Banished (The Ravenmaster Chronicles Book 2), page 20
“Just jealous?”
“I’m not that, either.”
“That’s good. It’s a…tragic emotion.”
“Now you’re saying I’m tragic?”
“I’m saying you’re trapped. But I can get you out.”
I shake my head at this, hoping to clear it. “Wait. You’re the one who’s trapped, and I’m here to get you out.”
“Do I look trapped or like I want out? Do I look like I’d rather be anywhere than right here?”
“Not really.”
“Do I look unhappy?”
“No.”
“Stressed? Worried?”
“Actually, you look alarmingly relaxed.”
“And you?”
“What about me?”
“Are you unhappy? Stressed? Worried?”
“I’m on a mission.”
Simeon leans in, his head on a slant as he gives me a twinkly-eyed squint. “A mission Is that so?”
“I’m here because a few days ago, you saved my life. I owe you. This is my payment.”
“So this act of heroism is really just a transaction?”
I know I’m supposed to say, “Yes.” I’m supposed to pull the brakes, but this train is already in motion, and I can feel myself being swept along by its momentum.
He drapes his arm over the back of the couch behind my head and pivots around toward me. We lock eyes in a moment of mutual hypnosis, and I can’t tell which one of us is predator and which is prey.
Did the music just get louder? Is that why I can’t hear Render’s voice in my head?
Feeling alone, the only voice I hear right now is my own. It dips and bobs like a small cork in the waves of a vast ocean until it’s joined by a kindred spirit in the form of Simeon’s voice.
“There’s no pressure,” he promises. “I don’t want you to do anything you don’t want to do.”
“I know. It’s just that…”
“I know.” He takes his eyes from mine for a second, just long enough to glance at the open doorway. “There is some good music being made out there by some bad men.”
“If you know they’re bad, why are you choosing to stay here and be one of them?”
“Because you’re here.”
“I shouldn’t be.”
“And yet…”
I repeat those two words out loud, those two tiny words that are somehow big enough to hold all the insecurities and doubts I’ve been carrying around with me for my entire life.
Simeon leans in to kiss me, and I don’t lean away. Instead, I lean toward him until my cheek is pressed to his, our breath in each other’s ear. I slide my arms under his, swing my legs and body around as I stand, and—in one sudden surge and with every scrap of strength left in my tired muscles—I hook my arms under his and haul him to his feet with me.
Looking stunned to be standing in front of the couch with my arms clenched around his waist, Simeon blinks hard like he’s trying to remember everything all at once: who I am, who he is, where we are, and why we’re wrapped in each other’s arms with a bunch of scowling men striding through the doorway and into the room.
“You can’t leave,” the man in front commands. He’s short but muscular with a reddish face and a thick blue vein pulsing in his forehead. “This is the House of Men.” Mr. Veiny Forehead jabs a stubby finger at Simeon. “He’s a man. What we say goes.”
“Speaking of going,” I sneer at him, “I’m going. Simeon is coming with me.”
“I don’t think—”
“I know you don’t,” I interrupt. “And thanks to you, neither does he. But I do. And I think I’ll be going now, if it’s all the same to you.”
The boys and men behind Veiny Forehead sway and go glassy eyed as if I just muttered some magical incantation that’s frozen them in their tracks. They’re a threatening looking bunch—at least thirty of them now crammed into this room with maybe another forty or fifty jostling around in the hallway leading to the top of the stairs. But I’m not afraid. Not in the least. I don’t hear the music anymore. It’s been replaced by the bovine lowing of the men. Instead of seductive, it’s gentle and harmless, like the ocean’s crashing waves have dwindled into lazy ripples in a small, secluded lake.
I take Simeon by the hand. He gives my own hand an appreciative squeeze and smiles down at me with a smile and a flustered blush.
“You Emergents really are a better version of us humans, aren’t you?”
“We’re a different version.”
“Well, whatever you are, you make me want to be a better version of a man.”
