to kill me if she let the truth slip.
“She demanded to see me first. I remember the video session. We saw each other for no more than ten seconds, and she started crying in half that time. After that, they used her as a resource, asked her all sorts of questions, still do I think. She is their eyes behind the Wall. And she goes along with everything, all because of me. She’d do anything for me; it’s her greatest weakness.”
I’m now positive Maude is the reason I was saved from the Outer Ring. She likely worried Bo would be hurt if Frank believed her responsible for my beating the Heist, for keeping my birth date secret. She must have told him the truth as soon as I admitted it to her.
“And the berries?” I ask.
He shrugs. “I’m guessing she leaves them there in case I were to reappear, to show that she’s never forgotten me.”
“We should go,” Emma says.
I nod and move for the door, but something catches me off guard. Something odd in one of the topmost screens labeled Group A. “Wait! Did you see that?”
“See what?” Bree asks, looking at the screen I point to. We wait, and again there is movement, a shadow darting through the frame.
“That, just there. Did you see that?” Bree nods. So does Emma.
We spread out in the control room, locating the other screens labeled Group A and wait. While each screen shows havoc—charred buildings and trampled livestock fields—we begin to see life among them: the faintest of silhouettes, darting through the frames. You would miss them if you weren’t deliberately looking for life, which would be easy to do when the screens sit beside the lively pictures of groups B, C, and D.
“I thought Group A was gone,” I say.
Bree shrugs. “Our journals are incomplete, so I’m not sure.”
“No, they killed each other off,” Bo says. “I heard it reported. Occasionally, in the early weeks after I was captured, I became Frank’s favorite test subject. He hated Ryder for escaping and he took that anger out on me. I spent hours on his workers’ tables. Each time I prayed that I would die, but I never got quite that lucky.
“I remember the day Frank received the report that Group A had died off. They thought I was unconscious, but I heard the whole thing. Dead. Extinct. Gone. Every last one of them.”
“Maybe Frank’s wrong, though,” Bree says, looking back to the images. “Maybe a few of them made it.”
“And maybe our eyes are playing tricks on us,” Bo says. “Whatever is left of that ruined place, it is not an area that could easily foster life.”
“True,” I say. “But even if they were fighting at one point, all it would have taken was a handful of people who had hope, who wanted to keep going. Claysoot formed out of nearly nothing. So did Saltwater and Dextern. These people in Group A had electricity and shelter. If they decided they wanted to live, they did.”
Bree and Bo nod in agreement, but Emma has grown distracted by a display that shows Carter hunched over medical scrolls in the Clinic.
“Come on,” Bo says. “We need to keep moving.”
He checks the door, and after deeming it safe, we open it. The alarm is still blaring and we skirt through the rows of screens, red light dancing over our faces. Up ahead, the hallway opens into the garage.
And then there is a voice behind us. “Freeze.”
Bo, Emma, and I do, but Bree reacts so instinctively I don’t have time to stop her. She spins on her heels, brings her rifle up to her chest. She aims and fires.
But I hear two shots.
And then I hear two bodies crumpling to the ground.
THIRTY-SIX
THE BLOOD COMES SLOWLY AT first, soft and delicate, and then spreads over the fabric of her shirt like fire swallowing dry leaves. Bree lies on her back, eyes looking up at the ceiling, and draws short, panicked breaths. I drop beside her, not bothering to check if the threat has been eliminated.
“Bree?”
“I’m okay. I’m okay,” she gasps. Her hand finds mine and grips it tightly. The bullet has hit her upper arm, and as she lies there, panting violently, I realize how much she means to me. My chest starts pounding. I stand up quickly, my hands moving of their own accord. I aim my rifle down the hallway, but it is empty.
There is a body lying on the concrete floor. Bo has gone into