Three

by Kristen Simmons

  Reinhardt sighed. “No, that’s right. Article 5 violation. That’s what Ember Miller was charged with.”

  Tucker leaned down again.

  “I should have killed you when I had the chance,” I whispered.

  Tucker cut me again—a swipe crossing the others—and this time I did cry out.

  “That must hurt,” said the chief with a wince. “You know we’ve captured your leader, correct? Three is finished. There’s no need to continue to protect him. He didn’t protect you, after all.” The chief crouched down before my chair. “He sold you out. He told us where your posts were hidden. He told us where to find your base in the Red Zone.”

  DeWitt couldn’t be the one ratting out the posts. He’d only just been captured.

  “Yes,” said the Chief, as if reading my mind. “Aiden DeWitt’s been in contact with me for some time now.”

  Don’t listen to him, I told myself. I thought of Sean finding Rebecca, going to Mexico. I’d miss them.

  “It was luck, really. We didn’t realize Carolyn was his daughter when Captain Morris brought her to us for the sniper murders. She wasn’t in our cells for more than a week when DeWitt called me on the radio. Funny how people pop up when you’ve got something they want.”

  Rebecca had told me the doctor and his wife had been hiding Article violators, and that when the MM came his daughter had supposedly been killed in the crossfire. He’d taken down five soldiers in response.

  We’re not so different, you know. They took my mom, too. For harboring the enemy.

  I pictured Cara as I’d last seen her—broken and beaten and woozy with pain pills, but under that I saw a different girl, one who was young and pretty, with dirty blond hair. I saw how she might laugh without bitterness, and smile warmly.

  I saw the picture DeWitt carried with him.

  He had traded so many lives for his daughter.

  In my silence Chancellor Reinhardt groaned, annoyed. He followed my burning gaze to Tucker. “I’m sorry, it must be difficult seeing Captain Morris again after all you’ve been through. Perhaps there’s something you’d like to say to him if not to me?”

  Tucker stepped back, staring straight through me without any acknowledgment of what we had been through together. He folded the knife and put it away.

  I had plenty to say to him, but I kept my mouth shut.

  “Nothing? After he set up a fire in Knoxville that killed so many of your friends?”

  My teeth began to ache from pressing them together so tightly.

  “Not even after he led us straight to the Chicago resistance? I haven’t a clue how you made it out of there alive.” He chuckled bluntly.

  “I’m not sure how he made it out, either,” I muttered, jutting my chin at Tucker.

  A tight-lipped smile darkened Reinhardt’s hollow cheeks.

  “Some people are willing to die for their cause, isn’t that right, captain?”

  “Yes, sir,” said Tucker.

  My interrogator folded his hands behind his back. “I wonder, Ms. Miller, if you are one of them.” He stared at me for one bone-chilling moment with his black ferret eyes, before heading toward the door held open by New Guy. Tucker followed.

  “Is that what you told the insurgents?” I asked.

  They both paused.

  “Yeah, I know about that,” I said. “And I know you paid off their families to keep them quiet about it. They must have been in a pretty bad spot to take money from you.”

  He laughed, but behind his back, his hands were folded, and they tightened, making his fingertips turn white.

  “Don’t think I haven’t heard that before,” he said, turning slowly. “Reinhardt preyed on the poor. He promised their families would be taken care of if they served their country, gave their lives in the ultimate act of patriotism. Then blamed the acting administration for the war they started. Is that the way the story goes?”

  I felt the blood rise in my cheeks. “That’s about right.”

  “You see, you can’t tell me anything I don’t already know.”

  “You’re wrong.” My voice was hoarse.

  They both paused.

  “You keep acting like Three is one man,” I said, a reckless bravery controlling my words. “You’re wrong. There’s thousands of us. There’s more of us than there are of you.”

  Despite everything I’d seen, despite everything DeWitt had done, I clung to this. I did because my life depended on the secrets I knew, and if I gave them up I was as good as dead.