From somewhere outside and above the house, Render melts his mind into mine.
~ You saved him from an old, smooth path and have allowed him to walk a rough, new one.
He doesn’t hand out compliments easy or often. But when he puts it like that, I think coming in here to save Simeon might just be the most heroic thing I’ve ever done.
Simeon’s legs buckle, and I support him as I guide us past the gently rocking, gently humming, and seemingly catatonic boys and men. Retracing my steps, I lead Simeon through the congested hallway and down the crowded staircase.
Once past the last of the men, I emerge from the front doorway with Simeon trudging along next to me, his head still turned toward the powder blue house and the men and the music. I can tell from his posture and the hazy gray fog swirling in his eyes that he’s still at least partially enthralled. Giving up the old, smooth path in favor of a rough, new one can’t be easy.
But better to be captivated from out here than to be a captive back there.
I’m thinking this about Simeon, but as we get farther from the house and I get closer to a reunion with Brohn, I realize I’m thinking it about me, too.
The Fallen rush to greet us, but I make a beeline for Brohn.
“I missed you,” I tell him.
He grins, points to his ears, and shakes his head. “Give me a second.” He pries out the waxy earplugs of soft tar and tosses them to the side. “You were saying?”
“Render may be the voice in my head, but it’s your voice I hear in my heart.”
“I love you, too.”
Exhausted, I fall against him, and I realize he’s not just holding me up. He’s holding me together. And I realize another thing: You’re not trapped when the arms wrapped around you make you feel free.
30
ARRIVAL
After a quick sprint, Brohn and the Fallen and I duck down a side street lined with crushed houses on either side.
Each one of the houses looks like it’s been stepped on by some very large, very angry giant. I recognize the work of Assault Drones and the gravity-enhancing ordnance they use to cause structures like these to collapse in on themselves, crushing their frames down to their foundations and killing anyone hiding inside.
It’s only once we’re safely out of earshot of the House of Men, that the rest of our crew risks taking out their earplugs and whipping them off into the scrub brush lining the road. After a round of happy hugs over Simeon’s safe return, Brohn claps his hands together. “Only one more to go.”
“Right,” I confirm. “Caryl.”
“The hospital?” Simeon asks. I can tell he’s still struggling to shake off the daze of his time in the House of Men. I also see a little more clearly what he was talking about back there. The only thing worse than being trapped in a place you don’t want to be is trapped in a place you do want to be. The common denominator seems to be the loss of choice and the ability to move. As it turns out, free will comes at a very high price.
“The hospital,” I confirm to Simeon as the seven of us get back to following Render through the city.
Worried we could be out here after dark, lost and exposed, I connect with Render.
Please tell me you’re not leading us all on a wild goose chase.
~ It’s a raven chase. And it’s not my fault if you can’t keep up.
At least your confidence isn’t suffering.
Render’s laugh—haunting and hollow but so very welcome—fills my ears.
With me and Brohn side by side, which feels beyond right, our Conspiracy weaves through the dead city. We leap curbs and cut left and right, jogging at one point for over a mile down the middle of an old highway-turned-graveyard. The off-ramp back down to the smaller streets is a congested tangle of mag-cars and one bus with the crusted bodies of its passengers visible through the ash and dirt-streaked windows. Walking next to me, Tallynne makes a gagging sound and asks if I believe in God.
I don’t turn her way or look her in the eye when I finally answer, “It’s easier than believing in men.”
Before she has a chance to press me any further, Render hovers to a mid-air stop and then glides down to perch on the curved top of a vine-covered light post. His clacking barks announce our arrival as we turn a corner and find ourselves face to face with the hospital. It’s been less than a week since I was here last, but I barely recognize it.
What was a surprisingly unblemished building—with its walls and even most of its windows intact—now looks like it’s been hit by a bomb. Or, rather, by lots of bombs.
