“Agreed,” Hawk added, fumbling around in his backpack for a bottle of water. “I’m working on rev 2 of the sound ring. It’s got a video feed.”
“You’ll have to change the name. Too bad. Sound ring has sizzle.”
Hawk stopped rummaging around in his bag and gazed into nowhere, aware that he’d fumbled the ball on branding.
“I need a marketing manager.”
They shared a smile, because they both knew no one was ever going to buy a sound ring or a video sound ring or anything else Hawk came up with. They were part of a rebellion, outside the State’s system, fending for themselves. They’d be lucky to stay alive, let alone launch a technological product into the mainstream.
They’d set up a makeshift camp within a ring of fir trees that gave them excellent cover. They were positioned on the side of a hill, covered in tall, green trees. It was a zeroed part of the world, and according to Hawk, the only other people within a hundred miles were a small group of outsiders about eighty miles due west and the adversaries hiding out in the prison. The camp was deliberately basic and consisted mostly of the camouflaged HumGee. A tarp covered the rig, under which sat three folding chairs, a box of protein bars and ramen noodles, and several gallons of water. But it was no ordinary tarp; it was another of Hawk’s recent inventions: a canvas that reflected the surface all around it, blending in like a chameleon. Assuming they’d stay long enough to need sleep, they’d do that in the HumGee, one in the front and one in the back, while the third member would take watch on a rotation.
There was a wide boulder on the far end of the encampment with a flat surface. From there they could see past two trees and right out into the open. All three of them—Faith, Hawk, and Clooger—were stationed on the rock, watching the proceedings die down.
“I can’t believe they fired rockets at Dylan,” Faith said. “I guess they weren’t as concerned about their cover as we thought.”
“Once they discovered he was a second pulse, I think secrecy went out the window,” Clooger said. He was peering through a set of high-power binoculars.
“Now what do we do?” Faith asked. Unlike Hawk and Clooger, she’d never been on a stakeout.
“Now we wait,” Clooger said. “And we don’t use a pulse of any kind.”
“And we lay low,” Hawk said. “There’s a good chance they’ll send out surveillance fliers, just to make sure Dylan arrived alone.”
“Hopefully he’s a good liar,” Faith said, but the truth was, she had little doubt Dylan could pull it off.
“Won’t matter,” Hawk said. “I’ve run some calculations, and given the size of our location and the obscurity of our hideout, the odds of being found by a flyover are one in seven thousand six hundred and nine. We’re fine.”
“Good to know,” Faith said. She had a surprising appreciation for geeky statistical data.
They’d been out in the field for only a few hours, but already Faith was wishing she could get into the action. Just knowing Clara Quinn was close enough to go after was making her crazy.
“I’m going for a walk,” she said. “I’ll ring if I cross paths with a skunk.”
Clooger shivered at the thought of skunks, told her to be careful and stay out of any prison sight line, and went back to his binoculars.
The forest grew thicker and darker of shade as Faith walked. A wet morning fog hung in the trees, which dulled the sounds all around her. It wasn’t like the air and the open space near the Six Flags, full of brown hills and abandoned buildings. The fog and the trees and the strong smell of the wild calmed Faith’s nerves, but the combination also put her in a melancholy mood in which thoughts she didn’t want to have came to the fore.
She didn’t want to think about her parents, who were both dead and who hadn’t been there when she needed them most. But she did.
She didn’t want to think about her best friend, also dead. But she did.
She tried not to imagine the one she loved surrounded by all that concrete and all those second-pulse rivals inside the prison. But she did.
This, she concluded, was why she did not take walks in the quiet of the woods.
Later she would conclude that another reason not to go walking in the deep end of a forest at the edge of a zeroed city were the packs of violently territorial wolves. They’d talked a lot about wolves, but standing alone in their domain was a different thing entirely.
