We always will.
Weeks ago I’d have gone after anyone in front of me. Innocents. But tonight, I’m going to do what Meadow would do.
Take out the Leeches. I grit my teeth. Focus, hard, until I taste blood in my mouth. “I . . . choose . . . the Leeches,” I hear myself say. And then I feel the freedom. I feel the system release a part of me, the part that begs to listen to its every order. The release is only for a second. A lightness in my skull, like a breath of fresh air.
But it’s enough, and it’s like I flip a switch in my head. The hunger for killing citizens becomes a hunger for Leeches, and suddenly the Murder Complex agrees.
The train rattles past. I leap, grab a hold, and hang on tight. It drops me off in front of the Rations Hall, right in the middle of the Shallows. I roll to my feet, then run for the alley.
Kill. Destroy. No escaping. No turning back.
There’s a Leech locking the door, probably some ChumHead who came to steal rations for himself. Like he doesn’t have enough already. Kill, my brain tells me. Obey.
I’m silent. A predator. I pick up a piece of pipe, broken on the cracked pavement.
Then I slink up behind him, a shadow in the night, and thrust it through his back, so hard it breaks the skin. Pierces his black heart. The guy drops, and I know I’ve won.
I stoop down and grab the rifle from the Leech’s lifeless body.
Purge the Earth.
This is the Murder Complex.
I can’t stop. I have to kill. I have to spill blood.
I turn and run down the alley, past two citizens huddled on the ground. Too obvious. The Leech Compound is just ahead. Stupid, to think they’re safe.
I stop outside the gates. Touch my hands to them, and I’m shocked backward, blown to the ground like a bullet from a gun.
I stand up, body wobbling, but I don’t feel pain. Not when the Murder Complex has a hold of me. I’m strong. Stronger than ever.
I aim the rifle through the gates, look through the scope until the red dot lands right on the second-floor window. I breathe out. Steady. My heart rate slows. I squeeze the trigger.
The window shatters, and I keep shooting. Lights shut off, exploding from fired rounds. Screams come from the inside. I keep shooting, until the trigger clicks beneath my finger. I’m out of ammo.
I drop the rifle.
“You can’t control me!” I scream, even though I’m wrong. They still control me; I just have a new way of dealing with it. “Screw all of you!”
I’m seeing Meadow in my head, drenched in blood as we tried to escape the Leech Headquarters together, and it makes me go crazy. I beat the fence with my palms. It blows me backward again, and I can see Leeches pouring out of the building, sprinting toward me. A part of my mind whispers that I need to run, hide. But I shake it away. I snarl, ready for the fight, needing it.
Someone tackles me from behind. I feel something wet, over my mouth. I try to get away, but there are too many hands, and then there’s the feeling of . . . falling.
Slowly.
I sink backward, the world disappearing into a funnel of black, until all I can see is a girl’s face hovering over me. Dex, Rhone’s little sister, the only light in my world right now.
“Too easy,” Dex says. “Take him.”
My eyes close, and I’m gone.
CHAPTER 6
MEADOW
My father taught me how to be strong.
He gave me a lifetime of lessons in how to kill with a hardened heart. Peri and Koi and Zephyr taught me how to love, how to reel myself back in, to be soft again.
It is my mother’s influence I will rely on now.
Because she taught me how to lie.
“Tell us where the Resistance is,” the Interrogator says. He stands above me in my cell, pacing back and forth, arms clasped behind his back.
He has been doing this for twenty-one days.
I have marked the time with twenty-one gashes on my calf, using my fingernails to carve a bleeding line into my skin with every day that passes. Twenty-one perfect, solid scars. They remind me of how long I have stayed strong.
Today, the Interrogator’s hands are clean. Soon they will be stained from my blood again. A part of me wants it. I deserve to be tortured. I deserve to feel pain, for messing up, losing my family when they were so close. I remember Peri, screaming for me as an Initiative soldier dragged her away. I remember the fear in her eyes, the way she looked so small. So helpless. The memory hurts more than the torture ever could.
Pain is good, my father’s voice tells me. Use it to become stronger.
I look up at the Interrogator and give him my coldest smile. “The Resistance?” I ask. The Interrogator nods. I think of the Cave, the underground facility where the Resistance is hiding out.
We failed to destroy the Motherboard, because I was the Protector. I am the Protector, and I feel it inside of me like a curse. It is because I still live that the Murder Complex lives on, too.
I think of Zephyr, his eyes the color of the outside. The tiny glimpse of freedom I saw as Peri was carted away. I hope Zephyr has gone back to the Resistance. I hope they are working up a new plan to take down the Initiative. Then I hope he will escape the Shallows, go and save my family from the Ridge up north.
I gave myself up for the cause.
I will give nothing else away today, or tomorrow, or however long they keep me here.
“I don’t know who the Resistance is,” I say. “But if there is a Resistance, it sounds like you have bigger problems than interrogating a sixteen-year-old girl.”
“Oh, you’re much more than that.” The Interrogator grins. “And I guarantee, you’ll spill all of your secrets in due time.”
He turns to a metal table. There are all kinds of devices on it. Things that should be in a hospital, not in a dirty cell in the belly of the Initiative Headquarters. Sharp things that I don’t want anywhere near me.
“Do you know, Miss Woodson, what the heretics fork method is?”
I do not speak.
“No, you wouldn’t. Uneducated, as all the Shallows citizens are. Worthless mutts without any real importance to this dying world.”
“Is that how you justify the mass murder of thousands of innocent people?” I ask.
He ignores me. “This is the heretics fork,” he says, holding up a metal fork with two red prongs on each end. A collar is attached to the center of the fork, as if it were made for being strapped around someone’s neck. “A beautiful device, used all the way back in the Medieval Era. Do you know what that is, Miss Woodson?”
“Does it matter?” I cannot look away from the fork. The prongs are as sharp as knives.
“Everything matters,” the Interrogator says. “You see, this clever little invention is something your mother would’ve loved to use. I’ll show you how it works, in just a moment.” He holds it up to the light, tilts his head. “Unless you want to tell me where your mother is?”
“My mother is dead,” I say. I look right into his cold, black eyes.
“That, my dear, is where you are wrong.”
I refuse to look away. He continues.
“We know about your mother’s fail-safe. If she dies, the Initiative dies, too.” He paces back and forth, shiny black boots on pale gray pavement. “Just as we know about the connection in your brain. We’re working to reverse the connection your mother has to the system. But your connection, Miss Woodson, is something beautiful.”