Jubilee hesitates—after all, we don’t have time to try another route if mine doesn’t work—but only for a split second before nodding and picking up the pace. “It’ll be total chaos as the day goes on,” she warns, as though the disorder now is only inconvenient. “It’ll be like it was on Verona when the rebellion broke out.” She couldn’t have been more than eight or nine, but she sounds as though she’s speaking about something that happened only yesterday. Her mouth is set tight, her hand resting on the new gun at her hip. “Stay close.”
My eyes keep picking out familiar features—a man of just the right height, or a flash of sandy-colored hair, or a flash of indigo fabric that matches his backpack—but it’s never Gideon I’m seeing, only fragments of memory. If he and Tarver have run into the husks above by now, then it’s possible they’re somewhere down here too, trying to bypass Lilac’s army the same way we are.
But I can barely keep Jubilee and Flynn within line of sight with the jostling and milling of the frightened crowds—Gideon and Tarver could walk by ten meters away and we’d never see them.
Abruptly a hand closes on my arm and jerks me back, my lips forming a half scream before I can stop it. I’m whirled around to see a middle-aged woman with a curtain of dried blood down one side of her face—her pupils are dilated, and for a moment I’m certain it’s one of Lilac’s husks. But the woman’s eyes search my face vaguely, and I realize: she has a concussion. She must’ve been struck by a piece of debris.
“Mandy?” she’s asking. “Mandy, is that you?”
“N-n-no,” I stammer, my mouth dry and heart pounding. I cast a frantic look around, but Flynn and Jubilee have vanished in the press of the crowd. “Sorry, I don’t—”
“Mandy?” the woman asks again, drawing me closer; her fingers tighten painfully when I try to pull my arm away.
Then Jubilee appears again, elbowing her way back through the crowd. No sign of Flynn. “Let her go,” she orders, voice quick and sharp, hand on her gun.
“It’s fine,” I gasp, prying at the woman’s fingers. “She’s confused. Not dangerous.”
“I’m just trying to find my daughter,” the woman moans, before her hand slides away from my arm.
Jubilee pulls me away, dodging the crowds. “Too many people,” she says in my ear, over the noise of voices and sirens and destruction. “We’ve got to find some place to hole up until night, when it’s safer to move. We’ll get trampled if we don’t.”
I glance over my shoulder and see, for a brief, frozen second, the woman standing still where we left her, hands clasped, confused gaze sweeping back and forth; then the crowd swells, and closes around her, and she’s gone.
We barricade ourselves inside what had been a restaurant before looters got to it. There’s no food left, and most of the chairs and tables are gone, or in pieces. The front part of it was little more than a stall, but farther back the door is still sound, and the kitchen’s one of those hole-in-the-wall places with a metal security gate. It’ll hold for now, especially since there’s nothing left inside worth stealing.
Flynn and Jubilee are efficient, working together like they were born to it, moving tables and chairs toward the door, searching for other exits—one leads to the back alley but has a deadbolt strong enough to suit them. It isn’t until the work is mostly done that I see Jubilee’s hands are shaking where she’s dragging furniture, and that her face looks ashen despite her darker skin. It’s Flynn who finally puts a hand on her arm, saying something in her ear that makes her nod and take a breath. “We’ll have to stay until nightfall,” she says quietly. “It’s chaos out there.”
We settle in to wait in silence, taking cover behind the counter and trying to get some rest. They’ve gotten new flashlights from an abandoned stall, and set them up like lanterns in the shelter of the countertop so we won’t have to wait in the dark. We find another gun under there, jammed in where its former owner could pull it out in case of a holdup. I wonder what happened, that they didn’t have time to bring it with them when they fled. It’s probably a certifiable antique, but since Sanjana’s EMP fried our cutting-edge weapons, this antique is looking pretty good.
As we wait for the noise outside to ebb, and I try to force down a handful of crackers and peanut butter from our supplies, my mind drifts back to Gideon and Tarver. Somewhere above us, they’re surrounded by husks. “Do you think Lilac’s aware of it, in there? Do you think she knows what it’s doing?” I hear myself ask.
“She could be.” Jubilee’s voice is quiet. “I grew up on Verona and had quite a few encounters with the whispers there, though I was just a child. I met the same one again on Avon.”
I drop the handful of crackers, crumbs scattering across the floor. “You talked to one of them? The whispers?”
Jubilee’s lips twitch as she glances at Flynn. “In a manner of speaking, yes.” She sees my expression and raises her eyebrows. “They’re not all bad. What LaRoux’s done to them—he’s been torturing them. Turning them into weapons.”