Ava and Penny make up, or at least get over it. He goes to talk to her, and then comes back, and Nua wants to go with him to talk to Shan, because they’re trying to figure stuff out with Sloan. So I go back to Ava’s tent, and find her inside. She’s lying on her back, holding the book of fairy tales next to her in the dark, but she looks over at me when I come in, putting it down.
I lie down next to her, putting my nose on her shoulder, and say softly, “Can I see them again?”
“See what?” she asks quietly, bending her elbow to touch my cheek, and I trace my fingers over her ribs. She looks down, and then unzips her sweatshirt. It’s dark and hard to see, and she’s not wearing anything underneath, except for the bandages. There’s one on her right side, and the stitches run down from her collarbone down to her stomach and to the sides. I trace the left one, feeling thread under my finger. “When were these supposed to come out?”
She sighs, stroking my hair back. “Day after I ran away. But we couldn’t wait any longer.”
“He didn’t tell us anything,” I say softly. “He came home sometimes, just to get stuff for Miss Lilly, but he didn’t say anything, he said he couldn’t.”
Ava smiles a little, and I look up at her. “What?”
“Miss Lilly,” she repeats, her voice quiet, and then looks at me. “He didn’t even say I was still alive?”
I shake my head. “You saw our faces when we saw you, we were looking at a ghost.”
Ava smiles again, and then rubs her lips together. I trace my finger up and down the stitches on her chest, running between her breasts, and ask, “Does it hurt?”
“Not anymore,” she says, shrugging a little. “Not much, anyway.”
So I pull my hand away, resting it on her bare stomach. Her skin is cold, and there’s hardly any light in here, just from what comes in from outside. Finally I say, “Nua went with Penny to talk to the Shan people. To make a plan with Sloan, about Bayan.”
“Yeah,” murmurs Ava. “I miss Bayan.”
I don’t say anything, but I agree. Ava just sighs again, and looks over at the book of fairy tales, and then sits up, wincing. I sit up too. “Does that hurt?”
“Sometimes.”
And we go down the western track towards Shan, and she takes my hand in hers as we go. Some people who are sitting outside their own tents look at us, but Ava is just twisting Keol’s ring around her thumb with her forefinger, over and over, and doesn’t seem to pay attention to anything around us until we get to Shan. Then she looks up, at the huge curved tunnel ceilings above us, and then takes me around to the room with the map in it. Three-quarters of Shan is there, Haywood and Alis and Nova, but not Sigrid. And Penny and Nua and Sloan are all there, too, sitting in folding chairs, all looking very concerned.
“What’s wrong?” asks Ava when we go in, and Nua looks over at us. Haywood sighs, leaning over the table. “We just don’t know what to do.”
“Sit,” says Ava to me, and I take the last chair in the room. She sits on my lap and puts her head on my shoulder, hiding her face, and Nua raises his eyebrows. I shrug and mouth, Tired.
He shrugs too, and Penny stands, rubbing his face. “There’s gotta be a way that we can get to that house.”
“He was always the one who deactivated the fence,” says Sloan. “If he doesn’t do it, I can’t get over it, and neither can he.”
“He never came earlier because there was no one to turn it back on afterwards,” I say, wrapping my arm around Ava so she doesn’t fall. “Miss Lilly would have noticed.”
“Yeah, well, she’s noticed,” says Penny. “And she’s probably killed him for it.”
Ava puts her arms around my neck. “We need rubber.”
Haywood and Alis look at me, but I just shrug. Her voice is muffled when she says, “Something to insulate it.”
“Or something to slingshot us over it,” says Penny. “Can’t he just take the car and drive away?”
“Probably not,” says Nua quietly, and Penny makes a frustrated noise, not at him. But Nua’s frustrated with himself. “We shouldn’t have left without him. By the time she found out, we all would’ve been long gone.”
But Penny shakes his head. “He’s smart. If he said he had to stay, he needed to stay for a reason.”
“So how do we get him out?” asks Sloan, frustration creeping into her voice, and Nova shifts her weight from one foot the other, but doesn’t say anything. I can’t remember why she’s here for a second, and I run through the names again. Haywood is information, Alis is supplies, Sigrid is women, and oh yeah, Nova is people. I wonder what kinds of conflicts she deals with down here; I wonder if they’re in any way similar to the ones she dealt with back in her old life as a lawyer.
Did you know this text is from a different site? Read the official version to support the creator.
“It’s electric, and it’s armed,” Sloan is saying, when I’m pulled out of my thoughts again by Ava sighing and adjusting herself on my lap. “Even if we could find a way over it without getting electrocuted, it has a sensor, it would set off an alarm or something. And there’s really no way to get to Bayan to give him any information, even if we had a plan. It’s all one-sided right now.”
No one answers for a moment, and then before anyone can someone else comes into the map room, someone I don’t know, and says, “Alis, there’s hungry people out here.”
“Ah,” says Alis, and then he leans over and kisses Haywood, and then follows the person out of the room.
I watch him, feeling heat in my cheeks, and I don’t know why. I look back at Haywood, and then at Nua, who just smiles. He doesn’t say anything about it, though, just looks at Sloan when he asks, “What has Lilly been doing?”
“Just going to work,” she answers with a shrug. “Nothing really out of the ordinary. There hasn’t even been a lot of buzz around her, which I thought there would be, what with…”
She trails off, jerking her head to Ava and me, and I lean my head against her blonde hair. She just sighs again, and Penny smiles slightly. “Who’s up on the surface right now, Haywood?”
