Abandon (13 page)

“Did you gather what you need?” I ask. I’ll be sending him to the Southern Region in another week or two. Irv is killer with tech, and the Resistance hopes he’ll be able to find a place in a city to set up a safe house.

He leans closer and catches me off guard with his newly enhanced green eyes. I’m still not used to them. “Got it.”

“Nice,” I say. “Stage two in effect. Did you meet with Bower?”

“Stage two,” Irv confirms. “And yes. Bower’s a go. He’ll join me down south in a few weeks.” He looks over my shoulder. I follow his gaze, and shrink back into the shadows. Two Greenies stand in the market path, looking at palm readers and shaking their heads.

“Better get rid of that tech,” Irv whispers. I scoot around the back of the stand after him and out of sight of the Greenies. My heart pounds, but I don’t feel scared. The adrenaline is a sign that I’m doing something besides looking at plans and blueprints. Something besides sitting in meetings and asking people questions.

Something.

I try to assign myself to field missions, but it’s been getting harder, what with bringing the Oceanic cities on board and increasing recruitment efforts across the Association. I can’t be everywhere, doing everything.

But I can come to the Goodgrounds. No one’s better at that than me. Not even Indy, though she likes to think so.

I smile at the thought of her, but it’s almost sad. She’d broken up with me last week when she saw Sloan dancing with me. “With” isn’t even the right word. More like “near.”

I tried to explain, but Indy didn’t want to hear it. She said my “killer voice” couldn’t save me this time.

I’d assigned her to management duty while I took this mission, just to get away. That, and Gavin had said I’d find something here. Something huge.

I don’t think she meant in the dregs of the trade marketplace behind an endless swath of booths. But I could be wrong.

In fact, behind these booths is the absolute safest place for me as the sirens start.

“Rendezvous one,” Irv calls, sprinting into the fray of bodies scrambling down the path.

I run in the opposite direction, but stop short at the sight of two board-reading Greenies. They see me, and I reach up to pull my hat lower.

My hat is gone.

One of them, a bald one, raises his reader, and I’m pretty sure the resulting flash signals that he’s just confirmed my identity.

I drop my backpack and kick it as far away as possible. They see every move. I spin and run in the same direction as Irv. His dark-haired head bobbing through the crowd is the last I see of him.

*   *   *

After a half hour of running and many random turns, I’m bent over, gasping. In front of me lie the tech canyons created by the tall
buildings in the Southern Rim. I can get lost there. Waste some time in one of my Insider hideouts. Get back to the Badlands in a few days.

I’ve lost my tech, but that hardly matters now. I duck into the cleanest alley I’ve ever seen and slide my fingers along the smooth surface of the building on my left. I wonder how many people it takes to keep the Southern Rim so sparkly silver, so clean, so orderly.

I know it takes twenty-one Thinkers sending out transmissions, laying down proclamations, getting inside people’s heads, to control the population.

A wave of disgust washes over me. I can’t believe people once believed their lives were so bad that they willingly gave up control over them. But I didn’t live during those wars; I didn’t survive those fires; I didn’t emerge from an underground bunker to complete nuclear devastation.

I could only strive to make things right now, centuries later.

I thought back to my time in Seaside with Gavin. She’d had a premonition about someone in the Goodgrounds.
Whoever it is will tip the scale. Either for us or against us. You must find them. And soon.

I’d immediately thought of Zenn. But he was already against us. Sort of. Maybe.

I’d delayed my trip here last month, sending Indy and her
team instead. They’d found nothing. No one. Our contacts hadn’t heard anything either.

Now, in the impeccably clean alley of the Goodgrounds, I think of Blaze again. He died in an alley like this in Freedom. My sadness suffocates me.

I try to shake away the thoughts of him. I shouldn’t be so emotionally attached. It makes running the Resistance too damn hard. Because people are going to die, most likely because of a decision I’ll make. I can’t afford to be emotionally attached.

So it’s probably a good thing Indy dumped me,
I think.

