A medic sat Clint down, but pushed her off and stood again. “My son!”
“He’s gone,” the medic yelled. “We need to tend to your wounds.”
Sam crouched and helped Penny up as she sobbed, saying, “We’ll get him back.”
“No we won’t,” Penny gasped, almost gagging.
Clint stumbled to them. “We need to get inside.”
The base’s gate opened. The few guards who had stayed inside took point on either side of the doorway. “Move! Move!”
Clint winced, face pale. “Gray Altar’s retreating.”
Sam pulled Penny to the entrance, but her sister writhed out of her grasp. “We have to go after them! What are we doing?”
“Penny, inside,” Clint said. His face drained of all color.
“No!” she yelled and pointed her claw at the blackened trees. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “We can follow them! I can!”
“Pen,” Sam said, not knowing what else to offer.
Alix stood at the open gate. “It was a big show for them,” she said. “They didn’t kill you on purpose.”
“You shut your fucking mouth,” Penny said, aiming her claw at Alix now.
“She’s right,” Clint said, coughing. He leaned on the medic helping him into the base. “They would have killed us if they wanted. God this hurts.” He stumbled and sat on the concrete floor. The guards who had survived the attack were being escorted inside. A missing leg. A hand ripped off its wrist. Sam looked away.
“They’ll barter for the baby,” Alix said. “And Jill.”
“What?” Penny yelled. “With Mason?”
Scanning the room, Sam started to panic. “Where’s Dixon?”
A medic walked over to her with a blanket. “He’s getting the attention he needs.”
“Is he okay?” Sam asked, watching Jill run to them from the depths of the base. “Where…?”
“C’mon,” the medic soothed, ushering her away from the door.
Penny refused help. She threw off her blanket and stood at the open gate, smoke filtering in. Light from the flaming gunship throwing wild shadows into the base. When Penny dropped to her knees and sobbed, Sam knew her sister blamed herself for the disaster—Dixon’s injury and Mason’s abduction—the dozens of men and women killed by Gray Altar. Penny let out a throat-grating scream.
Medics backed away.
And there was Alix, watching, studying, countless security cameras pointed at them. She turned to Sam.
“You saved us tonight, you know,” she whispered.
Sam tried to suppress her sneer. “Huh?”
“The last thing Gray Altar will do is hurt you,” she said. “Too many people support you now. Even if they’re going to broadcast footage from tonight, it’s good for our cause. For you and Penny and your mother.”
Sam snickered and turned to watch Penny. “But Mason? What about him? Are they going to kill him?”
Alix sighed in a sorrowful way that let Sam know she was genuine—that this wasn’t just some media war.
Penny’s scream echoed through the massive base.
“I’m sorry,” Alix said. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah,” Sam coughed, glancing back at her sister again. “Say that to her.”
CHAPTER 11
For Prince, there were few things more satisfying than successfully improvising on the battlefield. No mission ever went according to plan. He prided himself on his quick problem solving even under the most intensely stressful situations. Ideally, he should have returned to Fort Walters with the mother and child, maybe even the two girls. His father and Merrick understood that would be nearly impossible. It also would have given Gray Altar’s online opposition limitless ammunition to discredit their organization.
Standing inside the gunship, he removed his StiffArm and cloaking armor and stared down at the young man he had knocked unconscious. Blood streamed from the boy’s nose. Maybe it was broken. Hopefully that crooked nose would differentiate him from his twin for the rest of their lives.
Prince kicked the boy’s leg. “Your girlfriend killed my pilot.”
The boy didn’t respond. He kicked him again, a little harder. “I should have blown your daddy and brother to pieces.”
“Do you know which twin you have?” Merrick said over the radio.
“Ah…,” Prince chuckled. “Why do I keep running into this problem?”
“We’ll find out when he wakes up. Make him comfortable,” Merrick said, and went on to tally the death count of both One Nation members and the few Gray Altar soldiers who had been killed. Now the girl’s arm was too much of a spectacle for them to affectively use the footage of the battle in their favor.
