Into The Fire (The Ending Series) (33 page)

25

DANI

MARCH
22, 1AE

I was sitting on one of the stools at the island in my
kitchen, taking frequent sips from an oversized, brown-glazed mug. The steaming
chamomile tea calmed me as I organized my thoughts. My priceless bounty—the
camera containing all the illicit photos I’d taken in General Herodson’s
office—sat on the countertop in front of me. With Camille and Mase’s help, I’d
gathered far more information than I’d expected, and all that was left to do
was to pass it on to Jason, Zoe, and the others. Thus the organizing of my
thoughts.

Distractedly, I smiled. Camille and Mase were upstairs in
the larger of my two guest rooms.
At least
they
can be with the
person they love.
I forced the smile to stay in place when jealousy
threatened to erode it. I was determined to be happy for them, even if what
they had was denied to me.
Only for one more day
,
I reminded
myself.

I’d once told Jason that hope was the one thing that could
keep us going when all else seemed lost. He’d just learned his father was dead,
and had started unraveling right in front of me. I’d never seen him so distraught.
But together, we’d worked through it. Now, hope was the one thing keeping me
going—hope that I would see my friends again soon, hope that I would finally
escape the mind-controlled hell I’d been dragged into, and hope that I would be
brave enough to express the extent of my feelings for Jason…to his face. I loved
him, more than I’d ever loved anyone, and I needed to tell him. He needed to
know.
But what if he doesn’t…

No!
Not now!
It was minutes until the eleventh
hour, the worst possible time for doubts. Of course, knowing that didn’t stop
me from having them; the very heated, very real argument that started overhead
did.

Muffled by the floorboards, insulation, and drywall, Camille
and Mase had just erupted into an epic shouting match. I couldn’t tell exactly
what they were saying, but I could hear the tone, a heated mixture of accusation,
hurt, and anger. It definitely wasn’t the sounds I’d expected to need to
ignore.

Not too slowly, I crept toward the stairs and up to the
second floor. As I headed down the hallway, the guest room door at the end
opened and Camille burst out. She thundered past me, sobbing.

“Camille! Wait!” I chased down the stairs after her, barely
managing to catch her wrist before she reached the front door. “What’s wrong?
Did something…did he hurt you?” I asked softly. Concern was washed away by a
sudden rush of anger.
If he hurt her…

Camille faced me, her cheeks tear-streaked and her eyes red,
swollen, and filled with fear. “I thought I could at least have…” Closing her
eyes for a moment, she shook her head. “You won’t understand. You
can’t
understand.”
She jerked her wrist from my grasp and choked out, “Just let me go.”

She rushed out of the house, accentuating her exit by
slamming the front door. She was gone, and I was still standing in the entryway,
baffled.
What happened? What did he do to her?

Simmering with accusation, I stalked up the stairs and
toward the guest room. When I reached the doorway, fists on hips, I froze. Mase
was sitting on the carpeted floor facing me, his hunched back against the side
of the bed and his head lowered into his hands. His shoulders were shaking.
Is
he…crying?
The biggest and strongest man I’d ever met was crying in my
guest room.

My fists dropped from my hips of their own accord. “Mase?
What happened?” I asked softly. When he said nothing, made no move to respond,
I repeated, “Mase?”

He didn’t raise his head, but he did speak. “She killed me.”

“What?” I blurted, before I could stop myself. “I mean, you
look pretty alive to me.”

Mase dropped his hands and glanced up at me, then shook his
head. With dull eyes, he looked ahead, staring at nothing. “Before, when I was
a normal. She helped Father kill me and make me into this.”

My heart seemed to drop into my stomach, leaden and chilled.
I sat down beside him, cross-legged and facing him, and gently touched my fingertips
to the fatigues covering his knee. “What are you talking about?”

He told me. Everything. After he relayed everything he’d
learned from his file, he asked, “How could she do that? How could she lie to
me?” The angst filling his eyes, the tears of betrayal spilling from them,
broke my heart. His hurt was that of a small boy who’d just learned that the
world wasn’t fair and that bad things happened to good people all the time, or that
of a man who’d been misled by the woman he loved.

