No. Amory could handle himself.
Scooting closer to the fire, I tried to thaw my frozen hands. I knew Mariah must be freezing, judging by her proximity to the fire, but I wouldn’t risk untying her. Training with Logan was enough to tell me that I was no match for Mariah.
“So what happened to you?” I asked. Now that we were just sitting there, I realized I had a thousand questions burning in the back of my mind.
Mariah glared at me through the flames. “Before or after the rebels threw me out to die in Sector X?”
I shrugged. “After, I guess.” The guilt was thick in my voice.
“You hoped I was gone,” she said. “You wanted me to die, didn’t you?”
“You tried to get me and my friends killed, but you knew we weren’t a threat.”
“I knew you were cowards. I don’t have time for cowards. Cowards get you killed.”
“You were blowing up a building full of people!”
“Oh, and you tried so hard to save them all, did you?” she asked, her eyes gleaming with malice.
I fell silent, hating her and trying to stifle the memory of those horrible moments before the blast.
She was right. Amory and I had run.
“That’s what I thought.” She nodded and slumped back against the tree, sneering and looking satisfied. “We’re the same, you and me.”
“How’s that?”
“We’re both out to save ourselves. Our survival instincts are . . . spectacular.”
Anger flared in the pit of my stomach. “That’s not true.”
“No?”
“I look out for my friends. You only look out for yourself.” Even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t true. Now that I knew about Jared, it made me think we were alike, but for a different reason.
She laughed — a hard, cruel laugh. “Stop lying to yourself! You’re not saving them out of love. You’re saving them because you’re terrified of being alone.”
I stared at her. In that moment, I wanted to kill her. I wanted her to suffer.
Instead, I forced myself to refocus on the ultimate objective: saving Logan. I needed the truth.
“How did you rejoin the PMC after the rebels threw you out?”
Mariah rolled her eyes. “I wandered around for a bit, looking for someplace to get warm. I stumbled across these two dead officers lying there on the sidewalk. I took one of their uniforms — just for warmth. I also took one of their rifles. Basic survival. I didn’t really know where to go.
“Somehow, I wandered into a big pack of them. One of them yelled at me for breaking rank, and I realized I could do it.
“They’d lost so many men that order was breaking down. I knew it would be easy just to slip back in. It didn’t matter that I was deactivated. There were too many carriers and rebels running around, triggering all the rovers. I helped them shoot down a bunch of rebels at the bridge, and then I marched right back to base with them.”
“They must have realized you were deactivated eventually.”
She nodded. “It took them about five seconds after I entered their last standing base to figure it out. But they needed bodies to throw at the problem, so they gave me amnesty. When they realized I was infected, they sent me to World Corp International.”
“Why? Why not kill you or just lock you up?”
Mariah smiled to herself, not really looking at me. “I was an anomaly — the first case of the virus they’d seen in someone who was vaccinated.”
“And they cured you?”
She swallowed in disgust, as if pushing down a terrible memory. “It was horrible. The cure is . . . sloppy. Think chemotherapy. It works . . . if it doesn’t kill you first.”
“Still. They have a cure, but they tell the public they don’t know how to cure it or what caused the outbreak.”
“If you don’t know what caused the outbreak, you’re a fucking idiot,” snapped Mariah.
“World Corp?”
She nodded.
“How?”
“I don’t know. But the joke’s on them. The virus mutated. I was infected with a new strain they hadn’t seen before. The vaccine didn’t prevent it, and once you’re infected, it’s a much slower decline.
“I was sick for weeks before I realized. I was angry all the time. I wanted to kill people, but my brain was on overdrive. It was like I was still myself, only not quite. All I thought about was surviving, which is how I ended up with Rulon’s crew.”
I thought back to the carriers who had grabbed me in the woods and tied me to a tree. They had been further along than Mariah, but they still had enough sense to tie me up. They wanted to use me to help them survive. I imagined myself as the carriers’ hostage, stealing food from grocery stores and bringing it back to their camp. It showed a high level of thinking on their part that made me shiver.
