Summer Ruins (36 page)

No matter what happens now, we’ve sacrificed people. Humans who helped us, who trusted us. Emmy and Reese. Wes. One of Deshi’s parents. They were the first names, now angry red welts on Dax’s back.

My throat burns and I turn away from Lucas, hiding my tears. When I look back, the Goblert has disappeared.

***

It’s almost midnight when we crawl into bed later that night, the minute hand ticking toward the inevitable death of four more human beings. We wait in silence, closing our eyes as it winds toward 12:01, then return to our conversation. I don’t know what the boys do with that minute, but I use it to silently apologize for the blood on my hands and to hope that the people who just died didn’t suffer.

Pax looks like he’s going to throw up every time the Goblert arrives, and I know he’s waiting for Tommy’s name to appear, carved from gray flesh and bright red blood. If they’ve somehow found Jas, if her name ends up slashed on Dax’s back or stomach, I don’t know what will happen to me. I know it will cement the fate of the Prime family in my mind, regardless of my promise to Deshi to discuss the fate of the Others. I know a piece of me will break away and I’ll never find it again.

“Okay.” I take a deep breath. “Deshi, you left the
x
for Greer and Griffin?”

“This morning. They should be here soon,” he replies.

As though we summoned the Sidhe, a blobby hole appears by the windows in our shared bedroom, and the brother and sister step into our space. They’re barefoot and gorgeous as always, Griffin in brown pants and a green T-shirt and Greer looking unhappy in a knee-length mint-colored dress.

Worry tightens her gaze as it rakes our sad faces. “Are you guys okay?”

“We’re fine. We think we’re done with the substance,” Leah tells her.

“So why are we here?” Griffin asks.

A few months ago it would have been an irritated question, as though we aren’t worthy of bothering him with our problems, but ever since Nat died and Greer nearly lost it, Griffin’s been more invested. He wants the Others off this planet as badly as we do, and for his sister to be able to heal in peace.

“Because we need to test it on Others. We were hoping you might have an idea how we can do that.” I gauge their reaction but get nothing but thoughtful stares.

We sit in silence for several minutes, a growing wind whipping through the room and cooling the summer heat a few degrees. Clouds were gathering on the horizon as we walked home from the labs earlier, signaling the arrival of a thunderstorm.

I’ve never enjoyed storms in the other seasons, but this is the second one we’ve had this summer and I love everything about them. The way the air feels electric and the smell of the warm water soaking into the rich soil, dripping off blooming flowers and rustling trees. Like a promise that the following days will bring beauty.

“You need a place where we can either secretly swap your praseodymium for the real stuff, or kidnap an Other and inject it…” Griffin muses aloud.

Greer snaps her fingers a moment later. “The Harvest Site. It’s more controlled, and I bet Deshi knows where they keep the stash there.”

He nods, scooting to the edge of his mattress. “I do. They keep a small cache in the Prime family’s quarters and the rest in the extraction tent.”

“Obviously the two of you can help us get there, but those tents are both monitored all the time. How are we going to switch it without being detected?” Lucas questions.

“You four aren’t going anywhere. Greer and I can take care of it.”

“But if all the Wardens at the Harvest Site are out of commission, the Others will realize something’s going on. Without the element of surprise, our plan won’t work.” Panic clenches in my stomach. We have one shot and we may never get another. We can’t let them figure out our plan before we have the chance to put it into action.

“We have to test it, Summer. If we wait until the Summer Celebration and it doesn’t work, then what?”

“I know, Pax. I just… We have to think of everything before we send them in there.”

“Once again, Red, you underestimate my sister and I.”

I look up to give Griffin a piece of my mind, but when I see two Lucases standing by the window instead of Griffin and Greer, my mouth falls open. “What in the… How?”

They shimmer and shift, turning back into themselves, matching grins included.

“How did we not know you could shift into people, not just animals?” Lucas demands, looking freaked out that two more of him were standing here a minute ago.

Griffin shrugs. “You didn’t need to know. If you’d thought about it at all, the possibility would have occurred to you. Most likely.”

“So you can mimic two Wardens, sneak in, and switch their shots when no one is looking. That’s good. But what if they all die, or it works like we think and they’re too sick to continue checking in or writing reports or whatever they do so the Prime knows everything’s working smoothly?” There are so many variables we don’t know, and all of them make me nervous.

“The Harvest Site Wardens check in morning and night through the hive.” Deshi’s voice is sure and also filled with awe. “It could work. You two have access to the hive. Can you mimic the Wardens in there, though?”

Griffin rolls his eyes at us not understanding his greatness again.

Even his arrogance doesn’t bother me anymore, not since he’s been so careful with Greer. It’s not an act, exactly, but as he’s tried to tell me since we met, kind of inborn. He can’t help it, and the glints of the same egotism I’ve seen in Greer are just as genuine. In spite of how difficult they can be, I’ve grown very fond of them both, though I would never tell Griffin.

Not that he would care.

“So if our praseodymium does work, and it knocks them out of commission, you can check in for them so the Prime won’t suspect,” I reiterate, just to make sure we’re all on the same page.

“Okay. Okay, this could work. Can you go first thing tomorrow, after they do their morning check-in?” Lucas asks, his eyes shining.

“It’s almost seven at night there now,” Greer calculates. “Seven at night
tomorrow
.”

“What?” Leah’s face twists in confusion. “How is that possible?”

“It’s already tomorrow night there, trust me. Which means we should head down in about ten hours.” Greer checks with her brother for confirmation, who nods.

“That’ll work. We’ll eavesdrop on their morning report in the hive so we know how it goes for the future.”

“What about the people in the mines?” Leah’s face shuts down, her emotions buried, making me wonder how badly her time there affected her.

