by Joe Hart
“But what if they find the transmitter?”
“We have to hope they don’t.”
“But—”
“There was no other way,” Merrill says, teeth gritted. “Zoey is willing to give herself up, but I’m not.”
“Okay, signal is about three and a half miles away,” Lyle says, motioning Tia to the right. “Growing stronger.”
“They’re coming back toward us?” Chelsea asks.
Merrill nods. “It’s what I was hoping for.”
“What do you mean?” Lee asks.
“I always wondered if there was another way into the ARC besides over the wall. We searched for a long time before our first attack but never found anything. If they bring her in any way other than by the elevator or a chopper, we’ll know it.”
“Signal’s staying steady,” Lyle says, turning to stare out over the drop. “They’ve stopped somewhere this side of the river.”
“Can you tell where?” Merrill asks.
Lyle shakes his head but holds out both his arms, sectioning off an area of the river valley. “Somewhere in this range give or take a quarter mile.”
“The town,” Ian says, meeting eyes with Merrill. “They’ve stopped in the town somewhere.”
“Wait.” Lyle’s eyes go wide and he turns back to the case, adjusting a dial for nearly thirty seconds before straightening up and drawing the headphones away from his ears. “It’s gone.”
“What, the signal? How can it be gone?” Lee asks.
The baby begins to cry. Quietly at first but then with more volume until the plateau rings with her shrill voice.
“It’s like we thought,” Merrill says. “There’s another way in. The signal’s working off radio waves that can be interrupted by any number of things, but if they were just going behind a building or through a stand of trees, it would return as soon as they were clear. Still nothing, Lyle?”
“Nothing. It’s gone.”
“It’s got to be underground. Some way into the ARC from below.”
“You mean the entrance is under the river?” Lee asks, moving to where Chelsea rocks the baby, her cries slowly beginning to quiet.
“I don’t know,” Merrill says. “But we’re going to find it. Lyle, Tia, get points of reference we can search within based on the last signal. As soon as it’s dark, we go.”
“Zoey wanted a chance to talk to them, remember? She wanted to see if she could convince them about Hiraku and the army.”
“She’ll have until we find the entrance. Then we’re going in and getting her out.”
“Merrill—”
Merrill holds up a hand to silence him, eyes blazing with emotion. “Lee, I lost one daughter in that place, and I refuse to lose another.”
43
She’s in a boat of some kind.
Bobbing, swaying. The movement of water beneath her unmistakable. Zoey groans, pain invading her consciousness in buffeting waves. Her head aches at the base of her skull. With one hand she reaches back and rubs the spot, half expecting it to be swollen and sticky with blood, but there is only smooth, undamaged skin. Someone must have hit her though, what else could cause—
Her eyes come open as she remembers.
Steven shoving her into the vehicle.
Lee yelling in the distance.
Her pleading with Vivian about Hiraku.
The blast of mist in her face.
Sinking darkness.
She blinks. She’s in a room, not a boat, and she can’t move except to lick her dry lips.
The room is unlike any place she’s been before. The walls are a comfortable beige lined with richly stained bookshelves laden with texts. Exposed beams matching the shelves arch up and meet in the center of the room, which appears to be circular in shape, and in the middle a chandelier hangs, dripping with crystal and light. An enormous desk sits across from her on a woven rug the color of wine, a leather chair empty behind it. Two more overstuffed chairs rest to either side of a small table several feet away.
Zoey attempts to sit up and makes it on the second try. She looks down and notices she’s wearing a comfortable pair of cotton pants and a buttoned shirt made of the softest material she’s ever felt. Her feet are shod in a pair of slippers, and a light blanket is draped over her middle.
She tosses it aside, perching on the edge of the leather couch she’s been placed on. How long has she been sleeping? There’s no way to tell but it feels like more than a few hours. A tall glass of water rests on a table to her right and she only resists the compulsion of her thirst for a second before downing the entire thing. There would be no reason for them to drug her again, now that she’s here. But where exactly is she?
