Donor 23 (34 page)

The dark blur reach for the suitcase again, and Kaleb steeled himself. The tingling lasted a little longer this time. Then the pain came—even more excruciating. He tried not to scream. Tried. As the pain ebbed, he looked down at the wires attached to his skin. A strange sensation prickled at them. Rats. The applicators morphed into rats—gray rats, with their black, glossy, supernatural eyes staring at him. The wires distorted into their tails, slinking along his skin. They crawled on his body, gnawing at his flesh. Screams resonated through the canyon, up to Joan.

Joan shook her head, “That’s it. I’m going.”

Bash held her down. “That’s not going to save him. Nothing you do can save him now. We should sneak out. Leave. Once we leave, Nox should stop. Otherwise it’s just suicide for all of us.”

“He’s right,” Isabel agreed.

“You don’t understand, Bash,” Joan explained. “Nox won’t stop. And he’ll just take Kaleb back to the fort, and it’ll go on, until I give myself up. He’s not going to stop.”

Screams.

“He is suffering,” Arrow Comes Back observed. “Suffering to no end. No purpose.”

Joan looked at Arrow Comes Back, and she understood his meaning.

“You mean like the creatures in the traps? You said you ended their suffering? Put them out of their misery. He’s a person, a man—not an animal.”

“Then it’s even more important,” he replied.

“We’re not going to kill him,” Reck declared. “We have to try to rescue him.”

“Rescue’s not an option anymore,” Bash told him, his voice rising in anger. In resignation, he said, “But Arrow Comes Back may be right. I can’t leave a man like that.”

The screams stopped. Silence. Then moans.

Bash and Isabel, both seeming to agree with Arrow Comes Back, began discussing how to do the deed.

Bash commented, “I’m good with six-shooters, not long-range rifles.”

“Arrows won’t reach him,” Arrow Comes Back said.

They looked at Isabel, who shook her head and held up her shotgun. “This is my gun.”

Reck held Joan’s rifle and clutched it to him, “I’m not going to let you do it.”

Bash took the rifle from Reck, held it up, and motioned to Arrow Comes Back. “How’re you with this?”

Arrow Comes Back shook his head. Then he stared at Joan. “She’s good with it.”

Joan stared in disbelief, “You want me…oh, no. No way.”

All of them were quiet, then the silence was broken by Kaleb’s screams.

Bash leaned in close to her, “Joan—”

“No,” Joan vowed. She grabbed Bash’s shirt. “I don’t want this. Didn’t want this to happen.”

Screams resonated.

Bash continued quietly, “None of us do. That’s not up to us. We have to decide what we’re going to do with what we’re given. Play the cards dealt to us.”

Joan looked around. Reck huddled next to the boulder. He shook his head at Joan—his eyes strained, teeth set.

Bash held her hand. “If I could do it, I would. If any of us could…”

She grabbed the rifle from Bash, “I’ll shoot Nox—that’s who I’ll shoot.”

She peered over the rock, pointing the rifle toward the camp.

Bash put his hand on the rifle, covering the blot action. “Do you think that’ll stop the process?”

“I’ll shoot Nox first, at least,” Joan stated with determination, anger.

“No.” It was Arrow Comes Back. “You can only fire once.”

“What?” Joan asked.

“He’s right,” Bash said. “One shot—they can’t figure out where it came from. But two shots and they can figure out where we are.”

Isabel chimed in, “They’ll swarm us. We won’t have time to escape.”

Joan looked down the canyon. It didn’t matter, anyway. Nox and the machine were hidden behind boulders, out of her line
of sight. All she could see was Kaleb. She watched Kaleb. She’d known him before she knew Reck. He seemed to be looking at her, yet his eyes were not seeing her.

Kaleb fought to stand, dangling from the ropes that bound his arms. Concentrating, he tried to remind himself the rats weren’t real. They were in his head. The machine was in his head, using his thoughts, his memories, and his fears against him. He looked up as he heard birds fly overhead, but he couldn’t see them.

His thoughts wandered. They had talked about situations like this during the underground meetings back in the ghetto. They talked about being invited to visit the machine, that is. What would it be like, they questioned. How heroic they would be! They never could have guessed what it was like. No one could ever know how he or she would react. Would they fight? Would they relent? Would they beg? Would they give up their friends?

Now Kaleb would find out.

He recalled his grandmother, Zenobia, reciting something about a valley of death.
What was it she said?
Something about six hundred people riding into a valley of death. The noble six hundred, she called them. There was another story she told him, about a valley of death—about walking and not being alone. He looked around him and squinted his eyes, trying to make out the canyon.
Was he alone? Was this his valley of death? Would he be noble?

