Bound to Ashes (The Altered Sequence Book 1) (29 page)

As we move things aside, I turn to see Peregrine prying a panel away from the wall. She hasn’t said anything, just immersed herself in the task. She eventually topples over a pile of withering cardboard boxes in her effort, but she finds a ladder. The metal panel on the ceiling directly above it is slightly loose.

Peregrine’s breath is heavy and she wipes her brow a little, so I step over. “Here.” She steps aside. At the top of the ladder, I press against the panel and it gives way easily. I heft it aside with an echoing metallic clunk. More familiar scenery: dim bluish lights, distant shapes, the wire mesh scaffolding spiraling up a tower that fades into darkness.

“Damn.” It’s really, really high up there. My voice echoes.

Alessandra, peering over my shoulder, says, “Looks like the maintenance route. That’s our ticket.”

“Where does it lead?” I ask. “Right into the dome...?” I climb a bit higher and scope out the other chamber.

“It should go right up to, well, either a control room or another viewing platform,” Alessandra says.

“Let’s go, then,” Peregrine says.

“Better than being ‘cleansed’,” James mutters.

I want to stay as far away from those red lights as possible. It’s weird how much safer it seems out here than in the white halls.

The only proof I have of the others following me are gentle taps of hands and feet on metal ladder. We climb at a steady pace, leaving the lights of the rooms below so that the darkness overwhelms us. I just have to trust that everyone is following.

Could we really be that close? From Alessandra’s promise earlier, my heart’s pounding from anticipation. I guess we had to get to it eventually, but it’s really happening....

The next scaffolding platform appears just as vertigo threatens to set in. At least the platform has some dim yellow lights mounted on the side. We follow the scaffolding as it curls around the contour of the pillar. The clinking sounds of our footsteps echo softly.

I reach in front of me and my fingers find the ladder to the next layer of scaffolding. It’s weird that the ladder should be here when the rest of the scaffolding continues farther around.

As I put one foot on the first rung, it feels like I pull myself up without trying to. But it’s not me, it’s the surface under me, swaying and creaking. Is it—the scaffolding folding and breaking—Jules—but this is now, this is real.

The swaying stops. Just a tremor, nothing more. I have to take a moment to catch my breath.

“Dammit, now what?” James says, pulling out his gun.

Alessandra doesn’t say a word as she brushes past me. She disappears around the pillar. “Aless!” Why’s she going off by herself...?

A sharp gasp from the other side.

I skid to a halt when I see it. A man stands in front of us. His features are barely discernable by the yellow light below and a red light shining on his face, coming from the machine he holds. Alessandra’s palpable rage rises and I feel it growing inside me as well. It’s no stranger that stands facing us.

It’s Heydrich.

16
• the unfinished mission

[Dev]

Looks like he was quicker than we thought.

The Sentinels did a number on him. Red, angry lines lie across his bare arms and sliced through his undershirt, as if he ran through a forest of blades. But his expression betrays no fear or doubt. Only anger.

Alessandra seethes. “You have five seconds to get the hell out of here or I swear to god I’ll do what I tried to do back home.”

“You’ll try,” he spits, gripping the machinery in his hands tighter. He holds it like a rifle, but what is it...?

“Why’d you follow us?” Peregrine says. “Why couldn’t you just let it go?!”

I’m ready for an explanation, but I don’t think he’ll give us one judging by the furrowed look he’s giving us. “I don’t have time for this,” he says. He lifts the machine up and points it not at us, but at the scaffolding. And then it makes sense.

“Get back!”

Rifles fire behind me. My stomach drops from the grating, keening sound exploding from the red mechanism. The laser manages to cut through half the scaffolding floor, but Heydrich is punched back by something, probably the shot... but he’s still on his feet. The Sentinel laser sputters and groans into darkness. More shots. I almost reach for the rifle I no longer have, so I slide to the edge closest to the pillar. Heydrich isn’t scared. He just got shot once, twice, five times with the rifles from the humans. One by one I hear empty clicks in response. They ran out of ammo, what little was left. Heydrich stands. You’re kidding... he slumps over like a ragdoll, still holding the machine in one hand, and he starts to laugh. Slowly at first, then growing in magnitude, until he throws his head back and laughs at the darkness above us.

That laugh.

I’ve heard it before.

Before....

