Severed Ties

by Jo Schneider

  “To what?”

  “Are each of these blocks the same size in real life?”

  “Oh, no, I don’t think so.”

  “Damn,” Riggs muttered.

  They continued to pour over the map, Riggs and Jeff giving input about areas they’d ventured into and how they might correlate. Mike asked Wendy more about the area surrounding the Den. After an hour, Mike had a small pile of notes and Riggs looked as if he was already making plans. Hank watched and took it all in, only asking a few questions, seemingly content to let the others work.

  When they wound down, Wendy decided to ask the questions that had been plaguing her. “Do you know where the Primate is?”

  Mike leaned back glanced at Riggs.

  Riggs answered. “Not yet, but we’re working on it.”

  “Who is he?”

  Mike removed off his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “What do you actually know about the Primate?”

  That took Wendy by surprise. “I’d never heard of him until Pelton mentioned him.”

  “And what did Pelton say?”

  “Not much. No real information. It’s like he worships the guy. I’ve never seen him speak about anyone with that level of reverence and respect.”

  “And how well do you know Pelton?”

  A ball tightened in Wendy’s stomach. She leveled her gaze with Mike’s. “I thought I knew him as well as anyone could. He was with the Den for eight years. He taught me how to fight. He scavenged for us. We never imagined that he was working for someone else.”

  “There were no clues?”

  The ball rolled around. “No. Not that I knew to look for.”

  “Think.” Mike folded his arms across his chest.

  This was a subject Wendy had lost too much sleep over in the past month. She’d gone over every conversation she could remember having with Pelton. She’d broken down his actions. His associations. The simple gestures he’d made. She’d only come up with a few things.

  “He never took off his shirt.”

  Mike tilted his head to the side. “You think that’s important?”

  “All of the other men did, especially those that trained with him. But he never did. Not once. I spent every day he was in the Den with him, and I never saw him without his shirt. It gets hot up in those mountains.”

  “Okay, what else.”

  “He would point out people’s weaknesses. I never thought he was picking on them. He didn’t ridicule them, but he would point out how they didn’t understand survival, and how if anything ever happened they would be in trouble. Or how someone would have to sacrifice their own safety to protect them.”

  “That doesn’t seem too strange. He is a fighter. A tactician,” Mike said.

  “Yes, but he only said these things to me and a few others. Not everyone.”

  “Like he was trying to gather supporters? Followers?” Riggs asked.

  “Maybe. Honestly, I’ve thought a lot about this, and he didn’t leave many clues. He’s good. Whoever this Primate is, he’s obviously very invested in infiltration.”

  “Did your dad ever talk to you about other compounds that fell?”

  “Sure. People tell their kids about Skinny raids to keep them from being naughty or going outside the walls at night. My dad always said that he thought someone was picking off the compounds one at a time, but he could never find a pattern to follow.” She looked at Mike. “Was my dad working with you?”

  Mike and Riggs exchanged a glance. Mike spoke. “Yes, we were working together.” He leaned forward. “Do you not remember the first time we met?”

  “Unless it was in medical, then no.” Wendy hated to admit it, but lying about it now wouldn’t help.

  “You were in the tunnels when we first found you. Riggs flushed you out. We thought you might be a Skinny. Or a plant. You have to understand, people don’t usually survive when the Primate wipes out a compound.”

  “I know.”

  “You tried to get away. We stopped you, but not before you injured four of my people.”

  Wendy swallowed. It sounded like something she would do. “I don’t remember.”

  “I told you then that we had been working with Ed. We were trying to combine three complexes so that we could not only trade goods, but information. Sow trust between people. Did Ed tell anyone about that?”

  “My sister, Kenzie, and I knew he was up to something, but he hadn’t told us yet.” She headed off Mike’s next question. “I don’t know if he told Pelton. He might have. Pelton was out of the Den a lot. My dad often told him to keep his eyes open for anything suspicious. If he was worried about you guys attacking us, he might have mentioned something.”

