In the peace that followed, I thought of Jack and Truck and Mags, how heavy the weight from the surface pressed down on the shoulders of the soldiers beneath. How it made them brutal and callous, and how much more familiar that felt than Beth’s innocence, even after such a short time.
Even hardened, there were still moments like this. Soft spaces in time. Moments that made everything else matter.
That was when I finally realized that though I may have changed, I wasn’t broken at all.
* * *
I AWOKE to passing footsteps and the dim glow of a lantern. My limbs were tangled with Chase’s, reminding me how tall he was when my socked feet only reached his shins. One heavy arm locked me against his firm chest and his warm breath tickled my ear.
Home, he’d told me once. I was his home. He was mine, too. Had my mind not already begun churning with what the next hours would bring, I could have stayed right there forever.
He had obviously been hurting for sleep. Normally up at the slightest sound, he barely stirred when I wiggled away. Carefully, I slipped on my boots and meandered toward the muted light of the main tunnel, trying not to bump into anyone sleeping on a cot or luggage rack.
I needed to find Sean—hopefully he’d learned more about Rebecca’s situation while I’d been asleep. Now that I was more alert I felt it. She was close, and we were wasting time until the meeting not attempting a rescue.
I heard footsteps again, and a light appeared thirty feet down the tunnel in the direction of sick bay. I squinted, and in the dim glow caught a head of golden hair hurriedly walking away.
It could have been any number of people I hadn’t met, but I was certain it was Tucker. The knot in my gut was proof enough.
Heart pumping, I ran after him. I should have waited for Chase—I knew that. But I also knew that whatever Tucker was doing, he was doing in secret. I wasn’t going to miss the opportunity to bust him. If he caused trouble here on Chicago’s turf, all of us were going down.
The light disappeared as I rounded the bend in the tunnel. My feet kept between the dull blue tracks, but reactively slowed when the path before me lay empty. The clatter of my steps echoed like mocking laughter, drawing a prickling sensation down the back of my neck. I was surrounded by shadows and corridors that disappeared into the black. Tucker could be hiding anywhere.
There was a rustling to my left, and I gripped the long metal handle of the flashlight as though it were a weapon. The sound came from the line of temporary showers down a tile-encased corridor. As I tiptoed toward it I heard Sean’s voice from the medical car twenty feet away and told myself to relax. He would hear me if I ran into trouble.
I pushed back the trash bag curtain, but there was no one standing on the wet tile floor. Drip, drip, drip, went the steady, ear-shattering leak from the doorway. The IV shower bags with their attached spray nozzles hung limply on their wall hooks. I stared so long into the shadows that I began to see shapes. Hear things that didn’t exist—creaking, moaning, whispers.
“You get used to it.”
I spun, already swinging the flashlight, and watched Truck stagger back into the wall, surprise painted all over his simple face.
“What?” I bent, hands on my knees, trying to catch my breath.
“The dark,” he said, and then began to laugh. “You get used to the dark after a while.” He leaned close and whispered, “Saw you sneaking around. It gets to you quick, doesn’t it?”
His blond hair gleamed in the glow of the flashlight. He was the one I’d seen, not Tucker. I shook my head to clear my thoughts.
“Yeah, I guess so,” I said.
He walked with me to sick bay to meet Sean, who was sitting on a wooden stool in the train car, talking to Jack, and the medic I’d seen earlier; a short, bawdy man with a bald spot on the back of his head.
There was no sign of Tucker.
I stepped inside guardedly, remembering how Jack had looked below me as I pressed a baseball bat into his throat.
“I guess we’re all friends now, huh?” I said.
“No sense of humor,” said Jack. He flashed a condescending grin from across the car, and I caught the thick red mark across his neck. “Guys, we forgive and forget, but not a chick, man.”
“Find a bat and I’ll remind you,” I said.
