We didn’t make it that far.
Halfway up the hill, I could see two dark figures sprinting toward us. I stiffened in Amory’s arms, and I felt every muscle in his body tighten simultaneously. He set me on my feet, hand reaching behind him for the gun he had stowed there.
As the figures drew nearer, I recognized that flash of brilliant blond hair.
I sighed with relief, and my heart surged with affection as I saw their faces.
Greyson careened into me — almost knocking me clean off my feet — and Logan threw herself into Amory’s arms.
“Oh my god!” she screamed into his shoulder. “I didn’t think we would ever see you two again!”
“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Amory muttered, fighting for air in Logan’s stranglehold.
Greyson pulled back, and I stumbled. His eyebrows knitted together in concern.
“Hurt my ankle.”
“I was worried about you,” he said. His tone was accusatory, as though it were my fault. I smiled. Greyson always got angry when he had too many emotions to process.
“I was worried about you. I didn’t know if you would get out of the city in time.”
“We almost didn’t,” he said, grinning. “You’re not the best at avoiding rovers in high-pressure situations.”
I punched his arm.
Logan broke away from Amory and threw herself onto me. “I’m so sorry we left you there,” she murmured into my coat.
“It’s okay,” I said, gasping a little for air as she squeezed me.
She pulled away, looking at me funny.
“Really.”
Logan raised an eyebrow. “Or am I not sorry I left you there . . . with Amory . . . all alone?”
I glanced around to see that no one was listening to us and bit back a smile.
Logan grinned. “That’s my girl!”
“Let’s go,” said Jared.
I looked up. He was standing a few yards ahead, wearing a grim expression. “I need to report back to Godfrey.”
Logan’s smile faded. “You should probably prepare yourself,” she said. “Rulon wasn’t happy. And some of the other rebels . . . they still think you’re a traitor.”
I swallowed, feeling the renewed guilt that Logan, Greyson, and Godfrey had returned to camp to face the consequences of my decision. “Did he . . . do anything to you guys?”
Logan shook her head. “He tried. He wanted to. But I think Godfrey is about done with his bullshit.” She looked angry. “It’s not just us. Everyone is starting to notice that the resistance isn’t doing anything. The riots didn’t weaken the PMC as much as they planned.”
“Let’s go!” snapped Jared.
Amory’s face was dark, but he put an arm around my waist and hoisted most of my weight off my right leg. With Logan and Greyson flanking my other side, we continued up the hill through the snow with Kinsley trailing behind us.
As we reached the familiar horseshoe-shaped alcove of trees, I could see the glow of a campfire burning low in the early morning light. Birds were starting to sing, but the camp was eerily quiet. Everyone was still asleep.
“I’ll wake Godfrey,” Jared muttered.
Looking uneasy, Kinsley pushed past us and shuffled behind him down the first block of tents.
Amory was looking around in wonder. “How many rebels are there?”
“Only a couple hundred left in this camp,” said Greyson. “But there were nearly five hundred before the riots.”
“This camp?”
Greyson nodded. “There are others. Although this one is probably the largest in the country.”
“Except out west,” Logan corrected.
Greyson shrugged, but I could see something flicker in his eyes. I looked at him and then glanced away quickly. I felt a painful tug when I thought back to all the plans we had made when we first decided to flee the city. We were going to head west with my parents, and Greyson was going to find a way to bring his mother and sister back from the New Northern Territory. We seemed so far from that reality now.
A sharp, booming profanity shattered the peace of the early morning. I stiffened, and Amory released me. Logan threw me a nervous glance, and the four of us reflexively shifted out into a straight line.
I heard heavy footfalls through the snow, and Rulon appeared around the corner of the block of tents. He was wearing his huge fur coat with thermal long johns tucked into his boots. He looked larger and more intimidating than I remembered. Kinsley trailed behind him looking terrified, and I felt sorry for the boy. He had probably left his family to fight the PMC, and instead of fighting, he was serving and reporting directly to Rulon every day.
