by Tarah Benner
I disarm her cautiously and set her gun on the bed behind me, but I keep my own weapon trained on her.
“You’re cute,” she purrs, barely moving that pouty mouth. “So serious. You might want to put that thing away before we go out in public. No point freaking people out.”
“Turn around,” I growl.
She complies, and I’m not surprised to see that the back really is as nice as the front. I grab a sweatshirt from the desk chair and put it on awkwardly, one arm at a time. I can’t very well stick the gun in my sweatpants — and there’s no way I’m walking into this unarmed — so I conceal it in my open sweatshirt and let her walk out into the tunnel first.
Her heeled boots clack loudly on the tiled floor as she leads me down the tunnel. She looks so out of place in Recon with her skintight suit and perfect makeup, and part of me wishes Harper were here just so I could watch her size up this bitch.
As scary and assassin-y as Mina is, I’m confident Harper could take her in the ring.
“You’re Information?” I ask, not bothering to hide my disbelief.
It’s no secret that most Information workers are complete nerds — lab rats, scholars, and journalists whose duty is to conduct research, process communication, and archive the history of the compounds.
“That’s my day job.”
Of course. She’s Constance. If I had to guess, Mina is one of the Information wildcards whose job is to monitor everything from interface communication to Fringe intelligence.
“So what do you do for Constance?”
She turns around and fixes me with a sharp look and then pivots quickly and keeps walking as though I never spoke.
Rather than being turned on by her aura of mystery, I find I’m pretty fucking annoyed. She and Jayden get a kick out of watching me squirm, but I don’t have time for this stealthy Constance bullshit.
In the harsh light of the megalift, Mina isn’t nearly as beautiful. Her tanned skin is unnaturally dark from spending too much time under the UV lamps, and her big brown eyes are surprisingly cold.
The lift stops on one of the upper levels, and the doors open to Information.
It’s a stark contrast from the bright Systems levels. Everything here is tuxedo black, with shiny floors designed to look like black granite and recessed lighting along the walls. Each door we pass is illuminated by a single spotlight projecting down from the frame.
She leads me halfway down the tunnel to an unmarked door with a tiny sensor. She scans her ID card, and the door beeps softly as it unlocks.
We step inside, and the heat of the room quickly envelops me. It’s full of servers blinking lethargically from ceiling to floor.
Mina turns to a keypad on the wall, punches in a code, and then places her thumb on a sensor. There’s another high-pitched beep, followed by a mechanical groan.
At first, I can’t identify the source of the noise, but then the nearest server starts to move. It’s sliding on an invisible track, revealing a hidden space behind the bank of servers.
Throwing me a smug look, Mina gestures for me to follow her.
I hesitate, wondering if she’s leading me to my death, but my curiosity gets the better of me.
I step inside, and my eyes struggle to adjust to the unnaturally bright light of two dozen computer monitors. For a moment, I think we’re alone, but then a chair swivels around, and my eyes lock onto Jayden’s.
“Nice of you to join us, Parker,” she says in that clipped voice of hers.
“He wasn’t as fun as you said,” whines Mina, crossing to Jayden’s side and tilting her head to look at me.
Jayden smirks, and I get a pang of irritation imagining the two of them conspiring against me.
“So this is Constance.”
“It’s one of our home bases,” says Jayden. “It allows us to take advantage of Information’s extensive resources.”
My gaze bounces around the room. Most of the security feeds are changing constantly, revealing different views of the Fringe and several public places within the compound: the canteen, the main hall, and the megalift. I didn’t know there were cameras there, but I should have guessed.
Even more disturbing are the infrared views of darkened compartments. I see a few indistinguishable men tossing and turning in their sleep and couples lying together in bed — completely unaware that they’re being targeted by Constance.
By the looks of their compartments, most of them are high-level tier-one workers and board members. I imagine my own compartment flashing on screen, and my skin crawls at the thought of Jayden watching me.
It’s sick to think what Constance can get away with when no one knows what’s happening.
“Why did you bring me here?” I ask finally.
“I thought it was time you knew the extent of Constance’s reach,” she says. “I thought it might . . . motivate you to cooperate.”
“Haven’t I cooperated so far?”
Jayden’s mouth twists into a sneer. “More or less. But everything I’ve asked you to do so far has been relatively tame.”
“Tame?”
“The intelligence you gave us was good, but I’m afraid we missed the drifters. They move fast. And I have every reason to believe they are up to something serious.”
My stomach clenches, but I keep my face blank. Jayden can’t possibly know what I know. Hell, I don’t even know what they’re planning. How could she?
“Whatever they’re up to . . . we can’t let it happen.”
“So what do you want from me?”
Jayden fixes me with those cold eyes again and without missing a beat says, “I need you to take out their leadership.”
For a second, it feels as though all the oxygen has been sucked out of the room. It’s too hot in here, and the space is way too small for the three of us.
“You want me to do what?”
“Your job is to kill drifters, Parker. I see no problem with narrowing the scope of your duties.”
