I almost interrupted to ask about the stronghold—how they were actually able to defend it—but restrained myself. I could ask more about that later. I needed to get my sister off the Farm and to safety in Canada. Carter’s stronghold wasn’t my concern.
“Working from our base camp,” Carter continued, “we’ve been mounting a rebellion.”
“A rebellion?” I was so surprised that I couldn’t let it pass.
“Yes.”
“Against the Ticks?”
“Yes.”
“Forty-three guys against an unstoppable army of bloodsucking monsters? Are you kidding?”
Carter straightened a little, glaring at me with defiance. “There’s almost a hundred of us now. But, yeah. It’s just us against the Ticks. Well, us and Sebastian.”
“Sebastian, the vampire,” I said doubtfully. “Shouldn’t he be on Roberto’s side? How can you trust him?”
“I don’t trust him. But I understand him. And we need him. He can sense when other vampires are around and when Ticks are, too. It’s like he’s got this spidey sense or something. He’s thrown in with us because he hates Roberto and he’s pissed about what Roberto has done.”
“Why? I don’t get it. Haven’t the Ticks just made it simpler to corral humans? Hasn’t he made Sebastian’s life easier?”
“No. You’re thinking about it the wrong way. In the Before, Roberto and Sebastian each had separate territories. They stayed out of each other’s way. When Roberto created the Ticks, they destroyed that. They don’t care about territory. The pathogen that created them doesn’t, either. Sebastian went from being the only vampire in a territory with tens of millions of people to a territory where the only free-roaming kine are the Ticks.”
I released a strangled laugh. “So this guy, who’s all pissed off about losing his kine, this is the guy you trust?” And then another thought hit and I jumped out of my chair. “This is the guy you left Mel with?”
Carter stood also and reached out a hand to me. “Hey, calm down. Mel will be fine.”
“The hell she will! You left her with a vampire!”
“He’s not going to hurt her. I promise. In all the time I’ve known him, I’ve never seen him eat a person.”
“Oh, well, that’s a resounding recommendation. You’ve left my defenseless sister alone with a bloodsucking monster who hasn’t murdered when you’ve been around. You’re right,” I quipped. “When you say it that way, he sounds like such a stand-up guy.”
“Look, I got you away from that Collab, right? Maybe I’ve earned a little bit of trust here.”
“Okay, fine. I trust you. Now let’s go get my sister.”
“We can’t do that. We’ve got to leave her there with Sebastian for now.”
“Why?”
He placed a hand on my shoulder and gently eased me back into the chair. “This is what Sebastian and I do. It’s what we’ve been doing since this all started.” Standing beside my chair, Carter shucked his jacket. “Sebastian and I, sometimes other guys, too, travel from Farm to Farm, offering to upgrade their security. The new software fixes a few surface problems, but when the system is rebooted, it allows us to delete a couple of files permanently.”
Before I could ask what he was doing with his shirt, he dropped it on the ground, then tugged the white T-shirt he wore beneath it over his head.
“I’ve been in and out of more Farms than I can remember.” He turned his back to me and knelt, tracing his finger across a scar on the left side of his neck, just across the spot where my chip was in my own neck. “This was Colorado Mesa University. It was just a quick in-and-out. Me and three other guys. We didn’t know what the chips did yet. It was tight. My buddy Mike didn’t make it.” His finger moved down another inch to another scar. “This one was down in Durango. By then we knew the chips were trouble, but we hadn’t figured out a way around it. Sebastian hadn’t figured out the computer program for turning the chips off. But even that’s not fail proof, so we still just cut the chips out every time we leave a school. That way I can get a new one put in at each Farm and no one questions that I’m a Green.” He moved on to one of the scars on his right shoulder. “This was in the Oklahoma panhandle. It was the first time we felt confident enough to get Greens out. We rescued five people one of my guys knew back in the Before. Three of them joined us. Two headed west.”
He kept talking, listing off Farms and how many people he’d helped rescue and from where. His words became a blur of states and numbers. I could barely hear him past the thoughts tumbling through my mind.
He had done so much in so little time. All those scars. I’d seen them earlier, but hadn’t put it together. I never would have dreamed that each half-inch red spot was from a chip implant. My hand went instinctively to his back and trailed a fingertip across one raised scar and then the next. Every one of them represented a Farm he’d gotten into and out of. And the incalculable risk he’d taken. Lives he’d saved.
