“I can have Barclay take you home now,” I offer.
Cecily shakes her head. “I can’t leave everyone, not until we know where they’re going too. Some of them are from our world, but some of them aren’t.”
“You don’t have to take them on as a responsibility. Your aunt—”
“Will still be there in a few days,” she says. “I was an Unwilling and so are these people. We’re in this together.”
Despite how much I think she’s wrong, that she should let us send her home, I nod. She deals with things by helping other people. I know that; I’ve seen her at Qualcomm.
“Janelle,” she says, grabbing my hand. “I’m going to be okay. We’re all going to be okay.”
I don’t have the same kind of blind faith, but I hope she’s right.
01:13:06:41
“That can’t be it,” Barclay is saying as Cecily and I enter the room where they’ve set up the computer and hooked it up to a generator. “Let me see that.”
Ben is seated in front of the computer and Barclay is looming over his shoulder. It’s the kind of thing that would be driving me crazy, but apparently Ben has more patience, or he’s pretending he does.
Elijah is slumped in the corner with his back against the wall and his eyes closed. Without opening them he says, “Fucking Christ, what’s wrong now?”
Ben taps a few keys on the keyboard and analyzes the screen. If anyone knows more about computers than they should, it’s him. But neither he nor Barclay respond, and I don’t like that. It implies that a lot has been going wrong since we got back.
“It’s taken a while to break down the encryption on the computer,” Cecily says next to me. “And by a while, I mean like all night. The three of them haven’t slept and at least twice they almost came to blows over something ridiculous like who was going to press ‘enter’ or something.”
I clench my jaw. What a time for me to succumb to a concussion and pass out. I can’t exactly picture Barclay and Ben getting along—although I couldn’t really picture me getting along with Barclay either, and we’ve actually worked pretty well together. But still, Barclay went to Ben’s house, accused him of opening the unstable portals, and pulled out a gun. If I hadn’t gotten there and complicated things, Barclay would have killed him.
I’m not surprised there’s tension, and I doubt throwing Elijah into the mix helps much. Confrontation follows him wherever he goes—he’s just like that.
“What is it?” I say, because I can’t just wonder how bad the situation is.
Barclay turns around, gestures to the computer, and answers just a little too loud for the close quarters we’re in. “We finally cracked it but it doesn’t have anything we can use against IA.”
“We’ll figure it out. Let’s just all calm down.” Ben’s fingers press on the keys a little harder than they should.
“We’ll come at it from a different angle,” I say, because we have something even if it didn’t come from the computer.
“One that involves less testosterone in one room,” Cecily adds under her breath.
“What other angle is there?” Barclay throws his hands up in frustration.
“Don’t fucking yell at her,” Elijah says, pushing off the wall. “This wasn’t her plan. It was yours.” He raises his voice and mocks Barclay. “Break Elijah out, find Ben, go to the processing center, grab their computer. All that’s managed to do is add to our injuries.”
“Yelling at each other isn’t going to help anything,” Ben says, his voice calm but also unnoticed by Elijah and Barclay.
“Want me to take you back to the Piston?” Barclay says. “I could probably get you executed right now if you don’t want to wait another day and a half.”
Elijah crosses the room, and for a second I’m sure they’re going to come to blows right here, and I’m not sure what I’m going to do about it. Sure, I’ll end up jumping in, probably with Ben, to break it apart, but it won’t be pretty. I’m beat to shit, I feel like I’ve been run over by a truck—I know what that feels like—and my morale has taken a beating.
We’re injured and low on time. If we fight each other we’re going to end up dead.
But then Cecily is between them, her hands on Elijah’s chest.
“This is stupid,” she says. “How many times do I have to say that this room is entirely too small for brawling? We have plenty of space outside if you really want to start training for UFC.”
I jump in. “Barclay, the three guys in your apartment—they have to be involved, right?”
“Good idea,” Ben says. “We’ll start there.”
“And do what?” Barclay says. “We don’t have time to stake them out and see who they talk to.”
My chest tightens. I can tell from the tone of his voice there’s an insult in there. There’s a comment on how Ben and Elijah stalked Eric back when we thought he was the bad guy. Because I’m frustrated, I say, “So what, you’re just going to give up?”
Only it’s a bad time to push Barclay. Instead of responding to me, he shakes his head and walks out of the room.
And because I’m me, I follow. We are not done with this conversation.
“Barclay,” I call after him.
He doesn’t turn around.
But other people do. The hospital is crowded with Unwilling. We rescued more than forty people, most of them women, and a lot of them young. Someone—probably Cecily—has set them up in different rooms on the floor we’ve taken over, and when they hear me yell at Barclay, they come to their doors.
“Barclay,” I call again. He still doesn’t turn around and even though it’s childish, I add, “You’re being an asshole!”
He just keeps walking. I debate running after him, but I’m not sure what good it’s going to do. I look at the faces in the doorways. Wide eyes focused on me. Hope is practically dripping from their expressions.