If Mariah was telling the truth, then everything that had happened since the Collapse had been part of World Corp’s plan — except the mutation. It was too horrible to consider. It was too much to process.
“The only thing I don’t get,” I said, “is why you never led the PMC to Rulon’s camp. You could have betrayed all the rebels who turned against you.”
“Including my brother.”
I shrugged. “You could have gotten him amnesty in exchange for what you knew. But you didn’t.”
Mariah sneered, but it was a poor cover for her misery. “Insurance. If they ever decided I was disposable, I needed that as leverage. Why should I trust the PMC? They’d thrown me out once already for Logan’s crime. Fool me once, shame on you. But nobody fools me twice.”
I stared at her, and for just a second, I felt sorry for Mariah. There really was no one she trusted. I didn’t blame her. Both the PMC and the rebels had thrown her away for something that wasn’t even her fault.
From far away, I heard the crunch of footfalls in the snow. I jerked my head around and jumped to my feet.
There was a lone figure running toward us through the snow. As he drew closer, I recognized Amory’s long stride. I’d almost forgotten why we were there.
He was panting, and he carried a small backpack. Looking from me to Mariah, I saw his eyes widen, as though seeing her confirmed what he hoped wasn’t true.
“Where did you find her?” he panted once he was within earshot.
“The Exchange was raided. She followed us.”
Amory’s eyebrows shot up. “That’s never happened before. There must be a traitor on the inside.”
There was something off about the way Amory was speaking. His voice was cold, and he wasn’t looking at me directly.
“Are you all right?” he asked.
“Yeah. You?”
“I’ve been better,” he muttered.
“Hey!” I grabbed his arm and pulled him behind a tree, out of the range of Mariah’s smug expression. “What is it?”
Now I could see his face. It was distorted in an uncharacteristic look of anger.
“When were you planning on telling me that Logan was infected?”
My heart sank. He should have been the first person I told. He and Logan had been friends long before I had met them, and I shouldn’t have let him be blindsided by the news.
“I’m sorry. I just found out this morning.”
“You had time to tell Greyson.” His voice was accusatory, and I remembered that Amory was still not himself.
“I’m sorry. He came by, and I didn’t —” I broke off, looking at my feet. “I didn’t know what to do.”
“You could have told me! I had to find out from Ida while she was telling me that you’d taken a PMC officer hostage.”
“Mariah’s alive, Amory. She was infected, and now she’s not. What the hell would you have done?”
“I would have thought it through!”
“There was no time!” I yelled.
My raised voice seemed to startle him, bringing him back to reality. In an instant, he was himself again, and I felt my anger dissipating as quickly as it had
come.
“Are you sure about this?” he asked in a low voice. “It’s dangerous under the best circumstances. Out here, it’s . . .”
“I’m sure.”
“And what do you plan to do with her once the CID is gone? She isn’t going to stop being a PMC officer just because we take her off the grid. The others won’t want her kept alive.”
“We have to.”
We stared at each other, locked in a stalemate, but Amory read the desperation in my eyes. He didn’t say anything, but I knew he would do it.
Sometime that day, I knew I had crossed a line, even if it was hard to tell where.
I had shot a man. I’d taken a hostage. And now I was bringing a fox back to the nest. We had no other option.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Amory stepped around the tree to survey Mariah. She was glaring up at him like a cornered animal, but he seemed undeterred.
“You’ll need to uncuff her,” he said. “But keep her tied up.”
I squatted down in front of Mariah and dug the key out of my back pocket. As soon as the handcuffs clicked open, she thrashed out with her arms, swatting at me with her nails.
Ducking out of her reach, I stumbled backward.