“Ooh!” Truck gave me a high five, which I reluctantly returned. Here, under the wind-up lanterns, it was obvious that his left eye was swollen from the fight. He was sitting beside a cardboard box with the word morefeen scribbled on it. The medic laughed as Truck playfully shoved a sullen Jack off his perch.
“Shut up!” Sean shouted, slamming his hand against the wall. I stiffened. “The report’s wrong. Your man screwed up,” he said.
“The roster,” I realized, deflating. “She’s not here.” We had the wrong town. I hated myself for ever believing Tucker Morris would tell the truth.
“He’s never wrong—” began the medic.
“He’s wrong,” interrupted Sean. There were shadows of disbelief under his eyes.
“If you didn’t want to know, why’d you come?” asked Jack.
“What’s going on?” I said. “Is Rebecca at the reformatory or not?”
“Good news, she’s there,” said Truck. “Bad news, it’s not a reformatory.”
“What?”
“It’s a physical rehabilitation center,” the medic said. “Attached to the hospital. We don’t go there—not because it’s packed with soldiers or anything,” he qualified. “There’s only a skeleton staff of uniforms and it’s mostly manned by Sisters and doctors. But it’s … bad luck.”
“What does that mean?” I was beginning to feel that cold hand of panic walk down my spine.
“The place is a circus,” said Truck. Mags had said this earlier, but Truck’s tone held far more disgust. “A freak factory. They’re all over. You seriously haven’t heard of a circus?” I shook my head. “All right, look. It’s a place where they patch up the injured just enough that they can put them on tour and … what did they call it? Deter something…”
“Deter noncompliance,” finished Jack.
“Right,” said Truck. “All the people the Bureau messes up get sent there. Civvies and ex-soldiers and Sisters. They’re kept in enough pain so that they’re dependent, you know? So they can’t run away.”
I saw the burned boy in the Square, whose mother had held him up for everyone to see.
Advertising, Chase had said. Nothing puts people in their place like the threat of pain. He’d seen this first while he’d lived here, in Chicago. Had he suspected?
“One of our guys got caught,” said Jack. “They beat him pretty bad. Kept him on a breathing machine in that rehab facility and toured him around the base. Wanted to show off what happens when you bite back.”
It was the first time I’d seen him without his tough front. Even Truck was quiet. The cold air around us grew thin and brittle.
My anger for Tucker was scalding. How could he have neglected to mention this? If he’d really been inside that building, he would have known what went on there. Unless his supposed training—and his contact on the inside—were just more lies.
“What happened to him?” I asked weakly.
“Mags,” said Truck. “Mags went topside with a team, to this old abandoned high-rise across the street. From the top floor you can see down onto the courtyard on their roof. When they brought him outside, she took him out.”
“Mercy kill,” added the medic. It was the first time I’d heard the term used with something other than a bird with a broken wing, and it sunk into my body like fangs. “Mags is tough as nails. She could probably teach you a thing or two, Sniper.”
It took me a moment to remember my role, but when I did, all I managed was a one-shouldered shrug.
Now I knew why the gang outside had silenced when we’d mentioned where we needed to go. Why they’d all waited for Mags’s reaction. She’d killed one of her own men there, and instead of being horrified, t
hey’d been reverent.
It occurred to me the sniper could have been in Chicago all along. It made perfect sense. Mags was cold, protected by a legion of ex-soldiers who could defend her if needed. I wished Chase was here. I wondered if he’d woken yet; if he was looking for me.
My mind turned back to Rebecca, my fear for her swelling. “Why couldn’t the team break into the facility and get him? You said there aren’t many soldiers.”
The three Chicago boys glanced at one another warily.
“A Sister has to accompany any soldier into the building,” Truck told me. “And it’s not that Mags couldn’t rig that, but what were we supposed to do with him once we got him out? We can’t support that kind of care down here.”
Sean had had enough. He tore out of the car into the darkened passage.
I shook my head, wishing I could replay this conversation with a different outcome. But we’d come here for answers, and we’d gotten them.
