False Hearts (False Hearts #1)(93)

“You want to go out into the Impure world?” She sneered down at me. “Very well. I’ll let you go. You can never return. Never contact your parents or your friends. You’re cut off from here in every possible way. I know that the big, wide world out there will chew you up and spit you out, until you wish you could come crawling back. But you can’t. You’re apostate. You’re dead to the Hearth.”

“You done?” I asked wearily.

She glared at me for a long time before she finally moved away, her robe whispering against the forest floor. She turned her back on us and made her way through the forest to her Hearth. She’d made her point. We couldn’t hide things from her, even if we tried. Our choice was final.

I spat in the direction she had taken.

I looked up toward the spaceship. We heard the low whistle of an owl—Dad’s signal. Oh God. If Mana-ma knew about our escape, would she hurt my parents for helping us?

I tried to move, but Taema was so heavy, and I was so weak. We weren’t far. I could see the ship through the redwood trees. A little door came down, but as much as I tried to move toward it, I was too weak. Our heart beat so loudly it seemed to be the only sound in the world.

I collapsed against the dirt, defeated. So close and yet so far.

I heard a clicking, whirring sound.

With my fading vision, I looked up into the face of one of the droid supervisors, her machine at her side. “You’re the ones we’re meant to pick up?”

I managed to nod.

“Shit,” she muttered, and then she hauled us up by the shoulders and dragged us toward the ship, the droid assisting her. I watched our legs trail through the dirt. She kept under the cover of trees, looking around nervously. I didn’t have the breath to tell her that she didn’t need to bother, that Mana-ma had already found us and let us go, at least for now.

She put us in the ship and closed the hatch behind us. All sound cut off, and we were in a hallway. Everything was made of metal. I’d never seen that before. Looking up, we could see the metal crosshatches, the boots of people walking past and the wheels of droids.

“I’ll get the medic,” our savior said, and took off at a jog. All fell silent and then I heard the low roar of the engine. I hadn’t expected it to echo all around us, from all directions at once. And I could tell when it left the ground.

“We’re flying!” I whispered to Taema. But she couldn’t respond.

I slumped on the floor, my arms around her, tears running down my face. “Please,” I kept gasping. “Please.” I actually prayed. Prayed to a God. Not Mana-ma’s. My own idea of a God, one who wasn’t a total *.

A group of people came running down the metal hallway. About five or six, their footsteps and voices echoing all around me. I was barely conscious. For a moment, when the unfamiliar faces peered down at us, I wondered if they were going to toss us out like so much junk. But my first experience with those from the outside world after we’d actually left the Hearth was kindness.

They’d never seen conjoined twins, and they looked at us with a mixture of awe and fear. They touched us gently, as if afraid they’d break us. I was almost all gone by then, but I still remember those soft fingers laying us down in the sick bay. I could see a gray fog with vague shapes and hear distorted sounds, but that’s it.

A mask was put over my face and I could breathe better. My vision cleared, but I still felt so very weak. I wrapped my arms around Taema and closed my eyes, pressing my face against her neck.

The last thought I had before I fell unconscious was that I really, really didn’t want us to die. Not when we were so close to that big, wide world out there.





TWENTY-EIGHT

TAEMA

Something is wrong.

Or, at least, it’s not what Ensi had planned. I see the tall, towering redwoods of the Hearth. The sky is full of rainclouds, and the luminescent green fog of the bay floats through the air. I smell sea salt and old smoke. It is more vivid than anything I’ve ever experienced.

It’s almost exactly like that shared dream forest my sister and I visited along with everyone else in the Hearth after we took the little pill from Mana-ma’s hand.

I’m not bound. Neither is Nazarin. I don’t see Ensi. This isn’t where we were meant to end up. This definitely isn’t where Ensi would send us to torture us. This is too … peaceful.

“Were you able to dose him with what Kim gave you?” Nazarin asks.

I nod.

He looks around, and then glances at his hand. He frowns. I blink, and a gun appears in his hand.

“It worked. That tooth was full of nanites that worked their way deep into his implants and biochemistry.”

I take a shuddering breath. “How did Kim learn to do this?”

“Sudice’s labs and a brilliant brain.”

We start walking through the woods, cautiously. We don’t see Ensi, but he’ll be here, somewhere.

“How’d you meet Kim?” I ask, keeping my voice low. “Through Juliane?” We both scout our surroundings, but I want to focus on something other than the fact I could die at any moment.

“I met Kim the first time the SFPD hooked me up with her to put in my memory mods. She met Juliane the same day. Juliane and she hit it off right away, started dating. Then they married, and they were one of those married couples that just worked. You saw them both together and you could only hope to have something like that someday. We both helped each other heal when we lost Juliane. I think if we hadn’t had the other person to lean on, we might have both been broken by it.”