Silas throws me his facemask, then retrieves mine and puts it over his own mouth and nose. “He’s dead,” I say.
Silas lifts Crab’s head. “Yes,” he says. A dark, thick liquid oozes from his head onto the earth. A stabbing of regret trickles into me, but I sweep it away: it was him or us. Right?
“No one can find him,” Silas says. He pulls me to my feet.
“What does it matter?” My throat is still stinging.
“They’ll suspect us. I don’t want to be next.”
I bend down and lift Crab’s legs. Silas takes his arms. Blood drips from the gravedigger’s fractured skull.
Quickly, we carry Crab to the hole he dug himself and throw him on top of the other body. “I’ll get the shovel,” Silas says. I stare down at Crab, lying cheek to cheek with the other dead man, their limbs bent all out of shape.
Silas begins filling the hole as soon as he returns, and when his muscles ache, I take over. We work like this until we’re done. “We’re murderers,” I say, wiping my sweaty hands on my trousers.
On our way back we use stones and loose earth to cover the track of Crab’s blood. “Let’s stash the airtank. We may need it later,” Silas says, leaving me by the wall for a few minutes while he finds a good hiding spot.
We still have the problem of how we’re going to get into Sequoia. There don’t seem to be any cameras at this rear exit, but there’s the glass on the wall; it won’t go unnoticed if we turn up to breakfast gashed to pieces from climbing over it.
“Alina,” Silas mutters. He’s on his knees. “A way in. Or out,” he says. I squat next to him and look.
Someone has furrowed a narrow tunnel underneath the wall.
“Can you fit?” I ask.
Silas answers by crawling into the tunnel headfirst. He has to wriggle from side to side to get through, but he does it, and soon after I am through, too, covered from head to toe in dirt. “Hopefully the flood lights are still off,” Silas says.
Tonight we have achieved nothing more than killing a man, and as we head for the cabin, one word repeats itself in my head: Murderer. Murderer.
That is what I have become.
32
QUINN
I’m awoken by arguing. “Quit nudging me!” the boy groans from his cell.
“But you won’t stop snoring,” the girl says.
“I can’t help it.”
I turn over on the hard slab of concrete. They’re standing face-to-face and grappling with each other through the bars. The girl sees me watching and stops.
“What did you do?” she asks. I stand up and dust myself off.
“Nothing,” I say. “But seems like that’s enough here.” The girl squeals with laughter. She hits the boy as she continues to titter. It’s not a genuine laugh: she’s hysterical. “Is there a way out?” I ask. There’s a sliver of a window by the roof, but that’s about it.
“I wouldn’t try to escape, if I were you,” the boy says. He pulls up his shirt to show me his chest, which is covered in bruises.
“Maks?” I ask.
He nods and puts his hands between the bars to pull up the back of the girl’s shirt. Her skin is crisscrossed with red welts. “He beat me and whipped her,” he says. “Because we stole an airtank. That was it.”
I dry heave. I miss Bea, but thank goodness I didn’t bring her here.
Keys rattle in the lock and Maks pushes open the door. The boy and girl scuttle to the backs of their cells and watch as he approaches me. “Exciting news. Vanya’s forgiven you, which means you have a busy day of exams ahead.”
“Exams?”
“Just get a move on,” Maks says, pulling open the cell door and grabbing me by the back of the neck. I don’t struggle, because I could be in for it if I do. Besides, I have a better chance of finding Alina and getting out of here and back to the pod if I’m not locked in a prison cell.
The boy and girl watch me go. They look afraid.
And I should probably look afraid, too.
33
ALINA
I wake in a sweat, sure someone has his hands around my throat. Silas is sitting on my bunk. “It was a dream,” he says.
I push my hair out of my face. “What time is it?” I ask. Everyone else is up and dressed.
“Six in the evening. We’re getting ready for this stupid Pairing Ceremony,” he says.
“I’ve been asleep all day?”
“I told Vanya you had an iffy stomach,” he says.
I think of Crab’s foaming mouth as he tried to kill me and I am breathless again. “Did you tell them?” I whisper. I can’t remember anything that happened after we snuck back into Sequoia. Silas had to half carry me to the cabin.
Silas slides closer. “They know we saw a body being buried. We’ll tell them what we did, if we have to. Keep it together, Alina. You’ve killed before.” I shake my head to contradict him. “At The Grove. You think none of your bullets hit those soldiers?”
But it was easier then—the troops were far away; I couldn’t see their faces, and I didn’t have to bury them.
Silas turns to the others. “Seeing the body last night leaves us in no doubt. . . . We need to get out of here. Our main concern is oxygen. Song?”
Song bites his lips. “I can find a way to store oxygen and pump it into an airtight space, but we need trees to produce it or the formula for manufactured air . . . plus the chemicals.”
“Well, that’s impossible,” Silas says. We’re all silent. Our options are meager. “I have the map that Inger was putting together, which has the locations of solar respirators on it. We can survive on those and wait for Song to design something better.” He looks at each of us in turn. I want to have a better idea, but I don’t.
“We was fine on solar respirators before you lot showed up,” Maude lies. If it was fine, she wouldn’t have tried to kill me for my airtank the first time she saw me.
Dorian puts his hands on his hips. “We buried people at The Grove, you know. I don’t know why this dead body should change anything.”
“This wasn’t a one-off, Dorian. There were dozens of graves,” I say.
Dorian pulls his red robe over his head and faces us, defiant. “I don’t agree with pairings any more than you, but I’m not spending the rest of my life drifting and barely clinging to life.”
We all watch Silas and wait, willing him to find a solution to Dorian’s fears. Fears that are ours, too. But he has no answer for this. “We have to leave Sequoia now,” is all he says.
“We won’t make it a mile before they’re on top of us,” I say. I don’t mean to contradict Silas, who is glaring at me, but we have to bide our time, run when they least expect it. Besides, if we run now, they’ll know we were the ones who killed Crab. “We found a way out. It’s a narrow tunnel under the wall at the back, about fifty feet from a steel door. Anything heavy goes down, we leave that way and wait for one another on the other side. There are only a few places back there to hide,” I say.
Song goes to the door, takes the rest of the robes from the hook, and hands them out. The sleeves are too long, eating up our hands.
Silas goes to the wall and punches it. Dorian pulls up his hood and it covers his entire forehead, right down to his eyes. “Red ain’t my color,” Maude says. She tries to struggle out of the robe, but Bruce stops her.
“It’s just for an hour or so, Maddie.”
Somewhere beyond the cabin a shrill whistle sounds.
“Pairings,” I say.
Before being led into the orangery where the pairings will be performed, we’re held in a waiting room with narrow benches running the length of it. Silas is on my one side, Dorian on my other. Apart from those of us from The Grove, around ten people are with us. Abel sits opposite me. When he smiles, I smile back. He’s always been able to make me do this, even when things were dire.