Before we’re all killed, we have to get out, push through the chain link fence and push past everyone else, just get out, get out. It doesn’t matter who you have to trample to get there just
move
. We all grew up in the labs— our life consists of orders, shuffling around one building to the next, we don’t know anything but that, and we were never trained to know how to deal with this. I get shoved aside. Everyone else is so much bigger than me. I’m just a kid. All the other kids are dead. Across the yard a guard is shooting one in the face once, twice, too many times. Killed by guards, killed by each other. Killed by him. The one standing on the sentry tower, the one holding the guard helm, just watching us run and panic and kill each other like animals. I see his eyes from here, boring through me, willing me to run. Someone screams behind me— I turn and see them fall into the dust, blood mingling with the yellow dirt and turning into mud from the writhing and squirming, the clawing to get the bullet out of their gut— I dodge, hide behind a burning storage unit, but above everything else I hear a laugh. A high-pitched, manic laugh. Our death trap is his achievement. His entertainment.

It’s the same exact laugh.

He started the revolt. He’s the one that put us in danger. We would have died anyway thanks to Caduceus, but not like that... not by desperation and fear by our own kind... and him just laughing....

I’m across the tear in the scaffolding before I know how. Someone screams my name, but my hands are around his throat. He’s strong— almost flings me off, his pounding limbs threatening to break mine, bruises doubtlessly forming under my grey skin. Press harder, close his windpipe. For all the shit he put us through, murdering our friends, trying to starve us out in the desert, for no good reason—

Jagged metal presses against my stomach. I bring my knee up to jar it loose and it fires next to my head— that grating sound threatening to deafen me. I slam my hand into it and pin it to the ground on our left, it fires into the pillar and leaves an oozing red hole. Screeching metal on metal accompanies it and I swing around— the scaffolding is tipping, but not the side Heydrich and I are on. It’s the one with the others on it.

It tips and catches, halting at a steep angle. Everyone on the other side grips the rails and Ashton— thank you Ashton— grabs a hold of whoever’s closest and hefts them back to level ground. The weakened scaffolding buckles at the nearest attachment point, then gives way. Too far for even Ashton to jump.

My vision goes white.

My hand comes back sticky. And red. Vision’s back, Heydrich is above me, snarling, but he doesn’t have a weapon. Must have dropped it.

I rear up and lunge out of the way of his next kick, rising to my shaky feet. He flies at me again and I catch a flash of the rage in his eyes, those black eyes, and for a second my anger is replaced with fear. For so long I was occupied with fighting humans and how best to do it, but I never once thought about what it would be like to fight one of the Altered.

When I think he might throw another punch instead he shoots his leg out and sweeps it under me.

When the blackness recedes, I rub the back of my head and feel a fat lump growing. Heydrich is gone. The ringing in my head is replaced with voices.

Dev. Wake up. Are you okay.

“Dev?!”

I haul myself up, every movement makes me feel like the scaffolding is unsteady, but I know it’s me— and I finally get on my feet, bracing with the railing.

“Are you okay?”

I blink my eyes open and once they adjust, I can make out the shapes of the others— one, two, three, four, five— and sigh from relief. “I’ll be fine. Are you guys...?”

“We’re okay, but pretty much trapped here,” Alessandra says, miffed.

“I might be able to—” Ashton starts.

“No.” I push the railing and the whole piece of scaffolding sways like at any second it’ll hinge and fall. “Not sturdy.”

He exhales stiffly.

“Dev, you gotta go get him,” Alessandra says. “He’s going to try to do something to the dome, that damn, tricky....” she continues in a low grumble.

James picks off where she left off, “Seriously though, here. Take this.” He tosses his rifle to me, and I barely catch it. A spare clip follows it.

“We’ll see if that’s enough,” he adds.

Yeah, he only got shot half a dozen times and still escaped. Even if only half the shots hit him, that doesn’t change a thing. I don’t want to find out how many shots it actually takes.

I reload the rifle even though my vision is swimming and I cast aside the empty cartridge. How am I supposed to fight this guy like this?

“Where will you go?”

“Back into those halls,” Alessandra says. “No other place to go, and I don’t want to stay up here longer than we have to....”

“We’ll be fine,” Ashton assures me. He knows what to say to me, but it doesn’t work as well as he intends.

“Go!” Peregrine urges. “Kill that stubborn asshole.”

That normally would have made me smile, but right now I’m doubting my motor skills to get me up that ladder. Did he really hit me that hard? It’s almost humiliating....

