Firestorm Page 5

  I swallowed. “I’m a resident of Beacon. I was caught outside the gates and injured myself in the night—I wasn't attacked. I managed to find my way to one of the docks.”

  “She’s lying, Jen,” Wilt said, gesturing to me with his wrench. “How’d you get in the dock in the first place?"

  I stared between the two men. There was really no way around this. "I'm a high-level scientist in an underground government facility. I had fingerprint access," I said. Best not to mention whose fingerprint it was.

  The two stared at me, and then the older one broke into laughter. I could tell he was an influence on the younger engineer, because he laughed a little, too.

  Wilt recovered himself, and he looked skeptical. “Okay, Mrs. Secret Scientist. Where’s your tattoo?”

  I slowly lifted my hand, rolled up my left sleeve. I angled my forearm for them to see, the four lines illuminated by the light. It had been over five years since anyone had asked to see it.

  “Scientist’s Guild. Well shit, she might not be lying, Wilt." His eyes flicked from his partner to me, made a quick survey with his eyes. "Though you’re not flabby at all. Kind of pale, though.”

  Somewhere in the back of my mind a switch covered in cobwebs flicked on, and out came the girlish charm I’d once been able to turn on at will.

  It had been so many years since I’d felt womanly, I could hardly remember myself from that age. “We’re not all sedentary,” I said, smiling a little. “But we almost universally don’t see much light.”

  Jen still wasn't convinced. "How'd you get the key from Ehren?”

  My mind raced. “The key was already in the basket. I didn’t see anyone named Ehren.”

  Jen laughed. “Put the wrench down, Wilt. We’ll check her for weapons, and if she’s clean, we’ll turn her over to the guardians. They’ll know what to do with her. Come on out of the basket, girl.”

  I was lucky for stereotypes: young women didn’t knock out men like Ehren and steal their keys, right? Well, not exactly. But I was more than happy to go along with Jen’s impression of me.

  I opened the gate. Jen patted me down, giving my chest and hips a wide berth. “You seem good. How’d you avoid the silvers?” he asked, stepping back.

  “I got lucky,” I said. And I had a super soldier with me who had vowed to protect me at all costs. Well, he had been with me; I realized that Blaze must have assumed I'd be safer alone, that he would find his own way into the city.

  He wasn't wrong. The man had good judgment.

  “Well, let’s get you above ground, then. This way.” And Jen led me toward a rectangular door with a turning handle.

  “Keep your head low,” he told me as he swung the handle and pushed the door open.

  We followed an upward-sloping tunnel, and after a time the walls and ceiling shifted from rock to the red dirt I’d grown up with. Lights had been strung along the ceiling, illuminating the back of Jen’s balding head.

  At the end, dirt became metal, and we stood before another door. Jen swiped a keycard and opened it. And just like that, we were in Beacon.

  Everything looked as I remembered it. A real city before us: a dirt street, several buildings with slantwise metal roofs. Over those, the tall hanging tree and, farther off, the guardians' tower with its balconies.

  Metal sheeting layered Beacon's outermost walls for about fifty feet from ground to sky, and above that, the scaffolds and netting. The whole place had been lit from bottom to top like an ornamented tree, spotlights cast outward even in the daytime.

  And this was truly the day. From somewhere, I heard the sound of metal being hammered to. A pair of guardians passed us, crossbows slung at their hips, their adolescent eyes appraising the three of us.

  I didn't recognize either of them, which didn't surprise me; these young women had only been children when I'd left, and I'd been constantly in the lab in the years before I left.

  Constantly working. Trying to concoct the right drug for my sister.

  Jen waved. “Hey, gals,” he said to the guardians.

  “Overnight again, Jen?” one said.

  “Me and Wilt got the short stick."

  The two guards looked at me, surveying my clothing and injured arm in its slung and disarray. "Who's this?" the other asked.

  Without my consent, Wilt lifted my arm to display my tattoo. "One of the Scientists' Guild. She appeared in the control room—claims to have gotten caught outside the gates. We're taking her to the guardians' tower."