Zoey rises slowly, tries her balance and finds it intact, though she feels slightly sluggish, her senses lowered a notch. The hardwood floor beneath her creaks, and she turns in a circle, examining the office. She’s in the ARC, but where? She never encountered a place like this in all her years in the facility. Even as she tries to recall the blackened stretch of memory that is the last few hours, a sound comes from behind her and she turns.
A door set between two bookcases opens, and a figure steps into the room, his face lost in shadow for a split second before it is revealed.
But even before her mind registers the impossibility of his features, it is already computing how he moves, the set of his shoulders, the suit he wears.
The Director stops a dozen yards from her and smiles. “Hello Zoey.”
She stumbles back, knees catching on the couch, forcing her to sit. “No,” she hears herself say even as she’s rising again, her brain trying to uncouple what she’s seeing from what she knows. “You’re dead.”
The Director smiles, glancing over one shoulder, and it’s then she sees he isn’t alone. Vivian steps into the room behind him and closes the door, but not before Zoey glimpses what’s outside.
A sterile hallway, the corner of a stairway visible to the left. And it’s all she needs to know where she is.
The Director’s room.
“Not the welcome I was hoping for, but the one I expected,” he says.
Zoey scrambles to her feet again, beginning to circle away from them. She glances at the desktop, searching for a weapon, but there’s nothing but a neat stack of papers, a small lamp, several books. Maybe in one of the drawers—
“There’s nothing in this room to fight us with,” the Director says, moving closer. He stops near the low table in the center of the room. “Though I’m guessing you could become pretty creative with one of the heavier books. It wouldn’t be the first time someone was injured with knowledge.”
“How did you . . . ?”
“Survive? With quick treatment and through many hours of pain.” His handsome features twist slightly with anger and become an ugly facsimile, as if there is another face hiding beneath them. His true self surfacing. Then it is gone, replaced by the easy smile he wore during all his speeches. “But that’s neither here nor there. You were under duress at the time. Your actions were perfectly reasonable.”
“You killed Terra,” she says, her anger trumping the disbelief at seeing him alive.
“Yes. It was most regrettable and probably somewhat hasty on my part. Needless to say, it didn’t have the intended effect.” He waves a hand through the air, a dismissive gesture. “But let’s not focus on the past. What’s done is done, my mother always said. Please, sit.” He motions to one of the chairs and lowers himself into the opposite one. Vivian remains silent, watching her closely as she stands several feet to the Director’s left.
Zoey makes no move to sit, looking past both of them at the door. Could she get by them and out into the corridor? But where then? She’s on the fifth floor, surrounded by guards and concrete walls.
“I know you’re trying to gauge your escape,” the Director says, folding his hands in his lap. “But you and I both know the first time was a fluke. A brilliant fluke, but a fluke nonetheless.”
“What about the
second time when we broke in under your nose and took the rest of the women with us?” She sees a flicker of what could be amusement on Vivian’s face.
“I would call that reckless, since you caused the deaths of several people. Simon, Terra, Penny, Lily. Not to mention all the men your friends killed in cold blood. Need I go on?”
“You’re a bastard.”
“Let’s be civil, shall we? I mean, you’re here under your own volition.”
“You had my daughter.”
“Regardless, you’re back and here we are. You understand as well as anyone how important you are, Zoey. As I said before, any choice besides the greater good—”
Vivian raises one hand, holding a small pistol to the side of the Director’s head, and pulls the trigger.
The gunshot is like a slice of thunder in the enclosed space, deafening and gone in an instant.
Zoey jumps as the Director’s head snaps to the side, a fan of blood and brain matter spattering the chair and floor.
For a full second he sits exactly where he is, still looking directly at her, his mouth open and struggling to finish the rest of the sentence. A teardrop of blood slips from the corner of his right eye and his shoulders jerk, spine stiffening.
Then he tips forward and slumps to his face, blood jetting out in two feeble pumps before drooling down the side of his ruined head to soak into the rug.
