Catalyst (28 page)

Say something, Zelia. Anything.
“I know where it is, but it’s not in Avida. It’s in . . . Okks.”

It’s hard to concentrate on my words. My bracelet buzzes with increasing intensity. I clutch at it, digging my fingertips against the edge to rub the irritated skin.

“Liar.”

I look up in surprise. Sean rushes forward, his arm coiled back and he punches me straight in the jaw before I can react. My body crashes to the floor and white starbursts pepper my vision. I don’t know which way is up. If it weren’t for the necklace around my neck, I’d have stopped breathing from having the air slammed out of me.

“You know where that list is.” Sean stands over me, frowning deeply, as if he might cry again. “That’s one thing I was always better at than Julian. I know when someone is lying to me.”

He rips my necklace off.

“I liked you, Zelia.” Sean sounds like a hurt child. “You were supposed to be on my side.”

No,
I think.
You were supposed to be on mine.

Sean lowers my necklace onto the round table nearby. He lifts a large glass paperweight and holds it over my pendant.

“No!” I beg him.

“Tell me where it is.”

“I don’t know. I just said that so I could talk to you,” I say quickly. “I’m sorry. I just wanted to make sure Caliga was okay.”

“She’s mine,” he repeats, raising the paperweight higher. His face is stricken with pain. “Julian promised she would be mine.”

I cower on the floor. It’s like I’m talking to a broken machine. There’s no winning an argument here, no reasoning where reason has fled.

“Sean.” Micah’s voice comes from Sean’s bracelet. “He’s coming.”

Sean’s eyes stay on me as he holds the paperweight aloft. Clarity enters his eyes for a moment. “Where are the others?”

“All under control, like you asked. It went perfectly. You know who are the highest flight risks now. I’ll have them locked in their rooms so you can discipline them as you planned. Cyrad got away, though. I thought you could take care of it. He’s headed for your room right now. My hands are full at the moment.”

I can’t believe it. At the end of it all, I was wrong to trust Micah. He played me so easily.

“I’m not well, Micah. I’m not well,” he whispers, barely concealing a sob. “Sedate them all for the night. Please,” he adds. The paperweight bobbles in his hand. The other hand digs into his pocket, fumbling for something. “It was Julian’s idea,” he says, but I’m not sure he’s even speaking to me. “Start a secret plan to escape and find out who the rule breakers would be. I told him no, they’d always obey him. But I knew no one would obey me. I have to know who my friends are. Everyone else can go away.” He raises the paperweight over his head, aiming for my pendant. “Like you’re going to go away.”

Three things happen, almost all at once.

Sean crashes the glass orb onto my necklace, and the tiny metal insides fly apart, bouncing onto the carpet.

The door opens, and Cy sees me on the floor, too weak to fight, and Caliga, still frozen in her chair.

And the neural gun in Sean’s other hand goes off with a hiss, aimed straight at Cy’s chest.

Cy collapses to the floor, eyes wide open.

“Oh my god!” I push myself off the floor and drag myself over to him. He stares straight ahead, breathing comfortably, but he doesn’t move. He doesn’t blink. Neural guns work too well. They only paralyze the nerves that control your movement. So I know Cy can feel my hands on him, hear me scream. He can breathe. But he can’t move, and he can’t speak.

The sight of Cy’s expressionless face fills me with so much hate, I can’t contain the fire of it. I force my breath in and out, so hard, my throat burns. My bracelet buzzes painfully. Curfew is only minutes away.

Sean steps over Cy, as if he were nothing more than a fallen piece of trash, and grabs my face, squeezing hard. I push, but I can’t get him off me.

“I could let you die on your own. It would take, what, a few days maybe? A week? But I’m not as patient as Julian was.” He lifts me up by my shirt, throwing me against the wall of the library. The holo shelves are fake, but the wall and watch cases are too real. I crash against them, skull and spine singing with pain, and my elbow smashes through a glass display full of watches.

Warm blood oozes over my arm, followed quickly by shooting pain in my elbow. Broken glass and watches and their cracked crystals surround my face. I try to crawl away but slip on the mess, chest down on the crackling glass.