  "You want us to take her?" the first guardian asked.

  "Should be fine—she seems harmless enough," Jen said, stepping forward. "Besides, it's good to get fresh air." He winked at the two guardians as he gestured for me to follow, and they only nodded. We were allowed to pass.

  I ventured a glance back toward the door. Not a sign of Blaze.

  “Eyes forward,” Wilt whispered. Evidently he wasn't convinced about me.

  Jen took us down the residential alley, made a left at Moll’s Pub. What I wouldn’t have given just to sit at her bar, not even drinking, just chatting.

  A glass clinked from inside, and the memory of my father’s hunched form at a stool came back to me. After our mother was taken, he drank often and well. And then it was just me raising Zara, even before he died.

  We entered the square. The hanging tree loomed before us, the noose empty. As a child it had been used often, but there had been one time in particular that stood out in my mind.

  All of Beacon had come out to see it, though my parents hadn’t let me. I was only three, and it was a boy who would be hanging. He had been wounded by a silver, and before he turned, he’d killed his entire family—mother, father, and younger sister.

  It was my first understanding that death would come for us all.

  “It’s just past here,” Jen said, rounding the schoolhouse I’d attended until I was sixteen. If only I’d known as a child how primitive the teaching had been, how much I had still to learn.

  I wondered if Leila the schoolteacher was still here, but the windows were too dark to see into.

  "I know," I murmured. This was my childhood; I already knew the way. We were headed to the guardians' tower.

  The guardians stationed below raised their crossbows as we came to the door. “Move aside, Aiden. I’ve got a woman here needs to see the captain.”

  I stopped sudden, my heart squeezing and then juddering back to life with a series of hard beats. Aiden.

  “He’s out on the scaffolds,” Aiden said, his blue eyes slitted to slivers. Then they found me, and widened.

  If he called me out, things would only get worse for me. The two engineers had thought I was joking about working in the facility, but the guardians were mostly humorless.

  I shook my head the tiniest degree, my mouth set hard. Please don’t say anything.

  “Well we need to see the lieutenant, then,” Jen said.

  “He’s out, too,” the other guard said.

  Jen threw up his hands. “Who the hell’s in charge?"

  Aiden’s eyes returned to Jen. “The deputy captain has command while Captains Jarl and Huss are out.”

  “Bring us to him, then,” Jen said, exasperated.

  The two guardians lowered their crossbows, their eyes examining me from under the shade of their helmets.

  “She’s busy, but I’ll take you in,” Aiden said. And we were led into the guardians' hall, which I’d seen once on a tour as a child. Down here were the barracks and the weapon stash, the mess room for meals.

  Aiden led us down a flight of stairs to a hallway full of cells, all of which were empty.

  He brought us to a door at the end of the hall and ushered me into a narrow room with two chairs and a table. One of the interrogation rooms.

  “She can wait in here,” Aiden said, stepping between Jen and Wilt and me. With him this close to me, my eyes on his broad shoulders, I remembered how I used to feel next to him: small, protected. We weren't right for each other in any other way
, but physically we'd looked just right.

  And then, one day, I'd disappeared from Beacon without any explanation.

  “All right. Good luck, Miss Scientist,” Jen said. Wilt said nothing, only nodded his head at me. The two of them returned up the stairs we had come by.

  Aiden nodded at me as though I could be anyone. Then he turned away, breathing into the mic wrapped at his ear. “Ma’am, a woman appeared in the control room under the city. She was escorted here by two engineers from the Electric Guild.”

  I heard faint words from the mic before Aiden turned toward me. "She'll be here in a few minutes." He paused. "And welcome back, Darcy."

  I opened my mouth, but he had already pulled the door shut, and I was alone in the room.

  I sat, slumping to the chair's hard back. Here was another wrinkle to deal with; I would have a lot to explain to Aiden.