“We all agree here, if we show the video, people are just going to focus on her. We went into the mission with the illusion of peace and she was the first to attack. It’s just, if we use the footage, it’ll be the first time people see her.”
“And you’re afraid they’ll like what they see,” Prince said.
“Exactly.”
“Can’t you just cut her out?” Prince asked.
“We could,” Merrick said, speaking to someone in the background. “Yeah. We thought of that. They’re trying. But we know that One Nation probably filmed their own footage to contradict us. We’d be gambling if we released an edited…”
“Right, right,” Prince groaned and kicked the boy’s leg again.
The speeding gunship hummed. Transport ships roared close by, carrying his men and equipment and the bodies of the fallen. Janet’s burned body would be missing.
The boy awoke with a gasp, banging the back of his head. He tried to touch his swollen nose, but his wrists were cuffed behind his back. Prince took a little pleasure in watching him struggle.
Blinking, looking around the gunship, the boy realized where he was. “Dixon…”
Prince was happy the little idiot so willingly gave up his identity. “Your brother? He’ll be okay.”
“You killed,” Mason snorted blood and coughed it out on the floor. “…him.”
Prince looked to a screen set inside the gunship’s wall. Communications analysts at Fort Walters were already editing footage of the attack and sending it back to him. “No. I could have, but I didn’t. I could have blown your dad and him to pieces.”
“Ugh…fascist Dupe,” Mason spat. He pressed his forehead to the floor and groaned.
Prince rolled his eyes to the ceiling and kept them there. “Yes. Maybe. Yes. I… some people might describe me as a fascist.” He stepped to the boy and gathered a fistful of his hair, pulling up. “What else did you call me?”
Surprisingly, Mason grinned. White teeth between trickling blood. He looked down at Prince, winced, and looked back up. “You… fucking… duplicate.” He swallowed and choked. Grinned again. “Clllone.”
Prince didn’t even think. His fist wailed Mason’s temple so fast, the boy bounced off the side of the gunship and onto the floor. The pilot looked back from the cockpit, but was afraid to say anything. Prince shot him a glare. The pilot did make that face though—the slightly squinted eyes and tight lips, nodding slowly—like so many other Gray Altar soldiers.
Prince crouch, leaning into the boy’s face. “What!?”
Mason closed his eyes tight and groaned. “Screw… you.”
Gripping the boy’s hair down to the roots, he shook his head. Dribbles of blood vibrated to the floor. “You tell me what you said.”
“I said,” Mason screamed in a shrill screech that bordered on fright. “Screw you!”
Prince tossed his head, snapping him down. He stood and wiped his palm on this thigh, looking at his open hand, the palm and the back, flipping it over. The boy was messing with him, surely. Definitely. He had heard One Nation rumors and wanted to test Prince’s patience. Get under his skin.
“Twenty five minutes to LZ,” the pilot said over the radio.
Yet, the words dupe and clone would not evaporate from his mind. How would this boy know wo
rds like that would insult more than any other he could say? There was nothing online about Prince beyond his name and title and affiliation with the company—nothing personal that stated he loathed Sets so much that he wished them eradicated entirely. If Mason had guessed, it would have been a remarkable bullseye.
Staring at the backs of his hands, they were his hands and not some cloned copies rendered in a lab. Prince made himself believe this.
“Lay there,” he said. “Don’t fucking move.”
Prince didn’t expect to feel affinity for the boy. He was a terrorist, one of the youngest he had ever captured. But after watching the two videos and getting to know the two girls, he couldn’t help but feel something, even if he couldn’t identify what that something was. Here laid the boy who he had ripped from a night’s swim. Skinny-dipping with his high school sweetheart. Was there anything more American? Here was the boy who kissed the girl. The girl that nearly killed him. This made him pause. Was there anything more American?
Maybe, Prince thought, I should have died that night.