Nox’s voice broke into his thoughts. “23, come down. It’ll be so easy. No pain for anyone.”

Joan rested the rifle on the rock, pointing it at her friend. She slowed her breathing. “Forgive me,” she whispered, as she took aim.

35

A
s her finger began to squeeze the trigger, her gaze fell upon her tattoo. The black-inked number glistened with her sweat. She wasn’t a number anymore. She was Joan Lion. The Alliance and its System—through the power it once held over her—had made her complicit in how many deaths? Too many.

The System manipulated her into informing on her mother. It was her escape from the Alliance that killed her father. It was her passion against the Alliance that made her almost kill Duncan when she threw the rock. In her heart, she knew it was partly her rage at the Alliance that made her kill Garth. She—
Joan
—had promised herself it would hold sway over her no more.

She would not be told what to do by the System. She didn’t belong to them anymore. It was so clear to her now—but it had been obvious all along. She understood now what Old Owl had
meant when he said someone could be enslaved on the inside. She was free. It was her decision. She took a deep breath—a weight lifted from her. She had forgiven herself.

Relaxing her grip on the rifle, Joan looked up to the sky and said calmly, “I’m going down.”

The others jerked their heads toward her.

“No, Joan,” Bash grabbed her arm.

She glared at him and softened her stance.

“I have to. It’s my decision. No more deaths.”

Bash didn’t let go of her. He shook his head. “Those deaths weren’t your fault—”

“Bash, it’s alright. Really. I’m not doing this out of some sort of guilt.” Her voice rang with confidence—serenity. “Nox won’t kill me or Kaleb. Nox will stop torturing him and take us back. He’ll leave Kaleb alone then. Whatever he does to me… well, I’ll still be free. The Alliance can’t change that. The Alliance can’t change me, that is. Don’t you see? I’m not donor 23 anymore.”

“No,” Bash pleaded. He squeezed her arm tighter.

Joan spoke kindly, explaining patiently, as he always patiently explained things to her. “It’s like in that book you gave me,
Jane Eyre.
Jane says she isn’t a bird caught in a net. Instead she’s a human being with an independent will and that she has a treasure inside her that will keep her alive, no matter if anything bad happens.”

She looked beseechingly at him, “You can understand that, can’t you? Understand me? Like you said. I know myself.
My self
.”

Bash wrapped his arms around her and pulled her to him. She leaned her head back. He nodded. His blue-gray eyes looked watery and tired. But his voice, like hers, was steady and sure, “I understand.”

She turned toward Nox and yelled. “Don’t shoot. It’s me, Joan Lion. I’m coming down.”

This was his valley,
Kaleb decided. He garnered his courage and struggled furiously at the ropes that bound him. His writhing from the pain had loosened the rope around one hand.

Manipulating it, he jerked it free and screamed into the phone on his arm, “Don’t come down, Joan.”

With his free hand, he yanked a handful of the machine’s wires off of him. Two soldiers rushed forward and grabbed his one free arm—tried to grab it. Kaleb thrashed wildly. He tussled with the officers and landed his fist on one’s nose.
The gun
. He reached for the soldier’s handgun. Grasping it from the holster, he began shooting wildly. The other soldier panicked and pulled his own weapon. Kaleb shot him. The force from the bullet threw the soldier back, and his gun fell backward. Nox jumped forward and picked up the gun. Then he quickly took aim and fired two shots at Kaleb.

Kaleb groaned. Both shots hit him in his chest. With his free hand, he grasped the wounds, blood seeping between his fingers.
He did it
, he thought.
He had charged into the valley of death
. He slumped down almost to his knees, and he hung there with his one arm still tied to the tree holding him up. He spied the wrist phone, which had fallen at his feet.

With his final breath, he uttered, “Don’t come, Joan.”

P
ART
IV

Lionheart

36

T
hey stopped by a stream to camp for the night. Reck barely spoke on the ride back. After Kaleb died, they sneaked out of the canyon, hiked back to the horses, and rode away—away from death.

Reck sat apart from the fire by himself. Joan went up to him and sat near him. She put his arm around his shoulder, but he pushed it off.

“You gave up your mom?” The news disillusioned and saddened him. “All that time, you lied to us?”

“I never lied. I just never…I always told you to stop talking about it. I always said I wasn’t a hero. I don’t know how to explain. It’s—”

“But an
informant
?” he spit the word out with derision. “Who else did you inform on? Did you inform on Kaleb and me, too? Is that how we ended up here? And were you really
giving yourself up back there to save Kaleb or just going back to your partner, Nox? To work for him some more and inform on others?”