  The cuts on my shoulder stung. “We carry them,” DeWitt had said, “because they remind us we are not alone.” I was not alone. Chase was with me. My mother was with me. Jesse, and Sean and Rebecca, and everyone else who had been wronged by the MM was with me, and that filled me with a freedom he couldn’t understand.

  Tucker did not turn around. As he stared at the door, I watched his fists clench and release.

  “No, Ms. Miller,” said Reinhardt. “There is but one man with a thousand hands. Cut off his head, and his limbs lose their purpose.”

  “I guess that’s why we keep coming after you then,” I said.

  His lips pulled thin, and grew dark white. Then he inhaled loudly through his nostrils and smiled. “Yes, that’s why.” On his way out, he added, “I’ll be back later to check on you, Ms. Miller. We’ll see how much you have to share then.”

  The door closed, locked in place by a deadbolt.

  * * *

  MINUTES passed, stretched by my impatience. Dark thoughts gathered at the edges of my mind like storm clouds, but I kept them at bay, refusing to give in. I twisted my wrists within the cuffs, straining to pull my numb hands through the metal rings. My skin grew raw.

  “You did well, Ember.”

  I looked around, but the room was still empty.

  “I’m officially losing my mind,” I said quietly.

  A soft chuckling could be heard, and then the voice, weak and crackling, came again. “It’s Aiden. I think I’m in the room next to you. Or maybe below. It’s hard to say.”

  I’d never heard him refer to himself by his first name before.

  My gaze lowered to a drain in the floor where the sound had emanated.

  “You heard everything,” I said.

  He waited a moment. “Yes.”

  If I was honest with myself, it was good to hear his voice; it didn’t make me feel so alone.

  “Is it true? Did you sell out the posts?”

  Another moment passed. “I don’t suppose it matters anymore, does it?”

  “Endurance wasn’t empty.”

  “I know.”

  “The safe house wasn’t empty.”

  Down the hall, someone was yelling. The guards responded, harsh words and the clang of metal hitting metal. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, and somehow that made me even more afraid.

  “No,” he said finally. “It wasn’t. Once the Bureau knew the location, there was nothing we could do.”

  Without blowing the mission. Even now I was afraid to speak it out loud in case someone was listening.

  “Our people at the mini-mart. They were all dead when we got there.”

  My hands hurt, like pins and needles digging into my skin. They’d been tied too long; I could barely feel my fingers.

  “I’m sorry to hear it,” he said.

  “Are you?”

  He chuckled humorlessly. “In medicine they call it triage. Prioritizing where to allocate your resources.”

  “Prioritizing who lives and dies, you mean.”

  “Yes,” he said. “Essentially. I made a call. We didn’t have enough people to send.”

  Even with everything else, I was relieved to hear he hadn’t sent a team to execute them, as Chase had suggested. But the fact that we’d both considered it made me question our purpose all over again.

  “What are we doing?” I asked. So many lives lost. They hit us, we hit them back, but in the end, what would we gain? The removal of the MM only mattered if
it was replaced by something better, and right now Three didn’t seem much better. I hoped the old president had something better in mind.

  “Protecting our families. Our mothers and our fathers,” he said, just as he’d told me in the cemetery before he’d given me the three scars on my chest. “Our sons and our daughters.”

  But it wasn’t all the sons and daughters he fought for. It was one daughter. His. Cara.

  “They let her go, you know,” I said. “I saw her. Alive.”

  I could hear his breathing then, and only after a moment realized he was weeping.

  “Thank you,” he said quietly.

  A moment later there was a screeching of metal.

  “Let’s go,” I heard a muffled voice say. DeWitt didn’t answer, but from the sound of it he was pulled from his cell and taken away.

  I was alone.

  CHAPTER

  23

  THE deadbolt slid back, and the door pushed inward.

  Sweat broke out on my brow. I tried in vain to jerk my hands free. All I could think of was my mother. This was how she’d spent her last moments, too. In a cell, awaiting a grim fate.