They’re counting on me. No matter what Barclay says, we have to get them home.
I head back into the computer room.
“We need a plan,” I say, because apparently I like to state the obvious.
“We need to fucking disband IA, maybe blow the shit out of them or something,” Elijah says.
“Somehow I doubt that will get you off the Most Wanted list,” Cecily says with a smile.
Elijah shrugs, but I see a smirk on his lips.
Ben ignores them both. He puts a hand through his hair and takes a deep breath. “Barclay is right. If we don’t know who in IA is involved, we don’t know who to trust. We could hand over the evidence to the wrong person, and my family will still be on the execution block, only the rest of us will be right there with them.”
“I know,” I say as I move to his side.
We’ve also blown our element of surprise. We broke into the processing center, stole their slaves, tied up their guards, and I shot at the people coming after us. And now it’s taken entirely too long to break into the computer and come up with a plan. Anyone who’s working for Meridian will know Barclay is trying to take them down.
Which means they’re hunting us. With their resources and manpower, we don’t have long before they succeed.
There’s only a day and a half before Ben’s family will be executed. But we may not even have that much time anymore.
01:12:44:28
“What do we have?” I ask, looking at the computer.
“A whole lot of nothing,” Elijah says.
“Eli, since you want to be so helpful, you can come with me to see the Unwilling,” Cecily announces. He looks at her like she’s crazy, but whatever it is about Cecily that makes people listen to her, he sees it.
Cecily looks at me and smiles. “We’ll be back and ready to come up with a plan.” Elijah is in for some kind of terrible lecture about staying positive and upbeat, I know it—I’ve gotten those lectures before.
He must have already gotten one too, because he rolls his eyes and mimics her, but he follows her out of the room anyway.
When they’re gone, Ben takes my hand and gives it a squeeze. I breathe a little easier. We may not have a lot of time, but no one here is going to give up either. If IA takes me down, it’s going to cost them something.
“Here, let me show you what we’ve got,” Ben says, opening a software program on the computer. He gives me the rundown of how to read it, and somewhere in the middle of it, I realize what he’s showing me is the ledger with the identity of everyone they’ve ever stolen. Where they’re from, where they were sent—and for what.
“We already knew that most of the Unwilling are coming from underdeveloped worlds and being taken to the wealthiest ones,” Ben says. “And we probably could have guessed that most fall into two valuable commodities.”
A wave of nausea moves through me. “Girls and kids.” Sex slaves and forced labor.
“We did find something new in the data, though. A couple years back the rate of teenage boys and young men who were trafficked skyrocketed.”
That doesn’t make sense. Men might be strong, which would make them good candidates for forced labor, but they’re also the least likely to go quietly. They’re trouble. Women and children will bend easier under the will of someone stronger in order to survive; men lash out and end up dead. Rebellion and dead slaves aren’t really good for business.
Ben sighs and puts a hand through his hair, “I think they might have used them for soldiers.”
I feel sick at how inhumane all this is, and I press my hand to my stomach. Essentially, wealthier countries going to war could use Unwilling to fight wars for them, probably promising the teenage boys they’ll be able to go home if they win the war and all that. But they’d be put on the front lines because they’re the most expendable, which would make them the most likely to die, and if they did live, then it wouldn’t be that hard to sell some of them off once the war was over.
“How long is the list?” I ask.
Ben looks down. “Longer than it should be.”
He’s right. It’s too long—much longer than I had been expecting.
Because Meridian hasn’t just been grabbing people for the past few months or even the past few years. He’s been grabbing people for over two decades.
From the records, the turnaround wasn’t quite as big in the beginning—he was trafficking about twenty-four people in eight-person increments every few months during the first few years, mostly young women. Then five years ago, the number jumped to ten people every few weeks, which in itself is a major operation, but it continued to grow—steadily—after that, then spiked again about five years ago and skyrocketed from there.
As I look over the numbers, I do the math in my head, and then I do it again, because it can’t possibly be right.
Because if it is, Meridian’s responsible for abducting and selling 131,824 people into slavery last year.
01:12:40:07
“That’s . . .” Ben takes a deep breath and stares at the computer screen. He swallows hard, like he’s trying to digest the information, trying to convince himself it’s somehow not that bad.
But this isn’t exactly the kind of data that you can spin.
A hundred and thirty-one thousand people is a city. There’s no upside here.
“It’s not your fault,” I say, because if I were him, that’s exactly what I would be thinking.
“I should have done something,” he says, his voice gritty with emotion.
“You did.” I don’t mention that he could have tried to do something sooner, because really I don’t think that’s true. If he had tried to do something sooner, maybe we wouldn’t have the information that we have now.
Ben doesn’t respond, and I can tell from the hard look on his face that he doesn’t believe me.
“I’m serious. Look how far back this goes.” I start scrolling back to the first records, which of course are only the first records that they wrote down in a computer. Who knows what they were doing before that?