Amory and I exchanged a look, and he bent down to examine the site of her CID insertion. She swung out her other arm to strike him, but Amory seized it in his grip. That cold look was back in his eyes, and I remembered that he too had basic PMC training. Mariah stopped struggling for a moment — just long enough for Amory to plunge a syringe I hadn’t seen into her arm.
Mariah swiped at him again with her free hand, but she’d already given up. Amory pulled back, and she yanked her other arm out of his grip.
“What did you give her?”
“A sedative. I can’t work on her when she’s like this.”
“Wish I’d had one of those,” I muttered, remembering my own painful extraction.
“Yeah, well, the defectors’ medical supplies are much better stocked than Ida’s cupboard at the farm.”
We waited in silence for the drugs to kick in, but Mariah already seemed more docile just knowing she had lost the fight. When Amory reached for her arm the next time, she glared at him but did not lash out. She was slumped down against the tree and pliant enough for Amory to spread her arm palm up on a clean towel he had lain in the snow. He gently swabbed her arm and withdrew his scalpel.
“This will hurt, but I’ve done it twice before,” he murmured. His voice was cool and professional. “The less you move, the less painful it will be.”
Mariah didn’t make a sound.
As I watched, I felt a stab of ugliness. I knew it was wrong to forcibly remove her CID, but we didn’t have another choice. If Mariah had been any other officer, we would have shot her. Forcing her to defect and bringing her to the rebel camp was hardly a fair chance at a new life, but it was the most we could do. And if I was completely honest with myself, I would have condemned her to much worse if it meant saving Logan.
Amory made a small incision as he had done for me and used his forceps to pull apart the folds of skin. I hadn’t watched this part of my own procedure, and it was much more gruesome than I’d originally thought. Blood pooled up over the site of Amory’s incision, running down her arm and over the towel.
Glancing at Mariah, I saw she wasn’t watching either. Her face was screwed up, but whether it was from pain or anger, I could not tell.
Amory sucked in a breath of air through his teeth. “Shit.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“I nicked her artery.”
My chest constricted, as though cold chains were snaked around my rib cage, crushing my heart and lungs.
“She’s losing a lot of blood.”
Mariah’s face had relaxed from the sedative, and she was staring bleary-eyed at Amory.
“What can I do?” I asked.
Amory shook his head once, but I couldn’t see his face. His shoulders were taught as he bent over her arm, and I could see by his elbows that he was working quickly.
He paused to wipe his brow with his sleeve. “If I don’t find it soon, I’ll have to stop.”
“You’ll find it,” I said quietly.
He sighed and continued to work. I didn’t dare step over to look at Mariah. I didn’t want to see the blood — didn’t want to consider that if she died, I would be responsible.
After another long minute, Amory froze. “It’s done.”
He began swabbing away the blood, and I caught a glimpse of the soaked towel. My stomach turned as he began stitching up Mariah’s arm. Over his shoulder, I could see her looking at him with an expression of defeat.
Watching Amory work, I felt a swell of affection at his care and precision. To Amory, it didn’t matter if Mariah was one of us or an officer who wanted us dead. He did the job with the same concern for his patient.
“So that’s it, then?” I said to break the heavy silence. “No CID.”
“Oh, I got it,” said Amory, turning to look over his shoulder. His face was serious, but I could see the pride in his eyes.
He finished bandaging Mariah and bent over to retrieve something from a Petri dish with his forceps. When he held it up to the light, I saw the glint of gold around the edges. He held it out to me, and I took it carefully between my fingers.
Amory turned to Mariah. “I’ll be checking to make sure the cut is healing all right. Should be a fairly clean scar.”
Her eyes lingered with pointed distain on the jagged scar on Amory’s own forearm.
“I did a much better job on Haven,” he said, following her gaze.
As Amory began gathering up his supplies, I wandered off into the trees until I found two sizable rocks. Clearing away a patch of snow at the base of a tree, I carefully placed the CID on the flattest of the two and held the other rock over my head. In one clumsy motion, I brought the rock down and smashed the chip, nearly crushing my fingertips in the process. When I lifted the rock, the CID was glimmering in five separate pieces of gold and white.
