by Martha Adele
Three people sprint past us toward the private dining hall with bags and first aid patches on their arms. I look back to Tom, and he pulls me close into a hug.
With the air injected into his bloodstream, the symptoms of a heart attack are imminent. No one will know what happened. All they will know was that there were five witnesses.
He had a heart attack.
Since Tom wasn’t in the room when I did my job or was told of the plan, he isn’t an accomplice. He doesn’t know what happened, so he can’t get into trouble for it. He will also not have the guilt on his conscience.
This was what had to happen. This was what was best for the country. This was what was best for the reinstitution of justice. This was what was best for Tom.
One down.
Three to go.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Zane
It has been all over the news for the past week.
“James Sparrow dies of a heart attack.”
“Could new health acts be put forward?”
“Sparrow dies at the age of fifty-six. Could there be foul play?”
It hasn’t stopped. June has had her picture taken a few times with Chancellor Oswald but none of them she knew about. It was mostly him walking her out to the fence or back into the capitol building, but either way, this isn’t the most beneficial thing.
Our job is to remain hidden. I realize—and so does June—that she has a job where she will most likely have her face plastered in newspapers and on gossip channels; but that doesn’t mean we need to embrace it.
I have begun to wonder, with the way she comes back talking about Oswald, if she has begun to fall for him just as every other eligible bachelorette in this country seems to have. It is not as if she is drooling over him. She is simply speaking very highly of him whenever she gets the chance. I don’t think he is a bad guy, not at all, but speaking so highly of someone who lies for a living? I don’t know.
She is the only one of the two of us who ever really goes out. She meets with Logan every now and then to continue discussing the plan and meets with Oswald every other day. I don’t know what she does with the rest of her time, but I do feel as if I can trust her judgment.
Sometimes.
The chime at the front door rings, and I look up to see Van walking in with a smile. “How is it going, Zane?”
I shrug. “As good as it can be I guess. No one seems to really like buying fabric anymore, though, so …”
She nods back. “That is one of the reasons we chose this place and hid it within the city.” Van pulls a file out of her jacket and slides it onto my desk. “I can’t stay for too long. Go ahead and look through this and update June.”
I open the file and flip through the paper-clipped pages, revealing something I find more than unsettling. I read through each page and become more and more worried about the plan.
When June walks in about an hour later, she makes sure to come through the back door. I immediately wave her over and have her read the files. “Here. Van just dropped these off this morning.”
“What is it?” She lifts one of the pages up and scans over the paragraphs.
“So we know that people have been and most likely are still being kidnapped and tortured for answers, right?”
She nods.
“According to recent intel, they are also making soldiers out of them.”
June looks to me with confusion and back to the file.
“By pumping the soldiers full of glucose and starving their brains of the proteins they need, they make the soldiers more susceptible to suggestion. Along with torture and old brainwashing techniques, they are enhancing the experience with vials and other medicines.”
She places her finger on one of the pages, seemingly trying to block my voice out to finish reading it.
I try waiting for her to finish but can’t force myself to be patient enough. “Logan was tortured. He was also assigned to ‘protect’ Oswald. Do we need to be concerned?”
June looks to me with a sense of pain.
“I am not saying that it would be his fault. I am just asking. He is one of their soldiers, and he knows about us. Do we need to be worried that he will end up telling them?”
June shakes her head and takes a step away. “Logan has a good-enough sense of judgment not to take certain missions. He is only working there so that he won’t be tortured anymore.”
A small moment of silence sits between us.
June turns back to the files to continue reading. “He helped us kill off one of the chancellor’s advisors. Why else would he do that?”
June
I finish reading through the file and find myself slightly hesitant to meet Logan again. I head out the back of the Fabric Room and to our rendezvous point in the woods. I stand there, waiting for him, and listen to the sound of the breeze through the trees, feeling its cooling sensation on my face. I close my eyes to absorb the late-spring warmth and sniff the scent of the forest, allowing it to remind me of a better place and a better time.
The snap of a twig in the distance brings me back to the present. I look to the source of the noise and find that Logan is much closer than I thought he was. His black silhouette figure blends in with our surroundings but not enough to make me lose sight of him.
“Hey,” I say to him.
I can see his cheeks rise from under his mask. “Hey.”
The two of us walk through the woods toward the outside of town and talk about anything and everything that comes to mind. There are certain questions though that neither of us answers.
He asks me what happened after leaving Frieden, and I tell him. I tell him about the tree foxes, about Bram and Samantha, and about seeing Grayson and Janice. I tell him about how I trained and I trained until I became the best I could be.
But that is it.
