Some contacts from the resistance will be there in the next few days. You’ll have to wait it out.”

“What about you?” Beast asks.

Pippa pushes her way out of the circle, stepping into the three-sided structure at the center of camp and moving toward the old refrigerator. “I’ll do what I can here,” she says.

Everyone speaks at once. Beast says, “I’m staying with you.”

Tack bursts out, “That’s suicide, Pippa.”

And Raven says, “You’re no match for ten thousand troops. You’ll be mowed down—”

Pippa raises a hand. “I’m not planning to fight,” she says. “I’ll do what I can to spread the word about what’s coming. I’ll try to clear the camp.”

“There’s no time.” Coral speaks up. Her voice is shrill. “The troops are already on their way. . . . There’s no time to move everyone, no time to get the word out—”

“I said I would do what I can.” Now Pippa’s voice turns sharp. She removes the key from around her neck and opens the lock around the fridge, removing food and medical equipment from the darkened shelves.

“We won’t leave without you,” Beast says stubbornly. “We’ll stay. We’ll help you clear the camp.”

“You’ll do what I say,” Pippa says, without turning around to face him. She squats and begins pulling blankets from under the bench. “You’ll go to the safe house and you’ll wait for the resistance.”

“No,” he says. “I won’t.” Their eyes meet: Some wordless dialogue flows between them, and at last, Pippa nods.

“All right,” she says. “But the rest of you need to clear out.”

“Pippa—” Raven starts to protest.

Pippa straightens up. “No arguing,” she says. Now I know where Raven learned her hardness, her way of leading people. “Coral is right about one thing,” Pippa continues quietly. “There’s hardly any time. I expect you out of here in twenty minutes.” She sweeps her eyes around the circle again. “Raven, take the supplies you think you’ll need. It’s a day’s walk to the safe house, more if you have to circumvent the troops. Tack, come with me. I’ll make you a map.”

The group breaks up. Maybe it’s the exhaustion, or the fear, but everything seems to happen as it does in a dream: Tack and Pippa are crouching over something, gesticulating; Raven is rolling up food in blankets, tying up the bundles with old cord; Hunter is urging me to have more water and then, suddenly, Pippa is pressing us to go, go.

The moon beats down on the switchback paths cut in the hill, tawny-colored and dry, as though steeped in old blood. I shoot a last glance back down at the camp, at the sea of writhing shadows—people, all those people, who don’t know that even now the guns and the bombs and the troops are drawing closer.

Raven must sense it too: the new terror in the air, the proximity of death, the way an animal must feel when it is caught in a trap. She turns and shouts down to Pippa.

“Please, Pippa.” Her voice rolls off the bare slope. Pippa is standing at the bottom of the dirt path, watching us. Beast is standing behind her. She’s holding a lantern, which illuminates her face from below, carves it into stone, into planes of shadow and light.

“Go,” Pippa says. “Don’t worry. I’ll meet you at the safe house.”

Raven stares at her for a few more seconds, and then begins to turn around again.

Then Pippa calls, “But if I’m not there in three days, don’t wait.”

Her voice never loses its calm. And I know, now, what the look was that I saw earlier in her eyes. It was beyond calm. It was resignation.

It was the look of someone who knows she will die.

We leave Pippa behind, standing in the dark, teeming bowels of the camp, while the sun begins to stain the sky electric, and from all sides the guns draw closer.