Abandon (16 page)

My pulse jumped. Greene’s name was listed in the journal. “How old are you?”

“Twenty.” His answers came quick and sure. He stared at me—no, almost
through
me. I couldn’t tell the color of his eyes because of the shade of his hat.

“Why are you out here alone?”

“I was waiting.”

“For what?”

His shadowed eyes shifted, then found mine and held them. “For you.”

I took an extra breath before continuing. “Well, you found me. Let’s go.”

Entering Cedar Hills turned out to be crazy-easy. With Greene by my side, I simply walked through the gate and into a world of glass houses. The very air seemed to be holding its breath. The streets were paved with packed dirt, barely wide enough for Greene and me to walk side by side between the Greenhouses.

Freedom had maintenance crews to clean every surface to a silver gleam, but here, a white film clung to the metal frames. A metallic square with a number hung from the top
of each door. The Greenhouse in front of me bore the number thirty-nine. The soft sound of sprinkling water added to the peacefulness of the city.

“Are you ready, Zenn Bower?” Greene asked, tearing my attention from the decor. The way he spoke my name sent tremors down my spine.

“Yes,” I said. “But first I need to find another friend of mine. Maybe you’ve seen her? Saffediene Brown?”

Greene suddenly turned down another narrow path between two Greenhouses. I followed him just as plodding footsteps approached from a direction I couldn’t place. The sounds echoed between the metal and glass, making it impossible to pinpoint.

Greene strode away, his narrow shoulders brushing the glass of the flanking Greenhouses.

He ducked into Greenhouse Sixty-Four (how had we gone from Thirty-Nine to Sixty-Four?), casting a cursory glance at me as he did. Inside, the smell of soft roots and wet dirt hit me like a punch. I’d never seen so much disorder. Little shovels lay in a metal tray by the door. Muddy boots and coils of hose festered in heaps under the metal tables holding flower after bush after tree.

I’d only been in two Greenhouses, both of them on the roof of Rise Twelve. Neither of them looked like this. There,
plants were laid in neat rows, organized by height. This seemed like someone had held a giant handful of seeds and simply dropped them. Wherever they landed, they grew.

Utter chaos, this gardening in Cedar Hills.

Greene stood a few feet down the first row, his back to me. The stillness of his body and the way he hardly spoke set my nerves on edge. And I was used to being the cool one.

“Eighty-Nine is one rung north,” he said, turning to face me. “Then go west until you get to Eighty. It’ll be on the left.” He removed his hat and wiped his forehead. “I believe Saffediene is there.”

I nodded, unable to look away from his face. Or his scalp, which was almost blindingly white and utterly hairless. His milky skin couldn’t hold pigment if it tried. His eyes, a strange shade of pink, dared me to say something.

“Who are you?” I asked, wondering how his name had landed in the journal.

“I am a rescuer,” he replied. “Your friend shouldn’t have gone snooping.”

Worry caused a sharp snag in my airway. “Is she okay?”

“Minds had to be tampered with,” he said. “And that takes talent and energy, neither of which we have much of here in Cedar Hills.”

“Is she okay?” I repeated, disturbed by his oh-so-white
eyebrows and color-of-cream complexion. And the way he held so deathly still.

“She is waiting for you in Eighty,” he asserted, as if that answered my question. “I must get back to the city center, Zenn Bower.” With that, he snapped his fingers and disappeared without a sound.

I hadn’t seen a ring on his albino fingers, so either Greene Leavitt was tampering with my mind, causing me to think he’d turned invisible, or he had access to tech that didn’t need to be contained in an object to be used.

I chose to go with the tech. Maybe he was like Vi and could control it somehow. I took a deep, cleansing breath and immediately regretted it. Dirt and rot and dung didn’t exactly make breathing pleasant.

Outside Greenhouse Sixty-Four, all was quiet. A wind blew across my face, hot and lazy. I stroked it with two fingers, whispering for it bring me a cooler draft. Wind shouldn’t be hot.

A moment later, the current dragging across my skin turned cold, almost icy. “Perfect,” I murmured. “Now mask any sound I might make.”

With the wind as my ally, I crept toward Greenhouse Eighty.

