Phoenix (Black City #2) 8

I slide off the rock and sit beside him to help prepare lunch. I’m not keen to eat raw fish, but I’m too hungry to argue. My knee accidentally brushes up against his as I lean across him to pick up one of the fish, but he doesn’t make any attempt to move away. I squeamishly dig my fingers into the slit Elijah cut into the fish’s belly, pulling out its insides.

“You mentioned your mother was a geneticist?” I say, trying to keep my mind off the fish guts.

He nods. “Her work is mostly focused on xenotransplantation—”

“Xeno-what-now?”

“She transplants cells or organs from one species into another,” he explains. “Because there are so few Bastets left, organ donation among my people is almost unheard of these days, so she’s finding alternatives that we can use if we get sick.”

I think about the scar on my chest, from my own heart transplant when I was a kid. I would’ve died if Dr. Craven hadn’t ripped out Evangeline’s heart and given it to me.

“I like to help my mom around the laboratory. Well, I did before she . . .” He stares at his hands, which are covered in fish blood. “Do you think they’re torturing her, like they did with Polly?”

My heart stings, thinking about my sister. In all honesty, if the Sentry has Elijah’s mom, then I’m certain she’s being interrogated and tortured. It’s what they do. He doesn’t need to hear this, though.

“We’ll get her back,” I say, lightly touching his tanned arm.

He glances down at his arm where my fingers touch him, and a deep flush rises up his neck. He lifts his honeyed eyes and holds my gaze for a lingering moment, and suddenly I’m the one who feels too hot.

“You’re getting fish blood on your leg.”

I start at the sound of Ash’s voice. Flustered, I quickly drop my hand from Elijah’s arm. Ash is leaning against the cave wall, his thumb hooked in one of his belt loops. There’s a hard edge to his expression I’ve never seen before. I place the gutted fish on the rock.

“I thought you were asleep,” I say.

“Sorry to disappoint you,” Ash replies as Elijah puts on his shirt.

My cheeks burn. I’m not sure whether I’m furious at Ash for insinuating that something was going on between me and Elijah or embarrassed that maybe he was right, at least a little bit. Ash stalks over to the water’s edge. I go over to him.

“Nothing was going on,” I reassure him.

I try to take his hand, but he puts it in his pocket, preventing me.

“Why are you being like this?” I say.

“Sorry,” he mutters, finally taking my hand. “I guess it pisses me off when a half-naked guy flirts with my fiancée.”

“He wasn’t—”

Ash raises a brow.

“Even if he was, it doesn’t mean anything,” I say. “You know what he’s like.”

“Yeah,” Ash replies. “It’s you I’m confused about.”

I snatch my hand away from his, definitely angry now.

“You’re being ridiculous,” I snap. “Nothing happened. He was upset, and I was consoling him, that’s all. I—”

My words are cut off as we’re suddenly plunged into twilight. Confused, I peer up at the gap in the cavern roof just as the air around us starts to hum. My heart freezes as the Destroyer Ship slowly stalks across the sky.

They’ve found us.

We sprint away from the large hole in the cavern roof and slam our backs against the stone wall, trying to make ourselves invisible. The shadow of the Destroyer Ship blocks out most of the light, the aircraft’s engines making the surface of the water vibrate.

“Did they see us?” Elijah whispers.

“We’ll know soon enough,” I murmur, keeping my eyes fixed on the airship’s hatch. If they know we’re here, any moment now it’ll open up and a Transporter will come down to get us. We wait for second after agonizing second as the Destroyer Ship cruises by overhead. After what seems like an eternity, light floods back into the cavern, and the blue sky returns. It’s gone.

I exhale, my nerves shot.

“How many hours until nightfall?” Ash asks.

I check my watch. “Six.”

“We’ll leave as soon as it gets dark,” he says.

We sit down on the coats while Elijah finishes cleaning the fish. Tension bubbles between me and Ash, still upset from our fight. Elijah returns and offers some pieces of fish to me, but I’ve lost my appetite. Instead, I retrieve the portable digital screen from Ash’s bag and watch the news with the sound down low, not wanting to draw attention to our position on the off chance the Lupines are still in the area.

