Falls the Shadow (27 page)

I'm an origin. He's CCA. We're not on the same side, and I couldn't have made that any clearer than I did when I showed back up with my sister's deadly clone.

I have to find some way to undo the damage I've done—quickly. So I blurt out the quickest explanation I possibly can about Huxley, about Violet and Samantha and what
really happened. But when I finish, Jaxon's eyes only narrow, studying me in disbelief.

“Voss is the vice president of the CCA,” he says. “He and my mother have worked together for almost two decades.”

“All I know is what I saw.”

“She—”

“This is a bunch of crap,” Seth interrupts, jerking his arm out of Jaxon's grip and spinning away from him. He starts to lift the gun toward me, but Violet springs forward and grabs his wrist, twists it, and gives him a vicious shove. They both tumble back and slam into the saturated ground. They roll back and forth, Violet shouting and Seth stringing entire sentences together out of just curse words until he finally manages to kick her off. When Violet straightens up, Seth's gun is securely in her hand.

I step between them before she can even think about aiming it at him. Jaxon follows me, gets his arms locked around Seth's, and holds him back until he finally stops struggling and starts to calm down.

With Seth restrained, I look back at Violet. Anger flickers across her dark features. I brace myself but don't move; not until her shoulders rise and fall in a deep breath and she flings the gun into a puddle at my feet. Then I bend slowly to pick it up, not taking my gaze off her.

Her lips curl back into an almost-snarl. “Next time I won't be here, and he can just shoot you,” she says.

Before I can answer her, I feel Jaxon's hand on my arm. “You're sure it was Samantha?” he asks quietly. He's
watching Violet out of the corner of his eye, a worried frown on his face.

I nod. “You need to warn your mother.”

Jaxon's face turns several different shades of white at the mention of his mother. He pulls his phone from his pocket but doesn't say anything. He just takes a deep breath—an attempt to calm himself, I think. But still the phone trembles just slightly in his hand, and I see the way his arm tightens, the muscles trying to keep it from shaking.

And all at once, I realize why.

“You did try to call home earlier, didn't you?” I ask.

He lifts his head, but his eyes never quite manage to meet mine. “No one answered.”

I should be angry at him for trying to contact them behind my back, I guess; but he looks too miserable to be mad at. And when I think about how badly I've wanted to hear my parents' voices over the past couple days, all I want to do is put my arms around him instead.

“We should have enough of a charge to open the comcenter,” Seth says, wiping a speckle of mud from his cheek. “Maybe I can reach her through messaging.” All of his attention is focused on Jaxon now, his fight with Violet abruptly forgotten. He's watching him anxiously, waiting for some sort of reassurance, maybe. He doesn't get it. All Jaxon gives him is a silent nod. It's enough to make Seth move, though, to send him racing toward the car without another word.

“He's not going to reach her, is he?” The cynical question escapes me before I can stop it.

Jaxon's chest rises and falls with a deep breath. “Sometimes I feel like she's
been waiting for something like this. For Huxley to make some sort of move. For a reason to fight, to prove that she's right.”

I don't question him on that, because from just my brief encounter with his mother, I have no trouble seeing her as the kind of person who doesn't like being wrong about anything.

Does anybody, though? Not everyone is as confident about it as President Cross, but maybe deep down we're all convinced that we're the heroes of our own stories, and that we're the only ones with good enough vision to see the truth. Which would explain why there are so many different versions of it flying around lately.

I think I understand now—maybe better than the president herself did—what she said a few days ago:
Most of the things that are bad in this world started off as someone's idea of good.
And I'd be willing to bet that more evil has been done in the name of righteousness than for any other reason. That's what started all of this, isn't it? My sister set out to do what she thought was the right thing, and it just ended up all wrong. And Samantha had her own good reasons for what she did, and they made sense to her.

I just wish I could figure out what makes sense to me.

“So you think your mother will have already started to fight?” I ask Jaxon.

“I think . . . that I need to get back to the city,” he says. “I think I need to know that she's okay.”

Because right or wrong, good or bad, I guess she's still family.

“Are you coming with us?” he asks, his eyes finally meeting mine.

I can feel Violet watching me too. Still hoping I'll say no, I think. That maybe I'll decide to run away with her after all.

If only I had the time and the words to explain to her why I can't.

But when Jaxon turns and heads for the car, I hesitate only for a moment before following—just long enough to ask Violet one last time to come with us. She refuses. And with every shake of her head, with every second of her silent stare, I imagine the ground between us opening a little wider, until it's a chasm that I'm not sure either of us will ever be able to cross again.

I catch up with Jaxon, and in an attempt to take my mind off of where Violet is going to go from here, I say, “I thought you'd left. When I came back, when I didn't see you—”

“I tried to leave,” he says, his gaze directed straight ahead. “I couldn't. Not without knowing what would happen to you.” He glances over at me. “It's pathetic, I know.”

I slow almost to a stop, the words bouncing around in my brain. I'm not sure what to say. How to fully accept that even now, he really did refuse to leave me behind. He must have been worried when he couldn't reach his mother. But despite that, despite every hateful word I said to him, he was still here when I got back. And that's . . .

Well, it's not pathetic.

We reach the car—which is now back to full opacity and to that pearly blue color I love—and he opens the
door for me without a word. I wipe my shoes off in the wet grass as best I can and climb into the backseat, thankful to finally be out of the driving rain. Seth doesn't look up from the comcenter or acknowledge me in any way. I hold in a sigh and wipe off the foggy rear window so I can look back toward where Violet stood, watching me walk away. I can't see her now, of course. It's much too dark. If she's there at all, she's blending in with the hazy gray rain and the black backdrop of sky.