I didn’t know what to say. I didn’t know how to help him.
I’d experienced a hell of a lot of pain in the form of death and loss, but
never such a personal betrayal, not even from Gabe.
That must be how Zo and
Jason feel about their parents
, I realized.

“You said that whatever Camille found in her folder upset
her, right? But that you didn’t read it?” I asked.

He nodded, still staring ahead. His eyes seemed to have lost
some of their life.

“Hold on,” I said, jumping up and rushing out of the room. I
ran downstairs, grabbed the camera, and hurried back up to the guest room.

“Okay,” I said, a little breathless as I reclaimed my spot
on the floor beside Mase.

He watched me, curiosity lending some spark to his deadened
eyes.

“Let’s see what she read that upset her so much. Maybe it’ll
help us understand why she did what she did.” Mase’s eyes narrowed
infinitesimally, and I added, “I’m not saying there’s anything that could
excuse her actions, but…let’s not judge her
too
harshly until we know
the whole story. Grams, my grandma, used to say”—I adopted my best Irish accent—“‘Every
story has as many sides as it does people.’”

Mase frowned, looking reticent, but he eventually nodded.

“I’m pretty sure there was a letter sort of like yours in
her folder,” I said as I scanned through the images on the small screen. I
glanced at Mase. “There wasn’t much in there, not like your file, but yours was
mostly service records and other military documents. I think hers was just a
profile sheet, some medical records, and a letter.” I pursed my mouth as I
waded through the pictures. There were so many. There was no way I would be
able to read all the documents before the breakout in less than twenty-one
hours, but there would be plenty of time once I was on the outside.
Not that
I know where I’ll find the power to charge the camera, but still…

“Ah—here it is!” I scanned through the images of Camille’s
letter to see how long it was, then met Mase’s eyes. Anticipation gleamed in
their depths. If I was reading him right, I was pretty sure he wanted Camille’s
letter to exonerate her, to prove that at least part of her was the woman he’d
come to depend on…and love. “It’s a couple pages. Do you want me to read the
whole thing out loud?”

Again, Mase nodded, so I started to read.

My name is Camille Marie Lin, I’m 17 years old, and I
want to die.

Last month, I went to my high school’s winter formal with
my boyfriend, Matt. I wore the dress of my dreams, and Mom even let me splurge
to get my hair and makeup done. I’d never done that before. Mom hadn’t known
that Matt and I planned on spending the night after the dance in a hotel room
together. She thought I was going to a sleepover with a bunch of my
girlfriends, but I was really going to be with Matt…like, BE with him. And we
did. It was okay, I guess, but not amazing like everyone pretends it is.
Fireworks? Yeah, right.

The next morning, my life turned into a horror movie.
When I got up, Matt wouldn’t wake. I called my Mom and confessed everything. Okay,
not EVERYTHING, but you get the point. It turned out that half the school had
to be hospitalized the day after the dance, and Mom and I were admitted the
next day. We were both really sick, and they stuck needles in us and hooked us
up to IVs and packed us into a room with a dozen other sick people. I
eventually got better, but Mom didn’t.

There were too many bodies and not enough people to take
care of them…like, bury them or whatever…so they just stacked them up outside
the hospital and lit them on fire. I’ve never smelled anything so disgusting,
and it probably didn’t help that I was still puking every other hour. I watched
from the hospital room window as they wheeled Mom out to the human bonfire and
tossed her onto the pile. I don’t know what was wrong with me, but I couldn’t
look away. I watched my mom burn. Why couldn’t I look away?

Eventually it was done, and I couldn’t tell her from the
other blackened bones. I didn’t want to end up in that pile with her, so I
left. I hid in my house for a day, then wandered around my neighborhood,
looking for any of the people I grew up with. There was nobody. I stopped by
Mase’s house. It had always been like a second home to me, but there didn’t
seem to be anyone there. I sat in Mase’s room for a while, wishing he was there
with me. He always knew what to do. I knew that he would take care of me, if he
was even still alive.

