[Contributor 02] - Infiltrator (2013)

by Nicole Ciacchella

  “It’s unconscionable,” she said.

  “Yes, it is,” he said, obviously pleased with her choice of words. Little did he know she had been speaking about something else entirely. “We cannot allow it to happen, can we?”

  “No.” The steel in her voice deepened the satisfaction in his eyes.

  “It’s good to know I can depend upon your help.”

  “You can, sir.”

  With a low, rumbling chuckle, he raised his teacup to her and took a drink. As she forced down the suddenly cloying perfumed liquid, she felt like she’d sold her soul.

  Chapter 25

  “He’s escalating,” Dara said when she finished telling Raj about her conversation with Andersen. She could not sit still. Work had been excruciating for the last several days, and she had been so filled with pent-up frustration that she would gladly have walked across the wasteland barefoot in order to reach him at last, so she could let him know what was happening.

  “You’re right, he does have something planned,” he said, sounding worried. He’d been studying her with a concerned expression from the moment he’d first seen her, which did nothing to make her feel any calmer.

  “I take it the data miners have finally found something substantial?” she asked, unable to keep the hard edge from her question. She knew it wasn’t the data miners’ fault, but she needed to vent her anger on someone.

  “Subtle manipulations in some of the data sets.”

  “Meaning?”

  “It appears Andersen is setting Jasmine Shah up. Nothing obvious, not yet, but he’s been laying the groundwork. He’s a lot craftier than we imagined. It took our most skilled hackers to figure it out.”

  “He’s never done this before?”

  “Never.” Raj met her gaze and a chill raced up her spine. “Andersen trades in information, and he keeps records, but nothing that would raise any eyebrows. This is the first time we’ve ever known him to get into Magnum’s systems and make changes.”

  “He’s never had this much at stake before.” Shoving a hand through her hair, she started pacing again. “You have to ramp up my training. I need to be ready.”

  “I know. But, Dara, I’m concerned about you. Are you okay?”

  “No, I’m not okay!” she shouted. Whirling around, she balled her hands into fists and glared at him. “He’s going to ask me to do something, I know it. That’s what that meeting was all about. He’s like a spider, drawing me into his web, and I’ll have no choice but to go along with it, whatever it is.”

  “Then quit. You don’t have to do this to yourself.”

  “I can’t, you know I can’t.” The fight went out of her and she sank into a chair, holding her hair back with both hands, tugging on it.

  “You’re not alone.” His voice was quiet, and he pulled her hands away from her hair, trapping them in his. He clasped them tightly, making her feel like he was anchoring her. “You have to stop thinking you are.”

  “Raj, he’ll want me to hurt people. He’ll want me to do something to sabotage Shah, and, yes, you keep telling me that you’ll keep an eye on her, but what if you can’t stop this? How will I live with it if you fail? It will be my fault. I don’t care that my intentions were good. That won’t make an ounce of difference if the Authorities drag her away and make her disappear.”

  Maintaining his hold on her hands, he tilted his head and peered up at her, forcing her to meet his gaze. “Do you know how many Contributors I helped send away?”

  “What?” she asked, confused.

  “Do you know how many Contributors I helped send away?”

  “No.” Dread crept over her as his hands began trembling.

  “I know. It’s been three years since the last time. I’ve helped extract three times the number of people I helped send away, but I remember every one of their names. Every time I close my eyes, I see their faces. Twenty-nine faces, Dara, twenty-nine. Twenty-nine people I tore away from their families, twenty-nine living, breathing human beings I discarded like broken old machinery. And you want to know what the worst part is? I felt good when I did it. I thought about what a great Contributor I was, what a fine doctor I would make. I thought about how well I was serving my Creator, and I was proud of myself.” He all but spat the last words, his hands tightening on hers until his grip was painful. The shame, the disgust in his eyes, told her he was tangled in his memories. He was reopening old wounds with the express purpose of making himself bleed, and she knew he had done it many times before. He had no scars because he made a point of freshening his wounds whenever they seemed on the verge of healing.

  “Raj, you didn’t… You thought you were helping them. You wanted…” She flailed for words, painfully aware of how poor a job she was doing of convincing him to absolve himself of his guilt. A need to end his torment drove her, but she had no idea how to go about it, and she was frustrated by her own inadequacy.

  “I did want to help them, at first,” he said, his voice raspy, harsh. “After number fifteen, they brought me in on the big secret.

  “Desai Nanotechnology values its Contributors, they told me. Desai wants to ensure that it meets the needs of every man, woman, and child living under its dome. There is nothing Desai wouldn’t do for its Contributors. Without them, Desai wouldn’t exist. They told me these things and I believed them. I believed every last word.

  “Resources are limited. Desai can only do so much. If Desai doesn’t carefully manage those resources, there will be nothing left. It’s a sad reality, a harsh fact of life in the domes, but Desai can’t take care of everyone. Desai has to allocate its resources to the most productive Contributors to ensure the success and welfare of all.”

  The words fell like blows, bursting from him as if his body could no longer contain them. He didn’t sound like himself, and his glazed eyes made her flinch.