I glance back at them one last time. The humans all march off, but Ashton lingers, watching me. He nods, gives me a loose salute, and follows the others. I’m glad he probably can’t see me very well, because I’m paralyzed. Holding onto the ladder like it’ll crumble beneath me if I move. I’m glad he can’t see what a coward his friend is.

But I have to go, or else all this shit is for nothing. Cain leaving us, Jules leaving us... all his fault. If I don’t stop him now, it’ll all be for nothing.

But one foot in front of another has never felt so dangerous.

‘Alone’ feels wrong, like an emotional glitch. I haven’t felt it in so long. Ever since fleeing from the revolt, hiding in that landfill, and Ashton finding me. We stuck together ever since. The distance is cold. It should be no different, being on my own, but I feel numb. Frostbitten.

I adjust the rifle over my shoulder and reach the next level. The scaffolding path forks off into the darkness, but it’s the only way he could have gone. My lonely footsteps echo off the walls. Sickly sweet adrenaline pumps through me and forces me into a run. I throw the door open.

The circular room is painted pale yellow and all around it is a thick rim of control panels and screens and a door on the far side. And there he is, bracing his arms on the panels across from me, his back facing me, head bowed over the screens. The screens that show still frames of the white hallways.

I point the rifle at him and he starts laughing softly.

“Why do you fight for them?”

Why— what? What kind of question is that? “Like you care.”

He turns around casually, leaning on the panels, as if he were entertaining a guest instead of facing down someone with a military-issue assault rifle. “I do care. I want to know. Why side with them when they’re so obviously going to betray you?”

My mind throws a flurry of answers I could respond with. They promised us a new life. Safety. It’s the most logical choice. We had no other choice.

I say instead, “Because they’re my friends.”

This is hilarious to him, and I step closer, staring down the barrel, pointing it at his face.

“You know, you and that other one are remarkably hard to kill. I thought that stunt at the stadium would have offed you for good. But you can’t trust humans no matter how you try to spin them,” he says, tracing outlines of knobs and screens on the panels. His twisted face is lit up by cold blue light. “Tried to do it at Cad Tech, didn’t work out to plan, obviously... tried it with the humans in the desert, that worked for a while, but that human bitch mucked everything up... these things happen....”

“But why?” My voice operates without my brain. “Why start the revolt, why try to ki—”

He stands bolt-upright and paces over to me, I inch back and hold the rifle steady. “Why?!” He shouts. “You want to know why, E4-17?!”

My blood goes cold. That number....

“I’ll fucking tell you why! Because I was the first one, E4-17! I was number one! S1-01! Your predecessor, your prototype, the first test! They made me and locked me away, I was their failure! Their mistake to learn from! Everything you are is from me!” He’s inching closer and closer, voice rising higher and higher. “How could I live knowing that everything coming after me would be better than me, more perfect? How could I?!”

“They were going to kill us anyway! They were planning to euthanize us, all of us! It doesn’t even matter!” What am I trying to prove by saying this?

He stops, slackens, stares into space. The rifle shakes in my grip. “Explain,” he says, the softest sound I’ve ever heard.

The rifle rattles from my shaky grip. “The war was getting bad, and, CadTech’s funds, or something.... They didn’t want the Northern Alliance to have us, so they....”

“You mean,” he says quietly. “I could have... just... waited...?”

Why did I say that... dammit, Dev, of all the stupid things to say....

His breathing grows ragged and heavy. “Everything I did was for nothing?! Everything?”

I can’t move. Or speak. My finger is immobile, hovering over the trigger.

A cry of anger and shame, and he’s on me— I fire, but the gun’s away, flying out of my grip, his hands around my throat. I plant my foot on his stomach and push, he’s flung but lands on his feet, rushing forward again— on my feet, but only for a second, his hand covers my eyes and grabs me, my head, by the temples, hot on the back of my head—

“I had to try to kill you, don’t you get it?!” He screams. I try to kick and push but nothing—

“You’re everything I could never be! I was never good enough for them, for anyone, not even for me, I couldn’t sleep unless you were gone! Out of the picture! I can be the only one! I should be the best, the perfect one, the only one!”

He pulls me back and shoves me forward— the back of my head into the screen on the panel. And he drops me. The floor flies up way too fast and my hands miraculously splay in front of me, I don’t hit the ground, but my head.... The room sways. I look up at him and he’s got the look of someone about to put down a dog that bit one too many times.

“There’s only three of us left, not counting you,” I spit. “We’re dead anyway....”

He waits too long to reply. But then, “One left on the surface. But there were three of you in the facility.”