Necessary Sacrifices (The Internal Defense Series Book 2)

by Zoe Cannon

Smoke.

  She shoved through the wall of onlookers, no longer bothering to apologize, no longer caring about looking inconspicuous. Her silent plea pounded through her chest with every heartbeat. No. No. No.

  Until she reached the line of Enforcers that held back the crowd.

  Until she could see the place where the bookstore had been.

  A gutted ruin stood in its place, charred bits of wooden wall reaching for the sky, an egg cracked open with nothing inside. Fire trucks stood vigil on the curb, even though nothing remained of the fire but the destruction it had left behind. A firefighter approached an Enforcer—Enforcers, they were everywhere, there were so many—who waved him away with a dismissive gesture. The Enforcers swarmed the sidewalk in front of the ruin; as Becca watched, a firefighter warned one away from the front door, which, incongruously, was still standing.

  No no no no…

  She drew in a choked breath. Let it out slowly. Mask on. She was just another bystander, just another rubbernecker wearing an expression of excited horror as she craned her neck to see closer. Jameson’s voice rang in her ears—If you look at all guilty, if you look at all afraid… She didn’t have to finish the sentence. She knew how his warning ended.

  It ended like this.

  She caught a flash of bright hair from behind the Enforcers, a glimpse of two people wearing neither the firefighters’ uniform nor the Enforcers’ face-concealing helmets. Someone had survived. A burst of hope—but no, the resistance had done this, she remembered them threatening to do it when they had argued over whether to let her live. They had destroyed the building, and themselves along with it. They hadn’t wanted to survive.

  The two people stepped forward, their arms swinging loosely at their sides.

  No handcuffs. Not prisoners.

  No survivors.

  The first was a man with an Asian cast to his features, surveying the destruction before him like royalty, lowering his head only slightly to speak to the woman beside him.

  The woman was Heather.

  Part Two

  Chapter Eight

  Becca came back to awareness slowly, drawn by the familiar ring that seemed to travel to her from an impossible distance. The bedroom came into focus around her as she fumbled for her phone. She didn’t remember leaving the scene of the explosion. Didn’t remember driving home. Didn’t remember how she had ended up here, sitting on the floor in the dark—when had the sun gone down?—with her legs pulled up to her chest.

  Her shaking fingers closed around the phone. She brought it to her ear. “Hello?” Her voice, like the ringing, came from a long way away. It sounded so normal. How did she sound so normal?

  “Hey, Becca.” Micah’s voice wrapped around her like a blanket. “Vivian is trying to get us all together at Lucky’s tonight—she has some kind of news. I know it’s short notice, but do you think you can make it?” Hesitant hope hid behind his words.

  I can’t, she started to say. But any minute now, the footsteps would come. The soft click of the door, the handcuffs fastening around her wrists. If any of the others had survived, they would give her up before too long. Every interrogation was the same. She could almost hear it in her mind; her fingers twitched, tapping out the transcript.

  If this was her last night of freedom, she didn’t want to be alone.

  “I’ll be there soon,” she told him.

  “Great! I’ll see you there.” Too much happiness in his voice. Too much relief.

  It doesn’t matter, she wanted to tell him. I’ll be dead soon anyway.

  She hung up.

  The trip went by in flashes. She was swaying on her feet outside her apartment, blinking in the too-bright light of the hallway. She was driving down darkened streets. She was standing in the restaurant, a shaky ball of stillness in the center of the noise. Gripping the table to stay on her feet. Sliding into the chair next to Micah.

  Vivian watched her with satisfaction. She nodded almost imperceptibly, a private acknowledgement that Becca was keeping up her end of their bargain. Across from Vivian, Ramon studied Becca, his face unreadable. And Heather—

  Heather.

  The image came back to Becca as clearly as if she were still standing there on the sidewalk. Heather standing in front of the bookstore, talking to the Enforcers, examining the aftermath. A question threatened to explode from Becca’s lips—What have you done? She didn’t know whether it was meant for Heather or herself. Had she led Heather to the resistance? Had they died because of her?

  Heather looked up. As soon as she did, something crossed her face, disappearing too quickly for Becca to read.

  It looked a little like relief.

  That strange aborted conversation on Friday night. Had Heather been trying to tell her something? Had she been trying to warn her?

  Had Heather known about her and the resistance all along?

  Micah’s voice interrupted her thoughts. “I’m glad you could make it.” His eyes sparkled; his smile threatened to split his face in two. He had looked at her that way after their kiss, a million years ago.

  She tried to match his smile, the brightness in his eyes. The look slid into place too naturally. It shouldn’t be so easy to pretend. Not when the others were all dead, not when she had breathed in the remnants of their death a few short hours ago.

  He frowned slightly as he looked at her more closely. “What’s wrong?”

  No. Not now. She couldn’t let him see through her now. Not with the others listening. Not with Heather watching, putting the pieces together in her mind.

  She couldn’t give in to the temptation to curl up in his arms and tell him everything.

  Not that it mattered. If any of the others had survived, the Enforcers were probably already on their way.

