The Wandering (The Lux Guardians, #2) (36 page)

Officials … made me
addicted
? “Addicted to
what?”

“It’s a drug. Not a
street drug. It’s a chemical compound but that’s all I know. I had
hallucinations, too. I saw my friend but … he wasn’t really there.
John snapped me out of it.”

I’m addicted to a
chemical? This gets worse the more I know about it. Is Tia addicted
too? I mean to ask but instead I say, “You’re good friends, then?
You and John?”

“We are.” Even with
the raw scrape of her voice I can’t see her as harmless.

I take a breath of
rain and air and force myself to stay calm about this. There must
be some way to ask the questions I need to without freaking out.
“My sister,” I start. “She was in Underground as well. I need to
know—is she addicted too?”

Cat glances away from
me, fixing on the people carrying backpacks and boxes of supplies
and equipment from the plane for five seconds. “We all were. But I
know how to fix it. There’s a cure to stop it all—the
hallucinations, the vomiting, the addiction.”

“Vomiting?”

She reaches to flatten
her hair with fluttery hands but then drags them away, pasting her
arms to her sides. Her face clouds over with anger. Weird. She
says, “Everyone reacts different to the withdrawal, but every
reaction is bad. And we can stop it. You can stop it, stop being a
carrier too. There’s an organisation, people I knew back in F.L.
who can help reverse what was done to us. We just need to get to
them. In States.”

“States,” I echo. So
there’s a magical way to fix all my problems but it just happens to
be in enemy territory. I should have guessed that with my shitty
luck it wouldn’t be easy.

“The Guardians are
going there anyway. Eventually. We just have to go with them, find
my people, and get them to treat the withdrawal and reverse the
procedure.”

Ice cold rushes
through me, my body going deadly still. I can’t look at Cat, can’t
look at anything, when I ask, “What procedure?”

“Oh. I … thought you
knew.”

I can tell by her
voice that she’s telling the truth, but that barely pierces the
horror moving through my body. I feel like I’m going to be
sick—until I remember the memories that were taken from me. That
must be the procedure. The procedure to make me forget. There’s no
need to jump to conclusions and assume the worst.

“The procedure to wipe
my memories?”

I have my answer when
Cat’s eyes drop to the floor. “No, the one they did to us as kids.
The one that made us … you know?”

“No.” I wipe the sweat
from my palms on my jeans. “I don’t know.” When she doesn’t say
anything else, I start to really panic. Full on breathing-fast, out
of control panic. I wish for the days when I didn’t feel fear, when
I never reacted this way. I was stupid to think I couldn’t be
scared—I just needed something terrifying enough to kick the fear
into me. “Did they do this procedure to Tia as well? Did they do it
to my sister? Did they hurt her?”

Cat
looks alarmed at my words, but downright scared when I grab her
shoulders. My voice rises. “What did they do to my sister? What did
they do to
me
?”

“Honour.” A smooth
voice cuts through the hysteria and an out of place calm washes
over me. Someone takes me by the arm. “I think you should leave,”
says the voice and at first it makes no sense—why would they be
gripping my arm if they wanted me to leave?—but then Cat says,
“Fine,” and stalks away.

It’s a while before
the panic totally leaves me and I can think clearly again. It’s a
while before I open my eyes.

“Better?”

I blink in confusion
at Kari, the woman from the aircraft, the only survivor of
Manchester, Yosiah’s sister. Why did she make Cat leave? And how
did she calm me when I don’t know her? Why is she looking at me
like she gives a crap?

“Your body remembers
me, even though your mind doesn’t,” she says, pressing a
handkerchief to my sweaty forehead. “You and I knew each other in
Underground London Zone. We were … housemates.”

“Were we
together
?” I don’t know why that’s the first thing I could think to
say. Possibly because my mind’s still messed up from my freak out.
More likely because I’m an idiot.

“No.” She laughs, one
side of her mouth tilting down and her eyes creasing. “You’re
younger than my brother.”

“How old are you,
anyway?”

Kari raises a dark
eyebrow, but her smile is indulgent. “Twenty four. I was younger
when you knew me but still far too old for you.”

I lift a shoulder up
in a shrug. A warm feeling spills into my stomach. “I think … I
remember this. Being your friend. Was I happy?”

