UnBound - Neal Shusterman Page 0,39

says.

“You’re trapped,” he says back.

He manages to reach her and tries to dislodge the beam, without the use of his legs, but he can’t—it’s too heavy. Anissa rocks back and forth, and Jobe pushes, working together to free her. “Why are you helping me?” she asks, then looks into his face and doesn’t need an answer; she already knows. It’s too late for Jobe to save himself . . . but not too late to save someone else.

Finally the beam slides off the heatsuit, clattering to the floor, and Anissa wriggles out from under the suit.

Jobe, now lying on the ground, lets out a shuddering breath. He looks up at her, his eyes glazing, life draining from him. Yet he smiles.

“Did it,” he says. “Made it count . . .” Then he releases a final rattle and is gone.

Anissa touches his face in a moment of silent communion, closing his eyes. It’s too late to thank him, too late to say good-bye—but even if she could, there isn’t time, because she has to move, to seize the chance he’s given her.

With flames licking closer, she wriggles into the heatsuit, sealing it like her father showed her, just as the ground beneath her gives way, and Anissa falls into an ocean of fire.

It’s a long fall—much longer than Anissa expected. Finally she strikes the ground hard, sprawling forward. Within the suit her infected hand erupts in pain. She’s lying prone on a rough, uneven surface, rock walls looming close, loose mortar tumbling through the hole she’s dropped through.

Awkwardly she climbs to her feet.

The suit adjusts automatically to Anissa’s height and body size, as if it was custom fitted. The headlamp snaps on, but she can’t see much—just a fiery wall of burning gas. This isn’t the basement, she realizes. She’s fallen into the blazing depths of the Centralia mine, the longest-running fire in history. Before her the burning mine snakes off into the distance. But despite the blistering heat, the suit’s interior is almost comfortable, thanks to its built-in climate controls.

She tries to walk, takes her first tottering baby steps. Her infected hand feels like a knife has gone through it.

The heatsuit’s faceplate display winks on, and Anissa squints, trying to focus. The display provides an interactive readout, showing everything she needs to survive: the outside temperature, her current location, the oxygen reserves, and remaining battery power—still over 80 percent, after years of disuse. With luck, it’s enough to get her to safety.

But it won’t be easy.

The temperature in the mine is a searing 647 degrees Fahrenheit—enough to flash-boil her sweat away if it escaped the heatsuit’s recycling system. The temperature in a mine fire can reach one thousand degrees, so she counts herself lucky. She still can’t see anything, just flames curling and dancing, filling the cavern. She can only follow the moving map projected on her faceplate.

Just like Dad used to, she thinks, though it’s not comforting, because he was doing that when he died.

She stumbles, jamming her hand against a spur of rock, and cries out in pain. She can’t see her fingers under the bright yellow glove, but they feel swollen and tender. She wonders if the suit’s biomedical scanners will detect it.

They do. On the faceplate readout, a picture of her hand appears. SEPSIS DETECTED, it says. RECOMMEND AMPUTATION. Standard procedure, she knows, is to anesthetize the injured limb and then sever it—something the suit can do automatically. But for Anissa, that’s not an option.

“Amputation refused,” she says.

She keeps walking, trying to figure out what happened aboveground. The Centralia camp has been attacked, maybe destroyed, by forces unknown—someone who knew where they were hiding out and decided to squash them. She wonders if they knew, somehow, about Heath’s poison-unwind program, if Sebastian and his scouts were too conspicuous in hunting down candidates and attracted the wrong attention from someone who decided to destroy them. Or perhaps there was a mole, someone Heath trusted but shouldn’t have. All she knows is there was a massive explosion, like a clapper’s detonation, although she can’t imagine why clappers would be involved. Blowing up a secret AWOL camp doesn’t seem like the high-profile kind of terror they go in for.

Not that it matters. My friends are gone, she thinks despairingly. Heath’s gone. I warned him, but they found us too soon.

There’s a lump in her throat, an aching sadness for everyone consumed by the inferno. The ones who survived will probably be captured and taken to the nearest harvest camp.