They were stealth, these wolves, all seven of them. And they were in the habit of attacking all at once, of taking no chances. Faith hit the ground so fast it knocked the wind out of her. She couldn’t be hurt by these beasts of the forest, but that didn’t change the fact that she couldn’t catch a breath, her lungs confused and fighting for air. A set of teeth were wrapped like barbed wire around her forearm, more at her legs. Yellow eyes, bared teeth, and snouts were all she could see as she stared up toward the sky, wishing she could breathe.
When she finally got some air, a full gulping monster of a breath, she exhaled; and like the big bad wolf, she blew the space around her into oblivion. All seven wolves blasted up in the air, careening off trees and tumbling end over end.
Faith was on her feet in a flash, taking in deep wells of air, feeling the rage inside her.
“That all you got?” she asked, a pair of yellow eyes staring her down, the lone wolf that hadn’t been tossed aside.
“Faith,” someone said. She wheeled around and found Clooger and Hawk approaching delicately. One of the wolves Faith had blown up in the air had landed to the left and behind Hawk and Clooger, and it was moving fast.
“You should have called,” Faith said, wishing she didn’t have to do what she was about to. Hawk didn’t have a pulse at all, and Clooger was only a single. They were both in danger. She started to think about altering the wolf’s path as Clooger held up a compact crossbow and fired. The animal fell backward, the arrow having passed through its neck. This seemed to have the desired effect on what was left of the pack. They hobbled away, turning back every so often, until they vanished into the fog.
“What did I tell you about pulsing out here?” Clooger asked. He was not in a happy mood. “Was I not clear enough?”
“Sorry, I—”
“Save it,” Clooger said, reloading his crossbow. “It’s my fault for letting you come out here in the first place. Should have known better.”
“Hey, that’s not fair. I was just walking. I wasn’t doing anything. Those things attacked me. What was I supposed to do?”
Clooger turned on her. “Do. Not. Pulse. Is that clear enough? If you blow our cover, what’s going to happen to Hawk? Or me, for that matter? Or Dylan? It’s not just about you, Faith. Keep a lid on it.”
He started walking away, but Hawk waited for Faith. She brushed herself off, pulled back her hair.
“Sorry,” she said.
Hawk shrugged: No big deal.
“Now what?” she asked as the two of them followed Clooger back to the HumGee.
Hawk kept glancing over his shoulder, alert and nervous.
“Now we break camp and find a different location. And fast.”
“Did you feel that?” Wade asked. He knew the difference between a first and a second pulse. Both created a sort of tremor under the surface of his skin, like a sonar sense that told him how far away the source was. And a second pulse felt different from a first pulse. It was deeper, lower, like the absolute bottom of a boom on a DJ dance track.
“Feel what?” Clara asked. Only second pulses could feel a second pulse, and obviously Clara and Gretchen either hadn’t been paying attention or didn’t care.
“I felt a tremor. It was strong,” Wade said.
“I felt it, too,” Gretchen said without stopping to turn around. They were heading for the prison cells, searching for Andre. “It’s this Dylan kid. Must be him.”
Wade wasn’t so sure. Either his body was confused by all the mayhem going on, or he’d felt a second pulse coming from the direction of the hills outside the prison. B
ut that was impossible. Still, not sharing vital information with one another was a Quinn family tradition. The Quinns were not unlike the family of a king in a royal court so many years ago: everyone was vying for position, the king had a vital weakness, and the pathway to the crown was full of deceptions and secrets. He decided not to say anything.
In cell block D, Dylan looked around his new digs and wondered how long he might be staying. Considering the fact that, for Dylan, concrete was akin to Kryptonite, it was about the most inhospitable room he’d ever been in. The bed he was sitting on, concrete. The floor was made of stone. There was an immovable concrete stool and a concrete desk jutting out from the concrete wall. There was a toilet, sink, and water fountain combined into one weird metal unit, and a tall stone pillar in the middle of the room with a showerhead.
“Nice place you got here,” Dylan said. “Very cozy.”
Andre examined Dylan like a specimen in a cage, trying to piece together whether it was possible that this second pulse sitting four feet away was in fact his son.
