by Zoe Cannon
She didn’t want to understand, but she did. If it were anything but this, she would have agreed with him. But this could have been Heather. It could have been her. And she had sent Jake to that place, to die or be erased.
She took a deep breath. Calmed her voice. She needed him to take her seriously. “This is important enough. It’s worth the risk.”
“You’re young, Becca.” Jameson’s voice sagged with sudden exhaustion. “You don’t even realize how young you are. I have a daughter your age. She’s a junior in high school. She thinks she could bring down Internal singlehandedly if only I’d let her try.”
So he thought she was some stupid kid because she wanted to save lives? Because she wanted to keep Internal from brainwashing hundreds—thousands—of children? “I know better than that.”
“But you think we can take on an entire division of Internal.”
“I think we have to try.”
“And if we try and fail, there will be no one left to do anything that might have a better chance of success.” He shook his head. “We’re meeting tomorrow night. I’ll bring it up with the others then. But I can already tell you what their decision will be. You’re going to have to let this one go.”
And let all those people die—people like Heather, like Jake, like her—so she could go back to gathering useless names? No. If there was anything worth risking her life for, this was it. “I can’t. I have to do this.”
For the first time that day, Jameson met her eyes. Did she see a flicker of regret there, or was it her imagination? “If you pursue this on your own, we’ll have no choice but to cut off all contact with you. We won’t be able to risk the association.”
So she could go ahead with this—and lose all her resources in the process. And what chance did she have of bringing down an entire division of Internal on her own?
It wasn’t an option. But neither was letting this go.
So she would have to convince the resistance somehow.
“Do you understand?” Jameson pressed.
She nodded. “Fine. I’ll let it go.” She put just enough resentment in her voice to keep it convincing. She didn’t even have to fake it.
She was glad Jameson didn’t have interrogation training. If he did, there was no way he could have missed seeing the lie.
Chapter Four
Becca had a plan.
The idea had come to her as soon as Jameson had dismissed her after their meeting. She knew how to reach the rest of the resistance. What she didn’t know was what to do if her plan succeeded and she got her chance to talk to them.
She needed to convince them that this was worth the risk. And she needed to do it without making them think she was more trouble than she was worth.
She had no idea how.
If they kicked her out, that was it. She would be sidelined, even more useless than she was now. She had no chance of accomplishing anything against Internal on her own.
She looked at her screen and realized she had typed nothing but the letter R for a good minute and a half. The video had long since moved past the last coherent—or as coherent as a dissident could get after five hours of interrogation—sentence she had typed.
The sound of an office chair’s wheels behind her didn’t startle her. She was used to it by now. “Hey, Micah,” she said without turning around.
He rolled closer. “Working late?”
“No, I—” She glanced down at her watch. Micah was right. Work had ended half an hour ago. “I guess I lost track of time.”
“Tough transcript?”
She shrugged. “The usual. Another dissident who doesn’t know when to quit. This one likes to mumble, too. I keep having to play the same section over and over.”
“Mumblers. I hate those.” He winced in sympathy. “Anyway, if you’re done here, do you want to grab some food together? I don’t know about you, but I’m starving.”
Her stomach shriveled at the mention of food. After what she had been watching, she would be okay with not eating for a week. And the last thing she needed was another opportunity to let Micah see through her. But she imagined driving home and facing her empty apartment. Imagined staring at the blank white walls and thinking about how she could lose her position in the resistance. Suddenly anything that put off that moment sounded good.
“I don’t think I have time for anything but a quick burger or something.” Every second spent with Micah was another chance for him to use his disconcerting talent for seeing things he wasn’t supposed to see.
Micah smiled. “Not a problem. I know just the place.”
Billion Dollar Bagels hadn’t sold bagels for as long as Becca could remember, but they had the best sandwiches in town despite their battered sign and despite having barely enough room to hold more than three customers at once. They drove there in Becca’s car, Micah keeping up a steady stream of benign chatter all the way. Becca couldn’t remember the last time she’d had a passenger in this car. Maybe never.
Inside, they ordered their sandwiches, then went back to the car, where they watched people enter and leave as they began to eat in silence. After the first couple of bites, Becca’s stomach forgot about the day’s interrogations, and she had to stop herself from devouring the whole sandwich in two gulps. Instead she ate slowly, savoring the food and the quiet companionship. For a moment she could almost pretend her life was this simple.
Micah broke the silence. “The evaluation wasn’t what I expected.”
Becca swallowed her bite before answering. “You had yours?”
“Last Thursday. I knew it was supposed to be thorough, but I didn’t know it was going to be quite that thorough. All those strange scenarios, and then the tests. Why does it matter how many how many shapes I can draw from memory? Or which words I can remember out of a ten-page list?”
Had her evaluation been so different from his? “What tests? And what scenarios?”
