The Wandering (The Lux Guardians, #2) Page 11

  She finally stops when we reach the glass wall that separates us from Vast and the science team. The room is three times as wide as the biggest room I’ve ever been in—a ballroom in Carolina and Jeremy’s summer mansion—and twice as high. The room goes on for days and I already feel as though I’ve crossed the Pacific ocean with Garima. I stuff the wayward strands of my hair into my head scarf and straighten my tunic as I catch my breath, face as warm as these Bharatian days.

  “So,” I say, inhaling the antiseptic smell of cleanliness as we enter the main laboratory. “Wasn’t there supposed to be a demonstration of some kind?”

  Garima races to what I assume is her work station, ever quick. She pointedly ignores a tut from her colleague. I follow my eccentric friend, allowing myself a smirk.

  “Finally.” Vast manages to project disapproval without changing an inch of his face or a note of his voice. How does he do that? “I thought you were going to gossip all day.” He switches to Hindi to speak with the other scientists—orders I assume from the way the scientists become a flurry of movement. Beakers and phials are collected and deposited on the table in front of us, and the gold-green-silver-blue ‘cure’ is produced from a locked box.

  “You’re familiar with the Miracle,” Vast speaks to me in English, gesturing to a test tube held by a round-faced girl in her twenties with a sea-green hijab. “This is its antithesis. Devika, begin the process now.” The girl, Devika, disappears through a hidden door in the wall to ‘begin the process’. Whatever in the world that means.

  I’m irritated by the first part of what Vast said—I am in no way familiar with the Miracle, since nobody will tell me a thing about it—that it takes me a moment to realise what else he said. What is the antithesis of a cure?

  A weapon.

  I’m flung back to the fear I left in eighteen seventy eight, with my brother on his grief-fuelled manhunt for an organisation that refused to be found. It’s trying to recover the Lux and the Weapon all over again, to stop the destruction that will surely come to pass with them in the wrong hands. Except this time I’m unsure. Are these the wrong hands for a weapon to be in? Or are these the right hands? Weapons, as well as being tools of ills and evil, can be used for good, for much needed change, for an end to a dark era … can’t they?

  I don’t know.

  I raise my eyes to the Guardians’ leader with grim reluctance. “Show me what it does.”

  ***

  Miya

  14:44. 21.10.2040. The Free Lands, Northlands, Manchester.

  I narrow my eyes at every person in the crowd before us, searching for the biggest threat. I find him—tall, old, weathered, and balding. His hand rests on a big gun, everything about his posture relaxed and easy. He’s a soldier for sure, maybe even ex-Official like Siah, though he’s old enough to have been in one of the armies from before. I’m suspicious of him instantly.

  At his side, in the direct centre of the group, is a skinny black girl about Yosiah’s age, her chin stuck out like she’s the most important woman in the world. Her curling white hair draws my attention first but her shrewd eyes hold it. Given where she stands in the middle of the crowd and the way she’s scanning the Guardians— for Alba, I’d guess—this girl must be in charge here. That explains the bleached hair. Rich people in Forgotten London used to do the same. She’s important and powerful and I hate her as instantly as I’m wary of her bodyguard.

  Around the blonde girl and the army man, children of all ages have clustered. Women as old as Alba and men even older hold them back. I’ve never seen so many old people in my life. They didn’t exist in Forgotten London. We die before twenty and it’s a fact of life. My mum lived to thirty two because she spent most of our credits on black market drugs, but most of us? Dead. I doubt they have those drugs in Manchester, but how else do they stay alive?

  Tom clings to my hand hard, as wary of these people as I am. I catch a red blur moving in my peripheral vision and nearly break my neck spinning to it. Yosiah’s already fastened onto the place I’m looking but there’s nothing there.

  “Soldiers,” he says. At my expression he clarifies, “Civilian soldiers, not Officials.”

  I nod. When the panic wears off, I’m glad I know what to expect. The old man in the brown dress that took over from Alba introduces himself to the Manchester people, clear and calm, trying, I reckon, to make us appear harmless and friendly. He can speak for himself.

