by Kat Falls
“So, what was the point, Delaney?” Spurling’s tone turned acidic. “To terrify people? Show them that monsters are real? Or worse, that the monsters are the very people they’ve been grieving?”
People deserved to know the truth. I still believed that, though my reasons hadn’t been completely unselfish. If the public knew about the infected humans, there’d be more demand to find a cure. At least, that’s what I’d hoped would happen. Someone needed to come up with a cure. And once a cure existed, I’d get a dose to Rafe. No matter how long I had to search for him, no matter how far into the zone I had to go. Because putting him down or even hiring someone to do it wasn’t an option. Screw my promise.
Spurling heaved a sigh. “You can drop the ignorant act. I’m not here to arrest you.”
I cut her a look. “And I’m supposed to believe you why?”
“I haven’t lied to you yet,” she said all matter-of-fact.
“Maybe not, but you did send me over here six months ago — alone.”
“So?”
I didn’t expect an apology, but smugness? That was too much. “I could have gotten infected!”
She cocked a brow. “Did you?”
“That’s not the —”
“Of course it’s the point.”
Now I actually hit the brakes and gave her my best death glare. She worked for the government, not the line patrol. She couldn’t have me thrown off Arsenal for disrespect.
“Give me some credit,” she said, though not with her usual prickliness. “My instincts are dead-on when it comes to judging people’s motives and abilities. You wanted to save your dad, and you were up to the task. You just went too far with that video.”
“What video?”
“Oh, come on, Delaney. The tunnel, the crawling through rubble to get to Arsenal Island. Like I don’t know who made that journey with a dial around her neck.”
“What does that prove? Anyway, you’re the one who let me keep my dial when you sent me over here.”
“Yes, I did. Did you think that was an accident? Letting a budding filmmaker keep her recording device? I even made certain it was fully charged.”
That took me aback. It was something I hadn’t considered before. “Why?”
“I wanted to see what was going on here.” She flicked her hand at the squads of drilling guards. “I didn’t expect you to go all the way to the Feral Zone.”
“What’s so interesting about Arsenal?” This island looked like any old patrol base to me.
“Drive and maybe I’ll tell you.”
She wouldn’t give me the truth, or at least not the whole truth, but whatever. I hit the gas. “I’m listening.”
“First, let’s jump to the part where I tell you the effect your little video has had over there.” She jabbed a finger at the wall, the monstrosity that loomed over the west bank.
I thought of the mailroom’s bags of love letters for Everson and winced. “I have some idea.”
“Then you know you set off a firestorm of panic?”
Ah, no. I didn’t know that. That certainly hadn’t been my intention.
As we passed the ancient stone clock tower, Spurling twisted in her seat to face me. “What did you expect would happen when you shared images of those mutated humans? A big outpouring of compassion?”
“Uh …” Yeah, I had. Well, I’d hoped anyway.
Spurling saw my expression and made a noise of disgust. “Spare me your good intentions. I’d like to keep my lunch in my stomach.”
“I was trying to get people to care about the manimals!”
“Your video didn’t make people care about the manimals. It whipped them into a frenzy of fear, which is why no one objected yesterday when the president pledged to triple the line patrol’s budget in his State of the Union address. As if employing more mercenaries will make us safer,” she scoffed.
I shrugged. What did I care if the line patrol had three times as many guards marching along the top of the wall?
“Use that creative brain of yours and try to imagine it,” Spurling ordered. “The danger we’re heading for with arms wide open.”
“What danger?”
“In the wake of your video, Ilsa Prejean asked for and received the authority to do whatever is necessary to safeguard the West against those creatures and the virus they carry. Well done, Delaney. I hope she gave you a bonus for your help. As soon as the president signs that executive order, her private army will outnumber and outgun what’s left of our national armed forces.”
Well, that explained why the chairman hadn’t ordered me off the base. My video had boosted her bottom line.
“The line patrol isn’t an army,” I pointed out. “It’s a security force.”