I’ll never get used to them saying the surface, but Haywood responds as if it’s the most normal thing in the world. “Keshi and Alicia. I sent them up for anything they could find out about the court cases, though. They have the dogs, taking Nano for a walk.”
“What court cases?” asks Nua, and Nova the lawyer answers. “A few people going on trial for marriage-related issues. Breaking contracts, harboring people, things like that, civil cases we’re keeping an eye on.”
“Oh, I thought they’d be back already,” says Penny musingly. “Well, could we send Sara or someone up?”
“For what?” says Sloan with a slight smile. “Think she’d be able to find out something I couldn’t?”
“No,” says Penny with a sigh, rubbing his eyes. “I don’t know.”
“I know,” says Sloan quietly. “We’ll just have to keep thinking about it.”
Ava on my lap moves, turning more sideways and finally picking up her head so she can look at Sloan. “What about from the city?”
Sloan furrows her eyebrows. “What do you mean?”
“Can I see the map?” asks Ava, biting on her thumbnail, and Penny nods. Ava stands up and goes to the table as he unfurls it, lying it across the table on top of the spare lantern parts and screws. Ava looks at it, and says, “Which one’s the southwest entrance?”
“Here,” says Penny, pointing somewhere. “That’s closest to home.”
“Yes,” says Ava softly, and then turns back to me. “Remember when we went into town?”
I raise my eyebrows, glancing at Nua, and nod. “Yeah.”
“We walked to the train station,” she says. “My mother and I are the only ones with keys to the garage door in the house, so Bayan only goes out when she lets him. Or makes him. But the garage door, to the outside, it’s not inside the fence.”
“It’s not?” I say, furrowing my eyebrows, and Nua nods slowly. “That side of the fence just goes right to the house.”
I remember tracing the fence with my eyes one day, early on in my few months at the beach house. I went around the first floor, following it from one side of the beach all the way around the backyard, behind the flowers and the fountain, to the other side. It stretches all the way to the water in high tide. But I never went into the garage, which is attached to the house. That door was always locked, except for when Ava took us out into town. We just walked straight past the car and out into the world, no fence to stop us.
“I never noticed that,” I say slowly, and Ava finally smiles slightly, a little crooked, and comes to sit back down on me. “We didn’t want you to.”
I look at her, and she leans her forehead against the side of my head and doesn’t say anything else. Sloan goes over and looks at the map too, and then turns it on the table. “This is your house.”
“Yeah,” says Penny. “Like, over here.”
“If I go up through the southern track,” she says, “the one with the sewage river.”
“Ew,” says Nua, and Nova laughs. “Yeah, that was one of the first tunnels to get shut down. That’d take you a mile or so east of the train station on the plaza.”
“That’s where we walked to,” murmurs Ava. “About a mile and a half.”
“Why not just go up the southwest entrance and run around the house?” asks Nua, going to the map too, and Sloan shakes her head. “It’s not just the fence. It’s getting in and out of the house, especially since I can’t contact Bayan anymore. We need to get out of there as soon as possible, the woods behind your house will be the first place she looks.”
“You don’t so happen to have your keys with you, do you?” I ask Ava, and she shakes her head against mine. “Oh, god no, you’d’ve all been out of there a month ago.”
Nua smiles slightly. “Does your mother ever leave the house nowadays?”
“Probably not,” she says quietly, looking up and putting her chin on my shoulder. “Me dying was kind of a thing. Me coming back to life was also kind of a thing. People know about it. So me disappearing…”
“Probably also kind of a thing,” says Penny, “and Lilly is not one to be the center of attention for anything negative. She’s also not one to let bad press linger too long. I’d be surprised if she didn’t have people out and about looking for you. All of you.”
He looks at me and Nua, who takes a deep breath. “So what do we have to deal with?”
“Spies on the lookout for all of us,” says Ava quietly after a moment, when no one else answers. “Getting out of, and back into, the entrance without being seen. The locks on the house. And getting Bayan without my mother noticing before he’s gone.”
“I can do it,” says Sloan airily. “I just need a solid plan.”
“Yeah, that’s what we’re working on,” says Penny, rolling his eyes. Sloan is unperturbed, though, and leans her elbow on the table. “So?”
“Another middle of the night run?” asks Nua, and Penny shrugs, twisting his mouth. “How will Bayan know?”
“He doesn’t need to know,” I say honestly. “If you can get into the house somehow, just find him.”
Penny raises his eyebrows at me, and Nua shrugs. “He didn’t tell us when we were going, either. Just woke us up one night and said go.”
“But how do we get in?” asks Haywood, and suddenly Ava sits straight up and says, “9-26-67.”
Everyone looks at her, in confusion, except Penny, who furrowed his eyebrows. “Dad’s birthday?”
“The safe,” I whisper, and she looks at me, and smiles, and nods. “That’s the code to the safe in her office.”
“How’d you figure that out?” asks Nua in surprise, and she shrugs. “Maybe it’s the code to something else, too.”
“Like the garage door,” says Penny with a grin, and I glance between them. “Really?”
“Really what?” asks Ava, looking down at me. Her forearms rest on my shoulders, and I shrug. “That’s it? It’s that easy?”
“It won’t be easy,” says Penny, shaking his head. “But it’s simple.”
“Aber is right,” says Haywood, and I look at him, surprised. He shrugs a little too. “Bayan has been helping us for years. We’ve always known that eventually he’d come and join us. And now’s the time. Sloan, are you willing?”
“Absolutely,” she says. “It’ll be fine. He’s a light sleeper.”
“So’s my mother,” mutters Penny, but then he just takes a deep breath, running his fingers through his long hair. “But if anyone, Sloan can do it.”
Sloan grins.