Wrapped up in my thoughts about Gavin, and Blaze, and Indy, I get stupid. I’m not paying close enough attention.

I don’t even realize I’m surrounded until it’s too late.

*   *   *

I wake up, feeling my mattress shift. Someone’s just gotten out of the bed in my holding cell. My bed. The bed I’m lying in.

Across from me sits a girl. The first thing I notice is her wicked-cool hair. It spikes all over, colored like the depths of night. I switch my gaze to her eyes.

Thinker eyes. Part blue, part green, and as sharp as my father’s before he died.

But something isn’t right. This girl doesn’t seem . . . real. I can almost see through her.

“Who are you?” I ask, reaching for her to see if I can touch her or not. “What’s going on?”

A mask of panic covers her face, and suddenly I know who she is and exactly what’s going on.

*   *   *

I woke up coughing, the jerky movement sending pain rippling through my sliced-up back. My mind reeled with a different kind of disturbance, though. A whole Vi-was-just-in-my-head-witnessing-how-I-got-caught-in-the-Goodgrounds kind of disturbance.

The faintest of lights splintered the darkness covering my room. I blinked, trying to make my eyes see more.

“Vi?” I knew she was there, even if I couldn’t see her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I can’t help it.” Her voice pitched higher, and she started crying. I followed the sound to the chair near the doorway and pulled her back to the bed with me.

She snuggled against my chest. Like we fit, the pieces floating in my head suddenly clicked together.

She’d woken up and gotten out of bed—in real life.

The same disturbance woke me in my dream. And then I saw her—in my dream.

“Shh,” I said, smoothing her hair. “So. Did you see it all?”

“Yes.” Her voice sounded like a child’s. Tiny/afraid/far away. “I can’t help it,” she repeated.

“I’m not mad.” I held her until she fell asleep again, her breathing deep and even against my collarbone. I felt weary, but I didn’t allow myself to sleep.

If I didn’t, then Vi wouldn’t have to witness my nightmares.

18
.
The buildings of Lakehead shimmered against the horizon, blocking the sun like a partial eclipse. My back hurt. My head too. My heart also sang with pain. Strangely, because I’d spent most of the last seven hours thinking about Saffediene instead of Vi.

Which hurt in a new, weird way.

Gunner made a great companion in that he didn’t ask questions. He didn’t feel the need for useless chatter either. But his silence had made the last several hours almost unbearable in comparison to the flight with Saffediene, her
cool hands holding mine, and her perky voice telling stories about her life.

Half of me preferred Gunn’s steady, sure approach to our missions. The other half longed to watch Saffediene rebraid her hair as she went over the finer points of our assignment.

“Hey,” Gunn said. “Are you alive?”

“Huh? Yeah.” I took in his disbelieving expression.

“Look, you’ve got to stop pining over Vi.”

I glared. “I am not pining over Vi.” But the way he just came out with it reminded me of Saffediene. Could I be pining over her?

He rolled his eyes. “I can feel stuff, Zenn.” He wasn’t like Saffediene in his specificity. Right now, I appreciated his “stuff” more.

“What do you know about the Evolutionary Rise?” I asked. He regarded me for a moment in surprise. “I can figure
stuff
out too.”

“Ask Jag,” Gunn said. I didn’t want to ask Jag—and it annoyed me that Gunn knew something I didn’t. I looked away.

Lakehead was a blip on the radar, a tiny city surrounded by lakes. Mostly a water filtration city, the people lived packed on top of one another in a narrow neck of land between two large bodies of water.

“The Director sent an e-comm several weeks ago, claiming
to have stopped all transmissions.” Gunn flipped through his dad’s journal, any apprehension about my question gone. “But I don’t see how that’s possible. For one, Indy said she never sent the software. For another, the Association would need to be fed a fake feed, and there’s no record of that, either.”

I slowed to a stop as we approached the border. “What does the journal say we need to do here? What’s the mission?”

“Install the software, send the live feed,” Gunner said. “Then we’ve got to find the . . .” He checked the book. “The West End Lakehead Treatment Facility and locate a man named Phillip Hernandez.”