  “They don’t send anyone to facilities, Dara. There are no facilities.”

  “What do you mean?” she asked, horrified, trying to pull her hands from his.

  Starting, he stared down at their hands as if he didn’t understand what he was seeing, then loosened his grip. She cradled her smarting hands to her chest. Pleading filled his eyes, and she realized he was pleading with her, begging her to understand what he was about to say. Sweat beaded his hairline, and his voice was strangled as he forced the words out.

  “When the Creators decide that a Contributor is no longer useful, they transport them outside of the domes. They abandon them without food, shelter, or water, leave them at the mercy of the wasteland and the roving gangs.”

  Clamping a hand over her mouth, Dara gagged, desperately trying to control her rebelling stomach. Raj grabbed her elbow and propelled her over to a wastebin, where she emptied the contents of her stomach, retching with such force that her throat burned and her ribs ached when she was finished. She knelt in front of the bin for a long time, choking and heaving.

  “That’s what would have happened to my mother,” she rasped when she regained the power of speech.

  “Yes.

  A sob tore from her raw throat and she fell to her side, curling into a ball, as if it could protect her from what he had just revealed.

  “I’m sorry, Dara,” he whispered. Distressed as she was, she could hear the self-loathing in his voice, and it gave her enough strength to push herself upright and throw her arms around him. She lost track of time as they sobbed together.

  Chapter 26

  Dara worked tirelessly to master her trainers’ basics over the next several weeks. When they had to move on to training new candidates, she sparred with Tasha, who was light and quick on her feet, twisting and evading Dara with blinding speed. Thanks to Tasha, Dara learned how to read her opponent’s intent in the lines of their body, the slight movements they made, the direction in which their gaze flickered.

  Raj sparred with her too, a mutual, unspoken vow simmering between them. She knew he was intelligent, but she had no idea he was so intense, so single-minded when h
e needed to be. She had thought his standing as extraction mission leader was due to his medical training, and while that was an asset, it was clear that he was formidable in a fight. Not once did his control slip, and he was laser-focused, seeming to anticipate every one of her moves when they were nothing but half-formed ideas in her head. He wasn’t easy on her, but it was obvious he held a lot back, making her wary of ever finding herself on his bad side.

  “What you told me doesn’t make what I’m doing okay, you know,” she said to him one day after a particularly grueling session. They sat side by side on the floor, panting and resting their heads against the cold concrete wall.

  “I know,” he said in a tight voice, handing her a water bottle. He hadn’t been at ease with her since he’d told her the truth about the facilities.

  “I’m not mad at you, Raj.”

  “That makes one of us.”

  “You shouldn’t be angry with yourself either.”

  “How can I not be, Dara? I told you they brought me in at number fifteen. It took sending another fourteen to the ‘facilities’ before I finally left.” His face drawn in harsh lines, he refused to meet her gaze.

  “There’s nothing I can say to make you okay with this, I know that, but it doesn’t mean I won’t try.”

  “I don’t want to be okay with this!” he exploded, his eyes blazing as he met her gaze at last.

  “I understand that, and I don’t blame you. It’s good that you feel that way. If you didn’t, you’d still be in Desai’s dome, wouldn’t you?”

  His head fell back against the wall with a dull thud. “Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

  “So many of the things you said make sense now.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, when you were talking to me about the way a crowd can be controlled, you were talking about yourself. You were speaking from experience. You know people can be manipulated because you were manipulated.”

  “I knew it was wrong.” The words were angry, and she wasn’t sure if he was trying to get her to stop or if he wanted to pick a fight.

  “You didn’t, though, did you? Not at first. It seemed off, didn’t feel quite right. But everything you’d ever known, everything you’d ever been taught, told you Desai had to be right and that you had to be wrong. You were the problem, the one who couldn’t understand, the one unworthy enough to question their motives.”

  He said nothing. She took a long pull on her water, closing her eyes as she searched for the right words.

  “I felt that way too,” she said. “It was so hard, so confusing. I started to notice things, things I’d never noticed before, but no one else did, and I told myself that there had to be something wrong with me.”

  “Don’t make excuses for me.” His voice was a low growl.

  “I’m not. I’m explaining why you reacted as you did, and, deep down, you know what I’m saying is true, even if you don’t want to accept it. For a long time after I met him, I couldn’t understand why Mal always seemed so angry, but I get it now. We like to think we’re all good, every one of us. We do the right thing, we follow the rules. When we figure out that we’re not so good, that the rules are wrong, we can’t deal with it because we suddenly see all the bad parts of us, like they’ve been ripped from the shadows and shoved under a spotlight.”

  “I killed those people.” Raj buried his face in his hands, his voice breaking.

  “Desai killed those people,” she insisted, her voice fierce.

  “I helped.”

  “And now you’re helping to save them.”

  “Yeah, so?” Defiant, he dropped his hands and stared at her, challenging her. Mingled with his anger, his refusal to stop punishing himself, was fear and agony, telling her just how wounded he was.

  “That means something,” she said in a gentle voice, taking his hand.

