Into the Abyss (32 page)

There are two CCA members also kneeling beside the president, one trying to stifle the bleeding from her wound while the other swings his weapon toward anyone who gets too close. They both move aside when I bend to pick her up. I cross her arms over her chest, placing the gun in one of her hands so I have both of my hands free to cradle her against me and prevent jostling her as much as possible. She is still conscious, but her eyes have taken on a strange, glassy look.

She needs medical attention.

And I have no idea how we are going to get it for her in time.

Right now, all I can do is get her out of the center of the fray. I bolt across the room, dodging bodies and stray fire and plenty of fire that was actually intended for us, and reach the observation room. Angie and the others have barricaded themselves in the far corner with some of the loyal CCA members standing as protectors in front of them. Catelyn and Jaxon—and now Seth as he joins them—are still fighting with their handcuffs.

I've made it a few steps into the room when a shot hits me between the shoulder blades. The pain is blindingly, teeth-grittingly intense for a few steps. It passes almost as quickly though, my lightning-fast brain releasing the synthetic chemicals to block it and sending signals to the cells around the new wound to start healing it.

But then two more shots hit. One right after the other. The second is dangerously close to the nerve center of my brain. My head buzzes. My face flushes with heat.

I stumble and fall, and it takes all my focus to keep myself from crashing hard on top of the president's wounded chest. I have to drop her to catch myself on my shaking hands, and she hits the ground with a sickening thump that shocks life back into her glassy eyes for a split second. I close my own eyes for a moment, trying to bring myself back. The world has fallen away to only a few basic sensations—that heat on my face, spreading over my
scalp. Footsteps pounding, vibrating the floor beneath my hands. Catelyn's voice screaming my name.

I roll off President Cross. Blink my eyes open just in time to see a figure step into the doorway, a silhouette against the bright lights shining over the battle outside.

Josh.

He fires another shot without even thinking about it, without even really aiming. It glances off my shoulder. The weak shot normally wouldn't faze me, but my brain is already struggling to keep up, to heal as fast as it normally does, and so the burn of it is enough to nearly well my eyes shut. I do close them—for what can't be more than a few seconds—and when I reopen them, Josh is somehow already directly in front of me. President Cross shifts beside me. The gun still in her hand glints in the corner of my vision.

Josh grabs it first.

He points both of the guns at my chest. I vaguely wonder how many shots my body could actually take, if my brain can continuously keep up with this brutal healing, pain-dulling cycle.

“One more move and you're dead!” shouts one of the CCA members behind me.

Death by firing squad, I think. Exactly what he deserves.

He still doesn't seem to notice the firing squad facing him, though. And the guns are shaking in his hands. My mind has controlled enough of my pain that I can focus on the tiny movements. Movements that seem strange,
being made by this boy who has never shown me anything except a foolish, death-wish sort of confidence.

At least not when he thought I was looking.

It's like watching him outside Huxley's gates all over again.

His mom was there. Her name was Michelle, I think.

“My dad is dead,” he says suddenly, talking more to his shaking hands than me.

I am not sure what he expects me to say.

“Not you, this time. I don't even know who it was, but does it matter now?”

I know enough about human nature now that the normal reaction to something like this statement would be to say “I'm sorry.” Even to someone like Josh. So I try saying that.

But it only makes him laugh. “No, you aren't.”

The strange thing, though, is that I am.

I am sorry enough that I don't want him to be gunned down in front of me, at least. Maybe it isn't true, what they say I did at Huxley's lab. I don't know. But I know what it is like to have things taken away, to wake up empty, and to not know how to fill those empty spaces inside you. So I make myself sit up, and then stand, so that I am blocking any clear shots at Josh. My body protests the entire time. The tingling around my healing wounds turns into more of a needle-pricking sensation, and my vision shifts in and out of focus as my ears fill with an odd whirring noise.

“Sit back down,” Josh says, pressing one of the guns into my chest.

“If I sit down, they'll shoot you.”

“I don't care.” I don't think he really does, either. And I don't know why I do, but I stay on my feet. “Get back on the ground where you belong,” Josh warns, “or I will pull this trigger again.”

I take a step, shrinking back as if I am actually thinking about it.

Then I punch him instead.

It was for his own good, really. Because now he is the one lying on the floor, after tripping over the president's outstretched body, and he is too dazed to put up much of a fight when I disarm him. I peer over my shoulder to see the line of CCA loyalists lowering their weapons. Catelyn and Jaxon push through them and hurry over to me and President Cross, and I see that they've managed to get their handcuffs off too—with Seth's help, maybe. He follows the two of them a moment later, leaning a bit on Angie for support.

“I so wanted to be the one to do that,” Seth says, looking down at Josh's still, curled-up body. “Except I probably wouldn't have been able to stop at just a punch.” He says that, but I don't think it's sincere. As his voice trails off toward the end, he doesn't seem to be able to keep his eyes on Josh.

Maybe it's because of the way Josh is holding his head and curling into himself. As if he wishes, just for the moment, that he could make himself disappear. That he could get away from this place, and everything that
happened here and everything that led up to it. No more of that confidence now. Just a small and broken boy as in over his head as I am beginning to think we all are.

I don't want to look at it any more than I wanted to watch his father pull him away from the lab.

“I'm fine. Just a bit light-headed is all.” I am grateful for President Cross's voice, because it wakes me up, pulls my attention away from Josh. She is sitting partway up. Her arm is resting against Jaxon, while Angie tries to clean away some of the blood and other seepage around the wound. I reach absently up between my shoulder blades, checking my own wounds, and my fingers find the bits of my shirt torn and singed by gunfire. The cloth around them is damp with blood.

Human blood, I remember Angie calling it the night we met.

