by Tanya Lisle
At the sight of Clyde standing outside a door at the end of the hall, she remembered the prisoner they currently had locked away in here. After all the trouble with Snow slipping out without any explanation and under an armed watch, she should check to make sure that the locks were in good working order before she talked to the section heads.
“At ease,” Ed told him as she got close. “How’s the door holding?”
“No one’s gotten through it yet,” Clyde said, moving out of the way of the handle as Ed knelt down to look at it. “Then again, I don’t remember that being the problem before.”
Ed let out a grunt, looking over the handle. There was a panel that she needed to pop open, but she couldn’t for the life of her quite remember how to do it. She needed a screwdriver. Iris could get her the schematics once she got it off, but first she needed to get her tools in order.
Stifling a yawn, she looked down to her waist to find it devoid of the rows of tools she usually carried. She probably left them in the control room. No matter, there was another way to get the panel off to have a look, she knew. She just had to remember how to do it.
“Hey Snow,” Clyde said. “Rumour is you had something to do with giving us the heads up on the attack.”
“I did.”
“Thanks.”
Ed looked behind her. She didn’t even realize Snow followed her out of Kitty’s room, but there she was, standing calmly over her shoulder. Snow said something about a man coming to kill her before, and Mac had also mentioned that this man they had locked away knew Snow as well.
“Looks in order,” Ed said, getting back to her feet. “Keep an eye on it. Come on, Snow.”
Ed stifled another yawn as she walked past, heading down the hall and back out of the Medical Wing. At this point, she wasn’t even sure if she did it to prevent the man from killing Snow or keeping Snow from doing the same to him, but she knew they had to be kept apart. Snow shouldn’t even be that close to him.
“You are suffering from exhaustion,” Snow told her as Ed continued to lead them both away from the Medical Wing. “In twenty two minutes, you are going to be unconscious again.”
“Is that guy in there the person you think came to kill you?” Ed asked.
“Yes.”
“You don’t try to talk to him,” Ed told her. “You don’t even try to look at him. Whatever that thing you do to get anywhere you want is, you don’t do that to try and get a better look at him or get close to him or anything. I am going to restrict your access to everywhere but the residential areas.”
“You can’t.”
“The hell I can’t. Who do you think has the admin controls around here?”
“I’m not a registered member of your community,” Snow said. “Even if I was, I can still open doors.”
Ed didn’t like it, but for the moment she was probably right. So far, Snow had shown that she was immune to door locks and had an uncanny ability to get places that she had no business being in. Ed doubted locking her up would even do anything. She doubted putting her outside would prevent her from getting back in. There had to be something, but her options escaped her for the moment.
“Mac will talk to him first,” Snow said. “When he’s done, then it’ll be safe for me.”
“Or just don’t talk to him,” Ed said. “That’s an option too.”
“I need to remove Providence’s mark on him,” Snow said. “If I don’t, she’ll continue to watch. They all will. I’d rather they didn’t continue.”
“By that logic, wouldn’t you need to remove the mark on all of them?”
“I’ve already removed the mark on the others.”
Ed stopped, grabbing Snow by the shoulder to keep her from going any farther. Something needed to be said here, but Ed had trouble coming up with the words. She wanted to ask how she managed to find them or get to them through what was surely thick security if Mac had anything to do with it. Liah said she knew what was happening as it happened and Ed needed a better explanation than a fairy tale and a disappearing mountain origin story. She also wanted to know why she was suddenly seeing shadows on people that weren’t there before.
The room moved around her and Ed realized she was wavering on her feet. Snow stepped forward and held her by the shoulders, keeping her steady as the room around her spun. Stars spun around her and everything faded to black for a moment before she regained her bearings.
“You need sleep, Ed,” Snow said. “When you continue to refuse sleep, you end up in the hospital several more times in the next few days.”
Snow let go and Ed lost her balance, falling onto her rear and landing on something soft. Looking around, she was in her room and Snow was nowhere in sight. For the moment, she was far too tired to question it any longer. She took out her phone to make a couple notes of things she had to do and finally gave into sleep.
Chapter 13
Never was Ed so happy with the section heads than when she woke up nearly twenty four hours later to find only one new message on her phone with a document filling her in on how the sections were adapting after the attack. Everything had gone back to business as usual and the funeral arrangements were set for a little later this week. Section I was cleared and ready for rebuilding when she was ready to organize it.
There was even a note at the end for her to check outside her door. One of them had gone through the trouble of leaving her breakfast for whenever she finally woke up again.
Regardless, Ed called each of them to check in and make sure that everything was still operating smoothly and that there were no unforeseen issues that had come up. Besides Brady Greenwood going missing, a thing that wasn’t an uncommon occurrence to begin with, there was nothing of note that wasn’t already on her list of things to repair.
She still had an hour before Mac could get his hands on the man in the Medical Wing, which gave her plenty of time to at least look at the server room. After a quick stop in the control room to collect her tools, she headed down to see what caused the interference between the floors.
