Summer Ruins (13 page)

People clad in their tattered brown rags line both sides of a corridor that’s slightly wider and taller than the one we just left. They’re working with hand tools, sharp silver instruments, and shovels, plus more stuff I’ve never seen before, and the sound of metal hitting rock clinks over and over until it fills the air with a cacophony of strange music.

They peck and slash at the rock walls. When chunks of rock tumble loose and clatter to the floor, the people kick them away and continue working. A few minutes later a group of children, all Primer Cell age, push a giant metal bin down the line, gathering the rock pieces. The rocky chunks hit the bottom of the bin with loud clangs at first, but as they move farther and gather more, the rocks hit with quiet thuds instead.

It’s not cold or hot, but alternating blasts of both, and the stench of body odor and sweat wrinkles my nose. It’s freezing underground, but the people packed together expel enough heat that some of them sport a sheen of sweat.

“They’ll gather the samples all day, and the children empty the bins into elevators like the one we took down. Select groups are assigned to pull the rocks up to the surface, then they’re transferred to a fifth igloo, smaller than these, where the necessary particles are extracted.”

“What particles?” It’s a long shot; they can’t tell me the name of their sustaining force.

I give Carrej a mocking smile when he swallows and glares.

“You know I can’t tell you. Not that I would, anyway.”

“I know. I just wanted to remind you that you’re not better than any of these people. You’re as trapped as they are.”

He ignores me, but the way his jaw clenches tells me I’m at least bugging him. “It’s the way we are built. It’s not anything the Prime does to us on purpose—we’re born with the inherent ability to protect our species. Perhaps if humans were as highly evolved, this wouldn’t have happened on Earth.”

“Whatever. So, is this hallway my area or what?” I’m tired of sparring with him. Being alone with the humans seems like a pretty good thing right now, although being stuffed in this awful hole with a thousand bodies sweating in silence for the next fourteen hours won’t be fun.

“Yes. This is the Southeast Main in Station Three.”

“You guys really busted your brains coming up with names, huh?”

“This was actually a base station used by the humans for scientific research at one time, and the lab where we do the extraction was also part of that—there are several more on this continent, actually, but they weren’t geographically compatible with our needs. We developed the other three stations after we arrived.” He gives me all the information without my prying, and it’s like a handful of gifts.

It may not mean anything, but it’s knowledge. I tuck it away for later. “What did this igloo used to be called?”

“Vostok.”

“What’s a continent?”

He rolls his eyes. “A big landmass. Earth has seven.”

Carrej walks away before I can ask any follow-up questions, even though about a hundred push their way to the front of my mind. No further instruction is necessary, I suppose. Instead of focusing on the fact that I’m walking who knows how far underground with only one tiny way out, I start patrolling the line, doing my first count along the way.

At first I’m not going to count them, but it occurs to me that it’s as much for their safety as the Warden’s control. If one of them were hurt or if one of the children wandered away, we wouldn’t want to return to the top and leave them here overnight.

So I count.

I get to six hundred before I recognize Reese. The memory of how her hand bled from the frozen beaker in chemistry, red blood pooling on the desk, burns my stomach. Her hair, which I remember as sunny blond, is dirty and covered with gray dust. She swings a sharp axelike object at the wall, not making any discernible progress.

As she pauses to wipe her brow she catches sight of me and turns, her mouth open. “Althea?”

It’s louder than she probably intended, evidenced in the way her eyes dart up and down the row. A few people on either side of her take notice and frown, their eyes cutting toward me, but they go back to work when I ignore them. “Hi, Reese.”

“What are you doing here? Why are you supervising?” The questions are accusing, and the harsh whisper hurts my ears.

“It’s kind of a long story. I saw Emmy last night.”

“You did? She’s still alive?” Her brown eyes, so dark they’re almost as black as the Others’, fill with tears.

It’s still so strange to me to witness such natural emotion in the stoic kids I grew up with. It’s unsettling, even though it should make me happy. It means they can’t protect themselves from getting hurt, or from being irreparably damaged from this experience. “She’s good. Her hair’s really short.”

“We heard they had some kind of infestation in Station One a few months ago and they shaved everyone’s head.” She shudders. “Not that it matters. I guess we won’t be Partnering at the end of the last year, huh?”

I give her a weak smile. “I guess not.”

We’re attracting attention, and there’s no way to know how many of these people would sell us out if they thought getting on the Others’ good side would earn them an extra meal or a day not spent underground. They know nothing of our fight—or that if we lose, they’ll forfeit what’s left of their lives—and there are simply too many people down here to make telling them all at once a feasible tactic.

Not to mention there’s nowhere to go, according to Lucas.

Reese seems to realize people are watching, too. Color drains out of her face, and the dirt streaking it seems darker by comparison. She turns to get back to work, and as much as I want to tell her what’s going on, I continue walking. The safest thing to do would be wait a few days to determine if they’re always going to leave me alone with the same group, then maybe try to find a way to sneak a note into her pocket or something.

But that’s no good, either. What if she gets caught with it?

It’s something Lucas would think, and the fact makes me smile and punches me with fear at the same time. I know they won’t hurt us, especially not him since they need him to stabilize the ice, but it doesn’t stop me from worrying.

The rest of the day creeps past slower than any Cell day I ever experienced. The children have carted countless bins of mined rock to the elevators, and the smell of sweating bodies has gotten worse. I walked up and down the path for hours and hours, making up stories about different people to pass the time. The desire to pick up a tool and work beside them for a while, just to loose some energy from my jittery limbs, pushes forward, but it might not be allowed. It’s only my first day. No sense in rocking the boat before I survey the sea.

