The Last Uprising (Defectors Trilogy) (37 page)

“I don’t want to leave her here,” I choked.

“We don’t have a choice,” said Roman. “Besides, Logan’s not in there anymore.”

To anyone else, this might have sounded harsh, but Roman’s voice was softer than usual, and he was right. Logan was never one for this world. She was too good.

I knelt briefly beside Logan’s body and touched a single lock of blond hair that had escaped her ponytail.
 

“I’ll take care of them,” I whispered, pulling the blanket over her still face.

I stood, fighting the tears that threatened to burst forth, and followed Roman back down the spiral hallway. He punched the elevator button furiously, but the doors wouldn’t open. I remembered that all the elevators were controlled from the desk in the lobby. The rover with the camera was down, and even if Greyson and Amory were all right, they wouldn’t be able to see us leaving Aryus’s chamber and coming back down the hall.

Following the smooth wall opposite the bubbling fountain, we located a door to the emergency staircase and pushed.
 

It took forever to wind our way down through the building, and by the time we reached the bottom, I was dizzy and out of breath.

Roman shoved against the door, pulling his gun out of his waistband, but the lobby was deserted.

“Greyson!” I called. My voice echoed off the rounded walls, and the emptiness made me feel more alone than ever. I’d lost Logan already; I didn’t think I’d be able to stand it if I’d lost Greyson and Amory, too.

I ran to the center of the room where we’d left them behind the desk. There was only a pool of blood, smeared by footprints and someone being dragged away. Whether the footprints belonged to Greyson or PMC, I couldn’t tell.

“Greyson!”

Only my own voice answered back. Roman sighed beside me, and I felt the surprising weight of his hand on my good shoulder.

“We’ll find them,” he said.

“No we won’t,” I said with a sniff. “They’re gone.”

“Ready to give up on me so quick?”

I snapped my head around toward the sound of Greyson’s voice, hope flooding my chest.

His head was sticking out of a door fitted seamlessly into the titanium wall, floating like a ghost.

“Oh my god!” I cried, sprinting toward him.

He stepped out into the lobby, nearly falling back against the wall as I threw my good arm around him.

“Where’s Amory?” I asked anxiously, pulling back to examine Greyson for injuries.

“He’s fine.” It was just like Greyson to understand instinctively what I
really
wanted to know. I looked around him and saw Amory’s feet resting against a huge stack of paper towels.

“It’s a janitorial closet,” said Greyson. “I moved him in here to hide, and I found a first aid kit. I got the bleeding to stop, but he needs to see Shriver right away.”

Greyson was looking around me at Roman, his eyes scanning the lobby anxiously.
 

My heart sank when I realized who he was looking for. I didn’t want him to ask. I didn’t think I could handle it.

“Where’s Logan?” The anxiety in his voice tore at my heart.

I looked away, unable to see his face fall when I told him. “She got shot,” I choked. “By Mariah.”

Greyson’s gaze flickered, and a shudder rolled through him. “What?”

He didn’t want to put this information together with Logan’s absence. He didn’t want to face the truth.

“No!” said Greyson, tears filling his eyes.
 

I gripped his arms tightly, but he jerked around, shaking his head in disbelief.

I didn’t say anything. Tears were streaming down my face. I looked at him, willing him to accept what had happened. I couldn’t take the denial.

He yanked out of my grasp and flung himself away from me. “No! She can’t be
gone
!”

I didn’t know what to say. I never did when Greyson was hurting. His pain had a way of mixing with my own grief and compounding it.
 

He spun away, pressing the heels of his hands against his eyes — hard — as if trying to stop the tide of despair.

“We shouldn’t have believed her,” I said. “Mariah tricked us.”
 

The weight of responsibility hit me like a ton of bricks. If we had just killed Mariah as she turned to leave, Logan would still be alive.
 

But then I realized Mariah must have intended to leave when she had heard her brother had been killed. She had only returned because she knew she had nowhere else to go.

“We have to get out of here,” said Roman. I noticed his voice had changed since we’d lost Logan. Everything he said was softer, as though her death had ripped away his usual hard exterior. “Carriers are storming the city. We’ll be trapped here if we don’t move.”

