Tether (14 page)

“Why?”

He shrugged sheepishly. “I should be the one protecting you.”

“Oh, don’t be stupid,” she said. A proud flush colored her cheeks. She liked how he was looking at her, as if she were strong and fearless. She’d been waiting forever for someone to look at her like that. “I promise, you can have the next one. Come on. Let’s get out of here before someone realizes we’re gone.”

“They what?” the General roared.

“They escaped,” Adele said. Thomas admired the way she kept her fear of the General out of her voice. It had taken him years to learn how to do that. He struggled to keep a smile off his face—
they’d escaped.
Sasha had escaped. Maybe his suspicion of Selene had been wrong; she clearly knew what she was doing.

“You,” the General snapped, turning his attention to Thomas. “Was this your doing?”

“No,” Thomas said. “I haven’t spoken to either of them outside your presence since they arrived here.” And nobody could prove that he had. As far as the General knew, his feelings for Sasha were gone, replaced by a renewed sense of loyalty to the KES.

The General’s jaw tightened. It was rare to see him so worked up. Things really were changing in Aurora. The General was starting to worry.

“We’ve deployed the search teams,” Thomas continued. The General glanced at Adele, and she nodded.

“They can’t have gotten far on foot, and the one from Earth
is wearing an anchor with a GPS tag. We’ll catch up to them in no time.”

“No. Call off the search.”

“Sir?” Thomas wasn’t sure what was happening. The General wasn’t going to let Sasha and Selene escape—not now, and not ever. He considered them property—
his
property—and the General relinquished nothing without a fight. So what was he playing at?

“You want us to stop looking?” Adele narrowed her eyes. “But they’ll get away.”

“I know that,” the General barked. “You don’t catch the fox by scouring the countryside, hoping for a glimpse of its tail. You give the hounds the scent and follow their lead. I would bet my life that those girls are looking for Juliana, and so are we. They obviously think they know what they’re doing. Let them take us to the princess. Then we’ll have all three of them.”

Thomas took a deep breath. He needed the KES out of the hunt altogether. He already had a plan for how to send them off course. When he was in the Labyrinth basement, he’d reactivated the anchor and tossed it in the trash compactor. The refuse truck kept a precise schedule, and it had left the compound just before lockdown. If the KES followed the anchor, it would take them straight to the dump.

“Sir, I’m concerned that you’re underestimating them, especially the one called Selene,” Adele said. “She brought down the power in three quadrants of the Labyrinth, and we still haven’t figured out how. She knew how to navigate the compound, and she found a way out. She’s smarter than she seems.”

“I’m perfectly aware of that,” the General said. He looked pointedly at Thomas. “The one called Sasha trusts Agent Mayhew. She thinks she’s in
love
with him. So let’s see what she’s
willing to do for him. Mayhew, put together a team—take whoever you think can get the job done—then find those girls and convince them you’re on their side. Nguyen will be your second. Use all the resources of this agency to help find Juliana, then bring all three of them to me.”

Thomas knew how it would look if he protested, but this was just about the worst situation he could be in. He’d hoped to slip out of the Labyrinth to meet up with one of the search teams, then find Sasha at the Almond train station and take it from there. He’d spent the whole night coming up with a strategy. Having a team along was going to completely mess that up. Choosing the right people would be crucial. The only variable was Adele. Why had she let Selene and Sasha get away when her orders were to seize them on sight? He and Adele had been close friends once, but he was starting to wonder how well he really knew her. If Adele had her own agenda, it would only make things that much harder.

“As of this moment, this is a shadow mission,” the General said. “Prepare to leave immediately, tell no one but your team the particulars of your assignment, and do not fail.”

“Yes, sir.”

“I’m warning you, Thomas,” the General said, staring him down with rage in his eyes. “If you so much as think about letting those girls go, I will deploy an exterminator to hunt Miss Lawson down and get rid of her once and for all. Do you understand me?”

“Yes, sir.” His voice was as taut as a steel cable. There was no doubt in his mind that the General was telling the truth. Exterminators were assassins on the KES payroll; if the General sent one after Sasha, Thomas wouldn’t be able to protect her for long. Anger boiled up inside him, and he had to clench his jaw to keep from saying something he would regret, dig
his nails into the flesh of his palms to keep from lashing out at the General with his fists.

When Thomas had been brought back to the Labyrinth and all seemed forgiven, he’d thought that maybe, just
maybe,
he could stay with the KES. That maybe he still had the opportunity to do some good within the organization that had once been his home. But now he saw that it was impossible. The father he’d feared but always respected was gone, replaced by this cruel tyrant he barely recognized. If the UCC was going to survive, the General had to go.

The water was freezing cold and impossibly dark. When we landed, Selene’s hand was ripped from mine and I couldn’t see her anywhere. I couldn’t even tell which way was up—everything looked the same, unending blackness in all directions. My lungs were pinching, desperate for air, but I kept my mouth shut and willed myself not to panic.

Selene?
A burst of green rippled through the tether as her head broke the surface and she took a huge gulp of air. My body relaxed, as if it had been me, and when she said,
Use the bond,
I knew what she meant. I imagined it as a glistening towrope stretching from my mind to hers. I followed it upward, trusting it, and after what felt like decades of swimming I felt a hand grab the collar of my shirt and yank me up the last few feet.

I gasped, sucking in air as fast as I could. Selene bobbed next to me. “Don’t overdo it. You’ll make yourself sick.”

