Limerence: Book Three of The Cure (Omnibus Edition) Read online

  About Limerence: Book Three of The Cure (Omnibus Edition)

  No injection can cure love. Only life can do that.

  Deep in the darkest tunnels hide the last of the resistance fighters. Hunted by the savage Furies and the ruthless Bloods, they live in constant peril. The only means of survival is to seek strength in family and find courage in love. So what happens when love is cured, scoured away, leaving death in its place?

  In the final battle for freedom, there are no lines that won’t be crossed. And for Josi this means becoming the creature she fears most of all: the girl with a blood moon heart.

  The gripping conclusion to the dystopian trilogy The Cure, Limerence is a love story for the monsters within.

  Perfect for fans of Pierce Brown, Laini Taylor and Maggie Stiefvater.

  Contents

  About Limerence: Book Three of The Cure (Omnibus Edition)

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Acknowledgments

  About Charlotte McConaghy

  Also by Charlotte McConaghy

  Copyright

  For my friend, Rhia.

  We require that all things be mysterious and unexplorable, that land and sea be infinitely wild …

  Henry David Thoreau

  Chapter 1

  Josephine

  I used to imagine that in the heart of the earth it would be warm. But in the deep dark it is cold. The space grows smaller each day. The walls creep closer and the silence seems to petrify all in its path like the ancient ghostly trees within the dead forest. We’ve become like the rats whose claws scratch scratch scratch, the hated creatures who flee below to hide. We are hunted and cowed. Forced into the cold dark corners. They wish to make us small, the smallest things in the world, too small to fight. Once this was where I belonged. Under the floor of the world with all of you, my family. With you, Luke Townsend. Once I was content to be small because it meant being alive.

  But now I think I’m done with being hunted.

  Now I think I belong in the sky with the other predators.

  *

  December 15th, 2067

  Luke

  The cold of the tile floor makes my muscles stiff. There are metal bracelets around my wrists and they cut into my flesh more by the day. I have no veins left – the army of scientists has started searching between my toes for places to inject me. When they’ve ravaged the veins there they’ll move to my eyeballs. That’ll be nice. I swing between perfect clarity and hazy confusion, between mind-altering rage and mind-numbing boredom. Sometimes what they give me makes me sick, sometimes it makes me hallucinate or try to scratch my wrists open, and sometimes it makes me strong. What gets to me most is the light. I live now in a room of perpetual glare and cold white tiles; I exist outside of time. There’s no escaping it, not even when I bury my face in my arms. My head and eyes, so used to the dark of the underground, ache.

  A tone sounds from somewhere above and I sit up on my hard bed. The tone means it’s time for testing. Through the glass door of my cage I see four men approach along the white hallway. Two scientists and two Bloods. I stand and go to the chute. My head’s quite clear today, which is a pleasant surprise.

  “Bruce, my man. You’re looking peaky. Did you get enough sleep?”

  The scientist’s name isn’t Bruce, as far as I know, but since he didn’t tell me what it actually is I decided to name him. I’ve named them all even though they never say a word to me that isn’t an instruction.

  “Cuffs on,” Bruce tells me calmly. Everything he does is calm. Larry, on the other hand, is easily ruffled. He’s twitchy.

  I take the cuffs from the chute and lock them around my already manacled wrists, then place the second set around my ankles. “How’s Marie? And the baby? Did I tell you I decided you’ve had another baby? Well, you have. And she’s a crier. Maybe that’s why you look so dopey today, Brucey.”

  “On your knees, face the wall.”

  I face the wall and crouch to my knees. The door slides open behind me and I feel the two Bloods take hold of me. They yank me to my feet and steer me into the hall. I shuffle along at a snail’s pace. There’s a gun between my shoulder blades, aimed right at my heart. There’s a second at the base of my spine. Cameras watch me from every few meters and gas vents will dose us with a knockout sedative if I so much as blink the wrong way.

  Still, as I pass Larry I lunge at him and snap my teeth like a Rottweiler. He gives a yelp of alarm and I grin. It earns me a whack on the back of the head. Not hard enough to knock me out of course, but hard enough to hurt.

  We move through the facility and despite the pain I count the doorways and turns as I always do. I have most of this place mapped out now, but there’s still an east wing into which I’ve yet to be taken.

  “Hey Brucey, can I have some more of the green stuff? That was a fun day. I bet you use that shit on yourself, don’t you? Take the edge off the numbness?” Surprise, surprise, he ignores me but I keep going. I always keep going. “I bet Marie hates living with a robot. Bet she’s desperate for a bit of passion, huh? Some life? Do you make her laugh? Or cry? You can’t, can you? You’re not even a real person. You’re a fucking drone, mate.”

  We arrive at the lab and I’m hooked into the machines and then strapped to the upright bed. It’s very Hannibal Lector-y. The scientists start injecting and extracting. They usually take blood and piss and shit and hair. Sometimes they take bone marrow. Once they took a piece of my kidney and a chunk of liver. I think they would pluck my heart from my chest if they could. Maybe they intend to.

