As they arose, a voice came over the central speakers. “This is Captain Brogan. Please stand by to welcome the latest addition to our team.”
The men sank back into their seats. “It never fails,” Garrett said with a groan.
Jaxon’s reply stuck in his throat as the premonition he’d had five times in the past two months overtook him. The man stands tall and lean. He’s smiling, but no expression shows in his eyes that are covered by dark iTeev-like glasses, even though he’s inside a building and not talking to anyone through the feed.
Jaxon knew him, of course. No mistaking that mischievous grin. Jaxon also recognized the location now as he wouldn’t have before last night: Reese’s apartment, except it was furnished with a brown leather couch.
The holos on one of Jaxon’s office walls shimmered to life, and it was like suddenly appearing inside the conference room. Jaxon pulled himself to his feet.
“Everyone,” Captain Brogan said, “I’d like you to meet our new weapons expert. Name’s Randal Jensen, but he goes by the name Eagle. Please make him welcome.”
Chapter 9
REESE MANAGED TO arrive at her apartment in plenty of time before the meeting to put away the food her aunt had insisted on sending back with her. She hoped it didn’t go to waste. She’d come in the enforcer shuttle they’d used last night, and no one appeared to be lurking around the building, but that didn’t stop her from staying on hyper alert, even inside the apartment.
Jaxon arrived first, clean shaven and with only a few mottled bruises showing on his face. As she invited him in, he put two glass bottles into her hands. “Here’s the chotks you wanted.”
“Just what we need to relax. I’ll pour us a glass right now.” The expensive drink was sweet and light—ten times better than sauce, which was part coarse alcohol and part synthetic fillers.
“Nice furniture, by the way,” Jaxon said as he sat on the leather couch. “Glad they got it here.”
“Thanks. It’s darker than I expected, but it’ll do.”
Jaxon gulped down most of his drink. “Eagle is coming too.”
“He’s here already?” Reese set down her chotks on the coffee table, not sure why she felt surprised when Jaxon had warned her he’d be arriving soon.
“Yeah. His real name is Randal Jensen, but he still goes by Eagle. Captain introduced him today as our weapons expert.”
“Weapons? Is that a real position? I thought that job only existed at the academy.”
He laughed. “We have one in every division out here, but I talked with Eagle today and his background isn’t focused on weapons training or even maintaining weapons, though he is qualified enough for the job. He’s been working at a company in New Delaware that was recently purchased by the CORE. He was hoping to get on the Development Unit at HED when he was transferred here. He isn’t very happy about it.”
Reese understood why Eagle wouldn’t be happy about being sent here instead of the Headquarters Division. “Neither was I.”
“I know you said they wanted to transfer you for your protection, but weren’t you given any choice?”
She tilted her head. “Let’s see. I think the exact words were ‘No one wants to risk being your partner. You need to transfer far away where others won’t be killed when the KC tries to get to you.’ Very touching.”
“Hmmm.” Jaxon took another drink.
“I can see Eagle in weapons development,” Reese said. “He was always inventing things, and CORE knows we need upgrades. These pre-Breakdown weapons won’t hold up forever, and then what? And speaking of weapons, what kind do the fringers use?”
“Basically like ours.”
“I wondered. You ever see any fringers up close? See what they’re really like?”
“We had an intense battle with them over a river that borders Dallastar a couple years ago, and I saw groups of them there. They aren’t all brainless, radiation-warped creatures you hear about in stories, although I’ve seen a couple of those too. Not many these days. Anyway, we held them off. Water’s important out here. Can’t let them take control. We still have men out there guarding it.”
“So about the names. Did you talk to Hammer?”
“He messaged me just before I left for the day, saying we definitely have a problem. No details, but I didn’t expect any through a message, not when I asked him to use a back door for the search. He agreed to come and talk to us all tonight about what he’s found.” He paused to fill up his glass again. “Look, as soon as Hammer leaves, I want to talk to the others about my ability.”
“What? No!” Was he crazy? “At least, I’m not willing to do that. I’ve spent a lot of years hiding what I do.”
