Exposure (The Fringe Book 2)

by Tarah Benner

  “I’ll have a better story than I did last night, that’s for sure.”

  But his strained expression makes me nervous. He has no idea how he’s going to get out of this one, especially if the trust between Jackson’s old crew and Malcolm’s men is as fragile as it sounds.

  “When will you be back?” he asks.

  I open my mouth to respond but close it immediately. I don’t know what our next mission is going to look like, but if I had to guess, I’d say that Jayden is going to send us to Fort Sol.

  “I’ll be out again in a month,” I say, not meeting his gaze. “But I don’t know where I’ll be sent.”

  He nods but doesn’t say anything.

  Harper appears in the doorway, hair pulled up and her rucksack slung over her shoulder.

  “Ready?” she asks.

  I bob my head and turn back to Owen. This is it — time to say goodbye to one of the people I thought I’d never see again.

  At first, I think he might just slap me on the shoulder like the complete stranger I am, but he throws an arm around my neck and pulls me in for an embrace.

  I’m not used to this. I know my arms are too stiff, but it’s oddly comforting.

  Owen lets me go quickly and clears his throat, looking and sounding just like Dad.

  “I’ll be in touch,” he says.

  “What?”

  He cocks his head, that familiar mischief in his eyes. “Don’t worry, kid. I’ll find you.”

  As I pull on my mask and sling my bag over my shoulder, he sticks his head out the door to check that the road is clear. He steps aside so Harper and I can pass, and she glances back at him a few times as we head down the road.

  I only allow myself one look. Owen is standing in the doorway with his arms crossed over his chest, attempting an indifferent look that does nothing to mask the regret in his eyes. His shoulders are hunched protectively under his ears, and I can tell he’s grown used to losing people, too.

  As we walk away, I force myself to ignore the uneasy knot forming deep in the pit of my stomach. Something is telling me I shouldn’t go back — that I would never have gone to the compound in the first place if Owen had been with me — but I can’t just run off with my brother.

  The compound is my home in ways that Owen hasn’t been for a long time. And, as much as I hate myself for it, I couldn’t just cut and run from Recon.

  But I realize I can’t go to 119 with Harper either. I’d be hundreds of miles away in Arizona, and I might not even be placed in Recon a second time. I just found Owen. I can’t leave now and risk never seeing him again.

  “What are you thinking?” Harper asks.

  “Nothing,” I lie. “Just stay alert.”

  We’re approaching the main strip of buildings. The town is silent as always, and I don’t even get that prickle on the back of my neck that tells me we’re being watched.

  For once, I feel utterly alone out on the Fringe, but I still go through the motions. I stick to the shadows of buildings, look around every corner, and make Harper stop twice to rehydrate.

  When we leave the cluster of abandoned restaurants and gas stations behind, my senses sharpen automatically. The town may have been deserted, but I don’t trust the huge expanse of open land we have to cross to get back to the compound.

  After walking for half an hour in silence, Harper can’t keep her thoughts to herself anymore.

  “That’s crazy,” she says, referring to Owen.

  “Yeah.”

  “How has he been alive all this time and you’ve never run into him out here?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She’s quiet for a beat. I can tell she’s trying to be polite, but her curiosity gets the better of her. “Is he . . . different than you remember?”

  I grin despite the nervous energy thrumming in my shoulders. “I haven’t seen him since I was eleven. Of course he’s different. Taller, too.”

  “That’s not what I meant.”

  I take a deep breath, not wanting to admit that our reunion wasn’t the joyous occasion I always imagined. “Yeah. He’s different. He’s . . . angrier. But he’s still my brother, you know?”

  She nods, looking worried. “What’s going to happen to him next time he runs into Malcolm’s crew?”

  The thought makes my stomach clench, but I shove down my discomfort. “I’m sure he’ll talk his way out of it. He always had a talent in that department.”

  “And if he doesn’t?”