I saw Rulon run an agitated hand over his bald, dark head. Gold rings gleamed on his fingers, and his eyes were cold.
“Well, well. Look who’s back,” he snarled as soon as he was within earshot.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see the rustle of a tent flap, and I knew some of the rebels had awoken.
“It’s the PMC traitor and the disobedient upstart who thinks she knows better than my entire army.” His lip was curled into an angry smirk. He was looking at me now. “Not only did you go AWOL and drag three others with you, but you used the movement’s resources to do it.”
I took a deep breath, trying to stand up straight on my shaky ankle.
“Now, what am I supposed to do with that, soldier? The PMC would have you permanently deactivated for this sort of thing.” His voice was low and lethal now. “Am I supposed to welcome you back into our ranks after you disobeyed direct orders? I explicitly told you —”
“The mission was a success,” I said.
A look of fury clouded over Rulon’s face. “A success? You got four of our legitimate PMC officer IDs flagged, lost one of our cruisers, and put our last Sector X safe house out of commission. You call that a success?”
“We saved him.”
“You saved a known PMC spy and brought him back into our ranks!”
“He’s not a spy!” I said, hatred boiling over in my chest. “He was their prisoner! They performed horrible experiments on him and tortured him for three weeks.”
I turned to Amory and grabbed his arm, shoving his sleeve up above the elbow to reveal the row of burns. “Look what they did!”
Amory jerked his arm away, looking ashamed. He didn’t meet my gaze.
“I guess that’s nothing to you,” I said quietly, although I knew the onlookers who had gathered could hear.
Rulon sneered at Amory as if he were something stuck to the bottom of his shoe. “They implanted him with another CID. They’ll have every satellite rover in the state out scanning for him.”
“It’s gone! I removed it myself.”
Rulon took another step forward. He towered over me by at least a foot. “You think you’re something special, don’t you?” His voice was almost a whisper, but it sent a wave of fear through me. “You think you’re exempt from the rules. You think you’re a hero.” His eyebrows shot up. “You’re nothing. You’re just a spoiled little bitch who ran away from home and decided to join the revolution because it seemed fun to you.”
“Hey!” Amory shifted in front of me, shoving Rulon roughly in the chest. His eyes were dark and full of warning, and they sent a chill down the back of my neck. “I’m the reason she disobeyed you. Your problem’s with me.”
Rulon laughed coldly. “No. No, it’s not. It’s not people like you I’m worried about. Spies are easy to dispose of because they’re easy to sniff out. I don’t have to try to turn this whole camp against you. Nobody trusts a PMC brat. It’s people like you.” He turned to me. “You’re way more dangerous than one PMC spy. Your kind are a disease. You infect the ranks with dissent. You think you’re smart, but you’re not. You’re dangerously stupid. It’s people like you who get good soldiers killed, and I won’t have it in my camp.”
I looked up into his cold eyes. “Are you going to torture me again? Is that how you solve problems here?”
/> He smiled, and his bright teeth were blindingly white against his dark skin. “Not today.”
“You done yelling?”
I looked around Rulon’s hulking frame to see Godfrey. He was fully dressed as if he hadn’t gone to sleep, and his eyes were gleaming with a challenge. Behind him was Jared, still in his PMC whites and eyeing Godfrey warily.
Rulon stepped back and let out a low breath of disgust. He stalked away, and Kinsley followed in his wake looking panicked.
Glancing around, I could see rebels all down the block poking their heads out of their tents. They looked interested, almost amused. Amory eyed them all angrily, and Logan looked exhausted.
It was Godfrey who spoke first, addressing Amory. “Come on. You can bunk with Greyson and the kid.”
Amory looked up, and I didn’t want to be separated from him. I didn’t trust Rulon, and all of this was foreign to him.
Logan seemed to read my mind. “Greyson, why don’t you go, too? Help find him some clothes and blankets.”