“You know. In such-and-such situation, would you do A, B, or C? And all the options are bad. ‘Your mother is drowning in the ocean. Do you swim in to save her even though neither of you will survive, or do you watch and do nothing?’” He frowned. “You didn’t get any of those?”
“No. Nothing like that. Just a bunch of questions about my preferences and my past.”
“What about the tests? Like the one where you had to draw all the shapes?”
“Nothing like that, either.” If she didn’t know better, she would think Micah was the one under suspicion. On the other hand, how did she know? He could be another dissident and she would never suspect. He could even be working with the same resistance group, dealing with the same private frustration. Wearing the same mask.
She shook her head violently to clear it of those thoughts. Ideas like that would lead to temptation she couldn’t afford. She could just imagine convincing herself that Micah was a dissident, starting to believe it enough that she confessed everything to him.
It would be so easy, with him. Too easy.
Micah tilted his head to watch her. “You don’t relax very often, do you?”
She locked any scraps of temptation away behind her mask as she answered. “Why do you say that?”
“Every time I see you, you’re so closed off. Even now. It’s like you’re just waiting for something bad to happen.”
She shrugged. “Working in 117 will do that to you. We don’t exactly deal with the most cheerful stuff.”
“You can’t let it take over your life, though. If you do, you’ll burn yourself out.” He fiddled with the end of his empty sandwich wrapper. “You think you’ll be able to make it to Lucky’s on Thursday? I missed you last week.”
“I don’t think I’ll have time.” Nothing could get her to face that gauntlet again. It wasn’t as if blending in mattered anymore, anyway. Looking social wouldn’t save her when Internal’s extra monitoring revealed her work for the resistance.
“Don’t let Vivian scare you off. Once you get to know her, she’s the best friend you co
uld ever have. I’ve never seen anyone as loyal to the people they care about as she is.”
“It’s not about her.” She searched the air for an excuse. “My mom was talking about wanting to do some kind of mother-daughter night on Thursday. I’ll have to check with her.” An unexpected pang of guilt shot through her as she spoke the lie. She dismissed it. She should be used to lying by now.
“Don’t worry about it. I know better than to get in Raleigh Dalcourt’s way.” He packed the ball tighter, until he could close a fist around it. A few seconds passed before he spoke again. “Well, if you can’t make it, maybe we could do something this weekend. Just the two of us.” He met her eyes for a second before lowering them to study the ball of paper in his hand.
Oh. Oh no. This was not what she needed. This was the last thing she needed. What wrong turn had she taken to make Micah think this was a possibility? How had she not seen it coming?
But even as she asked the questions, she knew how ridiculous they sounded.
Looking back with opened eyes, she could see everything that had led them to this point—all the smiles, the looks, the conversations. A million little wrong turns, and the worst part was, they didn’t seem like wrong turns at all. She had seen on some level the potential that was building between them, had tried to shut it down, but she hadn’t tried hard enough, hadn’t wanted it badly enough.
She hadn’t had a friend in so long, let alone anything more. And the thought of losing herself in his optimism and his gentle conviction, his bright blue eyes and the hands she was sure would cradle her as if she were a baby bird, precious and perfectly safe…
“No.” She was talking to herself as much as she was answering him. “No. No. I can’t.” Her mask was slipping and she couldn’t get it back. She didn’t know what he heard in her voice, didn’t know what kind of panic he was seeing in her eyes.
The hope in Micah’s eyes faded, turned into something dull and ugly. “I didn’t know the idea would be that… repulsive to you.”
She smoothed the mask back into place too late. “It’s not like that. I—”
He held up a hand. “Don’t explain. Let’s just get back to pick up my car, okay?”
They made the drive back to 117 in silence.
* * *
A steady stream of people poured out of the downtown bank, none of them the one she was looking for. She pretended to examine the dresses in the window of the store next door, growing tenser by the second. She checked her watch. Maybe he had already left. She had rushed here as soon as she had gotten out of work, driving so fast she’d gotten honked at twice in ten minutes, but maybe she had gotten here too late.
And if she lost this opportunity, she had nothing.
But when she looked up again, there he was, staring fixedly ahead of him as he exited the building.
After her meeting with Jameson yesterday, she had hurried to be the first to leave the park. He didn’t like them both to go at once—it made their meetings too conspicuous, he said. Never mind that if someone was watching them closely enough to notice something like that, it was probably already too late. She had raced back to her building to pick up her car, and had driven back to the park just in time to see Jameson walking away.
Then she had followed him.
He had gotten in his car and driven here, to this bank in the middle of downtown. This had to be where he worked. Now all she needed to do was let him lead her to the resistance meeting, where she would convince them to stop the reeducation program.
Right. That was all.
She stepped back as Jameson strode past her down the sidewalk, but he didn’t even look her way. He didn’t turn toward the parking lot around the side of the building, where her car was waiting; instead he continued down the street, away from the center of town.