  “Owen’s a grown man,” I say impatiently. “He can take care of himself.”

  “I didn’t say he couldn’t! But these guys mean business, Eli. Don’t you think we should help him?”

  “Help him how?”

  “I don’t know!” she splutters. “Talk to someone. See if it’s possible to bring someone in from the outside.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Once we relocate, I mean. Maybe there will be someone at 119 we can trust.”

  I shake my head. “The compounds killed the Fringe Program. You know that. I was in the last group they brought in from the outside, and considering we all ended up in tier three, it doesn’t seem like an overwhelming success.”

  “So . . . what are you going to do?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  She lets out an impatient huff, and I can tell she’s been holding in her thoughts the entire night. “Eli, we can’t let them destroy the compounds. I know he’s your brother, but —”

  “We don’t even know what they’re planning,” I snap, lengthening my stride to put some distance between Harper and my loud, guilty thoughts.

  Owen’s warning about 119 makes me think they have plans to attack, but I have a hard time believing the drifters would ever have the opportunity or the resources to succeed. And, truthfully, I feel worse about my decision to abandon Harper than the possibility that I could be complicit in a plan to take down one of the largest remaining human settlements in the country.

  “Well, clearly they have more capabilities than we thought. Do you think they’d really do it?”

  “Try to take down the compounds? Yeah, I do.”

  “How, though? If we knew what they were planning, maybe we could —”

  “Maybe we could what?”

  “Maybe we could stop them!”

  I round on her, fully aware that our voices are much louder than they should be. “No, we couldn’t! Don’t you think we have enough issues of our own right now? Or have you forgotten that you’re at the top of Constance’s bad news list?”

  Harper goes red in the face and opens her mouth to speak, but I cut her off.

  “Don’t make this your personal problem. As far as I can tell, they don’t have the capabilities to bring down the compound. One drifter getting into the cleared zone doesn’t prove anything. Even if they repurposed all our explosives, they wouldn’t be able to pull off an attack of that magnitude.”

  “Shouldn’t we at least . . . I don’t know . . . try to get more information?”

  “I tried! Owen’s smarter than that. He’s not going to jeopardize their plans.”

  “But you’re in the compound, too! Would he just let you go down with it?”

  “No!” I yell. “Of course he wouldn’t! That’s how I know they haven’t gotten very far.” I take a deep breath, trying to calm my own racing thoughts. “He may be a drifter, but I know my brother. He wouldn’t do that. Not if it meant killing me.”

  Harper stares at me for a long moment out of the corner of her eye. She isn’t convinced, and if I’m being honest, neither am I.

  The empty desert stretches out as far as the eye can see, with nothing except the dunes to our right and the compound far off in the distance. I grip my rifle a little tighter, waiting for enemy fire.

  Nothing.

  As we walk, the silence grows heavier between us. I keep thinking she’s going to be the one to end our stalemate, but she doesn’t say a word — not about Owen, not about our moment in the training center,
and not about the way we woke up this morning.

  I know it’s dangerous to leave that hanging between us, especially since we have to continue to work together. I clear my throat to tell her it can’t change anything between us, but she cuts me off.

  “Don’t,” she snaps. Her eyes look cool and distant over the top of her mask, but I can tell she’s a little off balance.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Don’t do your lieutenant thing right now.”

  “My lieutenant thing?”

  “I know what you’re about to say, and I really wish you wouldn’t. Don’t ruin whatever happened the other day.”

  She pauses, and I brace for the worst. I’m not sure if she’s going to yell at me or declare her undying love, but I know whatever she says is going to be hard to hear.

  “I can forget it happened if you can,” she says.

  Suddenly it feels as though all the air has been sucked out of my lungs. I wasn’t prepared for that, and her indifference hurts more than I want to admit.

  “I don’t want to forget it happened,” I say roughly.

  Her eyebrows lift in surprise, and it kills me that I can’t see her full expression. “You don’t?”

  “No!”