“Hiding in plain sight.” Jaxon laughed. “I should have gotten a job as a fortuneteller. And maybe I would have if my hunches had come with any regularity in the beginning, but I used to go months without any hint of them. Anyway, I told you I’d keep your secret, and I will. You make the choice about you, but I plan to tell them about me.”
His promise only partially alleviated her concern. “Any hunches about tonight?”
“No, but last night when we were talking I remembered something odd that happened years ago when Lyra’s daughter was born. Lyssa was staying with Lyra and helping out with the baby. Lyssa called and asked to talk to me in person, sounding spooked enough that I pushed off a big case I was working on to meet her. She was almost hysterical for an hour, telling me she’d left her body.”
“Left her body? That’s strange. What did you do?”
“I calmed her down, took her out for a drink—and two days later she called and made me promise never to mention it again. And I haven’t until now.” Jaxon laid his hand on her arm. “I think we’re right about this. But if things go bad, I can always say I’m kidding, and you can back me up.”
“All right then,” said Reese as the doorman below rang up to signal she had more visitors. “But let’s be careful.”
Reese immediately recognized Lyssa and Lyra from her drawings, and in person it wasn’t hard to peer past the decades between them. Both still had the straight ebony hair to their shoulders and they were still short, with an almost unnatural thinness. Their dark eyes looked large in their delicate faces. Overall, they hadn’t changed nearly as much as she and Jaxon had, though tonight Lyra didn’t have a problem with meeting her eyes as she sometimes had in the past. Reese could still tell them apart by the tiny mole on Lyra’s neck under her right ear.
Reese hugged them, her emotions suddenly catching in her chest. “It’s good to see you guys. Really good.”
They both grinned. “You too,” Lyssa said. “When Jaxon told us you were here this morning, we had to come see for ourselves—we weren’t in when you arrived yesterday. Anyway, you’ve changed so much that I barely recognize you.”
Lyra nodded and added, “I about died this afternoon when the captain introduced Eagle to everyone.”
“It’s weird, isn’t it?” Reese commented. “Come and sit down.”
Jaxon paced as the women sat and accepted glasses of chotks. Reese could tell he was nervous by the way his thumb rubbed against his forefinger as he prowled. He’d done that as a kid and also last night when he’d confronted her about her ability.
“I hear you have a child?” Reese said to Lyra.
She smiled widely. “Oh, yes. I have a daughter, Tamsin.”
“I can’t wait to meet her. How old is she?”
“She’s ten now.” She shook her head as if unable to believe the passing of time. “About the same age we all were when you two left the colony, if you can believe that.”
Reese sat down next to her. “How was it after we left? I always wondered.”
It was Lyssa who answered. “Dani took care of us, thank CORE. Otherwise, we might have had it bad. Remember those horrid Jammer boys who lived by you? Well, they had plans for us to join their crew, the kind that would have had us pregnant at twelve and stuck in the Coop with them forever. Dani landed one
of them in the hospital, and the other she scared off long enough for us to join up with another small crew for protection. They had a few tough characters but were decent enough people. We made it through.”
“I’m really glad.” Reese hesitated before saying, “I wish I would have looked you all up before now. I think somewhere in the back of my mind, I was worried about what I’d learn.”
“Whatever might have happened, it wouldn’t have been your fault.” Lyssa placed her hand on Reese’s. “You couldn’t help your dad getting killed on that sky train, any more than Jaxon could prevent his mom from being killed.”
Reese felt Jaxon looking at her, perhaps wondering why she hadn’t told him about her dad’s death, but he didn’t appear surprised at the news. Did he also suspect there had to be a connection between their parents’ deaths? Even if he did, there was no way he’d realize her part in it unless she told him.
The silence grew a tad too long, but she was saved from responding when the doorman let her know Eagle and Hammer had arrived only seconds apart. “Send them up,” she directed.
She wasn’t prepared for the change in Eagle. His scrawniness had become lean muscle, and his formerly non-descriptive face had all the makings of attractiveness. But the biggest difference was the pair of dark, close-fitting glasses that covered his hazy eyes like a second skin.