  Beneath it all, I felt exhausted; this was the first time I’d rested in a day and my body felt like it'd been squeezed through a drain, everything swirling and twisted. The silvers, the tunnel, the engineer Blaze had knocked out, and now Blaze just gone.

  I set my thumb and forefinger to the bridge of my nose, squeezing my eyes shut. None of this had gone to plan—but then, we hadn’t really had much of a plan beyond escaping the facility.

  The door opened and someone crossed the room, sat across from me. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

  That voice.

  My eyes opened, and our gazes met at the same time. The woman across from me was decked in uniform, her honeyed hair pulled into a tight bun. She sat straight, regal, her full lips only now parting just a little.

  She was my sister.

  We sat frozen.

  “Zara,” I whispered.

  She flinched, her chest lifting. She was five years older than when I’d last seen her, more radiant, all the roundness whittled to fine angles—but she was my sister, and she was alive. Her mouth opened, but she didn’t have words.

  Tears sprung to my eyes, and she seemed to respond to this, her chest quavering under her uniform. "Darcy?" she mouthed—a question.

  “I’ve missed you,” I said, my good hand sliding out across the table, palm facing up. She glanced down at it, and then her eyes flicked to my shoulder and the sling. She didn't take my hand.

  “You look well," I said. "Healthy."

  As soon as I'd asked it, the regality returned to her posture, her face. That was the wrong thing to say.

  “Technology has improved since you left," she said, the words rolling hard from her tongue. "We’re not as primitive here as you think."

  I shook my head. “I didn’t think you were. It’s just that the disease…”

  “Was killing me? Yes, it was. And you thought I wouldn't be around anymore.”

  My throat swelled, my open hand still on the table. “No.”

  “Well, I eventually thought you were dead, too. Things become pretty stark when you’re alone—especially if you're thirteen-year-old with lupus. You have to figure out whether you’re the type of person who will sink, or the type who can swim.”

  “You were always a swimmer," I breathed.

  “I wasn’t ready. You left me here—sick, alone. You said you'd be gone a year. I never even knew where you went. It was like you never existed.”

  I dropped my eyes to the table, studying the hard edge of it. “I did it for you.”

  She went silent except for her heavy breathing. She’d always been like this: quick to emotion, whether joy or fear or anger. But it seemed her time as a guard had helped to steady that impulse. She reined it in faster.

  “And now you’re back for me?” I heard her ask. "What the hell happened to you, anyway?"

  I wanted to ask her so many things. How had she survived the infection? When did she join the guards? Where had all the baby fat gone from her face?

  But right now, the woman staring back at me wasn't Zara. She was the deputy captain of the guard.

  "It's a very, very long story, and I can’t tell you here," I said.

  Her upper lip curled. She didn’t trust me. “Why not?”

  My eyes flicked to the door where I knew the two guards stood outside.

  “They can’t hear us,” she said.

  I sighed. "The crux of the story is that I'm okay, but I need private access to Beacon's hospital. Right now."

  Two lines formed between her eyebrows, and then she let a short bark of a laugh. “What? What makes you think I'm just going to—"

  "Because," I said, "I outrank you."

  I cringed inwardly at what I'd just said, but it was true—my position at the facility put me at a higher standing than the deputy captain of Beacon's guard. Plus, we didn't really have time to be going back and forth.

  “Please, Zara.” My hand remained outstretched on the table, the palm up. "Can we just talk in private?"

  She sighed, pressed herself up and away from the table and nodded me toward the door. “My office."

  Six

  Friday, May 9, 2053

  11:03 a.m.

  Blaze

  I couldn't protect Darcy from here, and I didn't like it.

  The engineers had led her into Beacon two minutes before. I’d just dropped to the ground when I heard the door clang.

  I pressed the button to lower the cart. It burst into motion above me, juddering its way down to the cavern floor. From here, it looked miniscule. I had crossed that ceiling, worked my way down that rock wall in a shorter time than I’d estimated: four minutes, thirty eight seconds.

