Firestorm Read online

  Scarlet’s eyes didn’t meet mine as I spoke; instead, her gaze fell on Aiden and stayed there. “That was maybe ten miles from here, and it was night. We could see your lights—so many lights—and we decided to bunker down in the vehicle and make for your post come morning, but the silvers came.” Her chin crumpled a moment before she recovered. “Only I made it.”

  “How did you survive in the vehicle until morning?” I asked.

  “We had weapons,” she said to Aiden. "I managed to keep them at bay until the light came."

  “And where’s your weapon?” I asked.

  She shifted in her chair, the metal restraints clinking. I flinched at the sight of it, expecting her to break them in one swift motion. But she remained bound. “I was a heavy ballistics gal, which makes for bad running. In the morning, I left everything and sprinted for this place.”

  Aiden’s mouth opened, but I leaned forward, my hand slapping the table. “Bullshit. What about your sprained ankle?"

  "The ground isn't so smooth just outside your gates," she said at once. "I tripped. I fell."

  This was an amalgam of the origin stories we had trained our infiltrators to tell if they were ever caught or interrogated. A little bit of frontier guard, a little bit of a silver ambush, and—of course, by some miracle—the infiltrator was always the only survivor.

  “She’s lying,” I said. “She’s lying about everything. I know this whole story, because I made it up for her.”

  The Scarlet said nothing, but her eyes went wide and frightened. She seemed almost physically to recoil from me, her red hair slipping in front of her face like a veil.

  “It’s okay,” Aiden said, raising his left hand to stay me. “We want to hear more about everything that happened from you, Ruby.”

  The Scarlet offered a slow nod, though now she strictly avoided my gaze. “I haven’t lied about anything. You walk ten miles north of here…you’ll find what’s left of them.” She paused, seemed to struggle for composure. “My husband was one of them.”

  “We’ll send our scouts out today,” Aiden said.

  “Where is this outpost?” I asked. “Let me guess: way too far for Beacon’s scouts to reach on horseback.”

  She ignored my sarcasm. “A hundred miles northwest you’ll come across our place, called Fairweather. We’re maybe five hundred people.”

  Fairweather. I had written that name for the infiltrator narrative, plucked it out of my brain as a nice sounding place to live.

  “How did you survive the silvers?” I asked.

  “We have a generator,” she said. “A massive central generator that provides us light. Not as bright as yours, but we also have ballistics.”

  “Guns and vehicles,” I said, folding my arms across my chest. “It’s a miracle.”

  Aiden stood. “Could you excuse us a moment please? Darcy and I need to speak.”

  I glared up at Aiden.

  “Of course,” the Scarlet said.

  I stood, and Aiden and I stepped just outside the door. He closed it behind us, though through the window, I could see the Scarlet watching us.

  “Darcy, please,” Aiden said. “I can’t let you stay if you can’t be professional.”

  “I’ve already told you what she is, Aiden. This is pointless. If you don’t put her in an isolation cell, I’m going to have to take care of her myself.”

  His eyebrows went up, and he glanced around at the other guardian—who was within earshot of us—before he whispered to me in a low voice: “You know what it means to threaten a human being’s life to a member of the guard. It doesn’t matter if she’s a citizen of Beacon or not.”

  But I didn’t care. At this point, everything was on the line.

  “Her presence is a threat to my life,” I said as quietly as I could; I still sensed the Scarlet watching us. “Aiden, if you ever had any love for me, please believe me. She’s weaving a pretty story to charm you, and anything but the highest-security cell with guardians on watch is a death sentence for me. Unless I end her first.”

  Aiden let a long, low breath. He glanced back into the interrogation room, where the Scarlet pretended not to be looking. She was quick enough that she appeared to be staring at the table when Aiden turned her way, but I knew.

  Aiden straightened, set a hand on my arm. “Darcy West, as a senior member of the guard, I’m obligated to place you under arrest.”

  I flared on him, tried to jerk my arm away. “What the hell are you doing?”

