The Wandering (The Lux Guardians, #2) Page 8

  I walk faster to match her pace. “Too busy?”

  “Of course. He’s giving everything he has to them. To us.”

  “We should kidnap him, force him to spend time away from work.

  Hele’s peal of laughter brightens the misty grey townscape. “When?”

  “When’s the next meeting?”

  “Tonight, I think.”

  “Then. We follow him and just as he’s about to go in, we steal him. Take him to some abandoned pub and have a family night. Just us. No stress or worrying allowed.”

  Hele stops walking without warning and hugs me tightly. Her dress is cold and dripping but her embrace is warm as the sun. She touches my cheek with the back of her fingers. “Thank you.”

  “For what?”

  “Being so kind.”

  “But I’m—”

  “Don’t argue with me, I’m thanking you.”

  I close my mouth.

  “I don’t say this enough, and I know Dalmar doesn’t either, but I’m so grateful to know you. We both are. I wouldn’t want to lose you for anything.”

  I duck my head.

  “You’re a sweet, sweet boy, Honour.”

  “I’m only three years younger than you, stop calling me boy.”

  She hugs me closer, wrapping both arms around my shoulders. “But you are a boy. I know you’re hard on yourself. I know you blame yourself for a lot of things. But you shouldn’t. You’re still so young, and it’s not your fault any of this has happened to you.”

  My throat is tight. I clench my jaw.

  “Go,” she says, releasing me.

  “What?”

  “Go, explore, wander. Go do what you used to in Forgotten London. I’ll watch your sister and your friends. They’re my family too. Go and be carefree for an hour.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You can. Nothing important is going to change in an hour. Please.”

  I shake my head.

  “I promised Dalmar I’d stop your worrying. If I go back and tell him you’re even more worried now, he’ll be twice as distressed.”

  “That’s emotional blackmail.” I lean up and kiss her cheek. “One hour. No longer.”

  “Don’t hurry back.”

  “You’re such a pain,” I say over my shoulder, heading up a sloping road. Hele smiles wide. She knows I love her.

  With nothing to do and nobody to watch over, I stand on the top of a hill and watch the angry waves of the sea. For a while I just let my thoughts run away. I’ve been repressing, not letting myself think about what I was told yesterday so I could act normal. So no one would be able to tell anything was wrong. But something is wrong and it’s eating away at me.

  How many years did I lose? I remember a life of scraping by, barely living, on the streets with my sister. But now that I seriously think about it, my memories could span just a few months, or even one. I should remember more than this.

  I swallow the lump in my throat. No worrying, that’s what Hele said. No worrying.

  I distract myself with the landscape. This area of the town is populated with short, wide buildings. Instinctively glancing around myself for shadows—Officials—I see a flicker of motion from the corner of my eye. It’s Miya, up at the blocky, blue building marked as Port of Hull. I lumber up the hill, not enjoying the return of the ache behind my knees.

  Miya is staring through a window that’s taller than she is and as wide as a ship, her lips pursed in concentration. I stop beside her, leaning against the glass. Miya spares me a silent nod of hello then returns to the staring. Now that I’m closer, her focus looks more analytical than curious. She’s planning something. Oh God.

  I ignore my face in the window, peering into the room. I don’t have to look to know my eyes are sunken, my skin pulled tight over my skull. Every day I look worse. Every day I feel worse. Maybe this is what it means to be States’s tool. Maybe I just destroy everything around me until eventually I destroy myself.

  Inside the Port of Hull building, I can’t see anything but plastic furniture. Chairs cling to each other in fours and fives, tripped over when the flares hit. They look a lot like a drunk gang of friends on a Friday night. There are no more clues than the chairs to what the room behind the glass is.

  Staring at a twisted chair, I think, I can’t tell Tia about what might have happened to her. She’s not a carrier—The Guardians know that much—but States could have done God knows what to her, made her into anything. She doesn’t need that now, not after losing Marrin.

