by Tarah Benner
Then, to my utter shock, Blaze grins. “You can’t take all of us,” he murmurs.
He sounds pleasantly surprised by the realization, and his dazed smile starts to grow. “One at a time, sure. But all of us together?” He shakes his head. “We’d overwhelm you.”
“This is your last warning,” the controller snarls.
Blaze glances at Lenny and then looks at me. It’s just a half smile, but it lights a fire inside me and unleashes the fury in my soul.
Blaze raises his arms in surrender, and a gunshot shatters the air.
One moment, the controller is pointing his gun at his chest, and the next, Blaze is falling forward.
Lenny lets out a scream of anguish that merges with the other workers’ yells. The crowd ripples as people throw themselves onto the floor and cover their heads. I stare at the controller in horror. Even he looks surprised.
But then my gaze drifts down to Blaze’s prone body.
His arms and legs are splayed at odd angles, and he landed with his head twisted to the side. His eyes are open but vacant, and a pool of blood is spreading over the white tile.
I count to five in my head, waiting for the nightmare to end.
One . . . Blaze doesn’t move.
Two . . . The controller lowers his gun and adjusts his mask.
Three . . . Lenny pitches forward in a wave of silent sobs, and the controller behind me releases his death grip on my hair.
Four . . . My legs give out, and my knees hit the cold tile.
Five . . . I’m staring into Blaze’s ocean-blue eyes, but the Blaze I know is gone.
nineteen
Celdon
As soon as I emerge from the meeting, I’m surrounded by people. Information workers are in a frenzy, pushing their way down the tunnel to locate their friends and loved ones.
I stick out in my white Systems uniform as I push through the sea of black slacks and turtlenecks on my way to the megalift. I stab the call button to take me up to Health and Rehab, but nothing happens.
The light above the doors isn’t illuminated, and I don’t hear the telltale hum of the lift shooting up through the compound. I push the button again. Still nothing.
Suddenly, the door to the emergency stairwell bursts open, and a bottle-blond woman with hot-pink lipstick appears. She’s replaying some footage on her interface and looks oddly familiar for some reason.
“The lifts are down,” she says absently, panning her interface down the tunnel.
That’s when I realize she must be a reporter. I’ve probably watched her on the news feeds dozens of times.
“Both of them?”
She nods. “They’re locking down different sectors of the compound to contain the virus.”
“Shit.”
The woman pauses at the mouth of the tunnel and turns the camera on herself to fix her makeup. Then she hits record and breaks into a serious reporter voice: “I’m standing in Information tunnel B, where compound citizens are reeling from the recent viral outbreak . . .”
Without waiting around for Miss Lipstick’s spin on things, I throw open the door to the emergency stairwell and take the steps two at a time.
When I round the corner, I shove my body against the door with the large red cross, but it doesn’t budge. I travel down one more flight of steps to the Health and Rehab residential level and almost smack right into a ceiling-to-floor plastic partition.
Somebody has sealed off the next flight of stairs. There’s an airtight door in the center of the partition with a serious-looking keypad off to the right. On the other side of the plastic, a pale Operations worker stares at me blankly.
“Hey!” I shout. “Can you tell me how I can get to Health and Rehab? The lifts are down, and the door to the medical ward is locked.”
“I’m sorry, sir,” says the man. “Health and Rehab has been sealed off from the rest of the compound, and no unauthorized personnel are permitted to enter the medical ward.”
“I have to get through,” I say. “It’s an emergency.”
“If you have a medical emergency, please dial nine on your interface and someone will assist you,” he says in a monotone voice. It sounds as though he’s reading off a script, which annoys the hell out of me.
“It’s not a medical emergency,” I say, hurrying to think up a good lie. “Systems sent me to update the medical ward’s software. I need to get through!”
He shakes his head slowly. “I’m sorry, sir. I don’t have the security clearance to open this door.”
“Then why are you here?” I growl.
“Sir, we’re doing everything we can to restore normal operations. Please be patient while we —”
I don’t have a chance to hear the end of his sentence. I tear up the stairs the way I came and head for Systems. The bright white tunnels are a welcome relief from the darkness of Information and the damp, musty stairwell.
Up here, people are a little more calm and collected as they move down the tunnel, but their faces betray their anxiety.
Systems headquarters is completely deserted, but I don’t find the rows of sleeping monitors nearly as comforting as I usually do. The emptiness gives me a shiver when I think of all the deserted levels back at 119.
No, I say to myself. I can’t think about that right now.
The automatic lights tick on as I walk back to my cube. As soon as I boot up my computer, my screen is overtaken by the breaking-news ticker. Miss Lipstick’s face appears on screen, and I turn up the volume to hear what she’s saying.
“The medical ward has not confirmed how many people are infected so far, but a source from within Health and Rehab says that at least five medical workers have been quarantined, including doctors James Watson and Lee Conroy, Nurse Berta Higgins, and interns Caleb MacAvoy and Sawyer Lyang.”
Sawyer’s picture appears on screen, and my stomach drops through the floor.
