Renegade (The Elysium Chronicles #1)(74)

“We should refill the tunnel,” he says, staring into it as if expecting monsters to crawl out at any moment.

Then again, it wouldn’t surprise me if there was something crawling through the tube. When Mother figures out we escaped without dying, she’ll send people to finish the job.

“Right. Mother won’t be too happy when she realizes we outsmarted her, which won’t take long. So, this will at least buy us a little time.” Though I’m pretty sure she already knows we’re out of the tube anyway. Something doesn’t feel right about how easy this has been, but we don’t have any choice but to keep going. We’ll just have to deal with whatever Mother’s planning when we get to it.

He holds out a hand to help me up and at first I reach for it. But then a wave of anger pours over me and I yank my hand away.

“Don’t touch me,” I say with clenched teeth.

He raises his eyebrows and slowly withdraws his hand. “Sorry,” he mumbles, hurt and anger pooling in his eyes.

I close mine as the anger fades. Where in the world did that come from? “No,” I say, holding out my hand to him. “I’m sorry. I … I don’t know what came over me.”

“It’s okay. We’re both under a lot of stress.” There’s something in his eyes when he says it, but he helps me up and into the booth, where I study the control panel.

Since I know what I’m looking for this time, it doesn’t take long. I press my hand to the glass plate and wait for it to do its thing. Then press the lever up. The doors close with a clang, and then there’s a silence that’s almost as deafening.

Exhausted from the pain and everything else, I lower myself back to the ground and Gavin kneels next to me. “You okay?” he asks.

“Yes. There’s a manual lock on the doors. It’s a red switch. It’s there in case of a Surface Dweller attack.” I laugh at the irony. “Just press the button. It’ll ensure Mother can’t send anyone through the tunnels.”

When I hear him step away, I glance at my shoulder. For some reason, it hurts even worse when I see the blood soaking the bandage. Turning my head away, I close my eyes again.

Gavin returns and kneels next to me.

I keep my eyes closed. “I don’t think we need to clean the wound now.”

“What do you mean?” he asks. I can hear the frown in his voice.

“The saltwater,” I say.

“Oh, shit!”

He yanks off my rebreather, pushes the dress strap down my shoulder, then slowly removes the soaked bandages. Even though he’s being gentle, I wince and have to bite back a scream.

He grabs the antiseptic bottle from the first-aid kit on the wall, then pours it over the wound. This time I can’t hold the scream back. I look over to make sure I still have a shoulder—it feels like the lava flowing over it dissolved it. The wound bubbles with pinkish-white froth.

Gavin watches the wound and pours more antiseptic over it when the froth turns dark red.

“Why is it still bleeding?” he mutters. “It should have stopped by now. It’s been almost twelve hours.”

“Well,” I say with a forced smile, “it’s not like we’ve given it time to heal.”

After what feels like forever, but is probably only a few minutes, the pain ebbs until it’s only a dull ache.

He studies the wound carefully before rebandaging it. “You okay?”

“Yes.”

“Good. Let’s get going. I want to get the hell out of this living nightmare.”

He helps me to my feet and I bristle, nearly snapping at him that at least it’s better than the Surface, but I swallow the words and the irrational anger.

Knowing it doesn’t matter what we do to hide from this point forward, since we’re soaking wet and they’ll find us by our trail, we stay in the open and make our way through Sector Three’s vestibule. This Sector has several floors and there are several stories above and below us, so there is no view of the ocean in the ceiling. We have to settle for floor-to-ceiling windows.

But something is wrong. Everything is deserted. We should have run into somebody. Even with the leak and even if everyone was evacuated, there should still be Enforcers and Guards to make sure no one comes back here until the leak is fixed. And what happened to the workers fixing the leak?

We turn the corner that will take us to the elevators. And stop in our tracks.

Littering the ground are bodies. Women, men, children. About fifteen or so.

Slowly walking forward, I examine each body we pass. There’s a bullet hole dead center in each of their foreheads. Each and every one.

A memory flashes in my head: Me, aiming a gun. Pulling the trigger.

“Enforcers,” I whisper.

“What? How can you tell?” Gavin asks, kneeling beside a woman who’s holding a child to her chest. Her eyes are open and staring. He closes them before gently touching the downy hair of the toddler.

It breaks my heart to watch him. How careful he is with them. And they aren’t even his people. It was their own people who did this to them. It’s obvious now Mother was wrong about Surface Dwellers.

“One shot to the forehead. This is an assassination. They were ordered to kill and do it quickly.”

It was quick. For that much, at least, I can be grateful. Most of them probably had no idea what was going on. No time for fear or pain.