  Now I’m irritated, and I have no reason to be. I don’t know if I’m mad at myself for admitting it or angry at Harper for being so quick to doubt me, but I can’t blame her after what happened on the observation deck and everything I’ve done to push her away since. “I don’t want to forget it, but it doesn’t change anything.”

  She nods quickly, avoiding my gaze.

  “Things are even more fucked up than usual. We can’t have something like this getting us separated if Jayden decides to send us out again.”

  “You want to see Owen,” she murmurs. It isn’t a question.

  “Well . . . yeah.”

  She sounds hurt, which is strange, considering she was the one who wanted to blow off our little encounter. I know now is the time to tell her that I can’t go to 119, but I can’t bring myself to do it. I care about Harper, and planning to bail on her makes me feel like a piece of shit.

  Thankfully, my interface beeps softly as we approach the mines. The messaging icon lights up as my device registers the compound’s wireless signal, bringing a halt to any meaningful conversation that Constance could use against us.

  I focus on the ground in front of me, looking for places where the earth has been disturbed. Nothing seems out of place, so I turn on the map display to navigate around the mines that are supposed to be there.

  As we cross into the cleared zone, my heart rate speeds up. I don’t know why I expect to run into a drifter, but suddenly my awareness is sharpened by a dark undercurrent of guilt.

  What would Owen say if I shot another drifter, knowing it could be one of his friends?

  I immediately dismiss the thought. This is my job. Owen’s gang has been killing Recon operatives without remorse for years. He has to expect that I’ll do the same.

  In the distance, I see a flash of movement. Harper does, too, because she jumps a little and grabs my arm.

  “Is it . . .?”

  I squint through the bright sun and raise my rifle.

  The figure is too far off to tell if he’s one of us or one of them. I zoom in with my interface and breathe a sigh of relief when the gray fatigues come into focus.

  “It’s one of us,” I sigh.

  I loosen my grip on my gun and try to relax my shoulders. I don’t have to kill anyone today.

  We walk in silence for another twenty minutes, and I focus on the sound of Harper’s footsteps instead of the pain in my leg and the dread eating at my insides.

  The compound looks taller and more imposing than usual with the late-morning sun reflecting off the windows. I inhale deeply and try to welcome the sight of it, but it just makes me feel empty inside. It isn’t really my home.

  Harper puts a little more distance between us, and I cast one more glance in her direction. Her expression is unreadable, but her silence tells me she doesn’t feel great about how we left things.

  Only a few yards left. I quicken my pace, anxious to get off my feet and rehydrate.

  We reach the doors to the compound, but they don’t glide open automatically. I bang on the metal, hoping the security camera is just down or the ExCon guy fell asleep waiting for our return.

  “Hey! Open up!” I yell, even though no one can hear me through the thick glass and steel.

  “That’s weird,” says Harper, peering in through the nearest window.

  I’m starting to get a weird feeling. In all the times I’ve ever been deployed and returned ahead of schedule, someone has always been standing by to let me back into the compound.

  Unnerved, I pull out my interface and message Miles: Can you go wake up the ExCon guy? Someone needs to let us in.

  “Is there another door?” Harper asks incredulously.

  “Not on this side.”

  We could walk around to the bay on the opposite end of the compound, but the heat is starting to get to me, and I don’t want to be out here any longer than I have to.

  As the minutes drag on, I start getting nervous. Maybe this is one of Jayden’s power plays — her attempt to show us that she’s still in control. Maybe she really intends to leave us out here.

  But she was too anxious for more information about the drifters. Waiting isn’t her style.

  Finally I hear a loud clunk, and the doors glide open with a hiss.

  I step inside, anxious to get out of the oppressive heat, and the cool air stings my sunburned face. I drink in the comfortable humidity and blink a few times to force my eyes to adjust to the dim lighting of the chamber.

  As I squint up at the tall figure in front of me, a familiar face swims into view.

