Arena Three

It’s no use. He’s fallen a good thirty feet to the bottom of a long pit. The wires of the device have snapped and dangle against the wall. Every time they touch, electricity zaps across them, sending sparks down on my dad. He peers up at me, terrified.

That’s when I realize I’m not alone. All around the perimeter of the room, looking down at my dad in the pit, are hundreds upon hundreds of biovictims. They shout and jeer, waving their fists in the air.

My dad is in an arena.

From the far end, a door opens and a huge spider, at least ten feet tall, crawls into the arena. Its legs are as thick as tree trunks. It scuttles toward my dad as fast as a tiger. The spectators go wild.

He looks up at me. “Brooke!” he cries. “Brooke! Help me! You have to come to me!”

I start to scream.

I wake, screaming, and look all around.

I realize I’m back in my room, in my bunk bed. Daylight is streaming through the curtains and Bree snores softly in the bed beneath me. My heart is beating fast. I take deep breaths to try and calm myself down. It was just a dream, I tell myself. Just a dream.

But it felt like a dream that was telling me something. Urging me to find my dad. To help him.

Telling me that he’s alive.

Quietly, I climb down the ladder of my bunk bed and land softly on the ground. I take the fresh uniform Neena cleaned and ironed for me and slip it on, feeling the rough fabric against my skin. It’s a sensation I’ve become familiar with over the last six months at Fort Noix. As I sling the backpack over my shoulder, I hear Bree’s voice coming from behind me.

“You’re an idiot, Brooke,” she says.

I tense. I hate hearing my sister so angry, and I can’t help but draw painful comparisons to the way I left Mom, the last bitter words I said to her.

Without looking back, I say, “I’m sorry, but I have to do this.”

I take one more step, stop, and add: “I love you. Don’t ever forget that.”

There comes silence in return.

Then, without another word, I step out of this room, out of this new life, for what may be the very last time.

CHAPTER NINE

Molly, Zeke, Ryan, and I watch quietly as the Commander spreads a map out on the table in front of us. We’re in his office in the busy main building, the one where he’d first decided to let us stay all those months ago. Now, here he is, helping me to leave.

The map looks incredibly old. People stopped making physical maps because technology surpassed the need for them, and most of the ones still in existence would have been poached from museums around the early twenty-first century. There’s no doubt in my mind that this map is an old, historical relic, stolen in a raid years ago. There’s no way of knowing for sure if the roads depicted on it will still be there, or that there won’t be extra settlements on the way not shown, places where unsavory people might dwell.

General Reece leans over and taps a spot on the map. “This is us,” she says. Then she runs her finger down the length of the map all the way to Houston, Texas. “And here is where the signal came from.”

I frown and lean forward, looking more closely at the map in the dingy yellow light. It looks like such an enormous distance to cover. The thought is daunting.

“I would recommend you stick to the waterways wherever possible,” she continues. “It will be safer. Faster. And will require less fuel. Stay far from the shores. Take the Lawrence River and head west as far as you can.”

I’d been planning on leaving by the same route I arrived, traveling alongside the Hudson toward New York. It seemed logical to me to retrace my steps, to tread familiar ground, at least for the initial part of the journey. But looking at the map makes me realize that my plan is too risky. New York is crawling with slaverunners, and is the site of Arena 1. She’s right: passing through it via land would be incredibly dangerous. By sticking to the waterways and following the river for as long as possible, we’ll be able to bypass many of the main highways and cities.

“There’s just one snag,” I say. “I don’t have a boat.”

It’s the Commander who answers.

“We’ll give you a boat, Brooke,” he says, almost matter-of-factly.

My mouth drops open at the news. I can hardly believe it. Molly and Zeke are both wide-eyed in disbelief, too. My first instinct is to ask him why, why he would choose to help me by offering up a precious vehicle like a boat, but I decide against it.

General Reece taps the map again, pointing to a place in Ohio on the banks of the river.

“If you survive that far,” she adds, “the water can take you all the way to Toledo. There’s an old train station there, built during the war as a way to transport coal down south. There are tracks running all the way to Texas.”

“Really?” I gasp, my voice rising several pitches at the stroke of luck.

She nods in her typically emotionless way. It takes all my willpower to contain my excitement. General Reece and the Commander have no idea how grateful I am to them for the information.