World After

“You’ll have to leave them here,” says Madeline. “You won’t be allowed to bring anything into the aerie.”



I should have known. I hate to leave them but at least I might be able to hide them. The other guards leave me alone, probably realizing that Madeline has an agenda with me, and they don’t want to get into trouble with her.



I look at Mom’s tracker. On the screen, my arrow points to San Francisco’s piers. Paige’s arrow points near Half Moon Bay on the Pacific coast.



“Where is the new aerie?” I ask Madeline.



“Half Moon Bay,” she says.



Is Paige really looking for Beliel? I close my eyes, feeling like I’ve been stabbed in the stomach.



I shut off the tracker. I badly want to take it and the sword with me but I don’t have a choice. As much as I want to hide the tracker, I want my mother to have it if I can’t keep it.



The world is littered with abandoned phones. The odds of people leaving the tracker alone are very good. I shut it off and put it back where I found it, forcing myself to turn away.



The sword, on the other hand, needs to be hidden. I got lucky that the looters were probably in a huge rush, otherwise, they would have noticed that the bear’s dress is too long. I can’t resist giving the bear a final caress before hiding it with the sword under a pile of wood and shingles that were once part of a shop.



I’m about to let go of the sword when my vision wavers and fades.



The sword wants to show me something.



I’M  IN the glass-and-marble hotel suite of the old aerie where Raffe and I spent a few hours together. This must be the time after visiting the speakeasy club and before his wing transplant.



The shower is running at the other end of the suite. It would be peaceful and posh here except for the panoramic view of San Francisco’s charred cityscape dominating the living room.



Raffe walks out of the bedroom, looking fantastic in his suit. With his dark hair, broad shoulders, and muscular build, he looks better than any movie star I’ve ever seen. He looks like a guy who belongs in a thousand-dollar-a-night hotel suite. Every move, every gesture conveys elegance and power.



Something catches his eye and he walks to the window. A formation of angels flies past the moon. He leans toward the glass, almost pressing his face to it as he looks up at the angels. Every line of him tells me he longs to fly with them.



I suspect it’s more than just wanting his wings back. We once had exotic fish in a bowl that Paige and I had decorated with seashells. My dad told us that we always had to make sure there were at least two fish in the bowl because some species needed to belong to a group. If one of them was left alone long enough, it would die of loneliness.



I wonder if angels are like that.



When the angels disappear into the night sky beyond the moon, Raffe turns sideways and looks at his reflection in the window. The wings peeking through the slits in his suit jacket look like other wings I’ve seen on angels at the club downstairs, but they’re not. The severed wings are strapped under his clothes and arranged to look normal.



He closes his eyes for a moment, swallowing his sadness. I’m so used to seeing Raffe with his game face on that it’s hard to see him like this.



He takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. Then he opens his eyes. He’s about to turn away from the window when he sees something on his white shirt.



He plucks it and holds it up. It’s a strand of hair. He runs his fingers along it. It’s dark and long and looks like mine.



His lips twitch as if it’s funny to think about how my hair might have ended up on his shirt. My guess is that it must have happened when I kissed him in the hallway downstairs by the club. He thinks it’s amusing.



If I had a body in this dream, my cheeks would be burning. It’s embarrassing just to think about it.



He walks over to the marble bar lined with bottles of wine. He looks beneath it and comes up with a small hotel sewing package. Why anyone who can afford a room like this would want a set of emergency thread and buttons, I don’t know, but there it is. He rips open the package and pulls out the thread. It’s the same snowy white as his wings.



He holds the thread and hair together and twirls them with his thumb and forefinger so that the two strands intertwine.



Holding the ends together, he steps over to the sword that lies on the counter and wraps the strand around the sword’s grip.



“Stop complaining,” he says to the sword. “It’s for luck.”



Luck. Luck. Luck.



The word echoes in my head.



I PUT my hand on the splintery dock to steady myself. The world comes back into focus as I take deep breaths.



Did Raffe really keep a strand of my hair?



Hard to believe.



I look carefully at the sword’s hilt. Amazingly, there it is, on the grip at the base of the cross-guard. Snow-white thread mixed with midnight dark.



I run my finger over the hair-thread and close my eyes. I think about Raffe doing the same thing as I feel the alternating texture of thread and hair against my fingertip.



Was the sword wishing me luck?



I know that it misses Raffe. If I don’t come back, I guess it has no chance of ever seeing him again. Even if it bonds with someone else, that person will have no connection with him and no knowledge of what it is. So maybe it does have a reason to wish me luck, along with a little reminder of Raffe.



