by Zoe Cannon
“You have to make sacrifices,” said Heather in a small voice. Looking at her, Becca had the sense of someone standing on the brink of something, afraid to jump over the edge.
Becca nodded. “Yes.”
“To make the world what you want it to be.” She paused. “To keep it the way you want it to be.”
Something squirmed in the pit of her stomach. A warning. “Yes.”
“Like Milo.” Another pause, longer this time. When she spoke again, Becca could barely hear her. “Like my parents.”
If Heather had been afraid to jump before, now she was hanging in midair, bracing herself for the inevitable crash. She reached out a hand—Becca wasn’t even sure she knew she had done it—as if searching for something, anything, to hang on to. Searching for someone to catch her.
If Becca helped Heather down this cliff, down this path she had chosen, she would give up any chance of bringing her over to the resistance. She would give up any chance of putting things back the way they used to be—her and Heather, laughing with their heads together as they faced the world side by side.
But Heather had already made her choice. She had chosen Internal. Not as a way to suppress her grief, like when she had joined the Monitors a year and a half ago, but with her eyes open. Nothing Becca said here tonight would change that.
And Becca couldn’t let her fall again.
She took Heather’s hand.
“Internal believes in a better world, too,” she said, her voice as quiet as Heather’s. “Someone once told me it was like we were all part of a single body, everyone working together to create a perfect society. Internal sacrificed your parents to preserve that world. I don’t believe in the world he saw. When I look at what they’ve given us, I see innocent people being tortured and killed. I see people repeating back everything they’re told because they don’t know any better. I see people afraid of their own thoughts.” She paused for breath. “I believe your parents weren’t guilty of anything but wanting something better than that. I believe their deaths were a crime. But if you can accept it—if that’s the world you’re willing to sacrifice for—I won’t stop you. I’ll fight the world you create with everything in me… but you won’t be my enemy. Just like my mother isn’t my enemy.”
Heather nodded. Took a breath. When she let it out again, something had changed. The desperation in her eyes was gone. The pain remained, but transmuted, no longer a wound but a scar.
“I like this world,” she said. “Maybe I shouldn’t, but I do. I know bad things happen. I know people die. I’ve lived through it. But most people are happy. Most people have good lives, if they just don’t fight.” Tears still distorted her voice, but there was a solidity underneath that hadn’t been there before. “And if my parents had to die to make that happen, I…” She only faltered for a second. “I can accept that.”
Despite her assurances, Becca wanted to protest. To ask how that could possibly be acceptable, to ask how Heather could possibly value comfort and inertia over the lives of her parents.
But Becca had not only accepted her mom’s arrest, she had caused it. For the sake of something her mom didn’t believe in.
She had made her own choices. She would let Heather make hers.
“You should take some time,” she said instead. “Figure out what you want to do. Whether you want to stay with Internal.”
But Heather shook her head. “I already know what I want. I’ve been thinking about it since you told me the truth about Milo. I joined Internal because it was easier than facing how I felt about my parents—but I’m going to stay.” Only a small echo of her trembling remained as she set her shoulders. “Finding dissidents doesn’t matter all that much to me. But what Milo tried to do, protecting dissidents’ children like he did—that matters. That’s something I’m willing to sacrifice for.”
Her voice echoed softly through the room with a familiar conviction. Micah’s conviction, and Becca’s.
Heather smiled—a thin, wobbly smile, but it was real. Something glimmered in her eyes, some faint ghost of her old spark. “Maybe someday I’ll even be able to do something about the reeducation program. I know I can’t shut it down, but I could do something else. Make things easier for the kids somehow.”
Becca remembered the offer she had made to Milo. The hope she had dangled before him of doing just that. “I hope you can.”
Finally, after a year and a half, she had done what she had set out to do on that first trip to 117. She had helped Heather. Given her a way to make sense of her parents’ deaths. It wasn’t the way Becca would have chosen, but that didn’t matter. It was what Heather wanted. What she needed. Now maybe Heather could find her way back to herself again—scarred, certainly, and not the same person she had been before, but no longer deadened by denial or drowning in grief.
And she would do it without Becca.
The last thing that had bound them together was gone. Heather didn’t need her anymore. She had her own path to walk, her own mission to accomplish. Her own sacrifices to make.
Becca stepped back and prepared to watch Heather walk out of her life for the last time.
But Heather’s smile deepened. And there it was again, that hint of an almost-forgotten spark. “We can do it together.”
* * *
Becca’s feet crunched through the dusting of snow as she crossed the narrow strip of land to the lot next door. She felt her pockets to make sure the folded pieces of paper were still there. Ahead of her, the last rays of the sun glinted off the skeleton of the half-finished apartment building. She hadn’t come here in more than a year, not since the day she had given Jake to Internal. She had seen the lot change through her window day by day, seen the old playground equipment ripped out of the earth to be replaced by the bones of another building like hers. Still, some part of her had expected to find something familiar here, to feel a glimmer of the peace the playground had brought her.
