Bound to Ashes (The Altered Sequence Book 1) (21 page)

“Hey,” I turn and glance at Dev, Ashton, and Jules walking behind us. “Out of curiosity, how old are you guys?” If I was eight at the time, then Dev must be....

Jules lets out a long raspberry and says, “No clue.”

“What? You can’t even guess?”

She throws her arms up and says defensively, “Pff, fine, Twenty. Twenty-something. That’s an age.” As if any age would do.

I shake my head and say, “Yeah, okay.”

Just as I think the conversation’s dropped, Dev says, “Twenty-two.”

Jules looks at him as if he’d insulted her. “What? You kept track?”

His shoulders bunch up as he puts his hands in his coat pockets. “I just counted winters.”

“Ohh, well,” she says. “Lookit you. With a birthday.”

He elbows her in the ribs and she flinches, laughs, and keeps walking. Dev doesn’t smile.

James bristles next to me and glances back at the Altered. I’m just waiting for him to say something derisive, like ‘They’re just kids!’ I grow angry at his imagined comment, which is stupid, but I am glad he didn’t actually say it. They might be young, but they’ve seen more shit than all our lifetimes put together.

We should find a place to rest for a while. We’re lagging. The scaffolding pathway leads us deeper into the chasm of the outer facility. Dad always said it was like a giant onion. Lots of protective, tough layers protecting the good stuff inside. I was little at the time and the only thing I knew about onions was they were gross, so I never realized how accurate the comparison was. We’re still in the green, tough hide. Full of machinery guts. Its intestines, giant pipes thicker than any tree, hum sleepily. We pass under several of them and if we hung around long enough, we’d be able to track them traveling alongside each other and then branching out like wild fingers groping into the darkness. Thick black shadows stick like cobwebs in every orifice and around every corner.

I don’t remember the facility being this huge. Or anonymous. With every turn I hope with every ounce of me that a familiar sight lies ahead. But so far it’s as strange to me as it is to everyone else. The nostalgia ebbs away. Everyone else is so quiet. I can’t look back at them, they need to see me looking ahead and sure of my direction... they need to be able to trust me.

I have to give them a reason, first.

[Dev]

“What’s up?” Ashton asks.

“What?”

“You look... I dunno. Something on your mind?”

I exhale through my nose and say, “It just... feels weird here. Like I’ve been here before.” He knows how stupid that sounds.

“Oh,” he says as if he figured out the answer to a puzzle. “Déjà vu.” He knows by now to elaborate on any weird words he drops, so he continues, “It’s just a thing that happens, you know, your brain gets confused. It’s just misplaced familiarity. I think.”

I laugh a little and say, “Yeah, misplaced is right....” I can’t bring up any memories of these giant glass tubes or CadTech having all these deep ravines and canyons.

“Well, it’ll go away eventually,” he replies.

“Ok,” Alessandra says brightly. The scaffolding ends at a pillar of featureless metal and a blank door. “This is a good a place as any.” The door creaks open to small room with a desk and computer. Couches and chairs are pushed against the opposite floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the facility. It’s weird to see a room so untouched. Nothing’s broken, the couches aren’t moldy, and it looks like the computer might actually turn on.

“Finally,” Peregrine sighs, collapsing into one of the cushy armchairs. The humans treat the furniture like old friends, sinking into the plush cushions with sighs of pleasure and rolling their heads back. Wish I could relax like that.

“So what is this like... a break room?” Vinder asks, opening a small refrigerator in the corner. He peers inside, wrinkles his nose, and shuts it quickly.

“Oh, probably,” Alessandra says, dropping her scholarly façade and smiling, just happy to be sitting in something comfortable.

The room isn’t quite as cold as the rest of the facility outside, and it warms up considerably the longer we linger. We probably won’t need a fire. And the lighting never changes. What time is it, even? Already dusk?

We slowly settle like dust across the floors and padded furniture until one by one everyone drifts off to sleep.

I guess I’ll justify my insomnia by keeping first watch. First watch... and probably last watch. I can’t even count the reasons why I’m not even going to
try
to sleep. But one of them is this dust. It’s everywhere. It swirls around everything and isn’t kind on the lungs.

The humans and Ashton are already asleep. That’s a trait of his I’ve always envied—he sleeps the hardest out of all of us. He chose a spot behind the desk where his head slowly rises and falls, resting on his chest.