Zoey feels her jaw working, mimicking the Director, as she tries to give birth to the scream that must come. The unreality of what happened continues to loop in her mind’s eye.
Vivian stares down at the corpse before examining the pistol’s barrel, and frowning, wipes it on her pants leg before tucking it into a pocket.
“Wh . . . why?” Zoey finally manages.
“Have a seat,” Vivian says, nodding toward the couch. “Before you fall down.”
Zoey shuffles over to the couch and sits. The smell of burnt skin and hair mixed with cordite is almost overpowering and sends a sickening wave through her stomach. When one of the Director’s feet death-twitches, she forces herself to look away.
Vivian grasps the arm of the chair the dead man hadn’t been sitting in and drags it toward the couch before lowering herself into it. Her expression is unchanged from when she first entered the room.
She’s insane, Zoey thinks, fear suddenly returning amidst the aftershocks of violence. She’s insane and now she’s going to kill me too.
“Why did you do that?” she asks, reasoning the only way to stay alive is to keep the other woman talking.
“Because the time had finally come and he was no longer needed. Besides, I was absolutely sick of his voice.”
“What do you mean?”
Vivian turns her gaze to the corpse. “His real name was Dennis Anderson. It’s very strange to be telling you this now after so many years of him being ‘the Director.’ He came up with that, you know? Everyone thought it was fine to use his real name but he wanted a title.”
“Who was he?”
“A political wannabe. Before assuming his position, he was an aide to the Secretary of State under President Andrews. He was young, impressionable, and truly believed in our purpose.” She becomes quiet, almost introspective, and Zoey feels as if she’s seeing for the first time who Vivian truly is.
“You,” Zoey says, drawing Vivian’s inward gaze back to the present. “You’re in charge, aren’t you? It was never the Director. It was you.”
The barest of smiles. “You always were very smart. Yes, I became lead scientist late in the Dearth, after my predecessor decided our pursuit was hopeless. I answered only to the president himself along with his idiotic team of advisors, none of whom would’ve known a chromosome if it bit them. They were arrogant, even in the end. All of them old, gray-haired white men who had made a career out of their titles, just like Dennis over there did. All of them riding on the backs of the taxpayers and completely derisive of anyone who was better educated or happened to be a woman. Needless to say, none of them were pleased whatsoever when I became the head of the National Obstetric Alliance.”
Vivian sighs and runs her tongue across her teeth before standing and striding to the desk. She rummages in the drawers for several seconds before straightening, a small metal bottle in her hands. “Talking about the past always causes me to drink. I know for most people it’s reversed, but . . .” She shrugs and unscrews the cap before waving the bottle at the Director’s body. “To you, Dennis. Good riddance.” Vivian takes a long drink from the bottle, and Zoey uses the moment to study the door. She can see no locking mechanism and wonders if the Director would have required one. But again she’s faced with the decision of what she would do if she were able to make it out of the room. There is nowhere to go.
Vivian finishes her drink, wincing. “God, I miss good Scotch. This is nothing like it.” She crosses the room and sits again, offering the bottle to Zoey.
“No thank you.”
“Probably smart.” Vivian sets it down on the floor beside her chair.
They look at one another for a long moment. This woman is the reason for her suffering, for all of what’s happened. Not the Director, not Reaper, not any of the clerics—Vivian. A boiling rage begins to well up within Zoey from an unknowable depth. It sends a tremor through her, a reflex of movement she has to fight down because it carries the urge to rocket forward and tear this woman to pieces. She could do it. In this second it is within her to destroy, to kill. What restrains her is the image of the baby in Lee’s arms.
She shuts her eyes so she doesn’t have to look at the monster before her. “Why did you do this?”
The other woman doesn’t respond for so long Zoey begins to think she didn’t hear her, but when she opens her eyes Vivian is staring at her, gaze as cold as stone.
“Why? Why did I do this? You need to ask?”
“There were other ways.”