Its roof has collapsed in on itself, turning the hospital from roughly cube-shaped into more of a jagged-topped bowl. Exposed steel struts splay up into the air like the long, twisted spines of a castle-sized sea anemone. Every window has been blown out, the wheelchair ramp leading up to the entrance is a snaking heap of broken concrete slabs. Even the smaller outbuildings and parts of the surface-level parking lot have been fused into lumpy slags of singed concrete and melted steel railings, traffic barriers, and signposts.
Frozen in place, I stare at the wreckage and at the heaps of debris and ash. “Am I imagining this now?” I ask out loud. “Or was I imagining it then?”
Brohn plants a supporting hand on my shoulder but doesn’t answer. He wasn’t here, so I know he’s just letting me know, through the comfort of contact and by virtue of his physical presence now, that, either way, he’s with me now.
Simeon steps forward and scans the ruins. “We thought it was a proper hospital. But what if it wasn’t. What if the Communers did something to our heads?”
Tallynne reminds us that Tiresias and Kyrk did something to us, too. “If it wasn’t the drugs, maybe it was some kind of hypnosis. Or mind control?”
Walking up next to her, Dove kicks at a twisted piece of steel and kneels down to gather up a handful of bits of red brick and stone. “This is real, right? I can’t tell if it’s been like this for days or years.”
Letting go of her brother’s hand, Méridienne walks over to stand between Tallynne and Simeon. She looks around with them for a few seconds before turning to face me. “Ce n’est pas possible. Étions-nous vraiment là? Cet endroit était-il autre chose? Ou étions-nous quelqu’un d’autres?”
Next to me, Corbin stares at his sister for a minute before clearing his throat to translate. “She wants to know if this place was something else before, or if all of you were someone else.” He stammers and apologizes for not knowing what she means.
“I know what she means,” I tell him.
“I don’t,” Brohn admits.
It’s hard for me to rehash one of my more embarrassing moments in recent memory, but I remind Brohn that the Fallen and I weren’t exactly ourselves the last time we were here. “We thought we were free,” I confess. “We felt…unburdened. We thought we were where we most wanted to be and that we were with the right people at the right place at the right time.”
“You were drugged,” Brohn reminds me. “You said it was like being brainwashed.”
“It’s not just that.”
“What then?”
“I think maybe there’s something left over. Something lingering in our heads. Something…permanent?” I pause under the weight of that last word. In all our adventures and experiences, we’ve had our minds tested and our bodies pushed to the limits. But there was always the unspoken assumption that nothing would or could ever tinker with the essence of who we are. Until now.
But Brohn isn’t buying it. “Trust me. You’re exactly who you’ve always been.”
“No,” Simeon calls back from where he’s still standing with the rest of the Fallen. “She’s right. I feel it, too. It’s like someone poked a hole in the wall between dreams and reality. And it hasn’t closed all the way.”
“It’s hard to know what’s real,” Dove admits. “I’m looking at this and at all of you, but it’s like some small bit of it—and of all of us—are the leftover scenes from someone else’s life.”
“That’s what I was trying to say,” Simeon insists. “I can’t tell how much of what happened here was real and how much was a dream.”
In cases like this, Render is fond of asking, What’s the difference?
But I’m not Render, and this is hardly the time for deep, philosophical inquiries. We’re here to find Caryl. We can look for the Truth another time.
With that in mind, I point to the ground in front of the former hospital, clear my throat, and begin the process of bringing us all back down to earth. “Either way—dream, reality, memory lapse, altered perception, brainwashing, or drug-induced hallucination—Caryl is under there somewhere. We had to leave her…” Flooded with guilt, it takes me a second to blink my eyes dry and to clear my throat enough to finish. “And there’s no way we’re…I’m leaving her again.”
Render flies down and parachutes to a landing on my shoulder. Feeling simultaneously strong and scared, I stride forward with Brohn at my side and the rest of our impromptu Conspiracy following along, their faces riddled with unspoken doubt.
It’s times like this that I wonder about Brohn. When he strides forward, leading the rest of us into battle, is he really confident? Or is he just faking it like I am?