  Mike sighed. “I was afraid of that.”

  Wendy waited.

  “I’ve been trying to figure out how the Primate knew when to attack the Den. When Riggs told me you knew Pelton, and that you thought he had betrayed you, our lives became infinitely more complicated.”

  Wendy made the connection. “Because now you figure he’s got someone inside here.”

  “I’m sure he does.”

  “And it could literally be anyone,” Riggs said.

  “Including me,” Wendy said.

  “Including me,” Riggs said. “I’m not worried about you. Not anymore. The other kids are probably clean as well. But we’ve let a lot of people in over the past few years.”

  “Is there anything you can tell us about the Skinnies that attacked the Den?” Mike asked.

  Wendy closed her eyes. She still had nightmares, but the specifics she’d recalled when she and Pelton went back were now fuzzy. “Not much.”

  “Anything could help,” Mike said.

  Wendy nodded. She kept her eyes closed and tried to relax her mind. “All I remember are flashes. They were fearsome, but not mindless monsters like some can be. They talked. They were rational, but also consumed by a blood lust. Different than the hunger.”

  “Different how?”

  Wendy opened her eyes. “This might sound crazy, but I saw them carving themselves.”

  “Carving?”

  “Yes. For each kill they made, they would stop and carve something into their skin. Usually on their chests, but some on their arms.” Wendy shivered. Her palms began to sweat. “Some of them had forked tongues.”

  “Forked tongues?” Riggs asked.

  “Yes.”

  The room around Wendy began to dim. Her breathing sped up, and bloody, scarred faces swam before her eyes. The tunnels closed in around her, and suddenly she could hear screams and smell death.

  Pelton’s face appeared. He was speaking to her, but she could only hear the screams. Wendy followed him. Why had she followed him?

  “Wendy?” Jeff’s voice cut through the flash. He put his hand on her back, and it gently but firmly pushed the tunnels to the back of her mind. Wendy blinked a few times, and the room solidified around her.

  “You okay?” Jeff asked.

  Wendy looked up at him. How did he do that? Force light into the darkness? “I’m fine. Just trying to remember.” She kept her voice light.

  Mike did an admirable job of pretending to believe her. He looked at his watch. “You two had better go and get some breakfast. You have a team meeting in an hour.”

  Chapter 7

  “This way,” Jeff said. He pointed and waited until Wendy was there to walk next to him.

  “So, what are we doing?” Wendy asked. She’d been curious about this. Were they joining a new set of fighters?

  “Computer stuff.”

  Wendy blinked. “What?”

  Jeff looked down at her. “Have you used a computer before?”

  “Uh, no.”

  “Ever seen one?”

  “Only in pictures.”

  “Well then, this ought to be fun for you.”

  “I don’t really like the sound of that.”

  Jeff laughed. He stopped at a nondescript door that had a keypad on it. He typed in a five-digit numbe
r and then hit a button that said, “Enter.” A green light flashed behind the buttons, and Jeff reached out and opened the door. He indicated that she should go first.

  Wendy hesitated. She didn’t like walking into unknown situations. But then Jeff put his hand on her back and pushed, giving her no choice but to either shift quickly to get away from him or go forward.

  She went through.

  Three rows of tables sat facing the door. Each table had six small boxes on it with a larger box on top and a long keyboard in front. Wendy had seen pictures of computers before. This was the real thing.

  Twelve men and women—all fighters—filled the room, most of them behind their own computer. Wendy recognized a few of them from the fight with Pelton. Arie’s dad, Hound, stood talking to two women at the front of the room. Hound spotted them and came over.

  “Morning,” he said.

  “Good morning,” Jeff said.

  Wendy nodded.

  “Good to see you out and about,” Hound said. His eyes were lighter than Arie’s, but his hair darker. “How much do you know about computers?”

  Wendy tried not to grimace. “Nothing.”

