False Sight (11 page)

G

ane finishes and sinks into his chair. He pulls out a rag from his vest pouch and mops sweat from his brow. I stay on my feet, but just barely. The implications ...it’s too much. This was once New York—not mine, but close enough. I try to imagine the monsters spreading and multiplying, eating everything in their path. How do you fight a war against something like that? It’s a virus on a global scale.

We’ve been waiting for these monsters to come and conquer our world. But they’ve already done it to this world, decades ago. Noah somehow knows what they look like, so they have to be related to the creators. They have to be the monsters Mrs. North was so afraid of.

But the question
why?
remains unanswered. Why destroy this world?
Why destroy ours?
If our world is in the same danger that destroyed Gane’s world, then the creators have to be from a different universe entirely. One much more advanced.
Gane folds his rag and takes another drink. “So I ask you for the last time, where do you plan to take the eyeless?”
I speak quickly, before Nina can start. “She’s going to use them to conquer our world. She wants to make our world like yours.” I know it’s true. It all adds up. Nina knew where the entrance to the Black was, and she came here willingly. She wants to control the eyeless, to take them out of
this
world, where their job is clearly finished. It’s on to the next world... ours.
“She’s lying! She’s—”
Nina never finishes.
Gane roars and sweeps everything off his desk, bursting upright from his chair. He stretches his hand out to Nina, palm out, fingers spread; Nina chokes as her feet come off the ground. She drifts up . . . then
slams
hard into the floor. Her head bounces and she writhes on her stomach, moaning.
I don’t move.
Because I can’t. Gane holds me with his mind the entire time, like a vise. He’s crushing my chest, making it hard to

FALSE SIGHT
breathe. Then he releases me, and my knees wobble and my heart pounds. I start sweating in my burlap bag of an outfit.

Nina climbs to her feet, cautiously, eyes on the floor. A welt on her cheek grows before my eyes, deepening from red to purple.

“Do you want the eyeless gone or not?” Nina says quietly. “On my terms, yes,” Gane says.
The elevator rises out of the floor behind us.
“Miranda North, I will speak with you later,” he says,

eyes on Nina though he’s speaking to me. “You may rejoin the others.”
“Don’t let her do it—”
“Go!”
I nod and close my mouth. Until I can get Nina alone, I have to trust Gane is smart enough to see through her decep- tion. If any monster is here to beguile, it’s Nina. I wanted to giveSequelthatchancetoreturn,butthere’stoomuchatstake now. Too much . . .
“Go, now,” he says, quieter.
I nearly say thank you but realize how pathetic that would be. The fact that I’m about to return to Peter and Rhys is almost enough to make me smile. The only reason I
wouldn
’
t
want to leave is so Nina can’t try to manipulate Gane. Who knows what she’ll say or do when I’m gone?
In the next second, Noah is standing in front of me, and I almost yelp. “You can’t let her stay with Gane,” he says, almost panicked. “You can’t.”
Why not?
“Because she’s going to trick him. He’s underestimating her. Listen, I know things about Nina I shouldn’t know. Some- one put this information in my head. I think—”
Gane is staring me down. “Leave under your own power, Miranda.”
There
’
s nothing I can do.
Noah sighs. “I know.”
I turn around and see the two in red have returned to escort me. The man and girl with their outlaw masks. They’re stoic as before, hands clasped behind them, eyes forward but not looking at anything in particular, especially not me.
I step into the elevator and turn around, ready to rejoin Peter and Rhys. Nina and Gane watch as the doors begin to close.
In the last moment, right before the doors shut, Nina turns her head and smiles at me.
Being alone with Gane is exactly what she wants.

W

e ride down as fast as we ascended. My stomach flutters and my feet go light. I feel their eyes on my back, but refuse to give them the satisfaction

of turning around.

I break the silence as we step onto the main floor. “Hey, could you guys fill in the part between my coming through the Black and waking up in that cell with different clothes on?”

I hear the girl’s steps falter, then resume.
The man says, “You came through unconscious, which happens for everyone the first time they go through. Your armor was removed for obvious reasons.”
His voice sounds familiar in a way. It takes everything not to turn around and rip his mask off. We enter the tunnel lined with torches and their footsteps become crisp. They stay a few paces back, which I’m grateful for.
“Who removed it?” I say.
“I did,” the girl says.
“Everyone gets knocked out the first time, huh?”
“Yes,” the girl says. I’m surprised they’re talking to me at all.
“Who were the other interlopers? The ones who came before us?”
“I was one once,” the man says, which makes me stop, but his gentle hand on my back pushes me forward, and my spirit rises with a shred of hope. More from the way he guided me than his words. I wait, not sure what it means.
We pass through the iron door into the jail. Peter and Rhys jump up from where they were resting against the wall.
“What happened?” Peter says, coming to the bars.
But it’s the man behind me who answers. “Quiet, all of you.” His tone has changed. He’s not telling us to shut up because we’re prisoners; he’s doing it because he doesn’t want anyone to hear. My heart thrums.
Please don’t let it be a trick.
Rhys’s mouth drops open and his eyes narrow. Behind me, the iron door shuts softly but doesn’t lock.
“Take off the mask,” Rhys says.
“I said
quiet
,” the man in red growls.