My mind turns the question of the pink substance over and over, but although there are soft metals threading through the bedrock, none of them are the right color.

Maybe it’s oxidation that turns it pink. That’s possible; I remember from Cell.

I’m on my last count, all the way past eight hundred and twenty, when a loud bang echoes dimly off the rock walls. As I move to investigate, the desperate sound of someone struggling to breathe quickens my pulse.

At the opposite end of the Southeast Main, near where Carrej brought me in this morning, are the kids in charge of collecting the mined rocks. Instead of pushing their bin, they’re crowded around a little girl with pitch-black hair who is slumped against the metal container holding the back of her head and taking shallow, wheezing breaths.

When the children see me they back away, scurrying to return to work. They shove the bin forward, knocking the little girl to the ground. Her huge green eyes shine with terror—not being able to breathe would be one of the scariest things I can imagine. A single boy has stayed behind, kneeling at her side with her hand in his.

He turns at the sound of my crunching footsteps and the sight of his face stops me cold. I’ve only seen it once before, on television several months ago, but I’ve heard so much about him I could never forget those few moments.

Tommy.

Chapter 14.

“Tommy?” The incredulous tone in my voice narrows his eyes.

His sandy hair and brown eyes are exactly as I remember them from the television.

For a seven- or eight-year-old, he’s got a pretty decent stare. “Do I know you?”

Tears fill my eyes. Pax will be so relieved to know that Tommy is alive and his mind seems okay, that he’s not Broken because of what happened to his parents, even if it did land him here. I shake my head, yanked back to the situation at hand by a particularly loud wheeze. “No. I’ll explain later. What’s the matter with her?”

“She gets these attacks sometimes when we’re in the mine, always toward the end of the day. I think it’s the dust, but she doesn’t want us to tell anyone.” His lower lip trembles, reminding me he’s only a little boy. “They’ll throw her out in the cold if she can’t work.”

I crouch beside the girl, brushing sweaty midnight hair off her forehead. “What’s her name?”

“Jas. Jasmine.” He doesn’t let go of her hand, and Jasmine’s eyes find his and latch on. “If she panics it gets worse.”

That her name matches my scent strikes me as odd, as though it’s some kind of sign that I was supposed to find her in this moment, to try to help her.

“Jas, no one’s going to hurt you, okay? I’m not going to tell. I’m not an Other.”
Technically
. “Just calm down for me, okay? Close your eyes, and think about all the air in here and pulling it in and out.” I have no idea if this is going to work. It sounds like there’s something going on that would require a Healer, but from what I’ve seen and what Lucas told me, there’s no reason to question the girl’s fears. The Others would probably expose her and be done with the problem before trying to fix it.

Her lips turn blue over the next several minutes and beads of icy sweat drip down the sides of her face. She’s going to die right here in this mine. Fear constricts my own lungs and I breathe deeply, trying to stay calm. There’s nothing we can do that we’re not already doing.

Except maybe there is. Whenever I started to lose control of the heat, my mother would talk in my head. I think mostly it worked because she distracted me with something to concentrate on besides burning down the house.

“Jas, look at me, okay?”

She does, her eyes opening with the smallest of slits. The resignation in the emerald irises speeds up my heart again, but I smile at her anyway. “Look.”

Her eyes grow open wider as I show her the dancing balls of fire in my palms, even tossing them back and forth a few times for entertainment. It’s not much, but it’s all I’ve got, especially down here.

It seems to do the trick a minute or so later when she draws one huge, shaking breath and her hand relaxes around Tommy’s. Over the next five minutes she takes some more, and then we sit her up. She’s such a pretty little girl, with that straight dark hair brushing her shoulders and a hint of a single dimple when she smiles at me shyly. I’d guess she’s younger than Tommy, maybe only five.

“How did you do that?”

“You know what, Jas? It’s a really long story, but if you promise to keep it a secret, I’ll tell it to you one day.”

She nods, her face serious. “We don’t tell the Wardens anything unless they make us.”

“That’s a pretty good rule.”

A single horn blasts through the sound of the mining, and both Jas and Tommy shoot to their feet. I get up a little slower, my joints and muscles aching from pacing on my feet all day. It’s not hard to imagine what the people doing the actual work must feel like. It’s no wonder they hardly uttered a peep at dinner last night. They’re probably too exhausted to form a thought, never mind hold a conversation.

Or figure out a way to overcome their captors.

Jas slides her hand into mine and I follow the line of people headed toward the elevator. It turns out there are about ten like the one Carrej and I took down, but even so the line moves slowly. I am probably supposed to be in the front, reinforce the idea that I’m in charge, but I’d rather talk to Tommy.

Plus these people seem to have no fight left in them. If it was ever there to begin with, it’s been extracted through carefully managed labor that will kill them sooner rather than later. All day I noticed tears dripping down many cheeks, people swinging tools almost absently, as though they have no idea where they are or what they’re doing.

I glance down at poor Jas, whose body rejects being underground in the rock dust, and wonder how many more of those attacks she’ll survive.

“You can’t protect her,” a voice gasps roughly, almost painful in my ears.

I turn toward the voice at the same instant as a hard tug rips Jas’s hand from mine, eliciting a whimper of protest from the girl and a flicker of anger in my center.

An older woman with frazzled gray hair tucked into a haphazard bun clutches a squirming Jas to her chest, challenging my assumption that none of these people will fight me or anyone else.

“Let her go,” I demand.

People stop moving forward at the sound of my voice, gathering in wide-eyed silence to witness the confrontation.