  “You’ll be kept in one of the guard tower’s cells overnight until we can bring you before the council.” He raised a hand, gesturing for the guard at the end of the hall to come forward. “Take her downstairs.”

  “Do you know what you're doing, Aiden? You’re killing me,” I said, still trying to tug away from him. As the other guard came forward, I spun bodily away. In a flash, I spotted the Scarlet through the window. Was that pleasure on her face? “If you do this, you’re killing me.”

  “Don't be so dramatic, Darcy. You’ll be safe in there,” Aiden said as the other guard gripped my uninjured arm. “It’s just one night.”

  I let a wild laugh. “Just one night?” I said as I was walked down the hall toward Beacon’s cells. I sounded a little crazy, and maybe I was. “Just one night is all I have.”

  Aiden turned away, and as I turned the corner, the last I saw of him was his back. Unbowed, always trying to do the right thing.

  5:58 p.m.

  The sunlight was fading, and the Scarlet was coming for me.

  I stood, crossed to the high window in my cell. Outside, the same two pairs of guardians' feet passed by the bars. After a day of sitting in a cell beneath the ground and watching the patrol go by at twenty minute intervals, I would never again mistake those boots as anything but the guardians’ standard wear.

  But every time, I still kept hoping to see those Gales’ boots Blaze had been wearing when we escaped the facility. I kept expecting him to appear, to rescue me from all this.

  How quickly we came to rely on the people who were reliable.

  I shook my head, crossed to the cot. I gripped the side of it, staring at my own shoes. He might be gone today, or he might be gone forever. I had no way of knowing, and in the meantime, I had to prepare myself for what was to come.

  I had to be the person I needed right now.

  She would come for me only in the dark. It was the most obvious choice. My eyes lifted to the cell door, following the outline of it. That thing was solid, probably impermeable. And it would be a pain for her to deal with the guardian posted at the end of the hall.

  Which left the window. It had been built rectangular, narrow, the bars fitted to it thicker around than my arms. No one would be getting in or out through that window unless they were a cat.

  But if she could see me, she could kill me. The air flowed freely between those bars, and I could even reach my hand out if I so chose. Which meant she could reach her hand inside. And if she could reach inside, she could reach me.

  Her night vision was strong, and her aim was true. Beacon was jam-packed with sharp things to steal and throw, after all. It wouldn’t take much.

  Footsteps sounded in the hallway, and I straightened. The hatch in the door slid open, and the dinner tray came through. A cup of water, a bowl of something brown and processed, and a trencher of bread.

  Aiden’s voice sounded outside. “You doing okay in there?”

  “I am now,” I said, grabbing up the tray and placing it on my lap. I set into the food so fast I hardly heard what he said next. I stopped eating, raised my face. “What was that?”

  “All I need you to do is promise a member of the guardians you won’t try to kill Ruby, and we’ll let you out in the morning.”

  I chewed a moment longer, shook my head. “Can’t promise that. Sorry.”

  He let what might have been a sigh. It was hard to tell. “We’ll revisit this in the morning.”

  “Sure,” I said, though I couldn’t promise that, eit
her. Which was why this food tasted like nectar to me.

  Three hours passed. I remained awake, vigilant long after night had fallen, and finally I heard the tolling that announced the outpost was shifting over to the evening patrol.

  I closed my eyes, could see clearly the routine that was occurring as I sat in my cell: the outer gates were being secured, the largest lamps activated up and down the scaffolding, the metal wall surrounding us pulled up higher to enclose us from the ground to seventy-five feet above our heads.

  In my cell, the overhead light had gone dim. It was supposed to allow me to sleep, but it only set my heart to beating faster.

  Before our parents died, I had been so afraid of the silvers I’d wet my bed many nights. Sometimes I would crawl beneath it, ashamed and fearful of both my parents and the silvers. As though the bed above me would save me from their reprimands, and from the silvers' claws and teeth.