Alessandra and Peregrine curl up impossibly small together on the smaller couch and James and Vinder sprawl on the larger one. They could be dead if not for the steady sound of their breathing.

I guess I’m not the only one who can’t sleep. Jules sloppily turns over and lies prone on her back, staring upside-down up at me.

“Dev, have I ever told you that you drive me crazy?”

“Hello to you, too.”

“I mean it, you drive me nuts. You know why?”

“No....” I wish
she
was the hard sleeper, sometimes.

“Because you don’t make things happen.”

Where on earth is this coming from? “Sure I do.”

“No, you just sit there and react. You don’t act. No, don’t gimme that look, it’s true.”

“You act like I
can
make things happen. What do you even mean? What things?”

“Yeah. Things. Everything. Events, decisions. The only decision I’ve seen you make lately is deciding to ‘wait and see what happens’. You don’t make anything happen, everything happens to you.”

I frown at her. “That’s not fair—”

She sits up and faces me, voice rising with her. “Yes it is! C’mon, you...! You...! Just do me a favor and try to be more proactive.”

“Yes, sir.”

Her narrow eyes bore into me.

“Fine!”

“Good,” she says.

“So what’s this all about?”

She just straightens herself and folds her hands innocently and says, “I think we all need little reminders in our lives to keep us on the right track.”

“Well, thanks.” I can’t keep up with Jules half the time.

“What’s eatin’ you, anyway?”

“Well,” I wave my hands in the air at our surroundings, “I couldn’t be because we’re deep underground trapped in a metal chamber.”

She snorts. “Dev, we used to live in an underground metal chamber.”

“This is different. You can’t blame me for being anxious.”

She looks at me quizzically, like when Ashton’s vocabulary stumps us. “You worry too much. Everything will be fine. If we can survive our last encounter, I think this’ll be a cinch.”

Just stop talking, Jules, please... even though she’s sort of right, it just sharpens anxiety’s blade.

Shuffling feet and lazy yawns. I blink my eyes open. As I get to my feet, Ashton slides over and offers me a hand. He smiles and says, “Sleeping?”

“No,” I brush the dust off my clothes. “Resting my eyes.”

He looks slightly disappointed, but not surprised.

“Fend for yourselves for breakfast,” Alessandra says in a strained voice as she stretches her arms. “Eat as you walk. We need to get going.”

Our footsteps echo off giant metal shells and plates. In a place with no droughts or sunlight, everything is cold. We can even see our breath sometimes. I look behind us and what we’ve passed looks exactly as unfamiliar as what we have yet to cross. Every time I look at an object we could use as a marker, it blends into the sea of cold grey metal. If we decide to turn around, we’d be as lost as we are now. All of this is riding on Alessandra. We have to put our entire trust in her, our lives are in her hands, and I’m surprisingly okay with that. I shiver.

“How long did you say that day... whatever... lasts?” I ask Ashton.

He shrugs it off and says, “Déjà vu. Eventually.”

Sustained conversation finds no place among us as we walk. Just the clank, clank of our shoes on the metal scaffolding. We pass under more of the giant glass tubes ringed with metal supports, swooping in arcs over our heads and curling under our feet.

“What’s that thing?” Vinder asks, pointing to where a cluster of tubes converge.

“The main coupling center for all the pneumatic freight transport tubes,” Alessandra says.

“Oh, yeah,” Jules says. “That’s what I was gonna say.”

I thought the machines at CadTech, while horrifying, were impressive. Impossibly vast and complicated. But they don’t even hold a candle to the ones here.

It seems like an eternity since anyone’s said anything when Alessandra says, “We’re about to pass through a storage vault.” We stop outside a pair of industrial doors with no windows.

“Storage for what?” Jules asks.

“Not sure,” Alessandra says. “It’s not marked.”

“Probably nothing,” Peregrine says. She goes to open the doors, but stops. “They’re locked. Not sure what I expected....”

Alessandra pushes on them and true enough they don’t budge. “Huh,” she says, interest piqued. “The security systems should have been unlocked by now. It must need special clearance.”

James groans.

A harsh smell emanates from the doors. Chemically, sour, sharp. “What’s that smell?”

“I don’t smell anything,” Alessandra says.

