Tandem

into the ambulance, rocking me to the floor. I fell against Callum’s limp body as the IV bags dangled above my head.

“Hey!” one of the medics cried, pounding her fist against the wall of the cab. “What’s going on up there?”

“I think something just hit us!” the driver called back. A thrill rippled up my spine. Someone was coming. Someone was here.

I’d just righted myself when there was another crash, this time from the other side. The back of my head cracked against the metal wall, but I hardly felt it. I checked Callum’s wrist for a pulse. He was still alive, but unconscious, unaware of the commotion going on around him.

Two shots fired from somewhere outside and the driver shouted, but I couldn’t tell what he was saying. The ambulance swerved wildly, pitching from side to side, before coming to a screeching halt. The medics were both in shock, completely baffled, but I knew what was happening. We were being rescued. I began ripping the IVs out of Callum’s arm. The female medic screamed, “What do you think you’re doing!” but I didn’t stop. I would’ve dragged Callum off the gurney, too, if I had the strength to manage it.

The back doors swung open and three men dressed in black climbed in. They each held a gun, and I flashed back to what had happened in the Tattered City with the Libertas commandos. What if I was wrong? What if this wasn’t Callum’s plan at all? What if it was someone else’s? A flare of panic shot straight up through my lungs and I found it hard to draw breath.

The medics were easily subdued; as soon as they saw the guns, they backed off. One of the men in black grabbed me and hauled me out of the ambulance. I glanced back to see another hefting Callum over his shoulder while the third kept his gun trained on the medics. There was a fourth, I now saw, dealing with the driver, and a fifth sitting at the wheel of a black unmarked van nearby. They had corralled the ambulance into a small dark alley. I could see almost nothing as the man who held me shoved me into the van. The one who had Callum laid him gently on the floor before climbing in and sliding the door shut behind him. I cringed as three more shots were fired, flinching at the sound of each one. Then the other two men jumped in through the black and the van sped off into the night.

It all happened in less than two minutes.

The men whipped off their masks and started tending to Callum.

“What did they give him?” someone demanded. I was speechless—I didn’t even know the answer. He grabbed my fist, wrenching the fingers open; I was still holding the vial. He took it from me and sniffed it, then tasted the rim with the tip of his tongue, before opening up a briefcase filled with medical supplies. He tossed a bag of saline at one of the others, who threaded the IV through the existing tap in Callum’s arm and hung the bag from a makeshift hook on the inside roof of the van. They rifled through the contents of the briefcase before finding an antidote to the poison he’d taken, jamming a hypodermic needle through the fleshy cap of the vial and drawing its contents into the needle. Then he stuck it in Callum’s arm.

“Will that cure him?” I asked. Please don’t die, Cal, I thought desperately. Please, please, please don’t die.

“We’ll know soon,” one of them said. He removed another vial from the briefcase and loaded the liquid into a second hypodermic needle.

“It’s best if you’re not awake for what comes next,” he said. Before I could shrink away, he injected something into my bloodstream.

“What are you doing?” I cried, or attempted to. The sedative overcame me so fast I wasn’t able to get all the words out before sinking into a heavy, dreamless sleep.

 

THIRTY-SIX

“She’s coming around. Juli! Juli, come on, open your eyes.” Callum! He was alive!

I tried to obey but I couldn’t. It was as if each of my eyelashes weighed a ton. I felt a hand on my cheek. I tried to sit up, but Callum pushed back against my shoulders, urging me to settle down.

“Don’t worry, you’re all right,” he said. “Lie back and relax. We’re here. We’re safe.”

“Where’s here?” I could open my eyes now, but all I could see was his face. He smiled.

“Home,” he said. “Or, at least, my home. Farnham. We’re almost to Adastra Palace.”

“How did we get here?” The last thing I remembered was being in that van, wondering if Callum would recover from whatever poison he’d ingested at the Castle, and now here we were, both awake, both alive, together. A wave of gratitude washed over me.

“We drove to Buffalo and crossed into Canada, then they loaded us on a plane and flew us straight to Adastra City,” Callum explained.

“Those men …” The memory of gunshots echoed through my head. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying to erase the faces of the medics who might have been hurt or died so we could escape. So that Callum and I could live. Kata to chreon. My debts were piling up, and I was no closer to getting home.

“They work for the Farnham Intelligence Agency,” he said. “Basically our KES.”

“How did they …”

“The ring,” he said, flexing his hand. I ran my fingers over the engraved surface of the bloodred stone, thinking of the one Thomas wore, what it meant to him, and what secrets it might hide. “It’s a panic button. It called the FIA agents to me. They were undercover in Columbia City this whole time.”

“But why?”

“My mother had a feeling something like this was going to happen,” he said darkly. “They were there to extract me in case of emergency. I fought her on it, but I’m glad she insisted.”

“Me too,” I said. I sat up groggily with Callum’s support. We were alone in the back of a stretch limousine.

“She’s never going to let me hear the end of it now,” Callum said. “You should’ve heard her before I left. ‘Don’t trust them, they’ll kill you as soon as look at you.’ I didn’t believe her, and I hate, hate, hate that she was right. But at least I’m alive. And so are you.”

I nodded. “I’m so sorry, Callum.”

“Don’t be,” Callum said. “You’re just as much a victim of all this as I am. And look at me. All better.” He grinned. “Not a scratch. Well, a few puncture marks, but those’ll heal in no time. Girls like scars, right?”

“Sure,” I said with a weak smile. “The tinier, the better.”

“Well, that’s good news, because you can barely even see mine,” he joked. He handed me a glass of water. “Drink this. They tell me you’re likely to be dehydrated.”

I gulped it down. Dehydrated was an understatement. “Why did they knock me out?”

“They’re trained to treat anybody from the UCC as an immediate threat,” Callum explained. “They had to incapacitate you. It’s protocol. Sorry about that.”

“Forget sorry. After what you went through, I think I can handle it.”

He smoothed my hair. “We’re going to be okay.”

“I wish you didn’t have to come back here,” I said. “I know you hate this place.”

He shrugged. “It’s fine. I’m just glad we’re both living—right now, I don’t give a damn where.”

Callum put his arms around me. I sank into him, taking comfort in the sturdiness of his body. But now that the sedatives were wearing off, I couldn’t get Thomas out of my mind. I could feel his absence like a yawning chasm in my gut. He’d try to find me, I knew he would, but he didn’t know where I’d gone. Could he guess? Could he find out? Thomas could do a lot of things, but not if he was suspended from the KES and cut off from all their resources. And did I really want him sacrificing the only career he had left going AWOL to find me? My dad had betrayed his assignment to be with my mom, and look what had happened to them. If Thomas died because of me, I would never forgive myself.

I knew one thing for sure—I couldn’t keep leading Callum on. It wasn’t that I didn’t have tender feelings for him, because I did, especially after what we’d just gone through—what he had put