The Forsaken (39 page)

The bottom of the video monitor displays a row of red numbers. An additional series of moving lines is tracking his vital signs. All the lines are flat, but no alarms are going off.

I realize the pod is like a reverse life support system. There is a problem only if the boy starts heating up and his heart begins beating again.
A flat line in this terrible place means that everything is in great shape.

I tear myself away from the capsule, pick up the extra suit and helmet, and start moving rapidly down the catwalk again. I can see Liam’s light in the distance, blinking and flickering. Calling to me.

I suppose that here, in a weird way, I’ve found the Fountain of Youth. None of these kids will ever age. But it’s a terrible fountain, because it sucks your life away. These kids are preserved just as surely as if they were dead and embalmed.

I walk for what seems like forever. Without the suit it might have taken me only two more minutes to reach Liam. But with the suit on, it’s more like ten minutes, and I’m well aware that our time is running out. On either side of me are unending rows of pods. They’re dark, but I know that almost every single one of them is filled with a frozen body.

It’s so silent with the helmet on that between breaths I hear faint static in my ears. It’s like the sounds of the island are still inside my head, keeping me company. I wonder if I’ll ever be rid of them.

I continue walking.

By the time I reach the illuminated pod that holds Liam’s body, I’m drenched with sweat, even though the air outside my suit is far below zero. My hair is soaking, and I blink strands out of my eyes.

I maneuver myself awkwardly along the catwalk in front of Liam’s pod. Beams of white light are pouring out from behind it, like miniature spotlights, delineating its contours.

I’ve been trying not to think too much about what I’m going to do. I’m not sure what buttons to push, or if I can thaw him in time.

I long to see his blue eyes open. To hear his voice again. To feel his touch on my skin. Plus, I could use his help right about now.

Because his pod is so well lit, it’s easy for me to decipher the controls on the front of it. I see a switch marked
VIEW, SO
I flick that one first.

The video screen activates, and Liam’s face appears with crystal clarity. I stand there staring at him in awe. His eyes are shut, and the oxygen mask obscures part of his face. His brown hair drifts in the fluid. My breath gets frozen for a moment like the air. It’s almost too much for me to take.

He’s alive after all.

The very thought is shocking; I guess part of me didn’t really believe it.

“Liam,” I murmur. He looks peaceful. Uninjured. I’d think he was sleeping, except for the halo and the oxygen mask.

I quickly pull the lever marked
MANUAL OVERRIDE
. I’m expecting an instant reaction from the pod, but nothing happens.

I spot a number on the upper corner of the screen, like a countdown clock. It reads “–15:49.” I assume that’s how many minutes I have left until Liam gets taken from me again.
I’m not going to let that happen.

I glance down at all the dials and knobs on the pod. I was hoping that the process of thawing people out would be more intuitive. But most of these knobs might as well be labeled with hieroglyphics.

I flick the manual switch up and down again, but there’s still no response.

Suddenly the static in my ears gets louder, and I hear an electronic squalling noise that makes me wince. It’s followed by a faint voice:

“Alenna?”

“Gadya!” I reply. There must be some kind of speaker system in the helmet.

“I can hear you,” she says through the static. “I just found a microphone up here.”

“And I found Liam—he’s alive! But we don’t have long. Fifteen minutes.”

“I can see you down there. I’m watching you right now.”

“I don’t know what to do! I can’t figure out how to rescue him. This was a crazy idea.” Hot tears of frustration well up in my eyes, and I fight them back down. One escapes and rolls down my cheek. “Can you help me?”

“I don’t know what to do either—” A burst of static cuts her off.

I’m looking all over Liam’s pod for a way to thaw him. If there is one, I don’t see it. I can’t believe the manual override switch didn’t work. The clock on his pod now tells me I have only twelve minutes left.

“We have to put Clara back online,” I say finally, still furious at myself for thinking there would just be a button I could push that would solve everything. My luck has finally run out.

“I’m not sure that’s a good idea,” Gadya’s voice drifts back to me. I can hear the pain and fear in it.

“I know. But can you try? Or we’re going to lose him.”

After a pause: “Okay.”

I’m still staring at Liam’s face on the monitor. He looks ghostly. Otherworldly.