As soon as Ed walked into the room, she knew what the problem was. The server room stretched out wide with racks upon racks of boxes, humming and clicking as they worked. The fans blasted through the room, keeping the temperature low and the machines cool as they worked.
All, that was, except for the racks by the door. The area by the door was stuffy and quiet, though not as warm as it would have been if the boxes were actually running. For the moment, Ed could only hope that meant that the machines turned off when they started to overheat like they were supposed to and not that they were fried all together.
It was a quick fix. She disassembled the three fans closest to the door and cleaned them of the years’ worth of dirt that stopped them. Just to be sure, she checked all the connections before reassembling the parts and waited until she was certain they were working again before she tried turning the servers back on again.
The servers flared back to life, the whirs and clicks soon followed by Ed’s phone buzzing. She had messages from Liah, but she also saw the time. If Ed didn’t hurry, she might end up missing her chance to keep Mac from putting a man in the hospital in the name of Janus security.
Though she tried to go over everything that happened, Ed couldn’t quite wrap her head around all the events of the past few days. She spent more of it unwittingly unconscious than she liked, and most of it was spent organizing for the most well-planned counterattack Janus had ever managed to execute. A counterattack that they wouldn’t have been able to pull off without the far too accurate warnings of the person who put her in the hospital in the first place.
Snow. Ed still didn’t know what to make of her. She also didn’t know where she was. No one said anything about her poking around and that was concerning.
“Ed! Where is she?”
Ed turned around to Miranda storming down the hall to catch up with her. Her hair was in more disarray than usual and Ed could see the dark circles under her eyes more clearly the
closer she got. She was furious; her eyes wild and set on Ed like she’d taken something from her.
Right, Brady was missing.
“I haven’t seen Brady. I’m sorry.”
“That girl you let in took him,” Miranda said. She looked so sure of herself that Ed knew better than to argue if she didn’t want to be late. “If I find her, I’ll find my son. Where is Snow White?”
“Miranda-”
“Don’t you make excuses, Ed,” Miranda said. She was closer than Ed preferred her. If she took a swing at her, it would land. “I know you know where she is.”
“Actually, I don’t,” Ed said, taking a step back. “Have you considered that Brady’s just gone off on his own for a little while? He might just need some space. I mean, he is a teenager. He might be sick of spending all day hanging around with kids.”
“Don’t act like you know more about my son than I do. He is still a child, Ed. Something you’ll never know anything about.”
“Goodbye Miranda,” she said, walking back toward Section H. Ed didn’t have time for this.
“You can’t just walk away from me, Ed!” Miranda roared after a moment, charging back after her. “Tell me where you’re hiding her!”
“Iris, run exit strategy.”
Ed made it through the doors before Miranda caught back up to her, the doors sealing shut behind her. She suppressed the urge to turn back and took a deep breath. She had enough to deal with today without Miranda right now.
By the time she got to Section H, Ed felt calm enough to handle Mac and whatever he might throw her way. She walked through the wide white halls until she arrived at a small set of rooms with several men milling around, many of them looking somewhere between confused and concerned. Their chatter echoed down the hall and echoed the sentiment.
“Not like how he usually does it.”
“He coulda smacked him around a little.”
“It’s weird, right?”
“He must be going soft.”
“Please tell me this means Mac didn’t kill anyone yet,” Ed said as she got close. The collection of men and women came to attention, Ed immediately dismissing them with a wave to get them back to the cluster they were before. “None of that today,” she said. “Just tell me how it’s going so far.”
They looked between one another, their eyes eventually falling on David. He kept his composure, though Ed could tell he was irritated as he turned to her. “Mac’s talking to the second one now,” he said. “It’s the usual stuff. They’re starving and they need supplies, but they’re more than willing to stay here. He’s not being as hard on them as usual.”
“Or at all.”
“Shut up, Gary,” David said, tilting his head back to shoot him a warning look. Ed could see a dark shadow on his neck, but David looked back at her before she could get a better look at it. “We also haven’t been able to get in touch with Downstairs to make arrangements.”
“I just fixed that. Give it a hour and you should be fine. Where are you keeping the last guy?”
David pointed to one of the doors and Ed let herself into the observation room. She wanted to get a better look at this man that had Mac so interested. She dimly remembered watching Mac hesitate while talking to him before, not to mention what he’d said since.
The observation rooms were silent, soundproofed, and contained a few chairs in front of a large glass wall overlooking the second room with a door into it on the right. On the other side of the window was a man with dark hair and a thick beard staring down at his handcuffed hands on the table. Clyde stood in the corner at attention and perfectly still with his eyes on the man.
The man sat in silence, though Ed could clearly hear the shuffling of his feet against the ground through the speaker. His green eyes didn’t waver from the metal chain and there were several shadows on his skin, like smudges on his fingers and across his face. When she looked closer, she could see them as shapes, all diamonds with circles drawn in the middle of them and little spots at the various points.
“She’s coming, you know,” he said. “You really should let me finish her off now. I can still do it. I have nothing left to lose. She already took it all.”
