Defect

[chapter 22]

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Somehow, when Maddie had said 'army', I had pictured rows and rows of soldiers with gleaming uniforms and weapons.

This was not that.

I had pulled up in our second stolen car and stumbled out, my legs cramping from sitting for so long, only to find that our war camp looked more like a messily organized reenactment field where nobody could agree on costumes. Men, women, children, and a wide variety of teenagers wandered around. Some people were wearing formal clothes, like they got out of a board meeting and decided to see what all this was about, while others were wearing ragged jeans and old t-shirts, and still more were just standing in pajama pants and worn sweaters. On top of that, most people didn't have weapons. I saw a few middle-aged women standing together with kitchen knives, a man with an old metal baseball bat, and one teenage boy with long green hair and a frying pan. There was a group of about twenty that had gathered brooms trying and failing to sharpen pieces of the handle into spears on the edge of the camp.

These were the closest things to weapons anyone had. More often than not, I saw families with young children, everyone empty-handed and looking nervous.

We had done this. Maddie, Aretha, Alex, Sofia, Jax and me--if anything happened to these people, if any of the children were orphaned or killed--that was on us.

It was nearly enough to make my knees buckle under the pressure.

I pushed the sentiment aside, trying to make myself seem calm and confident as I strode across the dewy grass, beelining for the billowing white tent in the dead center of the makeshift headquarters. It felt like approaching the eye of a hurricane, and the wind blowing eerily through the trees under gray skies did nothing to alleviate the doomed feeling.

"Oh, you're here. Good. I thought you were going to be late," Maddie said as I walked in, not bothering to look up from the desk she was hunched over.

"We had a bit of trouble stealing a car."

"Speaking of, where's the rest of 'we'?"

"Unloading the car, as far as I know," I paused, considering my next words. "Do you think we're crazy? For trying this, I mean?"

Maddie glanced up, a grim smile decorating her lips. "You were crazy for joining the Wrobel. This is suicidal."

A faint rustling behind me was the only sign that the others had joined us, until Jax spoke. "So why are you doing this? I mean, you're free. Xander hasn't been branded or thrown in a School. Why not run, leave the rest of the world to its fate?"

There was a pregnant pause as everyone watched Maddie, curious for her answer. Slowly, it came, the words stumbling out of her mouth. "When I was little, my parents died. It wasn't Evos. It wasn't some dramatic shoot-out or double homicide. My dad was working a hundred hours a week, barely sleeping, never eating. He got sick--really sick. Not long after he died, Mom stopped being able to put food on the table, and what little she could scrape went straight to Xander and I. Eventually, she was so weak that she couldn't even move. We tried to help her, but I wasn't even ten yet--there was nothing I could do, especially not since Xander was still too young to leave the house and I could be snatched by the Evos.