  “I’m just tired, that’s all.” She turned to the others. “So what’s the news?” Her voice didn’t so much as quiver.

  “I think Heather should tell you that.” Vivian gave Heather a significant look. “Go on, Heather, tell them.”

  Heather looked down at her empty plate. “You didn’t have to bring everyone here like this, you know. It’s not like I did anything.” She twisted her hands together. “It was Milo’s baby. I was just there.”

  Vivian gave Heather a mock glare. “Tell them or I will.”

  “Okay, fine. But it’s really not a big deal.” Heather glanced up for a second before fixing her gaze on the plate again. “Milo… the investigator I’ve been shadowing… he’s been trying to find this local resistance group for weeks. He found out the other day that they would be meeting today, and where. Of course, it all went wrong—as soon as they realized Enforcement was there, they blew up the meeting place with themselves inside. Milo was furious when he found out—he went down there just to yell at the Enforcers about how incompetent they were, and brought me with him, I guess to show me how to yell at Enforcers.”

  Becca sat like a doll, like a stone, a paper smile pasted on her face. Listening as Heather dismissed the others’ deaths in a few short sentences. Listening for the one piece of information that would determine whether she lived or died.

  Did any of them survive?

  “Hey, that’s an important career skill, or so I’ve been told,” Ramon was saying. “You know what they say in Investigation. How did the dissidents make sure Investigation couldn’t get hold of them? They created Enforcement.”

  Becca’s mom had always said the same thing, except with “Processing” and “Investigation” respectively. That was the thought that ran through Becca’s head, the absurd thing her mind latched onto so she wouldn’t have to think about the rest.

  Vivian clucked at Heather in disapproval. “It wasn’t all Milo. You know you helped. And everyone in Internal will know it, too. Milo is going to be the Raleigh Dalcourt of Investigation if he keeps this up, and he’s taking you with him.”

  “I don’t know,” Heather mumbled. “That’s not really what I want. I just want to do what I can to help.”

  Ramo
n rolled his eyes. “And everyone knows Raleigh Dalcourt became completely ineffective once she got famous.”

  Heather’s shoulders closed in around her. “I’d rather not have people looking too closely at me, is all.”

  Vivian threw up her hands in exasperation. “Do you know how many people would kill for an opportunity like this?”

  But Ramon nodded, the humor in his dark eyes transmuting into a quiet intensity. “Because of your parents.”

  “People are already talking about how I’m going to turn out like them.” Heather folded further in on herself. “The more people know who I am, the worse it will get.”

  “There’s no better way to get out from under your parents’ reputation than to work against what they stood for,” Micah pointed out.

  Heather shrugged. With her shoulders hunched the way they were, the movement made her look like a baby-faced gargoyle. “That’s what Milo keeps saying.”

  “This isn’t the time to worry about what people might think of you,” said Vivian. “You need to celebrate. You took out an entire dissident group! How many people can say that?” She turned to Becca. “Right, Becca?”

  “Right.” There were two Beccas—one buried deep inside her, curled in a ball on the bedroom floor, the other smiling at Heather and marveling at how easy this was. “Congratulations, Heather.”

  Jameson and his cold lectures. The restless man desperate for payback. The woman and her unborn baby. Congratulations on killing them, Heather.

  The other version of her, the small shaking grieving version, stirred.

  What reason did she have not to drop the mask and accuse Heather of the murders she had helped commit? Why shouldn’t she make Heather understood what she had done?

  What did she have to lose now? They were coming for her anyway.

  No. She forced the questions back. Held her mask up as a shield between her and her dangerous thoughts. Maybe the Enforcers weren’t coming. Maybe none of the others had survived to name her. She had to keep pretending, just in case.

  And if they were all dead? If there was no resistance anymore, no way for her to fight? What was the point of this charade then?

  Get the information. The rest could come later. She had transcribed enough interrogations to know her priorities. Information first.

  She made sure her other self was safely locked away before speaking. “Did any of them make it to 117?”

  Heather shook her head. “As far as I know, they’re all dead. Unless any of them got away, but I don’t think that’s likely.” Something else flickered in Heather’s eyes then, something Becca couldn’t make sense of. And then it vanished. Maybe Becca had imagined it.

  But it didn’t matter, because she had gotten the information she needed.

  They were dead, all of them. Her name wasn’t going to show up in anyone’s transcript. Maybe she could get through the night without the Enforcers marching into her apartment. Maybe she could get through another week, another year. Maybe the rest of her life, because if they didn’t already know about her, what danger was she in now? She could keep on collecting information until her head bulged with it, but it would never put her at risk, because who would she give it to?

  She was safe. She was alone.

  * * *

  When Becca woke up the next morning, they were still dead.

  Her alarm clock, rather than the sound of footsteps beside the bed, had woken her. That probably meant she was still safe. If Enforcement hadn’t come for her by now, they probably weren’t going to.

  Probably.

  Internal sometimes watched dissidents for weeks or even months before finally arresting them. Maybe to collect evidence. Maybe to follow the dissidents to their contacts. Maybe just to make sure no one could predict what Internal would do, so no one could ever really feel safe.

