by K. Makansi
“Yeah,” he says. “You probably can’t see it from your angle, but one of the cameras just moved.”
“Shit,” I swear.
“No, it’s okay,” he whispers. “I don’t know why, but it’s pointing up towards the ceiling now.” I hear the same clicking again, this time from a different location, and I look up to see one of the cameras in my field of vision swerving slowly up towards the ceiling.
“What’s going on?” I muse.
“This is either really good or really bad,” Soren says tersely. Then there’s a click to my left and I look up to see the door swing open. My heart jump-starts and my breath quickens again. But it’s not Aulion, or Philip, or Vale—it’s the soldier who was with Vale. He has a stack of clothes in one arm and two backpacks draped over the other. He drops one pack each in front of us, separates the pile of clothing into two identical stacks and drops one at my feet, one at Soren’s. He pulls out a bolt cutter and, in about five seconds, cuts through the bindings around our feet and hands. His movements are clean, efficient, and precise.
“Get up,” he says, and Soren and I scramble to our feet, motivated by his tone of command. My leg is still stiff and sore, and since I’m not drugged at the moment, I feel the pull of my stitches. And I’m so hungry that I’m woozy.
“What the—” Soren starts, rubbing his freed wrists, but the man cuts him off.
“I’ll explain later. If you want to get out, do as I say.” He picks up the uniform at my feet and hands it to me. It’s a food-service uniform by the look of it. The clean laundry scent wafting from the clothes reminds me of fresh air, childhood, and freedom. “Change now. We have maybe five minutes, tops.”
Soren and I exchange glances, worried, awed, and confused. Can we trust him?
“Now!” the soldier snaps, startling me into action. I stop worrying and start obeying.
We jump to do his bidding. Without a thought about privacy, I slip my ragged, destroyed, dried-pee pants off and pull my shirt off. It’s a relief to have those dank clothes off. I try not to look at Soren as he strips, too, but my eyes keep tugging in his direction. I turn away. Shivering and cold, I pull my uniformed pants and shirt on as quickly as possible. The uniform fits me perfectly, and I notice Soren’s is equally well-tailored. How observant is this man?
“Stuff your ruined clothes in the backpack,” he says, and we quickly obey. He hands each of us a cap, and we put them on. “We don’t want to leave evidence that someone helped you out of here. Don’t worry about shoes. I’ve got boots for each of you in your packs, but right now we don’t have time. Follow me.” Wordlessly, we shoulder our packs and obey.
He leads us out of our cell, beyond the room with the two-way mirror, and into a long hallway. The lights are off and the halls are lit only by low green lights on the floors, so I assume it must be nighttime. It’s hard to see, and I wish for my infrared contacts, but the doctors took those out. I follow our mysterious rescuer by the sound of his footsteps, and Soren takes up the rear. My stomach burns from emptiness, and my body feels like it might implode. Standing up and walking of my own accord is a lot harder than I thought it would be. My stitches threaten to rip apart, and I grit my teeth with every step. I distract myself by wondering who this man is. But I keep my questions buttoned up inside my mind and pad softly through the darkness in my strange uniform.
We come to a door, and the soldier punches in a code and scans his palm print. The door opens, revealing a flight of twisting stairs going in only one direction: up. I shudder a little. So they were keeping us in the basement—the dungeon. Just like the stories my dad used to tell me when I was little. I wonder if there’s a dragon outside, and then think: Yes, there is. Her name is Corine Orleán.
Inside the stairwell, the lighting is a little better. We trot up the twisting stairs, barefoot, and the metal is cold on my feet. I pray the man has done as good a job guessing my shoe size as he has with my clothes. After a few twists of the stairwell, we alight on a different floor and the man palms and codes this door open as well. The halls here are dim and green as well, but I can see a hallway up ahead with brighter lighting. We push through wide swinging doors and find ourselves in an enormous industrial kitchen filled with 3-D printers, and I feel horribly exposed. Someone’s going to recognize me or Soren—after all, his mother was chancellor years ago, so he had his moment in the spotlight. But everything is quiet and empty. Even in the kitchen, the lights are dimmer than they would be during the day, and the shadows we cast are ominous and dark. It’s almost creepier than it would be if it were pitch-black.
