by Zoe Cannon
And in exchange, he would use that influence to maneuver himself into a position where he could subtly work against the reeducation program. Not to shut it down—she had explained to him what would happen if he did—but to soften it, to ensure that the kids who went through the program came out with as few scars as possible. To help them in the only way he could. The only way she could.
I’m willing to sacrifice my life for this, she had told him. You’re planning to frame me for something as soon as my mother is executed anyway. I’d rather die for something that matters. She had met his eyes—and had found respect there. How about you? Are you willing to make your own sacrifice? Are you willing to work with a dissident to protect these kids?
It hadn’t taken him long to come up with his answer.
“You’re sure this will work?” he asked now.
“As sure as I can be.” Her eyes drifted shut. Prying them open again took more strength than it should have.
“I won’t be implicated? You’ll give them the story we agreed on?”
“Word for word,” she managed as her eyelids fell again. This time she couldn’t stop them. “I promise.”
The rest of the drive blurred by in a half-conscious fog. She fought to stay awake, to absorb every second of what could be her last hours of life, but her body refused to obey. Every time she opened her eyes the sky was a little darker, until finally she woke to the flat black of a moonless night and the silence of a parked car.
The processing center loomed ahead of them, a box of deeper black with a scattering of lights where a few people still hadn’t left their offices. Most of the work at this time of night, though, would be happening on the underground levels.
Somewhere in that building, her mother was waiting in a cell, counting down the hours until her execution.
Milo’s shaking had stopped. He surveyed the building ahead of them as if he had never known a day of fear in his life, as if the processing center and everything in it belonged to him. For a little while there, his mask had faltered, but no one looking at him now would ever suspect it.
“Are you ready?” he asked.
She nodded. The movement sent a wave of pain through her head. “I’m ready.”
Milo got out of the car first. He crossed to her side and opened the door cautiously, like he was afraid she might bolt at the last minute.
“I won’t run,” she promised him.
He placed an arm around her waist, avoiding her bruises as best he could as he helped her out of the car. She wobbled, but stayed on her feet.
He waited until she found her balance. Then, with an apologetic look, he pulled his arm back from her waist. He gripped her elbow as if she were any other prisoner as they walked toward the front doors.
During her months working in 117, the once-intimidating structure had become nothing more than an ordinary building. Even with the daily reminders of what it represented, even knowing her life would likely end here, when it had been part of her daily routine it had been almost impossible not to start taking it for granted. Now it rose as threateningly as it had the first time she had walked through those doors, the night Heather’s parents had been arrested.
The doors opened on the same scene that had greeted her at the beginning of every workday. Familiarity had rendered the receptionist all but invisible, and the metal detector a brief annoyance that demanded her attention only when she forgot to take her keys out of her pocket. Now every detail sprang out at her as if she were seeing it for the first time. The gleaming metal desk that dominated the room. The inscrutable expressions of the guards who stood to either side of the metal detector. The light that shone down too brightly, illuminating every nuance of her fear, every detail of her guilt.
The receptionist looked up at them with a puzzled frown. “Becca Dalcourt? What’s going on? What happened to you?” Her gaze dropped to the handcuffs around Becca’s wrists. Her eyes widened.
Milo walked up to the metal detector. Looked down at the handcuffs. Hesitated. One of the guards waved him around the side. With a nod, he bypassed the detector and strode up to the front desk, Becca in tow.
“I have a blue-flagged dissident for you from R100.” Milo jerked Becca forward for emphasis.
The receptionist studied Becca, then Milo. “May I have your name, please?”
“Milo Miyamoto.” He straightened as he said it, giving his answer an undeserved emphasis. “I’m with Investigation.”
The woman turned aside and tapped something out on her keyboard. She nodded as if the screen had answered a question for her. She touched her earpiece and turned away, murmuring in a voice too low for Becca to hear.
She nodded again, maybe to the person on the other end of the call, and turned back to Becca and Milo. “Someone will be out for you in just a moment.” Her expression was bland.
Becca waited in limbo. She eyed the door to the right of the desk, the only link between this room and the rest of the building. How many times had she passed through that door without a second thought?
The door opened.
Two Enforcers, identical in their faceless helmets, strode through the door. Their steps were in sync as they crossed the room to Becca.
And passed her by as if she weren’t there.
One grabbed Milo’s arms. Slammed him down against the desk before he could react. The other snapped the handcuffs around his wrist in a fluid motion. It all looked smooth, crisp, rehearsed, like a ritual they had performed many times before. The receptionist watched impassively as Milo struggled and sputtered.
Do something, Milo begged Becca with his eyes. Make them understand.
She turned away.
One more betrayal.
Milo didn’t find his voice until the Enforcers had marched him halfway to the door. “No. I’m not a dissident. The girl I brought in with me—she’s the dissident. You don’t know what you’re doing! You don’t—”
And then he was gone.