“A paramilitary security force owned by the Titan Corporation, which is wholly owned and controlled by Ilsa Prejean. I’d say ‘private army’ fits the bill.”
As we neared the southwest tip of the island, I could feel Spurling’s gaze on me, sparking with curiosity. “Tell me something,” she said. “The guard who went to Chicago with you —”
“Everson,” I supplied.
“As in Everson Cruz?”
I gave a quick nod. Why lie?
“Ah, that’s why he got the hero edit.” She smirked at me.
I hadn’t edited the video to make Everson look heroic. He just was.
“Everson and I are friends.” I stopped the jeep just short of the bridge, where a guard stood before the locked gate. “That’s all.”
“Of course you are,” Spurling conceded with obvious amusement as the guard unlocked the gate and waved us through. “Why would Everson Cruz limit his options when a million girls are ready to throw themselves at his feet?” She sent a smirk my way. “Bet you didn’t see that coming when you hit post.”
A million fangirls — that’s what I’d risked execution for? Yes, Everson was all over my video — start to finish. Rafe, less so. I’d given the manimals the starring roles because they were supposed to be the takeaway message.
I eased the jeep onto the ancient bridge. On the far bank, Spurling’s white hovercopter, emblazoned with a black biohazard symbol, waited on the landing pad.
At least Everson didn’t seem to mind too much about the bags of letters, even if a few of them teetered on obscene. Okay, probably more than a few, and probably more than teetered. But so what? Fan mail had to be better than the mountain of death threats he and his mother were still getting twenty years after the outbreak. Besides, what guy would mind being adored by thousands upon thousands of strangers?
Guilt punched me in the gut. Everson, that’s who. The last thing he wanted was more attention. That’s why he lived in the barracks and ate in the mess hall instead of using his private suite in the research building or its fancy dining room. He had serious goals he was trying to accomplish and hated being known as “the prince” on base. I knew because I’d watched him bloody another guard’s nose after the guy had shouted it across the mess hall. So, if being “the prince” bugged him, how much more would he hate being known as a teen heartthrob? For once I was really glad the patrol blocked internet access on this side of the wall.
“He’s a strapping young man, I’ll give you that,” Spurling said over the rush of the river. “Attractive, if you can forget for one minute who his mother is, which I can’t. But putting all that aside, Delaney, you can’t trust anyone who works for a private militia. They don’t stick to the same codes of conduct as real military, which is precisely why the government hires them.”
I waved off her concern. “Everson isn’t like the other guards.”
“I’ll say.”
“No. I mean he doesn’t think like them. He hasn’t had the empathy drilled out of him. He’s the one person on this island I trust.”
She shrugged as if I was beyond help. “Personally, I was rooting for the other one. Rafe. Now, he was fun. He —” Her words cut off with a gasp. “What are they doing?”
We’d reached the end of
the creaking bridge, but that wasn’t what had her gasping. No, that honor belonged to the gray Titan hovercopters, circling overhead. As soon as one cleared the bridge, guards began dropping out, one after the other, to crash into the churning river below.
“New recruits,” I yelled to be heard over the hiss of the hovercopter fans. “That’s how they get to base. It’s a test.”
When the guards surfaced, spitting out water through chattering teeth, they inflated their vests, secured their weapons on top of their waterproof rucksacks, and held up an arm for pickup. No easy feat. Several struggled to stay upright; others kicked frantically to catch up with gear that had been swept away by the strong currents.
“Secure your weapon first!” boomed a squad leader via a bullhorn from where he crouched in the prow of a rubberized speedboat. More boats skimmed the river, staying just out of the floundering guards’ reach.
As we waited for a sentry to unlock the gate at this end of the bridge, another hovercopter swooped overhead. “This is so much worse than I thought,” Spurling said darkly.
I drove through the gate onto the island of pure black asphalt that served as the patrol’s landing strip. “What do you mean?”
“If the president signs an executive order to increase Titan’s budget, this drizzle” — she waved at the plummeting recruits — “will turn into a typhoon. Thanks to you.”