  Of all of this, the worst day was when the birds left me. That was how I knew they’d cured the blood moon from my heart. I’ve never felt so lonely.

  Bruce approaches to swab my mouth.

  “You want saliva?” I ask him, and then oblige by spitting on him.

  He recoils. I wonder if they’ve given me anything infectious. I hope so.

  One of the Bloods punches me in the face but I’m laughing and hardly feel it. His blows are nothing. All of this is nothing. It’s funny, actually. It’s so far beneath what matters to me that they are specks of dust on the bottom of my shoe.

  I laugh because they can prick and prod and steal little pieces, but they’ve taken nothing real from me. Not my rage. Not my sadness. They certainly haven’t taken my sense of humor. And here’s the secret: there’s no survival without laughter.

  Today is a big day for me. Today is attempt number twenty-eight.

  I’ve already worked out how to get free of the cuffs, and I can use the Bloods’ weapons against them. The problem has always been finding a way out of this damn place. The security is unlike anything I’ve come across and each time I get free I wind up sprinting blindly into one of a million dead ends.

&n
bsp; I’ll get there in the end though. I’ll find a way out, no matter how long it takes.

  Because I know one thing. If Josephine Luquet has yet to rescue me then something immense is stopping her. And I sure as hell intend to find out what.

  *

  I wake some time later. I have a pounding headache and a very sore jaw. Obviously whatever they gave me knocked me out before I had a chance to get free of my bindings. That’s attempt number twenty-eight in three months, failed spectacularly.

  “Lukey.”

  I blink at the sound of the voice. My heart rate spikes. In the bright tile room I struggle to sit upright. Confusion and a concussion make me dizzy.

  “You’re okay,” the voice says.

  I know this voice. I never thought I’d hear it again.

  They must have given me some very strong hallucinogens because when I finally manage to settle my eyes upon the figure sitting in my cell with me, I recognize him straight away. The sandy hair and big brown eyes. The slightly crooked teeth. The tall, slender frame and lanky crossed legs.

  It’s my brother, Dave. My dead brother.

  A woozy breath leaves me and I decide that I’m not able to deal with this today. I rest my head on my knees and squeeze my eyes shut. Go away. Please.

  I hear him rise and cross to my side. My skin prickles.

  And then—

  He touches me, this hallucination. A hand on my shaved head. It’s warm and gentle. “It’s okay, mate,” he says softly. “I’m alright. You’re alright.”

  It’s a mighty ocean wave striking my tiny body and slamming it way down into the deep. It’s all the air from my lungs and the thoughts from my mind. Gone is the laughter. It must be a lie. They’ve finally found a way to breach my walls and brutalize me with a monstrous trick.

  It takes all my courage to open my eyes, turn my head and look him full in the face. He is older and wearier and different. And that’s how I know he’s real.

  “What …?” The single word leaves me in a breath and then I’m weeping and clinging onto him and burying my face in his too-skinny chest.

  “You’re dead,” I tell him. “You’re dead.”

  “I’m not. I promise.”

  My big brother. He smells like my big brother, this creature in my hands.

  My heart.

  “How.”

  He doesn’t answer. He waits for me to gather myself. It takes a very long time. Seemingly hours of scrabbling in the dark for an answer, of fearing when I will wake from this dream, of dreading when he goes again.

  The raw edge of it all can’t remain raw. In full survival mode, my mind starts making it numb. When I’ve stopped crying and moved into a space of numb dull what the fuck, Davehe goes back to his spot on the floor. He looks so much smaller than I remember him. So much older.

  “You didn’t kill yourself.”

  “No.”

  “So what happened? Where have you been?”

  “Here.”

  I stare at him. “For eleven years?”

  He nods once.

  A shiver of horror runs down my spine. “What … I didn’t know. I didn’t know or I would have come for you.” This is a more ferocious truth than any I’ve yet known.

  Dave shakes his head. “That’s why they told you I was dead. So you’d never look.”

  “But … why?” I’m not even close to making sense of this. I can’t fit any pieces together.

  “To use me. To punish me.”

  “For what?”

  “For leading the protesters.”

  “But you stopped protesting when they cured you.”

  Dave shrugs blankly. “Shay wanted a subject. For the future cures. Who better than the man who’d been so publicly defying him?”

  “Jesus. So he brought you here and tested you for eleven years?”

  “On and off. Mostly I have time to myself.”

  “To stare at a white wall?”

  “I don’t live in the lab anymore.”

  “Then where do you live?”

  “Within the Gates.”

  I wait for him to continue explaining but he’s tight-lipped. “Dave, man, you’re not making this easy on me. Start from the beginning.”