We zig-zag around printers and packaging machines and come to another door. Our rescuer—if indeed he is rescuing us—pushes it open. There is a gentle whoosh, and I feel a breath of fresh, cool air on my face. It’s an exit, I realize, and the man holds the door open for me.
Just then, the room erupts in throbbing high-pitched noises. The alarms! Did we trigger them just now? No, not possible, they would have gone off immediately after he opened the door….
“Aulion must have found your empty cell,” the man says, appearing unconcerned. An automatic voice comes over the loudspeaker system.
“All available Sector military personnel to guard stations. Code Red, Code Red. All available Sector military personnel to guard stations. Initiating building lockdown in ten seconds.”
“Get outside,” the soldier says. “We need to get to the PODS.” Soren and I jump out the door and now my feet are freezing. Fortunately, there’s a POD glistening not fifty meters away.
Before we can make a dash for it, though, the man throws a hand out to stop me from running. He points up slowly—far too slowly, given our predicament—at a camera trained broadly around the exit. He pulls out a handheld Bolt and takes careful aim, fires. The blue light flashes around the camera and when it dissipates, the light on the camera is off.
“Now we run.” The three of us sprint to the POD, and the man punches in an emergency override code. They’re not supposed to be running at this hour, but apparently our rescuer has a way around that. The POD door slides open and starts to shimmer, indicating that it is active and receiving passengers. We slide in and the door shuts, and the POD starts to roll us through the capital, to an unknown destination. Soren and I sit down side by side, and the man sits across from us.
“You’ll find your boots in the bags, along with several spare pairs of socks. I recommend putting them on now, because we’ll need to move quickly once we arrive at the end of this line.” He pulls his own pack off his shoulders and digs through it. He pulls out some antiseptic wipes and bends over me. “You’ll need to pull off your pants for a minute. I need to check on your stitches.”
“I can do it perfectly well,” I respond curtly. The idea of getting naked yet again in this tiny enclosed space does not appeal to me. He looks up at me and shrugs. He hands me the wipes, and I start to roll my pants down exactly as much as is necessary for me to see all the various places where they’ve stitched up my thigh. I unroll one of the wipes and start to gently massage the dried blood off my skin. It stings, but it’s nothing compared to the pain of the electroshocks from earlier. Once I’ve finished and the wounds are tingly clean, he takes the used cloths, douses them in rubbing alcohol, and pulls out a lighter. In the corner of the POD, he lights them on fire, and they incinerate.
“No DNA evidence this way,” he says. I nod, looking at the little scorch mark on the POD.
“I didn’t have time to get much food, but this should do for now,” the man says, handing each of us a little round sticky fruit ball and some preserved meat. Soren and I eye the food lustily, but we don’t dare take it. Who knows what the Sector could have put in it?
“It’s okay,” he says, with a trace of a smile. “I have my own personal supply of food, untainted by the Sector Dieticians.”
“How is that possible?” Soren asks, grabbing the fruit bar and stuffing it in his mouth.
“Who are you?” I demand.
; “That’s not relevant now.” I stare at him. I should feel grateful that he just rescued us, that he is risking his life to get us out of the Sector’s hands, that he’s done so much for us, but all I feel is a frustration at our helplessness. Why won’t he tell us anything?
“We’ve put our lives in your hands—” Soren says with an edge to his voice. I’m glad he’s on my side.
“You’re not safe yet,” the man interrupts.
“Maybe not, but the least you can do is tell us who we should thank for getting us out of that cell.”
“Chan-Yu,” he says, softly. “Chan-Yu Hayashi. That’s my name.”