In the ledger, 1995 was the first year that the trafficking ring recorded the Unwilling. Even though they referred to the people they took by number—took away their names and identities—they’ve listed the universe each person came from and where they were sent.
And I see a listing for my earth—Earth 19402. Someone was trafficked from my world to Earth 04032. And in the next column, where there are sometimes notes, it says, “Female, seventeen, blond.”
It makes me feel sick.
01:11:59:31
That’s when the plan comes to me.
I’m looking at an entry of a girl stolen from my world—and I realize we’ve been going about this all wrong.
Five and a half to six years ago, the human-trafficking operation more than doubled and became something much bigger than a crime organization—that’s when it started operating on a corporate scale.
Which means, that’s the point things changed, when they had more resources and fewer concerns about being caught.
That must be when Meridian started recruiting people in IA.
Whether he was paying them off to look the other way or involving them deeper—maybe getting old quantum chargers from them or something—either way, that’s when things really changed.
But we don’t need to know who in IA is involved. We don’t even need to know who’s not involved. We just need to get it in the hands of the right people at IA.
So why not just get it into the hands of everyone?
01:11:47:56
My plan is pretty simple—we’re all going to Prima.
We’ll copy the files from the ledger to a couple of zip drives—Barclay or Ben can portal somewhere and grab however many we’ll need. Then we’ll break into IA headquarters, upload the files to its intranet, and email them to everyone with an IA address.
Then everyone in IA will have the files. They’ll have proof of the operation. They can take down Meridian, search the processing center, find and bring back the Unwilling who are slaves, and root out their own conspiracy.
Even if we’re caught, someone is going to recognize this operation is bigger than IA has been letting on—and bigger than Ben. They’ll see what Barclay saw and what I see. That there are people in IA who are dirty.
“How are we going to get into IA headquarters?” Barclay asks after I lay out my idea.
“Being a dangerous criminal makes everything more difficult,” Elijah says, and Cecily laughs a little.
“Elijah and I can just portal right into an office,” Ben says. “We can even go tonight.”
Barclay shakes his head. “This is IA headquarters we’re talking about. You’ll never get through the hydrochloradneum shields.”
“I’ll go,” Cecily says. I shake my head, but she doesn’t let me talk over her. “You guys are all wanted by the government or whatever, but nobody knows anything about me. I’ll just go to Barclay’s office and use his computer.”
Suddenly Barclay smiles. “We’ll all go.” Then he looks at Elijah. “Not you, you’ll stay here.”
“Why the fuck do you think I’d stay here?”
“If we don’t make it, we need someone who can portal the Unwilling back to their worlds,” Barclay says. He doesn’t say that Elijah’s leg is messed up or that he’s been shot, but he doesn’t need to. We all know that.
“We’ll go in as two teams. Janelle and I will approach IA from the front entrance,” Barclay says. “Ben and Cecily from the back. We’ll each have a route, and everyone will have to memorize a few passwords, but it gives us two solid chances. I can even set up a com link between us.”
Cecily must see the look on my face and know what I’m thinking. “Don’t even, Janelle. If you think I’m just going to sit here and wait for you to either pull this off or end up dead, you’re out of your effing mind.”
“Cee—”
She shakes her head. “Don’t even try to placate me. I was minding my own business, and some asshole with terrible breath grabbed me, stuck me with a needle, and pulled me through a black hole. A. Black. Hol
e. And then they put me in a cage. There are portals and other worlds, and an Interverse Agency, and all I want to do is go home.
“But I’m not going to feel safe there if I’m always worried about someone else grabbing me and abducting me into slavery!” She takes a deep and shaky breath, blowing the air up into the strands of hair that fall into her face. “I am a part of this whether you think it’s safe or not.”
I look at Barclay because he’s the one everyone is going to listen to—at least usually.
Our eyes meet briefly, then he looks at Cee. “I say she’s in. She’s right, but more than that, we need two teams. It’ll throw security off and give at least one of us a fighting chance. And Elijah should stay here.”
“She’s never used a gun,” I say.
“Neither had Ben or Elijah until recently,” he says. I open my mouth to say more—that she’s never run from the law or had to do something this dangerous—but Barclay cuts me off. “Look, I’d rather have three agents with tactical training and experience at my back, but I don’t. I have three people who have a lot to lose, and it might not be ideal, but it’s going to work.”
Now that he has a course of action and a purpose, his determination is back.
I look at Cecily and my eyes sting. This was never supposed to happen to her. She should be planning more movie nights, taking care of people in Qualcomm, bossing Marines around and making them fall in love with her.
But she’s here now, and I don’t have the right to take her choices away from her. She’s smart and she knows how dangerous this is going to be. The best thing I can do is make sure she’s prepared.
“All right,” I say, and I’m not sure who I’m saying it to or what I’m talking about. But it’s what everyone needs to hear.
Barclay takes a deep breath. “So here’s how we’re going to do this.”
He knows IA headquarters inside out. Now he just has to teach it to us.
Before time runs out.
01:02:38:27
Unbreakable (Unraveling) Page 24