Authors: Erin Bowman
Frozen
For my husband:
who shows me the road when I’m lost,
and the woods when I need to wander.
CONTENTS
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Fourteen
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Twenty-One
Twenty-Two
Twenty-Three
Twenty-Four
Twenty-Five
Twenty-Six
Twenty-Seven
Twenty-Eight
Twenty-Nine
Thirty
Thirty-One
Thirty-Two
Thirty-Three
Thirty-Four
Thirty-Five
Thirty-Six
Thirty-Seven
Thirty-Eight
WE HAVE BEEN WALKING FOR
two weeks. Nothing tails us but snow and crows and dark shadows of doubt. The days grow shorter, the evenings frigid. I thought I’d be able to handle the cold.
I was wrong.
Back in Claysoot, our winters were hard, but while our homes were drafty and crude, we still had shelter. Even if I had to bundle up and head into the woods for a day of hunting, I could always return to a house. I could light a fire and put on clean socks and cling to a cup of hot tea as though my life depended on it.
Now it is just endless walking. Endless cold. At night we have only tents. And exposed fires. And blankets and jackets and countless additional layers that are never enough to chase the chill from our bones.
It’s funny how Claysoot actually looks good on some days. When it’s freezing and no amount of blowing on my hands seems to warm them, I can’t help but think of the comforts of my old home. I have to remind myself that Claysoot was never a home. A home is a place you are safe, at ease, able to let down your guard. Claysoot is none of these things. It will never be these things. The Laicos Project made sure of that, starting the day Frank locked children away to serve his own needs, corralling them like cattle, raising them to create the perfect soldiers: Forgeries. Human machines to do his bidding. Perfect replicas of the people he imprisoned.
And now we march to one of those prisons, a forgotten group in the Western Territory of AmEast’s vast countryside. We’ll look for survivors at Group A, invite them to join us in the fight against Frank. See what secrets they’ve learned in all their years of hiding. Ryder’s holding out hope that Group A might make a decent secondary base, help us extend our reach to the opposite end of the country.
I look at my hands, dry and chapped. Snow is falling again, drifting through the early-morning light as delicate, gray flakes. I’m supposed to be doing something. What am I supposed to be doing?
I see the footprints, and I remember. Clipper.
He’s been drifting from our team lately. We’ll settle down for the night, or pause for a water break, and then someone will notice that he’s missing. I always get saddled with the honor of retrieving him.
I stand and pull my gloves back on, return my focus to tracking him. I crest a small rise and there he is, leaning against a pale birch tree.
“We need to keep moving. You ready?”
“Gray,” he says, turning to face me. “I didn’t hear you.”
I force a smile. “You never do.”
“True.” There’s an unmistakable heaviness to Clipper’s voice. He sounds older. Looks it, too. After Harvey died—was murdered by Frank—the boy took over as the Rebels’ head of technology. All the added responsibility seems to have aged him.
“I miss her,” Clipper says, touching a twine bracelet I watched his mother give him when they said their good-byes two weeks earlier. “And Harvey.” He kicks at a snow-dusted rock at his feet. “He was . . . I don’t know how to put it. I just feel lost without him.”
Harvey was like a father to Clipper. That’s what he means to say. I know it, and so does the rest of our team. It’s painfully obvious.
“You’ve got me, at least,” I offer. “I’m the one who races after you every time you take off. That has to count for something, right?”
He laughs. It’s a short, quick noise. More of a snort than anything.
“Come on. Everyone’s waiting.”
Clipper straightens and takes one last look into the endless forest of tree trunks. “You know I’ll never actually leave you guys, right? Sometimes I just need some space.”
“I understand.”
“But you always come after me.”
“It makes my father feel better. We’d be lost without you, and as our captain, he sleeps better knowing you’re not running away.”
Clipper frowns. “I might get scared, but I’m not a coward.” He folds his arms around the location device, clutching it to his chest as we head for camp. Clipper’s spent so much time staring at the thing lately, I’ve started to think he believes Harvey is out here somewhere, waiting in a snow-filled gully that Clipper can get to if he only plugs in the right coordinates.
Even though my father has been pressing us at a grueling pace lately, the camp is still not broken down when it comes into view. Tents as bright as grass speckle the snow, and a fire sends a thin line of smoke through the tree branches. Xavier and Sammy are pulling their tent stakes from the frozen earth, but everyone else is huddled around September, a mean-looking girl in her early twenties who is actually far sweeter than her angled features let on. She’s dishing out a breakfast of grits. This has been our fare since we set out. Grits in the morning. Whatever meat we manage to catch throughout the day for dinner. And little rest in between.
Bree spots Clipper and me first. She shoots me a smile, wide and shameless. It’s a good look on her. Refreshing, even, since she seems bent on scowling most of the time. She elbows Emma, who stands beside her, a wool hat pulled over wavy hair. Even from a distance I can hear Bree’s energetic words. “They’re back. I told you not to worry.”
