“Okay, so we’re well past that date,” I said drily.
Jolie hadn’t made any gestures toward me—I was starting to recognize certain words and sometimes sentences without her spelling it out. Now I looked at her and saw that she was standing quietly toward the back of the cave, facing the wall.
I walked over to her and made the sign for “What’s up?”
She pointed to the wall. I shook my head and shrugged, so she took my hand and rubbed my fingers against the wall.
I brushed away dirt and dust to see the words scratched into the rock:
BEWARE THE PLAGUE!
TOUCH NOTHING HERE!
SAVE YOURSELVES!
I read the words several times, then looked at Jolie’s solemn face. Her glance moved to where Mills and Bunny were still opening packages, sniffing ancient food.
TOUCH NOTHING HERE!
I read the dire message again, then looked over at the skeletons. None of them had bullet holes. Had they been ill, and died where they lay?
I made sure Jolie could see my face but spoke softly. “They died a long, long time ago. There’s no way there could still be germs here, no way this could be contagious.”
Jolie didn’t nod, just looked at me with her big, expressive blue eyes.
“Okay, people!” I called, clapping my hands. “Time to go! Make sure you have all your gear! And… where’s Ansel?”
Bunny looked up. “He went to take a leak,” she said, then frowned. “Been gone a long time.”
“No one… went with him?” I asked quietly.
No one answered me, but we all left the cave and spread out into the woods as silently as possible. Without calling his name, we searched beneath shrubs and up in branches till we realized it was pointless. The only person I was mad at was me. I’d made the decision to bring him with us, I’d let him off all this time without forcing him to tell me how to get into the capital, I hadn’t bothered to tell anyone in the squad to, hey, keep an eye on him. Which they should have known, of course.
But I was at fault. Because I was the leader.
My jaw set and I was about to start internally screaming at myself when I noticed Jolie scratching at her neck. I stopped her hand and looked closely.
“You have words written on your neck,” I told her, pulling her sweater collar aside. Jolie made a surprised face and wrote “?” on my hand. “To the,” I read, and looked in her eyes. “What is this?”
She shrugged and shook her head, convincingly mystified. She rubbed at the words again and they began to flake off. They were written in blood.
71
CASSIE
I HA
D NEVER SAT IN a vehicle’s passenger seat and tried to read anything, so I had no way of knowing that it would make me barfy. After the second time I puked out the window, Tim slammed the All-Terrain Transport to a halt, grabbed my sheaf of papers, and got out to shove them into a box in the back. Then something caught his gaze—he frowned and read a couple sheets.
“This is about Becca,” he said, getting back in the ATT. I reached for the pages but he held them out of my reach, like an asshole. Fine. Be like that. He read them while I rinsed my mouth with a bottle of water and spit out the window.
“Oh, my God,” Tim said. “Oh, my God.”
“What? What?” I cried, lunging for the file.
Again he held it out of my reach. “Becca was sent to the capital,” he said. “She’s on a special, secret mission that not even she knows about—she’ll be told when it’s time.” Tim was a pretty stoic guy—I’d seen him take punches without flinching and hear bad news without flicking an eyelid. But right now he looked like someone had just slammed his head with a baseball bat.
“Sounds… real Strepplike,” I said carefully.