She placed her hand on a metal beam, let the cold radiate through her hand and down her arm. This place had been her sanctuary once. Soon it would be just one more thing that belonged to Internal.
She knelt in the snow, heedless of the cold wetness that seeped in through her pant legs. Felt along the edges of the foundation until her fingers found a tiny gap. She brought her hand to her mouth and blew a couple of times, letting the warmth of her breath wake up her frozen fingers, before reaching into her pocket to pull out the first of the papers she had brought.
The note had gone soft from repeated handling, its words half-absorbed by the creases where it had been crumpled and smoothed and crumpled again. But that didn’t matter. She didn’t need to read it. She already knew it by heart. She and Heather had found this note in Heather’s parents’ things after their arrest, written to some unknown contact who had never received it. In the note, Heather had only seen proof that her parents weren’t what she had thought. But it had told Becca about the false confessions, about what her mother really did. It had lodged itself in her mind until she had started asking dangerous questions.
And in the end, it had brought her here.
She smoothed the paper in her hand one last time before carefully folding it into a square. With something close to reverence, every movement precise, she slid it into the gap in the concrete until no sign of it remained.
She drew out the second piece of paper, this one crisp and new and folded with sharp creases. She opened it slowly to reveal a propaganda flyer like the kind that hung on the bulletin board in the park. If you wait until you’re sure, it might be too late, the flyer warned, above a grainy picture of a ticking bomb. Report suspicious activity today. She turned the paper around. The other side nearly bled with the thick scrawls that covered it. Becca had read the words over and over after a stranger had pressed the flyer into her hands yesterday, exactly two weeks since she had stepped out of the underground levels for the second time. But now she read them again, lingering over each one.
We’re out. We’re free. Kar
a is keeping us safe. I wish I could tell you more, but we both know that’s not a good idea.
I still believe in Internal. But I don’t believe in what they want to do to these kids. No one will ever convince me to try to bring down the regime, but protecting these kids is my first priority, and I’ll do whatever I have to do.
I never expected to end up here, but I’m doing what I always wanted. I have you to thank for that. I don’t know when or if I’ll be able to come home, but until then, know that I’m out here thinking of you, and that I forgive you for everything.
I love you.
“I love you too,” she murmured as she refolded the paper.
Maybe she would never know what happened to Micah and the kids. Maybe she would never know whether Internal caught them in the end. Maybe—probably—she would never see him again.
But he was out there, doing what he had dreamed of doing. Working for a better world alongside her.
She slid the note into the crack beside the first, and it was gone.
Soon this place would be just one more thing that belonged to Internal… with resistance built into it at its core.
She had nothing of Jameson and the others to slip in beside the notes, no way to represent their sacrifice. She had nothing of Jake’s parents, or the Jake who used to be. Nothing of the countless files in the dissident bin. But they were all here nonetheless; their lives and deaths were part of what this world was made of. A world where for every execution there was someone else who woke up and decided to question, where the whole massive tangled bureaucracy that was Internal had sprung up just to contain what couldn’t be contained.
Becca stayed where she was for another few minutes, until the cold began to bite into her legs. She pulled out her phone as she stood up.
The cold had made her fingers clumsy; it took her two tries to dial the number correctly. When she got it right, she pressed the phone to her ear and listened to the distant tinny ring.
“Becca? Is something wrong?” Her mom always jumped straight to fear these days when Becca called. It would take her a while, Becca suspected, before she completely recovered. Maybe she never would—at least not in the sense of going on as if it had never happened. Maybe it would linger like Becca’s guilt, like Heather’s grief. A scar pulsing with every heartbeat, reminding her of where she had been and where she would go from here.
“Everything’s fine,” Becca assured her. “But I’ve been thinking about what you said, and I’ve decided—I want to come back to 117.” She paused. “And if the offer is still open, I know what placement I want.”
Chapter Twenty-Three
“Reactions to the announcement of the new Reeducation branch of Internal Defense, scheduled to open its doors by the end of the year, have been positive,” the news anchor chirped in her perennially plastic voice. “Commentators have pointed to several recent events, including dissident Milo Miyamoto’s nearly-successful attempt last year to frame renowned interrogator Raleigh Dalcourt for dissident activity, as evidence of why such a program is sorely needed. Miyamoto’s father was executed for dissident activity eight years ago. How much tragedy could have been averted if—”
Becca flicked the TV off.
Beside her, Heather held up a screw. “Any idea where this goes?”
“No clue.” Becca gave the coffee table an experimental nudge. It didn’t so much as wobble. “It looks like we’re fine without it, though.” She pushed herself up from the floor and surveyed the room. The white walls now shone a rich shade of green. A matching couch sat along the wall across from the TV, with the just-assembled coffee table in between. Under the coffee table, a tasseled rug stretched across the floor, with another forgotten screw lying at one corner.
