Free The Believers (The Breeders Series - Book 2) by Katie French Page A

assignments.” She shrugs her narrow shoulders, making her cotton jumper rise and fall. “Sorry,” she says, pocketing her paper frog. “Best I could do.”
    “It's fine,” I say, anxious. Mama. I am dying to see her and dreading it. I push up, needing to move my body. “Can we go?”
    Ethan stands beside me. I wait for his hand to slip into mine, but they're locked at his sides. His eyes follow Mage.
    I turn back to Clay and Rayburn. Clay hugs me, a sympathetic smile at the corners of his mouth. “Go,” he says. “We'll be fine.” He looks at Rayburn, who stares blankly back. An elbow from Clay gets Rayburn unstuck.
    “Yeah, uh, fine,” Rayburn manages.
    Mage leads us back down the hallways at a fast clip. No one speaks. I'm too nervous and Ethan is either love-struck or feeling the nerves too. Mage fiddles with the frog in her pocket. Her silence makes me worry.
    At the end of the hallway is a large department store, with a wide rectangular entrance and glass display windows that have naked, limbless life-sized dolls piled like a plastic holocaust. A guard sits at the entrance on a metal stool, slumped over, one boot hooked around the stool leg. He’s wearing a patched security guard uniform that must’ve come from the days when this mall still saw shoppers. He doesn't have a gun, but there's a seriously long knife hung at his belt. Does he use it to keep people out, or patients in? I run my hand over the ankh brand on my wrist. I vowed never to step foot in a hospital again.
    “We're here to see the newcomer.” Mage shoves both hands in her jumper pockets and smiles innocently up at the burly guard.
    Rising to his full height of over six feet, the guard stands, his stool scraping on the concrete floor. “I heard no visitors.” His voice is mumbled and phlegmy. When he opens his mouth again, I see a red sore like a smooshed raspberry on his tongue. There’s another blistered patch of skin just above his wrist. My stomach lurches. Have we already been infected by whatever it is they carry? But then, why doesn't Mage seem infected? Why have all the women looked healthy?
    Mage rocks back and forth, heel to toe, looking every bit a little schoolgirl. “My daddy says we can go in.”
    The guard's brow furrows. He scratches his crop of brown hair and shrugs. “Didn't hear nothing.”
    Mage tugs down a blond curl. “That's 'cause he didn't tell you . He told me . Can we go in now?”
    The guard blinks, confused, but he shuffles aside and sits back on his stool, falling easily back into looking bored. Mage grabs my hand and I tug Ethan along. When we're out of earshot, she leans in to us.
    “Perks of being the Messiah's daughter.” She winks.
    “He didn't tell you we could visit?”
    She smirks and places a finger to her lips in a don't-tell gesture. I have found myself one powerful ally. Or maybe she just likes getting me into trouble.
    She leads us around the gutted department store. The front has nothing but discarded racks and old display tables. The dirty, scratched linoleum sits bare and lifeless. Faded posters cling to the walls. My eyes trail across a large poster with two bored-looking girls in tight jeans and even tighter shirts. What would it have felt like to be a kid when this mall lived and breathed? When throngs of girls marched with plastic shopping bags slung over their wrists.
    We turn the corner. Cots and mattresses line the floor. Patients lie on them. An elderly woman with rheumy eyes and skin like crinkled paper. A middle-aged man covered in large red sores writhes on the bed. A little boy with a splinted arm watches us with wide, wet eyes. Then he turns and buries his head into the yellowed mattress.
    I search the beds, my heart starting to pound. What will Mama look like? Will she be awake? With sweaty palms I walk, eying each patient. A girl about my age lies so still on a cot I wonder if she’s breathing.
    Then I see Mama. My heart freezes to ice as I walk over, Ethan at my heels.