I navigated between the patrol hovercopters, black and multibladed, that surrounded the biohaz ’copter like drones around a queen. “Okay. I messed up. Made my video too scary because I wasn’t over what had happened. They’re not all bad — the manimals.”
“Nobody cares about the manimals,” she snapped. “That’s not why I’m here. I came because I learned something from your video, Delaney.”
My eyebrows hiked.
“Drop the face,” she ordered without heat. “I never said I knew everything about the Feral Zone. Titan limits our intel, even at the highest levels. For example, I had no idea there were so many uninfected people still living in the East.”
“You didn’t know about Moline and the other compounds?”
“I knew about Moline, but I thought the other compounds had been abandoned or overrun by the infected. It seems that isn’t the case. Now,” Spurling said as if getting down to business, “this is where you come in.”
My internal warning system powered on, red lights flashing. I threw the jeep into park, a hundred feet from her hovercopter, and twisted in my seat to face her. “What do you want?”
“Same thing as last time, Delaney.” A corner of her mouth quirked up. “You’re going to give your father a message for me.”
Right, ’cause last time worked out so well.
“I want the name of every healthy person living in the zone,” Spurling went on. “Starting with Moline. And I want Mack to get those names for me.”
Questions exploded in my mind like timed fireworks, one after another, but all I got out was, “Why?”
“Let’s call it a census.”
“Are you going to let them immigrate to the West?” I asked, remembering how Hagen had wanted to do exactly that years ago. Did she still want to leave the zone?
Spurling held up a hand. “One step at a time, Delaney. Let’s get people over there” — she hooked a thumb at the wall looming over us — “to put down the pitchforks first.”
A census was a good idea — a step in the right direction — except for the part about my father being the one to fetch the names. “My dad can’t do it. He’s still spending all his time looking for a certain strain of the virus. And his leg isn’t —”
“So he’ll delegate. He must know someone who can handle a job like this.”
The answer came to me in a flash. “Hacks!” At her nonreaction, I explained, “Path hackers. They’re like jungle guides, only they guide people from compound to compound and kill ferals along the way. They can get you names.”
“Hacks,” she said as if tasting the word and finding it acceptable. “That’ll do. Take care of it.” She plucked up her satchel and swung her legs out of the jeep.
“What?” I scrambled onto the asphalt and rounded the jeep, blocking her path to the hovercopter. “What do you mean ‘take care of it’?”
“You said Mack is too busy for the job,” she said, as if stating the obvious. “So you do it.”
My jaw went slack. She was joking. She had to be joking. Why didn’t she look like she was joking?!
“You started this,” she went on. “You fix it.”
“I didn’t start the plague!”
“No,” she agreed. “You agitated the public with your video. Do you want to see Titan’s budget tripled? No? Then help me fix this, Delaney. Not by playing on people’s fears or throwing up a wall to hide the problem. We need to remind them” — she jabbed a finger toward the West again — “of what we left behind — of who we left behind.”
“Okay,” I said slowly, though my mind was racing. “But if you really want to fight that” — I nodded toward the swarm of speedboats scooping recruits out of the river — “you’re going to need more than just a list of names.”
She arched a thin brow. “What do you suggest?”
“Give me your dial. I’ll go to Moline and record the healthy people living there. I’ll get you a lot more than names. I’ll get you their faces and voices. Their stories.”
Spurling lifted her sunglasses to study me. “You’ll humanize them.”
I shrugged. Who cared what she called it? I just knew what worked from volunteering at the Davenport animal shelter. To get people to care about the abandoned animals, they needed to see the animals. Every time I’d posted a video showcasing the shelter’s available dogs and cats, introducing them by name, we’d get a spike in adoptions and donations. Every time. Without fail.
“All right, Delaney. You want a do-over, you got it.” Spurling unfastened the silver chain around her neck and held out her dial. I met her eyes. She knew that Titan didn’t allow its employees to have dials on this side of the wall, and that included everyone: guards, scientists, staff … me.
