The Ward

4


1:40 A.M., SATURDAY


I’m pounding against the glass, now wishing it would crack. Water splashes inside the mobile, all around me. Grimy, icy slush finds my mouth. I close my eyes, struggling to get out through the moonroof, pushing against it. My Rimbo drops into the sunken city. I open my eyes despite the cold and the water. Beyond the roof, giant-sized buildings loom, towers of brick with the windows crashed in. I can’t stop looking—I can’t stop trying.

It takes less than a minute for the water to reach my neck.

Despite it all, I’m thankful for my leather jumpsuit. It’s keeping me warm. Relatively speaking, that is. I press my mouth against the glass and take a deep breath, one that I hope will last me long enough.

As the water starts clinging to the ends of my hair, moves to soak the roots and all of my scalp, Aven appears in my mind. Like a punch to the gut. A sister who is not my sister—as close a resemblance to each other as a swan has to a pigeon, and I’m the pigeon. Take everything about me, flip it on its head to get its opposite—that’s Aven. She’s too good . . . for me, for the world. Why did she pick me? Of all the people in Nale’s orphanage, she picked me.

Did she think I could protect her?

Selfish, reckless . . . I didn’t even want her around to start.

Panic starts ticking away in my chest until I can actually feel my heart bombing around in my rib cage. What have I done? Losing the money would have been bad, but was it really worse than her losing me? Without thinking, I open my mouth just a little bit. A trickle of water flows in. Fear is in my mouth too, with an aftertaste like acid.

The thing I can’t leave—it isn’t life. It’s Aven.

The inside of the mobile is now filled. I tug again at the roof—it doesn’t budge. The pressure inside should have equalized against the outside right about now. My arms move too slow; I slog through the water, my hand fumbling for the knife I keep strapped inside my boot. Above, the watery ceiling has turned so dark and I can’t tell how far I’ve sunk. Has this taken seconds? Minutes? I can’t tell. . . . My mind’s all dizzied. I can’t panic. I won’t panic.

Using what energy I’ve got left, I spear the tip of my knife into the glass window.

Nothing.

I pound again on the window, trying to weaken the spot.

Still nothing, but I think I see a slight webbing. The blade’s cracked the window, barely.

Hoping the third time really is the charm, I go full force. I hurtle myself and the knife into the window.

It works.

The glass cracks, breaks into pebbles. They float toward my face. I shield myself and shimmy through the side window, avoiding the fragments jutting from the frame.

Out in the open channel, my body feels weightless, drifting.

Next to me, my Rimbo slams into a building, loosening some of the bricks. Debris barrages down, a slow-motion shower of stone and concrete pieces. I can’t avoid them all. All I can do is dodge them, one by one. Dog-paddle. Push myself backward. Then, somewhere along my forehead, sharpness and fire are all I feel.

A bloom of red appears before my eyes.

A square shape bashes into my shoulder. Eyelids grow heavy; I can’t make myself want to stay awake. The swirling underwater city fades into jagged shapes and shades of brown. Navy, too. It’s as if the sky is somehow underwater, and I’m sinking into a galaxy of black.


Air hunger forces my eyes open. My body heaves, convulses. I ignore the need to open my mouth. How long was I out? It don’t matter. Instinct overrides thought. My body knows what to do, even if exhaustion has made my brain useless.

I swim. Up.

Can’t get there fast enough. Arms grow heavier. I can barely feel my legs, though my Hessians are still on, I think. Thank goodness.

Then I can’t help it—I open my mouth. Water rushes in, salty and cold. So cold, it makes my teeth ache. It trickles down my throat, knifing my lungs. I gag, I push myself up.

It feels like hours since I came to. Years since I went under. Years till I reach the surface.

Aven. The race. The money. My Rimbo. All of it pulls me back to myself like the riptide of a tsunami. I need to get out of the water.

Each stroke tears at my muscles. Something as light as water has never felt heavier to anyone, anywhere. It’s lead. My body is lead. It’s like lead pushing lead, and I can’t even be sure I’m moving.