  I glance around, catching more creeping figures. They’re all dressed in different colours and styles but I still look for a uniform. Without a way to identify who can kill us, how am I supposed to defend my family? They could turn on us in a second and we’d be caught off guard. I wrap my fingers around the knife at my waist. The blonde woman steps forward with a cold smile.

  “Welcome to Manchester.” Her voice is deep, low. She doesn’t seem like she’s going to order her soldiers onto us right now but I don’t risk dropping my guard. “We’re happy to host you here. We’ve cleared a place for you to sleep and a meal will be waiting for you in the square when you’re ready. Treat this town as you would your own.” She gestures to a ginger haired girl in the crowd. “Maddie will show you to your building.”

  With a word from our speaker, leader, whatever he is—I should probably pay attention to his name next time—most of The Guardians trail after the girl. At this point I’m pretty sure they’re just following the promise of a bed and food. The Guardians’ council stay behind—Timofei, the old guy in the dress, a man with a huge moustache, an albino guy my age, and a dark woman with the features of a hawk. We stand close by Timofei, right on the edge of being Guardians. We’re not ordered to leave so I guess we qualify as important, thanks to Honour’s celebrity status and our immunity to The Sixteen Strains.

  Nobody has brought up us being immune yet but every time a new Guardian speaks to us I expect them to. Timofei too, sometimes, though I think he’s too weird about his connection to—and his kiss with—Yosiah to pry. Mostly we have two minute conversations, sticking to exciting subjects such as the weather, before he has to rush off to something important. I think he’s scared of Yosiah, to be honest, but I’m not sure why.

  The civilian soldiers hovering at the edges converge, forming a ring of bodies around the Manchester people. Holding my knife isn’t enough; I take it out, hold it at my side. Tom glances at it but doesn’t question. Livy looks ready to snatch it out of my hand and attack them herself. It wouldn’t surprise me if she did.

  The blonde woman introduces herself formally as Dagné—a name our speaker mispronounces twice, first as Dana, then as Danny, instead of the way she said it: dan-yay. I snort every time he gets it wrong. Dagné’s face darkens at the error. The other Manchester people introduce themselves but I forget all their names except Marc—army guy. I won’t need the rest of their names so why bother remembering them?

  Boring pleasantries after boring pleasantries send me yawning. The strangers have the same thought, more and more of them disappearing. Eventually there’s only three—Dagné, Marc, and a sharp faced Asian girl who keeps her head down, either uncomfortable with new people or disinterested. The sword across her back and gun at her hip makes me think the latter. You can’t be shy if you’re a protector.

  The Guardians—we—outnumber them now but they don’t seem to notice or care. I make an attempt to listen to them but it’s either strategy and planning that I don’t understand, or enquiries about people we’re missing—it wasn’t just Alba who died in the Hull explosion. The Guardians lost seven. After ten minutes of awkward small talk, we’re guided up a wide street lined with old glass-fronted shops.

  Mangled metal benches are dotted in the middle of the paved road; Tom decides it’s a good idea to jump onto one and balance on the thin bench spine. I grab his hand and yank him down with a stern look. Instead of cringing under the force of my glare he snickers under his breath, pleased with himself. Infuriating little rat.

  “Such a child,” Livy mutters, as if she is
n’t younger than him.

  I tune out Dagné as she blathers on at the front of the group about the self-sufficient state of the town. I couldn’t care less about the canal filtration system—whatever that is—or how they leach electricity from an Official power port a few hours away.

  The Asian woman keeps cutting looks at us, specifically at Honour. I watch her watch him, her small mouth pressed into a thin line. I make a mental note to watch out for her. Whatever reason she has for paying special attention to Honour can’t be good.

  Silently, we make the decision to ditch the boring council and the Manchester leaders. Honour and his sister branch off first, joined quickly by Dalmar and Hele, and then the rest of our band just sort of ambles after them. I’ve got no idea where we’re going but the town seems a lot smaller than Forgotten London, so we can’t get that lost.

  Apparently we can.

  Dalmar sighs for the fifth time, stopping us. We stand in a hopeless, defeated circle to figure out what to do.

  “We could just drop here,” I suggest. I feel half dead after all the walking. “The floor looks really comfy.”