“I’ll do it right now,” Gadya says. “I found some instructions on the wall. It’s a sequence of buttons.”

A moment later, I hear a high-pitched electronic squeal. It’s definitely not coming from Gadya this time. I crouch down on the metal grid by the pod.

“Activating localized neural network,” the computer’s bland voice says in my ear. Then, a beat later, “Hello. I am Clara, your electronic tour guide to the Silver Shore facility. We are sorry for the interruption in service. How may I assist you?” The voice trails away. Almost like it’s trying to remember what happened.

“We need your help!” I blurt out.

“You are in a restricted area,” the voice volleys back. But there’s no edge to it now, just manufactured concern. “You must have become lost. A security team will escort you to safety. You are in danger.”

“Tell me something I don’t know!” I interrupt. “Look, how do I unthaw this pod? Give me instructions.”

I only have ten minutes left.

The voice ignores my request. “Please wait for the security team.”

“Maybe next time,” I snap, still looking over the buttons and dials. So far Clara hasn’t been very helpful. I’m about to ask Gadya to shut her back down, when something occurs to me.

I have to do something drastic.

In a burst of deranged inspiration, I decide that maybe if I act like there’s something terribly wrong with the pod, I can get Clara’s attention off me and onto Liam. “Hey—wait!” I yell, as I rake my hands up and down over the pod’s buttons and levers. “There’s a problem down here! Emergency! Emergency!”

“Running diagnostic check now,” the voice replies smoothly. “Please step away from the pod.”

So I was right in guessing the computer would prioritize the contents of the pods above everything else. The voice probably thinks that its long-defunct security teams will handle any other problem that comes up.

“Diagnostics complete,” it continues. “No anomalies detected. Please state the nature of the emergency.”

I am the problem, of course, but the voice doesn’t seem to know that. My hands are busily fiddling with all the dials, trying to wreak temporary havoc on Liam’s pod, despite the risk to him.

I know I’m gambling with his life, but that might be the only way to save him. He’s going to die anyway unless I take action.

“Check the pod again!” I yell. I have eight minutes left. “How do I manually thaw this thing out?” I slam my hands on the knobs one last time. I toggle the manual override switch up and down, over and over, like a crazy person.

I’m watching the pod’s video screen. Liam is still completely frozen, and so far nothing I’ve done has affected him in the slightest. But apparently it has finally affected whatever data stream Clara monitors.

I suddenly hear a distant beeping noise, getting louder. It almost sounds like something’s coming toward me. I twist sideways.

“Warning! Error!” a voice starts intoning. It’s not Clara—it’s a different voice. Deep and robotic. Simpler. I’m confused, until I realize this voice is emanating from the pod itself.

“See?” I yell. Lights start flashing all over the pod. The light on Liam’s face suddenly switches from white to stroboscopic red. “Do something, Clara!”

“To activate emergency thawing procedure, please press sequence three-seven-four-two-eight on the red keys, followed by the enter key,” Clara finally explains over the voice of the pod. I pound in the numbers and press enter.

The two machines are both talking at once now, yammering at each other. The beeping continues too, drilling into my skull like the buzzing of an angry hornet. And somewhere in the cacophony I hear Gadya’s voice, trying to yell over the clattering din.

I scream in frustration. Nothing is happening.
Are my actions killing Liam?
Am I going to accidentally murder the first boy I’ve ever fallen for? The voices and the lights grow to an almost unbearable level.
Six minutes left.
I sink to my knees.

Then, everything changes.

The noises cut out.

The light dims.

And it’s over as quickly as it began.

I see steam rising within the pod, blotting out Liam’s face on the screen. Then the screen goes black.

“Emergency thawing procedure on specimen number 112-782-B initiated,” Clara tells me. “Do not interact with this unit. Keep away from it for your safety. An armed security team will be there shortly.”

I ignore the voice, standing up to stare at the pod’s dark video screen. I press my helmet against it, despite the cold. Then I hear cracking and snapping sounds.

Clara is still talking. About temperatures, and radiation, and safety risks. But I don’t care. I’m repeating Liam’s name over and over again in my head like a silent prayer. I don’t know if he can be thawed in time.

