to carry him back out of the subterranean basement.
“Where are we going?”
“Someplace safe. I had thought it would be just you and Ruthie…but. Well. As soon as you’re safe, I’m going after Sammi.”
“How-where-?”
“I made him tell me.”
“Who?”
“The tall one.”
Ralston.
“I’m…sorry, Dor.” Cass felt her face flood with shame. She hated that he’d found her that way, burned with the memory of not just her near rape but also what she’d done earlier in the evening. Everything she’d done was for Smoke, to save him, but Dor had seen her on her knees with two men standing over her, and she hated that he had seen her defenseless, had seen her with the fight gone out, that he might believe she had given up. Jimbo had seemed to enjoy her fear; he’d only gotten more excited when she resisted-so she’d stopped resisting.
“You have nothing to apologize for.”
She searched his face, his hard-set jaw and flinty eyes, and found compassion there, even stronger than his anger. And she breathed.
“How did you know where to look for me?”
“I talked to the other guy. Back at the dorm.”
“And he just told you?”
Dor scowled. “After a bit. Look, Cass, I didn’t come here to kill innocent people, but anyone who’s made it up to being a guard in the Rebuilders-they’re not exactly innocent. It’s not like in the Box.”
Cass didn’t doubt it. “But how…they took everything from us when we got here. Where did you get a weapon?”
“No, not everything. My shoes…my jacket, I had them made specially. There were places to hide things.”
He slipped a thin, double-sided blade from his pocket. “Japanese ceramic. Harder than steel.”
“But how did that help you get past the guard?”
“It didn’t. I have Joe to thank for that.”
Cass remembered all the times that Smoke disappeared early in the morning to practice with Joe, the obscure martial art involving rigid fist strikes that could break a branch, a plate. “That guard, he trained in the Marines. You can always tell a guy who learned to fight in the Marines-they all train to the same standards. I learned that from Three-High.”
So it had been the Marines. Three-High sometimes talked about the Three Borders War, the last one anyone was left to report back from, when the U.S. won a decisive ground battle over enemies who’d already exacted their revenge in advance with their avian poisons. He was one of the few people Cass had seen Dor spend much time with, besides Smoke. It was a sign of Dor’s determination that he had learned enough in the months since he started the Box to take down a professional fighter.
“Anyway, Joe’s trick shut the guy up long enough for me to get him restrained.” Dor frowned at his blade and slipped it back into his pocket. “I had to use that a little to convince him that I really wanted to hear what he had to say. Turns out he didn’t care all that much about revealing where his friend was, after I…showed him I was serious.”
Dor dug in his pack and came up with two more guns. The ones from Ralston and Jimbo. “And now we have these, too. Which one do you want?”
She chose the smaller one, a small black semiauto. It wasn’t so different from the one Smoke had insisted she practice with on several occasions. “I don’t know how much good I’ll be. With, you know, carrying her.”
“Hopefully you won’t have to carry her for long. Are you…all right to walk?”
For a moment Cass didn’t understand the question, and then she realized that Dor was carefully not looking at her, at her body; he focused on a place over her shoulder, but his face was lined and sorrowful, a dozen years older than he’d looked even that morning.
He’d spoken to the guard. He knew what she’d traded.
Cass’s face flamed. “I’m fine.”
“I’d just leave you here, it should be relatively safe now that they’re down…but I don’t know when shift change is, and it’s already nearly dawn. And besides, the other guy’s going to be waking up in an hour or two.”
“He’s not dead?”
“No. Like I said, it was never my intention to kill when I came down here. I brought some darts, the blade. I had hoped it might be enough…that was probably naive.”
“How many darts do you have left?”
“Three.” He grimaced. “And there’s a problem with them, you have to be close enough to jam them in by hand, because I couldn’t figure out a way to bring a tranq gun in here. I nailed the guy in there because I was practically on top of him when I came around the corner. And I had it in my hand. Otherwise…”
“So you just left him there?”
“Not…without a souvenir. Something to make sure he doesn’t do this again, to some other woman.”
“What…”
Dor made a slicing motion. “Assuming he doesn’t bleed out, or die of infection, he’s gonna be pretty damn tender for a while.”
Cass felt no pity. Despite the fact that she had given herself away to get here, down to Smoke’s prison, there was still a difference between what she had given Ralston in trade and what Jimbo meant to take from her without compunction.
“What did you find out about Sammi?”
Dor’s face went dangerously blank. “She’s in a dorm, where all the girls her age live. It’s not too far from here, maybe half a mile.”
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“Nothing. They just…the girls live together, the young women. There’s about forty of them and four guards on duty at night. I made him tell me. Two more come on at six in the morning, so we need to move fast.”
“How are we going to find out which room she’s in?”
“Leave that part to me,” Dor said. “But listen, here’s the problem. I can’t carry Smoke that far. He’ll slow us down too much.”
“I’m not leaving him,” Cass said quickly. “I can’t leave him.”
“Cass…” Dor’s face was shadowed with anxiety and something else, some dark thing. “Look at him. He’s lost a lot of blood from his shoulder. He’s been beaten, probably tortured. There’s a good chance he’s bleeding internally. There’s no guarantee he’s going to make it. Is it worth the risk…?”
“You can go without me,” Cass said. “I know you need to go to Sammi. I understand. But I can’t. If they find me and Ruthie…I can convince them I’m innocent. I’ll tell them you shot them when you found us together, that you went back to, I don’t know…”
It was all tangled in her mind, the men who had been killed tonight, the trail of violence and cruelty that had brought them here. “I don’t know, I’ll figure out something. I’m an outlier, Dor, they need me. I have something valuable to trade with them.”
His eyes narrowed with anger. “
“I know they mean to keep me hostage, okay? And I know there’s no guarantee they’ll ever find the vaccine, and I could spend the rest of my life being poked and studied for nothing-but is that so bad? I’ll be with Ruthie, and we’ll be safe, and-”
There was something so dangerous and fierce in his voice that Cass shut up and listened.
“They’re not making a vaccine. They’re not studying outliers. They’re using them…
For a moment Cass didn’t understand.
Harvesting…
And then she put it together.
