Chapter 53
VANDLE
I’d been clear on the phone call that I was in trouble.
The problem was, my history with the outside world wasn’t only limited because I was a victim of experiments. My memory was shot for almost all of it, from the experiments to the Vaults above Anarchy.
There was only one person—or pack—I remembered from before.
And they were part of the same experiments I had been.
Luckily for me, they’d escaped, and their pack had quite a bit of prestige.
That was clear, because after they’d spoken to George, we were freed of having to be in a cell, given coffee and jackets, and a few wipes so we could get rid of the most obvious stains of blood.
After a while, we were all escorted to the door to wait outside—away from the howls and cell walls. A guard still waited by the gate, but he was a distance away, and though I was sure he wasn’t alone, it felt like we could run.
Like we might be free of this place.
I stared, dazed, as the wind whipped Crescent’s hair into her eyes, Karma holding her close. Sin stared blankly through the trees to where we could hear the grey, churning ocean below. Phantom was watching the gap in the forest, through which we all knew a car would come.
One to take us away from here at last.
I was the only one who hadn’t put on a jacket. I needed the cold to keep me present. I knew, without a doubt, that without adrenaline, I would collapse. So I needed the icy wind, and the occasional pressure of my palm to the wounds on my torso, to keep me alert.
We weren’t safe yet, and I wouldn’t be going anywhere until we were.
It took an age before they arrived—or it felt like it, and we all waited in tense silence the whole time. The ancient stone of Anarchy loomed behind us, a jagged tooth against the grey clouds.
I’d tried on the phone—without being explicit, since George was in the room—to communicate that time was of the essence.
Any moment now, someone higher up might find out—someone who couldn’t allow us to escape with their secrets. I kept glancing back at the heavy iron doors leading back to the huge building that had been our prison for so long, half-expecting them to burst open.
For armed guards to spill out and sweep us back in… or worse.
Finally, we heard the crunch of wheels, and I squinted down the road to see a black van headed toward us.
It didn’t look too official…
At my side, Sin straightened, and Phantom blinked, craning his neck.
“Could be them?” he asked.
I nodded. “I think so.”
“Who are they again?”
“Just uh…” I wasn’t really sure how to explain. “Only visitors I had when I was up in the vaults.”
Phantom nodded absently as if that made sense, and I didn’t expand—or mention that those visits might not have been purely for the sake of camaraderie. Or that I might have once—a very long time ago, and for reasons that had made absolute and urgent sense at the time—tried to kill their omega.
But none of the others had contacts on the outside. George had only managed to get in touch with this pack because they had name recognition.
The van pulled up before us.
I recognized Umbra, a tall, brawny alpha who was first out the door. Another alpha, with jet black hair, and piercing yellow eyes, exited from the driver’s side. To my shock, the side door opened, and the last two members of the pack spilled out. One, an alpha with long auburn hair, and the other—
What the fuck?
The Kingsman pack had brought her here?
My mind was strangely blank as the pack introduced themselves, barely perturbed by the state (and likely smell) of us. Ransom was the auburn haired alpha who’d been in the back seat with their omega. And the driver introduced himself as Dusk, the final member I didn’t know.
Shatter—I heard her announce to Crescent enthusiastically—had thick brown hair down to her waist, a backpack hanging from her shoulder, and bright eyes marking her gold pack.
I caught her scent—something dark. Made of a thousand ancient memories that scratched distantly at the walls of my mind, begging to come loose.
The scent they’d visited the vaults to ask me about.
I shoved those memories away as the host of the scent took form in a mousy omega full of tangible excitement, and far less fear for my blood stained pack than she should have (she was currently shaking hands enthusiastically with Phantom.)
The omega in a lab gown with hollow cheeks and dull eyes, destined for things so much worse than death—she didn’t exist anymore.
Umbra nudged me, and I realized the others had all loaded into the van, which had more than enough seats for us.
“You brought her?” I asked, voice rough.
“That, Vandle—” Umbra nodded to Shatter who was shoving Ransom over a seat so she could take the one beside the door. “—Is a queen-bee omega. And if she wants to see the Vaults for herself, she sees the Vaults.”
I glanced at him. Another changed creature from the fragments of memory I had. With more colour to his skin and less hollowness in his eyes.
