She removed her finger, and the second Doctor shoved Gideon’s head into the bathtub. I glanced at my watch: 12:36:14.
112 seconds later, she pulled his head back and he gasped for breath, water dripping from his hair onto his face and clothes.
“Have you ever been to Erroris?
Silence. Water. Watch.
“Did you join the rebel movement?”
12:40:24. I repositioned my wrist so I could look at it less conspicuously.
12:42:59.
“Do you know the whereabouts of Jade Doe.”
“She’s dead,” he coughed, attempting to wipe his cheek on his shoulder. “I told you, she’s dead.”
Dunk. 12:43:14.
132 seconds.
Good.
“Did you or did you not try to feed lies about the Doctors to one, Meghan Amicus?”
He glanced at the camera in the corner, and I felt Dr. French’s eyes move to me. I stared at the monitor, breathing evenly.
“No.”
It wasn’t time yet.
The questioning cycled again. Twice. Three times. Gideon gasped. His face lost all its color. He couldn’t catch his breath, since the air was filled with bleach. They would soon inject him with chemicals, but neither Gideon nor I wanted it to go that far.
285 seconds this time. When his body started to jerk involuntarily, the Doctors knew that he had had enough. His body would fight until he drowned, and he was no use to them dead. At least not yet.
“Okay, okay!”
I could see him shivering from where I sat in the other room.
He shook his soaking hair out of his eyes, which were unfocused. His chest rose and fell with his quivering inhales and exhales, and my stomach twisted again with discomfort.
“I did speak to Meghan. She came to see me in jail.”
Carefully . . . carefully . . .
The second doctor pulled him back onto the chair that waited behind him.
“Yes, we know. What did you say?” she demanded.
“I wanted her to turn against Victor.” His voice trembled, but he was strong. Hopefully strong enough.
“Dr. Doe.”
“Yes, Dr. Doe. I didn’t know what I was saying. I just wanted to hurt him, but she didn’t believe me.”
Perfect.
“Why?”
“Because he broke Jade’s heart.” He spoke quickly now, blinking the water out of his eyes. “And after she died, I had to do something. Please, I promise, she’s dead. I don’t know anything about rebels, and I’ve never been inside Erroris. I’ve been in the mountains.”
I glanced at Dr. French, who leaned forward with a pen in her teeth, watching the interrogation closely. Would she be satisfied?
“Why did you tell Meghan Amicus that the Doctors were members of the Ten Colony Council?” the other Doctor asked.
For a moment, I could hear nothing but the buzzing that powered the TV monitor. Gideon stared at his knees. Dr. French stared at Gideon. I stared at Dr. French, my heart beating too quickly.
Then they dunked his head in the tub again.
The sigh of relief died in my throat, nearly betraying me.
There was more information he could give them; he would live another day.
And we could use as much time as we could get.
Chapter Twelve
Cece
After Jade left, I was unable to fall back asleep and therefore offered to take Marsh’s place guarding the patrolwoman.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered, wiping sleep out of her eyes. “I didn’t mean to doze off.”
“Get some rest before the others wake up,” I smiled reassuringly at her, taking a seat next to the gagged and dozing stranger. “I’ll take good care of her.”
She nodded, returning my smile, and crossed to the wall where her sleep sack had previously been arranged. I couldn’t tell from where I sat, of course, but it looked as though she fell immediately back into slumber.
So I sat and watched the sky lighten into day, hoping the others would awaken soon. Now that Jade was gone, her only hope of survival fell on the swiftness with which we could gather more survivors.
I had always considered myself a thinker more than a doer, but I supposed this was the trajectory on which my life had always been headed. First, I had read all of the books my grandfather had saved from the purge, violating Statute 89. Then I passed that Knowledge on to others. After fleeing Liminis, joining up with another group of rebels, and then preparing to fight the Doctors (I could still barely believe that they had been the Ten Colony Council all along), it would only make sense that I would next help form a small militia and raid my old colony with a brood of other misfits.
But I wished I could think of another way.
After all, I had managed to convince twenty-odd people that Knowledge was a virtue, rather than a vice, long before I knew anything about the Doctors. Malek, Christa, Jaron—they all seemed driven by revenge, but I just wanted people to have the freedom to pursue Knowledge, should they feel so inclined. If, however (as was true throughout antiquity), the only way to get people to listen was through action—violent action, usually—then I would do what I needed to do to set people free.
For them.
It was my fault that my Seconds and Firsts had died outside of Erroris; their lives had been enhanced and deepened by what I had to teach them, and they had chosen to follow me, but if they had stayed behind, they would have never been in harm’s way. However, I was a practical person, and I knew it was anti-productive to be consumed by guilt. All I could do was press forward and try to bring about the world we had all dreamt of.
Besides, it was possible that at least a few of them would be among the survivors we had yet to track down.
Malek was the next to arise, and he made an unnecessary amount of noise in order to passive-aggressively wake up the others. Normally this childish behavior would prick my nerves, but I wanted to get moving, too. Time would be a deciding factor in whether or not we succeeded.
“Alright, alright, I’m up,” Christa grumbled, the last one to get out of bed. “You don’t have to make such a hawking racket.”