My fingers reach for the door handle. It's an automatic reaction, and I have to fight to keep myself from flinging that door open and rushing back to find my sister. I can't keep doing that. I've spent too much time stumbling around in the dark, trying to find her, and I've lost sight of so much else because of it.

“What's taking it so long?” Jaxon asks.

“It's searching for satellites,” Seth replies. “And the rain's not helping. Just give it a second.”

In the rearview mirror I can see Jaxon, and how his face has grown paler still; I wish there was something I could say to bring the life back to his eyes, and the color back to his cheeks. I wish I could make the message go through. I wish I could somehow guarantee that his mother would answer from the other side and tell us everything is fine. That she's fine, and this is all some misunderstanding, and nobody is fighting about anything and it's all going to be okay.

But all I can do is stare at the LCD screen blinking
CONNECTING
over and over in a bright green font, and shiver in my soaking-wet clothes, and hope, and hope. . . .

“Here.” Jaxon's voice makes me jump from my practically catatonic state. A canvas jacket lands in my lap a second later. “Your lips are turning blue,” he says, looking at me in the mirror. His tone isn't quite as harsh as before. Progress, at least.

“What about me?” Seth asks.

“What about you?”

“She holds a gun to you, and she still gets the jacket?”

“Yeah.”

“That's messed up.” Seth twists around in his seat so he can see me, and mouths,
Whipped
. And I'm about to smile, just because I'm glad that Seth isn't ignoring me anymore, but then the comcenter beeps.

All three of our heads jerk toward the screen.

We have a connection. The contact list loads along the right side, and after a few frantic seconds of searching, I find their mother's name. Third from the top, grayed out with a little offline icon beside it.

“She's never offline,” Seth says. “She's always working.” His voice is barely audible over the rain that falls like pounding hammers against the roof of the car.

We're all silent for a minute, holding in a collective breath, suspended in a moment that feels poised on the edge of chaos.

And then Jaxon turns the key. The car roars to life, and the tires squeal as we turn back toward the city.

The sun breaks the horizon
in a hundred different places—reflected in a hundred different buildings—just as we reach the city limits. I've had so little sleep that I'm beyond the point of tired. My eyes are burning, bloodshot, and as we drive, the edges of Haven blur and run together into a spinning canvas of silvers and blues.

Even though I'm half-asleep, I still can't help but notice how strangely empty the city is. It's close to seven a.m. The streets should be packed with people going to work, but we have the road almost entirely to ourselves, and I count only a few dozen people on the sidewalks. They all seem blissfully unaware of the desolation around them—one of them even looks like he's whistling to himself, which for some reason sends a shiver up my spine. Most of the stores and restaurants still have their lights off, and several of them have the metal security walls pulled over the doors and windows. Everybody has those walls; after all, the people who built Haven are the ones who lived through the war. Even so, this is the higher-end district of the city—the safest district—and people in this part of town almost never use them.

Something is definitely wrong.

My house is only a few miles from here. Do my parents have our security system engaged too? Are they safe? I almost ask Jaxon to turn down the next road, which would take me to them, but I know that finding out what's going on at the CCA headquarters is more critical right now.

Still, when we pass the street, I find myself gripping the armrest for strength and breathing deeply through my nose, commanding myself not to panic. I sink back against the seat, and though I'm trying not to think about her, Violet's words are the first thing that drop into my head.

It's too late. . . . It's already begun.

We can't turn back now, though. Because suddenly we're in that same abandoned parking deck that Jaxon brought me to just days ago, and he opens the door for me just like he did then. Except this time he won't look at me.

Everything is so different now. We're so much more complicated. And out of everything else that's weighing on my nerves, out of all the anxiety and worry, the way he averts his eyes is somehow worse than anything else.

Because suddenly I realize: Standing here, I still feel the same as I did before. After everything we've been through, I want to trust him even more than I did the very first time we stood here together. I can't stand the thought of him still being angry with me. Especially not now—not when I don't know what we're about to face, or if I'll have another chance to apologize and set things right between us. Maybe there's no time for that sort of thing now. But when you're faced with the possibility of the end, it's hard not to think about all the things you should have started.

Seth is busy digging through the trunk, pulling out weapons left and right. Jaxon is taking more time than necessary to mess with the opacity adjuster—I'm guessing because it gives him something to look at instead of me.

This may be my last chance
.

That's the last thing I think before I walk over, grab Jaxon's arm, and pull him to the corner of the garage.

“Cate, what are—”

“I'm sorry. I'm sorry about what happened earlier. About everything I said.” The words tumble breathlessly from my mouth.

“Okay. It's fine. Let's just—” He tries to maneuver his way back around me, but I stop him.

“It's not okay.”

He sighs. “We really don't have time for this.”

“No—I mean, I
know
we don't have much time, but that's just it, isn't it? We don't have time, so I . . . I have to tell you that I'm sorry.”

“You already did. I heard you the first time.”

“Not just about earlier. About everything.”

He stops trying to fight his way around me.

I take a deep breath. There are so many things I've thought about saying in this moment—lines that I've rehearsed, words that I thought would be so perfect if only I could find the courage to say them. But the words that come out of my mouth are not what I planned; for better or worse, they belong to this moment and this moment alone.

“I'm sorry for not trusting you,” I say. “I'm sorry for
all of the times I looked away when you tried to catch my eye in the cafeteria, and for pretending not to notice you when you came into the auditorium. Because I knew you were there.” I take another deep breath. “And I guess you've always been there, but I've always been too scared to admit that to myself, but now . . . I mean, after everything we've been through it just seems really, really stupid to be afraid of telling you all this, and so I think you should know that walking away from you earlier was one of the hardest things I've ever had to do. I couldn't do it again if I tried.”