“Isn’t there another way in? Or do we even have to go through it at all?” Jules asks. I crane my neck to see around the platform we’re on—the only thing left or right for what seems like eternity is smooth metal walls occasionally interrupted by massive pipes or support beams. Hazy darkness swallows the rest.

Alessandra shakes her head, dark ponytail swishing back and forth. “This is the only door.”

“Then bust in!” Jules blurts out.

“You think it’ll be that easy,” James says snidely. His pessimism is disheartening. I wonder if all pessimism is this ugly from the outside.

“Well, technically the locking mechanisms are pretty poor,” Alessandra says. “With enough force they would come open.”

“Some top of the line technology here,” James says.

“With enough force, like a battering ram,” Alessandra shoots back. “No trespassers are packing that sort of punch.”

I’m the only one who notices Ashton backing up to get a running start. “You guys should step aside....”

Everyone turns and I can see it click when they realize.

“Didn’t you hear? Battering ram!” Vinder yells.

“Shut up,” Jules says condescendingly. Vinder presses his mouth together and his shoulders fall.

Ashton readies himself like a sprinter before a race, moving on the balls of his feet side to side. Strands of his black hair hang loosely in his face. In an instant he takes off, the steel grate platform providing a sure grip. He flies past us and at the last second, leaps up and turned sideways. Of course an Ashton-dropkick would bust the doors open. If it was a person on the other side of that kick, not a door, their bones would be gravel. The door crashes open and he hits the ground.

“Aah, dammit,” Ashton groans. I help him to his feet, laughing.

“Nice work.”

He just smiles shyly, brushing a clump of wavy hair behind his ear.

“That really shouldn’t have worked,” Alessandra laughs, beside herself with surprise.

“Guys....” Peregrine says, leaning in the doorway. We step forward and look inside.

The room is vast and relatively dome-shaped, and eerily dark. Like the contents are
supposed
to be deprived of light.

Seeing a large number of anything is always impressive, no matter what it is. A forest with a thousand trees. A swarm of migrating birds blocking out the sun, moving like one conscious thing. But you’re never really prepared for it. Your mind can never fathom a thousand, a hundred thousand, a million of anything. You always shorthand it, write it off as ‘a whole lot’. Actually seeing it is different.

Especially when it’s a thousand glowing lights and moving mechanical parts. But they aren’t just lights and parts, they’re eyes and legs. Moving toward us.

12
• the eleven-year secret

[Dev]

The doors shut immediately and everyone’s breath heaves.

“So that’s what kind of storage it was,” Alessandra pants.

“What the hell was it?” James demands.

She glances at him and says, “The defense systems.”

My heart bottoms out. That’s what she brought us here for. I had entirely forgotten.

“So let’s go around,” Vinder says.

“Well,” Alessandra says, leaning over the railing to gaze into the darkness below. “We could....”

“It’s better than being torn apart by those things,” Jules says, shuddering. “Like big ol’ spiders.”

“Ugh,” Alessandra says, pressing her back against the doors and sliding down. She buries her face in her hands and says, “They’ve probably alerted every other Sentinel in the vicinity....”

In a brief moment of alliance, the other humans, Jules, Ashton and I exchange wary glances.

“I take it those things are Sentinels,” Peregrine says. “But how did they alert—”

“Wireless communication via a central hub somewhere in the facility,” Alessandra answers as if she saw the question coming. Utterly defeated.

“So let’s go turn off the hub, right?” Vinder suggests.

“We’re already wasting time as it is,” Alessandra says, begrudgingly standing. “We can’t afford any more detours. We don’t have enough supplies.”

“Okay, well, this place is so big... they’ll have a hard time finding us, right?” Jules offers hopefully.

Alessandra just looks at her with tired eyes.

“...Right?”

Jules was right about one thing: this place is huge. It’s not hard to imagine it going on forever. If Alessandra said the facility expanded to the whole planet, I’d believe it. Through another tunnel laced with living machines, we enter a chamber, taller than it is long. So tall the ceiling is clouded in foggy shadows, and the giant elevator shaft standing in the middle disappears with it as well. Seemingly floating in the middle of the gigantic room is a sphere. It has a mesh of tubes around it like a metal atmosphere, woven into curves and switchbacks. Some of the tubes attach themselves to the sphere.

“What is that?” Vinder asks what I’m thinking.

Alessandra pauses, gives it thought, and answers, “No idea. But let’s camp here for the time being.”