I left the car and found Sean just outside, pacing.
“Sean,” I said. He didn’t stop. I stood in front of him. “Sean!”
“I still have to go. I have to see.” He crouched, hands on his head.
“Sean, stop it,” I said, grabbing his shoulders. “We’ll figure this out.”
“How? How are we going to do that?”
“I … I don’t know. Yet. I don’t know yet, okay? But we’ll think of something.”
He stood, shaking his head. “I should have gotten her out of there years ago.”
“Sean, it’s not your fault. If anyone’s, it’s mine.”
“No.” He shook his head. “No, I was supposed to look out for her.”
“Sean…”
“Chase got you out!” His voice was powerful enough to push me back a step. “Chase didn’t wait, but I waited. I kept waiting, thinking that there’d be a better time. She’d age out, and then I’d go AWOL…”
Sean was losing his control, and as he did, mine returned. My hands had captured his wrists, and squeezed when he tried to brush me off.
“Sean, listen to me.”
“I swear, if they’ve been towing her around the base…”
“Stop. They said it’s run by Sisters. I promise, if I have to go in there by myself and get her, I will, okay?”
“I should have—”
“We’ll tell Mags tonight we’re going to try Tucker’s contact.” I couldn’t believe what I was saying, but we had no other options. “We’ll see her tomorrow, okay?”
Finally, he blew out a strained breath.
“Dawn,” he said.
CHAPTER
17
WHILE Sean stayed in sick bay to question the Chicago resistance for more information, I ran back to the barracks to wake Chase. Now that I didn’t have to be strong for Sean, I became aware of the fear, rooting deep inside me. Rebecca was in more danger than I’d ever suspected. She’d been hurt—badly—and now they were torturing her, showing her off like that poor boy in the Square. I thought of Mags, cold and hard, standing in that window and shooting her own man. Mercy kill, the medic had said. We couldn’t do that to Rebecca, even if her life had become what they’d described.
Chase was not in the barracks.
I ran back past the showers, but he didn’t answer when I called his name.
I returned to sick bay. He wasn’t there either. Neither was Sean, or the Chicago guys.
We still had an hour until the meeting, but clusters of people were already filtering out of their respective stations and funneling toward what Truck had called the Loop, just beyond the mess hall. Sharp-smelling bodies surrounded me, bumping me, reminding me of the tight quarters in the Knoxville Square.
I searched for Chase, but would have settled for Sean or even Tucker. It made sense for Chase to go on to the meeting site without me; it’s where I would go if I’d woken unable to find him. But moving through the crowd of muscled arms and dismissing faces was about as easy as wading through quicksand; I kept getting stuck. Finally we passed the mess hall, where everyone who had just eaten was filtering out into the tunnel.
I saw the tall, athletic build and the golden hair, and staggered only momentarily before pursuing. I was sure it was Tucker this time. He was heading to the supply room—the opposite direction from the meeting. I lunged onto the platform and sprinted past the refrigerators and the counter made of shiny plane hull, to the back of the mess hall. Only a few stragglers remained. Most had left for the meeting.
A flash of movement near the coal carts caught my eye and I dashed after it, but the supply room was empty when I entered.
“Where’s the sniper fan club?”
At the sound of Tucker’s voice I spun back to the entrance that he now was framed within, the shadows over his face sending a chill straight to my bones. His eyes, pinched around the corners, looked edgy—like they had when he’d told us how Cara was killed.
I became acutely aware that it was just the two of us. My hand gripped the flashlight. When his head tilted curiously to the side I gritted my teeth.
“Not still worried about being alone with me, are you?”
He took a step toward me, and I moved back like the wrong end of a magnet.
“Guess that answers that question,” he said.
Laughter filtered through from the platform, not too far away. If Tucker tried anything, I could scream, and they’d be close enough to hear me.
“What are you doing here?” I asked.
“Stealing.”
I twitched.