  “No problem. Mike asked me to give you a crash course. We’re doing an exercise in a little while. No one expects you to excel, but I do want you to try.”

  “Okay.”

  Jeff gave her a nod of encouragement and moved away to talk to the two women who were still standing nearby.

  Hound led Wendy toward the back of the room. “How’s Arie?”

  Wendy still didn’t quite understand why Arie had moved out of her dad’s room. Arie said it was because her dad was never around. “Good, she started helping Maudie with the Council stuff.”

  “Yeah, she told me that last night. She’s wanted a piece of that Council ever since we got here.” They ended up at the table farthest from the door. Hound sat on the end and indicated that Wendy should take the next place over.

  “So, you’ve never used a computer?”

  “No.”

  Hound whistled. “Well, then, we have a lot of catching up to do.” He pointed at the buttons with letters. “This is the keyboard. Type in the letters and they make words. Some computers you can talk into and they’ll react to your voice, but most here rely on keyboards.”

  Wendy studied the device. She could read, so she recognized all of the letters, but they didn’t seem to be in any sort of understandable order. Plus, there were a line of numbers above the letters, then again clustered to the side. Besides that, an entire set of symbols she didn’t recognize dotted the edges, along with a few buttons with names she didn’t understand like “tab.”

  Hound patted the keyboard. “This is where you tell the computer what to do. We call it entering commands.”

  “I can tell it what to do?”

  “In a manner of speaking. It is set up to automatically run some programs. Others you have to tell it to run.”

  Wendy could feel the blank stare on her face.

  “For instance, see this symbol here?” He pointed to a small button on the small box that had a circle with a line starting in the center and going out through the top. “That’s the power button. Go ahead and press it.”

  Wendy did so, and a faint whine sounded from somewhere inside the large box.

  “What’s happening will show up on the screen,” Hound indicated the black surface in front of her. It flickered to life and turned blue.

  Wendy watched in fascination as the screen dissolved into black again before coming to life with the picture of a tree with bright pink blossoms, sitting on a green hill. Little pictures came up on the left side of the screen.

  “You’ll probably be ignoring this screen,” Hound said. “For what we need to do, you need to press this button.” His finger depressed a key with four white squares on it. A different section slid up from the left hand corner. “See this little white line? Type in ‘command.’”

  He patted the keyboard.

  “Me?” Wendy asked.

  “You can read, right?”

  “Yeah, I can read.” Wendy eyed the keyboard. “Those letters aren’t even in order.”

  Hound laughed. “You’re right, they’re not. You put your hands on like this. These two fingers go on these letters with the little bumps. Then the letters that are in the middle—the easiest for you to reach—are used the most.”

  Wendy imitated his hand position, looked down, and couldn’t see half of the letters. “Uh. What do I do?”

  “For now lift your hands up. I’ll get you a tutorial or something. We call it hunt and peck. Look for the letters and type them in. Go ahead.”

  Wendy was grateful that the two m’s in command were one after the other. It saved her a lifetime of hunting.

  Hound took her through a very quick crash course on what computers did and how Mike wanted her to be able to use one. Most of the jargon went over her head, but she caught the gist. In complexes like Shelter, old computer systems might still be working. They would need to get into the “back door” of the computer and type in a few codes that would let them override the defense grid or a locked door.

  “And Mike has these codes?” she asked as she looked for the n.

  “A lot of them. And no, I have no idea how he got them.”

  Yet another tidbit about Mike that put her on edge.

  After an hour, Wendy could get to the command prompt, type in a few commands and get the computer to allow her administrator rights. Which she was pretty sure meant she could change stuff.

  The others in the room had been typing and talking. At this point, Mike, who had wandered in a few minutes before, stood up front and waved his hand.

  “Okay, everyone, test time.”

  A few groans accompanied the announcement. Jeff, who was sitting one row ahead of Wendy, pushed his fingers through his hair. He didn’t look excited.