When I ask how his back is, he tells me all about how, at one point, he was paralyzed. I can’t even imagine him being paralyzed. Logan is one of the most active beings I have ever met. He tells me about Eric and how he was going to be moving to State Three for his dream job, but he stayed behind to help him instead. He also tells me that Derek came to visit him at one point but stops speaking of him after that.
I force myself to swallow my questions about the Pages and continue listening.
After telling me about Eric landing a new job with John, Logan stops. He doesn’t go any further. I don’t know if he stops because he senses that I cringe at the name or if he stops because that is when he was taken and tortured.
We walk in silence, just listening to the sound of whatever is around us. For me, I choose to focus on his breathing. His perfect breathing pattern is something I have always adored. Though his breathing is much more hoarse and much more of a wheeze now than anything else, I still find it lovely to listen to.
“So,” I say to him, “what are the chances that you will be taking your mask off again for me?”
A small chuckle escapes his chest. “I don’t know.”
“I know you said the wind hurts your skin, so I wouldn’t ask you to take it off now, but anytime in the future, do you think I will get to see you again?”
He shrugs. “It really depends on the situation. If we are being completely honest, even if the wind didn’t hurt me, I wouldn’t want to take off my mask.”
“Well, I’m never going to force you to.” I listen to him clear his throat and try not to disgust me. I can tell he has more he needs to cough out, but I don’t push it. “But your eyes have always been my favorite trait.”
Logan looks to me but glances back down to the path in front of us quickly. His eyes seem to be the only thing that didn’t take any damage. Not that I wouldn’t still like his eyes if they did. I just hope my pointing that out will help him feel a little better.
I break the silence between us as we continue thr
ough the woods. “So can I ask you a question about work?”
“You can ask, but I may not answer.”
I nod. “What kind of assignments are you given?”
He looks to me.
“And do you always do them?”
Logan shakes his head. “I am given choices usually. They lay out three different assignments for me to choose from, and I choose the one that makes the most sense.”
“What do you mean?”
He clears his throat again. “For example, just over a week ago, I was given an option to either kill one of two people, neither of which they would tell me what they did, or bring in a man who is a known kidnapper.”
“A known … kidnapper,” I restate.
He nods. “I only do assignments that I know are good, like protecting Oswald or bringing in that man for questioning. I made a deal with my officer that I will do what they ask as long as it is sensible.”
I find myself silent. I don’t want to offend him, but I need to know. “How do you know they are telling you the truth? Like, when they told you that man was a kidnapper, how do you know he really was? Couldn’t they just be telling you that to get you to comply?”
He shakes his head at me. “No. They wouldn’t do that.”
I remain quiet. If he doesn’t want to accept it, I don’t want to push it on him and get caught in a bad situation. Not that I think he will do anything to me. I just don’t want him getting himself killed.
The two of us continue our walk in silence, only asking the occasional question every few minutes.
Logan
He sent Elloise up to my room to get me. She came in and gave me the location to meet Tony and then left immediately. No other exchange was made; no other words were said.
Within half an hour of her instructions, I make my way to the building where he requested our meeting and work my way to the room I was told to meet at. When I arrive in the large concrete room with only one small entrance all the way in the back, I look to a man’s silhouette.
Tony’s voice meets my ears. “Thank you for finally joining me, Logan.” He takes a few steps toward me when I hear a small shuffling. I look to my right to find the room fades into darkness so dark that I can’t see through it to the source of the noise.
I turn to look back to Tony, and he is holding a gun to my head. “Mr. Forge, I don’t want to put a damper on our relationship, but I have begun to feel as if I can’t trust you anymore.” Before I have the chance to say or do anything, he allows the gun to spin on its trigger forward and hands it to me. “It’s time to fix that.”
I take the gun, and the lights on the other side of the room switch on and reveals someone sitting in a small wooden chair, with a bag over their head, tied up with ropes.
“I need you to kill this man.”
I look back to Tony. “What did he do?”
“He is an Amiable rebel.”
I step forward to Tony and look back to the man as he sits, obviously drugged, in the chair. “How do you know?”
Tony takes a deep breath and stares at me. “I shouldn’t have to tell you, Logan. You should just trust my word, but since I respect you, I will make you a deal.” He looks back to the man and stares. “Once you kill the rebel, I will tell you how I know.”
My eyes follow Tony’s, leaving us both staring at the target. Dozens of thoughts run through my head, leaving me hesitating but only for a moment. I find myself raising the gun and taking out the man with a single blow to the head.
“You made the right choice, Logan.” I turn back to look at Tony, and he gives me a small smile. “We know this man was an Amiable rebel because he was the one responsible for the death of Chancellor Oswald’s advisor, James Sparrow.”