“They’re going to know something’s up—usually there are forty or fifty Wardens running around. If there are only two, it’ll be obvious,” Lucas tells Griffin and Greer.

They shake their heads in tandem, then Griffin takes the lead. “Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it, yeah? We don’t even know if your little science experiment is going to work. Either way, they’re on an island made of ice on the other side of the world. They can’t hurt your plan in any way, even if things get out of control.”

An idea plants itself in the back of my mind, something to do with all of those unveiled people, but I ignore it for now. I don’t want to get my hopes up about the praseodymium we’ve designed until we see if it works.

“How often do they take the injections down there?” Greer purses her lips, as though she’s trying to decide what else they need to know before taking on this mission.

I get the sense that she likes that we’ve asked for help, that we’ve given her a job to do that will keep her mind off Nat. It’s probably the real reason she decided to train us to fight.

“I don’t know for sure, but not more than once a day,” Deshi responds. “They don’t get shipments all that regularly and because of the temperature there, don’t need them as often.”

After another half an hour, the Sidhe seem convinced that they’re armed with every bit of information we have to offer. We walk over to the lab, where Laura, Katie, and Jordan are taking a turn fooling around with the liquid-to-powder ratio, and they hand over full jars, enough to fill fifty syringes.

It’s everything they’ve made until now, and we’ll need triple that in the next couple of days. When Griffin and Greer leave, still intent on jumping from place to place so that the Others can’t trace them, Pax, Lucas, Deshi, Leah, and I don protective gear and start the arduous process of making more of our praseodymium.

We might be wasting our time because if it doesn’t work on the Wardens at the Harvest Site, we’ll have to start from scratch. But if it does work, we’re going to need enough to swap out daily injections for the remaining two hundred or so Others at the Summer Celebration.

It had better work. We don’t have a backup plan other than seventeen kids with questionable fighting skills, and time is running out.

Chapter 34.

We head back to Perkins Hall when Sophie, Ben, and Christian show up at the lab the next morning. The Goblert appears in our path in a cloud of sparkling dust once again, a daily nightmare none of us can hope to escape.

The morning light brushes his pallid skin, and the dew clinging to my ankles sends shivers up and down my bare legs, despite the warmth. Dax stumbles and falls to a knee, bloodier than on previous mornings. Instead of getting up he lies flat in the grass, showing us the four names slashed into his back. They almost cover Emmy and Reese’s names.

Garret Crawford.

My heart stops at the name of Lucas’s Danbury father. It climbs into my throat until it blocks my ability to breathe, and terror that all of the Danbury people will be listed today pushes black clouds in front of my eyes.

They clear and I find the courage to read the rest of the list. Anna Walters. Henry Jenkins. Mary Clark.

Mrs. Clark. My Iowa mother, who fed me chickpeas at every opportunity and knitted me hats and scarves and gloves that always matched but never kept me warm.

But no Mr. Morgan. Not today.

I lean forward, pressing my hands into my knees while I try not to puke on the Goblert. I straighten up to see Lucas’s ashen face, and matching expressions of grief, anger, and guilt marching across Pax' and Deshi’s.

Deshi kneels next to Dax, gently touching the names. As always, there isn’t anything we can do for him but feel badly. After a moment he lets us help him up, then he disappears.

The clock in our room reads eight-fifteen. Griffin and Greer are in the hive right now, deciding when they should arrive at the Harvest Site and start switching out syringes. The earliest we expect to hear from them is after their check-in tonight, which Deshi says is at eight. Eight in the morning, eight at night. If I’ve calculated right, that should be just after 1 a.m. our time.

“Let’s get cleaned up and sleep for a few hours, then we’ll go back and help in the lab,” Lucas suggests in a hoarse voice.

“I agree with the sleep, but I want to check in with the scouts before we go back to the lab,” Pax says, digging fresh clothes out of the dresser and heading for the door.

The people not in the lab spy on the site of the Summer Celebration, which I still haven’t seen in person. We need to know when the Others arrive so we can start trying to figure out where they keep their traveling caches of dymium. The Celebration lasts a week, so they have to bring
some
with them.

We follow Pax out of our bedroom and into the cleansing room. I’m so tired that I wash my hair and shave my legs on autopilot. The thought of the bed, of closing my eyes on the pillow, sounds better than anything. But when I step into the room, intent on sleep, I find a crowd larger than the four people I’m expecting. It takes a minute to catalog their faces, but it’s Phil, Katie, and Jordan—the kids who were scouting.

I glower at Pax. “I thought we were going to talk to them
after
we slept.”

“I didn’t get them, Summer. They have something to tell us.”

Phil’s bright eyes shine with a mixture of fear and anticipation. “The Others are here.”

***

In the end, we decide to forgo the few hours of sleep and go check out the development ourselves. Phil and the girls said the Others must have arrived overnight because they slept in the old book depository building and when they went back to the site early this morning the Others were there unloading equipment.

Worry tightens the muscles in my calves as the four of us make the two-hour walk to the site of the Summer Celebration—after all, now that the Others are in Dallas, they could be anywhere, and we don’t want to run into them. We take care to stay off the main roads, a decision I’m happy about when more than one rider whizzes by within hearing distance.

I trust my friends since they’ve been to the site and I haven’t, and they lead me down a littered path to what clearly used to be a large, tan-colored building but is now a half-standing pile of tan-colored bricks and Sheetrock. A huge, white broken statue of a woman lies cracked and forgotten among chunks of plaster, vines and small trees crawling over her torso and shoulders. The front of the place must have been a huge window, because now it’s nothing but a gaping hole that used to connect the two halves. The right side still stands precariously, but the left spills tons of rubble into the surrounding concrete lots and encroaching nature.