Greyson nodded and followed Godfrey and Amory. I felt a little better, but still slightly apprehensive.
“He can handle himself,” said Logan. “I seem to remember him teaching you how to shoot a gun.”
I grinned. “You taught me that.”
She laughed. “But it took a little of Amory’s special touch.” She ran her hands over her arms in a jokingly suggestive way. “Come on. You look like hell.”
Allowing Logan to support some of my weight, I limped over to the medical tent where Doctor Shriver slept, wishing I did not have to see her. She’d examined me for any signs of infection upon my arrival, and it had not been a pleasant experience.
Caroline Shriver was a woman in her early thirties with short, black hair that had a slightly purple tinge. It stuck out all over the place like a lion’s mane and framed her enormous glasses in a mad scientist sort of way. She had been a paramedic before the Collapse and had a way with grim facial expressions and morbid comments that made you feel certain you were going to die. Treating rebels with missing limbs and shrapnel embedded in their flesh after the riots had done nothing to tame her tendency toward the macabre.
“Hey!” Logan called through the canvas. “You up, Shriver?”
There was a bit of rustling inside, and Shriver pulled back the tent flap and stuck her head out. She had dark circles under her eyes and wore an oversized jacket over a navy jumpsuit. Her hair looked more unruly than usual, as if she had just woken up.
“How could I not be? What happened? It sounded like a trip to the principal’s office from in here.”
I shrugged off her obvious curiosity, not wanting to talk about it. “My ankle’s messed up.”
She sighed. “All right. Come on.”
Logan and I ducked into the tent, and I collapsed onto Shriver’s rickety exam table. There were four cots lining the right wall of the tent. All of them were empty except for the one at the end, which was occupied by one of the few seriously injured rebels who had made it out of the city. He lay perfectly still with his arms, legs, and face all bound with gauze, which made me think he was recovering from bad burns.
Shriver lived here, too, but her living area was separated by a thin canvas curtain that ran down the left side of the tent.
She rolled up my pant leg and squeezed.
“Does that hurt?”
“Yeah.”
“Does that hurt?”
“Yes!”
“Can you move it?”
“Yeah.”
She scrutinized my swelling ankle with her glasses pushed down to the end of her nose. “It’s just a sprain. Should be fine in a couple weeks.”
Shriver wrapped my ankle with a length of fabric, eyeing the ripped knee of my pants and the scrapes running all along the right side of my body.
“We need to treat those cuts,” she said. “I don’t want to deal with any infection next week.”
I nodded and let her clean all the scrapes I had sustained when I fell from the fire escape. When she was finished, Shriver thrust a crutch at me and dismissed us with a gruff nod.
Moving was much easier with the crutch, and although I was unsteady in the snow, it felt good not to be dependent on Logan or Amory to move around. We went back to our tent, and I fell over onto my sleeping bag. Thankfully, Logan had thought to bring all my things back after they escaped Sector X. As soon as we were alone, Logan sat down to grill me.
“What happened in there?”
By “in there,” I knew she was referring to Sector X and everything that had happened to Amory and me after we had separated. I told her about the old tunnel that was closed off and how we had run to the safe house to avoid the PMC. When I got to the part about the carriers, I paused, unsure how much I should tell her. It felt like a betrayal to Amory to tell Logan about how he seemed like a different person when he was fighting them, but in truth, I was worried about him and the effects of his brainwashing sessions at Isador.
“It was like he just . . . turned off his emotions,” I said. “He didn’t even see me there. He was a machine.”
Logan looked slightly alarmed but cracked a nervous grin. “Let’s hope he’s just a carrier-killing machine, huh?”
“Do you think that’s what they were training him for in there?”
“I don’t know.”
I shivered. “You didn’t see those videos they were showing. And the problem is that stuff is in his brain. I don’t know if removing his CID —”
“You really removed his CID?” Logan’s eyes widened. “I thought you made that up!”