FALSE SIGHT

The cell door swings open, whether automatically or under the man’s power, I don’t know. And I don’t care.
“Step out,” the man says.
The girl hovers by the door, shifting from foot to foot. They’re as tense as I am. Which is the only reason I don’t think they’re acting under Commander Gane’s orders.
“Is this a trick?” Rhys says.
If it is, it doesn’t make sense. Gane has the power to move us however he wants to. He doesn’t need to trick us.
“Boy, I don’t have the time or the patience. Follow me, or rot here. Assuming Gane doesn’t dismantle you first to see what makes an interloper tick.”
Peter and Rhys share a look, then step out of the cage. The two in red whirl around and open the door again. They move fast and so do we. My heart pounds, but not from fear. Even with the horrors that lie outside this building, we have a chance if we’re together.
“What about our armor?” Rhys says.
“It’s taken care of,” the girl says over her shoulder. Up close, her eyes are the color of honey.
“We need something hidden within the suits,” Peter adds.
“Taken care of,” the man says. It’s enough for us to follow him—not like we have an abundance of options.
We exit the tunnel onto the main floor of the beehive, then start along the perimeter wall, following the circumference of the floor counterclockwise.
Suddenly, Noah walks beside me. “You sure this is a good idea?” He cranes his head down to peer into my face, but I refuse to look at him.
Nope. But it’s the only option I see at the moment.
“Because right now we know where Nina is. If we leave, we might not find her again until it’s too late.”
If we stay, it
’
s as prisoners.
“Listen, I think I know who Nina really is.”
Who?
“You know the Miranda you saw in Mrs. North’s memories? The one we think is the Original you?”
Yes.
How could I forget? It was the first time we realized that our creators seem to have creators of their own.
“Yeah, I think Nina is her
daughter
. A clone the director raised as her own child.”
The director?
I almost stop to look at him, but we’re moving too fast.
“Almost there,” the man says from the front. We’re approaching the next tunnel cut into the wall.
That’s when the elevator door in the pillar opens and Com- mander Gane steps out, Nina at his side.

W

here are you taking them?” Gane calls from the pillar. No alarm in his voice, not yet. With each passing second, I expect to feel his mind grab my

body, to hold me in place.
“Don’t stop,”
the girl hisses at us.
The man breaks off from our group and faces Gane. “Com-

mander, the scientists wish to study the interlopers in their laboratory.”

Footsteps clack on the stone floor—Gane walking toward us, fast. “No, no no no. No one moves them without my per- mission. Take them back.”

By now we’re halfway into the tunnel.