  As Becca mechanically prepared for work, the construction sounds from next door followed her. Erasing the playground. Erasing her past. Pouring cold concrete where her refuge used to be.

  Something had hollowed her out, emptied all the space where the grief should have been. She felt nothing as she drove to work. As she waved her ID badge at the receptionist. As she stepped into an office filled with the buzz of excited gossip.

  I heard they were trying to set up an underground base.

  They all killed themselves, can you imagine? Blew themselves up.

  Well, you’ve seen the videos—can you blame them?

  She sat down at her desk and opened up her half-finished transcript from Friday. Slipped on her headset to drown out the voices, grabbed at the monotony of work to drown out her thoughts. This dissident would probably break soon, and he looked like he might have something she could—

  Something she could do what with, exactly? She had no way to pass on any information, no one to tell her that everything she had found was insignificant.

  No one to help her stop the reeducation program.

  Yesterday had been a haze of grief and waiting. Yesterday she had known they were coming for her. She hadn’t thought about the reeducation program, about the plan the others hadn’t gotten the chance to share with her. But today she was still alive, and nobody was going to stop the program. What was she going to do, stop it with her transcripts? With her amazing ability to keep herself out of harm’s way while everyone who could actually do anything useful died?

  She swallowed down tears of frustration. Not here. Not now. She could cry when she got home, although what would be the point? It wouldn’t bring any of them back. It wouldn’t save any of the kids who were going to die in reeducation.

  The others might have had contact with other resistance groups. If Jameson were in Becca’s position, he might have been able to enlist help from one of them. But Becca was here instead, and she had nothing but a well-connected mother and an entry-level job, neither of which were any help to any of the kids locked up in the reeducation center right now.

  She hadn’t started the video up yet. How long had her fingers been sitting silently on the keys? Some of the old rules still applied. She still had to go through the motions, even though now it was for nothing.

  She started up the video. The dissident quivered on the floor, crying as he pleaded for one more chance to prove his loyalty to the regime.

  If yesterday had gone just a little bit differently, if just one of the others had survived, she would have been in one of these videos instead of safely up here recording someone else’s agony.

  She could leave. She could walk out the door and never come back. Not today, not on the heels of what had happened yesterday; she couldn’t risk the chance, no matter how slim, of someone putting the two events together and not liking what they saw. But a week from now, or two weeks, she could leave. Never see another of these videos again. Never hear her coworkers taking bets on when someone would break. Never come near this building again. She might not even end up in one of the underground cells if she behaved herself, and what choice did she have now that the others’ deaths had rendered her useless?

  Keeping her dissident thoughts hidden was easy enough; she’d had more than enough practice at it. She could live out the rest of her life with her silent opinions locked safely away inside her. Go off to college someplace where Raleigh Dalcourt was nothing more than a name on the news. Someplace with only a token Internal presence—a surveillance center sharing space with Investigation, and just enough Enforcers to take care of the ordinary dissidents who popped up every couple of months. And then she could… what? What had she wanted to do with her life before the resistance? What life had she imagined for herself back when she had still had a future?

  She had come to work here knowing how it would end. She had turned it over again and again in her mind during her last months of school, all the sleepless nights paid for with covert naps in class the next day. And in the end, she had chosen it. Had accepted the fact that this would kill her.

  But the others had died instead.

  The resistance was go
ne, and she was still here, and there was nothing left for her to do but walk away unscathed from her suicide mission.

  Through her headset, the dissident screamed.

  A few more days, and she would never have to hear another scream like that again.

  Tears stung her eyes. She forced them back.

  She should have been happy. Everything she had thought she’d given up—her entire future—had been handed back to her. She could do anything, she could live, and she was holding her breath to keep the tears back because she would rather stay here and die.

  But she hadn’t given up her future, not really. She had chosen her future. And now it had been taken away.

  The dissident began burbling names, and she dutifully recorded each one. She fixed them in her mind out of habit, even though there would be no meeting with Jameson this afternoon or ever.

  I could stay.

  The thought knocked at her mind like an uninvited guest. It was crazy. It didn’t belong. She could stay and do what? She had no way of helping anyone.

  But that wasn’t true, was it? She had her mom’s keycard.

  She couldn’t stop the reeducation program. But maybe she could save one life.

  It was a stupid plan. Even if she made it down to the underground levels, she couldn’t just walk out of 117 with a dissident. She would only get herself killed.

  But what was her alternative? To walk away when she could have tried to save someone? To live a safe and meaningless life while Internal’s crimes continued all around her?

  The dissident on the screen went still. The video ended.

  So she was really going to do this. Even knowing how it would end, even knowing it would probably come to nothing, she was going to do it.

  Anticipation pulsed through her body, the beating of a heart jolted back to life when she hadn’t known it had stopped.

  She skimmed the transcript for errors and sent it off. Her cursor hovered over the next video in the queue. The video was marked as urgent, with dire warnings of what would happen if she didn’t get the transcript finished by the end of the day.