“They inserted it in the back of his head. It was like they wanted it closer to his brain.”
“Or somewhere he couldn’t remove it himself,” she reminded me.
I nodded, feeling strange that Logan was taking the role of the voice of reason.
Finally, she asked the question I had been dreading most. “Is he different now?”
I shook my head. But even as I did, I knew it was a lie.
“I don’t know,” I said. “He’s —”
I faltered, listening intently. Outside, I could hear people yelling. Logan sprang to her feet and flew out of the tent. Struggling to stand, I pulled myself up with the tent supports and limped out into the snow. Several tents down, I could see two figures sprawled in the snow fighting, one on top of the other.
People were emerging wrapped in their sleeping bags, rubbing their eyes and looking less amused by the second interruption of the night but still curious to see what all the commotion was about.
As I hobbled closer on my crutch, I saw Amory on his knees pummeling another man I did not recognize. His eyes were cold, his muscles taut with exertion and rage. I watched in horror as blood spattered the fresh snow on the ground, and Amory brought back his fist again, knuckles red and cracked. He wasn’t the Amory I knew. That Amory was gone.
CHAPTER TEN
It was like watching a movie.
This couldn’t be happening.
But it was.
Amory was pummeling a man into the snow. I could hear the man’s soft grunts of pain as Amory’s fists connected with his flesh.
He had that look in his eyes again, and I felt the familiar ripple of fear in my chest.
“Amory!” I yelled.
He did not look up.
Ignoring the stares of the onlookers, I limped over toward them and was alarmed to see blood spattered like paint across Amory’s face.
“Amory. Stop!”
I drew closer, and he still did not seem to see me. Again he brought his knuckles down to collide with the man’s jaw.
I passed Logan, and she grabbed my arm. Her face was ashen. I shook her off and hobbled through the snow. Holding on to my crutch, I bent down and pulled Amory roughly around by the shoulder.
He turned abruptly and, before I could react, shoved me backward into the snow. Amory didn’t stop pounding the man. Shock and anger coursed through me like venom, and I aimed a hard kick at h
is shoulder with my left leg.
“Amory!” I growled.
He turned, panting with exertion. His face was still screwed up in anger, and he was even bloodier than before. Snow was starting to fall. He froze.
His eyes cleared first. They focused on me and immediately wrinkled in pain and regret.
“Oh god,” he murmured.
He struggled to disentangle himself from the man he was fighting. Silently, he crouched down to pick me up out of the snow. I cringed away, glaring at him. Even though I knew his outburst was the result of whatever the PMC had done to him, I couldn’t stop the anger and distrust pouring off me.
I realized everyone was staring at us.
The man on the ground pulled himself into a sitting position, looking much worse for the wear.
“What the hell was that?” I whispered to Amory.
He opened his mouth to speak but wouldn’t look me in the eye.
“He started it,” Greyson panted. I hadn’t even noticed him standing off to the side, holding back one of the man’s friends. He stepped around the beat-up man on the ground, looking down at him with disgust.
“He came at Amory . . . said he was going to drag him and you back to the PMC himself.” Greyson muttered. “He started shoving him, and Amory snapped.”
“I just lost it,” muttered Amory, rubbing the back of his neck.
I tried to meet his gaze, but he was avoiding it expertly. He looked ashamed.
“You need to see Shriver,” I said.
His wounds looked bad.
Reluctantly, he followed me past the mob of angry onlookers back toward the med tent. Me — the traitor — and Amory the psycho. What a pair we made. It was slow going, and I cursed Jared for making me sprain my ankle. I just wanted to get away from all these people as quickly as possible.
When we reached the tent, I didn’t even call for Shriver first. I ducked inside with Amory trailing several feet behind me. Shriver wasn’t there, but I knew she couldn’t be far. In the rebel camp, news of the fight would spread within minutes, and she would be back to tend to the wounded.
Enemy Inside (Defectors Trilogy) Page 11