“I’d think you were a hawking First based on how glutty you are,” Malek snapped back.
“Too bad you know better, or else maybe I’d get some respect.”
The two continued to bicker as we all packed up our campsite, but I was more concerned with the patrolwoman, who was now awake and watching us all sullenly.
“What are we going to do with her?” Marsh asked (evidently thinking along the same lines as I was), interrupting a particularly fowl exchange of insults in order to get Malek and Christa’s attention.
“Well, I would have thought that was obvious,” Christa turned her irritation instead on Marsh. “We can’t let her go and we can’t take her with us. We have to kill her.”
A renewed surge of escape attempts came from the prisoner, and Malek spun around, pointing a gun at her chest.
“We should have done it last night,” he snarled.
I wondered if he had slept with the weapon under his pillow.
“You can’t just kill her.” Marsh’s voice had developed a quiver.
“And why not?”
“Because it’s wrong!”
“So is telling people that Knowledge is evil and then turning them into slaves in order to keep people from finding out the truth.”
The patrolwoman’s eyes widened. She had grown still as Malek aimed his gun at her, and she was clearly more frightened than she had yet been in our presence. Before she had seemed simply annoyed—angry—that we had dared take her prisoner. Now it was clear that she respected our position.
“Not as wrong—”
Bang.
I jumped and threw my hands over my ears as the woman’s eyes went blank and a trickle of scarlet escaped the bullet wound in her forehead.
Marsh let out a tiny scream.
“What the hell did you do that for?” Jaron demanded, the
blood draining out of his dark face.
“She would have told them about us,” Christa said, clumsily stuffing her bedding into her pack like nothing had happened. “She would have done the same to each of you.”
I dropped my hands from my ears, unable to form a cohesive thought, while Marsh began to cry.
“Come on,” Malek said stiffly, shoving the gun back into his waistband. “Help me cover her up.”
Wordlessly Jaron joined him, and they both shoveled snow over her lifeless body while the other three of us looked on.
“Look, I’m sorry,” Malek said as they finished, and his statement of remorse shocked me enough to refocus my mind. “It’s not as if I liked doing it, but it had to be done. And if I didn’t do it right then, I would have gotten cold feet.”
Christa crossed to him and put her hand on his shoulder. “Let’s go,” she said quietly. “We’ve got a lot of ground to cover if we’re going to start finding backup.”
He nodded, and we all silently—reverently—left the Outram Hotel.
---
We split into three groups, each taking a third of the list we had procured from the recently deceased. Jaron and Christa went north; I went south with Marsh; Malek preferred to go alone.
I wondered if he had killed anyone before and didn’t envy him the dreams he was likely to have from now on.
We were all well-armed, as long as we didn’t waste any bullets, and it was liberating just to be on the move again. It didn’t matter that the days were slowly counting down to my inevitable demise—I was elated to be out of that damned cave, working for something again.
Marsh didn’t talk much, so our days passed mostly in silence, and it wasn’t until two days after we left the others that we finally made contact.
It was just after a close call with a two-man patrol. They had taken us by surprise, and we barely had time to hide ourselves before they trampled the ground where we had been standing, only moments before.
I watched them from deep in the underbrush, grateful that there was no longer snow on the ground, until I realized that Marsh’s attention had been attracted by something else. Turning my gaze to her, I followed her wide eyes to a place fifteen feet away, where a girl in her late-teens crouched, gawping at us.
Time seemed to stretch into ages, an almost tangible tension bridging between her eyes and Marsh’s. It wasn’t until my head spun that I realized I hadn’t been breathing, waiting for the young girl to shout and give us away.
As though they were on the other side of a closed door, the footsteps and voices of the patrolmen faded into nothingness, but still they stared at each other. Checking first to make sure we were safe, I took a deep breath and motioned for the girl to join us.
When she didn’t, I held up my hands and crept forward, careful to stay low, careful to maintain the eye contact she now afforded me instead of Marsh.
She didn’t run, though she visibly tensed with each step I took toward her.
“Are you from Erroris?” I whispered as soon as I got into range to do so.
She watched me for a second more before very slowly shaking her head.
“You’re a rebel.” I stopped in my tracks as she backed away, letting her readjust to the situation. “It’s okay. So are we.”
She hadn’t alerted the patrolmen to our presence, and Erroris was the only colony near our position. Either she had gotten very lost, or else she was one of the survivors we had heard about.
“Cece—” Marsh warned from behind me, but I ignored her.
“We survived the attack, too. We got out just in time, after we heard they were coming. Are you alone?”
The girl nodded once.
I reached her and stuck out a tentative hand. “We have food. There are others. Will you talk to us?”
Her eyes moved to my outstretched fingers. Then to my face. Then after several more seconds, she nodded once more.
---
The girl’s name was Minerva. At least, that’s the name she was given after she had joined the rebellion. She was from Absens, a place where names were considered too grand a thing for the likes of Third Class Citizens, and as far as she knew, she was the only one from her colony to come to Erroris.
“Minerva. The goddess of Wisdom,” I said kindly, passing her another package of salted nuts. “It fits you.”