“You were.” Her smile
slips. “Sometimes.”

“But not others?”

“No.” Kari pats my
shoulder, far too familiar and thoughtless to be faked. If I didn’t
believe her before, I do now.

“That’s why you were
upset with me. On the plane. You thought I’d recognise you.”

“Yeah. I didn’t think
you’d forget me but remember Vian. That was an interesting turn of
events.”

I tilt my head, an
irritating habit that emerges when I’m confused. “Vian?”

“You call him Yosiah
now.” She looks so thoughtful for a second that I don’t disturb
her. In the back of my mind—or more like in the back of my feeling,
which doesn’t make any kind of sense, but feels more accurate—I
remember this, that Kari needs silence when she’s thinking, that
interrupting her could derail her train of thought.

“There’s still some
memory trapped in your subconscious,” she says. “There must be. How
did you and Yosiah become friends?”

I was in the library
closest to our home. I’d sneaked in after dark for the third time
that week, to steal another book because I’d read the one I took
before twice by then and needed another story. I liked books—they
were the easiest way I’d found to forget everything around me, to
pretend I was some place better. I came across Yosiah in a store
room stealing food to survive. After minutes of tense glowering
when we tried to work out if either of us was going to report the
other—and realised we weren’t—we began talking. That’s not out of
the ordinary. It happens. You meet people in weird situations and
you become friends.

I relay to Kari how we
met, expecting—for some reason—a deep insight into our inevitable
friendship. Instead she says, “I have no idea. Some things are just
meant to be, and others are coincidences. I think your friendship
with my brother is a bit of both. Now, are you going to States like
Cat suggested to get this supposed cure? Or are you going to carry
on as you are now?”

I rub my face. “How
should I know? Is there a guide book for this kind of thing?”

“If there is, I could
have used it a few years ago.”

I’m not really paying
attention. There’s something off about this whole conversation,
something that’s taken me until now to recognise. “Tia,” I say,
searching for truths in Kari’s dark eyes. “You didn’t mention my
sister, not even once. Why?”

“Because I don’t know
her, Honour.”

Kari’s wringing her hands, watching me with a mix of sympathy
and frustration. At me? At herself? That part of me locked deep
down inside, the one that
knows
Kari, thinks she’s pissed at herself. I can feel
my breathing spiking again and something tells me this time it
won’t be so easy to calm down. “What do you mean?” I draw out every
syllable like I can put off the truth.

Because the secret
part of me already knows what Kari is going to say, just like it
already knew Cat would say I’d had the ‘procedure’.

“I never saw Horatia,”
she says. “I never knew her, because she was never with us. If she
was in Underground London Zone, she was somewhere else, in a
different experiment.”

***

Branwell

11:04. 04.11.2040. The
Free Lands, Southlands, Plymouth.

The dining room in
Plymouth smells of flavour and promises, the bland food of the
Northlands towns a distant memory. Gleeful and grateful I accept a
steaming bowl of stew and find a seat between Marie and the girl
with wild chestnut hair from Leeds. I glance around for the woman’s
leader—the weathered man with the bald patch—but I assume he’s with
the Guardians council, planning and compromising with the Plymouth
ambassadors, as they call themselves.

I wonder what wreck of
a building we’ll be assigned in this town. An old shop, like in
Leeds? Crumbled houses? The dungeons of an ancient prison? Nothing
would shock me after what we’ve been subjected to, but from the
quick glance of Plymouth I caught when we made our way to this
dining hall, this town appears, almost, like a real city. The
locals saunter and bustle, market vendors hawk their produce,
bicycles glide along the roads, and children play in dirty puddles
much to their custodians’ dismay. It is a true city, only lacking
the blinking stars of gas lit windows and carriages sloshing
through the rain. Surely a place such as this wouldn’t give us a
bedroom dominated by damp or ramshackle tents made of bed
sheets.