  Despite my time in cryostasis and my silver wound, I was getting stronger. I had to reframe my expectations of my body, my mind, my capabilities. Because now I’d begun to come into myself, even if I had only had received half of the full training regimen the Ides facility offered its infiltrators.

  As I waited, I tested the mechanisms of the crossbow I'd picked up from Ehren Lightsmith. The moment I'd heard the door close behind Darcy and the two engineers, I had circled back around to the small control room in the cavern, found the man whom Darcy had called a member of the Electric Guild.

  I'd knelt by him, found him still unconscious, a small welt at his temple. He was probably twenty-four.

  I could pass for twenty-four.

  I'd retrieved the crossbow and his badge. Ehren Lightsmith, it read. Fitting. And, clipping the badge to the waist of my pants and lifting the crossbow from where he'd dropped it, that man was now me. At least for a time.

  I set the crossbow at my waist as the cart came to a clanging stop in front of me. Its light shifted from red to green, ready for its next trip.

  I stepped in, jabbed the button. The basket shifted into upward motion, cranking me up toward the lit room above. I knew I only had a few minutes before the two members of the Electric Guild returned to their posts, and I had to get through whatever tunnel led between here and Beacon proper.

  Just under a minute later, the cart ground to a shaking halt inside the main control room. I’d already leapt out when we’d crossed the threshold of the cavern’s ceiling, taking a quick survey of the environs.

  Only a single tunnel led off the room, ending at a hatchlike door that could be secured in emergencies. Right now it sat open, probably because one of the two men had forgotten with all the excitement of Darcy’s arrival.

  Three computers sat at various points around the room. They looked like much older hardware than what I’d glimpsed in Ides, which made sense: I doubted much in the way of new technology was being produced above ground anymore.

  And, for me, that was a good thing. Old meant easier access. Someday I might need to access the ancient hardware they were sporting.

  But for now I slipped through the door into the tunnel. My first prerogative was getting to Darcy, ensuring her safety. I took the tunnel at a jog, following the strung lights all the way up to the second hatch of a door. This one was secured with a scanner.

  I lifted Ehren Lightsmith’s—my—badge, offered the barcode to the scanne
r’s light. After a moment, it chimed, and the door clicked.

  Everything I had learned about Beacon rose to the fore of my mind.

  The last outpost of humanity. A population at least large enough to sustain itself for the past few decades, which meant I might be able to exist in some sort of anonymity long enough to get my bearings. It was threatened by the silvers, whose own population had grown large enough for frequent incursions. Darcy’s mother had died during one of those attacks.

  They had guilds. Electric, Science, probably one for the guards and others for various practical needs. Some were more crucial than others, as I’d learned from Darcy’s reaction to Ehren’s death. He’d been critical—electricity was critical.

  And their generators were slowly, inexorably dying.

  Most of all, I’d gotten the sense that the right hand often didn’t know what the left hand was doing. It had been true at the facility, and it would probably be truer here.

  Which made things easy for an infiltrator.

  I pressed the door open, stepped into daylight. If I was Ehren Lightsmith, I had to belong, to move like a citizen, an electrician. But there wasn’t anyone in the alleyway to notice me.

  The back ends of two-story patchwork buildings rose before me, and where I stood offered a clear glimpse of the sky. I lifted my hands, observed them in the encompassing light and warmth. It was my first time seeing my own skin reflect daylight.

  I couldn’t help shifting my eyes up, squinting toward the sun. My only sight of it, filtered through a vast and tall netting floating hundreds of feet above. Not a cloud passed through that wide and deep blue sky.

  My eyes burned from all the light, and I jerked my gaze down, setting my fingers to my face. That had hurt. Even so, the warmth on my skin, the scents around me, the noise of human activity all rolled over me in an exhilarating wave.

  Here was where Darcy had lived most of her life. Here were the people I had been designed to protect. Those natural and conditioned instincts roiled inside me, diffused in palpating warmth through my chest.

  This was my purpose: to keep humans and humanity alive. And of course, one human in particular.