25
.
I twisted to protect Vi by shielding her with my body and shoved her backward when the screaming started. My ears rang with the sound’s depth of pain, even after it stopped.

A flare of light ignited behind me. I turned to find that Vi was on fire, literally. She’d somehow made her entire hand glow with unnatural flames. I stared at her fist, unable to tear my gaze from her pristine skin that wasn’t really burning.

She marched away from me, leaving me in the dark, stunned. I scrambled to follow and immediately wished I hadn’t when the scent of blood hit me. The terrible, cloying
smell told me there was a lot of blood. Vi’s hand-torch illuminated a body, and I had to force myself to take the last few steps to join her.

The body breathed, the chest rising and falling in ragged gasps. The body wore jeans, but its shirt had been clawed to ribbons. Blood seeped from its wounded flesh.

The body twitched, causing a wet squelching sound to shatter the quiet.

I closed my eyes for fear of throwing up when I looked at the face. Or what was left of it.

“Vi,” I said weakly. I doubled over, pressing my eyes closed to block out the sight of all that blood.

“A scout,” she said in a distant tone. “There will be another one. They travel in twos.”

I opened my eyes and straightened as Vi searched the darkness by the light of her freaky burning hand. I thought for a second I might be hallucinating, because this situation was too surreal. Vi didn’t hurt people. She didn’t make them hurt themselves.

In the strange light Vi’s face caught the shadows and trapped them. She looked fierce. Dangerous.

Deadly.

“Violet,” I said, a pleading note in my voice now.

She didn’t spare me a glance, but strode over to our
hoverboards. I hadn’t taken three steps when more screaming shattered the darkness.

Vi darted behind a tree, haloing the branches with her mind-induced light. She looked perfectly calm, pressed into the trunk, waiting for the shrieking to stop. I covered my ears until I couldn’t hear anything, and then I approached Vi slowly, as if she were a vicious animal I might spook.

And she was.

She stood so straight it must’ve hurt. Her fist burned. Waves of energy practically poured from her body.

I maintained a healthy distance between us and didn’t look at the body lying a few feet away. I felt certain that if I did, I’d never be able to close my eyes without seeing—

“Violet, please.” I didn’t want to believe that Vi had entered the minds of the scouts and made them kill themselves. But she had, and I knew she had. “Violet?” I asked now.

“He’s already sent a preliminary report,” she said coldly. “Four teams are on their way to this location. We need to leave. Now.” She went to retrieve our boards and backpacks.

Then she tugged gently on my hand, which hung lifelessly at my side. I couldn’t move.

“Come on.” She spoke softly, like she was talking to a child.

I stepped onto my waiting hoverboard, unable to command it to operate.

Didn’t matter. Vi could control the board. She could control anything.

The two dead men lying on the ground were a testament to that.

*   *   *

Nightmares looped through my alert mind. First the one where I was buried in the capsule. The sound of dirt pinging against metal: I would never forget that sound. I jerked to attention and listened.

Nothing.

No pebbles landing above me. No hiss as oxygen forced its way into the confined space.

I settled back into the lulling vibrations of my hoverboard and immediately saw Vi use her mind control to torture people. Suddenly I had a horrifying thought.

What if I hadn’t been buried alive? What if the Thinkers had just made me
think
I was? The way Vi made those two scouts think their own flesh needed to be peeled from their bones?

I closed my eyes against the memories. I couldn’t decide which was worse: being buried alive for real, or the mental violation if I hadn’t.

For the longest time I felt nothing from Vi. She existed inside her own sphere of reality, and I managed to keep
breathing in mine. Perhaps I was simply too wrapped up in my own troubles, because the next thing I knew, Vi was sobbing. I couldn’t hear her, but I was aware of her pain as if it were my own. A wave of her grief/regret/guilt/horror flattened me, physically pushing me onto my back on my hoverboard.

I had no idea what to say to make this better. Instead I flew in close to her. She cried into my chest. “Tether,” I whispered, and her board attached to mine. I wrapped my arms around Vi in an effort to protect her from herself.

*   *   *

We touched down when the night breathed out the last of its darkness and the sky held the first hint of day. Vi had used her technopathic abilities to keep the boards flying. She’d stopped crying hours ago, but she hadn’t moved. Hadn’t spoken.