There’s not a flammable thing in sight except the clothes on our backs. Another cold night for us, then. It’ll be no different from the fire-less and blanket-less nights back at home.

We end up huddling in the corner nearest the door we came through. The floating sphere behind us watches silently, like the cameras in the CadTech testing rooms. Always on, always watching.

Cold food, less than we usually eat, sits like a rock in my stomach. But I doubt it’s just because we finally got around to the dog food. This place makes my whole body feel like it can’t function properly. Like it presses in on me, making me slower and colder, like a slightly warmed-up corpse.

“Dev,” Alessandra says, breaking the silence. Her voice is hardly over a whisper but it echoes in the monstrous room.

I look up.

“Are you... feeling okay?”

I would feel better if people would stop asking me that. “I’m fine.”

“You seem kind of uneasy.”

The others are quietly finishing their food, perhaps waiting for a moment to join in the conversation, or just happy to be on the sidelines.

I swallow. “It’s just this place. It’s really....” I try to be like Ashton and find the right word. “Unwelcoming.”

“Yeah,” she says. “It’ll get better though.” She smiles.

My forced half-smile seems to placate her.

“This place reminds me of the labs,” Ashton says quietly. He’s the only one among us still standing, his preferred position. He’s even slept standing up before. He leans against the wall with his arms loosely folded, hazel eyes hovering on the foggy extremities of the room.

The humans all look at him, but Jules and I already know what he means.

“That sucks,” Peregrine says. “A place like this is no place to grow up.”

Alessandra side-eyes her, but she knows what Peregrine means. Our upbringings were very, very different.

Ashton sniffs, a substitute for a laugh, and says, “Yeah.”

“But you guys probably didn’t spend a long time there,” Alessandra says. “Right?”

Not sure where she got that idea. Ashton looks down at her with a dark expression and says, “Thirteen years, give or take.”

She closes her mouth tightly and swallows. “Sorry.”

Ashton rolls his shoulders slightly and settles against the wall. “I am thankful it was only that long, though.”

I can tell the other humans don’t like where this conversation is going. They look at anything but Ashton. Why’s he even bringing this up?

“You know,” Alessandra ventures, “this reminds me. I’ve heard you guys say something about a revolt. Is that what you called it when you guys....”

Ashton’s dark brows furrow in critical thought. Figuring out a good way to phrase it, probably. A storyteller’s craft doesn’t form immediately. “It was after they moved all of us from the main facilities to the temporary holding area on the outskirts of the city. Old apartment complexes damaged by the bombings and scheduled for demolition. CadTech purchased them at foreclosure rates and relocated us.”

He’s being awfully generous in his description. I would have called them concentration camps.

He continues in an even voice, “I must have been there when the plans for the revolt were hatched. One of my friends, E12-15,” his voice cracks a little, “said he overheard a guard talking to someone else, someone of higher rank. One of the subjects, us, had killed several staff members. Tensions among the subjects were too high. I remember he said the words, ‘preemptive damage control,’ several times. Something about the war reaching too dangerous of a pitch to carry on business. The government can’t afford us. The company is going under, anyway. And other things of the same ilk.

“Before we knew it, before I heard anything else about it, it happened. We woke up one day and guards were gunning everyone down. Some in their cots, some in the yard. But the guards were few in numbers, from budget cuts, and were overwhelmed. And that was it, really. We escaped. I don’t think there was much news coverage about it, because the virus was in full swing by that point. We were overlooked.”

His tale leaves a wake of silence like a blanket of lead over everyone. For fear of offending, or touching sensitive subjects, the humans stay quiet.

“What happened to your friend?” Vinder asks, shattering the silence.

If it’s a hard subject to recall, Ashton is damn good at covering it up. I envy that skill. “He’s dead. Like everyone else, most likely.”

“So, you think you’re the only ones?” Peregrine asks.

“Hopefully,” Jules mutters, setting her empty can on the metal floor. The tinny sound lingers in the cavernous room.

“I figure someone else ought to know what happened,” Ashton says. “It deserves to be told.” He touches the journal in his coat pocket for a moment. It never occurred to me that our story would never be told. If Heydrich had killed us at any point, our whole history would be forgotten. Part of me almost wants that to happen... why should anyone want to relive what we went through? But I am thankful for Ashton’s goal.
It deserves to be told.
So history doesn’t repeat itself.