And suddenly, my eyes open with surprise. Air forcefully spills into my lungs. My chest stretches wide as my body inhales—by itself. Without my effort.

The exhalation comes just as shockingly. Like a concrete block pressing down on my chest. The breaths are jerky, too long and abrupt, as if an ill-fitting iron lung has been crimped onto my body.

My back arches with each inhalation, and I lurch forward as the air leaves me. Confused, I turn my head to see Sean watching me curiously. How could my necklace work when it was shattered to pieces? Maybe the bits are still on the ground nearby? When I sit up more, the mechanical breaths stop abruptly.

And then Sean kicks me across my cheek.

The pain. It’s everywhere. I catalog it, because it’s all that lives in my consciousness. Head, arms, back, elbows. Skin, bones, teeth. I try to form a cry for help, but it issues out of my lips as a whimper.

A body cannot take more of this, I think. I’m already broken. And for some reason, familiar words randomly enter my brain. Memories and sweet things, come to comfort me.

I cannot feel your light on my skin.

This place swells with absences

As you seep forward

And I remain, fixed in memory.

But they’re not my thoughts. They are Cy’s, and Cy’s voice. Inside the pain, I smile. He’s doing this for me, when I have nothing left to hold on to.

Through my closed eyelids, I sense Sean standing over me. I can smell his excitement. It’s green, and there’s the earthy, musky scent of passion too. He’s giddy with it, swimming in his power. His foot pushes painfully into my ribs, rolling me over onto my back, onto more broken glass. My eyes open, and Cy and I lock onto each other. As his dark eyes stare unblinking into mine, I beg silently.

Make him stop. Cy. You can do it. I know you can.

I wait an eternity in a few seconds. But nothing happens.

Sean lifts his fist for another blow to my face. My bracelet relentlessly zaps me. I only feel it now that I’m not being bashed against the walls anymore. The clock chimes nine. The kids in the cavern are leaving. Right now.

“Wait, Sean.” Caliga steps gingerly over the broken glass. She speaks with a tenderness that makes me want to vomit. “You’re hurt.”

Sean drops his gaze to his knuckles that are torn from punching me across my teeth. I want to scream at her to get away, but I’m too confused. After being paralyzed by fear, Caliga is now serenity itself. She lets his hands find their way to caress her cheek. He touches her, gently at first, then clumsily drops his arms.

“What’s happening?” He stares at his hands, lurching his shoulders left then right to move them. It’s no good; they flop down again, like he’s got rubber flippers for limbs. His legs soon succumb, and he crumples to the floor, eyes wide open with wonder and fear.

How can this be? How could the vaccine not work anymore?

“You were going to take what wasn’t yours,” she whispers, crouching down to touch her hand to his face.

Sean tries to bat her hand away, but after contact with her arm, it drops again like a lead weight to the floor. Caliga lets her hand delicately touch his face, as if she were playing a sonatina on a piano. Her hands fold on top of his heart, and she waits.

“It will never be yours to take. From any girl. Ever,” she says softly.

Cy and I wait, staring. Hanging back. We know this is no longer our fight.

In the space of a silent two minutes, Sean is dead.

CHAPTER 26

C
ALIGA LETS ME SCOOP MY ARM AROUND
her thin waist. She helps pull me up.

“I don’t understand. I thought your vaccine had worked,” I say breathlessly.

“It did,” she explains in a daze. “I used a vector with a really short half-life. It was only supposed to work for two hours, but I miscalculated. I was off by an hour.”

Cy rolls over on the floor, groaning. “Thank god he only had a civilian neural gun.” He manages to stand up, wobbling and holding on to the table for support. “We need to go.” He stops in mid-lurch toward the door. “Wait. Your necklace,” he says, turning around. “I though I saw it—”

“It’s gone. Sean destroyed it,” I explain.

“We’ll find some way to help you. As I recall, I’m pretty good at CPR,” Cy mumbles with a crooked smile.

But it’s not funny. I hear Dad’s voice in my head, asking me to assent to an implantable breathing pacer. But I remember something else too.