A minute passes. It seems like an hour.

Then the front section of the pod unlatches and swings forward on automated hinges. I step back, startled. Thick white steam billows out in a cloud, along with a gush of liquid, and for a second I’m afraid Liam’s corpse is just going to tumble onto the metal at my feet.

Then I hear a gasp from inside.

The sound of someone fighting for air.

A hand emerges, followed by Liam’s masked face. He’s pulled himself free of the metal halo. He yanks the oxygen mask off and shoves it to one side. The liquid slime covering his body is already drying in the cold, and turning into a white, powdery substance that flakes off him like dead skin.

I stand there, too stunned to do anything.

I’m afraid this is all a dream. Afraid that if I speak, or move, I’ll wake up.

Liam takes a tentative step out of the pod. He hasn’t seen me yet. He puts an arm on the pod’s exoskeleton to steady himself, as he extricates his body. But then he slips, crumpling to the icy floor.

“Liam!” I gasp. I try to yell his name again, but it comes out as a hushed whisper—partly because of the suit and partly because I’m choked up.

He looks up and finally sees me standing there. For a second, a flicker of dazed anger passes across his face. Then he sees past the reflections in my visor and realizes who I am. His face floods with relief.

Then he realizes something else.

“Crap.” His voice is a slow rasp. He looks at me with a crooked grin. “I’m naked, aren’t I?” He is, but I just want to grab him and hug him anyway. “It’s so cold. . . . Where am I?”

“Liam, you’re alive!” I babble, feeling the tears start cascading down my face like raindrops. The tears break my torpor, and I rush forward, embracing him as hard as I can in my freezing zone suit. He hugs me back, shivering violently.

I never want to let him go. I want to stay here forever, even with the cold and the computer voices and the alarms blaring.

“What happened to me?” he asks. I’m amazed he’s recovering so fast. He reaches for the spare suit and starts putting it on quickly, trying to insulate himself against the unbearable cold. “The last thing I remember, we were fighting the drones. Then the feelers came and—” He breaks off, coughing.

“You got taken, and this is where you ended up. We’re at the city in the gray zone. I thought you were dead.”

“I guess I thought I was too.”

I help him up. The suit is on. I help pull the spare helmet over his head. I can see frostbite on his ears, but other than that, it looks like he’s okay. I realize the liquid in the pod probably had some kind of insulating effect to prevent damage.

“Wow.” I can hear his voice loudly now over the radio in my helmet, crackling in my ears. Liam is taking in the massive scale of the cavernous chamber, eyes filled with horrified wonder as he scans the seemingly infinite rows of pods. “What are these things?”

“Hibernation pods,” I tell him. “Whoever runs this island freezes the kids who get taken by feelers, and puts them inside these pods to dissect later in the UNA. They call us their specimens, and they call this place their archive.”

I’m suddenly interrupted by Clara, whom I’d nearly forgotten about. “You are in violation of the terms of the Silver Shore facility.”

“Ignore her,” I tell Liam. “It’s a computerized system that controls this place and keeps things running. There’s only computers here—no people anymore.”

The voice keeps talking, but Liam and I only have eyes for each other, standing there in our helmets and zone suits. “You saved my life,” Liam says.

“And you saved mine.”

Then another voice bursts through the static: “Alenna! Liam! Hurry up.”

It’s Gadya. Liam looks surprised.

“Gadya’s here too,” I explain, “but she broke her ankle. She’s in the observation deck.” I point up at the curved glass window that seems to hover a mile above us.

“Gadya, is that you?” Liam says into his helmet’s microphone.

“Yeah,” her voice comes back weakly. “So get your butts back here, okay? The time on Liam’s pod is almost up, and it’s going to leave the archive soon. I don’t really know what’ll happen next. Stop messing around.”

“Same old Gadya,” Liam says. I hear the smile in his voice.

Then Gadya speaks again, and this time her voice sounds even more concerned. “Guys? We’ve got another problem.”

“What?” I ask.

“I just heard a noise.”

I try not to panic. “What kind?”

“Something metal. Scraping. Like a feeler’s trying to get in. I can’t tell if it’s at the door or if I’m hearing it over the radio.”