There was no plan to get off.
16. FALLEN
By four a.m. on Sunday we were ready. We drove to the loading zone in silence. Ben sat motionless in the back seat, looking neither at us nor the gun. He’d dropped any vestige of fighting back. He did what we said, followed our orders, and every hour, seemed to turn deeper into himself. I knew what it was like to give yourself over to someone else’s decision making, following an external voice and silencing your own. But he was going to have to wake up soon, because in a few hours Jude, Auden, and I would be trapped inside a shipping crate; Ben would be on his own with only my sister and a dubious bluff to keep him in line. He was the only one who could talk us all onto the ship, and I knew he believed his life depended on it. I just didn’t know how much he cared.
The BioMax equipment crates were being warehoused in a secure facility near the docks. Ben guided us through the shadows and pressed his thumb to the security pad. A panel the size of a garage door creaked open. The interior was dark, but I could make out the dim outlines of towering stacks of crates.
“Where’s the security?” Jude asked, suspicious.
“Coordinates of this dock are on a need-to-know basis,” Ben said dully. “For something like this, the best security is no security.”
Jude shook his head. “Bureaucratic brilliance never ceases to amaze me.”
I couldn’t take my eyes off the stacks. “You’re going to hide us in a crate and get us on the ship, right?” I asked Ben.
“That’s the plan, isn’t it?”
“So what happens when we end up at the bottom of a giant stack like this? We just wait a few months for someone to get around to unpacking us?”
“I’ll make sure you end up somewhere private, where you can climb out and… do whatever you’re going to do.”
“And how do you plan to do that?”
“You’re going to have to trust me,” Ben said.
I laughed.
“Trust me,” Zo said. I was sure no one but me heard the quaver in her voice. “He knows what happens if he screws up.”
“You can still walk away,” Ben said. Apparently, he still had a little fight left. “All of you. I won’t say anything. And if BioMax is up to something—if your insane suspicious are right—let me look into it. There’s no reason to throw everything away like this.”
“Show us the crate,” I said.
“Lia, please. Think about your mother. And Riley. He’s waiting—”
“Show us the crate.”
There were two of them, coffin-sized and air permeable so that the one of us who needed to breathe could do so. One was red; one was blue. Both were, according to Ben, intended to hold delicate replacement parts and so would arouse no suspicion when he insisted on personally supervising their loading and unloading. Two crates, three of us—and neither Auden nor I was willing to risk eight hours in a box with Jude.
“So, roommates?” Auden said, with a wry smile.
I wasn’t ready to be his friend. “I need to talk to Zo for a second. Alone.”
Jude looked alarmed. “Lia, just remember—”
I ignored him and grabbed Zo, drawing her deeper into the cavernous warehouse, away from the rest of them.
She shook me off. “If you’re going to ask me if I’m sure I still want to do this—”
“I wasn’t. Should I?”
“‘Want’ isn’t exactly the word I’d use,” she admitted. “But I’m doing it. I just don’t know…”
“What?”
Something in her face relaxed then. The fierce, fearless mask of a warrior fell away, and she was just my sister again. My little sister. “I don’t want to screw this up.” She held the remote detonator between her palms, then crossed her fingers around it, like she was praying.
I could let her make her own choices, no matter how stupid and reckless they might be. But I couldn’t let her choose blindly.
“Zo, there’s something you have to know about the detonator.”
“You mean aside from the fact that it’s fake?”
I gaped at her. “You knew?”
“Haven’t we already established that I’m not a moron? If Jude had something like this, don’t you think he would have mentioned it sooner?”
“You knew from the start?”
“I know a car remote when I see one.” She slipped it into her pocket. “I almost wish I didn’t know. It’d be easier.” She gave my shoulder a light poke. “Of course, you would have just screwed that up!”
I felt like an idiot, on multiple fronts. “Sorry? I think?”
“Maybe it’s better this way,” she said. “At least I don’t have to worry about maybe having to kill someone. Because, honestly? I really don’t think I could.”
She sounded ashamed of the admission. I hated that.
“Are you going to be okay?” I asked. “Knowing you don’t have any kind of weapon, that there’s nothing you can do if…”
“I’m not worried,” she said, though it was clearly a lie. “Besides, you’ll be there the whole time.”
“I won’t be much good, protecting you from inside a box.”
“Like you’d let that stop you.” She looked away. “If I needed you.”
“Zo—”
No. No more jokes or compliments disguised as insults or nervous edging around the truth. I hugged her, tight. She let me. Slowly, her arms crept around me, and squeezed. It had been a really long time. I couldn’t even remember how long.
“I don’t want to screw this up,” she said again.
“You won’t.”
She pressed her face to my shoulder. “I missed you,” she whispered.
“You too.”
A small spot of wetness seeped through my shirt. But when she let go and backed away, her eyes were dry.
And, of course, so were mine.
The crate was too small for two people. Auden got in first, which was quickly revealed to be a stupid decision, because it left him crushed beneath me, his breath wheezing under the weight.
“Over a little this way,” I whispered.
“If you just—”
“No, I think maybe—”
“A little—”
“And then—yeah—like that—”
But lying on his side was too uncomfortable, putting all his weight on either a bad arm or a bad leg—not that he complained, but I could hear the soft grunt of pain every time he shifted his weight, searching for the Goldilocks position, but there wasn’t one, and we wrestled and rolled again. I ended up on the bottom, because I could bear the weight. Because I didn’t need to breathe. Auden lay on top of me, and I could feel him trying to hold himself separate, support his weight on his arms, anything not to press against me.