“We better get moving,” Amory called. “It’s going to be dark soon.”
He had already re-cuffed and blindfolded Mariah, and I felt another stab of guilt. I swallowed it down, remembering that she was our ticket to curing Logan.
It was a slow march back to camp. Night was coming quickly, and the icy wind was kicking up, cutting through our clothes and making it almost impossible to breathe. I had a grip on Mariah’s good arm, and she stumbled between us through the deep snow. Between the sedative and the blindfold, she was having a hard time avoiding the concealed tree roots and underbrush, and I was having a hard time keeping us both upright.
When Amory spoke after nearly an hour of silence, he startled me with the obvious question I had been dreading.
“What are we going to do with her?”
“We need to hide her until we can get the information we need,” I said, avoiding his gaze. “No one can know about Logan.”
“I don’t know how we’re going to keep something like this a secret.” I could hear the grating frustration in his voice. “We’ll have a couple days at most before someone figures out Logan isn’t getting better. That’s if we can keep Murphy and the others from finding out about her.” He nodded toward Mariah.
We fell back into silence, and my feet began to drag with exhaustion and dread.
Amory led us around the perimeter of camp. We were close enough to discern the outline of cabins through the trees, but I couldn’t hear any voices. Now that it was nearly dark, most people were already packed into the mess hall for supper.
I pointed to one of the empty cabins that sat farther back in the woods. “We can keep her there for now,” I murmured.
Checking first to see if the coast was clear, Amory motioned for me to follow with Mariah. He reached up and felt over the doorframe for the spare key and fitted it into the lock. The door swung open, and a heavy whiff of mustiness and rodent excrement hit my nostrils.
&n
bsp; I guided Mariah over the threshold, and she doubled over in a sneeze. I lit the lone kerosene lamp hanging near the entrance and surveyed the room. This cabin served as a permanent storage area for spare bunks and odd supplies, but the disorganized crates and rusted bed frames stacked haphazardly around the room told me it wasn’t part of Miller’s domain.
Amory dragged one of the mattresses over to the defunct radiator, and I clipped one end of Mariah’s handcuffs to the part of the fixture that was bolted to the wall. When I removed the blindfold, she was glaring up at me, still wheezing from the dust. I could tell that the effects of the sedative were wearing off.
“What makes you think I’m going to tell you anything?” Mariah growled. Her eyes were red and blotchy, making her look even more frightening.
“I think you’ll want to get out of here eventually,” I said, searching the nearest crate for some blankets to make her more comfortable.
“You can’t keep me tied up forever.”
She was right. Even in the few hours we’d had her, this hostage business was really starting to wear on me.
I sighed. “We’ll go get you some food . . . let you think about it.”
Feeling like a terrible person, I gagged her and checked her restraints. Amory followed me out of the cabin, locking it behind him.
Grateful to be rid of Mariah, I sank down on the bottom step and put my head in my hands. “What are we going to do?”
“We?”
I looked up. Amory was staring down at me with anger and detachment.
“You brought back a PMC officer from the Exchange — an ex-rebel — and called me out to the woods to perform an extraction. You didn’t think I had a right to know about Logan, but you dragged me into this mess anyway.”
“She had us, Amory. I was going to kill her, but then I saw who she was. She hadn’t turned. That’s never happened before.”
“It was a bad idea bringing her here.”
“I didn’t have a choice!”
“Yeah, well neither did I!” he yelled. “I would never perform a CID extraction out in the middle of the woods like that. It’s too dangerous. But you forced my hand. And now I’m helping you lie to all the people who are feeding us and giving us shelter when it’s incredibly dangerous for everyone. Having her here . . . not telling them that their vaccinations don’t keep them safe . . . It isn’t right.”
Enemy Inside (Defectors Trilogy) Page 21