The Lair Read Free Page B

I didn’t want to lie to anyone. When had that ever worked out well? I’d lied to Lily when I came to rescue her from the Farm, and it had led to one screw-up after another.
    “I don’t know,” I admitted. “People are going to wonder. They’ll have doubts. And I don’t see how a lie like this can stand up to the questions.”
    “Yeah, if it was just the one lie, it wouldn’t stand. But maybe lies are like cards. You can’t ever get one to stand up alone, but you balance them against each other and they’ll prop each other up.” Her lush mouth twisted into a wry, sad smile. “Didn’t you ever build a house of cards when you were a kid?”
    “No. All I know is that they’re destined to fall down.” My childhood had been spent in the back wing of the house, playing video games and hiding from my parents, because if they forgot I was there, they were less likely to give me a hard time.
    “Yeah. But we don’t need to convince everyone forever. We just need them to believe it long enough to come up with a better plan. Or find another abductura . Something. And the Elites are used to following you. If you say I’m the abductura , they’ll believe you. I don’t like it, but it’s better than driving off and leaving them here with no leader. Even if we could find safety—and there’s no guarantee for that, but even if we could—we can’t just walk away from this.”
    “Lily—”
    “She’s right,” McKenna said from the backseat.
    Lily and I both whirled around to see her slowly stretching as she sat up. Hell, I’d forgotten she was even back there.
    “We have to stay here,” she said.
    Lily’s mouth twisted a little, like she wanted to smile but was too sad to really do it. “You just want to stay here because you think Joe might show up.”
    “Duh. This is where he’ll go. So, I’m staying no matter what. But I agree with Lily. You need to stay, too. You’re their leader. You—”
    “I can’t lead these people,” I protested.
    “You’ve led them this far,” Lily said gently.
    “Yeah, but that was the easy part. I had a plan: find you. Let you convince the rest of humanity to fight. Let Sebastian do the rest. I could do all of that. I can’t do this.”
    “Sure you can,” Lily said. “All you need is a new plan.”
    “A plan to lead these kids, who are terrified and starving? In the middle of winter, when we can hardly leave the mountain?”
    “Okay, so that’s the first step in the plan: find more food. Stay close to the mountain. And then when spring hits, we go get more recruits from Farms. That’s what you were doing before, right? So that’s what we’ll keep doing.”
    When she broke it down like that, it seemed doable.
    All my life, everyone had treated me like I was a screw-up. My parents, my teachers, even Sebastian. They’d all expected me to fail, miserably. And all my life, that had pissed me off. Now, here I was, ready to finally live down to everyone’s expectations of me and along came Lily. And she didn’t expect me to fail. In fact, she expected me to save the world.
    When she looked at me like that, I almost believed I could.

CHAPTER TWO
    Lily
    Lily’s stomach turned over as she climbed out of the passenger side of the Hummer. Carter had parked it right in the middle of the otherwise empty parking lot. The parking lot was separated from the surrounding forest by a tall, chain-link fence, and it butted right up against the side of the mountain. Set into the mountain was a door under a sign reading “United Underground.” Beside that was a pair of huge garage doors, one of which was slowly rising. Carter had told her that nearly a hundred people lived at Base Camp, but the collection of kids huddled just inside the door didn’t seem close to that number—maybe because they were all so thin. Or maybe they were just small compared to the huge, open space inside the mountain.
    Lily rounded the Hummer to help McKenna climb out. They’d been cramped in the