How long had it been since he’d visited me in that cell?
It had woken me up.
Hazy memories of feral insanity for who knows how many years preceded that visit. But desperate for information, Umbra had used her scent—one tied to so much pain—to wake me.
I don’t know how long I’d been in the vaults before that, but after he’d left, I had a second lease on life.
A second chance.
And with it, I’d asked to go to the floor in the vaults that had given me a chance at freedom.
I’d asked to go to Anarchy.
I opened my mouth to speak when Umbra voiced the words I’d been about to.
“Wouldn’t be here without you.” He clapped me on the shoulder. “None of us would.”
I stared at him, frowning, parsing through what he could mean by that.
“Without the information you gave us, we’d be dead and she’d be…” He trailed off, gaze lingering on Shatter, a shadow crossing it for a moment.
I remember so little of that conversation.
Just the scent of poison. The insanity. The way speaking to him had taken me back to a worse place than even the vaults: to the white walls and flickering lights of a centre where alphas came to die.
To be animals. A place I’d survived only because a scientist had taken an interest in me, and how my eyes might affect the experiments done.
I took a breath trying not to let it drown me, catching Crescent’s golden eyes peering at me from the seats of the van, as if she’d sensed my tenseness.
I looked back at Umbra, who’d lived one of those stories, too. I held out my hand. “Even, then?”
The tension within the pack bond slowly unwound as the van took off down the highway.
Not completely.
I noticed Sin kept shooting glances through the rear window, as if expecting sirens to start blaring to drag us back.
Karma held Crescent in the crook of his arm. She was still shell shocked, but occasionally nuzzled his chin, and he’d calmed down further in the bond. Phantom was on her other side, and I was in the back row of seats with Sin.
I’d told myself I needed to hold on until we were safe, but now we were hurtling away from the prison, I still couldn’t take my hand from my side, pressing against my wounds occasionally to make sure I stayed alert.
The bandages, at least, were secured well, and there was no more bleeding to soak the seats of the van.
Time started to behave a little oddly, the world blurring occasionally, and the conversation around me jumping topics as if I was missing pieces.
At one point I felt warmth, and glanced up, eyes focusing on a hand pressed to my shoulder. Sin was steadying me. I think he’d said something.
“I’m alright…” My words were weaker than I’d meant.
“You want to rest…?”
I shook my head, though when I blinked, I was leaning against him. His arm had come around my shoulders to steady me.
From here, I could see into the rows of seats before me.
“I might have…” Shatter’s voice floated in. She was leaning over her seat, and rummaging in her backpack. I watched as a pencil case spilled onto the floor of the van. “Oh… bother,” she muttered, glancing up at Dusk. “We don’t even have snacks. I told you we should have packed more—”
“They said it was urgent,” Dusk snorted from the driver’s seat.
“It’s okay,” Ransom said. “We’ll get somewhere safe, then we’ll sort out food and clothes.”
“I did bring my spares…” I heard a rummaging and the pull of a zip, and then Shatter leaned around the seat she was in to press a pencil case into Crescent's hands as if that was a very normal thing to do.
And what did I know? I’d never been a part of polite society.
Crescent stared at it for a long moment, and I could see worry flash in her eyes, as if she didn’t know what to do with it.
But before anyone could intervene, she relaxed, a smile lighting her face as she unzipped it.
She was handing back fistfuls of pencils and pens to a very startled Shatter before digging in her pocket.
Sin snorted as we watched her cram her heavy keyring into the pencil case, and force the zipper closed. I was surprised she’d managed to get through the process without having them confiscated, but apparently the presence of two omegas had sent all protocol out of the window.
“Do you need one?” Shatter asked, peering at Sin, who was beside me in the back row of seats. “I have extras.”
“I’m fine, but thank you,” he said. He returned to anxiously staring out of the back window, but I caught what I thought might be a pleased smile on his face.
He’d always kicked back at being too obviously associated with the title of ‘omega’ in Anarchy. Perhaps because he’d always known it wasn’t right, or maybe it was a matter of survival, but I wondered if out here, he might not be as rigid about the association.
“They can get you I.Ds and all that,” Shatter was saying. “They’re great at that.”
I forced myself to focus on that. “Wherever we end up, it’s got to be as far from the Institute as possible,” I said.
