The Lair

A voice I recognized. Thank God.

I slowly turned around to see Eddie Mercado, one of the guys I’d gone to the Elite Military Academy with, pointing a rifle at my chest. I nearly laughed. “What are you going to do, Merc? Shoot me?”

Merc studied me cautiously. He didn’t look pissed off or angry. Not the way you’d expect from a guy who wasn’t lowering his rifle. Instead he looked nervous. Maybe even a little afraid, something I’d never seen before. He’d told me once that his mother was black and his father was Cuban, but I’d always suspected there was a little rino in there somewhere, too. The guy was just that tough. I could fight him, but there was no way I could win. Certainly not when he was the one with the rifle.

But instead of lowering the nose of his weapon, he said, “No. I’m not going to shoot you. I’m going to escort you and the two ladies in the van into quarantine. And if you try to rip my heart out anytime in the next three days, then I’m going to shoot you.”

I looked from Merc to the locked door and then out toward the charred patch of grass just outside the mangled fence. Suddenly, this all made sense.

I nodded and slipped my knife back into its sheath. “Sounds like a plan.”

* * *

After that, I shut down my emotions. As I listened to Merc’s story, my mind whirled, trying to fill in the missing gaps, to formulate a plan. Find a solution. All my anger, my fear, my panic—I just shut it all down.

Sebastian—my “mentor”—would have been so proud. When you’re fighting for survival, there’s no room for emotion; only strategy, action, and reaction.

Then again, Sebastian had been a bloodsucking monster for the past two thousand years and he wouldn’t know a human emotion if it threw him to the ground and beat the crap out of him. So maybe he wasn’t the best role model, but in this situation, he was all I had. I listened dispassionately. I planned. And when Merc was done talking, I gave him a nod that probably looked like agreement, and I walked back to the Hummer.

By the time I reached the driver’s-side door, I was done keeping the anger in check. I wanted to rip the Hummer apart. I wanted to peel the damn thing like an orange and leave it in pieces. I might have actually done it, too, but we’d need it to drive away in.

Lily slid over as I climbed into the driver’s seat.

“What’s going on? What happened?”

I immediately reached for the ignition, but realized she still held the keys. “Give me the keys. We’re getting out of here.”

She looked down like she was surprised to see them in her hand. She hesitated, and I could feel her looking from Merc—who had followed me up to the gate and was now opening it—to my hand gripping the steering wheel so tightly I was surprised it didn’t crack.

She was too damn smart not to figure out something was very wrong. “Can you first tell me what’s going on?”

I didn’t want to tell her, but figured she had the right to know how badly I’d screwed this up. “Right after I left for Texas to find you, a group went out on a food raid and got attacked by a Tick. There were four survivors. No one realized that one of them had been exposed to the virus. He disappeared into the catacombs deep inside the mountain. Thank God someone figured out what had happened before he killed anyone else. . . .”

“Damn.” She muttered the word on a soft exhale.

“That’s why Base Camp is all shut down. They’re hiding in there. They’re too terrified to come out and risk infection again. Merc said he’ll let us in, but only if we spend time in quarantine.”

I looked over at Lily to see her staring straight out the front windshield. Her chin had that stubborn jut to it and I could tell her mind was racing through the story she’d just heard. She twisted in her seat to look at me, but she kept the keys clutched in her hand. “Okay. So what’s the problem? Why are we leaving?”

“Lily, when I got you and Mel out of that Farm, I promised to keep you safe. But I didn’t. Our trip here was one screw-up after another. But I thought that at least once we got here, everything would work out. But now—” My throat closed over the word as I imagined Lily trapped there in that mountain with a killer. Panic hit me again and all I could do was curse.

I looked over at Lily, expecting to see horror on her face. Or fear. Panic, like mine. But she was frowning, head tipped a little to the side.

“So you think we should go?”

“Yes. Hell, yes.”

“Just drive off and leave them? I don’t understand. Why would we—”

“Because I thought it was safe here and it’s not. If Base Camp isn’t safe, if we can’t even go out looking for food without getting attacked by Ticks, then we’re all screwed. We can’t survive like this. I can’t protect you —”

“Maybe it’s not your job to protect me. No, wait. Hear me out, okay?” She waited until I nodded before she continued. “When you rescued me, you thought I was an abductura, you thought I had this amazing power to lead the human resistance and sway people’s opinions. Whatever. If I had been an abductura, then, yes, keeping me alive would have been more important than anything else. But I’m not that person. Which means you don’t have to work so hard to protect me.”

“Lily, that’s not the only reason I want to keep you safe.” The thought of her hurt, in pain . . . it drove me crazy.

But she waved aside my comment. “Maybe I can’t lead the rebellion, but I still want to fight. We’ve made it this far. I’m not going to turn around now.”

“Don’t you get it? If you’re not the abductura, then there’s no one to lead the rebellion. We don’t have a leader. We don’t have security. We don’t have shit. There is no human rebellion. Which is why you need to hand over the keys so we can just get out of here.”

“No.” Lily clung tightly to those keys. “As far as you and I know, this is the last outpost of free humans on the planet. Maybe there are still pockets of humanity in Canada or Beijing or Brazil or wherever, but as far as we know, for certain, this is it. Maybe the rebellion doesn’t have an abductura who can magically brainwash other humans into joining, but the rebellion still has a leader and that leader is you. It always has been. And you can’t just turn your back on these people. Not for me. Not for anyone. They need you.”

When Lily talked like that—like I was some kind of friggin’ hero—I couldn’t even look at her. The weight of her expectations was too damn heavy on my shoulders. All I wanted was to keep her safe. To just bury my face in her hair and hold her close and maybe forget for a few hours how completely screwed up everything was. But instead, I had to go save the world.

“Exactly how excited do you think they’re all going to be when they realize that after everything we’ve done to find to you, I was wrong?” She didn’t answer, just stared blankly out the front window. I followed her gaze and realized that up ahead, Merc had opened the gate and stood waiting. Watching us talk in the car. “Think about it, Lil. Those kids are terrified. They expect a leader. When they find out you’re not that person, they are going to freak out. There might not be a rebellion left to lead. The only thing holding Base Camp together is the hope that we can fight the Ticks. That we’ll be able to get more and more kids out of Farms and that someday we’ll be able to fight back. I think the Greens believe it because the guys from Elite believe it. The guys from Elite believe it because I’ve told them we could. Because I believed you would be able to lead us.”

“I’m sorry,” she said softly.

“Why are you sorry?”

She glanced at me from under her lashes. “Because I’m not what you thought I was. Because you thought I could be this great leader and instead I’m just . . . me.”

I reached across the console for her and cupped my hand around the back of her head so she looked at me.

Lily was crazy smart and determined. And she fought like a demon to protect the people she cared about. And I was crazy about her. Just the way she was. “You have never disappointed me,” I told her. “I don’t care that you’re not an abductura. Hell, in some ways I’m glad you’re not. But it’s my fault we’re in this situation. I’m the one who told them you could lead us. It’s my mistake. Not yours.”

She looked at me wordlessly, and I watched her swallow as she nodded. “Okay, then. We have to lie.”

“What?”

“If they expect an abductura and if Base Camp is going to fall apart without one,