Am I moving?

Then, a slow shift in darkness. From the black of a raisin to the black of sun-bleached asphalt.

I believe it only when my hands shoot out of the frigid water. Next, my elbows. Then forehead. My nose. My mouth, choking and retching, is last.

Hard and fast, I suck the sharp air into my lungs. It stings. Heady with relief, I close my eyes. My body is so tired, though, it forgets to tread water. Again, I go under. Stupid. I push myself up, once, twice. Swim.

I’m numb to the cold now, but my brain knows enough to tell my arms to paddle and my legs to kick. Once more, I force my head above the surface.

Beside me, the brick siding of a wall, and not too far off, an escape ladder.

I swim—flail, more like it—through the dank canal, inching my way closer to the ladder. When I reach it, I throw myself out of the water, trying to catch the bottom rung so that I can pull it down. I catch it in my grip, and the ladder collapses down. Chips of white paint and rust flake off.

Ignoring the ladder’s shake, I pull myself up. Never did like those chin-ups they made me do during DI training, but now I’m grateful. A few rungs later and I’m level with a huge window, cracked open wide and covered with algae. It tinges the sharp edges with green, makes them look smooth.

Finally, I’m close enough to the windowsill that I can swing myself half in the building, half out of it. Glass crunches under my fingers. I can hear it, the only reason why it registers on my radar, not because I can feel anything. Well, there’s one perk to being nearly paralyzed from cold, I guess. Shards rip the leather at my thigh—skin too, possibly, though I can’t feel it.

Both feet touch ground at last. I collapse onto the floor, grasping for flimsy, disoriented threads of thought. My blood pools on a mildewed carpet, and my teeth dance around in my mouth. I clench my jaw to still them. One look at my hands shows me they’re shredded from the windowsill and have turned a delightful shade of blue. I imagine my lips are about the same.

A heavy panting—my heavy panting—brings me to myself. I wipe my face of the brack water and my hand comes back red. Only then do I notice the deep sting of a gash somewhere around my temple. I flex my hands, watching the red squeeze from each cut. I may as well be a robot, nerve free. Don’t feel a thing. On my wrist, my cuffcomm blinks a fluorescent red through a cracked screen. This one is water resistant, but the crack must’ve allowed some in. Still, it’s a reminder that so long as I’ve got a heartbeat, I’ve got a job.

I feel for my video comm, though it wouldn’t do me any good with my cuffcomm not working. It’s gone, anyway. Must have lost it in the crash.

Benny will be able to approximate my location from the GPS in my Rimbo, though, so he’ll send someone for me, I’m sure of it. Which means I don’t have much time. I may have lost the race, but I can still scout for that Justin guy. At that thought, a wave of adrenaline courses through. Makes me forget for a moment how broken I am.

I try to stand but my legs wobble and I lose my balance. Then I feel myself shaking from the bottom up. This irritates me—I’ve got to scout before anyone gets here. But my thermal homeostasis has just been given an icy-cold middle finger, and I need to get warm. That’s step one.

I force my Hessians to carry me around the perimeter. Until I can arrange heat, movement is key. Get the blood pumping. I pass old bulletin boards, whiteboards, and wooden chairs, too, scattered along the floor. Peeling paint and tiny, scampering critters tell me that this place has been deserted since the Wash Out. With each step, the floor creaks. Hope this building doesn’t collapse with me in it—they can go under so easily, and my Rimbo hit the thing real good.

Feeling for my utility belt, I remember the lighter and my flashlight—it turns freshwater neon, but I can still use it. I pull the lighter out of my belt, removing it from some elastic lining that seems waterproof.

Don’t know for sure, as I’ve never needed to look.

To get the lighter started, I roll my finger over the metal. Nothing but sparks. With a few more flicks, I have a flame—a small one, sure, but it will do. My utility belt has already proven handy and I say a secret thanks to Benny for making me wear it all these years. “For your protection,” he’d say, and I’d take the belt and hook it on to humor him. Never thought I’d actually need any of this junk, aside from the flashlight. And even that, well . . . it’s been years since we’ve found a local freshwater spring in these parts. I never expect I’ll need the flashlight.