20 - VALE
Fall 91, Sector Annum 105, 03h41
Gregorian Calendar: December 20
Jeremiah sits opposite me, eyes closed, head back, chair tipped up on two legs against the wall. I’ve been briefing him on everything I found at my mother’s lab—about Hawthorne, the DNA, and the massacre. I haven’t even mentioned Remy and Soren yet. Now he’s quiet, still, and I know he’s deep in thought. Usually he’s a blur of movement, always tapping his fingers or his feet to some unknown or nonexistent rhythm. It’s only when he’s quietly contemplating something that he stops moving. It’s as if all the energy in his body flows directly to his brain, and everything else stops. I can’t even see him breathing. I can’t help holding my breath myself—will he believe me?
When I left Chan-Yu in the hallway and headed up to the rooftop flight deck where my Sarus was parked, I had every intention of going home like he said. I even had Demeter program the flight path. But going home didn’t feel right. All I could think of was whether or not I made the right choice. I left Remy and Soren’s lives in Chan-Yu’s hands, but how could I know I’d done the right thing by trusting him? He’d been my aide for all these months, and yet I didn’t know anything about him. Did he lie to my mother or did he lie to me? He could have killed Remy and Soren and then disappeared, just like my mother commanded. But then I heard the Code Red alarm, and I knew he had been true to his word. I gripped the Outsider pendant in my hand and instructed Deme to change the flight path. I needed to talk to the one person in the Sector I knew I could trust.
Jeremiah was furious when I showed up at his door, and no wonder, given that it was just after three in the morning. But he caught on to the urgency in my voice and let me in. I mixed him up a cup of the Dieticians’ brew for alertness and sat him down to tell him everything I’d just learned.
I’m the restless one now. I tap my fingers, stare anxiously around the room, and shift my weight in my chair. Finally, unhappily, Jeremiah raises his head and his chair slams down on all four legs. Then his foot starts tapping again.
“Okay.”
“What do you mean, ‘Okay’?” I exclaim. I was expecting more than that.
“I don’t know what else to say, Vale. I’m terrified, frankly, now that I know all this. I believe you, every word you’ve said. There’s no reason for you to lie to incriminate your mother, so I can only assume you’re telling the truth. But you’ve put my life in danger by telling me this. What will Corine do if she finds out I know about her crimes? She certainly won’t think twice about my well-being.”
I stare at him. I hadn’t thought of that. She was willing to have Remy and Soren secretly murdered because of something they said on camera—she would almost certainly be willing to kill Jeremiah to protect her secret. My mother, the murderer. I think I’m going to be sick. How many other atrocities have been committed at her behest? Does my father know about this? He can’t—he can’t know. But does he?
The biggest question looming in my mind is: Why? Why did she want them dead? What did she hear or see them talking about on the security cameras that necessitated an act of murder? For that matter, what about that DNA was so important that Hawthorne had to die? Are Remy and Soren connected to him somehow? To the DNA?
“I had to tell someone,” I say, embarrassed. “I thought I could trust you.” There’s a slight edge to my voice, a feeling of betrayal. I can’t lose Jeremiah, too.
“You can.” He laughs, almost barking, an awkward, uncomfortable laugh. “It’s not like I’m going to tell anyone. I’m not about to throw away my life like that. I’m just worried about what happens next.”
“Next. Shit. I don’t know. I can barely process what’s happening now, let alone think about what happens next.” I stare at him, conscious of the fact that I still haven’t told him the full story. He doesn’t know about the Resistance, the raid, Remy and Soren, or the fact that my mother almost had them killed, too. I haven’t gotten that far yet. Technically, Jeremiah only has first-level security clearance for his engineering work, so he’s not supposed to even know about the existence of the Resistance. I know word’s gotten around a little bit among some of the Sector workers, but Jeremiah has never mentioned them to me, and I know I’ve never spoken about them openly in front of him.
Damn the security clearances.
“Look, Miah, there’s something I haven’t been telling you, because under Sector security authorizations, I’m not allowed to.” He looks up at me curiously from across the desk. “But you need to know, because there’s a piece of the story I’m leaving out. There’s a group of, shall we say, rebels, former high-ups in the—”
“Are you talking about the Resistance?” he interrupts sharply.
“I—what?” I sputter. “How did you know?”
