“The government might suspect that they’re coming here,” Nathan said, flashing a mischievous smile. “It’s figuring out where here is that they haven’t mastered. And we don’t intend to allow them to do that.”
“Then why am I here?” I finally asked. What did I have to do with any of this? I had helped capture the executives, sure, but several of us were involved. I didn’t do anything special. I had nothing to offer here.
Piper pursed his lips as if he was wondering the same thing.
“Well,” Nathan started, “Corona made an observation and we came to the conclusion that you might be the right person to help us talk to the last executive who is holding out.”
“Talk to?” I asked, raising an eyebrow.
“Interrogate,” Nathan corrected himself, looking slightly abashed.
Me? Interrogate someone?
“I appreciate your confidence in my abilities,” I told him, turning to face Corona as well. “But I don’t know anything about interrogation. I can’t help.”
It was strange actually saying that aloud. Ever since joining Operation Hood, I had pledged to help where I could and in any way I could. I had risked my life, been shot at, been pulled into moving airships, broken into government buildings, and been labeled a suspected terrorist. I had given up my home and the precious little security I had in life because I believed in Operation Hood’s cause. I had even killed people. But I knew nothing about interrogations. Nathan and Corona had made a mistake. I couldn’t help here.
“This is why I preferred not to call it interrogation,” Nathan said.
“There, we’ve heard it from her,” Piper interjected. “Now we can put this behind us. That woman isn’t going to talk.”
Nathan looked over at Corona, cueing her.
“Robin,” Corona said, placing a hand on my shoulder. “We’re not going to ask you to do anything that makes you uncomfortable. And we would never ask you to go in and intimidate or bully this woman for information. We’re just asking you to talk to her. Just talk to her normally and see where it goes.”
I shook my head in confusion. “But why me?” I asked. Surely any one could just “talk” to this woman. The explanation seemed incomplete.
There was a muted crashing sound behind Corona, and we all turned to look at the screens. One of the executives was standing with her metal chair in her hand. As we all watched, she slammed her chair into the long mirror in her room. The chair bounced, temporarily throwing her off balance, but she reared back and slammed the chair into the mirror again. The reflections in the mirror wobbled as shockwaves flowed through the glass.
“Don’t worry, she can’t—”
But before Piper could finish, one last whack with the chair left a long spider web of cracks across the length of the mirror.
The woman threw her chair across the room and then cast an angry glare directly at the camera.
I stepped closer to the monitors to get a better look at the woman. I remembered her. It was the female executive in red to whom I had spoken back in Smally. A slight smile tugged involuntarily at the corner of my mouth.
She had kind of reminded me of… me.
“We thought maybe you’d connect with her on a personal level,” Corona finished, bookending the drama we had just watched unfold.
“You two definitely have the same spark,” Nathan added, smiling.
I exhaled deeply. The woman in Smally had been aggressively inquisitive, sure, but she had also been exhausted after a long day awaiting her transfer team, and probably scared for her own personal safety. But this woman looked like she had nothing to lose. She looked like a cornered viper, coiled and prepared to strike.
“She’s the government liaison, Robin,” Nathan said abruptly. “None of the other executives seem to know much of anything, or at least not anything that can assist us. But this woman was in constant communication with the regime. She may very well hold the key to how we should be using Artemis. If she gives you any information, our search can start there. Otherwise Artemis isn’t much use. The more we search aimlessly, the faster we’ll be discovered and then digitally blocked out.”
I exhaled slowly. We had done so much work to put Artemis in play at Smally. Savannah and Ajax had died for it. If we didn’t find anything before the government discovered the virus and put up additional firewalls to block it, the mission—and the lives of our teammates—would be for naught.
“We’ve tried everything. But if you could just connect with her—disarm her—maybe she’ll reveal something of value,” Nathan finished.
“Yes, the trick isn’t to interrogate her, Robin,” Corona said. “We have a whole specialized team for that and it didn’t work. The trick is just to get her to talk.”
“And to stop destroying my two-way mirrors,” Piper added. He looked annoyed and displeased with the whole situation.
I looked back at the angry woman standing in the interrogation room.
“Okay.” I sighed.
The thought of Savannah and Ajax dying for nothing was too much for me to bear. Artemis couldn’t fail. If that meant going in to talk to this woman, so be it.
Nathan and Piper walked me back through the door into the mirrored hallway, where a mirror on the far-right side was splintered with cracks. We walked up to the mirror, and Piper placed his hand against it. It suddenly morphed into a window, as if someone had flipped a switch, and we saw the woman inside picking her chair back up and sitting down at the desk. She was in off-white linens and socks. I guessed they had been offered food and lodgings since their arrival, but she looked exhausted and frail, as if she had been stubbornly denying both. She didn’t look at us or react when the glass changed, leading me to believe it was a one-way mirror, offering us a window into the room.
These mirrors were the same as the ones in the video feeds, which meant the executives’ rooms were lining this hallway. But, I realized, there were no doors leading in.