  “I concur.” Branwell drops to the ground without a second thought. “If only for a few minutes.”

  We sit there for an hour in the mouth of a damp alley, with Tom asleep in my lap and Olive against my side, fighting her closing eyes. Dalmar still has a pack of cards, so we improvise a game of poker with small rocks as chips and favours as stakes. I lose one favour to Dalmar, and gain four—two from Honour who sucks at playing, one from Siah who gnashes his teeth at losing to me yet again, and one from Hele who smiles helplessly when she loses.

  Eventually two Manchester civilians find us—a stranger and the woman who was watching Honour. She looks at each of us, her lips pursed, and says, “You shouldn’t wander off again. I’ll show you to the Station.”

  On tired legs we make our way to a flat semicircle of a building with a front made entirely of glass and a huge clock face in its centre. The massive space inside has been divided by sheets of plastic and long lengths of fabric pinned and clipped and hammered together to make small ramshackle rooms. We weave our way around corridors of cloth and blankets to four tents huddled against a back wall.

  My little family claims a room with two thin beds and a wider one. I suspect it was put together for us, and a cold stone settles in my stomach at that thought. If the people of Manchester already know enough about us to put together a room, what else do they know? I shake my head, my hair so greasy it barely even moves. I’m being paranoid. I need sleep.

  Barely awake now, I say bye to everyone and stumble into our tent. I doubt by morning I’ll remember the poker or the favours I’m owed.

  Tom crawls into one bed and shuffles around until he finds a comfortable spot—and then he’s out in a second. Livy takes the other small bed, after I insist three times she needs to sleep, and even though she’s huffy about it I can tell she’s relieved when her head hits the pillow.

  I watch my siblings like the frantic sister I am until they fall asleep, and then I drop the tension from my body with a long-repressed sigh. I eye Siah as, with gritted teeth, he lowers himself to the larger mattress, our bed. He struggles with his right leg. Badly.

  “Alright,” I say. “Enough.” I swing the backpack from my shoulders and pull out the first aid kit. “Roll your pants up.”

  “They won’t roll up.” Siah levels me with a look.

  “Then take them off.” I fix my jaw, fighting the horrible anxiety in my gut. I’m too tired for this embarrassment.

  The Guardian trousers Yosiah was given have long since changed to a beige-brown colour but even that doesn’t hide the rusty stain that appeared three days ago. I’ve been purposefully ignoring it, telling myself he’s fine, but his leg has obviously got worse so I’m gonna fix it. Yosiah searches me for a long moment, then he removes the dirty jeans, slow and timid. At first I look away but I force my eyes back. I won’t be squeamish or nervous about this, not when Siah’s in obvious pain and I might be able to help. I crouch on the floor in front of his legs and look over the wounds dotted across his amber skin.

  “What happened?”

  A long, deep scratch cuts across his old jagged scar, surrounded by small cuts and scrapes that have mostly healed. I curse him for not saying anything about it and reach for the first aid kit I stole in Harwich.

  “I landed badly when I jumped.” He doesn’t have to say when that was—it’s as sharp between us as a blade against my throat. “Caught my leg on a piece of broken metal.”

  I nod, pretending this doesn’t affect me at all. Playing nurse, all proper and emotionless. I clean the deeper wound with antiseptic and smother the scrapes with pain relief cream. “This is infected. You know that, right?”

  “Yes.”

  I bite my lip against the sharp words on my tongue and dab more antiseptic on the cut, spiteful. Siah clenches his jaw against a moan but the muscle twitching in his cheek is satisfying on its own. “Well, I think it’s clean,” I say, wrapping it more tightly than I need to. I tie off the bandage and jerk at the feel of fingers in my hair. “What—?”

  “Thank you. You didn’t have to do that.”

  “And let you die?” I scoff. “That’s likely.”

  “I won’t die. I’ve been taking antibiotics when you weren’t looking.”

  I scowl, sitting back cross-legged. “I’m always looking.”

  “I’ve noticed.” His expression turns sly. “Hiding things from you is nearly impossible.”

