She saved me, a guy who should mean nothing to her.
Now I am alive, and she is dead.
The world rocks, as an explosion happens. Fire, blazing fire, then cracking and groaning. Behind me, the Perimeter falls. Rocks fly. People dive for cover, but I sit frozen, unable to move.
Something hits my head.
I fall against Meadow’s body, lie still beside her. Through the dust and the smoke, I think I see hundreds of pairs of black boots, climbing over the rubble.
Someone touches me, lifts me away from Meadow. Another pair of hands grabs her, presses black paddles to her chest. They haul her onto a board and she’s out of sight.,
Gunfire. Leech guards arrive.
Shouts.
“Meadow,” I gasp.
I reach for her, but I can’t touch her. She is already gone.
I fall into darkness, and my last thought is this:
My moonlit girl is dead.
CHAPTER 111
MEADOW
I am standing in a world of white.
Fog drifts back and forth, all around me, dancing across the tops of my toes.
It is silent, except for the lightest kiss of the wind on my curls. My hair is long again, tickling my arms.
I look down.
I have no sparring scars. No blood beneath my nails. No cuff on my wrist or wounds from Needles.
I lift my arm, look for my fearless tattoo, but there is only fresh skin.
“Hello?”
My voice rings out, disappears into forever.
And then, through the fog, my father emerges.
He looks younger, stronger, and the first thing I notice is that his Catalogue Number is gone. His face is alive with the flush of life.
“Meadow,” he says.
I try to walk toward him, but I cannot seem to make my feet move. “Dad,” I say.
“You were always so brave,” he tells me. “You fought hard.”
“I’m tired,” I whisper. I want to sink to the floor, bury myself beneath the fog, and sleep for an eternity.
“I know you are,” my father says. He smiles, and the light explodes into his eyes. “But you’re not done yet.”
He walks toward me, reaching out. His hands look soft and new, free of any scars from his fishing hooks or his years training me and my brother. “Wake up, Meadow. Live free.”
He places his hand over my heart.
And I become one with pain.
I think I wake up, but I can’t be sure.
The world feels far away. I can’t feel my body, only a strange heaviness all around. Slowly, the sensation of me returns. A tingling in my fingers, my toes. A numbness that shakes itself from me, until I know I am a body, instead of just a mind.
There is a rocking beneath me. The steady hum of something.
And the feeling of a hand, wrapped gently over my own.
I try to open my eyes.
They are heavy, so heavy, but I fight. Gently, light pours in, as I look at the world.
And I see whose hand holds mine.
Zephyr.
He is sitting beside me in a chair, asleep. Snoring. We are inside a small room, and there is that strange rocking, rocking.
A familiar feeling, the thing that used to finally lull me to sleep when the nightmares threatened to haunt me into staying forever awake.
The walls and ceiling are silver.
The bed I lie on is a cot. I look up, see the inscription in the metal above my head.
US NAVY is scratched out. NEW MILITIA has been roughly carved above it; a new name. A new meaning.
I want to sit up, but there is too much pain in my chest. It’s hard to breathe.
A tube is in my arm, dripping blood into my veins. I follow the tube with my eyes, see where it leads.
Zephyr’s arm. It is his blood in my veins, that brought me back to life.
I feel myself smile. The smallest tug at my lips, but the effort is so much.
I close my eyes and sleep.
CHAPTER 112
ZEPHYR
Meadow’s signal was her death.
She had to die, in order for the New Militia to offer to set us free. Maybe they’d planned it from the second they saw her, when Ray brought us to their bunker. They wanted a war.
They just needed a reason to jump-start it. A reason to take that first step. When Meadow came in, with the key to ending the Murder Complex for good, the General took the chance.
She offered to die to save us all. What she didn’t tell anyone, was that her mother’s dying words to Meadow were not to leave the Shallows.
If she left, the system would kill her. She left anyways. Sacrificed herself for her family.
We’re on a boat, an old Navy tanker, just off the coast of Northern Washington. After the attack on the Ridge, it’s where they took us. Where I woke up, screaming Meadow’s name, ready to kill the New Militia.
It was the General himself who told me their deal.
And it was on his orders that the moment they found her, they’d try to bring her back to life. It worked. Meadow’s a fighter, and she always has been, even in death.
I don’t know what she saw on the other side. But she’s back with us, she’s here now.
She just has to open her eyes.
Sketch forces me to come down to the mess hall and eat. We weave through the metal halls of the ship. Close walls, low-hanging ceilings, metal ladders we have to climb to get from one floor to the next.
Everyone is eating when we join them.
The hall we’re in opens up to a wide room. A giant kitchen, and there are metal tables all over the place, filled with New Militia soldiers stuffing their faces.
I look left and right. I don’t recognize any of the faces until I see one table, all the way to the left.
Koi and Peri sit side by side. Soldiers stare at Peri’s Regulator, but she doesn’t seem to notice it anymore. Saxon is across from her, and Tox is nowhere to be found. Probably with the captain as he has been this whole time, holding his stupid walking stick. Trying to compare maps to the Green.
“Let’s go,” Sketch says. She tugs me along the rows of soldiers, until we take our places at the table.
“Zephyr,” Koi greets me with a polite nod.
Peri looks up at me and waves. She’s clutching a doll to her chest, one that Ray’s wife Martha gave her. She’s also cleaner, wearing an oversize green T-shirt that’s more like a dress. She looks happy. Almost.
It’ll take time for the smiles to come back. For all of us.
“How’s she doing?” Koi asks. “Still sleeping?”
He slides me a plate full of rations. The food’s the same, and I don’t have much of an appetite, but I eat it anyways. Otherwise, Sketch would tear me apart.