  When I was eight, my father ended all that in one night. He brought me out of our apartment into the center of the outpost, where I stood against his legs as he narrated everything that was happening.

  The gates. The lamps. The wall.

  “We’re safe from them here,” he’d murmured into my ear. “Safe inside these walls, beneath this light.”

  He was kindest when he was buzzed, never anything more or less. Irate when he was sober, awful when he was drunk. I still remembered the faint smell of alcohol on his breath that night like a strange comfort, knowing he was only half-drunk as he explained Beacon’s locks and lamps and lacerated metal walls.

  And he’d been right about the silvers. Though for him, they weren’t the real threat; it was the daily soothing ritual that got him in the end: Moll’s Pub, drink after drink until one night he’d tipped off the stool and never got back up.

  To think, even in the apocalypse, people would still die to their own demons. Maybe the starkness of such a life, the constant fear of death, propelled them toward those demons.

  When the tolling finished, I lay down. It was time for me to sleep, or at least pretend to. I shivered in the darkness, and my eyes refused to close. Every twig’s crack, every footstep sent a jolt through my body.

  I knew she wouldn’t come this early—she would wait until I had reached the very bottom of the well of my mind, until I was dreaming and my breathing came heavy and slow.

  But the heart wasn’t a logician. It operated on emotion, impulse, instinct.

  The image of Blaze’s face kept returning to me, and I wondered if I’d condemned him to a worse fate by bringing him above ground. If I survived this night, and if he ever returned, I would tell him how I felt about him.

  I would tell him that it had all been real. Everything I'd felt for him—done with him—had been the realest bits of my life.

  My thoughts fragmented, and exhaustion took me. Tonight I would fight, and maybe I would die. But I wouldn’t let her take me without that fight.

  Sixteen

  Saturday, May 10, 2053

  12:30 p.m.

  Blaze

  Light. Glorious, overwhelming light hit my eyelids. Which meant I was alive.

  I opened my eyes. The sun had risen high into the sky, and when I turned my face, I spotted 7950 sitting some three feet away with Zara laid out in front of him on her back.

  "Hey," he said.

  "Hey." I lifted my head from the dirt. Around us, the world stretched brown and sun-dried, hills rising left and right of us.

  "That was some pretty crazy shit you pulled back there."

  I sat up, squinting at him. "It worked, didn't it?"

  "Well, it got us out of the den." He indicated Zara with a nod of his head. "But her fate is still in the air."

  I surveyed Zara. She appeared pale, her chest rising and falling in stutter-starts. The leader had gotten her good, and now the silver infection had her in its thrall. "We need to get back to the outpost. Now."

  "We've been waiting on you," 7950 said, lifted Zara into his arms. “Come on, 8024. You’re making genetically engineered soldiers look bad.”

  And if there was anything my model responded well to, it was a finger in the ribs.

  I rose to my feet, pain tearing through me from an assortment of wounds I didn't even want to think about. But my body still worked well enough to carry me across the the dead zone in direction I wanted to go, and that was enough.

  "Let's go," I breathed, and we went.

  We walked for miles in silence, retracing the way we'd come during the night. Neither of us shifted into silver form—I didn't have the strength to, and he would quickly outpace me if he did—so we hadn't moved much faster than a quick jog.

  Eventually, seeing 7950 exhausted, I insisted on carrying Zara. But I only brought her a couple miles until I couldn’t make my legs work, and my arms had burned with the effects of the silver bite.

  "7950," I said, stopping. "You have to take her."

  He had been jogging some twenty feet ahead, and stopped, turned. "You look like someone decided to paint with their fingers on your body," he said to me.

  "If only," I said, passing Zara over to him. "That wouldn't hurt so much."

  "Do I need to take her alone?" he asked. This wasn't a rib or a challenge—it was just a question of logistics. It meant: "Will you be able to make it?"

  And while every part of me wanted me to lay down in the dirt and the whole world be damned, I shook my head. "Set the pace. I'll keep up."