He grabbed Reese in a hug. “This is so great,” he said. “Almost as great as when we broke into that cistern at the transfer station. We were so awesome back then. Look, I brought snacks.” He lifted a bag she hadn’t noticed, pushing it into her hands. “Anyone want pretzels? I’m still addicted to them.” His jovial tone lightened Reese’s mood.
“Thanks.” She chuckled as he passed into the room. Belatedly, she focused on Hammer with a smile. “I appreciate you coming,” she murmured, motioning the big man inside the apartment.
Hammer beelined for the armchair, nodding at the others, while Eagle crossed to Jaxon and gave him a slap on the shoulder. “Thanks for inviting me. I was not looking forward to this assignment out on the border away from real civilization, but I’ve changed my mind. What are the chances that we’d all meet up again?”
No one answered, and Reese stared at him like the others. “Hey, it’s a joke, you guys,” Eagle said. His glasses whirred softly, as if focusing and refocusing as he looked around at them. “Dani would get it if she were here. Of course I realize something weird is going on.”
“Why don’t we all have a seat?” Reese asked.
There wasn’t enough room on her couch for them, so she’d brought in the two chairs from her small dining set. Eagle lowered himself into one of these, his “eyes” fixed on her. It was a little unsettling that the dark glasses obscured his eyes completely, though she’d never really seen much of his eyes behind the thick lenses he’d worn as a child.
“I have great vision now,” Eagle told her. “I can see you’re wondering.”
“You had an operation?”
“Five of them. The first three didn’t work, and that was when I helped come up with these glasses. They’re actually pre-Breakdown tech, so we had to experiment for years to get them to work as well as they do. Besides letting me see, they have full iTeev capabilities. Makes you wonder what our forefathers might have come up with if they hadn’t killed each other.”
“Do they come off?”
He grinned. “Not if I can help it. But, yeah. Maybe someday I’ll show you.”
Reese went to dig a container out of a box to pour the pretzels in. She didn’t have many dishes that weren’t disposable, but her aunt had gifted her with a bright red serving bowl when she’d graduated from the academy.
When she returned, Jaxon still hadn’t sat in the remaining chair, but now he stopped pacing. “I’ve been examining this from all angles, and I’m sure our being here is somehow connected with growing up in the Coop. There doesn’t seem to be anything else that we have in common. Well, Reese and I are enforcers, and Eagle too, even though he’s not on active duty, but all of you only recently started working for division. So why are we here? That got me wondering about our other classmates. I’d like you all to look at a list of people Reese and I were brainstorming yesterday. See if you can correct any names or add new ones.” He held up a finger before they dissolved into questions. “Just bear with me for a bit, and I’ll explain. Or Hammer will.”
Jaxon brought up the names on Reese’s public guest Teev feed, directing the holo to appear over the coffee table. Everyone leaned forward, studying a cube, which had the entire list of names on each side. Slowly, they added names, or rather Eagle did—five in all.
“Actually, I thought of those,” Jaxon said. “But they’re in another file. They must have gone by nicknames because they don’t exist in the database.”
“Are you kidding?” Eagle’s mouth gaped. “I had a crush on Aida Boone for most of level eleven. That was definitely her name.”
“And I was stuck in the school director’s office for three hours once with Pene Sadat in level sixteen,” Lyssa said. “That’s her real name. They should both be in the database.”
Jaxon met Reese’s gaze, his frown telling her that he was as surprised as she felt.
“They’re not,” Hammer said, who sat so placidly in the armchair that Reese had almost forgotten he was there. “I looked into all the names Jaxon gave me, even the ones in his second file.”
“What about Dani?” Lyssa’s dark eyes peered at the holo cube. “Where’s her name here?”
“It’s not,” Jaxon said. “I couldn’t remember her real name, and neither could Reese.”
“Balak,” Lyssa and Lyra said together.
They all fell silent while Hammer checked his iTeev. “Sorry, that name doesn’t exist for that level or in the whole school.”
“Well, we all know she existed,” Lyssa said. “None of this makes sense.”