Turning from Mason, he rolled up his sleeves. Unzipped his fatigues. Every scar was there, all of them acquired during Gray Altar missions—a triangle shaped gouge in his side from a piece of shrapnel—a long yet faint line on his forearm from deflecting a knife. He touched the newest one on his scalp. Still a ragged river of healing skin. Prince flexed his forearm and chuckled to himself. The very idea that Gray Altar would go through all that trouble to clone him, ridiculous.
When they landed at Fort Walters, crowds of protesters surrounded the thick-walled building. From the roof, Prince could see blocked off streets filled with picketers. Parting side doors ushered in hot air.
Prince stepped out of the gunship, gripping Mason’s shoulder.
Merrick ducked, running from the roof’s entrance. “Word’s out! We released the footage to every news outlet! They’re saying we mercifully apprehended one of the fugitives.”
Prince nodded. “That’s the truth. No footage of the girl with the arm?”
“We left that out, yeah. You alright?” Merrick yelled.
Prince shot him a dismissive yes wave.
“We were watching from the cameras on your gunship before that bitch took it down. Some arm on that girl.”
“Yeah,” Prince laughed, tightening his grip on Mason. “Some arm.”
Arm. Prince’s eyes traveled down Merrick’s shoulder to his bare forearm. Here was an unapologetic clone, someone who pridefully cheated death to live among the elite few. An immortal asset. A renewable resource.
Soldiers jogged over and relieved Prince of Mason. The boy’s head hung below his shoulders.
Prince leaned into his ear and spoke low. His mouth inches from Merrick’s clones ear. “You’d tell me, right?”
Merrick tilted back. “Excuse me?”
Prince smirked. Could he test the old man? A person who lied so casually that he believed his own bullshit. Prince knew he could tease out an inkling of deceit if he was subtle. “I wouldn’t be upset. If it’s for the good of the company…”
Merrick raised his hand and wiped something off of Prince’s shoulder. A gesture that felt too intimate for a superior. “If you’re talking about what people say about you online, about the videos. No. I’m not going to tell you.”
That was Merrick’s best defense. Make him laugh. Treat him like the surrogate son he’d always been. More bullshit.
Beneath them, in the mobbed streets, people chanted and marched. Merrick looked to the side of the building. “Don’t they know we’re doing the best thing here? If anyone beside us got control of the cure, the Chinese, India, whoever. They’d own us.”
Now Prince laughed. “Don’t they already?”
Merrick almost looked offended. “Who?”
The soldiers held Mason up as he lifted his head and looked around the helipad with groggy eyes.
“Anyway,” Merrick added. “The cure’s our century’s atomic bomb. It’s that important of a discovery.”
This analogy wasn’t enlightened or helpful. All it did was make Prince anxious.
Prince turned to the soldiers, Mason between them. “Take him to my room.”
Merrick’s brow bunched. The old clone could still be surprised. “That’s not protocol. We have cells in the basement. Take the prisoner to the basement. I will meet you there.”
“No,” Prince interrupted. “Keep him cuffed. Bring him to my room. I want two guards posted outside the door. Two inside until I get there.”
The soldiers looked to Merrick for orders.
Merrick nodded and turned to Prince, speaking softly. “We think it’s best if the prisoner is interrogated in the interrogation rooms.”
“We?” You and who?”
“Your father,” Merrick said. “He gave me specific instructions to interrogate the boy myself. Alone.”
Prince smiled. “Alone…”
“Haven’t you been through enough tonight?” Merrick asked.
It wasn’t so unusual for Merrick to ask for his help in these matters. He was always willing to take on additional work for Prince, even mentoring him throughout the years, but he had never tried to stop him from such a routine task like interrogation. The opposite was true. Prince was his go-to man for extracting intelligence.
Prince leaned to his commander’s ear. “But this is the part I love.”
Merrick patted him on the same shoulder he had brushed earlier.
“Just leave this one to us,” he said, a tinge of irritation in his voice. “This is one of the most high value targets we’ve ever had.”