Hadn’t explained.

I drank half a bottle of water from my backpack and made Vi drink the rest. My eyelids felt impossibly heavy, my body still vibrating from riding the hoverboard all night. But I wouldn’t sleep.

I couldn’t. Every time I blinked, I saw that body. And every time I saw that body, I wondered what Vi had made them see to cause them to shred their own skin.

Vi and I lay beside one another, each covered in separate
blankets. I stared into the empty sky, wondering which star would have to explode to annihilate the earth. Maybe dying would be better than trying to fight this war, than watching Vi use her mind control in ways she despised. If I didn’t keep my thoughts busy, they returned to the body haloed in light from my girlfriend’s burning hand.

The problem was, every thought I had only added to the guilt I constantly carried. Blaze’s disappearance. Zenn’s defection. My parents’ deaths. Leaving Vi. Getting buried alive.

Watching Vi torture—

I cut off the thought, only to repeat the circuit of damaging memories.

“Tell me something happy,” I said to break the cycle. The heaviness of dawn hung over us, and I couldn’t stand this silence for another second.

Vi emitted a tiny sigh of frustration. “I can’t,” she said. “I don’t have many happy stories.”

“Then tell me what you’re thinking.”

“I can’t,” she said again.

“Why are you so relieved?” I asked, hoping she’d punch me for reading her emotions. At least then I’d know she was back to her normal self.

“I’m relieved that you’re still talking to me,” she said.
“After . . . after I lost control.” Her breath shuddered through her throat when she inhaled. “I’m so tired, and my emotions were all out of whack because of, you know, you kissing me like that. That scout, he would’ve killed us, no questions asked. He would’ve tased us both.” She paused, but I didn’t have a chance to say anything before she continued.

“I had to do something. So I just . . . let go. It was so easy, Jag. That’s what scares me the most.” She scooted closer and propped herself up so she could look at me properly. “It was so easy.”

Tears traced paths down her face, leaving clean tracks through the grime.

“That’s the hard part,” I said, wanting to touch her but not daring. “It’s not about doing what’s easy. It’s about doing what’s right.”

She nodded. “I know. I know I shouldn’t have . . . . But he would’ve killed us.”

“I know,” I said. “Sometimes we have to do things we don’t like.” No one knew the truth of those words more than me.

She laid her head on my chest. I held her tight, trying to erase this new awkwardness between us with simple pressure.

“Do you hate me?” she asked, her voice close to cracking.

“Of course not, babe.” It was the first time I’d called her
that since we’d been reunited. And as Vi radiated gratitude, I knew I’d said the exact right thing at the exact right time.

“Where to next?” she asked.

“I have no idea,” I answered. I closed my eyes and wished for sleep. Thankfully, my wish came true.

*   *   *

Ants scurry across my face. I scream, but no sound comes out. I’ve been silenced. I feel the tech on my throat as I swipe at the insects on my face and neck.

My ears. My arms.

They’re everywhere. And not just ants. Flies, with their multifaceted eyes. Spiders. I can feel their eight legs. Dry, cool snakes slither up my torso. Along my arms and legs, sharp pinches burn with heat and venom as the spiders and ants and snakes bite me.

I yell and yell and yell, but am greeted with only the hum of insects.

*   *   *

I jerked awake, brushing my hand across my—thankfully—insect-free face. The air around me was filled with light.

I am not in that capsule. Those insects are not torturing me.

“I don’t think they ever did,” Vi said from beside me. “I think that was a mind trick.” Her skin looked gray, her eye sockets sunken.

“Did you sleep?” I asked.

“No.”

Guilt and relief cascaded through me. “How long have I been out?”

“It’s okay to feel relieved. I wouldn’t want someone living inside my nightmares either.”

I shoved the blanket in my backpack. “That’s not what I meant,” I said. “I just—I don’t want you to have—”

“You don’t have to explain,” Vi said. From the detachment in her face to the position of her body to the violet fire blazing in her eyes, everything screamed,
Be afraid!
“But you don’t have to protect me either, Jag. I’m more than capable of taking care of myself.”

“I’ve seen that,” I said before I could think.

Her eyes narrowed. “You’ve seen what I wanted you to see.”