31
DESCENT
After weaving through a maze of concrete and steel, Simeon helps me and Brohn push some heavy wood beams away from what were once the hospital’s front doors. Ducking down, we enter the lobby, which is ankle deep with broken glass and strewn with bricks, ceiling tiles, smashed light fixtures, bent signs, wooden studs, rusted pipes, exposed wires, and piles of contorted, metal-framed tables and chairs. Underneath it all, a wide swath of carpet has melted into a bubbly mound of singed red threads and black rubber.
Two corridors branch out from the main lobby. Although they’re ominously dark, there’s enough light coming through one of the broken, partial walls to see that their floors are lined with the bodies of the dead.
We all whip around at the sound of a groan.
Sitting on the floor, his back pressed up to the cracked front of what’s left of a broken counter on the far side of the lobby, Kyrk raises his eyes as we approach.
“That’s Kyrk,” I tell Brohn through the corner of my mouth.
“The…pharmacist you told me about?”
“More like ‘drug dealer.’ But yeah.”
Kicking away some loose chunks of plaster, I kneel next to Kyrk. He’s dressed how I remember him from my first time here, only now, his once-white lab coat is a Rorschach Test of dirt and blood. The lenses of his thick-framed glasses are cracked and foggy, and his graying hair is ashy with dust.
“What happened here?” I ask.
“The Devoted,” Tallynne guesses from behind me.
Kyrk shakes his head. He works his jaw around, but it takes him a few tries before he’s able to answer for himself. “No. Not…not the Devoted.”
“Converters?” Dove asks even though we know that can’t be right. The Converters are a high-heeled shoe, short skirt wearing band of brainwashers and recruiters. They’re not a search-and-destroy demolition crew.
Kyrk shakes his head again, and his eyes roll back. I think he’s going to lose consciousness, but he refocuses, blinks a bunch of times, and stares down at his badly wounded legs. I can tell from here that he’s suffered multiple fractures, but I don’t even know how I’d begin to help him. “An albino…,” he whispers, “and eight…monsters.”
“Epic,” Brohn and I say at the same time. “And his Hypnagogics,” Brohn adds with a scowl. “What did Epic want? Why did he do this?”
“He wanted…he…”
I lay my hand on his arm, my eyes fixed to his as I try to get him to focus. I want to help him, but I don’t think he’s going to last more than another minute or two—the life is drifting away from his drying eyes—and I need answers. “Anything you can tell us…”
“Was he after Kress?” Brohn asks.
Kyrk answers with a feeble shake of his head.
“Me?”
“No…he wanted….” With a burble of black blood pooling at the corner of his mouth, Kyrk manages to lift his arm high enough to point to the exit door at the far end of the lobby. “In the sub-basement, way down under all the levels of the parking garage…”
“I remember,” I tell him, glancing back at the Fallen. “We were down there.”
“He wants something called…the Lyfelyte.”
Brohn repeats the word, but in his mouth, it’s a question. “Did you tell him—?”
His voice suddenly forceful as if the half-question has offended him to his core, Kyrk manages a more vigorous shake of his head. “I didn’t tell him anything. I wouldn’t do that. I take away pain. I never…I’d never cause it.”
His lips in a confused scowl, Corbin stammers the word, “Lyfelyte?”
“It’s a boundary,” I explain. “It’s where life goes after it’s done with us.”
“It’s here?” Brohn asks.
“Kind of,” I tell him. “Below this building…it’s not the actual place. But it’s maybe a gateway or a portal or something. I thought I saw people I couldn’t have seen. Mattea. Cardyn. Manthy. My father.”
“But that wasn’t real, right”
“Just because it wasn’t real doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.” Taking a deep breath, I make a decision. “We can’t get distracted. Even by something as potentially big as the Lyfelyte. Caryl is the mission.”
Smiling, Brohn nods his understanding and approval. “Then let’s go find your Fallen friend.”