“My job is to kill drifters who are getting too close to the compound! Clean out the nearby towns. This isn’t defense. It’s an assassination.”
Jayden crosses her arms over her chest. “It wasn’t a request, Parker.”
“No,” I say, backing away from her. “I won’t do it. Find yourself another hit man. I’m sick of this shit.”
Jayden swivels her chair around to face the monitor. She doesn’t raise her voice, but I can detect the fury and desperation there. “You aren’t in any position to refuse an order from me, Parker. Especially after that unfortunate incident with Cadet Riley the other night.”
I clench my fists. I can’t believe she would bring that up. But Jayden has no problem admitting what she’s done when she knows there will be no repercussions. I have the sudden urge to yank her chair around and choke her with my bare hands.
“Funny how you managed to get there just in time to save the day,” she muses. “It seems as though Riley’s had a couple close calls lately.”
I focus my gaze on each of the monitors, trying to distract myself from my murderous thoughts.
“She’s proven fairly difficult to get rid of. I’m starting to wonder if my time might be better spent.”
I freeze, and Jayden slowly swivels her chair around so I can see her smug grin.
“Might.”
“Why are you bringing this up?”
“I’m not as incompetent as you might think, Parker. If I were truly worried about Riley revealing what she knew about VocAps . . . the bidding . . . I would have smothered her in her sleep weeks ago. But because of her little friend Celdon, I knew she wasn’t a real threat.”
“Then why are you doing this?”
She smiles. “Because I needed to see how far you were willing to go to protect her.”
In that instant, it feels as though Jayden reached out and clamped her icy fist around my heart.
She’s been playing me the entire time. All those missions, the fight, the attempt on Harper’s life — they w
ere just to see how I would react.
“Turns out, you were very motivated to save Riley — much more motivated than the average lieutenant. But we already knew that, didn’t we?”
She hits a button on the keyboard behind her, and the monitor closest to me flickers to the training center. But it isn’t the live feed. It’s a recording.
Harper and I are in the middle of a heated debate, and she’s going at the punching bag. I don’t have to watch to know how this goes — I remember it as if it were yesterday — but I can’t look away.
I yank her around, and then we’re pulled toward each other like magnets. My hands are all over her, and I wince inwardly as I watch myself cop a feel.
Jayden hits the button again, and the recording freezes.
“I shouldn’t say I’m surprised, Parker. Every once in a while, you get a cadet who’s a little more . . . intriguing than the others.”
She takes her time raking her eyes up my body. Her expression is clear: She thinks she owns me.
“Why do you care about me and Riley?” I ask, feeling bold. “She hasn’t affected my work in any way.”
Lies.
“Oh, I care very much. The illegal fights, the back talk, your refusal to train my cadets in a timely manner . . . You’ve always made it clear that my authority means nothing to you. I was starting to think you had a death wish. But as it turns out, I just didn’t know how to incentivize you to behave. Now I do.”
My back hits the door, and I feel for the handle. I need to get out of here because if I stay a second longer, there’s a good chance I’m going to kill Jayden and Mina.
My murderous expression just eggs her on. “Clearly my threats haven’t been effective. But I’ll tell you one thing. If you do this for me, I’ll call off my attempts on Riley’s life.”
I stop trying to get away from her, too suspicious to leave. “Why would you do that?”
“It occurs to me that you may be more useful alive after all.”
I ease up from the door and walk slowly back toward the monitors. Jayden gives me a satisfied sneer.
Her olive branch hardly matters now that Harper is gone, but I can’t give her any reason to be suspicious. If she finds out what we’ve done before they arrive at 119, she could easily get in touch with compound leadership and have controllers waiting to send them back.
Jayden seems to take my tense expression as a sign that I’m interested, and she pulls up a few images of the Fringe on the center monitors.
“This is Malcolm Martinez and Jackson Mills,” she says. “They’re the leaders of the Desperados — a brutal Fringe gang. Mills used to lead a smaller gang, but their territory was taken over by Martinez’s crew.”
Hearing Jayden mention the two men Owen talked about feels strange, and it’s even eerier when she zooms in on stills of their faces.
Malcolm has a sharp, pointed head, heavy eyebrows, and wary eyes. Jackson looks more like the star quarterback type: well built with a youthful face that oozes charisma.
They’re probably the two most well-protected men on the Fringe, yet Constance knows exactly who they are.
“They’re going to be hard to get to, but we need to weed them out. You’re going to have to go through this man,” she says, pulling up another frozen frame of surveillance footage.
This guy is older. He’s dressed better than most of the drifters I’ve seen, exiting a building in a town I don’t recognize.
“We don’t know his full name or his current location. He’s all over the place, and he uses a different alias everywhere he goes. But he’s close to Jackson. He’ll lead you to him.”
She hits the keyboard again, and the footage starts to play. Another man exits the building on screen, and she pauses the video.
She zooms in slowly, waiting for the image to refocus at every level of magnification until she’s satisfied.
“When you get to Mills, you need to take him out, too.” She points at a fourth man. “He’s just a go-between, but he’s respected, and he knows everyone. From what I’ve heard, he could take over if Malcolm were killed.”