“Wade and Clara and Gretchen are going to be here in, I’d guess, under a minute,” Andre said. “Anything you want to say before they show up?”
Dylan had rehearsed this part with Meredith and hoped he’d get it right. He’d succeeded in getting a moment of one on one; now he had to use it to lay some groundwork.
“They’re not going to like having me around,” he began. “Clara and Wade will want to kill me, which they could do. I have a weakness when it comes to cinder blocks, stone, that sort of thing.”
“It’s your second-pulse weakness,” Andre said. “We know about that.”
“I’m sure I’ll get the full interrogation soon enough,” Dylan said. “All you really need to know? I’m Meredith’s kid, we’re not seeing eye to eye on things, and I’m looking for answers.”
Andre didn’t believe a word of what Dylan was saying. He wished it was true, but it was impossible.
“I’m afraid you’re wrong about that. I haven’t seen Meredith for over fifteen years. The last time I did, she wasn’t pregnant.”
“You sure about that?”
“Yes, I’m sure.”
But standing there and rewinding the clock on his memories, he pondered if it was in fact possible. It was not a period of his life he liked to examine, and it crossed his mind that, really, he deliberately had not thought about it for a very long time. He had been in love, he now remembered, and it pierced his heart there in the hallway.
“Meredith and I, we—” He couldn’t bring himself to finish the sentence out loud, but it ran through his mind like a runaway train. We were in love; I’m sure of it. Or was it only me? He remembered the feeling of her body next to his, the nights in the desert when all had gone quiet and it was only the two of them alone with the endless stars overhead. And now he knew for certain why he hadn’t thought of these moments in all the years after: because she had left him and he had never felt that way since.
“You and my mom were together, weren’t you?” Dylan asked. “Seventeen years ago. And then she left, and you never saw her again.”
Andre pushed the old feelings aside and raised his hands to his face, covering his eyes as he took a deep, cleansing breath. Could he wipe the shadow of pain and regret from his face so easily? He hoped so.
“It’s hard to imagine you and I are related in any way,” Andre said.
But his Intel mind had reversed the clock, calculated the odds, examined the situation from every angle. Conclusion: it was possible Dylan was his son, even likely.
A door slammed at the farthest end of cell block D. They were coming.
“I came looking for you because I’ve got questions,” Dylan said. “Not for them, for you. And I let you lock me in here so you’d trust me. Run a DNA test on me; I’m sure they have that kind of tech lying around this place. You’ll see. Either Meredith was lying, or I’m your kid. I’m not here for anything other than answers. If she was lying, then I recommend you do your best to try to terminate me. Because if I’m not your kid, I’m going to do some real damage before I get out of here. That’s a promise.”
“Andre?” Gretchen’s voice echoed down the hall. “What are you doing down here? Where is he?”
“Run the test, Dad,” Dylan whispered. “Let’s see what comes of it.”
Clara, Wade, and Gretchen all arrived at about the same time. It was Clara who spotted Dylan first, her blond brows creasing forward in confusion.
“Holy shit, it really is you,” she said.
“And Andre trapped the little bastard!” Wade clapped his hands together, which produced an ear-splitting echo in the hallway. Then he turned to his dad, confused.
“How’d you do that?”
“Doesn’t matter,” Gretchen said. “He could kill your father with one thought. Get him out of here, now.”
“It’s fine, really,” Andre said. He couldn’t stop thinking about Meredith, about the day she’d left. And then Wade calling him Andre. Wade and Clara had both gone from calling him Mr. Reichert, his cover at the high school, directly to Andre. Just a natural progression, further away from Dad. Sometimes it felt as if they weren’t even his kids any longer.
“Your funeral,” Gretchen said. “But you know as well as I do—just because he’s in there doesn’t make you safe.”
“If he’d wanted to kill me he’d have already done it.”
Andre hated being a single pulse, especially in the present company. He was an Intel, he was brilliant, but he was also by far the weakest among the five of them.
Andre looked at the twins. “Give us a minute, will you?”