“Wait. Something in here forced me to breathe. Like a pendant made for another person.” I gingerly step around Sean’s inert body, crunching over the glass and overturned tables. A dozen or so watches, most of them smashed, lie amid the mess. I pick up one that looks intact. A gold pocket watch with a mother-of-pearl face.

I touch the cold watch to my chest. And my chest puffs out with a rough inhalation and exhalation. It doesn’t fit me; it’s like a bellows built for a different, larger fire.

“How . . .” Cy says. “Who made those?”

“It was Endall’s,” I tell him. “Sean and Julian’s son.”

We know what it means. Endall must have my genes. My longevity genes, and with it, my Ondine’s curse. So Dad made a boy version of me too.

“Endall was here in Avida once, but he ran away.” And he’s out there somewhere.

“C’mon. Get as many of these as you can,” Cy urges me, and we hastily pick through the mess to find three more intact watches that can make me breathe. After a minute, we’re zooming down the transport.

“God, this bracelet is going to kill me,” Cy groans. I haven’t forgotten the pain. One pulse at a time, our bracelets are torturing us. The shocks were bad five minutes ago. Now they’re pure torture.

With my head and back still throbbing from hitting the wall, Cy’s recent paralysis, and Caliga’s last hour, and all of us grimacing and gasping in agony over our bracelets, we are a trio of walking misery when we exit the transport.

Renata stands, blocking our way out of the transport.

“So. Is it done?” she asks me, ignoring Cy and Caliga.

There isn’t an easy way to say it.

“Julian and Sean are dead,” I tell her. “We tried to only . . .” It’s so much to explain and I can’t bear to rehash the story. “You were right, Renata. About Sean.”

Renata nods. Her eyes take in my bruised body, Cy’s weakened one, and Caliga’s bloody lip. Her mouth twitches and she starts to cry. Her hand goes to cover her mouth as the tears drip down onto her dress.

“I’m sorry,” I say. It’s so easy to forget that they had a history together.

“Don’t be,” she sniffles. “I mourned losing Julian as a partner a long time ago. This is a relief, though I wish it hadn’t had to happen like this.”

Cy winces so hard next to me, his knees buckle. “The bracelets,” he says. “Is there any way you can turn them off?”

“I can’t,” she admits. “I can’t get full control of the security systems here until I report his death to the people who’ve protected Avida.” She looks straight at me, and adds, “I don’t think it would be wise for you to be here when I make that call.”

Caliga nudges me. “We have to go, Renata. We can’t stay here, even though Julian and Sean are dead.”

“I’m not stopping you. I’ve already said good-bye to Tennessee. I knew my water children would be the first ones to go. A fish bowl is no place to live.”

“It’s time,” Micah says gently. I step around Renata and slap his face.

“You bastard,” I seethe. Micah stands up and approaches me, hands out.

“Now wait. You don’t know—”

“I know everything! You lied. You set Cy up, sent him to Sean knowing he’d be attacked!” He only plays games to get ahead, no matter where he is.

“No,” Micah starts, when Cy interrupts him.

“Zel. It’s not like that,” he says, his voice returning to normal. He’s able to stand on his own now. “It was the only way I’d be able to get Caliga out without having Sean make all our bracelets injure us right when we needed to leave. I didn’t know that you’d gone after Caliga. I thought you were safe in the grotto, waiting for me to come back.”

“Tell me the truth,” I whisper, staring at Micah. I step closer to him, stand too close so I can scent his behavior.

“I’ve been playing both sides, it’s true. But my primary purpose has been to get out of here, not become the new king of Avida. I swear.”

His face is nothing but earnest, but I can smell something on him. It’s not the stench of a lie, but something more subtle. “You’re holding back,” I accuse him. “I can tell. So out with it.”

Micah’s face falters. He looks to Cy, who isn’t giving an ounce of sympathy. “I . . . I’ve been wanting to leave Avida and Inky.” He almost chokes on his words. “So I could find Dyl and Ana. And I wanted you on my side so they’d forgive me.”