  But I didn't know how long that would last.

  5:58 p.m.

  Just as we reached the forest's edge, I sank to my knees.

  7950 stopped, came back around, breathing hard with Zara in his arms. He had carried her nearly the entire distance—which, after the silver fight and in human form, hadn’t been easy. The both of us were dehydrated, raked, bitten.

  But he wouldn’t leave us behind.

  Now, right at the forest, she lay unconscious and deeply, dangerously infected in his arms.

  “This isn’t the first silver wound you’ve taken,” 7950 said, staring down at me.

  I pointed to my leg. “One got me in the thigh yesterday.”

  “We’re strong, but not that strong, 8024. It’s too much venom in your system.”

  I glanced up at him. “Which means what?”

  “You won’t die from it,” he said. “Your blood will eventually neutralize it. But hers won’t—which means she won’t survive the trip back. Not at this pace.”

  I glanced down at Zara. I could smell the infection on her, putrid and vicious. And I thought about her portrait in Darcy’s cabin, the care with which she had touched it that one day.

  Zara’s death would be Darcy’s death.

  “It’s about to be dark,” I said, glancing up. “They’ll be coming.”

  7950 raised his face to the sky. “We can shift soon.”

  “You won’t make it with her,” I said. “Even without me slowing you down. Not unless I intercept them.”

  7950’s eyes flicked to me. “You’re sure?”

  “Absolutely,” I said, but one hand went up and out toward him. “But promise me—”

  “That I’ll protect the doctor?” he finished.

  “And her sister,” I added, nodding toward Zara.

  His gaze shifted beyond me, seemed to darken. When I turned my head, I saw nothing behind us. He was thinking about something else. “What is it?”

  “I wasn’t the only one sent from the facility. There was a Scarlet. Your Scarlet.”

  I swallowed. I should have put her down for good when I had the chance. “Where is she?”

  “The outpost. Her explicit mission was to bring the doctor back again, just as mine was to neutralize you.”

  I balled my fists. My Scarlet had gone to the outpost, and I had left Darcy there alone. Unprotected. And then 7950’s words fully processed. “Bring her back again?”

  “She’s valuable.”

  “Don’t I know it. But you said ‘again.’ As in, this has happened before.”r />
  A stuttering howl pierced the silence that followed, and the trees ahead of us seemed to catch a wind that came from nowhere. It whipped Zara’s hair up toward 7950’s face.

  He and I met eyes, and I nodded. “Go.”

  “I’ll protect them,” 7950 said.

  “And I’ll buy you time to do it,” I said, setting a hand to the ground and pressing my unwilling body up to its full height.

  7950 handed Zara to me, and he shifted so simply and smoothly into silver form that it was time for me to hand her back over almost as soon as I’d received her.

  I pulled off her jacket, tied it around them as a sort of girdle to keep her on 7950’s back.

  He turned toward the forest, and as soon as he’d disappeared in amongst the trees, I spun back in the direction we'd come.

  My fingers curled to fists, and I dropped to all fours. My body had already begun to shift by the time my hands touched the ground.

  If this would be my last night, I would make the silvers remember it.

  Twenty minutes later, I had laid a perfect ambush. It went off almost perfectly.

  The silvers had been following Zara’s scent, and 7950 had crossed the stream at a very specific point. So I dragged driftwood to that point, making the geography a little more challenging to navigate.

  And then I waited in the water. I soaked myself through and through, washing away their scent and my scent and all the blood. It had felt good, especially with the trees swaying above me. It had felt good despite my weariness; several moments I wondered if I would collapse into the water and wash down the stream to the ocean.

  Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad, I thought. There probably weren’t silvers at the ocean.

  But I had a job to do. And it was there I waited, a silver submerged in the water until the moment they came.

  The remaining four. I caught one in the leg, dragged him down and punctured his neck before the others had a chance to react.

  And then the fight had become a blur in the darkness. I acted on instinct, my body behaving while my mind traveled. It traveled to her.