“Why would we do that?” Clara didn’t ask so much as make it clear there was no way they were leaving Andre alone with this guy. She hadn’t taken her eyes off Dylan since discovering him in the cell, and it wasn’t clear if this was because she didn’t trust him or because she longed to be with him. It was complicated.
Dylan hadn’t brought along anything, not a Tablet or a backpack or even a jacket to protect him from the cold. Black T-shirt, jeans with bullet holes in them, boots. That was it. He pulled the pockets out of his jeans, held up his hands, turned in a full circle.
“Unless you count my underwear and my socks, you’re looking at everything I brought in here with me.”
Wade laughed, then used his mind to throw Dylan into a wall inside the cell. Dylan flexed his entire upper body before impact and aimed his arm and shoulder to take the blow. He’d trained for this, preparing like a football player who would be expected to take some big hits, but the impact nearly buckled him over with pain.
It’s going to take a lot more than that, Dylan thought as he stared Wade down. The blow had gotten through Dylan’s second pulse and would, in due time, leave a bruise on his right arm. How had he let Meredith talk him into this again?
“Your brain is the only weapon you need,” Wade said. “What do you think we are, idiots?”
Dylan focused his mind on Wade, stared him down like the enemy he was, and thought about throwing him down the long hallway.
“Don’t—”
Wade tried to speak, but it was too late. He tumbled twenty yards end over end and slammed into the cell block D security door.
“You guys about through, or should we settle in for the show?” Gretchen asked.
Wade was back in a flash, ready to slam Dylan against the cell walls until he was finished for good.
“I say we end him right now,” Wade said. “He’s the only reason we’ve been waiting for whatever this grand plan of yours is. We kill him now, and nothing’s in our way.”
Andre didn’t know what to do. His family was right: Dylan was extremely dangerous. He could wipe out the entire single-pulse army they had if he got out, Andre included. But the nagging question remained: Can Dylan Gilmore really be my son?
“Don’t touch him,” Andre said. “Not yet. He’s not going anywhere as long as we’ve got him locked inside this cage. I need to think about
our options. Gretchen, assess damages and put the units on high alert. Clara, stay here; keep an eye on our prisoner.”
Andre turned on his heels and started walking away.
“And don’t let any single pulses down here, too dangerous,” he said over his shoulder.
“If we’re not terminating this loser, then you can fill me in on your plan later,” Wade said. “I don’t trust him. I’m checking the perimeter.”
Andre had expected as much. Wade was always looking for a reason to escape the supermax. Seventeen and holed up for months on end with his parents and his sister was wearing thin. Clara, for whatever reason, had taken to the secret training center more readily than Wade had. But then she had always been more focused than her brother, more willing to bide her time in order to get what she wanted.
“That’s a good idea,” Andre said as he stopped and looked back, seeing his chance to splinter the team long enough to do what he needed to. “Give it a good flyover, check for anything unusual. Go alone. Now’s not the time to risk losing anyone.”
Wade was already moving down the corridor before Andre finished talking, and Clara seemed perfectly happy to stay with Dylan and keep an eye on him. Her second pulse would protect her if anything went wrong. That left Gretchen, who was boring down on Andre with her machine-like eyes as she walked toward him.
“We should interrogate him,” she said. “Find out what he knows. I can do that if you’d like.”
“Gretchen, please. Give me some time to think about this. Go talk to the units, get them organized. Make sure they know not to come down here; keep them on high alert. But let me deal with this situation my way.”
There was a hint of condescension in Andre’s delivery, a tone that had come up before when sensitive information was being discussed. There had always been a certain pecking order to which they adhered, and Andre, while technically the weakest among them, had been second in command after Hotspur Chance all along. When Hotspur was gone, Andre took over the directives for which they’d fought. Gretchen had always maintained a suspicion that it was because Hotspur, too, was not a second pulse. He could orchestrate the re-organization of the entire planet, but there was nothing he could do that would give him the power he lacked. He trusted Andre the most, Gretchen thought, because Andre was vulnerable in a way that she was not.
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