  Hound raised his hand. “We should probably introduce the new girl.”

  “Ah, yes,” Mike said. He indicated that Wendy should stand. “Everyone, this is Wendy. Some of you knew Ed. This is his daughter. The only survivor of the Skinny raid on her home. She knows one of the Primate’s insiders. We’re hoping she can help us with some of our planning.” He looked over his glasses at her. “She’s also a decent fighter. Yan speaks very highly of her.”

  All of the heads in the room turned to look at her. Most of them smiled. She remembered her manners and said, “It’s good to be here.”

  “You may not think so in a few minutes,” a woman with long, black hair and caramel colored skin said from the front row.

  The others laughed. A few sounded strained.

  “Okay, who’s first?”

  No one volunteered.

  “Come on,” Mike said. “Don’t make me pick.”

  Hound stood. “I’ll go.”

  A bunch of the fighters groaned. “We all know you can do this,” one of them said.

  Hound shrugged and walked to the front of the room.

  “Sit,” Mike said.

  Hound took up residence in the first row of computers.

  Jeff waved Wendy up next to him. A few of the others had moved, so she went to sit by Jeff.

  “This is a speed drill. We’re supposed to be able to type in a certain number of commands in a limited time.”

  “Oh boy,” Wendy said.

  Jeff leaned over. “Don’t worry, Hound is usually the only one who can do it fast enough.”

  “Is that supposed to make me feel better, or make everyone else feel dumb?”

  “Maybe both.” Jeff grinned and returned his attention to the front.

  Mike pulled a small object from his pocket—a watch without a strap. He looked at Hound and said, “Ready. Go.”

  Hound began to type like a mad man.

  He handled the keyboard like Wendy wielded her knives. His fingers flew over the buttons, and he never hesitated.

  Wendy watched the screen, and could barely keep up with the words.

 
; “Half way,” Mike said.

  A few of the others started to murmur between one another, but everyone kept watching.

  “Fifteen seconds,” Mike said.

  Hound’s shoulders relaxed, and he hit one last key before pushing away from the table, with his hands up. “Done!”

  Mike hit a button on the watch. “With ten seconds to spare.”

  “No one else is going to make it,” the woman with the long hair said.

  “Come on, Janice, give it a try,” Hound said, standing and offering her his seat.

  She let out an overly dramatic sigh and sat down.

  Mike let her get settled, reset the exercise, and started his watch.

  Janice’s fingers moved almost as fast as Hounds, but she had to backtrack a lot. Once, she hit return before she should have, and had to go back a few commands.

  “Time,” Mike said.

  Janice gave the screen a scowl. “Almost there.”

  “Better than last time, “ Hound noted.

  Mike looked at the group. “Next.”

  Only three of the twelve fighters made it in the proper time frame. Jeff didn’t, but Hound complimented him on coming along faster than Hound thought he would.

  “Wendy?” Mike asked.

  Wendy, who had been studying the keyboard, swiveled her eyes up. “Yes?”

  Hound waved her up. “Why don’t you come up here and try what we were working on.”

  Wendy wanted to protest. She wanted to say she’d just started, and certainly didn’t have enough experience to do it. She wanted to wave it off and say she’d do it next time. But Pelton had taught her that new experiences told you where your weaknesses were. And, even though she wanted to kill him, she couldn’t argue with the wisdom in the words.

  “Okay,” she heard herself say as her brain railed against the idea. She stood and moved to the computer.

  “Give her a minute,” Hound said.

  Mike nodded and watched over the rim of his glasses as Wendy settled in. “Ready?”

  Sweat broke out on her palms, and Wendy wiped them on her pants. “Sure.”

  “Go.”

  Fighting came as naturally to Wendy as breathing. Confidence was something she didn’t lack in other areas, but this was so foreign that, for a moment, she froze. She forgot the first step. Hound must have seen because he said, “Start button.”