I wake up suddenly, sitting bolt upright, heart hammering, when someone bangs at the door. It’s Bruce, bringing a tray of lunch. The expression on his face shifts from slightly repulsed pity at my injuries, to undisguised interest at the swell of boob rising above the towel when I take the tray, and then to resigned disappointment as I close the door on him.
Later that afternoon, I put on my sweats and running shoes and force myself onto the running track in the giant indoor gymnasium. My knee hurts on every step, and I don’t manage more than a sluggish hundred-yard jog, before the pain and stiffness slow me down to a walk. A petite female cadet with dark hair tied in a high ponytail breezes past me on the outer track. When she turns her head to give me a filthy look over her shoulder, I see angry brown eyes surrounded by an intricate filigree pattern of henna tattoos.
It’s Sofia Medina — a cadet in the blue intel unit who worked alongside Quinn. I always suspected that she had a real soft spot for him, and now I hope I’m right, because I’ll be needing her help.
Chapter 10
Penitent
The next morning’s hearing is a fifteen-minute formality held in a large conference room dominated by a long, glass table on which there is recording equipment. Roberta Roth, who chairs the meeting, sits at one end with Sarge on her right and some other man whose name I don’t catch on her left. My stomach churns when I see her. As usual, she is wearing a business suit. It’s black, like her soul.
I sit alone at the far end of the table, where the whole of one wall is taken up by a large screen on which President Hawke’s face smiles broadly above the familiar admonition: If you see something, say something.
Oh, I intend to.
“Ms. Roth, before we begin, there’s something I want to say.”
She looks at me with mild surprise, as if a cog in a machine had suddenly spoken. It makes me even madder.
“I want to say that I think you’re scum. No, actually, lower than scum. At least scum doesn’t pretend to be anything other than what it is. You and your sick sidekicks like Sarge over there, pretend to be good and noble patriots. But I have seen the real you, and it is despicable!”
That’s what I badly want to say. In fact, I’d like to add a few slaps to emphasize my point, as she did. But, instead, I force my eyes not to glare, my mouth not to sneer, and my voice not to snarl. I adopt what I hope is a convincingly penitent expression and make my voice sound soft and regretful. I practiced in front of the mirror this morning, but I’m still not sure I’ve got it right — it doesn’t come naturally.
“I want to say that I am truly very sorry about getting mixed up with Cadet O’Riley. I was stupid, and I realize I may have jeopardized my career here at the Academy. I only hope you and Sarge can find it in your hearts to forgive my mistake.”
I bow my head and stare down at my hands. Both wrists are circled by bruises from where I wrenched against the restraining cuffs, and a scabbed red line circles my left wrist where my metal ID band cut into my skin.
Roth narrows her eyes at me, but her expression stays impassive — I can’t tell whether she’s buying this or not. She gets me to speak my statement into the microphone on the table, and then hands me a tablet displaying the automatic transcription. I sign it with a sensor pen and get my retina scanned as proof of identity. Sarge, as a witness, follows suit.
“Your version of events has been confirmed,” says Roth.
What exactly does she mean by that? Is she just talking about what came out — and what didn’t — in the interrogation and the polygraph test? Or have they started questioning Connor despite it only being day two of his “devitalization regime”?
“You have been cleared of the charge of collusion to assist a subversive, and you may return to your unit.”
“I’m cleared for duty? I’m back on the sniper quad?” I ask.
“You may not be a subversive, Miss James, but you have proven yourself to be foolish, careless and gullible in the extreme. I, for one, am not eager to trust you behind a rifle again. You are to meet with your unit commander to clarify your future role and options. And it goes without saying that if you make any mention of your debriefing, it will be considered a breach of security, and we will treat that in a most serious light. Our decision to release you can be revoked at any time.”
I will not go back to the detention center. I will never be that powerless again, I vow it.
Roth and the other man leave, and I’m left alone in the conference room with Sarge, who is tapping on the screen of the tablet. Keeping notes? Or, more likely, starting a voice recording of our meeting.
“So, Blue, I’m guessing you’ll be wanting to head home as soon as possible?”
“No.”
He looks up at that.
“Actually, I want to withdraw my resignation from the unit, sir. I’d like to stay and take up my work again.”
He raises both his eyebrows and tucks his chin back in surprise. “This is quite a change of heart.”
“When I say ‘my work’, I don’t mean darting M&Ms or suspects, sir, I still never want to do that again. Especially now.” I give him a dark look. “But I’d like to start ratting again.”
“We ain’t putting a weapon back in your hands — you heard what Ms. Roth said. And even if she gave you the all-clear, I’m not sure I would.” He gives me a speculative look.
“Sir?”
He hesitates a moment, then says, “It may surprise you to know, Blue, that back when I was a wet-behind-the-ears marine on my first tour of duty, I wasn’t exactly keen on killing people either.”
“Really?” This is a surprise.