  “Good.” I wrestle my jacket and boots off and survey the thrown-together room. The side walls are made of fabric clipped and sewn together, with a brick wall at our back and two swaths of material making doors at the front. Inside are the three beds and a dark green backpack of—I’m assuming—essentials. I rifle through it as Siah puts his trousers back on.

  “How nice of them,” I snort. “They gave us chocolate. Because we’ll die without that for sure.”

  Siah, safely clothed, leans forward. “What else?”

  “Water and dried meat mostly. Bandages, painkillers. A—I don’t know what this is.”

  I hold it up. Siah squints.

  “I think that’s a flare.”

  “Oh. Useful. When Officials attack us, we can put on a light show. Make sure even more find us.”

  He rolls onto his back. “Stop being belligerent.”

  I shove everything back into the bag. There’s a few other things in the pockets that I can feel but I don’t investigate. I can’t be bothered. After my brief bout of anger at Siah, exhaustion has returned.

  “Tired?” Yosiah asks.

  “What do you think? We’ve been walking for years and sleeping on the ground.”

  He pulls me onto my back beside him. This mattress gives us more room than we had in the other beds we’ve shared but a shard of nervousness still lodges in my stomach. “You’re always grumpy when you’re tired,” he says.

  I elbow him in the ribs.

  “Thomas said your name in his sleep last night,” he tells me when I’ve become one with the mattress and given up with being angry at everything.

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” There’s something reluctant about his tone that makes my heart squeeze. I won’t like what comes next. “So I figured—” He inhales a tight breath and says, “Vian. My birth name is Vian. You should know that.”

  I prop myself up on an elbow, his words cutting into me for two reasons. I know his name now, the one he was given, not the one he gave himself. And he knows mine. That’s what he meant. Tom said Leah in his sleep. Yosiah knows the name my mother gave me.

  “Well,” I force out. “I don’t care about that. You’re Yosiah, end of story.”

  His chest deflates. When he echoes my words I feel the same tidal wave of relief. Minutes pass. Yosiah tugs on a lock of my hair until I look up at him.

  “We could stay here,” he says. “The Guardians will leave but we don’t have to.”


  I don’t see how this place can be any worse than Forgotten London so I say, “Yeah, why not?”

  He half-smiles at me, straightening my hair with his fingers. “I want to stay here,” he tells me quietly.

  “We’ve been here like, two hours,” I point out. “You can’t know Manchester yet. What if you hate it?”

  “We’ll find somewhere else.”

  I look at him long enough that he squirms. “What, in any random town we find?”

  “Yeah.”

  I let my eyes finally close. “You’re wild, Yosiah.”

  “Like you.”

  I tilt my head, acknowledging the truth. “Yeah. Like me.”

  ***

  Bennet

  15:12. 21.10.2040. Bharat, Delhi.

  I squint at the empty glass dish, wondering how such a boring object should warrant me having to wear plastic glasses despite the dish being trapped behind a glass wall as thick as my arm. I’ve been staring at it for three minutes now, the ticking of the wall clock just about driving me mad. Finally something looks as though it’s going to occur when a strange sort of mechanical arm whirrs to life. From the safety of the lab in which I stand, the team of scientists control its every move.

  Garima has the controller, standing impressively still for once. Waiting for Vast’s permission, she moves the lever on the remote. The metal arm responds to her slightest touch. I switch my attention between the robot and my friend with every second, not sure which to watch. Eventually, I decide to focus on the demonstration.

  With a grating creak, the arm tips a coating of an unnamed blue liquid into the dish. I don’t know what it is—nobody is willing to tell me too many details in case I, like the man who betrayed them before, turn out to be an American spy.

  It’s bizarre, I think, that they’d suspect me when I am entirely convinced the government in States is the Olympiae that haunted my past and killed my father. Why would I work for the people who ripped my family apart? I have only motive to do the opposite—to do everything within my power to destroy them. I suspect that thirst for vengeance is what convinced Vast to keep me here in the beginning, when I was only a strange girl with a strange recommendation from Mumbai on thin, rain speckled note paper. That message was all I had and I thank my stars for what I’ve been given, for what this New Delhi home has gifted me: friends, safety, purpose, and hope. Precious hope.