  Tucker entered the room. He hobbled toward me quickly, wincing, one hand gripping his thigh where he’d been shot.

  “Well if it isn’t Captain Morris,” I said.

  He moved behind me, favoring one leg, and I did everything I could to make it hard for him to grasp the cuffs that bound me in place. The cuts on my shoulder burned like fire as I twisted away.

  “Hold still,” he ordered.

  A second later the latch popped, and my hands were free. As he knelt on the floor to remove the restraints around my ankles something beyond my control took over. I dove on top of him, bringing the chair to the ground with a crack that echoed off the walls. My thumbs wrapped around the soft tissue of his neck, but were uselessly numb from so many hours confined, and he peeled them away easily.

  He rolled, and ended up on top of me, pinning my shoulders in place with his knees. My legs twisted, still attached to the chair.

  “Hold. Still,” he repeated.

  “Where’s Chase?” I gasped. “What did you do to him?” I bucked my hips in an attempt to dislodge him, but he sat on my chest, crushing the air from my lungs.

  From his pocket came my necklace that Reinhardt had torn off, and he held Chase’s mother’s ring directly over my face.

  “You want me to tell you, hold still.”

  I stopped.

  Slowly, Tucker eased back and released my legs. I snatched the necklace up and hurriedly put it back in place over my head.

  “You have two minutes before surveillance comes back on,” said Tucker. He lowered to my ankles and again, the metal popped. “Then the control station will see you on the camera feed.”

  My gaze flicked up to the box in the corner. “Can they hear me?”

  Tucker shook his head.

  “Where is he?” I stood, rubbing my hands together.

  “He’s being moved. Everyone on this floor is being moved. You included.” He seemed to read my mind and added, “What are the chances that you’d escape twice on my watch.”

  The door rested on the deadbolt. He hadn’t let it close completely.

  “Where are they taking him?”

  “The party. The chief is about to show us what happens to terrorists.”

  It was like the rehab hospital in Chicago where they’d kept Rebecca. The circus, Truck had once called it. Where they exploited the injured to deter noncompliance.

  Us, he said. Because he was one of them. One of the soldiers.

  But he was helping me. At least I thought he was helping me.

  He checked his watch.

  “Give me your gun,” I said.

  “Not this time.” But he reached into his belt, and withdrew the knife he’d used to carve into my skin. I snatched it out of his palm and paused, trying to figure him out.

  “Did you really start the fire in Knoxville?”

  He didn’t answer.

  I swallowed. “And Chicago. There were so many people in those tunnels.”

  Tucker flinched. “I didn’t have a choice.”

  “You expect me to believe that.” He was probably going to tell the MM where all the bases were, too, if DeWitt hadn’t beaten him to it.

  “I don’t expect you to do anything,” he said.

  The rage within me swelled, but a deeper fear, too. Before me was a person capable of enormous destruction.

  I followed him, and unable to help myself, reached for the gun in his holster. Before I took another breath I was pressed against the wall, his body flush against mine, his forearm against my throat.

  “What are you, stupid?” he said. “You want him to make me kill you, too?”

  Fear shimmered through me, lighting my skin with goose bumps. The Chief of Reformation controlled Tucker, that much was obvious. The cuts on my shoulder were only the beginning.

  “Why are you letting me go?”

  “I don’t know,” he said through his teeth. He shoved me against the wall again. “Why do you care?” His voice broke.

  “Tucker,” I rasped, unsure what to make of the battle raging inside of him.

  He pushed me harder against the wall, until my spine cracked and I scratched at his hands.

  “You think we’re so different?” he asked. “You think your cause is so much better than mine?”

  I stood on my tiptoes, trying not to panic as the edges of my vision went blurry.

  “The FBR saved my family,” he said. “It saved my life.”

  “It killed my mother,” I said, kicking his shin uselessly. “You killed her.”

  “I followed orders,” he said.

  “Stop,” I managed.