“What do we do now?” The water was carrying us swiftly downstream. I looked back in the direction we’d come from, but I couldn’t even see the Labyrinth in the distance.

“We need to swim against the current and get to the shore. Can you do that?”

I’d fallen almost fifty feet into a river and hadn’t died—I could do anything, or at least I felt as if I could. We hauled ourselves out of the river and collapsed, soaked and sputtering, onto the muddy bank. I wrapped my arms around my body for warmth; my teeth rattled together like dice in a cup. Selene shivered next to me.

“Juliana,” Selene said after a few minutes of silence. “She found the power.”

“I know.” I’d seen and felt everything about her escape through the tether, including Callum. The guilt was sharp; it ate away at me—guilt for lying to him, guilt for getting him involved in all of this madness. I’d abandoned him in Farnham, or maybe he’d abandoned me. It was all so messy. I was afraid for him—and not just for his life. Callum was the last person in the world who deserved to have his heart broken, and I worried that, between the two of us, Juliana and I would shatter it to pieces. “She’s running.”

“That’s good. It will make her easier to find.” Selene stood up and wiped her hands on her pants. “Have you noticed that our clothes are almost dry?”

“Water-resistant fabric, I guess.” I let her help me to my feet. Leave it to the KES to think of pretty much everything.

We followed Thomas’s instructions, fleeing to the forest and following the river south. The sun rose, and the light streamed through the trees, casting everything in a verdant glow that reminded me of Selene’s presence on the tether. We picked our way through the underbrush, careful to stay beneath the thickest parts of the canopy. I could hear the sound of helicopters overhead; it almost drowned out the rush of the river.

“Do you sense her, Sasha?” Selene asked. “Juliana, I mean.”

“Sort of.” Juliana’s mind was a faint red glow at the horizon of our shared mind space. “Can she hear us?” I called her name over the tether, but there was no response.

“It’s no use,” Selene said, staring off into the distance. The forest seemed endless. It was hard to believe we would ever reach Almond, or the train station, or Thomas. “She’s not listening.”

“You mean we have a choice?”

“Of course you have a choice. You always have a choice.”

Not in my experience. “So what was that thing you said about destiny?”

“You always have a destiny, too,” Selene said. “You can either accept it or turn away from it, but it’s going to be there whether you like it or not. Fate is an arrow that flies straight and true. It pierces every obstacle it encounters and hits its mark every time.” She sat down on a fallen tree stump and rubbed her ankle. Thomas hadn’t given us shoes, so while I was in my Converse, she was wearing a pair of delicate silver sandals with thin straps. They must’ve been hell to walk in.

I sat down beside her. “I didn’t used to believe in fate.”

“But you do now,” Selene said, with as much certainty as I felt. She plucked Callum’s wet, limp drawing out of my pocket and spread it across her lap. I tried to take it back, but she fended me off. “The prince drew this before he met you, and he gave it to you as a symbol of the future. And then, in another world entirely, you come across the same door, which led you back to where you started. To me. To her. To the boy you love. Of all of us, you have the most to gain from believing in fate.” Selene handed the drawing back. I couldn’t explain it, but I knew it was a piece of a much larger puzzle, just waiting for me to put it together. Sort of like the tether itself. Whether I liked it or not, the tether was proving to be very
useful, and we’d barely even started our search for Juliana. Maybe Selene was right: maybe we needed it more than I thought. “And what about you? What do you have to gain from believing in fate?”

“A new world for me and my people. A bright and beautiful future … I hope.” She rose to her feet.

I followed her deeper into the woods, making sure to keep one ear out for the sound of the river. The sun was climbing higher into the sky, and I was starting to fear we wouldn’t make it to the train in time. The KES were good at tracking things down; it was only a matter of time before they found us. “You hope?”

“Taiga looked just like this once,” Selene said, looking up at the thick canopy. “Miles of forest, as far as the eye could see. The planet was covered with trees. We took care of them, and they took care of us; we lived in them. We built our cities in their branches. Or maybe I should say
they
did. It was a long time ago, way before I was even born. If you want, I can show you.”

“How?”

“Close your eyes.” I did as she said and tried to make my mind blank, to create some space for Selene’s show-and-tell. I felt a slight tingle at the back of my brain, a warning that someone else’s psyche was bleeding through, and I resisted the urge to push her away.

The darkness behind my eyes disappeared, and I was thrust into a lush, green landscape, a beautiful wooded glade in the middle of an expansive forest. Sunshine dribbled through the emerald canopy and sprinkled my skin with light spots like confetti. Except I wasn’t me. I could tell immediately, though I couldn’t explain why. I glanced around the glade as if looking for something, or someone, and then began moving toward
a small set of stairs that led up to a wide wooden boardwalk. Everything had a strange, translucent quality to it.

I’m sorry,
Selene said.
These aren’t my memories. They’ve been passed down to me from previous generations. They’re very old and worn out.

What do you mean, these memories are old?

Wait,
she instructed.
There’s more to see.

I strolled along the boardwalk; a soft, cool breeze tickled my throat. The wooden road wove through the forest, and after a while I began to see shops on either side, peddling shoes and pots for cooking. We passed a doctor’s office and a seamstress, a jeweler and butcher shop and bakery. All the structures were rustic looking, as if they’d been constructed out of the trunks of the very trees that surrounded them—or grown organically out of the soil themselves. The farther we went, the more I saw, except now I was looking at houses not just at the edges of the boardwalk but built up high into the trees, with bridges made of wood and rope strung between platforms that rested inside cradled branches.