And it does look like the president's, maybe. But for me, unlike for her, that bleeding has stopped. My body has put itself nearly back together again, while hers is still too weak to stand.

Members of the CCA stand like sentinels around us, and even though I know they are mostly here for the president—that they are on the loyal, moderate side—it still feels strange to be protected by them like this.

“Mostly shock, I think,” the president insists, trying to push Angie's hand away.

“That shot nearly hit your heart,” Angie says sternly.

“Well then, it's a good thing I have a heart made of . . .
what was it you said that time? ‘Painfully solid stone'?”

Angie looks sheepish. “This is hardly the time to bring up the past,” she says, continuing to clean. “This looks bad,” she says after a minute. “The bleeding doesn't seem to be stopping. And I'm not exactly this sort of doctor, but I would guess it's only going to get worse unless we get her stitched up. Soon.”

“There are more pressing things to deal with at the moment,” the president says. She attempts to stand, but both Jaxon and Seth are there to hold her down. She struggles. But only for a few seconds.

Then an alarm shrieks through the intercom system around the room, and she freezes.

“See? More pressing things such as that,” she says in between the pulsing shrieks. She places a hand on Jaxon's and Seth's arms and pushes herself up, ignoring their objections and Angie's disapproving frown, and staggers to the broken window. We all follow.

The scene outside has gone eerily quiet. People are standing, staring up at the intercom speakers and at one another, looking as though they have no idea how they arrived here. It makes all the signs of destruction and death—the still bodies on the ground, the scent of blood and charred flesh and hot metal—even harder to stomach, without the cushion of chaos around to distract from them.

A woman breaks free from the crowd, walks over to the door, and presses the button to open it.

A wall of black smoke rages in from the hallway.

“Shut the door!” the president shouts, and even in her weakened state her voice carries through the room.

The woman frantically tries to obey, but the door isn't made to shut quickly; it creeps along its track, sliding shut only after it's already let enough smoke in to start a coughing fit rippling through the crowd. This room is huge, though, and with plenty of space to disperse, the smoke rapidly stretches into little more than a thin haze. People start to panic anyway. Some are tripping over themselves to get away from the door, others arguing over whether or not to reopen that door and try to make a run for it. All other fighting has been forgotten for the moment, it seems, but this isn't much better.

The president takes one of my guns, stumbles out of the observation room and fires a shot into the air. It gets the attention of the panickers closest to us, and then one by one more of the crowd behind them looks in our direction. A hush falls over them.

“That door is built to withstand all the extreme conditions this room can be programmed to simulate.” President Cross still has to shout to make herself heard over the sounding alarm. “It's virtually indestructible, and certainly fireproof. Do not open it.”

Her words cause a wave of almost-calm to wash over the room. But I noticed the way her voice faltered a bit at “indestructible,” as if she didn't quite believe that was the right word.

“ ‘Virtually indestructible'?” I repeat, dropping down
beside her as she kneels down to catch her breath. “Does that mean it's actually perfectly destructible?”

I would swear she almost smiles. “Always so full of questions, aren't you?” Her eyes close for a moment, and she takes several more deep, steadying breaths as the rest of our group gathers around her. “That was too much smoke,” she finally says, and then she opens her eyes and looks to Jaxon, to the communicator around his wrist. “Contact the main operations control room, please,” she says in her calm, understated way. “And let's hope there is still someone at the monitors.”

Jaxon does as he is told. After he messes with it for a moment, a woman appears on the tiny screen, and he hands the communicator over to his mother.

“Hello, Rachel,” the president says. “Status report? What exactly is going on?”

The woman on the other end wastes no time. “Fire observed in the main hall, in north wing corridor A, south wing corridor D, and the corridor of training room three. All doors have been sealed where possible to contain it until we are able to extinguish it.”

“But why is it not already extinguished?”

“The automatic sprinkler system has disengaged somehow.” The woman's words tumble out in a rush. “There are no cameras in the room that contains the system's control panel, and we tried to send someone to check, but—”

“They couldn't get through the D corridor of the south wing.”

“Correct.”

The president massages her temple. The hand she uses has blood from her wound on it, and some of it ends up smudged across her forehead. “All of those fire locations are blocking exits,” she says. “I don't think the sprinklers being disengaged was an accident.”

Angie says what we all must be thinking: “Someone was trying to trap us. All of us.”

“Orders, ma'am?” says the woman on the screen.

But the president appears out of orders to give.

“It's contained, right?” Catelyn asks. “It will eventually burn itself out without getting any fresh oxygen, won't it?”

“It would likely take hours for that to happen,” Angie says. “And by then the structural damage may be substantial, and it won't be contained just to those rooms. It will be a domino effect. When the supports of the hall outside this room go, for example, chances are . . .”

“We'll be crushed in this room as well,” the president finishes for her. Her eyes have taken on that same glassy look they held earlier. “While we were busy destroying ourselves, we forgot there were still others outside, waiting to do the same. We knew this is what they wanted. We should have seen something like this coming.”

“We just have to find a way to fix the extinguisher system before the damage gets too bad,” Seth says. “We have to get to that room somehow.”

“It is likely already up in flames,” the president says quietly.

I stand up. Visions of the last time I was in this room flash through my mind. I think of blacking out, of that
numbing, violent ringing in my mind and of a life that is a million miles away from where I find myself now.

And once that ringing stops, there are only two words left to find there, within all of my brain's artificial grooves and circuits.

“I'll go.”

I step into blindingly bright
flames and suffocating heat.

It looks as though those flames have already smoldered out some, as Catelyn guessed they would, because the black melting streaks they've scorched along the walls were made by flames much higher than the tongues of fire that lash around my feet now. But it's still hot enough that I already feel blisters bubbling across the unprotected skin of my face and hands.