Suddenly I realized his voice had trailed off.
“Why would you do this?” I asked, my voice sounding breathless. “Why would you risk your life like that?”
“I’ve been looking for—” He broke off abruptly, swallowed, then finished. “For people who will fight.”
My fingers kept shifting over the muscles of his shoulders. His skin was warm beneath my hands, his muscles hard beneath my touch. I was awed by his strength. Not his physical strength, but his will. His courage. The sheer audacity that brought him back to this fight over and over again. He had been free. He could have run for the hills and never looked back. Instead, he’d stayed and fought. He’d faced death countless times to save other people, some of them strangers.
I stopped counting his scars at a dozen. He’d stilled. The muscles of his back were tense beneath my hand. His head was dipped down and he wasn’t even breathing.
I jerked my hands away and fisted them in my lap. He exhaled then pushed himself to his feet. Without turning around, he grabbed the white T-shirt and yanked it over his head, shoving his arms through the sleeves. He didn’t even glance over his shoulder as he tucked the hem into his pants and pulled on his Collab jacket. Every movement seemed jerky and tense. Like he was angry with me.
“Do you believe me now?” he asked.
“I’m . . . I’m sorry,” I said.
He half turned to look at me, his fingers still on his buttons. “Christ, you don’t even know what you’re apologizing for, do you?”
I felt myself shrink back into the chair. “I accused you of being a Collab. I was so sure that you’d betrayed us. I’m . . . I’m sorry.”
He gave me a long, steady look. Like my apology didn’t even begin to cover it.
I leapt to my feet. “Maybe I haven’t been out fighting in the great rebellion, but it’s not like I’m some Collab.”
He just shook his head as he picked up the tranq gun and slung the strap over his shoulder.
That look never left his eyes, like I’d disappointed him, like maybe, after all he’d been through tonight, this was his breaking point. This was where his patience with me had run out.
I knew I could never join his rebellion. Taking care of Mel had been the priority drilled into my mind from the time I was a child. Those had been my mother’s last words to me as we’d boarded the bus to come to the Farm. Not “I love you,” not even “Take care of yourself,” but “Keep Mel safe.” Still, I couldn’t blame my mother. Mel needed someone to take care of her. I’d always been so independent. Even as a kid I hadn’t liked to rely on anyone else. But Mel needed Mom. She needed me, because I was all she had now.
“I don’t suppose it’s occurred to you that just keeping me and Mel alive has been a full-time job. If I’m so focused on getting her out and going to Canada, it’s because I don’t have any other choice. I have to do it because there’s no one else here who can.”
I expected some kind of reaction to my impassioned speech, but Carter just blinked and asked, “What’s in Canada?”
“Safety, I think. One of the last things I saw on the news before Mel and I were shipped here was a story about Canada closing its borders.” For the first time it occurred to me that I might be wrong about Canada. Or maybe I just hadn’t let myself think about it. I leaned forward. “Do you know if Canada is still . . . there? Were they successful in keeping the Ticks out?”
“I don’t know,” Carter said quietly. “I haven’t been that far north. I haven’t met anyone who has, either. The Canadians aren’t here fighting for us, I know that much.”
I ignored the bitterness in his voice. As far as I was concerned, getting to Canada was still our best bet. “If we can get there, maybe we’ll be safe from the Ticks. And the vampires,” I added with chagrin.
“That’s all you care about, huh? Keeping Mel safe?”
“I’m all she has. She has to be all I care about.”
“Mel isn’t the only person who cares about you,” Carter said, his voice pitched low.
Under other circumstances, in another world, I might mistake that for a come-on. Or maybe another dropped pencil. Some way of luring me in. But no matter how I played through it in my mind, I couldn’t think of anything Carter could want from me. And I was really tired of being so suspicious all the damn time.
So I decided to give him a little credit. Maybe he meant it exactly the way it sounded. Maybe he cared about me—no, I wasn’t going to get caught up in some fantasy that he’d been nursing a crush on me all this time—but maybe he’d meant everything he’d said that afternoon about being glad to see me because we’d known each other in the Before. Maybe it was just nostalgia. Maybe I was just his can of Dr Pepper. So I could buy that he cared about me on some level.