Ed frowned, looking Clyde over as he refused to respond in the corner. She couldn’t see a single shadow on him, though she did catch him twitch at the words like he wanted to say something in response.
Stepping closer to the window, she peered at the glass and shuffled away from the door and the only light source until she could see her reflection in the window. Snow had said something about being marked before too. She said there was something Ed would do right before she collapsed.
She gingerly lifted her bangs off of her bad eye. The milky white coat over her iris and pupil still bothered her to look at, but there was something else there now as well. A black mark, like the one she’d seen on Mac and this man, covered her eye like an eyepatch made of shadows. Hers had no dots on its perimeter.
The sound of the door opening made her drop her bangs back into place and turn around. Mac didn’t look surprised to see her in there and nodded. “Thought you’d show up,” he said, though Ed could tell he didn’t want to talk to her.
“I hear you’re not beating them up this time,” Ed said.
“It’s always the same,” Mac said. “They came for supplies. They don’t know anything. They’ll do whatever we tell them. It’s not worth the effort.”
“Liah got to you.”
“Are we done?”
Ed watched Mac as his eyes flicked over to the man at the table. The air of impatience around Mac had nothing to do with Ed and everything to do with the man in there.
When Ed said nothing, Mac nodded and went into the other room. “Get out,” he said to Clyde, moving around the table and taking a seat opposite the man. Neither of them said anything as the door closed and locked, the sound echoing through the room.
Clyde locked the outside door to keep anyone else from coming in as well before taking a seat. Ed stayed on her feet and waited for one of them to break the silence.
After another minute, Mac finally spoke. “What’s your name?”
The other man didn’t look up from his chains and let out a sigh. “There is a procedure, I suppose. My name is Roland Perez.”
“And why did you think it was a good idea to blow a hole in our walls, Roland?”
“Because there’s a monster inside them,” he said, finally looking up. “Look, I’m not exactly proud of getting the nomads involved in this, but they’ve been eyeing this place for a while. It was the only way I’d get here in one piece.”
“So you could kill a monster.”
“That girl from the mountain is not human.”
“There’s no mountains around here.”
“You know damn well that mountain showed up.” Roland balled his fists, the chains rattling as he planted his feet on the ground, but he stayed in his seat. “She’s here. I can feel it. Just let me get rid of her for you and you can kill me or do whatever it is yo-”
Mac smacked him, nearly throwing Roland out of his chair. “There are no mountains around here,” he repeated calmly. “Why did you think it was a good idea to blow a hole in our walls?”
“Because she should die for what she’s done!” Roland got to his feet and was promptly smacked back down into his chair.
“And what did she do, Roland? Besides ride in on a mountain that doesn’t exist.”
Roland glared back up at him and wiped the blood from side of his mouth with his hand. “I’m not even from here. The rest of the world, we forgot about North America after the war. It was a lost cause. Fucking Colombia blew up Panama just to make sure they wouldn’t be affected by-”
Smack.
“I could do this all day,” Mac said.
Clyde shuffled in the corner of the room at that, looking back and forth between the events in the room and Ed. Ed glanced back and she could tell he was trying to find the words for what he wanted to ask. “Rest
of the world?” he managed to say. “You think there’s really a rest of the world still?”
Ed said nothing, frowning into the room. That was definitely what it sounded like he said. The implication of the rest of the world still existing while they tried to survive in this wasteland was a mess she didn’t even want to consider right now.
“She killed my family! Killed everyone!” Roland struggled to get himself upright this time. “We went to her asking for help. The girl on the mountain. They said when the mountain appeared, it was good fortune. The girl on the mountain knew what to do. She knew everything and if you did what she told you it was all supposed to work out. They never tell you that she helps everyone, though. Because of her, everyone’s dead and I’m stuck in a fucking wasteland slowly dying from whatever the hell is killing everyone else here. I’m just trying to save you from dealing with that.”
“By coming in with a bunch of asshats who were going to murder anyone who got in their way when they tried to rob us.”
“That isn’t accurate.”
Ed and Clyde jumped, both turning back to see Snow standing behind them. Clyde got up to check the door as Snow continued to watch the exchange on the other side of the window, a frown on her face and shaking her head.
“I only said what I was told to,” she said. “They told me the words and I did what they told me. He says it like I did it intentionally. I didn’t even try to do anything on my own.”
“How did you get in here?” Clyde asked.
“I walked.”
Ed’s hand hovered over the button to alert the interrogation room of a problem outside, but didn’t press it. Clyde confirmed that the door was locked and said nothing, staying by the door and keeping his eyes on Snow. Ed looked between the two of them, but Snow didn’t even move, her eyes still firmly on the exchange on the other side of the glass.
“See, here’s what got me curious about you,” Mac said, standing up from the table and looking carefully over Roland. “I travelled with some raiders for a little while. Not willingly. I never tried to set them on innocent people and didn’t try blowing anything up. But they used to talk about how they knew where my little shelter was because of some chick they found on a mountain too. I forgot all about it. Until you.”