“Already getting it sorted,” Ransom said from beside her.
“Know all about that.” Dusk added. “They wanted us dead, dead for what we knew. We’re experts on keeping out of the Institute's sights.”
Umbra, up in the front passenger seat, nodded, eyes meeting mine in the rearview mirror. “Did it for years.”
This pack had been a Hail Mary—the most recent attachment any of us had to the outside, aside from Crescent—but they might just be exactly what we needed. They knew what it meant to be used by the Institute and then tossed aside.
Those experiments that haunted me had been one story, Anarchy another—but now I was ready for the next.
That warmth I’d seen radiating from Umbra—an alpha who was impossibly whole despite everything he’d gone through—that was my next story, too.
PHANTOM
The silence was the strangest part.
It was a quiet I had forgotten. Even in the van, I’d felt it like a blanket of snow, as if the absence of something was a presence in itself.
I hadn’t realized until now that the endless howls and screams, the sound of distress from other creatures just like me, were small scratches, constantly reopening a wound I’d had for so long that I didn’t even know it was there.
It felt impossible, though, that I would get used to this quiet.
We arrived at a cabin deep in the woods, a twenty minute drive from the nearest small town. We hadn’t stopped on the way except to grab some fast food, so it felt odd to walk up to the massive, beautiful, wooden A-frame cabin with nothing in my hands at all.
It felt like a vacation home—something you’d approach with a suitcase or bag…
A few errant drops of rain cascaded through the broad canopy of trees above.
“This is yours, if you want it.”
I turned, staring at Ransom with bleary eyes as if I must have misunderstood.
“Ours?” My voice cracked with fatigue.
“We have one not far away,” Umbra added from the van. “Shatter and Dusk are finishing their studies in the city, but we used to live out here full time. Might again soon. But no one comes out here—it’s safe from prying eyes.”
I just stared up at it in blood-stained prison clothes, with nothing to my name but a pack, as Ransom kept speaking, but I couldn’t process all of it.
“…Sort you some new IDs—they won’t take long…
anything you need for her nest, there’s a room at the top, a nice sunroom—all good options…
five bedrooms in all, and a trail out the back…
don’t know if any of you can drive, so we might have to organize something…
be around in the next few weeks if you need anything. ”
I nodded, though I didn’t pick up much.
Ransom clapped me on the shoulder. “I’ll write it down,” he chuckled, then went to help the others.
I still stood, staring blankly, until the scent of ocean storm filtered into my senses.
Karma had joined me. He looked… confused, as he, too, stared at the house.
“I don’t… understand.”
“I think…” I said. “We got out?”
“I don’t know…” Karma muttered. “How do you think they fit a whole cabin down here?”
A chuckle rose in my chest, and he shot me a dirty look.
Still, that strange silence was deafening.
No… not quite silence…
I focused on the massive pine trees stretching above us. They swayed in the wind, rustling against one another, and there was a chorus of distant birds, bickering back and forth between the branches.
But no howls, or pain, or insanity…
Karma tilted his head, like the cabin might begin explaining how it had arrived in Anarchy in one piece.
We watched as Umbra and Sin helped Vandle up the steps. Crescent was clutching her pencil case against her chest, eyes wide, as she trailed them.
When they’d vanished through the doors, I tilted my head toward Karma. “You know, I don’t think it could fit in Anarchy.”
“Has to, or how could it be here?” he said, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.
Hmm… Maybe in the square?
No, I decided. The silence was too much.
There was nothing that could make Anarchy this quiet. And that meant… “Well, while you try to figure it out, I’m going to go and claim the best bedroom.”
He straightened, eyes snapping right to me. Before I could say another thing, he was crashing past me and through the double doors of the beautiful wooden cabin.
And finally—finally, I think it hit me.
We… were out.
I’d spent a long time imagining what it might be like when we got out of Anarchy. There were a thousand obstacles—after tests and gruelling check-ins, we might be deemed stable. And then the old grind would begin.
Finding a way to stay above water.
Work.
Survival.
It would be easier this time—I’d have a pack at my back, and no crippling illness to make it all but impossible. It would be enough—it had to be enough.
When we’d found Crescent, though, those pathways had all seemed bleak and inadequate.
But this…
This was freedom from all of that.
A chance to be able to care for her—for the whole pack.