The Gift (2 page)

A man—if you would call him that—is on the stage with her. He’s leaning on a crooked stick, his wickedly sharp black suit
hanging strangely motionless in the wind that’s begun to howl through the civic square. His angular
face is glowing with smug self-satisfaction, as if he’s just devoured a potful of whipping cream.

I know him; I despise him.
The One Who Is The One.
Quite possibly the most evil individual in the history of humanity.

Are there minutes or seconds left before this hideous execution? I have no way of knowing.

I knock people aside as I barrel through the thickening, or should I say
sickening,
throng. I can see a line of well-armed soldiers holding everyone back from the platform. If I can knock one of them down
and snatch away a gun…

I look up at the stage just in time to see The One raise his knobby black stick and shake it menacingly at my sister. He has
a look of absolute triumph.

“No!”
I yell, but I’m unheard in the roaring crowd. They all know what’s about to happen. I know, too. I just don’t see how I can
possibly stop it. There has to be a way.

“Nooo!”
I scream.
“You can’t do this! This is cold-blooded murder!”

There’s a flash—not of light but somehow of
blackness
—and she’s gone. Wisty. My sister. My best friend in the world.

My little sister is dead.

Whit

IF I’M STILL DRAWING air, it’s not because I care about living.

The last person in the Allgood family that I knew for certain to be alive, the person who knew me better than anyone else
in the world, the person who looked up to me in everything, is
gone.
What an incredible waste of an incredible life.

Wisty died while I watched, and I could do nothing to help her.

The One just vaporized my sister… and that monster, without any hint of conscience, doesn’t even seem to have broken a sweat.
He throws his arms in the air like he’s just scored a goal, like he’s mocking the pointlessness of human existence. I go weak
in the knees. I feel as if I might throw up as I hear a deafening roar of approval sweep down the concrete canyon of this
city—a place that now seems despicable and evil and beyond repair.

The One has just achieved his biggest public relations triumph
ever.
He basks in the adoration—but his usual impatience and anger soon erupt.

“Silence!”

His command sweeps across the city, obliterating every other noise.

But I’m unmoved. Still shell-shocked. Numb everywhere, including in places that I didn’t know existed.

“My good citizens,” he thunders, without aid of a microphone, “this is a truly magnificent occasion. What you have just witnessed
is the obliteration of the last significant threat to our stewardship of the Overworld! Wisteria Allgood, a leader of the
Resistance, has just been removed from this dimension. Forever.”

He raises his arms again, and a new gust of wind brings a thin layer of ash and the horrible smell of burnt hair across the
crowd. These “good citizens” begin cheering again.

I’d collapse to my knees, but I’m surrounded on all sides. Then, suddenly, there is space for me to move. The cheering turns
to screaming and the crowd is surging—moving backward—and I see a fiery explosion erupting not fifty yards from where I stand.

I
know
that fire.

“Oh yeah!”
I shout as the mere sight of it makes my heart almost burst with joy.
“Oh yeah, oh YEAH!”

That’s my sister! Wisty’s alive! She’s just set herself on fire, and that, believe it or not, is a good thing.

Wisty

AS SURE AS I am Wisteria Rose Allgood, I have only one thought:
I’m gonna
burn
everything and everyone around me. Burn it all down.

I’ll start with the death-drenched stage, move on to this ridiculously pompous plaza, then hit the whole cold city of stone—this
disastrous nightmare of a world. Even if I fry myself to ash in the process, I am going to obliterate all of this, all of
them.

The One Who Is The One just killed my friend Margo up on that stage from hell. I recognized her even with a hood over her
head. Her purple sneakers and black-and-purple cargo pants were the giveaway. The silver streaks and stars on the sneakers
were the final clue. Margo, the last punk rocker on Earth. Margo, the most fearless and dedicated person I’ve ever known.
Margo, my dear friend.

Don’t ask me why that monster in the black silk suit was pretending she was me. All I know is that
I’m going to burn that evil madman to cinders.

So I turn myself into a human torch, just as I have in the past. Only this time I abandon all caution. Suddenly ten-, twenty-,
thirty-foot tongues of flame are coursing around me, ripping upward in the formerly cool afternoon air.

The crowd backs away, screaming, and I can’t help myself: I smile. I nearly laugh out loud.

And I’m about to turn the heat up another notch—to send jets of fire everywhere around me, to burn brighter and hotter than
ever before—when my breath catches in my throat.

I feel
him.
I feel his wretched, diseased mind. I feel his eyes somehow locking on to me.