Vivian launches to her feet. “There was no other way! You weren’t there! You didn’t see the things I saw. It was hell on earth. People running rampant, destroying, pillaging. Men raping every woman they saw, and not because they were trying to keep the species alive, as if there would ever be a conscionable reason for it, no, just because they could. People ran when it was their duty to stay and try to fight what was happening. They went to war with each other when the fate of humankind rested on us working together.” Vivian’s gaze is alight with a fevered intensity. “Our only hope was the research we were doing, and even that was taken away. Shut down by a bunch of men who were afraid for their own lives when we were on the brink of discovery. You ask me why? I had to because people are too stupid to save themselves. The president was going to end NOA and shelve all our work.” Her voice lowers and her chin sinks to her chest. She seems unsteady, drunk not only from the alcohol but from her fury. “I couldn’t let him.”
The words slowly sink in, taking on a new meaning, and Zoey can’t help but shrink away from the woman, comprehension like a shower of ice water. “Shepherd,” she whispers, and at the name Vivian’s head snaps up. “You sent the emails to the rebels. You helped them kill the president. All those people . . .” She lacks the power to go on, seeing the truth in the other woman’s eyes.
“How . . . ?”
“We found them. All the messages. It was you.”
“They were supposed to take out the president and his staff only,” Vivian says, in a weak voice, her fervor gone. “I had no idea what they were planning. They were insane using a bomb like that. I was nearly killed.”
Zoey can’t respond. What can she say to a person who could make a decision like that? Who could put her profession above others’ lives? It is like she’s looking at a species utterly alien to her.
“I know what you’re thinking. How could someone do that? How could they decide to end another’s life? Well I’ll tell you: if I hadn’t done it, I would’ve been dooming the entire human race. The president was going to call for a cease-fire with the rebels and the end of the National Obstetri
c Alliance was his peace offering. All of my work, the sacrifice and dedication—for nothing. He and his advisors were willing to throw it all away.” Vivian pauses, looking down at her hands. “So I did what I needed to and when everything fell apart we retreated here. The ARC was built in secret, made to withstand centuries, a last-ditch effort to combat the Dearth. So that’s what it became, our final hope.
“And now I know I made the right choice because you’re sitting here with me, living proof that it wasn’t all for nothing.” Vivian brightens, as if casting off the events of the past. “You’re special, Zoey. I always believed I’d witness the fruition of all the toiling hours and endless theories, and now here we are at last.”
“I’m not special.” It’s all she can think to say.
“But you are, Zoey. To say anything different would be a lie.”
“Why?”
Vivian lowers herself into the chair again and leans forward. “You’ll have to forgive me; I wasn’t honest with you the night you returned here. I told you that the Dearth caused female embryos to become male no matter what we tried. That wasn’t a lie. But I also said we didn’t know why. In truth we’ve known for many years.”
Zoey sits back in her seat, despite everything a tingle of anticipation flowing through her. “What caused it?”
“The SRY gene. I’m sure that doesn’t really mean anything to you, but in short, it’s located on the Y chromosome and causes an embryo to become male during the early developmental stages. Twenty-five years ago, for reasons still unknown to us, there was a widespread duplication of the gene onto the X chromosome as well, so in essence, no matter which sperm reached a female’s egg first to fertilize it, the child would always be male due to the presence of the SRY gene.”
“So you’re saying it affected men?”
“Yes.”
“Then why were women taken and held against their will?” She tries to keep her voice even but fails. “Why were we kept here?”
“For several reasons.” Vivian stands again, as if filled with manic energy, and begins to pace, walking around the pool of blood still spreading from the Director’s body. “At first it was to eliminate the possibility of a female defect such as the SRY duplication. When we found nothing, we realized there would be an unprecedented fallout, that women were going to be considered a limited commodity by some. We knew there would be groups that would abduct them, sell them on the black market. During my tenure the NSA worked closely with the CIA to foil over a dozen attempts at mass kidnappings by foreign perpetrators. Long story short, we continued gathering women and young girls to protect them.”