I’m starting
to think how ironic it is that a firegirl might die in a deep freeze when suddenly I’m smothered by warmth. Somebody grabs me, lifts me up, and nearly squeezes all the breath out of me.
Wisty
IT’S MY BROTHER, Whit.
In a flash, he carries me a hundred, two hundred paces ahead, as if I weigh nothing. Then he and I duck behind a high stone wall. For a few precious seconds, we’re out of sight and safe.
I hug Whit with all the strength I have. He finally relaxes his powerful grip enough for me to breathe.
“But if this is really you…” He trails off.
“Margo,” I whisper. “He killed Margo.” Then suddenly I’m crying like a baby. I’m shaking, and my teeth chatter hopelessly.
Margo is dead. The girl who helped me put a third piercing in my ear last week. The girl who woke us all up at five a.m. every morning to report for duty, the girl who had more dedication to fighting the oppression of the New Order than the rest of us put together. She was so young. Just fifteen years old.
“I told her not to go in that building without more help. I begged her,” my brother says. “Why did she go in there? Why?”
“She was always the last to give up on a mission,” I remind Whit, as if I’m trying to convince myself that it wasn’t our fault she’d been caught. “First in, last out. That was her mantra, right? Stupid!”
“Courageous,” he says, and for an instant I see in his eyes why it is that girls love him, why I love him. He’s honest and sincere and absolutely fearless.
The mission, one of a dozen attempted rescues we’d undertaken in the last month, was our worst failure yet. We were trying to liberate maybe a hundred kidnapped kids from a New Order testing facility. But our intelligence must have been off. Instead of victimized kids, the building held a platoon of New Order soldiers. They were waiting for us.
“Actually, it’s lucky any of us—,” I start to say.
“Find her!” The speakers mounted in the plaza start vibrating with The One’s irate voice. “There’s another conspirator in the crowd! She has flaming-red hair! Close the courtyard exits. Capture her now!”
Whit grabs a gray hat off a passing businessman and plunks it down on my head.
“Tuck your hair in, quick,” he says.
I’m doing just that when a policeman spots me. He’s a couple of dozen yards away.
Now he’s grabbing for the whistle at the end of a cord around his neck… and he’ll soon have the attention of every soldier in the plaza. Not to mention that of The One, whom I hate to mention.
But then a small black figure leaps up and knocks the policeman down flat on his rear.
Whit and I exchange looks of surprise. He says, “Did you just—?”
But before Whit can finish, the black figure—an old woman—is at our side. She presses into my hand a crumpled, gritty piece of paper. “Take it, take it!”
I swear she’s the weirdest-looking creature I’ve ever seen in my life, and yet I know her from somewhere.
“Who are—?”
She cuts me off. “Follow this. Go! I’m a friend. Run. Run. Don’t stop for a single breath, or it’s over. For all of us. Go!”
Somehow she gets behind us, and then she delivers a kick to both of our butts. That sends us staggering into the surging crowd.
I immediately turn back… but there’s no sign of her.
“You heard her,” says Whit. “Go! Now! Go!”