“Relax,” he said. “My arm hurts.”
He rolled up his sleeve and revealed the pink, swollen forearm that until yesterday had been hidden within a cast.
“Looks traumatic,” I said. “Why don’t you go see the medic?”
“I don’t need to see the medic.” He regarded me with too much familiarity, the way a big brother shuns his annoying little sister. He began to sort through a box atop one of the tables. “I get the feeling there’s something you want to say.” He didn’t sound particularly pleased to hear whatever it was.
I gripped the flashlight harder.
“Apparently there’s a little problem with your rehab facility,” I said. “You neglected to mention that it was a physical rehab, not a girls’ reformatory.”
His golden brows arched. “I didn’t know a distinction was needed.”
He was incapable of honesty. Slippery as an eel.
“Is she even there?”
“Yes. Unless she ran away. Which I doubt. Where does one run in a town full of soldiers?” he mused when I narrowed my eyes.
“What really happened with Cara?”
The lines of his mouth drew tight. “I told you what happened.”
“Sorry if I don’t exactly trust you.”
He shook his head and glanced up at the exit sign. I had the fleeting fear that he was planning on bolting. He was going to escape and we would take the heat when he didn’t show up to report to Mags. She’d probably ground us so we couldn’t break Rebecca free.
“Believe it or not, I thought Cara was all right,” he said. That look of regret was back, and it made my spine tingle. I believed Chase could change, I could change, everyone could change, but not Tucker. “She had it bad,” he continued. “She told me she used to host at FBR socials. They didn’t always treat those girls so well.”
Cara? She may have been flirty, but not desperate.
I thought of how harsh she’d been to Sarah when we’d found her in Tent City, and then later, when she’d called her nothing more than a party favor. Then, strangely, I found myself picturing Cara in the pretty dress. Cara chatting with soldiers. Cara doing what she had to in order to stay alive.
“You mean you didn’t treat those girls well,” I countered.
A dark speculation filled me as the pieces slid into place—Chicago was quick to believe that the cartridge came from a sniper’s rifle, and Cara had been a part of the team that had hijacked the Horizons truck, the very place I�
�d found it to begin with. The other guys at the Wayland Inn had said she’d disappeared more than once; she’d even been in the Square during the last two shootings.
It seemed so clear now, I didn’t know how I’d missed it before.
Unless I hadn’t wanted to believe it.
Wallace had to have known what Cara had been doing. He’d sent me out into the streets knowing I’d been accused of a crime she committed. They’d used me as her cover, so that she could keep killing soldiers.
Thank you for what you’ve done, she’d told me. Thank you for taking the fall is what she should have said.
I felt ill.
I lifted my eyes to Tucker, doubting his story more than ever, suspecting that he knew, as I so certainly did now, that Cara was the sniper. But gone was his arrogance from the base, stripped away like his blue uniform.
“Hey, Sniper!” someone shouted from outside the room. “Come on, the meeting’s getting ready to start!”
“You should go,” he said.
“I’ll be right behind you.”
He moved toward the door, hesitating near the entrance, as though he expected me to join him. When I didn’t, he walked away.
Every muscle within me was shaking. Wallace had lied. Cara had lied. Tucker was lying. Everyone was hiding some truth my life relied upon.
I hated secrets.
I removed the St. Michael medallion from my neck. It couldn’t touch my skin anymore. It was for the sniper. It had been given to me right in front of the sniper. I’d been her cover all this time. Even in death.
It slid from my trembling hand and bounced on the floor with a fragile metal click.
I don’t know why, but amid the pounding revelations my mind found Chase. Clearly I saw him, sitting beside me on the tailgate of Tubman’s truck, telling me about St. Michael, and the spirit world, and his hope that my mother had found peace.
Before another thought entered my head I was on my hands and knees, retrieving the coin from where it had fallen, beneath one of the long tables covered with hodgepodge supplies. I needed it. It had kept me alive. I couldn’t let it go.
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