I hate to leave the sword but I have no choice. I cover it, bear and all, with broken shingles and splintered boards.



I get up and walk away, feeling naked. I hope the looters don’t have the luxury of digging through piles of debris for hidden treasures.



Chpater 47



BY THE TIME the captain gets off the boat, our group is being shepherded into a small caravan of vans, SUVs, and a short school bus. Madeline escorts the captain to one of those hateful shipping containers. I casually join them.



“There’s an escape planned for tonight,” I say in a low voice.



He looks at me, then at Madeline, then back at me. He’s younger than I expected—probably no more than thirty—with a clean face and a completely bald head. “Good luck to you.” His voice isn’t unfriendly, but it isn’t inviting either.



Madeline unlocks the shipping container and swings the metal doors open. It has shelves stocked with canned soup and vegetables, along with rows of liquor and books. Battery-powered lights stand in the corner and an overstuffed chair sits beside a small side table. By World After standards, it’s downright cozy.



“They need you to take the ship back and pick up the prisoners,” I say. His expression is skeptical so I rush on before he can say no. “It’ll be totally safe. All the scorpions and angels will be gone. They have a mission tonight.”



He steps into the container and turns on the lights. “Nothing is totally safe. And that ferry keeps me alive and fed. I can’t risk it. I won’t rat you out but I won’t let anyone touch that ferry, either.”



I glance at Madeline for help. “Can you talk to him? I mean, you have someone imprisoned on the island too, right?”



She looks down, refusing to meet my eyes. “The doctor will keep him safe so long as I help him with his little projects.” She shrugs. “We need to get going.”



I glance from Madeline to the captain who is now pouring himself a drink. “This is your chance to make a difference,” I say. “You can save all those lives. Make up for whatever it is you felt you had to do to survive. You know what goes on there.”



He bangs the glass onto the table. “Where did you find her, Madeline? Isn’t what we go through bad enough without Little Miss Pain-in-the-Ass lecturing us?”



“It’s the right thing to do,” I say.



“The right thing is a luxury for rich and sheltered people. For the rest of us, the only right thing is staying out of trouble and surviving as best we can.” He sits in the chair and opens a book, pointedly not looking at me.



“They need you. You’re the only one who can help them. My mom and my friend—”



“Get out before you convince me to rat you out just to get rid of you.” He has the decency to look uncomfortable about it.



Madeline closes the door. “I’m leaving it unlocked.”



“That’s fine,” he says in a voice that makes it clear he’s done with the conversation.



I had completely underestimated how hard it would be to talk someone into risking his life for others. Whatever issues the Resistance has, they would have rallied around a cause like this.



“Can anyone else drive the boat?” I ask Madeline.



“Not without sinking it while trying to back it out from the dock. You can’t make someone be a hero. I’ve left the door open for Jake in case he changes his mind.”



“That’s not good enough. I need to find someone to take the boat back tonight.”



Daniel, Madeline’s assistant, sticks his tanned face out of the bus window. “Let’s go!”



Madeline takes my arm and pulls me toward the bus. “Come on. It’s not our problem anymore.”



I yank out of her grasp. “How can you say that?”



She pulls a small pistol from her pocket and points it at me. “I told the doctor I’d take you to the aerie and that’s what I’m going to do. I’m sorry, but my husband’s life depends on it.”



“A lot of lives can be saved, including your husband’s, if we can just—”



She shakes her head. “There is no one else who can drive that ferry. And even if we found someone, he wouldn’t risk his life any more than Jake would. I’m not throwing away my husband’s life for a pie-in-the-sky escape plan. Let’s go. Now.” She has a determined gleam in her eyes like she’s ready to shoot my arm and drag me into the bus.



I reluctantly head toward the bus with Madeline.



Chpater 48



WE WEAVE through the abandoned cars onto I-280 and head south. The further we get from the piers, the worse I feel about the Alcatraz escape plan. Captain Jake looked like he was pretty comfortable with his position as slave captain. Is there any chance he might throw away the one asset that’s been keeping him alive and risk his life to rescue the same people he ferried to their doom?



There’s a small chance that he might. He is human and humans sometimes do things like that.



But it’s more likely that he’ll drink steadily all day until he’s in a guilt-induced stupor when the scorpions take off on their mission.



This is too much. Mom and Paige are too much. The sword and Clara and all those people on Alcatraz…



I shove everything into the vault in my head and mentally lean hard to shut the door. I have a whole world in there now. I can’t afford to open it without the serious risk of being crushed by all the stuff that’ll spill out. Some of my friends had therapists in the World Before. What I have in that vault could take a therapist’s entire career to untangle.