“Exactly.” Nate pushed his hand into hers. “Feel the rough places?”
His fingers were gnarled, with thick calluses from his tools and adjusting thin, sharp wires.
Pixel scratched her nail at a callus. “Will I get them too?”
“You will. And they’ll protect your hands.”
“They’ll make me stronger,” she said, fierce.
“Exactly,” Nate said. “Now rest, Pix.”
The others prepared to scavenge in the night. Reed’s voice rumbled like soft music. Nate longed to go to him and apologize for pushing him away, but it was better like this. The closer they got, the harder it was to hide.
And the more he’d hurt Reed in the end.
The hatch opened with a creak and closed with a rattle. Nate untangled himself from Pixel.
“Walk well,” he whispered, locking the hatch behind them.
A dream shook Nate out of sleep. He’d been in the car with his parents, speeding across Grand Cosmos Bridge from Gathos City to Winter Heights. The memory struck him often when he talked to Pixel about Bernice. His mother planting kisses on his cheek while he wiped each away, grimacing and confused. His father murmuring her nickname.Ivy, it’s time.
Except this time, instead of telling him to be very quiet and pushing him into a plastic box between stinking pallets of rotting food, his parents had pulled him back into the car. Instead, the car had crashed and rolled off the edge of the bridge into the dark sludge below.
The swooping sense of falling took Nate’s breath away as he shook off the fog of the bad dream.
He scrubbed his hand through his sweaty hair and reminded himself that his parents hadn’t given him away—they’d saved him. Smuggled him from the shadowy people who never let him stay with his parents for long, who always brought him back to the laboratory, to the cold and the hurt. His parents had taken him from Gathos City and given him to a kind, old aunt in the Withers. They couldn’t have known that Bernice would die before he was old enough to know what to do with the rest of his life.
He wondered—forcing himself not to be hopeful—if they were still alive. All three of them had supposedly died in a car crash, but he certainly wasn’t dead.
Yet.
If they still lived, where were they?
Did they wonder where he was?
The question raked across his insides. He shook it off. He’d never know one way or another.
He rolled over and bumped into Pixel, who slept with her mouth open wide and her arms stretched above her head. Nate smiled. He drew his blanket over her legs, smoothing the folds until his hands stopped shaking.
He crawled out of bed. The skylight above was a dark, gaping mouth.
Under the glow of a crank-light, he set out the pieces of an old stun gun Reed had found while scavenging the week before. It wasn’t in good shape—the circuit board had rusted over. But Nate’d already managed to rewire half of it. His mind quieted as he worked, hunched over the delicate web of tech.
Sweat beaded up at his hairline by the time he ran out of the thin wire he needed. He flexed his cramped hand and carefully put his tools away, wiping each clean with the edge of his shirt. It hadn’t taken as long as he’d hoped, and sadness from the dream still clung to him like the grime from the street. Bernice had known everything there was to know about tinkering. And so many things about Nate himself. She hadn’t been a scientist like his parents, but she’d lived in Gathos City long enough to know all about the GEMs kept locked away.
She would have been able to tell him why he was getting sick so fast between doses of Remedy.
Remedy kept GEMs alive when their bodies began to falter at an unnaturally early age. It was one more awful way for Gathos City to control their property. Bernice hadn’t understood the mechanics of it. She’d rasped out a low sound and said, “Yourmothertinkered with flesh, not me. I stick to guts that don’t bleed.”
Even Alden didn’t have an explanation that made a smudge of sense. Not that Nate really needed to know anything but how much better he felt when he had Remedy—as if it bathed him in light from the inside out.
So why isn’t it working the same anymore?
Nate searched for something else to occupy his mind. Dirty sheets and old rags hung like faded pennants from the scaffolding along the wall. He straightened the bunks, climbing from one to the next, folding blankets and shooing away pests. The others would return home exhausted and ready to sleep—and they’d appreciate not getting bit to pieces in their beds.
He woke Pixel up before dawn. Holding her small hand, he helped her climb up the scaffolding. They squeezed out the small skylight to the flat roof of the utility building where Reed had discovered the perfect abandoned space for a hideout a few months before.
As he gently massaged her scalp, she fell asleep again in his lap. Nate listened to her even breathing and stared out at the smudge of a horizon, waiting for the sun to rise over the endless sea and the towers of Gathos City.