Hammer leaned forward, placing his hands on his knees. “Jaxon gave me a total of fifty-five names, five of which he thought were invalid. Plus, five of the valid weren’t from your class.”
He paused, as if waiting for the numbers to sink in. “And?” Reese prompted.
“I’m sorry, but it’s not good. Nine still live in Colony 6; twenty-five do not exist in the database at all. One is reported lost to fringers. Twelve are dead. Only eight are living on the outside. Those eight include you five and two who are working in Estlantic for the Directors’ office, though my information doesn’t say in what capacity. The remaining man works for the Kordell Corp.”
Kordell Corp? Reese’s stomach churned at the name.
“That’s twenty-six missing, if we include Dani,” Eagle added. “And those are just the ones we know.”
“There’s more,” Hammer continued. “I also found a way into the database of the school records, which for some reason have been sealed. It shows that for your school, there were fewer than one hundred kids in level ten. Does that sound right?”
“No way,” Eagle said. “There were at least fifteen crews we had to look out for, and most of them had ten or twenty members. I’d say more like two or three hundred in our level.”
“What about the other levels and the other two schools?” Reese asked.
“I checked them all, but they were comparable to your level. However, when I compared the Colony 6 numbers to the other welfare colonies, Colony 6 recorded only about half the number of children in school over a twenty-year period.”
“Well, Colony 6 was the last to be created,” Jaxon said, “So maybe they started with fewer families and we’re remembering the number of children wrong.”
Hammer shook his head. “The records show each colony started with fifty thousand residents.” He swiped something on his iTeev, and new information appeared on the holo cube over the coffee table. “If you need more proof, you can see here that during the years you lived there, Colony 6 received the same amount of readymade meals as the other colonies, consumed a similar amount of electricity, had the s
ame number of school teachers and medical professionals, and so forth. Now twenty years later, each of the other colonies has remained at a constant fifty thousand people—except for Colony 6. They have only forty thousand.”
Reese wanted to tell him he was wrong, but her loyalty to the CORE wasn’t enough to overlook the fact that people she’d known were suddenly missing. Another problem loomed even larger in her mind. “The welfare colonies exist to provide for people until they can become contributing members of the CORE, and almost every child living there dreams of leaving. The population at each colony should be shrinking, not remaining steady.”
“Not all the children make it out,” Jaxon said. “Most have little support from their families. You know that. If a hundred kids left a colony each year after leveling out of school, that wouldn’t make a huge dent in the population, even in twenty years. Not when we’re still sending dozens of punks and others who can’t be rehabilitated to live there. Even in a best-case scenario, the colonies might have several thousand less, not ten thousand like Colony 6. Either way something isn’t adding up.”
Eagle lifted one shoulder. “Don’t forget that there are also a lot of deaths in the colonies. It’s like they put us there to live or die, to crawl our way to the top or be climbed on by others. I’m betting a lot of those sent to the colonies don’t last long enough to make a difference in the main population.”
It was an ugly truth they all knew too well. Reese gulped down her chotks. What a mess this was becoming. “Maybe that was just Colony 6. Enough must be surviving in the other colonies if the populations are holding steady.”
“I think right now we need to focus on the fact that of all the kids we once knew in the Coop, only three others besides us are living on the outside,” Jaxon said. “What makes us and those other three so special?”
“Maybe nothing,” Reese said. “You and I were attacked last night, remember?” She let her gaze run over these not-quite-strangers. “Have any of you noticed anything suspicious? Has anything odd happened?”
Lyssa glanced over at her sister before nodding. “When we lived in Estlantic, we were pretty sure we were being followed. We kept seeing these two guys waiting outside our work at iTeev. Luckily Lyra’s husband works for transportation, so he has a car and unlimited access to the shuttle system. He’d pick us up every day or send a shuttle. We were deciding if we should report the men, but less than two weeks after we noticed them, the opportunity to work here was offered to us. Better pay and a chance to leave Estlantic. We jumped at it. Haven’t noticed anything odd so far here.”
Sketches Page 13