She smiled weakly as she accepted the food, dumping the entire contents of the small bag into her mouth.
“You know, Minerva, we aren’t ready to give up yet. All those people who died? We want to finish what they started. We don’t want them to have died in vain.”
“We want the Doctors to pay for what they did to us,” Marsh added. “The bombing and everything else.”
Staring off into the trees, Minerva chewed slowly, apparently thinking about what we had told her. “You . . . you still think it’s true?” she asked gradually.
Marsh looked at me with a raised eyebrow.
“Do we still think what is true, Minerva?” I responded.
“That the Ten Colony Council—the Doctors—whomever—made it all up?”
I studied her face, which still observed the distant forest. Her dark brown hair had been shaved off, leaving a short, coarse covering on top of her head; her eyes were round, large, and likewise brown, with long, thick lashes; her lips were thin and pink, her nose was straight, and her ears were small. Like all the Thirds I had ever met, she looked far too thin. Not to mention worried. “Yes, Minerva. I don’t believe Knowledge is evil. What do you believe?”
She didn’t respond right away. It was a cloudless night, so the temperature had dipped quite a bit lower than it had in the last few days, and the stars were bright overhead. At last she sighed. “I think they’re trying to protect us. Those who gathered in Erroris were wicked, and they lost their chance to redeem themselves.”
An avalanche of snow doused the hope inside of me.
“What?” Marsh asked sharply.
Minerva seemed to retreat inside herself.
“You know there were Firsts and Seconds inside that Factory too, don’t you?” I reached up to straighten my glasses (still not used to the fact that they weren’t there) in order to give myself time to gather my thoughts.
“W-why,” I stuttered, “would they bomb Firsts if it was Knowledge they were combating?” How can she still believe? I could understand not wanting to risk her life in a suicide siege of Liminis, but this was not something I had been expecting.
With a glance at the tattoos on the back of my hands (the ones classifying me as a Second), she tightened her lips and dropped her gaze into her lap.
Statute 116: Thirds will not speak to Firsts or Seconds unless first spoken to.
“Minerva?”
“I don’t know, ma’am.”
Marsh let out a sigh and dropped her face into her hands.
It was admittedly not the kind of contact we had been hoping to make.
After another hour or so spent in silence, Marsh and Minerva turned in to go to sleep. I didn’t know what we were going to do with Minerva, but we had to keep looking. We were to meet up with the others at the Outram in another two days, and so far, we had come up emptyhanded. I wondered if the others had had any more luck.
Gazing at the stars above my head, I tried to let my mind wander. It was the only way I would ever be relaxed enough to sleep, and I soon found myself counting constellations. In a world destroyed by wicked men and warfare, it was amazing how little the skies had changed. The Earth had passed away, smoking and rotten, a ruin of what it once was, but thousands of lightyears away, those alien suns still blazed. Well, at least their light still reached us here. I didn’t fully understand the science, though, because I had never had access to that Knowledge. And what a shame that is, I thought to myself. How could Knowledge of the celestial heavens possibly bring anything but enrichment to a person? Certainly not damnation, in any case.
My thoughts became increasingly more random as my eyes finally grew heavy
, and I was able to drift off to sleep.
---
Bang!
Lightening shot through my chest, shocking my heart into action and tearing at my stomach as I shot out of bed.
Blinking quickly to try and make sense of my surroundings, I found it was difficult to shake the cloud of sleep that had so recently blanketed my mind.
Gunshot.
The word rung through my mind and my chest tingled, tightening my reality while my heart raced.
Marsh.
I whipped my head around, searching for her, but the world was too blurry for me to see anything. The fact that I didn’t hear another shot must have calmed my reflexes, however, because the panic inside my body soon ebbed as I tried to focus my eyesight.
“Cece, are you okay?” Marsh’s voice didn’t sound right.
Was she worried? Disgusted? Faint? I blinked rapidly, examining our little campsite through bleary sights as I silently cursed that Third who purposefully stepped on and broke my spectacles.
Minerva lay on the ground, her head turned sharply to the side, and my stomach lurched. There was a small but bloody bullet hole in her temple, a crimson pool beneath her fallen cheek, and one of our small guns lying in her lifeless fingers.
“What do we do?” Marsh’s voice trembled.
My first instinct was to cry.
But this wasn’t the first dead body I’d seen, nor would it be the last.
“We need to hide her,” I said, snapping into action as I had done before, shaking away the shock and steeling myself to do what needed to be done. “We want to make it as hard for a patrolman to stumble across her as possible.”
Marsh’s uncertainty helped to fortify me, and I quickly moved behind Minerva’s head.
“Pick her up by the feet. We’ll take her to that tree over there.”
My chosen tree had a large clump of thick brush gathered underneath it, and I lay Minerva’s limp form on the ground, dropping to my knees.
“Help me dig a little,” I instructed.
She obeyed, but her eyes appeared unfocused.
“It’ll be okay.” I stopped digging for just long enough to put my hand on her arm. “She made her choice. Don’t let that change yours.”
Fallen Firsts (Rebel Thirds Book 3) Page 12