A thousand soldiers turn my way in unison, and now it’s The One who’s smiling. He’s starting to laugh. And he’s laughing at
me.

I wince as the air rushes out of me.
How can he have so much power?

I have no choice but to run, at least to try to escape his wrath.

I throw myself into the panicked human tide, my small frame deftly ducking elbows and shoulders. But The One is too close.
I can feel his icy gusts chasing me, reaching out with cold, bony finger–like wisps, grazing my face,
my neck, sending a chill so cold it hurts everywhere at once.

I’m starting to think how ironic it is that a firegirl might die in a deep freeze when suddenly I’m smothered by warmth. Somebody
grabs me, lifts me up, and nearly squeezes all the breath out of me.

Wisty

IT’S MY BROTHER, Whit.

In a flash, he carries me a hundred, two hundred paces ahead, as if I weigh nothing. Then he and I duck behind a high stone
wall. For a few precious seconds, we’re out of sight and safe.

I hug Whit with all the strength I have. He finally relaxes his powerful grip enough for me to breathe.

“But if this is really
you
…” He trails off.

“Margo,” I whisper. “He killed Margo.” Then suddenly I’m crying like a baby. I’m shaking, and my teeth chatter hopelessly.

Margo is
dead.
The girl who helped me put a third piercing in my ear last week. The girl who woke us all up at five a.m. every morning to
report for duty, the girl who had more dedication to fighting the oppression of the New Order than the rest of us put together.
She was so young. Just fifteen years old.

“I told her not to go in that building without more help. I begged her,” my brother says. “Why did she go in there?
Why?
”

“She was always the last to give up on a mission,” I remind Whit, as if I’m trying to convince myself that it wasn’t our fault
she’d been caught. “First in, last out. That was her mantra, right? Stupid!”

“Courageous,” he says, and for an instant I see in his eyes why it is that girls love him, why
I
love him. He’s honest and sincere and absolutely fearless.

The mission, one of a dozen attempted rescues we’d undertaken in the last month, was our worst failure yet. We were trying
to liberate maybe a hundred kidnapped kids from a New Order testing facility. But our intelligence must have been off. Instead
of victimized kids, the building held a platoon of New Order soldiers. They were waiting for us.

“Actually, it’s lucky
any
of us —,” I start to say.

“Find her!”
The speakers mounted in the plaza start vibrating with The One’s irate voice. “There’s
another
conspirator in the crowd! She has flaming-red hair! Close the courtyard exits. Capture her
now!
”

Whit grabs a gray hat off a passing businessman and plunks it down on my head.

“Tuck your hair in, quick,” he says.

I’m doing just that when a policeman spots me. He’s a couple of dozen yards away.

Now he’s grabbing for the whistle at the end of a cord
around his neck… and he’ll soon have the attention of every soldier in the plaza. Not to mention that of The One, whom I
hate
to mention.

But then a small black figure leaps up and knocks the policeman down flat on his rear.

Whit and I exchange looks of surprise. He says, “Did you just —?”

But before Whit can finish, the black figure—an old woman—is at our side. She presses into my hand a crumpled, gritty piece
of paper. “Take it, take it!”

I swear she’s the weirdest-looking creature I’ve ever seen in my life, and yet I
know
her from somewhere.

“Who are —?”

She cuts me off. “Follow this. Go! I’m a friend. Run. Run. Don’t stop for a single breath, or it’s over. For all of us.
Go!
”

Somehow she gets behind us, and then she delivers a kick to both of our butts. That sends us staggering into the surging crowd.

I immediately turn back… but there’s no sign of her.

“You heard her,” says Whit. “Go! Now! Go!”

Wisty

THE CRUMPLED, quintuple-folded paper the old woman had forced into my hand is a map.
She said she was a friend, right? Besides, what better plan do we have?
So Whit and I follow the map.

The dotted line on the dirty, handwritten piece of parchment leads us through the south side of the city. So far, so safe
and alive.

“I can’t place her,” I muse as we hike outside the city’s perimeter toward a set of railroad tracks. “Was she… maybe one of
Mom and Dad’s friends?”

Whit shrugs. “Doesn’t matter, does it? Any person willing to risk her life tackling a New Order policeman is a friend. A really
good
friend.”

Whit rips down a
NOTICE
from a loudspeaker post near the track and tears it into shreds. “By the way, when did you become a
‘leader of the Resistance’?
” he asks with a chuckle and a glint of his baby blues.