Chapter Twenty-One
They brought Becca down to the underground levels anyway.
She had expected that. Had expected them not to accept her innocence without question. Still, with every step, she had to resist the urge to run, the voice that told her she would never leave.
A year and a half ago, her interrogation had taken place in a room with an old-fashioned wooden desk and a calming blue carpet. Her interrogator, a man barely a decade older than Becca with gangly limbs and an apologetic demeanor, had unfastened her handcuffs, given her a glass of water, tried to provide her with some semblance of comfort.
She knew as soon as the guard led her into the interrogation room that this time would be different.
The guard pushed her into the single chair, the only piece of furniture in the room. There was no carpet here; there were no painted walls. There was no glass of water. There was only the rough concrete of the underground cells and the stark light overhead that illuminated every corner, as though any shadows could be potential hiding places for dissidents’ secrets.
And there was the man leaning against the far wall, watching her with too-sharp eyes.
He straightened as she sat. Took a step toward her. She shrank back by instinct. She knew this dance. She had seen it a hundred times. It started with defiance—defiance and futile lies.
Like the lies she was about to offer.
She glanced up at the camera. Who would transcribe this interrogation later? Would someone wonder why she wouldn’t just give in already so they could finish up the transcript and go to lunch?
No. Because she was going to get this right.
“Tell me about Milo Miyamoto,” the interrogator said without preamble. “From the beginning.”
She pulled together the fragments of her story in her mind. Every half-truth, every bit of misdirection. If she made the slightest mistake…
She had seen what would happen if she made a mistake. She had seen it every time she had sat down at her desk.
She wrapped her mask around
her like a favorite blanket. Stitched back together piece by piece, almost as good as new. She didn’t use it to hide her fear—not this time. For once, the fear would work in her favor. She let her breath get slightly more ragged, hesitated a little longer than she normally would. Tried her best to make herself look terrified.
It didn’t take much. She knew what was at stake.
“He came to my apartment last month.” She made sure to look the interrogator in the eye. “He asked me to give him a statement he could use against my mother. He…” She swallowed. “When I said she was innocent… he threatened to have me arrested along with her if I didn’t say exactly what he wanted me to say.”
Interrogators were trained to spot dissidents’ lies. They did it every day.
But a lot of people in 117 wanted her mother to be innocent. Would accept any alternate explanation if it meant avoiding her execution.
Was this man one of them?
Please, she wanted to beg him. Please believe me. Please let me fix what I did to her. Let Milo die in her place—let him die for what he did to the resistance.
She waited for him to speak.
“Are you claiming that he knowingly gave Internal Defense false evidence relating to Raleigh Dalcourt’s dissident activity?” The interrogator was a blank slate, wiped clean of emotion, of human expression. He was nothing but eyes and voice and unspoken threats.
But underneath that mask of his, underneath that emptiness, there was someone like her mother. Someone human. Someone fallible.
And maybe that person underneath wanted Raleigh Dalcourt to live.
“He made the whole thing up. There were classified files he needed access to, so he forced someone to help him use my mother’s file access. That way he could find what he needed and get rid of my mother at the same time.”
“And you gave him what he wanted. You made a false accusation against your mother.”
“I…” The shame rushed back, heating her face, halting her voice. “I was afraid. He said he could make sure I was executed as a dissident, and I…” Her throat clogged with tears. She didn’t force them back. This small crack in her mask would make her lies more believable.
The interrogator took another step closer. “You understand that you’ve just admitted to dissident activity.”
She pressed herself against the back of the chair. “I know. But I need you to know she’s innocent. Even if that means admitting to what I did.”
She didn’t want to think about what would happen when he took that last step forward. When he finally closed the space between them.
But he didn’t. “Tell me about these files.” His voice was as unreadable as his expression.
“They were about some new program. Something about dissidents’ children. Like him. He said he was going to rescue them. He needed someone to take the blame—someone who would be executed in his place so he could keep working against Internal. He said if I didn’t go along with it, he’d frame Micah Nevin instead. Micah believed in Internal more than anyone else I know. He didn’t deserve that. And… and I thought maybe I did, after what I had done to my mother.”
“Micah Nevin.” The interrogator’s gaze sharpened. “You know him.”
This time her jolt of fear had nothing to do with the interrogator’s looming presence. “Why? Did something happen?” Had they caught him? Was he on the underground levels right now?
A flash of Micah in an interrogation room, Micah lying broken on the floor like Jameson. No. They would break him so easily. Destroy him so quickly. No. They don’t have him. They don’t.
The interrogator crossed his arms. “It’s not your concern. What was your relationship with him?”
“We were… we were involved. Before he left for interrogation analysis training.”
“What is his connection to Milo Miyamoto?”
