“Your man.”
“Yes.”
“Feyn killed him.”
Feyn. The one Rom insisted was their only hope.
Roland gave only a curt nod.
“My point is that you’ll have your hands full if you come against us. But you won’t have to.”
“Is that so?”
“It is.”
“Why?”
“Because you want Jonathan,” Roland said. “And I can give him to you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE CORPSES STARED at Jordin and Jonathan as they passed. One of them, a girl no more than five wearing a ragged red coat, came running a few steps toward them, only to stop abruptly and gape at Jonathan. Big green eyes, set in a face that was far too pale. She was clutching a dirty doll.
Jonathan paused and reached out to her, but the guard stopped him.
“We’re not there yet. I’m putting you in Fifteen. Come on.”
He made no move to follow the order. She sensed his anguish then-desperation rising inside his chest like a hard fist.
“Where are the guards housed?” Jordin asked, as much to give Jonathan a moment as to learn more. She quickly added, “If there is ever trouble.”
“Trouble? There’s no danger in the compound.”
“No one tries to escape?”
He gave her strange look.
“Why would they?”
It was hard to remember what it meant to be Corpse without any ambition or sorrow or desire. To be guided only by fear. They lived in fear of leaving the compound as much as in fear of death. As did the guard.
“There are four of us and we live outside the walls. You’ll see wardens and employees. If there’s any trouble, tell one of them. But there won’t be. Hurry up, boy.”
Jonathan tore his gaze away from the girl and followed after the guard.
Only then did Jordin realize she’d hardly registered the smell of the Corpse girl in the close proximity of so many doomed.
Now she could see the large, worn numbers on the end of each building. The white paint was peeling and faint against the gray concrete. Odd numbers on the left, even on the right. There were thirty housing units in all-each of them long buildings inset with small, square windows under the eaves of an industrial roof. Their panes were dirty, dark, as though covered over with some kind of film.
Now she saw them closely, the dark heads, the dirty hands pressed up against the glass. She blinked, swallowed.
Faces, in the windows. Four, five apiece. Ten windows along the side of the building, spaced perhaps ten feet apart.
She glanced back the way they’d come. An old man peered at her from the far corner of Building Four, leaning heavily on a wooden crutch, a part of his lower leg missing. A woman came out of a long building against the far side of the perimeter-the shower rooms, perhaps-walking as though half her body did not work properly, so that she had to drag it to catch up with the functioning side. A man with a bandage around his head and obvious palsy followed her. The victim of an accident, perhaps.
An affront. Alchemy, which had long solved the genetic puzzles of cancer, wasting diseases, blood disorders, dementia, and myriad maladies to humanity, could not abide to be reminded of the infirmities it could not prevent.
She swallowed and lowered her gaze to Jonathan’s heels in front of her, to the stony soil beneath that was as gray, nearly, as the concrete. As the smoke wafting to the sky. She tried to school her breath, which grew ever more erratic with each step. She would follow him anywhere, even into this maw of Hades.
The guard turned onto the broken walk that led to the door of Building Fifteen. The sky flashed again. Thunder in the distance.
Even the heavens couldn’t abide it. These people were created to be alive, not dead. Imperfectly alive, not perfectly dead. The realization hit her like a hammer.
Jonathan was born to bring life, not a new order. Chaos, not perfection.
She spun to Jonathan, words half-formed on her lips, but the sight of him robbed her of breath. He was frantic, trying to open the door, seemingly mindless. Clawing at it, banging on the wood with tears on his cheeks, gasping even as the guard was trying to unlock it.
“Move aside, boy, or I can’t-”
Jonathan shoved the guard aside.
“Hey!”
The guard went after him, and Jordin met him with a quick crack of her elbow to his temple. He dropped beside the stoop, unconscious.
Jonathan worked the key in the lock, got it open, and then tossed the ring to Jordin.
“We have to find her!” Jonathan cried.
She didn’t need to ask whom he meant.
She snatched the ring of keys from the air, leaped over the unconscious guard, and ran to the next building in the row. Thirteen.
After fumbling to find the right key, she opened the door…
Stared into the interior of the dormitory.
A hundred faces peered back at her. Some of them sat on bunk beds set like shelving into the walls, some on the floor. A young boy crouched in the corner. There were no chairs. No tables, no sofas, no comforts of any kind. No blankets on the beds that she could see. The sallow light of a lone electrical fixture illuminated not only the dirt of neglect, but the utter hopelessness of looming death.
“Is a girl named Kaya in here?” she shouted.
No one moved. A middle-aged woman began to cry. One man, older and feeble, thin as a skeleton, cradling an open and tattered copy of the Book of Orders on his lap, shook his head.
Hurried steps behind her. And then Jonathan was there, filling the doorway, staring into the dormitory over her shoulder.
“Is she here?”
“No.”
He grabbed the key ring and took off running. She stared a moment longer and then ran after him.
“Kaya!”
Jonathan came out of Building Twelve and ran to Eleven. She had never seen him like this before. Frantic. Desperate.
“Kaya!” he shouted before he had it open.
“Here,” Jordin said, taking the keys from him, finding the one, opening the lock. Throwing open the door.
“Kaya!”
Again, the mute stares, the soulless whimpers. A little boy ducked under a bunk and peered out with wide eyes. A young woman, not much older than Jordin herself, got to her feet and screamed.
Building Ten.
No Kaya.
Nine.