“I’ll get the car,” said Greyson, his voice husky.

I didn’t want him going out there alone, but I couldn’t look at him. Roman seemed to read my mind and followed him outside, reloading his gun.

When they disappeared from sight, I ducked into the closet to check on Amory. He was covered in blood and too pale, but he was breathing. His dark lashes were fanned out, throwing shadows over his cheeks as he slept.
 

As I reached out and ran my thumb over his scruffy jaw, I was glad he was unconscious. I didn’t think I could bear to explain Logan’s death again.

After a moment, his eyes opened lazily, and he smiled up at me.
 

“Hey.”

“Hey,” I said, unable to hold back a weak smile.

“I got shot,” he said, as though he needed to bring me up to speed. “It hurts like a bitch.”

“I know. You took a bullet for me.”

He shrugged, wincing. “I’d do it all again.”

I squeezed his hand. “Just hang in there, okay? We’re going home.”
 

As I said those words, my heart sank a little because I had no idea where “home” was anymore. I forced myself not to think of the future — only about getting Amory to Shriver and getting us out of this city.

A few minutes passed with Amory slipping in and out of consciousness, and I heard the rumble of an SUV.

I flew out of the closet and ran outside. The Xterra was blazing toward the building through a huge swarm of carriers, mowing down any that crossed in its path.
 

Roman was white-knuckling the steering wheel, and Greyson looked as though he might be sick. I realized Roman wasn’t hitting the carriers on purpose — there was just no other way to get through the huge mob.

He stopped the car, parking parallel to the marble stairs, and Greyson jumped out and ran toward me. The look on his face sent a shiver down my back: sheer ruthless determination devoid of emotion.
 

Greyson was shutting down.

I followed him back inside. Without a word, he lifted Amory from behind the shoulders, and I grabbed his feet. Amory awoke, wincing in pain as we shifted him, and I forced myself not to look at his face. Roman was standing outside the SUV, fending off encroaching carriers with his fists.

Two stray carriers staggered toward me, and I dropped Amory’s feet for a moment.
 

My elbow jutted out and connected with the nearest carrier’s jaw. He groaned, and I stomped my boot down above his knee cap, bringing him to the ground. My arm flew out on its own again, my fist striking the second carrier. She wailed, and I grabbed her by the shoulders so I could lodge my knee in her gut.

Greyson was staggering under Amory’s weight, so I pushed the carrier aside and ran to help him hoist him into the backseat.
 

Greyson jumped in the car, and I called out to Roman.

He was no longer fighting, but five more carriers were ambling up the marble steps toward him.

“Roman!” I yelled.

He was in a daze.

“Roman!” I called again. He didn’t move.

I grabbed the rifle lying across the front seat and turned it on the carriers. The kickback stung my shoulder, and Roman seemed to come back to life. He kicked one of the carriers out of the way and threw out his fist to take out another. Then he climbed into the driver’s seat as I picked off the last two, his big hands shaking as he pulled on his seatbelt.

I dropped the gun and jumped in, feeling the bile rise up in my throat. I didn’t have the stomach for killing anymore.

“I have to fix this,” Roman groaned, putting the vehicle into reverse and pulling out around the dead carriers.

“What?”
 

I wanted to be patient — sensitive to the agony he must be feeling — but we needed to forget about hitting carriers and get the hell out of here.

“All this time I’ve been hating
them
.” Roman nodded toward a carrier that was bent over a dead officer, tearing at his jugular. “When I should have been trying to stop Aryus.”

I glanced over at him and was startled to see a muscle working in his jaw as though he might cry.
 

I looked away. I couldn’t think about Logan, all the people we’d killed, or all the people I would
still
kill just to get my friends to safety.

“You did stop him,” I said quietly.

Roman shook his head, reaching into his pocket to pull out the extra syringes. “It’s not enough.”

“No,” I sighed, staring down at my blood-soaked sleeves. “It’s never enough.”