“They didn’t know each other. But Milo knew about me and Micah. That’s why he thought he could use Micah against me.”
The interrogator watched her. And watched her. And watched her. Waiting for… she didn’t know what.
She didn’t move. Didn’t speak. Saying Micah’s name had done something here that she didn’t understand. It had left her balancing on a tightrope, and any wrong move could send her tumbling to the earth.
At last, the interrogator nodded. A flash of something—relief?—crossed his face, gone almost too quickly for Becca to see. He took a step back, and Becca let out a breath she didn’t know she had been holding.
“Tell me about what happened tonight,” said the interrogator, inscrutable once again.
What about Micah? she wanted to ask. What happened to him? But she didn’t dare.
“I… I agreed to do what he wanted,” she said. “I followed him to this place out in the middle of nowhere. He killed two guards to get inside.” She let her voice get shaky as she continued. “He started letting kids out. They were… I don’t know. There was something wrong with them. He gave one of the older ones a keycard and told them to run.”
One breath after another. One word after another. She could do this.
“After he’d let a bunch of them out, he started getting worried about when somebody would notice the bodies. He told me to stay where I was until they caught me, and he left. The next time I saw him, he was with a couple of guards and some woman who worked there, telling them there was a dissident in the building. I…” She looked down at her lap. “I pretended to be a dissident. I said everything he had told me to say.”
“Even though you knew it would lead to your execution.”
“He would have framed Micah if I didn’t. I had already gotten my mother arrested. I couldn’t let another innocent person die because of me.”
“And then he brought you here.”
Becca nodded. “The woman told him to. She didn’t want Enforcement involved. Whatever that place was, I got the idea nobody was supposed to know about it.”
“You were in an overflow holding facility for dissidents.” The interrogator searched her eyes as if waiting for her to contradict him.
“An overflow holding facility,” she repeated, trying to sound as if she believed it.
“Under no circumstances are you to mention this facility to anyone else.”
She nodded.
“Acknowledging the existence of this facility will be considered dissident activity and will result in your immediate execution.”
She bobbed her head up and down like a demented bird. There is no reeducation program. I understand.
“Good.” He took another step back, and a little of the tension left her body. “Is there anything else I should know about Milo Miyamoto? Anything you’ve neglected to mention?”
She shook her head. She had given him everything she could. The rest was out of her hands.
“Then I think we’re done here.”
But he didn’t move toward the door.
“You understand,” he said, “that once I walk out that door, everything you’ve said here becomes official. There’s no going back. You used to work in transcription—you understand what will happen if there’s any doubt that you’re telling the truth.”
She searched his face for any hint of what lay behind his threat. Any sign of skepticism, any clue that he knew more than he was saying. She found nothing. “I understand.”
“With that in mind, is there anything else you’d like to tell me?”
She shook her head.
He studied her for a moment longer, then gave a short nod. “The guards will take you to your cell, where you will stay until we can determine the truth of the situation. I’m sure it won’t be long.” He turned and walked to the door.
With his hand on the door handle, he stopped. He angled himself away from the camera so that only his back would be visible. “We’ll do everything we can for you,” he mouthed to her. “You and your mother.”
Then his mask returned, and the moment was gone.
* * *
The cell was just l
ike the one they had put her in a year and a half ago. Same bare walls, same cot in the far corner, same camera following her movements. The cell was the same—but Becca was different.
A year and a half ago, she had screamed, sobbed, begged. Invoked her mother’s name like a prayer. I’m Raleigh Dalcourt’s daughter. You have to get me out of here.
Now she sat on the bed and waited.
Any minute now, the door could open and the guards would tell her she was free, and the rest of her life would open up before her. Any minute now, the door could open and the rest of her life would consist of the few minutes it would take for the guard to lead her to the room where they would shoot her in the head.
She should have been afraid. She should have been curled in a ball, heart pounding, body shaking, as she tried to process the possibility of her death.
Instead, she waited.
It doesn’t matter what they do to me. It doesn’t matter. This time, when she repeated the words to herself, they brought no fear in their wake. Only acceptance.
Whatever happened next, whatever came through that door, she was ready.
She hadn’t made her grand gesture. She hadn’t weakened Internal. She didn’t need to. That was never what it had been about; she just hadn’t known it.
The reeducation program would be made official. People like Jameson would die fighting an enemy that couldn’t be defeated, and people like Jake would die while they were still breathing. And every day, more dissidents would arrive in these cells never to leave, while people on the floors above typed up denials and inevitable confessions and tried to tune out the screaming.
But a handful of dissidents were free because of her. Even if Internal caught them in the end, someone had freed them, and that was the important part. She had helped create a better world, a world not entirely in the grip of the regime. A world where rescues happened. Where people fought for what was right. Where someone like Kara could watch a door open, expecting to see the person who was about to kill her, and find herself face-to-face with an ally instead.