  I pinch the inside of my elbow. No worrying.

  “What is this place?” I ask Miya, pressing my nose to the glass.

  “Some kind of waiting room.” She’s still squinting, calculating.

  “Waiting room for what?”

  She makes a noise like muh, which I take to mean ‘How the fuck should I know?’

  I glance at Miya through the rain and find her watching me. Her black hair is plastered in slashes to her forehead, her red vest clinging to her body. She doesn’t wear a jacket, even though it’s raining. She doesn’t give a crap.

  First Hele, now Miya—am I the only person pissed off with this rain? I shake droplets from my hair, water sliding inside the collar of my jacket and down my spine. I just made it worse. Great.

  Miya is pointing over her shoulder. I follow the line of her hand to the boat.

  “Oh,” I say. “So there was a … a station for boats? Like the tube stations?”

  “I guess.” She produces a penknife and a hair slide from her jeans pocket. “Wanna go in?”

  “No,” I say instantly. “I don’t think we’re meant to go in there.”

  “Ha!” She smirks, kneeling on the wet ground as she jams the hair clip into the lock on the door. “Says who? The Guardians?” Within half a minute, the lock clicks open, the door swinging backward. Miya raises an eyebrow at me. “How many rules have you broken in the last month, Honour? Five? Ten? You’re a genuine criminal—it’s about time you started reaping the rewards.”

  “I can do without the reaping,” I say, nervously looking around. Nobody seems to have noticed that Miya has broken into a building. Nobody’s even near. I suppose no one would really care, since The Guardians stole an entire boat, but it still bothers me.

  From inside the glass room Miya shouts, “Holy shit, look at this thing!”

  I bolt inside the building without thinking. “What?”

  Miya’s smile is devilish when I catch up to her. “I’m sorry, Honour, there is no thing. But you’re in now. Might as well have a look around.”

  I groan my annoyance but follow her through the dishevelled waiting room. In some parts the glass has been shaken out of window panes, making the carpet a wicked obstacle course. I step carefully. Miya vaults over the shattered glass like a wild animal. The glint in her eye suggests she’s a deadly one.

  “You’re terrible,” I mutter as we emerge into a dark corridor. Tiny beams of light slip through cracks in the wall. I watch dust float in them, dwelling again on what happened to me in Underground London Zone.

  Miya’s quiet laugh is pleased. “The worst.”

  As the dust motes spin and fly in their cage of light, I decide nothing has changed. If the Officials did do something to make me a carrier, they did it years ago. I’ve been living with it all this time, unknowing. I’m not suddenly dangerous now that I know. I might be a ticking bomb but I’m not gonna go off right this minute. I’ve lived through it and I’m still alive.

  “What?”

  Miya is watching me curiously. It makes me uncomfortable. “Look what I found,” she says. “A restricted door.”

  “Miya,” I warn. The door is metal and armoured. I don’t think a hair pin is going to open it. She doesn’t look any less determined, though.

  “Honour, come over here for a minute.”

  I cross the corridor, frowning. I open my mouth to ask what she’s planning to do, but my words are cut off by a burst of crackling noise and then a massive bang.
I flinch.

  I run a hand over my face. “Where did you get explosives?”

  “I might have swiped a few things from the Guardians’ stores when they weren’t looking.” Miya edges the door open with her boot. The room is pitch black until Miya switches on a torch and a narrow beam of light is thrown from her hand.

  “What kind of things?”

  “Batteries, explosives, water purification tablets. I might have also taken seven knives.”

  I turn in a circle, taking in the storage room. Shelves bisect the walls, running around the small square of lino on the floor. Half of the shelves are empty, but the others are cluttered with guns—not small hand guns like the Guardians have or the nimble electric guns the Officials carry. These guns are long and bulky and look like they could do a lot of damage. I let out a colourful word and run my hands through my hair. I hate guns. I can’t explain why I like them any less than knives or explosives or the Weapon, but I do.