He laughs bitterly. “I think my father is one of them. He left his job in Ellas about six months ago when one of his friends was killed in a freak accident. He didn’t think it was an accident and he couldn’t get any answers he liked. So he sent me a note and disappeared.”
“He sent you a note and said he was joining the Resistance?” I ask, incredulous.
“No, of course not. He didn’t say anything about why he was leaving, just that now that I’m a grown man, I need to make my own choices—and watch my back.”
“Damn,” I whisper.
“I hadn’t seen him in a long time anyway, only a couple of times since I came to the Academy, so it wasn’t a huge loss. My parents divorced a long time ago, and we were never very close. But I put my ear to the ground and asked the right questions, and I found out about the Resistance.”
I stare at him, speechless. Once again, I realize, I have underestimated my friend. I’ve relied too much on my mother’s judgment. But how will he react to what I have to tell him next? I clear my throat nervously.
“Okay. You know about the Resistance. Did you know that the Seed Bank Protection Project was just a cover-up? It should be called, ‘The Resistance Annihilation Project,’” I say with a forced, desperate laugh.
“No way,” he whispers, leaning forward. “So that’s why you’ve been spending so much time at the Military Complex with good old Aulion. You’re preparing to take on the Resistance.”
“Yeah,” I say, looking down at my shoes. “Something like that.” There is a long pause as I weigh the things I’ve done over the last year, in my training and preparation for my new position, and the steps I’ve taken recently as a commander. “So, anyway. The reason I have to tell you about this is—” I take a deep breath “—I recently led my team on a raid interception. It was a hostage-capture mission at one of our seed banks we had reason to believe the Resistance was interested in.” Jeremiah’s eyes go wide as he listens, whether with awe and intrigue or disgust, I can’t quite tell.
“We were supposed to nab Elijah Tawfiq—you remember him, brilliant researcher, one of the smartest people I’ve ever met. Long story, but he was a perfect target. He was slippery, though, and too quick for us. But we came back with Soren Skaarsgard and Remy Alexander.”
Jeremiah lets out a low whistle. He stares at me, sizing me up. I force myself to hold his gaze and accept whatever judgment he may pass.
“My former best friend. And your former girlfriend.”
“She was never my girlfriend—” I protest, but he lets out a low chuckle and a smile creases
his bearded face. I know then that he doesn’t hate me, that he’s not going to judge me.
“She may not have been your girlfriend, but you can’t deny you were in love with her for a long time. Maybe still in love with her.” He tosses me a grin. “What a strange coincidence that she should have made it back to the capital with you.”
“You think I did it for love? Oh, that’s hilarious. Let me tell you about how my mother almost had my ‘girlfriend’ and your best friend killed.”
I run him quickly through my disastrous interrogation, Aulion’s injections, and Remy’s words about her sister. I explain that she was the one who inspired me to go hunt down the real reason for the attack on Professor Hawthorne’s classroom, and how when I started to leave my mother’s lab, I overheard my mother telling Chan-Yu to kill Remy and Soren, cover it up, and disappear. Jeremiah’s eyes light up when I tell him how I had to sneak out of the building using the dumbwaiter shaft. When I get to the part where I ran into Chan-Yu and realized it was him my mother had been speaking to, he gasps perfectly.
“Did you kill him?” he asks.
“No!” The thought sounds absurd now, even though I had been prepared to do it—or die trying—when I confronted him in the hallway. “No, here’s where the story gets even more bizarre, if that’s possible. It turns out he’s an Outsider, and he had no plans of obeying my mother anyway. He said, ‘My allegiance lies outside the Sector,’ and I had no idea what he meant until he gave me this.” I pull the pendant out from my pocket and hand it over. Jeremiah picks it up and twirls it admiringly.
“I’ve never seen one of these before.” He turns it over in his hand.
“I hadn’t either. ‘If you should ever find yourself lost in the woods, this may help,’ he said.”
“What the hell does that mean?” Jeremiah holds the pendant up to the light, examining it from all angles. “Is it some miniature Outsider food printer or something? A grizzly bear vaporizer? Does it blow up into an airship?” I laugh. He passes it back to me