Rebel Born (Secondborn #3)(3)

The airship door closes, sealing us in. My throat tightens. Dim lights come on, but it’s still dark. The Zeros’ eyes glow like small moons in the night sky. Gore mottles their mouths, their clothes, and their fingers. The steel claws seem to have retracted into their fingertips, but I know they’re there.

The vessel rumbles and lurches upward. The Zeros don’t move. They don’t talk. They gaze straight ahead. They seem barely alive. Hawthorne sits across from me and several bodies over. He isn’t smeared in carnage like the others. I don’t think he was in the fight at the Silver Halo, which means Agent Crow wants to use Hawthorne some other way. More than likely against me.

My wrists tremble on my knees. Or maybe it’s my knees trembling. Or maybe it’s both. I thread my fingers together, but the trembling doesn’t stop. Panic seizes me. It’s hard to breathe. I feel dizzy. Sweat soaks the back of my white sparring outfit. Wisps of damp hair cling to my cheek.

I have to wait for several minutes in the grip of the panic attack. When it finally subsides and my breath isn’t coming out in hacking pants, I try to get up, and all the creatures look at me at once. They’re ghosts; the real people are gone, and these demons are what’s left. It’s like I knocked back a shot glass full of pure adrenaline. My stomach roils with fear. I press myself against the wall and rise. Carefully, I walk between the Zeros until I’m across from the ghoulish Hawthorne.

I kneel in front of him. He stares, but it’s as if he isn’t really seeing me. “Hawthorne.” I try a normal tone, but it comes out in a breathless whisper. “Remember when we first met? It was in Swords, when the airships fell from the sky. Remember?” My voice quivers. Tears spill down my cheeks. “You tried to help me, and I hit you in the nose?”

He doesn’t even blink.

I sit down and cross my legs. “You rescued me when I was Crow’s prisoner in Census. You were so brave. Nobody in my family lifted a finger to help me. It was you.” I touch his hand, wanting so badly for him to hold me.

Suddenly he focuses. He pounces, wraps his hand around my throat, and squeezes. My face burns hot. My windpipe feels crushed. I hold up my hands to him, palms out, in surrender. He lets go.

I cough and sputter and gulp breaths, gasping when I finally get my voice back. “Okay, so no touching.” I wipe tears from my cheeks with my sleeve. My fingertips glide over my ravaged neck. “I know you’re in there somewhere, Hawthorne. We’re a half-written poem, you and me. Wherever you are—whatever basement in your mind they’ve got you trapped in—I’ll find you. I won’t leave you down there alone.”

As if it’s just the two of us here, I remind Hawthorne of everything we’ve shared together. Every stolen moment when we were secondborns. Every kiss. Every caress. My throat aches, but still I talk.

Hawthorne stares straight ahead. No reaction. No indication that he hears me or understands me. Hours pass with no sign of recognition. The pain of it is too much. It’s too real. It threatens to bury me. I hold my head in my hands and give in, sobbing quietly.

The cargo ship begins to descend. The touchdown is smooth. Wiping my face with the back of my sleeve, I try to pull myself together. The tail opens. Humid air rushes in. The sky is still dark, but tall lamps loom above us, like those that line the secondborn military Bases in Swords, throwing stark white light on everything.

Hawthorne stands in unison with the other mind-controlled monsters. He grabs my arm and roughly hauls me out of the hold. Agent Crow waits on the hoverpad. The black beacon on the side of his head blinks blue. Around us palm trees sway in a salty breeze. Balmy air blows loose strands of my hair.

“Pleasant trip?” Agent Crow asks. He smiles, baring his wretched steel teeth.

Normally I try to have something scathingly sarcastic to say back to him, just so that he remembers he hasn’t beaten me. This time I don’t. This time he has destroyed me, reached inside me and torn my heart out, and I know this is only the beginning.

“Where are we?” My voice is gravelly.

“A little place we call The Apiary,” he replies. “It’s a small island near the Fate of Seas, one of the first military Bases to have Trees. It’s been decommissioned, as far as most people are concerned. Not a lot of people outside Census know of its existence.”

I can just make out the ocean in the distance. All around us lie the relics of a decrepit military Base. Ancient airships that I’ve seen only in holographic history files rust out in the open. Everything is at least a few hundred years old. The only lights shine from the Base’s Trees and infrastructure. Nothing but water lies beyond the Base, from what I can tell. Behind us, rough, tree-lined, rocky crags dapple the horizon. No other signs of civilization.

Viable airships hang from the Trees’ branches, but they’re not current models. I wouldn’t know if I could fly one unless I got inside the cockpit. Behind me the cyborgs form two lines, equally spaced. Efficient. Mindless. Controlled and manipulated by a psychopathic Census agent.

Agent Crow strides ahead of me into a Tree’s trunk. I’m prodded to follow. A familiar dimness greets me inside the Tree, but the smell isn’t the same as the military Trees I inhabited as a soldier. Energy thrums and snaps in the air. There’s an overcharged, singeing scent that, if I licked my fingers, I could probably taste on my skin. As it is, I feel it in my chest. The hair on my skin rises, from the smell and from fear.