I
try not to dwell on how much I miss my basement. My rumpled bed
with the remembered impression of my body’s shape. The scent of
musk on the air, as familiar as my own heartbeat.
Home.
I have a new home
now, in the people around me, but that doesn’t ease the
homesickness in my heart. I doubt the heartache will ever shift and
I wouldn’t want it to. As long as I yearn to be back, I haven’t
forgotten them. I try to call up their faces—Bennet, father,
Carolina, Jeremy, Nancy—but all I get are indistinct blurs and
shapes and colour. I’m reminded of being in the basement of
Morelock’s house when the cruel Olympiae villain left me beaten and
dizzy, seeing in foggy movement. Trying to recall the faces of my
family after being away from them for some time is achingly
similar.

“What’s up with
you?”

I peer at Marie from
behind my hair. It’s longer than I usually let it grow, curling on
the ends. “I’m just tired,” I say.

Priya leans around
Marie to gift me a smile. “We’ll be able to rest soon.”

“I know.” I’m less
craving sleep than I am world weary, but I don’t tell my friends
that. Some things are too personal to share. I return my attention
to the bowl of stew before me, scooping up the now-cold vegetables,
attempting to put together a complete jigsaw image of my family.
Bennet, as always, is clear as crystal behind my eyes. I’ll never
forget her face, not in my lifetime. My heart twinges and I wonder
if echoes of it go out to her, my twin sister, wherever she is. I
hope she senses me, the way I feel phantom sorrow in my sleep and
convince myself it is Bennet’s pain.

Hele and Horatia have
taken seats opposite us, so quietly that I startle when I look up
and discover them there. “You’re a world away,” Hele says. Her eyes
are crinkled at the corners, the window overhead brightening them
to a striking sky blue.

“Yes,” I agree.
“Sorry.” I rub the beginnings of a headache at my temples and pray
it doesn’t get worse. My headaches are either nothing to bother
about or they debilitate me. Unfortunately, the table’s other
occupants appear to be conspiring to give me a migraine.

An argument has
erupted between the red haired girl on my left and the woman named
Vivienne Cynwrig. Vivienne is by far the loudest of the two,
raising her sharp voice to deliver words as weapons. She attempts
to patronise Miranda of Leeds by circling back to her younger age.
But Miranda bats off the old woman’s words as if they’re no more
than rainwater.

“If we run straight
into war, everyone will be killed,” Miranda says, her hands pressed
together in her lap where her plaid dress pools. It’s primrose
yellow, made pale by time and patched together in places with
brighter and darker remnants.

Before I came to this
time I never realised how lucky I was to have clothes whenever I
wanted, to be able to ride into the city and have garments created
just for me. I’d give anything now to have a wool coat tailored to
my measurements. The coat I pilfered from Leeds is too long and
tight across my shoulders. I’ve taken to wearing it unbuttoned,
which leaves my limited number of shirtsleeves vulnerable to the
rain. I don’t know what became of the overcoat I fell into the
Guardians home wearing; I suspect it’s buried in the pit of
Forgotten London under debris and the dead.

“No, child, you’re
wrong—” Vivienne’s voice is a whip cracking, but Miranda’s cool
tone cuts through her words effortlessly and the elder woman has no
say. My headache builds.

“The
Guardians need time to put together the details of their plan. I’ve
studied strategy for ten years. I’ve been waiting for this war
since I was
born
.
I know what I’m talking about, Vivienne. Running into it won’t help
anybody. We need to stay in Bharat and strengthen our defences. We
need to wait for them to send the bulk of their military to Bharat,
so we can cut down their numbers and, finally, go to war when
they’re weakened.”

“There’s already a
wall around the City, girl. What more defences do you want?”

“Do you know how easy
it is to take down a wall?” Miranda stares directly at the older
woman, and Vivienne must be a better woman than I’m a man because
I’m squirming at the intensity in that look and I’m not even pinned
by it. I realise I was wrong to think the man we first met in Leeds
was the town’s leader. “It would take the Officials one day to
deconstruct it, and they know it. That wall is there to keep
immigrants out—not an army. What will you do when the soldiers
blast into the City and come for your nephew? I’m guessing he won’t
be running off to war—you neither. You’ll sit underground in a
Guardian safe place and wait for it all to blow over.” She raises
her chin. “And when the soldiers come to put a bullet in your head,
you’ll be glad we fortified the City’s protection, be glad it held
them off for a couple weeks longer, long enough for us to make them
weak, long enough for us to win the first small victory.”