Now for some dry fabric. I start opening all the doors on this level, hoping that one of them is a closet. When I find one with a few coats, I toss a whole pile of musty, moth-eaten fabric to the ground and light the edges on fire. I’m not worried about the building burning down—everything here is damp from tide fluctuations.

After some blowing, the coats go up in flames. I get as close to the growing fire as I can without burning my jumper off, then step out of my Hessians to let my feet roast.

The blood creeps back to my extremities, and every sensation is magnified. Painfully so. It’s worse than being numb, I realize. I know it won’t last long, that my skin just has to get used to this new and improved, fully functional body temperature, but that don’t make it any easier.

I give myself two minutes, then slide my Hessians back onto my feet—they’re still wet and I’d rather go barefoot, but I’m not stupid. I stamp out what’s left of the glowing, charred coats with my soles.

Grabbing one of the last coats from the closet, I make my way down into the stairwell. If freshwater is going to be anywhere, it’ll be either ground level or under the basement—Blues training, and common sense, taught me that.

It’s dark so I flip on the flashlight, clutching the banister the whole way. I’m in no shape to be doing this; my knees rattle like a madman’s and the cold is creeping under my skin again, but on the upside, that gash on my temple feels like it’s clotted.

Need to keep moving.

The plan is to first find out if the lower levels are underwater.

I step out into the ninth floor, officially below the water level. The stairwell isn’t flooded, so I’ll make an educated guess and say that the lower floors probably aren’t as well. The ninth floor looks much the same.

But there’s one key difference: the windows. Every single window on this floor has been patched up with bricks and mortar. Why would someone do that? If they wanted to preserve the building, why is this place deserted? And why stop just at the water level?

It don’t make much sense.

Back in the stairwell, I pick up my pace. By now, the race is probably over. Someone should be coming for me.

Level after level, staircase after staircase . . . my head starts to spin and nausea sets in just as I realize I’m going to have to walk back up. I groan out loud—the sound rebounds off the stairwell, a reminder that I’m the only one in here.

For some reason, this makes me nervous. As though smashing my mobile into the canal and busting up my face haven’t already made me nervous . . . But the quiet—a deep, echoing kind—lets me know how alone I really am. How I could pass out here and never come to, and no one would find me. Just some crazy dragster, turning to bone in a rotting stairwell. That’s the kind of realization I don’t need to be reminded of at every turn.

When I finally reach the ground level . . . well, when I reach what was the ground level before the waters rose, I see signs dangling from the ceiling. They’ve got letters and numbers on them, reading “uptown” or “downtown.”

This was a subway—one of those underground trains people used to get around on. The Blues taught me about subways early on, during my scout training.

The tunnels continue a ways in the distance, lines of rusted track laid out for miles. If I strain my ears, I can hear droplets of water sounding off, rhythmic, like a busted faucet in the underground. Seeing as I’m fifteen stories underwater, there’s probably a leak somewhere—I don’t want to get my hopes up.

Still, I glance around, listen for a direction. Though I don’t expect to find anything, at least this way I’ll have something to tell Officer Cory. The building is, after all, in Quad Nine. He never specified where in the quadrant I needed to look.

This flashlight is so genius right now.

I flip it on and head right. Random pools of water—brack or rain, I don’t know—gather under the tracks. The beam turns them bright and I follow the drip-drip-drip-ing way back into the dark.

Every few steps I slow. Stop. Listen—to the droplets and their echo.

I continue walking, then I pause. Wait.

They’re doing more than that. . . . I hear something at the tail end—a final sound, like water trickling into a full-up bucket. The sound of water as it falls into even more water. For a moment my heart does a jig. It could be . . . I think, almost allowing myself to hope.

I inhale, and I let the steady rhythm of its falling lead the way. Like it’s calling to me, speaking.