“Stop!” he yells. I feel the first brush of his mind against my skin. It evaporates the second I’m out of his sight.
“Run!” the girl says, sprinting ahead. “The horses know the way!”
Horses?
I don’t have time to think about it. Peter and Rhys fly past me, and I coax a little more strength from my limbs until I’m running just as fast. Faster, even. A hiss carries down the tun- nel from behind, and I recognize the sound—smoke grenade. Over my shoulder, a wall of gray smoke billows after us. The man in red bursts through it, arms pumping.
“Gane’s blinded!” he shouts. “Keep moving.”
He doesn’t have to tell us twice. The tunnel slopes down, around a corner, then up again to the exit. I’m almost giddy with the freedom of open sky above me, even though it’s not my sky. I catch the landscape in a glance—ancient rotting sky- scrapers, the towering sharp beehive of the Verge surrounded by a moat of black water. The tunnel traveled under the moat and let us out at the water’s edge.
Like the girl said, five horses wait just ahead in the street, next to the burned-out hulk of what was once a taxi. They stamp their feet and churn up dust with their hooves. The man types a code into the keypad outside the tunnel’s opening and a portcullis slams down.
“What is this?” Rhys says, head craned back at the ruin around us.
“What—?”
“Shut up, he can still grab us,” the man says, breathless. “Take a horse.”
Four of the horses are all black. The last one is gray, but only because of the dust and grit matted in her coat. Patches of her shine through brilliant white. None of them have saddles.
Peter and Rhys are slow to move toward the horses, obvi- ously stunned by their surroundings.
“Now!” the man roars.
The gray one turns its eye to me, as much of an invitation as I’ll get. I grab a hank of its mane and swing my leg up and over.
Smoke pours through the bars in the portcullis. I hear Gane coughing in the cloud, much too close.
“Dammit, boy!” The man circles his black horse past Rhys, who refuses to climb on. Not the best time for his trust issues to surface. Peter and his horse are already twenty yards down the street, the Empire State Building towering behind him. He stops and swings the horse around, mouth falling open. I follow his gaze—
The last free horse whinnies as its hooves come off the ground. It hovers under Gane’s power, legs thrashing at the air. My gray steps sideways, nimble as a dancer, as the black throws its head around, wide-eyed, lips pulling back from its teeth as Commander Gane lifts it higher. I grab the gray’s mane with both hands as she shifts under me. She rears, kick- ing with her front legs, and comes down, but she doesn’t leave the other horses behind, even with my frantic heels digging into her side.
“Go girl!” I plead.
Gane is at the bars, choking on the smoke cloud, hand stretched through with fingers spread wide. He snaps his wrist like he’s tossing a chip into his mouth, and the horse arcs up and over the mouth of the tunnel like a tossed football. I watch, frozen, as it plunges into the black moat.
Rhys decides it’s time to go right about then.
“Ride!” the man shouts. The girl in red blows past me, and Peter’s black horse kicks up a plume of dust as he keeps the lead. Rhys scrambles onto the back of the man’s horse, and together we pound the dirt, side by side. My horse moves under me like liquid, carrying me away from Gane and the Verge. I feel Gane’s mind crawl over my skin, tugging at my rags and limbs. I begin to rise off the gray, but clamp my feet down at the last second. She seems to run faster as I settle onto her back again.
And then we’re out of range, with a cloud of dust two stories high rising between the buildings, eclipsing the Verge. Gane’s scream of frustration echoes off the steel and glass, disturbing crows roosting in the broken windows. They take flight, crisscrossing over us, cawing. And I’m laughing, not because I’m happy, but because I’m out in the open, free. Wind tears at my hair and makes my eyes water. Eventually the man, with Rhys holding on behind him, takes the lead, and we fol- low him as he winds through the dusty paths between build- ings. I’m grateful for the action, as it gives me a break from thinking, from trying to understand how this place is possible.
I see the remains of the city as we pass. An orange-brown lump of metal that used to be a car here. Broken, pebbled pieces of blacktop there. Wide gray streaks of dust border some of the buildings, the powdered remains of sidewalks. We pass the north side of the Empire State Building; fires burn within, dark shapes crouched around them. A twisted, half-rusted sign on the ground says
5
av
.
People huddle in the doorways of buildings, watching as we pound past. I’m not laughing anymore. I look at a world near death and realize this could happen to us. Nina wants to take the eyeless through the Black, and as far as I know, the Black leads to us.
It makes me want to go back for her, but I don’t. We’re not ready. The two in red broke us out for a reason, and I assume they’re willing to help.
More people come out of their dwellings to watch.
A cry rises up, carried ahead of us. “Red riders! Red riders!”
“Don’t stop!” the man shouts next to me. “Just don’t stop!” We’re at full gallop, a storm of hooves louder than thunder, drowning out the thump of blood in my veins. I feel my gray breathing beneath me, the muscles in her back flexing each time her legs come off the ground.
“Keep going!” the man shouts.
As the arrows begin to fall.

They come from above. Ragged men lean out from the bro - ken windows on the second and third and fourth floors of the buildings. The cry in the street is no longer
“Red riders!”
but
“Meat!”
and the arrows zip down from the left and right, cracking into the hard-packed dirt or ricocheting off chunks of blacktop. One grazes my horse’s shoulder and she jumps, almost throwing me off her back. I grasp her mane tighter, squeezing with my legs, hunching, trying to make myself two dimensions.

Another comes right at my face. No thought—I lean, and it passes through my hair, severing a lock. I feel the strands flutter down my back then catch in the wind. My stomach clenches long after the arrow is gone, things moving too fast for me to process.

The girl in red has one in her thigh, but by the way she rides you wouldn’t know it. The red fabric of her pants is darker around the wound, and the stain is growing. I close my eyes, waiting for one to pierce my neck, wishing I had my armor. Then I open them, because wishing isn’t going to get us through this.

The men are terrible shots, but numerous. The arrows con - tinue to whistle down, buried shafts snapping under hooves.
I see an archer aim for Peter from the second floor on the left. His neck is wrapped in a filthy towel, thin arms straining against the bow. He tracks Peter as we approach his building.
“Peter, watch out!” My voice is drowned in the roar of hooves.
The archer fires. The arrow flies down, wobbling, and sinks into the chest of Peter’s horse.