“I’m sorry,” Ash whispers to me.

“Me too,” I reply.

He loops his arm around me, all forgiven.

The three of us huddle around the digital screen. There’s been some fighting in Fire Rapids in the Black River State, plus three rebel strikes against munitions factories in Gallium. Roach, Beetle and Day are certainly sticking to their end of the deal by keeping the Sentry busy while we search for the Ora, but how much longer can they hold them off?

Eventually night falls and it’s time to leave. We gather our belongings, exit the cavern the same way we entered and wander along the river for a few hours, passing a herd of resting horses. I keep an eye out for any sign of the Destroyer Ship, but don’t see it anywhere.

Ash stops and points toward the cliff. “There’s a trail up ahead. We should follow it up to the top of the ravine.”

In the moonlight I can just make out the path snaking up the rock face.

“It looks very steep,” I say, concerned. “It could take all night to climb.”

“Why don’t we ride the horses?” Elijah gestures toward the herd of animals.

“You can’t be serious,” Ash says.

Elijah smirks. “You scared?”

“No,” Ash replies, then adds under his breath: “Good luck catching one.”

I watch, intrigued, as Elijah cautiously approaches one of the chestnut mares. The horse clambers to its feet, neighing loudly. He raises his hands.

“Whoa, girl,” he says in a strangely hypnotic voice. “I’m not going to hurt you.”

The horse scuffs its hoof against the ground, agitated.

“Maybe you should back off,” I say.

Elijah ignores me and holds the animal’s gaze. He gently places his hand on its nose, and the horse immediately calms down.

“How are you doing that?” I whisper as we approach him.

“It’s just a gift my people have,” he says.

I let out a panicked yelp when he lifts me onto the horse without warning. Elijah chuckles.

“That wasn’t funny,” I say.

“Your turn,” Elijah says to Ash, his eyes bright with amusement.

Ash clumsily slings his leg over the horse, somehow managing to clamber onto it behind me. The horse lets out a disgruntled snort, but thankfully doesn’t buck us. Ash slips an arm around my waist, taking the horse’s mane in his other hand. Elijah confidently mounts one of the other horses and rides off without another word. Ash nudges our horse with his heels. It jerks forward.

Riding a horse isn’t as scary as I thought it would be. In fact, it feels freeing, exciting, as the wind whips past my face. I squeeze my thighs around its flanks, getting a better grip. We carefully trek up the horse trail. This one is wider and better tended than the one we took to get down into the ravine, which is an encouraging sign. We must be near a settlement of some sort. All the way up, I keep glancing over my shoulder, expecting to see the Destroyer Ship coming for us, but it’s nowhere to be seen. Where are they?

The journey is much faster on horseback, and we reach the top within a few hours. By now the sky has turned from the deep blue of twilight to the empty black of night. Only the moon and stars offer any sort of light across the wild desert plains. The rocky landscape seems to roll on to infinity, and I start to worry we’ve made a mistake coming up here. Perhaps we should’ve stayed in the ravine.

“Which way should we go?” Elijah says.

“That way.” Ash indicates a spot on the horizon directly in front of us. “There’s something in the distance. It could be a town.”

I just pray to heaven that he’s right, because if we’re not out of the desert before the sun rises, we won’t survive long.

20.

NATALIE

I CLING TO the horse’s mane as we gallop toward the buildings that Ash saw on the horizon. Elijah rides beside us, expertly steering around the rocks and brush jutting out of the arid earth, despite the poor light. He wasn’t exaggerating when he said he had a gift with horses. After several miles, Ash yanks on the mane, and the horse stops so suddenly, I have to fling my arms around its neck to prevent myself from sliding off.

“Are those what I think they are?” Elijah says.

“Yeah,” Ash replies flatly.