I squint at the grainy image, and the air freezes in my lungs.
Only a slice of the man’s face is visible in the still, but I know that face as well as my own.
It’s Owen.
twenty-eight
Harper
Running through 119 fills me with a strange sense of déjà vu. From what I’ve seen, the layout is nearly identical to our compound, but the walls are painted different colors, and the tunnels aren’t as well maintained.
The emergency stairwell is pitch black and has a damp, foul smell that ours back home doesn’t. The rust on the railing flakes off in my hand, and my boots splash through small puddles of water on every landing.
There must be a leak somewhere that caused the power outage in the stairwell, but I can’t believe Operations hasn’t fixed it. Back home, those issues are resolved within hours to prevent further damage to the compound.
Celdon starts to pant after five levels, but we can’t risk taking the megalift and running into a controller. Our sweaty faces and wary expressions would raise their suspicions, and we can’t afford to be brought in for questioning tonight.
I force my legs to keep moving, even when Celdon falls a little behind.
I hope the board members’ compartments are in the same place as they are in our compound. If they aren’t, our chances of finding them before the rest of 119 wakes up are slim.
When I reach the landing of the correct level, I lean against the wall to collect my breath while I wait for Celdon to catch up.
It’s so dark that he bumps into me when he rounds the corner. I can’t see his face, but I know he’s glaring at me.
There’s no time to let him recover. I pull the door open and step out into the tunnel. It’s running on emergency lighting, too, which strikes me as odd. It’s possible the compound is experiencing a mass outage, but I can’t ever recall a time when our entire compound was without power for more than a few minutes.
Since I can’t see anything outside the small pools of yellowish light, I feel for the wall and use it to guide us down the tunnel toward the area where the board members’ compartments should be situated.
The silence makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end, and the knowledge that we’re exploring the exact level that was blown to smithereens in our compound just adds to the eeriness.
I don’t like feeling my way through the shadows in a strange place, but hopefully we can find a board member, plead our case, and get a room for the night to await processing. They’ll have to discuss our case as a group in the morning, but if we can get one board member on our side, I’m confident they’ll grant us citizenship.
When we reach the end of the tunnel, Celdon clicks his interface to illuminate the placards on the doors. I grin. My interface is stuffed at the bottom of my rucksack, but Celdon’s is never far out of reach. I’m sure it’s already killing him that he can’t access 119’s network.
I see a placard that reads “Secretary of Relations” and knock. If anyone will be sympathetic to our cause, it’s her. I heard on the news that when she campaigned for office, one of her platforms was greater freedom to move between compounds. From what I’ve heard of her speeches, she seems levelheaded and fair.
We wait for a few minutes, but there’s no answer. I knock again — a little louder this time — but there’s still no sound of movement from inside the compartment.
It’s possible she’s a heavy sleeper, or she could be staying somewhere else tonight. For some reason, the thought of the secretary having an illicit affair sends a nervous giggle through me.
Celdon gives me a weird look, but I shrug it off and move on to the Undersecretary of Vocational Placement. He wasn’t our first choice, but if he’s anything like Sullivan Taylor, he’s a decent human being who actually cares about the young people he oversees. Plus, I’m not above threatening him with what we know about VocAps.
>
Celdon knocks this time — much more loudly than I would dare in the middle of the night — but he’s as nervous and impatient as I am.
My stomach clenches in anticipation as the seconds drag by. I already know what I’m going to say, but it’s still nerve-wracking since I have no idea how he’ll react.
We wait, but he doesn’t answer. The silence from inside his compartment is maddening.
We had a second backup — the Undersecretary of Information — but she doesn’t answer either.
This is getting weird.
“You think there’s some secret bunker where they’re all staying?” Celdon asks loudly.
I shush him and rack my brain to think where they could be. It’s possible someone called an emergency board meeting, but that seems unlikely. Anything big enough to warrant rousing the board members at oh-three hundred would have woken other people, too.
My first instinct is to go down to Neverland to ask someone, but then I realize Neverland is something that’s probably unique to our compound with the collapsed Underground tunnel.
“Fuck this,” says Celdon. “I’m asking someone.”
I open my mouth to protest, but Celdon is already banging on the nearest compartment door, which probably belongs to some retired Systems worker. I cringe, an apology already on the tip of my tongue.
But when he knocks, the door swings open, and we both freeze.
I shake my head at Celdon, preparing to make a break for it, but he just walks in as though he owns the place.
I don’t hear any startled noises or angry protests, so I follow him inside.
The compartment is completely empty, and it looks as though whoever lived here departed in a hurry. There are old canteen takeout containers everywhere, the bed is unmade, and I can smell rotten food in the kitchen area. There’s another smell that sets me on edge, but I can’t quite identify it.
“This is giving me the creeps,” says Celdon. “Where is everybody?”
“Let’s check the medical ward. There has to be someone there who knows what’s going on.”
The medical ward is one place where I know there will be people, and part of me has started to associate it with comfort since Sawyer practically lives there.