  So he does. Softly and calmly. He tells me of how he was snatched by the Bloods and brought here to be experimented on. After a couple of years he was moved into the cloistered community of the Gates, which is where the twelve Ministers live with their families and never leave the safety of its guarded walls. Dave says he knows Prime Minister Falon Shay, that he has been watched like a good little puppy and every so often returned to the lab for further experiments. He says he has seen the way the people fear Shay, all of them, even the Ministers who serve him. Dave says it is not only fear of the man himself that makes them acquiesce to his every order, but fear of the plague that ruptured the world one day returning. It was Shay who ended the first sweep of disease, quarantining us behind walls. It will be him who protects us from another. Or so he says.

  Last of all Dave explains how he’s the only human in the known world to have been given all three cures.

  “Three?” I demand. There are two cures – one for anger and one for sadness. The cure for anger was given to the public years ago but Josi led the resistance to destroy the sadness cure on two occasions before it could be administered to the remaining public. Since then we haven’t heard a word about it. I didn’t think anyone had successfully been injected with both the anger and the sadness cures.

  But Dave nods.

  There’s a pit in my stomach because of the way he’s looking at me. I can feel it, suddenly. A gaping absence in the air between us. A yawning grief.

  “What’s the third?” I ask softly. But I know, I think.

  Dave frowns and laces his hands over his knees. His eyes look hollow as he says, “A cure for love.”

  *

  December 16th, 2067

  Luke

  There is still no sense in it. No way to take the enormity of such a thing and fit it inside me. But I’m extremely good at compartmentalizing, so that’s what I do. I put my shock and my emotion into boxes with heavy padlocks and I determine to deal with them later. When it’s less … When it’s just less.

  We talk for hours. Well, I talk and Dave listens. I tell him about my life. About my Blood mission to spy on Josi. About escaping to the West and joining the resistance community of the Inferno. About the discoveries we made under the brutal sun of a scorched world. How the Furies aren’t a horror story, but all too real, created by Shay’s scientists and set free to spread their rabid disease throughout the last remaining humans. A sea of monsters swells out there beyond the city wall, scratching to get back in. I find myself speaking of poor dead Anthony Harwood, Josephine’s therapist, and of Raven, too. Raven the dark-haired, dark-minded, utterly mad beauty. I speak of our flight into the tunnels on that bittersweet night more than a year ago. I speak of what came after, of lives lived under the ground. I tell him about the blood moon and the birds that I see even though they are extinct, and about my own brutal stupidity. I tell him of the terrible, terrible mistake I made and the lies that led me to here. And last I give him word of our parents.

  I watch his face as I explain about Mom’s laughter and Dad’s builder’s hands trembling unnaturally. I see no hint of emotion. He’s not empty, exactly. Not cold. Just calm. I’m not sure if he feels nothing at all or just nothing with any strength.

  “You remember them, right?” I ask.

  “Of course. And you, Lukey.”

  “We’ve missed you.” Words can be so, so small.

  “I’m sorry you went through that. I know it must have been difficult.” He hesitates. “I … tried to get back to you, in the beginning. But I was unequal to the task.”

  I squeeze my eyes shut. I keep thinking my tears must be spent and then I feel more. “I should have come for you. I should have come.” The heart of it. The shame of it.

  *

  We are quiet now.
My thoughts have shifted to our escape. I thought I was determined before. I wasn’t. I will tear down the walls of this place to get him free. I’ll die to do it.

  It occurs to me slowly, a result of the drugs they have me on. “What are you doing here? In my room.”

  “I wish I knew. I woke up here.”

  I frown and consider why they might have put him in with me after taking such means to ensure I thought him dead. There is purpose to everything Shay orders. I can only imagine it means he thinks I’m never getting out of here and wants to torture me with the truth.

  But if he thinks that he doesn’t know me at all.

  And, as it turns out, he doesn’t know Josephine Luquet.

  Sometimes I think nobody does.

  *

  An alarm sounds. It’s not one I’ve heard in the three months I’ve been cloistered here. Smoke fills the hallway but none of it seeps through the airtight, unbreakable glass sealing us in. Dave and I are on our feet.

  “This ever happen when you were here?”

  “Nope.”

  I smile.

  “What are you so happy about?” he asks.

  “You’ll see.”

  There’s nothing in here to use as a weapon. Just the manacles around my wrists.

  “Have you kept up your training?”

  He glances at me like I’m a lunatic. “No.”

  Now that he’s standing I can see how weak his body is. What happened to my mammoth giant of a brother, the one whose strength I envied so badly? That man is gone and this one looks frail. “Then stay behind me.”

  Figures move within the smoke. Someone appears before the glass, clad in gray with a hood and mask to cover their face. Whoever it is, they are heavily armed with automatic weapons. They place small charges on all four corners of the glass and then motion for us to move back. Dave and I go for the far corner and crouch low with our fingers in our ears. I squeeze my eyes shut and try to shield my head. A high-pitched sound slices through the world and the glass shatters. I feel a burst of pressure slam me back against the wall and my ears go.