  “I followed orders!” he said again, as if I didn’t understand. As if he didn’t understand.

  “You helped us rescue Rebecca.” I didn’t know why I was disagreeing. I had my window to escape; I should have been long gone. Soon the bombs would hit—I didn’t even know how much time we had left.

  “Shut up,” Tucker said.

  “Whose side are you on?” I stared at him, watching a vein rise in his forehead. A sound of misery came from his throat.

  “Why couldn’t he just listen, like everyone else? Why did he have to ruin everything?”

  The buzzing in my ears paused as his grip loosened.

  “Who? Who ruined everything?”

  “He was my friend,” he said, letting me down abruptly.

  “Chase,” I realized. I tried to picture them in training together. Partners, before Tucker had betrayed him.

  “They would have killed him because of you.” He jabbed a thumb into his chest. “I tried to help him. I only turned in those letters he was writing you because he wasn’t listening. Those fights our officers put him through were going to kill him. And then when they took your mom, I was the one who did what had to be done. What he couldn’t do.”

  Tucker’s words came fast, like a faucet he was unable to turn off, and I fought the urge to cover my ears and drown them out. The misery rolled off him, thickening the air in the room.

  “He would have done it for me if our places were switched.”

  “No, Tucker,” I whispered. “He wouldn’t have.”

  Tucker stared at me, green eyes filled with self-loathing. “No,” he said, with a short, pitiful laugh. “Of course not.”

  As if he’d forgotten, he checked his watch and threw back the door.

  The hallway was empty. He broke into a run, and I followed close on his heels. At the end of the corridor was a security room surrounded by thick glass, and within a young soldier was typing rapidly behind a large black monitor.

  It was a trap. I slammed to a halt, already backpedaling, but the soldier looked up and met my eyes. With his hair cropped short, I almost didn’t recognize him.

  “Billy,” I whispered. “How…”

  A buzzer sounded, and the door beside the station popped open. T
ucker ushered me through.

  “He was in the mess hall when I got back from the Red Zone,” explained Tucker, unable to meet my eyes. “He said he snuck in with an extra security detail for the chief’s party.”

  I touched Billy’s arm, just to make sure he was real. He must have thought Tucker was attached to the resistance, not one of the real soldiers. I didn’t tell him differently. If he had known Tucker had been the one to start the fire in Knoxville, I doubted he’d be helping now.

  “Tucker marched right in here and told the two guys working they’d been reassigned and I was taking over.” Billy smirked. “Can’t believe they went for it.”

  “Focus,” said Tucker.

  Billy turned back to the monitor and began typing furiously on the keyboard.

  “You really don’t know when to quit, do you?” Tucker said. “There’s a radio report playing on a back channel we picked up last night. Some woman named Faye talking about reading the Statutes and fighting the FBR. She says she’s seen you herself.”

  “Faye Brown,” I said. Felicity Bridewell was actually reporting on something worthwhile. Something that put her life at risk. Something about me, just like before, when we’d been on the run.

  Of course that something was probably going to mean my painful death, but still. The bitterness I’d felt for her warped into appreciation.

  “Yeah, well, everyone’s probably heard it by now,” said Tucker.

  “The cameras in the cell are back on,” said Billy. “Hallway cameras back on … now.” As I watched, the screen before him flickered, then stabilized. A gray, grainy feed came through, and I shivered, thinking of the images of Chase and I that had been taken in the hospital in Chicago.

  “Have you seen Wallace? Chase? Any of our guys?” Hurriedly, I looked from screen to screen. Every cell, including one with a metal chair tipped on its side, was empty. Even DeWitt was missing.

  Billy shook his head. “I saw Marco and Polo. They didn’t look so good.”

  “Do you know where they were taken?”

  “To the party, I think. They went out through the recreation yard to the base.”

  Guilt surged through me as I thought of Marco and Polo’s capture. Maybe New Guy had been the one to turn them in, but I still felt bad for everything I’d asked them to do.