Emma looks up and raises a hand in a shy sort of greeting. I don’t return the wave. I wish I could forgive her. For replacing me so quickly when we were separated earlier this year—me on the run from Frank, her stuck under his watch in Taem. For moving on as if what we had was meaningless, as if we never talked about birds and pairs and settling into something that feels right. I know it’s foolish to hold a grudge, but I’ve never been the forgiving type. I’ve never been able to look past people’s faults or bite my tongue or be generally decent. I am not my brother.
Clipper runs ahead to retrieve a cup of grits from September and my father shouts to me from across camp. “Took you long enough!”
“The wind covered his footprints,” I lie. I don’t want to mention that, like Clipper, I experienced a moment of weakness alone in the woods. That I stopped to ponder it all: the grimness of what we face, the bleakness of our journey so far.
My father swallows a spoonful of his breakfast before narrowing his eyes at Clipper. “I won’t have this anymore, Clayton.” Hearing Clipper’s true name makes the entire team freeze. “We waste time whenever you take off. Gray has to find you. We all have to wait. And we can’t afford delays like that—not when our mission’s details could be spilled at any moment.”
Just three days after we left Crevice Valley, Rebel headquarters, Ryder radioed to tell us one of our own fell into enemy hands. We’re now well out of communication range, with no way of knowing how much information, if any, the Order acquired. Still, we spend a lot of time glancing over our shoulders as we hike. Fear is an ugly thing to have chasing you.
“I need you to start acting like a soldier,” my father adds, jerking his chin toward Clipper. “You hear me?”
“Oh, go easy on him, Owen,” Xavier calls out, securing his broken-down tent to the underside of his pack. The act reminds me of when he taught me to hunt in Claysoot, him loading up his gear and signaling for me to follow him into the woods. “He’s just a kid.”
Clipper frowns at this, obviously disagreeing that a boy of almost thirteen is nothing but a child.
Sammy stops wrestling with his pack. “Yeah, he’s just an immature, no-good, brainless computer whiz who can take any piece of equipment and make it do his bidding. Actually, on that note: Clipper, can you fabricate a time machine so we can get to Group A already? My toes are about to fall off, and I could really benefit from an accelerated schedule.”
This gets a light chuckle from the group. I met Sammy over a game of darts back in Crevice Valley, but it wasn’t until this mission that I truly came to know him. He’s good-natured, endlessly sarcastic, and has a quick-witted sense of humor that’s been a welcome distraction.
“We all know you’re cold, Sammy,” my father says sternly.
“I’m not just cold, I’m freezing,” he responds, wrestling a hat down farther over his pale hair. “And think of what this wind is doing to my face! How am I going to win over any girls when I have these windburned cheeks?” He pats them with his palms.
“The only girls you’ll be seeing for the foreseeable future are the three in our group. And they’re not interested.” Sammy raises his eyebrows as if he means to accept Owen’s words as a challenge, and my father adds, “Don’t get any ideas.”
“Let’s start moving,” Bo says. “Standing still only chills a person further.” His customary twitch surfaces—a forefinger tapping frantically against his mug of grits—and I decide he looks the coldest of us all. His aged frame appears thinner and paler with each day. He’s younger than Frank, in his early sixties, but the years he spent cramped in Taem’s prison weren’t kind to his body. Sometimes I’m amazed Bo’s made it this far without complications. I half expected him to turn back to Crevice Valley during the first few days of hiking. I’m pretty certain Blaine would have expected the same.
But of course Blaine isn’t here to confirm or deny the theory, and sometimes, his absence hurts worse than the cold. I always feel slightly lost without my brother, my twin. Next time I see him, he’d better be back to his old self. I miss the brother who could keep up with me while hunting, and run without getting winded. I even miss his disapproving, judgmental looks, although I’ll never tell him that.
September spreads out the coals and the team scatters to break down the rest of camp. We’ve all become so proficient at the process that in mere minutes, our bags are packed and we’re falling into a thin line.
I tell my feet to move, one in front of the next. Bree joins me, assuming her usual place at my side.
“Think it’s too late to turn back?” She says it like she’s joking, but I can see the seriousness on her face.
“What? Why would you say that?”
“The more I think about it, the more I worry we won’t find anything. I mean, the Order confirmed Group A extinct years ago. Maybe we saw what we wanted to in Frank’s control room.”
“No. There were people moving through those frames. We both saw it. Bo and Emma, too. We didn’t
all
see something that wasn’t there.”
She lets out a long exhale.
“And it was the most advanced of the test groups,” I add. “Even if we find it empty—which we
won’t
—we’re still going to see if there’s anything we can salvage. Ryder thinks—”