“Not at first. Not with all the targets. There was this one who was carrying a bag of mortars. He was young, no more’n a kid really. I figured we could just wound him, hit him in the leg or something. But my team leader set my head straight. He told me that if I didn’t end the threat permanently, it would come back and bite me on the ass. ‘That person you wound? He’s going to get up, get a weapon, come back right at ya, especially now he knows where you’re at. Maybe he’ll be back in five minutes, maybe in five weeks. Maybe he’ll get you, maybe your friend or your brother, but he’ll be back. Now put him down!’ That’s what he said, and he was right.”
“So … you think I should have been put down?” I ask.
Sarge looks at me for a long moment, then gives that grin that I’ve grown to loathe. “Nah, I just think you should have been chucked out of the program for good. Maybe sent to Alaska. See, that’s what the art of sniping is: it’s us picking a time and place to do you harm, before you do harm to us.”
“But I don’t intend to do you harm, Sarge.”
He gives a short bark of laughter. “Now, see, I ain’t convinced that you’re harmless. Not since the day you shot me in the neck!”
He’s never going to forget or forgive that.
“Besides” — he leans forward suddenly — “hold out your hands.”
I do. They tremble. They do this almost constantly now.
I sigh, as if disappointed. “Okay, so maybe you don’t trust me fully, and maybe I’m not steady enough to shoot accurately yet.”
“Not steady enough to shoot accurately? Hell, right now you couldn’t hit water if you fell out a boat.”
“But,” I continue, “surely I could go along on the missions as a spotter, or help keep the target area civilian-free?”
Sarge runs a finger over his neat mustache. His expression is doubtful.
“I thought you’d be wanting to head back home, spend some time catching up with your momma and your brother?”
“I’d like to visit them, of course, and I’ve already put in the paperwork with Personnel for a home-visit next weekend.” Every graduated cadet gets one four-day R&R weekend each month, and I need to take mine as soon as possible. “But I don’t want to stay there permanently. I know I’ll go stir crazy with boredom at home. Also, when I’m not kept busy, I get flashbacks and nightmares.” This much, at le
ast, is true.
“I’ll be honest, Blue, I did not think you’d want to come back into my unit after … Well, I didn’t think you’d ever want to work for us again.”
I twist my face into what I hope is an expression of heartbroken anger. “Ms. Roth said I had Quinn O’Riley to thank for all that happened to me in the last week, and she’s right. He used me. He dropped me in hot water and ran off. After he said he loved me! I’m done with him and all of his kind — they can all go to hell. I’ve learned my lesson, and now I just want to get my life back. I promise I’ll be good and keep my nose clean, Sarge. Maybe one day I can prove to you that I’m worth trusting again.”
Sarge stares at me for a long while, then says, “I’ll have a talk with Ms. Roth, and we’ll let you know.”
At least it’s not an outright no.
Part Two
Chapter 11
Allies
Once, before the Plague hit, our family went on an outing to a medieval festival. Robin and I were both fascinated by the knights in armor and placed bets on our favorite champions in the jousting contests, but the best part was walking through the living museum. Robin dragged my mother off to watch a blacksmith hammering out a sword on his forge, and I insisted Dad come watch the glassblower with me.
I was spellbound by the way the man scooped up a blob of honey-colored molten glass from the furnace and gathered it onto the end of his long blowpipe. He turned and twisted and swept that pipe through the air, using pincers to tweak out decorative edges and carve grooves into the delicate surface, all the while blowing into the glass, stretching it wider and thinner as if he was inflating a balloon. We held our breaths as the glass stretched finer and finer until it looked as insubstantial and fragile as a soap bubble. Then the blower scored it at the base, tapped it free from the pipe and held it up for the gathered crowd to admire. The applause had not yet ended when he lifted the vase high above his head, then turned and dashed it onto the ground behind him, shattering it into countless sharp shards, and turning our oohs and ahs of admiration into gasps of shock.
“Why did you break it?” I demanded, horrified at the destruction.
“It was flawed, it would have cracked anyway,” was his explanation.
Today, I feel like that vase, stretched brittle-thin and pulled into fragile shakiness by anxiety and impatience. I, too, am no doubt flawed and set to crack along my hidden fault lines. Every so often I get a panicky, breathless feeling in my chest. And my hands are still unsteady.
I urgently need to get a message to Quinn about his brother. Since his phone is in fragments somewhere in the city’s sewerage system, and since all telephone, email and internet communications with his family are being intercepted and analyzed, I will need to go low-tech.
I spend most of the day in the compound’s huge indoor gymnasium, waiting and hoping the person I want to see will show up today. I intentionally take a long time to stretch and warm up my stiff muscles. I’m still sore, but it’s only been a few days since I last exercised properly and, thanks to Sarge’s intense training sessions over the last months, I am fit and strong. I spend half an hour on the ergometer, rowing slowly on the lowest resistance setting and resting often, while keeping one eye on the gym’s entrance. The rest of my unit arrives and comes over to check how the hearing went.
“Okay, I think. But they won’t let me near a weapon. Sarge is going to see if I can go on missions with you guys as a spotter.”
“Cool,” says Mitch.
“Yeah, I’ll put in a good word for you,” says Bruce, seating himself on the erg next to me and beginning to row. Almost at once, he stops to crank up the resistance on the flywheel to the maximum, and then continues in a smooth rhythm, catch and drive, catch and drive.
