ONE YEAR BEFORE THE TRIAL
Branches lash my arms and face as I run, but I barely feel a thing.
Did I say you could leave, Owen?
Not even when I lose my footing and stumble, head over feet. I rub my eyes as I scramble up. My vision is slightly impaired. He went overboard with the dirt.
But you’re hurting me. Ana, please! Stop!
“Go!” Owen’s voice is everywhere. “I’m right behind you!”
Get back here! Don’t make me chase you!
It’s going to work. It has to work. There is no other way.
“How fast can you really run?” Owen had asked me breathlessly one week ago, the day I threw his notebook into the fire. “How much weight can you feasibly carry?”
“I—I’m not sure.”
“Do you think you could carry me? Let’s say I was unconscious. Or, like, badly bleeding. Could you drag me through the woods and down into the tunnels? How long, Ana? How long would it take to get down there and back?”
Centuries ago, in the forests of Vietnam and Laos, there once existed an animal known by many names. The Vu Quang ox. The spindlehorn. The saola.
The Asian unicorn.
This creature, once considered to be an incredibly rare and lucky species, has been extinct for generations. But earlier this evening, the Supervisors briefly powered down our gateway. They beamed with pride. And they transported their newest hybrid, a Formerly Extinct Species, into the Kingdom.
Tonight, that animal happened to be the saola.
Which is fortunate given that tonight, we need all the luck we can get.
We need a unicorn.
“How would I know? I’ve never timed it.”
“Could we do it in thirty minutes? How about twenty?”
My motor is racing. My head is spinning. I can hear him behind me. Branches breaking. Mud splashing. Boots crashing through the brush. “Come on,” he calls, grabbing my hand. “We’ve got this!” We race through the night until we’re just a few hundred feet from the tunnel entrance. Then Owen is pulling off his shirt. “Do it!”
I open his knife, switchblade out, and begin to cut. I cry out in anger as I work, tearing wildly through fabric, shredding it. Then Owen takes the knife, wincing, swearing as he cuts himself. Superficial cuts along his arms and chest that won’t impair his movement—he’ll need to move, after all, faster than he ever has—but will still provide the blood we need for evidence that I have killed him. “It’s not enough,” he mutters. Then he looks at me. “You’ve gotta punch me, Ana,” he whispers. “Punch me hard. Right in the nose. Make it bleed.”
“What?” I draw back. “I’m not doing that!”
“You have to. I can’t punch myself, can I?” Owen looks behind us, checking for guards, but thankfully, we’re still alone. For now. “Come on. Right now. Just do it!”
I grit my teeth. I ball my fist. “I’m sick of being told what to do!” Then I pull my arm back and swing hard. When my fist meets his face, the force of my punch knocks him to the ground.
“Ow!” he cries, blood spurting everywhere. “Jesus!”
“I’m sorry!” I cry, too loudly. “You asked me to do it!”
“No,” he says with a grin, red staining his teeth. “That was perfect. You were perfect.” He smears the blood all over his shirt and my dress. Then he takes out a prosthetic wound—stolen right from the Nightmare Costume Shop in Dream Land—and sticks it onto his neck, creating a fast and impressive illusion of a slashed throat, the sight of which makes my stomach knot.
“Okay, Wonder Woman,” he whispers, lying down on the ground. “The clock’s ticking. Do your thing.”
“Lights!” I locate the pressure point at the nape of my neck. “Camera!” I press down gently, but firmly—the Goldilocks of pressure points—until I feel a small but satisfying click. Right on cue, a red light begins to blink in my direct line of vision.
Action.
Breathing hard, my motor thudding so fiercely I wonder if it will break my metal sternum, I take Owen by the arms and drag him as quickly as I can through the dark woods, like a bloody trail of bread crumbs for the Supervisors to find. I make sure to glance down at him regularly, not only to ensure that I’m not hurting him, but to capture footage in case my cameras happen to link back up with the spotty signal. After several minutes, we reach the tunnels and I pull him into my arms with ease, as if he weighs no more than a child. “Please don’t drop me,” he whispers as I race him down the stairs.
A hundred feet.
Two hundred.
Three hundred.
“You have arrived at your destination,” my GPS announces.
I put Owen down and we are running, racing through the tunnels, the sounds of the compactor blades swinging, a giant scythe slicing through the air before every scrap of the park’s trash sweeps down into the wide-mouthed shoot. A river of garbage flowing into a blazing, blinding fire.
We reach the bridge, gasping, hands linked.
Suddenly, I am petrified. “No. Owen, no.” I’m shaking so hard I have to grip onto the rails. “You can’t do this. This is insane.”
“It’s already done,” he says. “It’s already happening. You have to go, Ana—now. You need to get back to the parking lot so they’ll see you on camera without me.”
“What about Mr. Casey?” I demand. “Did you tell him what I told you to say?”
Owen nods. “Everything’s set. I told him you and Kaia would be skinny-dipping at the lagoon. Cameron Casey, Pervert Extraordinaire, will for sure be watching the cameras. Then he’ll see you there alone—he’ll see you covered in blood—and then he’ll be the one to sound the alarm.” He grins. “It’s genius, Ana. The Supervisors will come for you, and in the meantime they’ll finally bust Casey for being the creep he is.”
“But are you sure there’ll be enough time? For you to get out alive?”
Owen puts his hands on my shoulders. “Listen, I’ll have plenty of time,” he assures me. “Once they power down the gateway, I’ll have at least thirty minutes, maybe more.” He smiles again. “That’s plenty of time for me to slide down the chute into the central pipeline.”
About as long as they had the incinerator shut down when Eve went missing; when they needed to redirect all the park’s energy toward heightened surveillance.
Hence the stink I had noticed. The sulfur. But it hadn’t been sulfur; I just hadn’t realized it then. It had been opportunity.
“But is it enough time to get to the reservoir?” My voice catches. “What if something goes wrong? What if the fire turns back on … while you’re still in the tunnel?” I think of his artificial valve. How fast can he really run?
He sighs. “Then I’ll be a literal piece of toast. But you know what? If that happens, I’ll be toast so fast I won’t even know what toast is.”
That’s not good enough. “Wait,” I tell him. “I just thought of something! The rats!”
“The rats?” he repeats.
“Follow them. They’ll know which way is out.”
“That’s gross,” he says. “But you’re a genius.”
With that, Owen kisses me—maybe our last kiss—leaving a streak of red behind. “There.” He smears more onto my cheek and smiles like he is pleased. “Now you look scary.”
Scary.
I know he’s joking, but shame spikes through me. I have been called scary before. “You don’t really think I’m scary, do you?” I whisper, so low it’s almost muffled completely by the crunch of the incinerator below us. “You don’t really think I am a monster?”
Owen wraps me in his arms. “They’re the monsters,” he says. “Not you.”
“But then, what am I?” I turn my head into his warm chest.
“Don’t you know?” He kisses my forehead. “You’re an angel.”
And then he’s gone, running.