“Are you saying you don’t trust me?” Prince asked.
Merrick feigned a look of disappointment. “No. That’s not it at all. You’re the best we have. Literally. You know that.”
“Good.” Prince pointed to the soldiers. “My room. Now.”
Merrick rubbed his stubbled jaw. “Your father’s not going to like this.”
Nothing could have been more ineffective than telling Prince his father might disapprove. He had based his entire career on defiance. His commander should have known better.
Merrick followed him. “You know why all those people are rioting down there? They want to storm this place. Carry that little bastard back home on their shoulders like a hero.”
“Then they’ll be thrilled when we swap him for the mother and child.” Prince smiled and patted Merrick on the shoulder. “Don’t you love the drama?”
“I’d rather storm One Nation’s base and slaughter every last one of them,” Merrick said.
Prince turned away from his commander and walked.
“We counted over thirty One Nation dead. We have several injured. Only three KIA.” Merrick inhaled and cleared his throat. “I’m sorry about Janet. She was an expert pilot. One of our best.”
There was no time to dwell on that now. “Clean him up,” he shouted to the soldiers and gestured to Mason. “Give him my breakfast.”
Merrick walked beside him. “You need to eat.”
“I don’t mean literally,” Prince said. “He’ll have what I’m having.”
It took two soldiers to carry Mason down the tight stairwell. Through the heavy hallways of marble and slate.
Behind him, Merrick’s pestering echoed. “What do you plan to do?”
Prince said nothing.
“The Secretary, even the President, they’re going to ask for documentation. Every second of this needs to be legal and legitimate.”
A soldier offered Prince a bottle of water and he took it, uncapped, and chugged. “You see the mag-vests those One Nation guards were using? Unbelievable. How’d they not know we could hack them?”
“Anything we do, it should be recorded. They’re going to investigate all of this once we have the cure.”
Mason’s toes dragged along the tile. Moans seeped from his slumped head. “You’re never… gonna get… the cure.”
“Ha!” Prince hooted.
After showering
and shaving, Prince took what he considered a very healthy crap while ordering food from the mess hall—whatever the southwestern breakfast special was along with the tallest coffee available. It was far better than shit on a shingle though the chef at Fort Walters made a mighty savory shit on a shingle.
Prince ate alone. Ignored calls from his father. He wondered why the old man hadn’t stuck around, but maybe the mobs outside the fort had spooked him. At a window in one of the old galleries, Prince forked egg and beans into his mouth and watched hand-painted signs bob over the heads of protesters. Many of them were in pairs, held by Sets and Set supporters: NO TWO OWNS THE CURE and NO KNEELING AT THE ALTAR.
Only days ago, the crowds were half this size. Now the wide grassy median up Charles street was crowded with people. Black flags with white 2s hung from the statues leading to the Washington Monument. Every intersection he could see was blocked off. People gravitated around the aid trucks parked east of the fort. Camera crews followed reporters. A new helicopter circled along the periphery, not able to fly over the fort’s protected airspace.
Gray Altar had moved in their own WarWalkers—hulking metal frames armed with tasers and turrets loaded with rubber bullets. They stood guard at the fort’s entrances and sauntered heavily along the clogged barriers where local police held the line. Legs jerking when they turned position. None of them had been activated, but their presence was enough to pacify any angry crowd. Even Prince didn’t like to stand next to them.
Though he wasn’t supposed to, Prince unlocked the old wood-framed window and pulled it open after a few tugs. The garbled voice of the people shared into chant, “One Nation, One Nation! Two by two by two! One Nation, One Nation! Two by two by two!”
“Jesus…,” Prince murmured. He knew there were demonstrations happening in other cities as well. New York, LA, and even abroad. Baltimore’s central location was pulling supporters from Virginia, D.C., and Philadelphia, something Gray Altar hadn’t anticipated.
A voice from the door startled Prince.
“How many people you think?” Merrick asked.
Two Girls Book 2: One Nation Page 15