“Sev!” The voice only pushes through my thoughts when the owner grabs my shoulders. Kasim’s grin is a little too close to my face. “I was supposed to report five minutes ago and you aren’t even dressed.”
“Dressed?” I look around at the unfamiliar hallway. Hand-painted numbers hang from the ceiling, the walls made up of tiny broken tiles arranged into a mosaic of animals in a forest. A lizard sits next to me on the wall, tongue lashing out to catch my hand. The movement startles me, just as impossible and frightening as the Red in the forest speaking to me from the dead, or the glass bottles singing my name back in the Chairman’s basement.
No. Not again.
“Aren’t you coming out on patrol with me tonight?”
I pull my hand away from the wall, brushing my sweaty palm against my pants. It’s just a picture. It can’t move. This hallway must be Jiaoyang. Where all the little kids go to school.
“I thought you were kidding,” I reply, still trying to rub the twinges of hallucination away. “How did you find me?”
“Telescreen. Tracks your ID card.”
I pull the card from my pocket. I don’t remember bringing it with me. “It tracks me wherever I go? Why?”
Kasim shrugs. “Let’s get out of here.”
Howl made sure I didn’t get a permanent ID chip. Talked his way around all of the blood tests and whatever else Dr. Yang is asking for. And somehow seems to know a whole lot more about what is going on than he did last night. Helix’s words repeat over and over in my head, spinning until I feel dizzy.
CHAPTER 28
THE NIGHT REACHES OUT TO me like an old friend, an unwelcome one that buzzes for attention at the back of my brain. But the fear that has me wondering if images around me are real or just inside my head dims behind the conversation I overheard upstairs. Kasim’s solid presence at my side should be reassuring, but when he reaches out to touch my arm, I jump.
“Outside at last, right? You ready for this?” he asks with a grin.
Kasim moves out ahead of me, letting me catch up to him under a tree with icicles hanging from its branches in long gnarled spikes. “This is a routine patrol. Checking for Reds, but none of them ever come this close,” he explains, pressing something hard and metal into my hand. A gun. A quicklight comes next. “Nothing fancy. Just don’t get lost.”
He fades into the night ahead of me, and following is impossible. I jog a few steps into the trees before stopping to see if I can hear him. But then something tugs at my hair, and I look back to find Kasim undoing my braid.
He guffaws when I grab my hair away from him and reaches out to swat a moth away from my face. “You move too fast. Too loud.” Hand still clenched around the moth, he tears one of its wings off, dropping it to the forest floor.
The casual nonchalance in his face as he crushes the remainder of the moth between his fingers leaves the hairs on the back of my neck standing on end.
Suddenly, he goes still, jovial smile turning a little as he cocks an ear to listen. “That’s odd. We’re so close to the Mountain. . . .” He glances back at me and then up into the trees. “Why don’t you play lookout. High enough no one’s going to find you easy.” His smile goes back to relaxed and teasing. “Shoot any Reds that come through, okay? I’ll be back in a minute.”
I watch him disappear into the undergrowth before finding a tree, clinging to the trunk to keep myself from kicking my dangling feet. Fifteen minutes. Twenty. He doesn’t come back.
When the darkness around me begins to swirl, I decide it’s time to move. I don’t want to fall out of the tree trying to run away from cloud monsters or evil tree demons that only I can see.
It’s unnaturally quiet down on the forest floor. But then I hear something. A whisper. Wind blows up from behind me, carrying the sound away with it. There are scuff marks against a tree and in the dirt a few feet ahead. When I get to them, I notice a few wet spots on the ground. Blood?
There’s a line scratched into the dirt and leaves. A drag mark. The trough in the ground trails away through the trees, and I follow with my nose practically in the dirt.
I come upon them so quickly, I almost fall over to keep from walking straight into the campsite. Four Reds, sitting around the smoldering ashes of a fire. Kasim is on the ground.
Dead.
CHAPTER 29
“SHOULD WE JUST KILL HIM and get it over with?” A girl, her head covered by a hood. “There are probably a bunch of them out here. The night patrols are out.”
I breathe out. Not dead.
“Nah.” The speaker’s voice is low and grumbles like a thunderstorm. “Hong wants them brought back. We’ll have to drag him to base camp.”
“You don’t think carting two hundred pounds of Kamari soldier is going to slow us down, Kai? We’re supposed to set these things and run.” The girl nudges a large flat disk with her foot. Get up high. Running in will just mean both of our heads on the Chairman’s desk. The gun Kasim so casually handed to me weighs heavily at my side as I climb up a nearby tree. The metal feels uncomfortable against my skin as I steady it across my arm, setting my sights on the hooded girl. I rethink and switch to Kai, the one who seems to be in charge. I can’t shoot someone, not even Reds who would happily tear me apart. I won’t. I’m better than that, better than my mother. I just have to scare them off. I can do this. This is Kasim’s life.
But something pulls my attention down, movement flickering at the edge of my sight. An eye blinks up at me from the base of the tree, a giant, muddled outline hidden in shadow. The thing yawns, shadowy hole of a mouth lined with yellowing ivory. Black eyes focus on the ring of Reds ahead of us.
A gore.
A fairy-tale monster, come alive. Even murky and indistinct beneath me, the nightmarish creature I had imagined after that first wakeful night Outside doesn’t do the real beast justice.
I drown in indecision, choking back the warning that tries to pass my lips. If the gore charges them, in all likelihood, they’ll kill it. On the other hand, Kasim would be the first one to go if they don’t. Even if he woke up this very second, his hands are tied.
Instant karma. For the moth.
I shake the thought away. I move my gun down to shoot it myself, but before I can convince my finger to go anywhere near the trigger, a baying call from the forest echoes all around us, pulling the Reds’ guns out like a magnet. The four in the clearing jump to their feet. The gore under my branch hasn’t moved, ears flicking back and forth at the hunting call from out in the darkness. The girl has two guns out now, standing wide over Kasim.
With their heads pointing toward the strange cry, none of them are ready when the gore under me charges. It zips through the trees, too fast for something its size, snapping toward Kai before he realizes the beast is there. A second gore charges in, hackles raised as it joins the first.
I can’t wrench my eyes away from them. The gores are gruesomely beautiful, heavy hyena-like shoulders at least five feet off the ground, spiky manes trailing down their muscular necks to a pointy nose. Their faces are dark brown, eyes sunken in over a mouth lined with jagged teeth engineered for ripping and tearing. But when the first bite clenches down, I cover my face with one hand, tree bark pressing painfully into my cheek as Kai begins screaming, the trophy in a ghastly game of tug-of-war. The beasts crouch down on long muscled legs, roughly shaking their heads back and forth as they go to work on him, powerful shoulders out of proportion with their smaller hindquarters.