“At least we have a direction. There’s got to be a million treatment facilities here.” One loomed just below me, white curls of smoke painted into the ebony metallic surfaces of the one-story building.

“You’re right. Super,” Gunn muttered. “Well, let’s get this done already.”

No wasted words, no wasted time. Gotta love Gunn.

*   *   *

Half an hour later, we hadn’t succeeded in even one of our objectives. The city was closed.

That’s right. Closed.

The fences had been activated, creating a dome of techenergy over the main group of buildings. Guards stood at every
ground entrance. Gunn and I had retreated to a small stand of trees near one of the smaller lakes, about ten miles away.

Gunn pulled a cube from his pack. “What do you want to eat?”

I smiled, but didn’t answer. The best part of being on the traveling team was the food-generating cube. We only had two in our possession as a Resistance, and we used them while traveling.

But it meant I didn’t have to eat out of a can.

A moment later Gunn handed me a stack of toast as high as my head.

The wind rippled through my hair, whispering a word of greeting. The sun beat down on my bare arms, charging our boards with its rays. I took a bite of buttery toast.

Ah, this was the life.

“Can you do something about the dome?” I whispered to the breeze. It scampered away, leaving me too warm and wanting.

Insider Tip #6: Use what resources you have, as long as you can do it without detection.

Ten minutes later the dome went down.

*   *   *

Gunn and I managed to float over the city at four hundred feet, well out of range of any guards, even if they had vision
enhancements. When we hovered dead center, I gave the signal to descend.

We landed on the roof of a medium-size building, where I fondled a cool westerly and said, “Thanks.”

The air current zipped away, buzzing with pride.

Before we could even begin, the dome regenerated, trapping us inside.

“At least we can get two things done,” Gunn said, folding his board and shoving it in his pocket. He looked to his right, then his left. “So, which way do you think we should go?”

Shouts filled the sky, and that same crazy-unsettling unease I’d felt in Harvest filled my gut.

“Toward that sound,” I said, though every particle of my being wanted to get back on my board and fly far away.

Gunn looked at me, shock darkening his features. “What’s going on?”

“I’d say a rebellion,” I answered calmly. I felt it deep, deep down. And I wondered—again—if canceling the transmissions and providing the general population their free will was a good thing.

Free vs. functioning?
If Saffediene were here, I’d ask her. But I didn’t dare voice anything with Gunn, lest Jag hear about it and question my loyalty again.

I led, walking fast across the close-knit rooftops and
waving off Gunn’s repeated questions. He’d see for himself soon enough.

After only a few minutes, we arrived on the scene. I blinked, activating the recording capabilities of my cache before I looked down.

Gunn and I stood on a ten-story building, looking down on complete mayhem. The open area was circular, with banners and flags waving every few feet. A celebration had obviously been interrupted, but by whom and for what reason I couldn’t determine.

All I saw were crazy-mad people crying in crazy-loud voices about something I didn’t understand.

A group of Thinkers stood in the middle of the fray, wearing bright-as-the-summer-sky blue robes, holding their hands out in the same placating gesture.

“What are they saying?” Gunn asked.

“I don’t know.” I listened, but the voices combined into a cacophony of anger and fear and desperation.

“Equal rights,” a voice nearby said.

Both Gunn and I startled. A boy, not more than ten, stood on the roof about fifteen feet from us, surveying the madness below.

“Who are you?” Gunn asked, edging the tiniest bit closer to me.

“Stone,” he said, still not looking at us. Like we didn’t even matter.

“Equal rights?” I asked.

“Yeah, you know, like education and food and water and stuff.”

“You don’t have food and water and . . . stuff?” I asked. I liked this kid already.

“We used to. Everyone did. Everyone had the same stuff, actually. Same clothes, same rations, same houses. Now—” He finally turned to look at me, and I saw how sunken his cheeks were. “Now we don’t.”

“What happened?” Gunn gestured down to the open area. “What happened to make them act like that?”