I look up to see what they’re talking about. Up ahead is the familiar ragged shape of Crimson Mountain, silhouetted against the bright, full moon. It’s a famous landmark of the Barren Lands, known commonly as the Devil’s Fork because of its three peaks, but I’m pretty sure Ash didn’t stop to admire it. Then I see what caught his eye. At the base of the mountain is a small town, and beside it is a forest of strange-looking trees. I blink, not understanding. A woodland in the desert? The shapes of the trees start to properly form as I continue to gaze at them: tall, narrow trunks, unnaturally straight branches. A gasp catches in my throat—they’re crosses. Hundreds upon hundreds of crosses.

We’ve inadvertently stumbled across the Barren Lands concentration camp, the place where thousands of Darklings were executed during the first war. My father described it to me only once, but there’s no mistaking what it is. He was responsible for sending the Darklings to the camp as part of the government’s “Voluntary Migration Scheme” at the start of the war, and the horrors he witnessed here eventually caused him to flip sides and work for the Darklings.

It’s one thing hearing about it, and altogether a different matter seeing it for myself. It makes me fully realize the true horror of the Tenth. That camp is large enough to imprison tens of millions of Darklings, humans and Bastets.

Ash nudges the horse forward. We’re all deathly silent as we ride through the forest of crosses. Goose bumps prickle my skin, but they aren’t just caused by the cold desert night. This place has the haunting feel of a graveyard, and I guess that’s what it is: a mass grave for thousands of Darklings. The wooden crosses are charred and covered in soot where the Darklings caught fire in the intense desert heat, just as Ash did during his crucifixion. They must have suffered terribly.

I fix my gaze on my horse’s neck, not wanting to look any more. I can’t believe my father was responsible for this. After a few minutes, the horses’ hooves hit stone, and I know we’ve reached the main camp. The iron gates are open, which strikes me as odd, but I suppose there was no need for the guards to close them when they abandoned the compound. We ride through. The camp is nestled in the shadow of Crimson Mountain, surrounded by a tall chain-link fence topped with barbed wire. Gun turrets are spaced at even intervals around it, and at every corner of the fence are tall metal pylons with these silver orbs on them.

“What’s that sound?” Elijah says, his ears twitching.

“What sound?” I ask.

“That high-pitched noise, like a mosquito buzzing in your ear,” he replies, wincing.

“I can’t hear anything,” I reply.

“Me neither.” Ash gestures to one of the pylons. “Maybe those are sonar towers?”

A sonic alarm? That would make sense if Elijah can hear it but we can’t.

“Why would they keep them on? No one’s here,” Elijah grumbles.

“They probably heard you were coming,” Ash says, and Elijah glares at him.

We ride deeper into the camp, following a wide road that resembles a main street, with sidewalks and buildings on either side. Most of the buildings are houses, but there is a hairdresser, a tailor, and something that looks like a small convenience store, where the guards probably went to stock up on luxuries like Shine and cigarettes.

“It’s not what I expected,” Ash mutters as we pass a number of elegant three-story houses done in the same colonial style as the houses found in the Plantation State. Some even have front yards, although the lawns and flowers are long dead. It looks like any pretty suburban street, except that there are iron security grilles in front of all the buildings’ windows and doors, and machine gun turrets on their roofs.

“I think this is where the guards slept. They certainly wouldn’t live with the Darklings,” I say.

I briefly wonder which house was my father’s. Did he ever enjoy a leisurely drink on his front lawn with his friends while a hundred feet away, Darklings were being starved and slaughtered? I can’t imagine him doing that, but maybe he did. My father wasn’t always a good man.

From my vantage point on the horse, I get a good view of the camp’s layout. At the entrance of the compound, where we are now, are the Sentry living quarters, where the guards slept and socialized. About fifty feet away, a set of railway tracks cuts across the road, creating a natural break between the guards’ living quarters and the heart of the concentration camp, where the Darklings were imprisoned. Then at the far end of the compound is a large, blocky gray building. I’m guessing that’s the main administration building and hospital, where the Sentry employees worked and did their experiments on the Darklings.