My heart drops as his words echo through the room. I feel a sudden pounding in my head as my brain seems to become heavier and heavier. I realize it is not my brain growing in weight but my conscience as I run to the man.
“It was only a matter of time before we caught him.”
I fall to my knees by the body of this man and pull the bag off his head.
“We won’t put this out to the public, though. We want the rebels to think they succeeded.”
His red hair covered in blood makes it appear much more orange than I ever thought it was. His eyes remain open as he lies on the ground, seemingly staring right past me. When I finally shut his eyelids, I realize I will never see the only purple iris I have ever seen again.
I rise to my feet, leaving a starved Derek Page’s corpse lying beside me. I know that if I react the wrong way, they will be onto me. They will know I am no longer their soldier, so I storm toward the door so that Tony won’t see my anger.
The moment I cross the door’s threshold, Tony’s voice echoes once more through the room, “You made the right choice.”
I find myself slowly turning to stare at him and scanning him over. His perfectly coiffed hair and obviously fake teeth fall with him, lifeless, to the floor as the shot from my pistol rings through the air, blowing a matching hole through his head.
“Now I have.”
June
Walking to the back room to check some of the microphones I have hidden in the capitol building, I trip on part of the carpet that has been folded back. After almost falling on my face and knowing Zane saw it, I straighten up my posture and continue forward as if nothing happened.
Listening to the high-and-mighty, all-business, super-serious Zane chuckle forces a smile to rise on my face. I’ve noticed that he has been tiptoeing around me since he pointed out that Logan may pose a threat a few days ago, but I don’t understand why. Why would he be trying to spare my feelings? It is not as if I would take offense to him being wary.
When I make it into the back room, my eyes immediately fall upon a piece of paper folded on the desk. After making my way over to it and reading it through, I speed back out to Zane.
“Read this.” I hand him the paper and watch his eyes skim over it.
“What? ‘You were right’? Who is this from?”
I pull the paper back and read over the two statements made. You were right. I am going to fix what I can.
“Is this from Logan?” Zane asks me.
“I think so.” I set the paper down on the table and look back to Zane. “I don’t know exactly what this means, but I think we need to get a jump start on the plan.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Logan
Through the halls I go, hiding behind corners whenever I need to in order to avoid contact with someone. I manage to make it undetected to Commander Isana Burris’s office and surprise her.
“Excuse me.” She rises to her feet when I take a step into the room. She looks me up and down, seemingly shocked at my appearance. “What do you think you’re doing?”
I watch her hand as she slowly reaches underneath her desk. Before she has the chance to trigger any sort of alarm, I leap across the room, startling her backward, and snap her neck. No sound or scream was made, only the slight shuffling of me sliding her back into her chair and leaning her over her desk.
Before coming here, I went to the file room in the capitol building where they keep the papers on who runs what. All the completed assignments as far as assassinations and interrogations were signed off by this woman: Isana Burris.
I look through her office and find a list in her drawer. The same list of people who had completed tasks and assignments in the file room.
I slide this list into one of my belt pockets and lock the door to the office. She is still logged into her hologram computer, so I scroll through the information and search the keywords for each soldier’s name. I go through the list and write down as many of their addresses as I can get until the computer program asks me for a checkpoint password.
Leaning back from the computer, I look around the room and find four large oil la
mps. Without hesitation, I rummage through the drawers and find a box of matches. After sliding the matches into one of my pockets, I take each lamp and empty the oil on Burris, the cabinets, the desk, the walls, the door, and everything I can as I slowly back myself up to the window. I set the last empty lamp down on the floor and slide the window open.
I light one of the matches and flick it into the room. It dies out before hitting the ground, so I take another one and do the same. When the whole room finally ignites, a blast of heat strikes me in the face, causing an intense pain to flood my skin. I slide the window closed, pull out one of the hooks and lines that I took from one of Tony’s supply rooms and hid in the suit’s belt, and climb my way back down the side of the building.
June
“There is no way,” I tell Riley.
He nods as everyone else laughs at his story. “I’m telling you, three weeks ago was the first time I had ever visited a real farm.”
“And the moment you walked in, you just happen to step on a rake?” I ask.
Riley nods. “It hit me in the nose so hard that I thought I had broken it.”
“That will be the last time he will ever step foot into a barn,” Madden snorts.
Every time I come over to be with Tom and the others to earn their trust, I have noticed that Tom takes it into his own hands to always remain in between me and the others. Tom scoots closer to me as Dotson adjusts his seating position on the couch’s armrest. I look away from him and around the room. The chancellor’s office is much larger than I ever really pictured it to be; but the more time I spend in it, the more it feels regular-sized and cozy, and everything else feels subpar.
“Wasn’t that the last time you did any publicity stunts?” Dotson asks Riley.