  He moved as if he’d snatch it away, curling his hand into a fist, but left it where it was. She covered his fist with her other hand. “It’s not like transferring water from one bucket to the next. A few good deeds aren’t going to erase what I did.”

  “No, but this life we’re living, it’s not that simple. Isn’t that what you’ve been telling me all along? It would be so much easier if things were black and white. Who you were then, he wasn’t a person. He was a robot, programmed by Desai, just like I was programmed by Magnum. It doesn’t mean we get to shed the blame for our actions, but there is a difference between making a conscious choice to do something terrible and doing it because you don’t know any other way.”

  “Is there really?” Drooping, he sighed, and his eyes drifted closed. He looked as tired as she felt.

  “There is, even if it’s hard to believe at times, but I know that doesn’t make anything better. Every time I think of what Andersen will ask me to do, I give myself that little talk, but I know it’s not going to make it more bearable when the shoe drops. Still, it’s all I’ve got to cling to. Is it better to give up? It’s easier, that’s for sure. What’s the point, though? What’s the point of giving up instead of trying to do better?”

  “I thought you might hate me.” Swallowing hard, he averted his eyes, staring down at his fist trapped between her two hands.

  “I don’t hate you. I hate what you did, hate that Desai drove you to it, but I don’t hate you. Let me ask you a question: were you the only apprentice to find out the truth?”

  “No,” he said, confirming what she’d already suspected.

  “Where are those other apprentices?”

  “Far as I know, still with Desai.” He knew where she was going with this, and she could feel his resistance. Absolution wasn’t what he sought because he was convinced he could never find it. No matter what he did, no matter what he risked, he believed he could never sacrifice enough to make up for what he had done.

  “You’re not. Don’t you think that counts for something?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I do. It does.”

  He didn’t respond, but his hand relaxed, his fingers slipping through hers, grasping onto them, and they sat side by side, breathing.

  Chapter 27

  Months passed, and despite that Andersen made no requests of Dara, she wouldn’t allow herself to relax. Still, her constant reminders to be hypervigilant did nothing but make her certain control was slipping through her fingers.

  Further progress with her fighting and self-defense skills would require time and practice, and when she was in the dome, she focused with growing intensity on physical activity. She ran and started weight training, toning her muscles and improving her stamina. Magnum expected her to be physically fit in order to keep her sick days and visits to the med center to a minimum, so it was easy to carry out that aspect of her ruse.

  Keeping up with her intellectual pursuits wasn’t so easy. Raj had her reading novels and histories, helping her to get a better grasp of what the world had been like before the domes. The revised history made it difficult to stomach the Magnum-controlled media she forced herself to watch, in case Andersen questioned her about her off-duty activities. Rather than absorbing the details of what she was reading or watching, she found herself picking it apart, spotting the inconsistencies that exposed it for the propaganda it was. Joshua practiced with her for hours, giving her a chance to hone her responses so that she could remove all traces of subversive thoughts. She needed a lot of practice.

  Her only reprieve was the reports of her mother’s progress. Though they were a bright spot, they also made her long for Leona, and they never failed to remind her of what Raj had told her. Whatever he thought of himself, if it hadn’t been for him, Leona would be dead. He had given her the chance to live, and she was thriving, picking up additional skills every day. It was clear now that she would never have been able to return as a Contributor to Magnum. That sort of work was beyond her abilities, but she would one day be able to lead a normal day-to-day life. She would always have challenges to overcome, and her headaches showed no signs of abating,
but she had learned to fulfill her own basic needs. Her independence improved her mood, making her calm enough to regain fragments of her memories and to establish a firmer grasp on reality. Her bouts of confusion lessened in number, and she had begun to assist her caretakers with other patients, providing peer counseling. It was a new life and she was a new person, one who could contribute, even if it wasn’t in the manner Magnum had demanded.

  “I’m so glad to hear all that,” Letizia told Dara the next time they were able to meet.

  “How are you doing?”

  Letizia shrugged. “As well as can be expected, I guess.”

  “Have you given more thought to extraction?”

  “Yes. I’m going to leave as soon as this whole thing with Andersen is straightened out. I need to see it through first. What about you?”

  “I’m not sure I’ll have a choice. I might have to expose myself to figure out what he’s after, but you knew that already, didn’t you?”

  “It’s a possibility. It always is. Are you okay with it?”

  “I am. I think I want out too. It’s not an easy life out there, but, I don’t know, it’s different. I know the Free Thinkers need people on the inside, but every day when I get out of bed, I have to tell myself that I’m trying to make a difference. Living outside of the domes, conducting raids and gathering intelligence, well, there it would be obvious that I’m trying to make a difference. I wouldn’t have to work so hard to convince myself of it.”

  “Your work for the Free Thinkers is important, but you need to do what’s best for you. So do I.”

  “Yes, we do.”

  “Listen, I’ve been doing some digging of my own, as much as I’m able. My team was recently assigned a new project, and at first I thought it was tied to our work with Zhang, but something keeps nagging me about it. I think it’s actually a small piece of Andersen’s project.”