I wish I’d tried harder to persuade him to stay. I just watched him leave. And he never mentioned Maude. Does that mean she never made it to Sequoia?
Ronan rubs his eyes. “I don’t know, Bea. But what I do know is that Jude asked for Quinn, and what I’m giving him is a sick kid and his son’s outlawed girlfriend. Let’s concentrate on winning him over, and then worry about Quinn, okay?”
He’s right: If I’m going to be any use to Ronan, and if my parents’ deaths are to mean anything, I have to focus on what we’re about to do. “We just tell the truth: Quinn was here and then he left. Jude Caffrey knows what Quinn and I mean to each other, and he’ll know I wouldn’t return to the pod if Quinn wasn’t following.”
“You seem very confident,” Ronan says. He stands up and peers through the blinds again.
“I’m not,” I say. I’m terrified of returning to the place where my parents were killed and attempting to collude with a man responsible for countless deaths at The Grove.
But if I want to stop others from spending their whole lives under the Ministry’s iron thumb, I only have one choice—I have to throw my shoulders back and fight.
31
ALINA
Song gives me a leg up, but when I push on the hatch it doesn’t budge. “There’s a latch,” Song says.
I pull it to the left and the piston lets out a gentle puff. Then I haul myself up onto the roof and sit low in case a patrolling guard spots me. Down in the cabin, Song and Bruce are helping Silas. His two hands appear at either side of the opening and then he’s pulling himself up through it. He sits on the opposite side of the hatch. “It might not be true. About Bea,” he whispers into the night.
My stomach heaves. “I think it is.”
“Well, let’s wait until we talk to Quinn,” he says. “We can’t know that anything these people say is true.”
I don’t want to dwell on it. What’s the point? What does thinking ever change? I crawl to the edge of the roof and turn onto my belly. I dangle a moment before letting go and land awkwardly. No floodlight is activated, and I crouch in the stillness. Silas lands next to me with a thud seconds later.
We stay hunched and sneak behind the cabins. As clouds cover the moon, we’re bathed in complete darkness, and I feel Silas hold on to the tail of my jacket to make sure he doesn’t lose me. When we reach the last cabin, and our eyes have fully adjusted, we stop. The annex is to our right, in front of the main house, the other outbuildings to our left. Between the outbuildings and us is an expanse of open land, and if it’s protected by motion sensors, we’ll be discovered.
The clouds shift, and the moon dispenses a little light. Silas looks quickly from left to right. “That must be the lockup. Narrow windows,” he says, pointing to a squat building in the distance. He’s about to speak again when we hear low voices. We flatten ourselves against the wall as Vanya and Maks come into view. I breathe as slowly and quietly as I can.
“I’m sorry about your daughter,” Maks says.
“She was dead to me a long time ago,” Vanya responds.
“Well, maybe she isn’t. I don’t trust any of them,” he says. “They’re too clever.”
Vanya smiles. “So what? How many brainy traitors have we buried?”
They are tittering when the area erupts in light. I pull my face around the corner and instinctively take Silas’s hand. He puts a finger to the blowoff valve of my facemask. Like he has to warn me to be quiet.
“What are those idiots doing?” Vanya says. “Go and shut down the floodlights.” Maks gallops away.
“It’s Vanya,” a new voice says.
“What are you playing at? What if someone sees you?” Vanya hisses, and the floodlights dim to nothing. I poke my face around the corner. Silas stands over me and does the same. In Maks’s place is a pair of men carrying a long object wrapped in plastic. They put down their load and stand panting.
“The buggy broke down,” one of the men tells Vanya. “Had to carry it ourselves.”
“Just get this garbage out back where it belongs. And if I ever see you two trying something like this again, it’ll be you rolled up in plastic.” Vanya kicks the load violently and strides away, the men watching her go.
“Hormonal or what,” one whispers. The other snickers. As they reach down for their bundle, Silas pulls on my elbow. “We have to follow them,” he says.
“What for?”
“Do you want to guess what’s in that plastic or shall I?” he asks.
“What about Quinn?” We need to make sure he’s okay, and find out what’s happened to Bea.
“What if that
“You don’t think that,” I say.
“He wasn’t at dinner.”
“Let’s check it out.”
We follow the men at a distance, stooping low and sticking as close to the outbuildings as we can. They chat, back and forth, and groan under the weight of the load. “Should’ve waited ’til tomorrow,” the one says.
“Best get it over with.” Eventually we reach the back wall marking Sequoia’s border. Like the front, the top is garnished with broken glass. With a sigh, the two men drop the bundle and stand huffing and puffing. “Need air,” one says, coughing.
“Too right. Soon as we’re done with this, I’m gonna set up camp next to an oxybox.” He roots in his pocket and pulls out a heavy, jangling set of keys, which he inspects in the moonlight. “Got it,” he says, and shuffles to the wall with a tiny steel door built into it. He rattles the key in the lock, and the door opens.
The two men let out long breaths as they bend down to retrieve the bundle, and once they have it, they scoot through the door, one walking backward, the other directing from the opposite end.
We spring at the door as quickly as we can, glance around it to make sure the men have moved on, and creep out of Sequoia.
I close my eyes and take a deep breath. “Quick,” Silas whispers.
The men are already way ahead, plodding along the uneven ground and sidestepping heaps of junk abandoned on this side of the wall, where no one has to see it. The moon disappears again, which is fortunate, because there are no buildings to hide behind, only the odd boulder or rusting car, and if the men were to turn, they’d surely see us.
They stop for the final time, and we drop behind an upended, rotting wooden table. Silas nudges me. I lift myself up beside him. There is another figure next to the two men now: a scrawny man with a long beard and wearing a facemask. “The hole doesn’t look big enough,” one of the men complains.
“Gimme a look,” the bearded man grumbles, and knocks the bundle with the handle of a shovel. The men let it drop to the ground and unwrap it.
I lift myself higher to see, sprawled on the ground before us, lifeless and stiff, the body of a man. His head is swollen and his eyes are bulging. I slide back down behind the table and cover the blowoff valve in my mask with my hand.
Silas’s eyes reflect a sliver of light. “Not Quinn,” he whispers, which makes me feel a little better, but not much.
“He’s too wide,” the bearded man says. The shovel hits the ground as he digs a bigger hole. “I’ve another spade over there,” he says.
“You do your job, Crab, we’ll do ours.”
There’s a pause and one of the men speaks again. “Hungry?” he asks the other. We hear something being unwrapped and slobbery chewing. I gag. How can they bury someone and eat at the same time?
And that’s when I notice the ground: it isn’t naturally uneven—it’s become that way from the bodies buried here. And though some mounds have already been concealed by rocks and debris, and are almost flat, others are still plump, the earth barely sunken in next to the body.
I poke Silas. “Graves
