I drop to my hands and knees, blinded, choking on metal and flinching as the impact jars the wound in my side. When I lift my head again the vision is gone, but my hand encounters a sharp object digging into my palm. My fingers close around it. All around me rises a quick, frenzied susurration, like the wind through grass, or aspen leaves quivering in a storm. But Avon has no grass, and Avon has no aspen trees.
Everything goes black, and then the whispering is gone as abruptly as it started. Suddenly I hear Romeo shouting at me, his voice urgent. I open my eyes to find his face close to mine, gripping me by the shoulder.
“What’s going on? Get up!” He’s drawn his gun; he thinks I’m faking.
“Don’t know.” I slide the thing I found into my boot with a shaking hand. I can’t stop to examine it now; whatever it is, it’s regular, plastic, man-made. There’s no reason this would turn up here on its own.
“Stay here, I’ll get you some water.” He starts to release me, but I grab at his chest, gripping a handful of his shirt. The canteen.
“You drugged me,” I gasp, my vision spinning away like the fog eddying around us. My body’s shaking, shivering in his grasp like I’m on the verge of hypothermia.
“I—what?” Romeo peers closer. “Why would I—Stop, calm down.” He grabs hold of my shoulders again and gives me a tiny shake, my head snapping back as though I’m too tired to lift it.
Something in my mind is screaming to be heard, something—something about his hands, gripping my arms, supporting me. Both hands.
If both hands are on my shoulders, then where is the gun?
There, on the ground by his feet. I flail out for the old-fashioned pistol, only a few inches from my fingertips. My shaking fingers fumble with the grip, clumsy with whatever drug is coursing through my system.
Romeo spots the movement. Somehow, despite drinking from the canteen himself, he’s unaffected; he gives an inarticulate cry and lunges for the weapon. “Goddammit, Jubilee—give it a rest for five seconds!”
“Never,” I gasp, dropping to the spongy, wet earth, too weak to stand without his support. Whatever he did to me, it’s getting worse.
Slowly, the sound of whispering is overtaking my hearing once more. I reach for Romeo, but I don’t know if I’m trying to get the gun back from him or hold myself up. He shoves the pistol into his waistband, out of my reach, and my vision clouds again.
It isn’t until I feel arms wrapping around my waist and a heartbeat by my ear that I realize I’m slipping out of consciousness, and Romeo’s carrying me the rest of the way back to his boat.
She’s back in the alley again, holding a burning firecracker, eyes watering with the effort of not letting go.
Beyond the ring of boys shouting and jeering at her, through the shifting clouds of smoke from the gunpowder, she sees a tiny light dancing and bobbing. It winks at her, surprised, hovering just out of reach. The girl stands frozen, staring, until the firecracker explodes in her hands, singeing her fingers. The ball of light vanishes in the flash, and the girl is too shocked and deafened to feel the pain in her hand until her father sprints into the alley to carry her away to the hospital.
THE WARM LIGHT OF OUR docking lamps welcomes me home as I coast into the harbor, the rock swallowing me up. Hidden behind the stone walls of the cavern, the lamps hang along a string, bobbing lazily like a row of will-o’-the-wisps—though these lights lead to safety rather than danger. A weight presses down on my shoulders as I ease the currach forward. A weight exactly equal to the trodaire curled up in the bottom of my boat. Jubilee is on her side, still unconscious, her hands bound once again. Whatever took her down in the swamp seems to have passed, and I can’t risk leaving her unrestrained.
Her dog tags have fallen outside her shirt, and I see the metal glint in the lamplight as she lies unmoving. Without them, you might almost forget she’s one of the trodairí. Without them, she’d look halfway human, like someone who might listen for half a second before pulling a gun on you. Until she woke up and tried to kill me, that is. But when there’s no hope to be found anywhere, even the tiniest chance is worth taking.
I can’t let McBride and his followers find her, or they’ll have her head on a spike before I can blink. But I can’t let her go either. She’s too valuable. Maybe the military will trade for her and give us resources we need, like food rations or medicine.
And maybe, just maybe, I can convince her not all of us are the lawless villains she and her kind believe us to be.
If Jubilee Chase can be convinced to stop shooting, anyone can.
The currach catches the current slowly swirling through our hidden harbor, drifting toward the dock. I stow the pole and let the water carry us the rest of the way, risking a glance away from my prisoner and up at the vaulted stone ceiling stretching high above us, stalactites hanging down. It drives the soldiers mad, trying to work out how we hide so many people right under their noses out here in the swamps.
From the air, this place looks like a couple of rocks no larger than one of their buildings on the base. From the water, only the trained eye can see we’ve disguised its size with woven camouflage, made it less prominent, rerouted the channels leading up to the base so there’s no easy way to approach by boat without knowing the way. You could get here by foot from the base if you were determined enough, but it would mean hours of slogging through mud and waist-deep water. The stone hides us from their heat detectors, and Avon’s atmosphere wreaks havoc with imaging drones and search gear. The leading theory among TerraDyn scientists is that the ionization levels interfere with their equipment, but all we know is that it forces them to search for us the old-fashioned way, with boats and spotlights. Though there are pockets of resistance all across the planet, these caves harbor a significant percentage of TerraDyn’s most-wanted list.