“If at any point you seem to be in danger, we will immediately intervene,” Nathan said reassuringly. “And remember, we’re not expecting you to interrogate. We just want you to talk. Be yourself. Let’s just see where it goes.”
Piper took his hand off the glass, and it switched back to a mirror. Then he placed his hand on a narrow patch of wall adjacent to the two-way mirror. The wall seemed to soundlessly crack open on four sides, until a door had formed. It had been so perfectly sealed that it was almost invisible.
Piper looked at me and nodded. I took a deep breath and stepped in, the door sealing shut behind me.
The light inside of the interrogation room was uncomfortably bright. It buzzed overhead like an incessant housefly. The walls were a dingy gray color. The room contained only a desk and a single chair, and felt cramped and tense. I felt all of the comfort drain out of me as soon as I entered. It must’ve been a tactic to get people to talk; a person would probably do anything to get out of that room.
I knew I would.
The woman sat stonily in her chair, her hands balled in her lap, and glared at me, her eyes narrowed.
What on earth was I supposed to say? What was I supposed to do?
Luckily, she quickly broke the silence.
“Looks like they’ve really sent in their big guns,” she sneered mockingly.
I scanned the room for weapons or projectiles. I had already seen what she could do with that heavy metal chair. I didn’t want to run any other risks.
Finding the room otherwise empty and thus (somewhat) safe, I stepped closer to her.
She stood quickly and walked behind her chair, grabbing the back of it with both hands.
Uh-oh. I had only been in the room for a few seconds, and it looked like she was about to start swinging.
“Torture?” she asked. She spat the word out, but I could tell she was afraid.
“Torture?” I repeated, slightly confused. Then it hit me. “No, I’m not here to torture you. We’re not like that.”
Her face contorted with cont
empt. “Oh, how noble of your terrorist organization,” she replied.
I cast a glance at the video camera in the corner of the room. I thought this lady wasn’t talking? So far she hadn’t shut up.
But, I thought, maybe if I can keep her talking it will work to my advantage. After all, I needed her to slip up and say something, anything that we could use Artemis to dig for in the government’s systems.
“Would you like to sit back down?” I asked her, trying to keep my voice calm and level. I had to remember that this woman was the enemy, yes, but she was also tired, maybe hungry, and obviously scared. We weren’t going to get anywhere like this.
“Why are you here?” she asked, unmoving.
“I know you’d be more comfortable if you sat,” I said, as compassionately as I could muster.
“WHY ARE YOU HERE?” she boomed.
The sudden noise in the small, insulated room sent a bolt of pain through my head, and I looked hard at the woman. I was beginning to feel certain that this would be a pointless exercise. If she wouldn’t even sit, how was I supposed to get her to calm down or give me anything valuable? She was scared and tired and she thought we were terrorists. I wanted to help Little John actualize the Artemis Protocol, but unless this woman had a sudden change of heart, I was going to fail at this.
Be yourself, Nathan’s voice echoed in my head.
Well, that was a thought. Besides, what did I have to lose? I slumped down and sat cross-legged on the floor.
“Honestly,” I replied to the woman, “I have no idea.”
The confession seemed to surprise her. She loosened her grip momentarily on the back of the chair, but then her eyes narrowed, her knuckles turning white as they squeezed the back of the chair firmly again.
I tried to think about what I would say next if I was just being myself. But, seeing as I so rarely had conversations with government hostages, I didn’t have a very good basis for comparison.
“I’m Robin,” was the sentence I eventually settled on. I felt stupid the moment I said it. No wonder Piper didn’t have much faith in me. I wasn’t really a natural.
The woman shifted awkwardly.
“You don’t have to talk to me,” I assured her gently. “But you should sit. You look tired.”
She stared at me for a moment longer, but then she walked around her chair and sat down.
We sat quietly for a couple of minutes. Then, to my surprise, she broke the silence again.
“I’m Mica,” she offered silently.
“I’m sorry you’re here, Mica,” I said. “I’m sure you’d rather be home.”
Her eyes misted over with tears. “When are we going home?” she asked in a small, strained voice.
“Today,” I answered quickly. “I just asked, and they said you and your team would be leaving today.” I considered for the first time that maybe going home today was a condition of whether or not she talked to me. But Nathan and Corona hadn’t given me that impression.
She broke into a sob, placing her face in her hands, and I watched her for a moment, watched her shoulders shaking as she cried. Then I stood and walked over to her and, surprising even myself, placed my hand on her shoulder.
She looked up at me, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“I’m not telling you anything,” she said resolutely.
“I don’t expect you to,” I replied.
I wondered how well Nathan, Corona, and Piper could hear our conversation through the monitors. If they could hear us well enough, surely they were wondering what I was doing. But I was being myself. I wasn’t going to interrogate a tired, terrified woman. If anything, I just wanted to make her feel less alone. This was a frightened and vulnerable woman who thought she was among enemies. I didn’t want her to feel any worse. And the closer we got, the likelier it was that she would share information with me.