I stared at the steel-and-glass disc dangling from her fingertips. It was all that I could do to take the dial calmly. “How will I get you the recording when I’m done?”
“Oh, you’ll be hearing from me again.” She headed for the hovercopter, her spiked heels clacking on the asphalt. “Count on it.”
I left the jeep on the landing pad and walked back across the bridge to the island. As I neared the gate, I fastened the dial’s chain at the back of my neck and dropped the palm-sized disc down the front of my shirt. If a guard saw it, he’d confiscate it and throw me in a cell. Maybe the one next to Mahari’s …
As soon as I stepped off the bridge onto the base, a voice shouted, “Lane!” from across the drill yard.
I looked up to see Bearly jogging toward me. “Hey. What’s up?”
As Bearly closed in on me, her dark skin gleamed with sweat. She touched the speaker-mic clipped to her shoulder. “Got her. Tell the captain we’re heading over now.” She let go of the button and looked at me. “Let’s go.”
“Where?”
“The lab.”
I glanced past the guard securing the gate that I’d just come through to the landing pad on the riverbank. Was it too late to make a break for Spurling’s hovercopter?
Stupid thought. Who knew why Hyrax wanted me? Maybe it was for something minor. I fell into step beside Bearly and asked, “What’d they do?”
“Who?” she asked without slowing her pace.
“The orphans. Are they in trouble?”
“No idea.” She gave me a sidelong glance. “Good visit with Director Spurling?”
Is that what Hyrax wanted? To debrief me about my talk with Spurling? Or maybe Bearly was asking for someone higher on the food chain.
“We were just catching up,” I said.
She eyed me for a moment as if looking for a chink in my armor. “I hope you enjoyed it. She
isn’t allowed back on base. Chairman’s orders.”
Yep. Top of the food chain. “Titan can block the director of the Biohazard Defense?”
“No one is above the quarantine,” she said in a tone that sounded like a warning.
After seeing the video in Chairman Prejean’s van of me fighting with the guard, I shouldn’t have been surprised to learn that she had eyes everywhere — mechanical and human. Still, it stung to think Bearly had probably been joining me at the orphans’ table at dinner because she’d been told to. But then, why was I hurt? I’d learned this lesson already — many times over. Everyone lied. Big lies and little fibs. Even the people who loved you lied.
My dad had wanted me to pass the lie detector test if I was ever interrogated about his illegal profession as a fetch. Every time he’d gone away, he told me he was doing business with art galleries when really he was fetching art from abandoned museums in the Feral Zone. I understood his reasoning. I’d probably do the same to protect someone I loved. But good intentions didn’t change the fact that my dad had lied. At least I could still count on Everson to be honest with me.
Everson and Captain Hyrax were waiting for me in a lounge on the main floor of the building. Everson was dressed in all black instead of the usual Titan gray, from his tactical jacket to his combat pants and spit-shined boots. Before I could ask why, I noticed Chairman Prejean looming behind them on the giant wall screen.
“Hello, Lane,” she said in a voice like dry ice. She must have been calling from somewhere incredibly clean because it was the first time I’d seen her without gloves or a surgical mask. She still looked like a corpse — hairless and pale — but she was wearing lipstick. Bloodred. No doubt hypoallergenic. Probably tested on animals.
“You’re here,” she went on, “because my son believes we can help each other. After all, we both want the same thing.”
“Which is?” I asked while shooting a suspicious glance at Everson.
“To catch a tiger,” Captain Hyrax replied, sounding as smug as ever.
“To find your friend Rafe,” the chairman cut in. “Lane, you do understand that the only way to truly protect people from Ferae is to vaccinate them?” she asked with feigned patience. “To do that, we need the last strain of the virus — the strain carrying tiger DNA. Your friend Rafe is the only person we know of infected with it.” Her cool gray gaze strayed to Everson. “My son seems to think you’ll be able to get Rafe’s location out of the lion-woman.”