It would be a lot harder to stay out of sight on foot, but what choice did she have? She followed.
The sidewalk wasn’t nearly crowded enough. Even with half a block between her and Jameson, if he looked behind him at all he would spot her right away. But he kept moving forward without so much as a glance in her direction.
Jameson kept up a brisk pace. Despite all the walking she’d done in the past few months, she struggled to keep up as they followed the sidewalk up a winding hill. Her skin prickled with every step. He’s spotted me. He knows I’m here. She could feel his eyes on her skin, could already hear the condemnation in his voice. But he never turned around.
She hung back as he waited by the crosswalk for the light to turn. Only once he had gone a few paces past the intersection did she run to catch up. The light changed just as she reached the near curb; she leapt into the street anyway, narrowly dodging a truck that honked as she flew by. Inconspicuous. Right.
They passed an antique shop with a sticker in the window that assured potential customers, The contents of this shop have been inspected and approved by Internal Defense. A hair salon whose sign urged passersby to Do your part—report suspicious activity. Everyone trying to prove they were more loyal than everyone else. Everyone afraid the Enforcers would come for them next. In theory only dissidents had anything to fear from Internal—that was what people told each other, anyway, as they proclaimed their support for the regime in their efforts to paint themselves as model citizens. But the threat was always there, lurking in each news report, in each whispered accusation, in each too-loud assertion that only other people had something to fear.
Growing up protected by her mother’s position, Becca hadn’t noticed the fear around every corner. She had truly believed everyone saw Internal as a benevolent force shielding them from the dissidents who wanted to destroy the fabric of their society. But now that she had reason to fear, she saw it everywhere, in the eyes of good citizens as well as traitors like her.
Her skin prickled again. But Jameson hadn’t spotted her. He kept walking, almost an entire block ahead of her by now, as she sweated to maintain his pace.
Something flashed in a store window. Something that disappeared before she could see it clearly. A reflection.
She spun around.
Mere feet behind her, Heather froze. Panic crossed her face as her eyes locked with Becca’s.
She turned to run, but Becca crossed the distance between them and grabbed her arm. “What are you doing here?” But she already knew the answer to that. Following her. Following her, just like she was following Jameson.
Her legs went weak as she realized what had almost happened. What she had almost done.
She had almost led Heather straight to the resistance.
Maybe it’s not what it looks like. Maybe she has some perfectly good explanation. Maybe it’s all a coincidence. But the guilty look on Heather’s face told her differently.
Heather looked away. “I just… I just wanted…”
“You were following me. Why were you following me?” She took a deep breath. Erased the anger from her face and voice and body as she retreated behind her mask. If Heather had suspicions about her—if, god forbid, Heather had followed her on Internal’s orders—nothing less than perfect control would save her.
She didn’t let go of Heather’s arm.
Heather faltered at the shift in Becca’s demeanor. “I… I just… I miss you, and work hasn’t been easy lately, and I thought… I thought you might understand. I figured we could talk after Lucky’s last Thursday, but you didn’t show. I’ve been trying to call you, but your old number doesn’t work anymore.”
She had gotten a new phone and a new number to go along with her new job. To make her calls more easily monitored, no doubt. Refusing hadn’t been an option. “So you started following me.”
“It was stupid, okay? I thought… I don’t know. It was stupid.” Her voice quavered with suppressed tears.
“How long have you been following me?” Long enough to spot her and Jameson together? To overhear something she shouldn’t have?
“Only a couple of times. I swear.” The first tears ran down Heather’s cheeks.
“I won’t do it again.” There was something desperate and hungry in her eyes when she looked at Becca.
Becca let go of Heather’s arm. It didn’t matter if Heather ran. Not if the damage had already been done.
Heather stayed frozen in place, not even bothering to wipe away her tears.
This cringing, quivering girl was not Becca’s best friend from before everything. She wasn’t the Heather whose laughter and tears had provided the melody to Becca’s constant harmony, whose fearless exuberance had brought color to Becca’s life and movement to her days. But neither was she the cold servant of the regime, the robotic good citizen Becca had seen the day their friendship had ended. This Heather was someone else.
So who was she?
All of Becca’s old instincts told her to help Heather, to comfort her, to find out what was wrong. But she lived in a different world now. They both did.
Maybe Heather could be taken at face value. Maybe she missed Becca the way Becca missed her. Maybe something had gone very wrong in her life, and old habits had kicked in and sent her running to Becca for comfort.
Or maybe she had come running to Becca because someone had sent her.
A spy for Internal wouldn’t act like this. A spy would be subtle, worming her way back into Becca’s life to discover her secrets. A spy wouldn’t get caught following her, and if she did, she would have a good excuse ready.
Unless that was what Becca was meant to think.
Or maybe Heather was simply as inexperienced at this as Becca was at working for the resistance. Maybe she was just fumbling along as best she could.