I glance at Jules and Ashton, my whole world, and you know, maybe I
did
do the right thing. Bringing them here. It’s a warm feeling, but it’s hard to feel satisfied about it. We’ve got a long way to go.

[Alessandra]

I rub the sleep out of my eyes and glance around—everyone’s sleeping. Even Dev. I’ve seen him fake it before, eyes clenched shut, arms folded. But this is genuine. Sleep as long as you can, Dev.

“Aless,” Peregrine says to me in a hushed voice. It makes me jump all the same.

“Yeah?”

“I’m worried,” she says, furrowing her brow. “About Heydrich. We weren’t able to cover the entrance once we came in—that’s just a big neon welcome sign. If he tracked us.”

I sigh. “You’re right, of course. I thought about it, too. But if he followed us, fine, then he has to fight the Sentinels alone. They’ll go after him, too, not just us. And I don’t care how strong he is, or if he is Altered, he’s only one person.”

“We won’t stand much of a chance, either,” Peregrine says with a grim laugh. “On a scale of one to ‘totally screwed’, how much of a chance do we have at fighting them if they catch us?”

“When,” I correct her, grimacing. “And I’d say about a... seven. Not entirely screwed.”

She laughs and says, “I can work with that.”

“We’re going to have to,” I breathe, slouching lower on the wall.

She leans against my shoulder and gazes up into the endless blackness above us. “Hey Aless?”

“Yeah, Pere?”

“I’m glad I came with you.”

I sigh and rest my head on hers. It feels so natural to just let my eyes fall shut and let my breath seep out of me slowly. “Someone has to be here to keep me from going crazy.”

“Nah,” she says. “Your crazy is why I came.”

I guess she’s right, this was a crazy idea. Let’s team up with the Altered, who hate us, and find a place that we may never reach, with hand-drawn maps and childhood memories to guide us.

We still have to wait and see if this gamble pays off.

[Dev]

Even though it might be the twentieth time he’s asked, Vinder asks again, “How close are we? To the dome?” He turns circles gazing up at the machines suspended above us.

“We’re close,” Alessandra says. “Really close. Unfortunately, we’re going to enter a very open area and the management scaffolding isn’t up, so it’s ground travel from here on out.”

She pushes the next door open. A rush of cool air meets us and I swear she opened a door to the surface by how expansive the facility is. The steep staircase looks like it goes down forever, disappearing into the depths of the machine canyon.

“Would ya look at that,” James says, swallowing hard.

I’m still amazed that anything can be built this far down. Construction on this place must have seen generations of workers. The steep metallic side of the opposite wall disappears into the inky darkness, barely illuminated from various glowing segments.

The clanking of our feet on the metal staircase becomes as natural as a heartbeat. My legs forget what solid ground feels like. Finally, we hit the ground floor. Everyone around me smudges into vague shapes. If it’s too dark for comfort for me, it must be especially dark for everyone else. I wish we had something to light as a torch.

We pace the wide paths between massive structures that stretch above us like windowless buildings. Some hum, some have round lights that shine like cat eyes. All too tall and sprawling to see the beginning or end. I think we’re all too afraid to talk because even the smallest noise echoes loudly.

“Reminds me of an elevator in here,” Alessandra comments without provocation, her voice careful and hushed.

I’ve never ridden in an elevator but I understand that they go up and down and are made for a type of person too lazy for stairs.

Peregrine glances at me and adds, “You know—well, when you’re in an elevator, you don’t talk to anyone else riding it. Even if you and the person you were with were having a conversation before getting on it, no one talks because of how close-quarters it is.” She wears a little smile and I get the feeling she just enjoys teaching people things. Like with the ocean.

“I can see what you’re getting at,” Ashton says. “But right now I think we’re—” He stops dead in his tracks. We stop one by one and look around. For a second, nothing, but then I pick up a sound. A gentle clink, clink, whirr-clink.

“...One of the machines...?”

“Be very still,” Alessandra says. She pulls the rifle off her back and holds it ready.

Eventually the clicking gets louder. Alessandra springs to life and spreads her arms, dividing us and pushing backwards. Everyone backs up to the nearest wall, divvied among tubes and protruding mechanisms. I peer at the spot we were just standing in, well-lit compared to everywhere else in the vicinity, when it steps into the dim light.