“Faster!” I shout at Twenty-two.
She swerves us to the right, left, right again. There are parked cars everywhere and it’s like we’re in a post-apocalyptic world, trying to navigate a suddenly abandoned civilization. But these cars aren’t empty, and the people inside stare at us as we pass. I wonder if the I-units of these strangers are being monitored even now, telling the Secret Service exactly where we are. A human tracking system.
We leave the new city and pick up speed on the highway. In the distance I see where the ocean has risen, where the old city is crumbling into the sea. A few buildings remain, their windows broken and empty, half buried in the water at their base. In the distance, the Washington Monument rises out of the waves, a single beacon left standing in the ruins.
I slump down farther. With the back window gone, the air whips through the car like a funnel, ringing in my ears and sending my hair flying around my head. The black car isn’t far behind us, and now another has joined it. They’re both gaining speed.
Wes glances back at me. His hands are clenched in front of him, and I know it is killing him that Twenty-two is the one driving, that he is not in control. “Keep down. Your hair is like a bull’s-eye.” Every word he says is shouted over the wind.
“I’m trying.” I hear more gunshots, loud even over the whipping air, the roaring engine. One flies through the car, cracking the windshield, and now it is a spiderweb of glass with a neat hole where the bullet has flown back into the night. Twenty-two shifts her body, trying to see through the side that’s still clear. Tim, hunched over, his muscled frame pressed against his knees, turns his head toward me. His eyes are too hidden to see in the darkness of the car, especially now that we have left the city and the streetlights are gone, but I know he is scared. He puts his hand out on the seat between us. Like mine, it is spotted with blood. I stare at it for a second, at how broad his palm is, open and exposed, his fingers slightly curled. When the gunshots start again I reach out and clutch his hand to mine, assuring us both that the bullets have not found us yet, that we are still alive.
We are getting farther from the city, and the new-growth forest emerges, lining the side of the road. This highway is emptier than the dense city streets were, but there are still cars dotted in our path. Twenty-two weaves us in and out, back and forth, making my body slide across the seat—first into Tim, then pressed against the window. I try to brace myself, though the turns are too quick, we are going too fast.
But not fast enough, and the cars behind us are creeping closer. Up ahead a semitruck is lengthwise across the road, halfway through a turn when the grid shut down. Twenty-two cuts the wheel to the right and we skid along the asphalt, narrowly missing a minivan with two little kids inside, their pale faces pressed to the darkened windows. “Hold on,” I hear her say, and I know it is serious because her voice has finally changed, finally lost that detached, unshakable quality. Now she sounds shrill. Panicked.
She jerks the wheel to the left and the car angles so quickly that it seems we will flip over. My stomach drops as if we are on a roller coaster, the very moment of descent. Tim grips my hand in his as I squeeze my other one into the battered leather seat, trying to hold on.
“On the left!” I hear Wes shout, and then something slams into the side of the car in a blast of noise and sparks and screeching tires. I am thrown forward and feel Tim’s fingers slip away from mine. My body is in the air. My head collides with something hard. I fall back against the seat as the window explodes, as the metal erupts, and my body, just skin and blood and bones, is no match for the force of it.
Chapter 7
“Lydia.” Someone is shaking me. “Open your eyes.”
I feel pain, a fire burning up my leg. I blindly reach out with my hands. Something touches my fingers, forces them down.
“Open your eyes,” the voice repeats, and it is so urgent, so desperate that I do. All I see is black.
“You need to try and move. We only have a few minutes.” It is Wes, and I turn my head toward his voice. He looks fuzzy at first, but then his shape forms, standing in the doorway of the car—though there’s no door now, just a twisted clump of metal pushed to the side.
“I’m pinned.” I choke out the words. “I can’t move.”
“You’re not pinned.” He puts his hand on my forehead, slides it down the side of my cheek. He is so warm that I lean in to him, trying not to close my eyes again. “I pulled the metal away. You have a cut on your leg, but it’s not too deep. It already stopped bleeding.”
I look down. He has ripped the hem off my dress and used it to bandage my lower thigh. The silk is sticky, but the blood doesn’t look like it’s spreading.
I sit up, wincing when the movement reaches my left leg. Wes’s hand falls away from my face. I see Twenty-two standing near the headlights, her gown torn off at the knees, blood trickling from a cut under her eye. Tim is propped against the open driver’s-side door, one hand clutching the opposite elbow, his face chalky, his lips cracked. Only Wes is unscathed, though his dress shirt is ripped across the collar and I see a bruise forming on the