  “Why would they have needed this many guns?” I look at them with disgust. “They weren’t surrounded by Officials. They didn’t have to live with States. Their world was—”

  “Sunshine and fucking daisies, I know.” Miya turns her glare around the room. “Go get Alba.”

  I hurry back through the waiting room, being less careful of the glass now, and burst out onto the rain-slick hill, half sliding down the grass.

  The Guardians are still bustling around the ship at the port, unloading cardboard boxes and big bits of machinery. They’re scavenging, I realise, taking apart the boat.

  When I tell Alba what Miya and I found, she folds away the old map of The United Kingdom she’s been using to navigate our journey and becomes a hurricane of action. Commands get shouted, Guardians spurred into movement. Dalmar asks me question after question about the weapons, filing every bit of information away before running off to join Alba inside the blue building. I’m not sure if it’s his knowledge of weaponry from working in the munitions factory back in F.L. that makes him curious or whether he senses how uneasy the guns have made me. My hands are shaking.

  I find Tia, hoping for the millionth time that she’ll speak, that she’ll settle my nerves. “You okay?” I ask. She just nods, her attention on the flow of Guardians heading up the road.

  Furious muttering alerts me to Miya’s presence before I spot her—I’m pretty sure she’s the only person inventive enough to come up with the words I’m hearing. Her curses die on her tongue when her little sister sprints to Miya and demands to know where she’s been.

  “Why, did something happen?” Miya’s eyes survey the area. They settle on Yosiah and her brother. “Olive?”

  Olive sounds exactly like Miya when she’s angry. “You disappeared. Yosiah was worried.”

  Yosiah joins them, a flash of frustration crossing his face when he stumbles. “I actually said Miya would be fine because she can look after herself.” He adds, “You were the one who was worried.”

  “I was not.” Olive scowls mutinously at Yosiah. She huffs dramatically and stomps off, dropping onto the road a few metres away.

  Miya explains to Yosiah what we found in the Port of Hull, her brother’s face hidden by her stomach, tanned arms clinging to her. She flattens his hair absentmindedly.

  Yosiah passes Miya her jacket. “What were you doing in there?” he asks.

  “It was Honour’s idea.”

  “What? I didn’t—I said—”

  Miya smirks. She was right—she really is the worst.

  Miya’s mouth opens to speak, and I ready myself with a quick rapport—

  But everything stops, tips on its side, hushes.

  The next thing I know, my face is pressed into the road, my arm throbbing violently. I can hear nothing but a shrill ringing that’s getting steadily louder. A solid weight is pressing me into the ground.

  I can’t move.

  I don’t understand.

  A prolonged second passes before the weight lifts from my back. I sit up, rubbing the ache in my elbow. Horatia staring at me with huge, frightened eyes. My body moves without my mind, pulling my twin into my arms. Her fear is my fear, and mine passes between us, multiplying.

  I look outside the bubble of fear and family we’ve made and now I understand. I know what happened. People lay on the floor, some conscious but others not. Others possibly dead. My stomach turns over.

  I gather myself together and find my legs, helping Tia up with me. Most people clamber to their feet like my sister and I, gaping at the collapsed, fiery structure that was, minutes ago, the Port of Hull building. Other people never get up. Smoke filters into the sky, light grey against charcoal. Orange tinges the air around the blue wreckage, unseen flames devouring.

  I can’t breathe.

  I start forward, forgetting my arms are around Tia. She holds me back by the collar of my shirt. I’m gasping, guttering, falling apart.

  Alba was in that building! Guardians were in—

  My next thought is wrenched from my mouth. I don’t recognise the scream that rips the air in two.

  “Dalmar!”

  Horatia can’t restrain me any longer. I’m fighting too hard, too desperate, too scared, too frantic. I lurch in a thousand directions because I don’t know what to do, where to go, how to do anything ever again. My breaths wheeze from my lungs and my head starts to spin as I start up the base of the hill, my whole body shaking.