Mitch and Tae-Hyun set off running on the track which runs along the outside perimeter of the gym, and Cameron takes the erg on the other side of me as soon as it’s vacated.
“You can come out on the range with me, if you like,” offers Bruce on the out-breath of a backwards pull. “I’ll let you practice with my rifle so you can keep your eye in.”
Cameron shakes his head.
“Thanks,” I tell Bruce, “but there are cameras out there, and if they caught me shooting when they’ve forbidden it, then I’d be bounced out and you’d be in trouble.”
“There are cameras on the range?”
“There are cameras everywhere.” I keep my voice carefully neutral, but his, when he replies, is mad.
“It’s seriously beginning to piss me off that we’ve got no privacy in this place.”
I grin at him. “You sound just like Quinn used to.”
Cameron laughs, and Bruce snorts derisively, but for once he doesn’t insult my ex. He pulls hard on the cables, says, “So he got away, then?”
“Looks like it. Not that they’d tell me if they’d caught him.”
“Yeah, they don’t tell us much.”
Bruce is definitely less blindly loyal to the authorities than he used to be, but he’s still as competitive as he ever was, and my slow pace on the erg is driving him crazy.
“Come on, Cameron, I’ll race you,” he says, jogging over to the track.
“I’ll catch you up,” says Cameron, then adds in a soft voice to me, “Are you planning something?”
“What do you mean?”
“You can trust me,” he says.
I want to, and I kind of do. I like Cameron, for one thing, and for another, he was the one who told me about Leya being a spy. But I no longer feel like I can trust anyone. Who’s to say he hasn’t replaced Leya as chief rat, that even now he’s trying to get me to spill my beans?
“I heard that before, from Quinn,” I say. “And it didn’t work out so well.”
Cameron shrugs and says, “What needs to be done can’t be done alone. Just know, when the time comes, I’m on your side. And I’ll want in on whatever you’re planning.”
It’s the most I’ve ever heard him say. I sit, dumbfounded, with the cables loose in my hands, watching as he jogs off to join Bruce. I just had an actual conversation with strong, silent Cameron.
The boys spend the next half hour challenging each other on the track, while I watch, sitting on an exercise mat under the monkey bars, slowly sipping on a bottle of water. They wave goodbye when they leave, and Bruce calls out that he’ll catch me later in the rec room. I nod and wave, check my watch and scan the entrance again.
Finally, Sofia Medina comes into the gym, does a few stretches and takes to the track. I follow her, walking, so that she can complete her lap and catch up with me quicker. When she does, she bumps me hard, sending me sprawling onto the track.
She stops and mutters furiously, “You betrayed Quinn!”
Her back is to the nearest surveillance camera. Probably it just looks like she’s apologizing for the “accident”.
I get up off the ground, noting that I now have two scraped knees, and say, “I saved his life. I saved both their lives.” I cup a hand in front of my mouth — as if coughing — to hide my lips, just in case someone watching the footage can zoom in and read lips. “They would have shot them with live ammo if I hadn’t darted Connor.” Would Bruce actually have done it? At the time, I had no doubts, but now I’m not so sure. “And I got Quinn out of here, didn’t I?”
Sofia glares at me and sets off running again. I take off after her. Though it still hurts to move, no way is she fitter or faster than me, and soon I catch up.
“Look, I know you hate me. But do you want to help him?” I ask, and pass her, then slow a little when I’m several paces ahead.
“What?” she says from behind me.
I allow her to catch up. “Do you want to help Quinn?”
“Do you know where he is?” she asks, without turning her head.
“Go ahead of me.” I wait till she’s a few strides in front before continuing. “No. But I do know where his brother is, where they’re holding him. And I know that they plan to start torturing him an
y day now.”
If they haven’t already begun.
I pick up the pace and overtake her. If anyone is watching, it will look like we’re racing each other. She peels off to the side of the track to catch her breath and, I guess, to think about whether she can trust me, whether she wants to help. I keep running. When I approach to lap her for the second time, she steps back on the track and starts running again. I slow my stride so that she can keep pace just behind me.
“Okay, yes. I want to help. But how?”
“There’s a chance I could get a message to him about his brother, but to do that I need to get out of the compound.”
“I don’t see how I could help with that,” Sofia pants as we change leads again.
“If intel said there were reports of sightings of rats or M&Ms, they’d have to send out ratting squads.”
“When? Where?”
I still remember what Kerry, Quinn’s little sister, told me on our ASTA graduation day — that her mother takes her to the local park every weekday at four after they finish homeschooling lessons. Kerry likes to visit with the lady who regularly brings her baby.
“Freedom Park, around 4pm on a weekday. In the section where the play park is.”
Sofia is silent for a while as she runs ahead of me.
“Well?” I urge as I pass her slowly.
“I could probably do it. Those reports come in all the time, and Brescia and I collate the lists. I could just add it to the list on Monday.”
Today is Saturday. That means another two days will go by before anything happens. But I only know times for weekdays.
“Thanks,” I say, then repeat, “Freedom Park, 4pm, weekdays.”
The Recoil Trilogy 3 Book Boxed Set: Including Recoil, Refuse and Rebel Page 27