After the last base fell, it wasn’t difficult to find the rest of the rebels.
 

They had taken over an enormous hotel far enough removed from the fighting to shelter the injured rebels and refugees who had fled the communes. There were guards stationed all around the block, fending off stray carriers that had wandered from the horde.

When Roman pulled up to the circle drive, two rebels toting a stretcher appeared to help us extricate Amory from the car. He was barely conscious by the time they lifted him out of the backseat, and I worried that the move had been too much for him.

We followed the men into the hotel lobby, and my eyes settled on an unusual sight. Rebels were sitting with escaped commune dwellers. People in white and black were bunched together between potted plants on the green loveseats, shaking, sobbing, laughing, and holding one another. They had tracked blood and dirt all over the polished parquet floor. The bewildered hotel staff were flitting around with carafes of hot coffee, setting out trays of bagels and cream cheese, and discreetly trying to mop up the foyer.

We followed Amory’s stretcher into the grand ballroom, where twenty or so rollaway beds had been lined up to form a hospital ward. Most were already occupied by injured rebels, and Shriver was flitting from bed to bed, looking harried but completely in her element.
 

Doctor Carson was also bent over a bed, and it warmed my heart to see Shriver sharing the space with him. Despite their differences, they were fighting for the same thing.

When Shriver spotted us, a smile broke over her face. “I can’t believe it,” she said, coming toward us. “I never thought you’d make it. Honestly.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” grumbled Roman. I knew the cure had to be taking hold because he looked a little nauseated.

“Amory’s hurt,” I said. “He’s been shot. Actually, most of us have been shot.”

“Where’s Logan?” she asked.

I swallowed. “She didn’t make it.”

Instantly, Shriver dropped her veil of cool efficiency, and she directed the men with the stretcher toward a table surrounded by a decorative bamboo partition.
 

I refused to leave Amory’s side as Shriver removed his bandages and extracted the bullet fragments. At one point, Amory passed out from the pain, but I held his hand and listened for the
ding
of metal on metal as the fragments hit Shriver’s tray.

Roman watched the operation slumped in an armchair, and Doctor Carson came over to treat his gunshot wound. I caught Shriver shooting Roman concerned looks. She didn’t know he had taken the cure, but it was written all over his face. He had witnessed Logan’s terrible recovery, and I knew he was anticipating the weeks or months of fever and sickness and possible loss of motor function.

After an hour, he fell asleep, his hand curled in his pocket with the extra syringes. I was grateful for the cure, not just because Roman wouldn’t turn, but because he now had a purpose that would carry him through the months to come.

Doctor Carson insisted on cleaning my wound, and once Amory had passed out from the painkillers, I looked around for Greyson. He was nowhere in sight.

I asked the Canadian teenager at the front desk, who told me he had given Greyson a room. When a new wave of rebels staggered through the front door and distracted the boy, I swiped the master key and went upstairs.

The hotel was eerily quiet away from the chaos of the lobby and ballroom. I found Greyson’s room and knocked softly on the door. He didn’t answer.
 

Fitting the key card into the lock, I tried to think what I would say to him, but there was nothing I
could
say. There were no words for what had happened.

The door swung open. It was dark inside the room, except for the light coming through the open curtains. The room had a window that went nearly all the way from the floor to the ceiling, and Greyson was lying in bed on top of the covers, staring out at the night sky.

I didn’t blame him. I didn’t like the room’s oppressively low ceiling, the nondescript walls, or the pristine burgundy carpet. After months of camping outdoors and living on the farm, the inside of a hotel felt fake — too clean.

I pulled back the covers and lay down beside him, watching a lone car speeding down the road. It was strange how few of the skyscrapers were lit up. Most had been overtaken by the PMC, and now they stood empty.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered, not knowing what else to say.

“I should have been there, Haven,” he mumbled.

“No. There was nothing you could have done.”

“How did it
happen
?” His voice was overly accusatory, but I shoved down my guilt.

“It was Mariah,” I said.
 

I explained how she had been guarding Aryus’s chamber — how she had turned on him, only to return moments later to kill us.