“I remember you,” she said, her voice gaining back its strength. “You were part of the team that took us hostage to begin with. You lied to me. You’re a kidnapper.”
I backed away from her. Kidnapper. I hadn’t heard the word used against me before. I hadn’t even thought it myself. But I realized suddenly how it must have looked to Mica and her team.
“I did lie to you,” I said earnestly. “I’m sorry for that.” I sat back down on the floor. Maybe I was saying too much, and maybe I was saying all the wrong things. But talking to Mica had begun to feel slightly cathartic.
“What are you guys even trying to do?” Mica asked.
I chuckled slightly at the question. Who exactly was interrogating whom here?
“We’re trying to keep families together,” came my answer.
“At the expense of the children,” she said with conviction. “You’re trying to keep helpless, vulnerable children with people too poor and uneducated to properly care for them. How can you think that’s the right thing to do?”
I had heard that line of reasoning before. When I approached my adoptive parents with the knowledge of my “adoption,” they had used very similar talking points. But I had been so removed from that type of thinking for so long that it was shocking to hear it again.
Unlike when my parents had said it, this time I had a rebuttal prepared.
“Then why not help the parents? Why not provide them access to better wages and better opportunities? Why just rip their children away?” I asked. I wanted to keep our conversation flowing, so I tried to use a calm, nonthreatening tone.
“You can’t educate people like that. You have to put the needs of the child first,” she replied haughtily.
“Why can’t you educate them? If their children can adapt to higher society, why wouldn’t the parents be able to learn?” I countered. I was beginning to feel angry and defensive, but I was trying hard not to show it.
“That’s why you have to remove the children. Keep them around the poor for too long and they’ll be poisoned. I’ve seen it firsthand,” Mica said.
Poisoned. Would Nelson have poisoned her child with love and affection? Would I have poisoned Hope by loving her unconditionally?
“Then pay the parents more! Allow them time away from work to relax and take up hobbies. Allow them to purchase food for their families! Give them the opportunity to be parents!” I was raising my voice now. I couldn’t help it. She was saying that we were all lesser people, that we couldn’t even succeed with support. That we were inherently bad.
“You can’t teach people like that to be parents,” she responded coldly.
And then, against my better instincts, I really became myself.
“They were already parents. I was already a parent when they ripped my daughter away from me. And I always put her needs first… which is why I won’t ever stop looking for her,” I replied, tears beginning to form in my eyes.
9
“I’m sorry,” Mica said.
I had been looking down at the ground for the past few minutes after my outburst and had half expected Nathan or Piper to open the door after I said what I did. Obviously, this conversation was going nowhere. Why not just let me out now?
Mica’s apology had come as quite a surprise.
I looked up at her. She was still sitting in her chair, looking much calmer now, as if she had finally accepted that I wasn’t there to torture or interrogate her. Maybe my tears or my confession had softened my appearance in her eyes. Or maybe she was conflicted about saying such hateful things about an entire class of people, only to realize she was talking to one of them directly.
“Thank you,” I said.
“But now your daughter has better opportunities for her future,” she said.
I felt a stab of anger shoot through my chest. But I closed my eyes and let it pass. I was talking to a woman who worked for the very agency that was taking and redistributing our children. Of course she wouldn’t see this from my point of view. And I had to hold back my emotions and find a way to connect with her if I had any hope of getting her to tell me something important.
&
nbsp; “I can’t argue with that. But as a mother, you could probably understand how hard that is to come to terms with,” I said.
I didn’t know if Mica was a mother or not. But she was definitely the right age for it, and she seemed to have pretty strong opinions on children and their best interests, so it felt like a safe bet.
“Actually… no,” Mica responded hesitantly.
I looked at her inquisitively.
“My husband and I tried to have our own. But it turns out that I can’t,” Mica finished.
I was surprised by the admission. It was a blaringly personal statement.
“But you work for the Ministry,” I said incredulously. “You can easily adopt instead, right?”
“Not everyone has the money for that,” she responded, looking down.
Wait… what? A Ministry executive couldn’t afford adoption? If she couldn’t, then who could?
Mica seemed to guess at the questions I was considering in my head.
“Children should have the best start in life. I understand that their needs come above my selfish desires,” she told me matter-of-factly.
It sounded like a script she had rehearsed before. Almost like she had had to convince herself of the statement at one point.
“Children need their parents,” I replied. “If it was truly about giving the child the best start they could get, the regime would support their real parents in providing for their children.”
Mica rolled her eyes. “That’s a really nice sentiment, Robin. Maybe in a perfect world it would work.”
“Don’t you and your husband live comfortably?” I asked. I was genuinely curious now. “Why wouldn’t you be suitable parents? How is it that you couldn’t afford it?”
“It’s not up to me to determine what is best for this nation. Just like it’s not up to you,” she responded.
“Mica, I saw Smally. There were so many children there. So many children without families. Why are they better off in a holding center than with their parents? Or even people like you and your husband? Why has the government made it so expensive that people like you can’t help?”
The Child Thief 5: Ghost Towns Page 9