  I only stop when I’m held back by someone too strong to fight. Cold hands frame my face. I can’t see through the film of my tears to who they belong to.

  “I’m here.” That voice reduces my gasping cries to shattering sobs. “I’m here.”

  My fingers become claws that grip and tear at his shirt and Dalmar talks to me in hushed tones as he crushes me against his body.

  Gradually, I regain my senses, my vision clearing.

  Eventually, I accept that Dalmar is here, that he’s alive, nowhere near the building that exploded.

  I blink until my eyes clear and look him over. He has a scratch above his eyebrow but he’s in one piece. “God,” I rasp, stepping back. “I thought—”

  Dal grabs my chin, forcing me to look him in the eye, steady blue-green on panicked brown. “I am here, Honour. I’m okay.”

  I nod and nod and nod. He’s okay.

  A gentle hand brushes over my hair. I don’t have to look to know it’s Hele.

  “Dal? Is Alba—?”

  “She was inside.” His mouth is a thin line. “She’s gone.”

  I drop my eyes to the floor. “Sorry.”

  Tia finds me, an arm snaking around my waist to comfort me even though I have no right to be upset. I barely knew Alba. I only met her days ago. If I were thinking with logic, I might worry what will happen to The Guardians now that Alba is dead, but logic might as well not exist right now. All I’m worried about is Dalmar.

  Hele holds out a hand to him and he stumbles into her arms, his eyes holding more fear than pain. Hurt and grief, I know, will come later.

  Tia and I huddle around him until the four of us are all parts of the same creature. I rest my forehead against Dal’s shoulder and decide that enough is enough. We have all hurt too much, grieved too much. I tighten my grip. I refuse to let anything else hurt my family.

  ***

  Miya

  22:42. 14.10.2040. The Free Lands, Northlands.

  The building we’re sleeping in tonight is a million miles from both the ship and the green house in Harwich. The grey brick of it rises into the dark clouds, decorative metalwork running up the side in an attempt to cover up the fact that it’s a great eyesore. If the green house was neat and pretty, this place is a clumsy mess.

  My legs barely carry me into the lobby, tired feet slapping on white floor tiles. The walls are painted white to match them. The Guardians ought to love this place—aside from the odd flash of purple and the beige of a wooden counter, it’s as blank as their base was. A purple sign hanging crookedly from the wall over the counter reads Premr Inn. S
ome of the letters must have fallen off because there are irregular gaps between them. Like everything else in the diseased lands, this building is only half of what it once was.

  Before we came in some guy in a dress assigned us all to a room and explained that although the furniture may be upside down and the rooms untidy, the beds should still be useable. The building itself seems to agree—the basic shape of it stands as it must have when it was a hotel, but the top floors have slipped off and crumpled on the ground. It’s the same with most of the tall buildings we see. Solar flares, I guess, melted them right off.

  We traipse through the entryway, following slumped Guardians up a staircase that smells of dust and damp.

  Olive trips over her feet, exhaustion beginning to get to her. I pick her up by her scrawny arms and balance her on my hip, ignoring every one of her complaints and insults. It surprises me how much she’s changed since I left. Thomas is the same excitable, loving brother as he always was, but Livy has changed. She’s become harsher, lost the innocent softness she used to have. Her vocabulary has expanded to twice its size, filled with curses and insults and God knows what else. She’s had to grow up far too soon because of me, because I left them behind with nobody but mum to care for them.

  Olive will have had to pick up my jobs—Thomas was always too sensitive to survive in the world outside our front door, and mum would do nothing but drink and throw things at the wall for sport. Livy will have had to work, collect the family’s credits, and brave the intimidating sight of Camberwell Zone on allocation day. I try to picture her there, surrounded by people older and more dangerous than her, but I have to force the image out of my head before it can form. Anything could have happened to her. Anything might have happened to her. No wonder she’s changed—she had to change to survive, just like I did.