Thankfully, we make it to the border wall without encountering any patrols, and locate a rusty metal stairwell that leads up to the guards’ walkway, which is also empty; we must be at the southernmost end of the city right now, very close to the camp, and security is concentrated in more populated portions of Waterbury.
Coral mounts the stairs shakily and I go behind her, to make sure she won’t fall, but she refuses my help and jerks away from me when I place a hand on her back. In just a few hours, my respect for her has increased tenfold. As we reach the walkway, the alarm in the distance finally stops, and the sudden quiet is somehow scarier: a silent scream.
Getting down the other side of the wall is trickier. The drop from the top is a good fifteen feet, onto a steep, loose slope of gravel and rock. I go first, swinging out, hand over hand, on one of the disabled floodlights; when I let go and drop to the ground, I slide forward several feet, thudding onto my knees, and feel the gravel bite through my denim. Coral follows after me, her face pale with concentration, landing with a small cry of pain.
I don’t know what I was expecting—I had feared, I think, that the tanks would have already arrived, that we would find the camp already consumed by fire and chaos—but it stretches before us as it ever did, a vast and pitted field of peaked tents and shelters. Beyond it, across the valley, are the high cliffs, capped with a shaggy black mass of trees.
“How long do you think we have?” Coral says. I know without asking that she means before the troops come.
“Not long enough,” I say.
We move in silence toward the outskirts of the camp—walking the periphery will still be quicker than trying to navigate the maze of people and tents. The river is still dry. The plan obviously failed. Raven and the others did not manage to disable the dam—not that it matters much, at this point.
All these people…thirsty, exhausted, weak. They’ll be easier to corral.
And, of course, far easier to kill.
By the time we make it back to Pippa’s camp, my throat is so dry I can hardly swallow. For a second, when Julian rushes toward me, I don’t recognize his face: It is a collection of random shapes and shadows.
Behind him, Alex turns away from the fire. He meets my eyes and starts toward me, mouth open, hands extended. Everything freezes, and I know I’ve been forgiven and I reach out my hands—reach out my arms to him…
“Lena!” Then Julian is sweeping me into his arms, and I snap back into myself, press my cheek against his chest. Alex must have been reaching for Coral; I hear him murmuring to her, and as I pull away from Julian, I see that Alex is leading Coral back toward one of the campfires. I was so sure, for just that one second, that he was reaching for me.
“What happened?” Julian asks, cupping my face and bending down a little bit so that we’re nearly eye to eye. “Bram told us—”
“Where’s Raven?” I say, cutting him off.
“I’m right here.” She flows out of the dark, and suddenly I am surrounded: Bram, Hunter, Tack, and Pippa, all speaking at once, firing questions at me.
Julian keeps one hand on my back. Hunter offers me a drink from a plastic jug, which is mostly empty. I take it gratefully.
“Is Coral okay?”
“You’re bleeding, Lena.”
“God. What happened?”
“There’s no time.” The water has helped, but still the words shred my throat. “We have to leave. We have to get everyone we can, and we have to—”
“Slow down, slow down.” Pippa holds up both hands. Half her face is lit by the fire; the other is plunged in darkness. I think of Lu and feel nauseous: a half person, a two-faced traitor.
“Start from the beginning,” Raven says.
“We had to fight,” I say. “We had to go inside.”
“We thought you might have been taken,” Tack says. I can tell he’s hopped up, anxious; everybody is. The whole group is charged with bad electricity. “After the ambush—”
“Ambush?” I repeat sharply. “What do you mean, ambush?”
“We never made it to the dam,” Raven says. “Alex and Beast managed to get their blast off okay. We were a half-dozen feet from the wall when a group of regulators started swarming us. It was like they were waiting. We would have been screwed if Julian hadn’t spotted the movement and given the alarm early.”
Alex has joined the group. Coral gets clumsily to her feet, her mouth a fine, dark line. I think she looks more beautiful than I’ve ever seen her. My heart squeezes once, tight, in my chest. I can see why Alex likes her.
Maybe even why he loves her.
“We beat it back here,” Pippa pipes up. “Then Bram showed up. We’ve been debating whether to go looking—”
“Where’s Dani?” I notice, for the first time, that she isn’t with the group.
“Dead,” Raven says shortly, avoiding my eyes. “And Lu was taken. We couldn’t get to them in time. I’m sorry, Lena,” she finishes in a softer voice, and looks at me again.
I feel another surge of nausea. I wrap my arms around my stomach, as though I can press it deep and down. “Lu wasn’t taken,” I say. My voice comes out as a bark. “And they were waiting for you. The regulators. It was a trap.”