It looked cozy. Comfortable. Like a real home.
It looked… terrifying.
She sat down on the couch and bounced up and down experimentally a couple of times. The couch, factory-fresh and unused to attention, squeaked under her weight. She fought the urge to bolt from the apartment, to run until she found someplace safer, some bare cell where she could wait to die.
The odds against her hadn’t changed, after all. She knew how her story would end. Eventually she would die for what she was, for what she did. Eventually, and probably soon.
But until then, she would change the story. She would try to remember how to do more than wait, how to do more than survive.
She would live.
Heather relaxed into the other side of the couch. “You’re done with your training now, right?”
Becca nodded. “I went solo for the first time today.”
“How’d it go?”
She thought back to this afternoon. To the fear that had radiated off the woman sitting across from her like a tangible thing. To all the red flags, one after another—in how the woman talked, in how she moved, in what she said and didn’t say. “Better than I thought it would.”
But this afternoon had been the easy part.
The hard part would be what came next.
She glanced out the window. If she was going to do it tonight, she didn’t have much time. The sun had set hours ago, and the construction workers had gone home for the night sometime between Becca nearly dropping the couch on her foot and Heather adding the finishing touches to the walls.
She could let the clock run out, if she wanted. Lose track of time with Heather until it was much too late for anything but sleep.
But then she would put it off for one more day, and then one more, and one more.
She didn’t have the luxury of time.
“Do you mind if we call it a night?” she asked. “There’s something I need to do.”
Heather idly started playing with her hair. “What’s that?”
Becca paused. “The kind of thing you don’t want to be around for.”
“Got it.” Only a slight tensing of her muscles betrayed Heather’s discomfort.
They told each other almost everything, these days. But there was one thing they never talked about, one shared secret they acknowledged only in half-statements and vague allusions. By unspoken agreement, Heather turned a blind eye to Becca’s dissident activity, while Becca let Heather remain in blissful ignorance.
Heather stood. “Right, then. I should get going. I have to get up early tomorrow anyway—I’m meeting someone from work for breakfast. Her mom was executed last year, so she’s interested in what I’m doing. She has some ideas on how to subtly encourage investigators to be more objective in cases that involve dissidents’ kids.”
“We’ll talk tomorrow, then.” With a smile, Becca waved her toward the door. “Let me know how it goes.”
“Of course!” Heather grinned, already halfway out the door.
As the door closed behind her, Becca eyed the folding chair leaning against the wall. She could still set it back up. Paint the walls the flat white of an unoccupied apartment, roll up the rug and stick it in a closet somewhere, give the couch and coffee table away to someone who would be around to enjoy them for more than a couple of years.
Instead, she pulled out her phone and began to dial the number she had memorized earlier.
Halfway through the number, her hand froze. Her thoughts raced at the speed of her heart. No. I can’t do this. What if she won’t listen? What if she turns me in?
What if she accepts?
She didn’t know how to do this. Not like Jameson would have, or any of the others.
But they weren’t here, and she was.
And she would do it.
She would rebuild the resistance. She would rebuild it with the tools Internal had given her. And from within the heart of Internal, they would fight for their small victories. They would create hope.
She finished dialing.
The woman answered on the first ring. “Hello?”
Becca knew that carefully neutral tone. She had used it herself a hundred times.
“This is Becca Dalcourt from Processing 117,” said Becca. “I’m the eva
luator who met with you this afternoon.” She took a deep breath. “I think you and I should talk.”
A war that can't be won.
Ideals that can't be lost.
No Return
the third Internal Defense novel
coming in 2014
Sign up here to find out when No Return is released!
More Books by Zoe Cannon
The Internal Defense Series
The Torturer's Daughter
Necessary Sacrifices
The First Unforgivable Thing
No Return (forthcoming)
Anthologies
Darkest Worlds: A Dystopian Anthology
Through a Tangled Wood (available as a free ebook)
The Adventure of Creation
About the Author
Zoe Cannon writes about the things that fascinate her: outsiders, societies no sane person would want to live in, questions with no easy answers, and the inner workings of the mind. If she couldn't be a writer, she would probably be a psychologist, a penniless philosopher, or a hermit in a cave somewhere. While she'll read anything that isn't nailed down, she considers herself a YA reader and writer at heart. She lives in New Hampshire with her husband and a giant teddy bear of a dog, and spends entirely too much time on the internet.
Visit http://www.zoecannon.com to find out what Zoe is working on now, and sign up for updates on new releases here: http://www.zoecannon.com/newsletter.
You can also find Zoe on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/ZoeCannonAuthor
On Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/cannonzoe
On Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/zoecannon
Or email her directly at [email protected].
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my husband, for playing along when I acted like I wasn’t working on anything new, for keeping me from deleting that important scene, and for giving me a new angle on a completely different project years ago that sealed a certain character’s fate in this one;