I was so happy when his dad walked into the room that I
ran to hug him, but there was something wrong with him. He wasn’t sick, not
like I’d been; he was mean. I’d known him my whole life, and I knew he was kind
and gentle, but he started trying to kiss me and take off my clothes. I
screamed and screamed and screamed, but nobody came, and before he could
actually undress me, a metal baseball bat flew to my hand like it was magnetic
or something, and I swung it. I hit Mr. Atwell in the head and he fell to the
floor. He didn’t get back up. I killed Mr. Atwell.

When I realized what I’d done, I ran out of the house and
into the street. I was so stupid. I ran right in front of a car, and it
should’ve hit me, but it just…stopped. It had been speeding and was really
close, too close to stop with brakes or anything normal. And I felt it. It was
like the bat.
I
stopped the car.

The driver looked scared, but I told her I wouldn’t let
her car move until she let me in. I promised not to hurt her if she just took
me with her. She did. Her name was Kathy, and she was my mom’s age. She’d heard
a radio broadcast coming from some place in Colorado. It was on every station,
apparently, and finally I heard it too. So, we drove, and made it here, to the
Colony.

I was coping okay, but then I saw Mase. I wanted to run
to him and fall into his arms, sobbing and begging for his forgiveness. But
there’s no way he’d forgive me for killing his dad. I know him too well. So,
when Dr. Wesley told me about a new program she was in charge of, a program
that would make me forget everything, I volunteered. So now I get what I want:
I get to die, and Mase never has to know what I did.

“That’s it,” I said, clicking to the next image and finding
the profile sheet for Jake’s sister, Becca. I made a mental note to ask Gabe to
search her out tomorrow—or, technically, later today—turned off the screen, and
set the camera on the bed near my head. “Mase?”

His face was twisted into a mask of grief, but only a single
tear leaked from his eye. “I don’t…” He cleared his throat. “I don’t know what
to do now. She”—he squeezed his eyes shut and took a shaky breath—“became a
Re-gen because she was afraid to tell me what she’d done. I know about the
normals who went insane because of the Virus.
He
must’ve been one of
them. Would I have blamed her for defending herself? Was I that mean?”

I shook my head and fought back my own tears. Watching a man
cry, especially one as strong as Mase, was usually a surefire way to jump-start
my own emotional waterworks. “I honestly don’t know, Mase, but I’d bet she was
just afraid of losing you—the old you—along with everyone else she lost back
home. I think she panicked and took the only exit in sight.”

“What do I do now?” he asked.

After a moment of thought, I said, “There’s one more person
who can shed some light on this story.”

“Dr. Wesley?”

I nodded. “I think you should stay here the rest of the
night, and we can go and talk to her first thing in the morning. I don’t want
this thing between you and Camille to get twisted into any more knots before we
know everything.” I watched him, waiting for his agreement. “At least you’ll
have plenty of time to work things out with Camille once we’ve made it out of
here. You won’t have to worry about people watching over you all the time or
doing who knows what for General Herodson.” A thought popped into my head. “I
know you work with Dr. Max, but what does Camille do for the General?”

“She’s one of his executioners, among other things,” Mase said,
but he sounded distracted…anxious.

I spluttered, “Executioners? I…what…that’s…wow.” I really
didn’t want to think about the implications, but I couldn’t help but wonder how
exactly the General used her to execute people.
Does she tear the metals
right out of their bodies?
I cleared my throat, shuddering. “I, um, suppose
we should get some sleep. It’s going to be a long day tomorrow.” When Mase
didn’t respond, I asked, “Are you okay?”

“I—” He met my eyes only briefly, then averted his gaze like
he was ashamed. “I’m afraid.”

“Afraid?” I reached for the hand resting on his knee and
squeezed it, nearly giggling at how childlike my hand looked compared to his. I
was filled with anxiety, and it was manifesting in unpredictable, inappropriate
ways, as usual. “Worry and fear won’t help us now,” I told him. “All we can do
is prepare.”

Mase shook his head, looking like a scared little boy
trapped in a huge man’s body. “It’s not the escape that I’m afraid of; it’s
after. I’ve never been…” He took a deep breath and tensed his muscles. “I don’t
remember ever being outside the Colony. I don’t know what to do out there. I
don’t know what it’s like. I don’t know anything. This is all I’ve ever known.”