Hope plucks a grasshopper from a nearby rock, dangles it in front of her face. “Hungry?”
Alexa scowls. “Not the point.” She kicks another pillar. “This entire mission has been one giant fail. I think it’s pretty obvious Finnley only wanted to get away from us, not hide out in some old ruined temple.”
“You didn’t have to come with us, Alexa,” I say. It takes effort to keep my exasperation from full-on steaming out of me. I don’t think she honestly believes a word she just said, and I challenge her on it: “If you didn’t believe we would find her out here, why didn’t you just stay at the beach?”
“Right, like that would have gone over well.”
Hope walks toward the arches, doesn’t wait for us to follow. “We’re already here,” she says. “Might as well look around.” Her ponytail is lower, dirtier than on the day we met, and she’s cuffed her grimy pants just below her knees. I suspect she may be tougher on the inside, too.
“Finnl—aghhhh!” Hope screams, recoiling.
Alexa and I rush up to meet her, under the first arch. A thin line of blood slices horizontally across her shin, but there’s nothing overtly dangerous anywhere near her.
I dig in my back pocket, hand her one of our last remaining pieces of path-marking fabric. “Here,” I say. “To blot the blood. Best to let it air-dry for now—we’ll clean it back at camp after the water’s sterile.” I keep to myself the details about how quickly wounds can get infected out here. How could I have neglected to bring our box of matches?
“Where exactly did this happen?” I ask, and Hope shows us.
After a quick search of the jungle floor, I find some long leaves like the ones I used to weave our mats. Carefully, at the same height as the blood on Hope’s leg, I wave one of the leaves around. With a sizzle, something invisible slices the leaf clean in half.
“Um,” I say. “So, that’s not good.”
“Neither is this,” Alexa says. She’s over by the wall, pointing at one of its smaller intricate carvings. I take a closer look, and my stomach drops.
The wolf’s face would have been easy to overlook amid the other carvings. Someone took great care to carve it in the same style as the others, to place it on one of the heavily decorated walls where it wouldn’t stick out. It is too much like the one on Alexa’s wrist, too much like the ones plastered on so much propaganda back home. This is no coincidence.
“This is supposed to be neutral territory,” I say. And it still could be, I suppose. But I never imagined sanctuary, and amnesty, and peace, and neutrality, to look so derelict. I hoped this place would be further removed from the people who stole our peace. I hoped it would be thriving. I hoped my father’s words would lead us to freedom.
I hoped.
Alexa shakes her head. “This is classic Wolfpack,” she says, running her thumb over the carving. “Hiding in plain sight.”
She depresses the wolf’s face, and a web of electric-blue laserlike beams crisscrosses through the entire length of the arched path. The first crosses in the exact place where Hope sliced her leg. This quantity of highly advanced technology—the hostility of it—it is not good. Alexa’s face is paler than I’ve ever seen it, and for the first time, I see fear on it. Her eyes are bright and glassy, the deepest brown with laser blue reflected in them.
I guess she wasn’t lying, after all, about only wanting to run away.
TWENTY-FOUR
I WORK THROUGH all I see, measure it against all I know.
“We don’t know they’re Wolfpack,” I say, as much for Alexa as for myself. “If the Wolfpack helped set things up here for Sanctuary in the first place, it makes sense that there’d be some overlap in their security systems.” I tread carefully, leave Dad out of it—that it took his life, possibly his death, for me to know what I know. “Doesn’t necessarily mean the people inside are hostile, right? Maybe it just means they want to control who goes in and out.”
Even though I don’t admit it, I’m not entirely convinced we’ll find anyone inside at all. If our voices weren’t enough to alert them to our presence, surely Hope tripping the laser system would’ve done the trick. Then again, why go to the trouble of having a merciless laser system at all if there isn’t something inside to protect?
“I vote we quit while we’re ahead,” Alexa says. “Finnley definitely wouldn’t have made it inside—she’d be, like, in pieces from all the lasers.”
“That’s terrible, Alexa,” Hope says.
But it’s the truth. It doesn’t seem possible to outsmart the laser system. The beams are too low to the ground, too close together—too everything—and we’d end up a lacerated, bleeding mess before we even reached the second arch.
“Maybe . . . ,” I say, not sure if I should tell them what I’m thinking. Because if what I’m thinking turns out to be true, it would mean Finnley was deliberately stolen from our camp. There’s no way she would have made it through these lasers without help—and help didn’t make itself known when we asked for it, so why should it be any different for her?
I come out and say it, because if those things are true, she might need us to find her. “Finnley could be trapped in there.” If I’m honest, though, Finnley isn’t the only reason I want to get inside. I can’t stand the thought of turning back after all we’ve been through when we’re this close—I have to know if there’s anything inside. If any part of what Dad wrote is true.
“Well, I don’t really care about Finnley,” Alexa says, and Hope makes a face. “What? It’s not like I know the girl, and she pretty much accused me of being a kingpin the other night. Can you blame me?”
The kingpins are our generation’s tyrants, the ones who led an insurgent movement inside the Wolfpack once they’d already established power. Each rules over one of the five enormous—formerly fifty not-so-enormous—United States. They’re the ones who planted and pruned their connections inside the Pentagon, the CIA, the White House, Hollywood, the Ivy Leagues, even the Red Cross. They’re also the ones who took down Envirotech, where my father worked. My father is most likely rotting somewhere, while his traitorous coworker, Anton Zhornov—the reason they were able to take down Envirotech at all—was named fifth kingpin in the pentumvirate.
They live like royals, how they think royals should live. They live like power isn’t proven until you’ve well and truly crushed someone—and no one calls them on their hypocrisy, because the underdog-to-alpha story is just rags-to-riches, glorified. They’re so lauded by their own for breaking the cycle of privilege in power, people don’t realize they’ve simply traded one broken thing for another.
Power tastes like blood to the Wolves, and one drop isn’t enough.