  “What the hell is going on?” I ask as the doors glide shut behind us.

  “Not much time to explain,” grunts Miles, yanking off his mask and glancing behind him at the second set of doors.

  “Where the hell is the door operator?”

  “A lot of shit has gone down since you left. Nobody knew when you’d be coming back, so . . .”

  “Why is no one manning the door?”

  Miles jerks his head toward the postexposure chamber again, looking anxious. “ExCon has gone on strike.”

  “What?”

  “It leaked out that there were ‘hostile survivors’ in the cleared zone, and they got pissed that the board was knowingly putting them at risk.” He cocks an eyebrow. “Three guesses who the rat is.”

  Jayden. “Are you kidding me?”

  “I wish. People are going crazy. The board doesn’t know what to do.”

  I stare at him, wondering how Jayden could be stupid enough to leak that information.

  Then I realize it’s her crazy way of putting pressure on Remy. He wouldn’t allow her to divert all her resources to tracking down the Desperados, so she created the perfect storm to embarrass the board and cause an uproar.

  “I can’t believe she’d do that.”

  “Really? You can’t? She’s fucking crazy. Nothing she does would surprise me.”

  The doors to the postexposure chambers slide open, flooding our small space in a creepy blue light.

  “Hey! You can’t be in here!” yells an unfamiliar voice.

  “Cool it,” growls Miles. “Somebody had to let them in.”

  He turns to go but puts an enormous hand on my shoulder and lowers his voice. “Hey! Watch your back, all right? People are going nuts.”

  “Thanks, man.”

  Miles raises an eyebrow at Harper — as though he’s telling her to keep an eye on me — just as the door on her side opens.

  Before the Health and Rehab people can get ahold of her, I pull her in. “We debrief together this time. Don’t talk to Jayden or Remy without me.”

  She nods, looking a little frantic, and vanishes behind the sliding door.

  Arms clad in a hazmat suit pull me backward
into my own chamber, and cold water bears down on me.

  I cough and splutter, squinting through the deluge of freezing water, but all I see are the shiny metal walls closing in around me. When the shower stops, a med intern starts unsnapping my overshirt, and I bat his hands away so I can undress myself. He strips off his hazmat suit, and I see he’s a scrawny kid with short strawberry-blond hair and a ruddy complexion.

  Shivering in my boxer briefs, I allow him to steer me through the next set of doors toward the waiting wheelchair. I sink into it, and he drapes a heated blanket around me. The chair whirrs noisily as we board the lift, and I can’t stop my leg from jiggling with nerves.

  I don’t like being separated from Harper — not with everything that’s going on — but since I’m alone in the lift with the med intern, I might as well see what he knows.

  “What’s going on with ExCon?” I ask.

  “I . . . uh . . . we’re not supposed to talk until you’ve been formally debriefed,” he says in a nervous voice.

  He looks so painfully awkward I almost feel bad for the kid. This must be his first Fringe retrieval, and they told him we might be unhinged.

  “No . . . we’re not supposed to talk about what happened when I was deployed,” I say carefully. I have a feeling this kid won’t be too hard to corrupt, but I can’t push him. I adjust my tone to sound a little friendlier and try to grin. “They don’t care if we talk about what’s happening inside the compound.”

  His hands tighten on the wheelchair as he considers my logic, and then he lets it all out in one big breath. “Everybody’s freaking out a little. ExCon has gone on strike because they don’t want to work if there are hostile survivors near the compound. That’s what they’re telling everybody, at least.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah. But I don’t believe it.”

  “Believe what?”

  “I don’t buy that there are survivors out there.”

  “You don’t?”

  The kid scrunches his eyebrows together as though he thinks it’s a crazy suggestion. “No! No humans could live out in those conditions. And if there were survivors right outside, the board would have brought them in. ExCon just doesn’t want to go out and be exposed to the radiation anymore.”

  “Would you?” I snap, all traces of friendliness gone.