I pull the monitor closer, expecting something to pop up saying that the report is mistaken, but Sawyer’s shy smile beams up at me with haunting clarity. It feels like a punch to the gut after the way we left things.
“Twenty-one-year-old Sawyer Lyang was discharging one of the AWOL Recon operatives who returned earlier this week when she noticed him engaging in suspicious behavior out in the waiting area.
“Eye witnesses say that when Lyang intervened, twenty-five-year-old Xavier Nero stabbed her in the chest with a homemade weapon and broke a vial containing spores of an unidentified virus. A source inside the medical ward has confirmed Nero’s death, but Lyang remains in critical condition.”
My heart is hammering in my chest, and I want nothing more than to crawl down to Neverland and escape in a snort of blue powder. But then the news broadcast ends, and another story about the outbreak in the commissary starts to play.
According to the reporter, the other AWOL Recon operative was arrested for trespassing in a restricted area above the shops. When Control brought her in for questioning, she admitted to releasing a virus into the air ducts before killing herself with a cyanide capsule.
Dragging a shaky hand through my hair, I clench and unclench my hands to steady myself.
It’s nearly time to chat with my mother again, and she’s expecting to see her son. I don’t know what to say to her. I have so many questions, but it kills me to think she might have been involved with the outbreak.
When the clock on the wall hits ten hundred, a new video window appears and takes over my screen. The feed is grainier than before, but the natural daylight filtering in through the window illuminates her entire face. She’s sitting on a couch draped in white sheets, and a framed oceanscape behind her perfectly complements light-blond hair that’s turning gray around the temples.
Robin, I think. My mother’s name is Robin.
After our first meeting, I dug into old compound records to hunt down my parents. It wasn’t easy, but I found them: Robin was a cryptography specialist in Systems until the year after my birth. My father was a dark-haired ma
n named Albert with a large nose and a good-natured smile who was supposedly killed by an unmarked land mine.
Robin’s got a hard jaw and sharp cheekbones that give her a beautiful, if severe, appearance. Her bright-blue eyes are just like mine, except they’re slightly crinkled from crow’s-feet arching out from the corners.
I want to be happy to see her, but right now all I see is someone who’s working with the drifters to kill my friends.
“Thank you for meeting me,” she says in a strained voice. “I wasn’t sure you’d be back . . . or if I’d still be able to access the network.”
“Well . . . I’m here,” I say in a flat voice.
“Yes.” Her eyes dart around my screen as though she thinks her son might suddenly materialize behind me. “Did you . . . did you do as I asked?”
“You’ve got a lot of nerve,” I growl, thinking of Sawyer lying in the medical ward with the virus burning through her veins.
“What do you —”
“You asked me to warn your son that it isn’t safe so he could escape, but you didn’t bother to tell me that you were planning on releasing a virus into the compound?”
From the look on her face, she knew this was coming. “I’m sorry,” she murmurs. “I know what you must be thinking. But I had nothing to do with that.”
“Right,” I snarl. “And I suppose you had nothing to do with 119 either?”
“Compound 119?”
I scoff. “Don’t act like you don’t know.”
“I don’t.”
“I was there after the virus hit,” I say. “I know what it can do. I know this virus has the power to wipe out everyone here.”
“Honestly,” she insists. “I had no idea they’d used this virus on 119. And I didn’t know what they were planning at 112. I didn’t have a part in that decision. I swear. I never thought they’d do something like that.”
“Why should I believe you?” I ask, feeling my voice creep higher and higher.
“Because I would never put thousands of innocent lives at risk,” she says. “The people in your compound were my friends . . . my colleagues . . . my son. They don’t deserve to die. All I wanted was to help the drifters expose some of the deep-seated corruption that —”
“Then why are you helping them? Malcolm doesn’t care about corruption. He and the rest of the Desperados want us all dead.”
“Honestly,” she chokes. “I didn’t know what they were planning. They just hired me to get through the firewall. They wanted eyes and ears inside the compound, and they wanted —”
She breaks off, looking as though she’s said too much.
“Wanted what?”
She shakes her head. “I shouldn’t say.”
I slam my hand down on the desk, and she jumps.
“God dammit!” I yell. “Don’t you think you’ve done enough? Your people released a virus that could kill everyone I’ve ever met. It’s already infected one of my only friends. Why are you still protecting them?”
My mother’s eyes are filling with tears. She puts a hand over her mouth and gazes off to the side of the screen, as though she can’t believe what she’s done.
“I’m gonna ask you one more time,” I say in a tremulous voice. “What — did you — steal?”
“Just . . . just some plans,” she stutters, still shaking her head as if she can somehow undo the damage by denying her role in all this.
“Plans of what?”
She swallows, and a resolved expression comes over her face. “I’m not telling you anything else until you bring me my son.”
“You don’t dictate the terms here,” I choke. “I do.”
“Okay,” she says in the voice of someone well-versed in crisis negotiation. “Tell me what you want to know. Not about the plans — I can’t talk about that.”
“Is there a cure?”
“I don’t —” She breaks off, looking around hopelessly.
“Tell me!” I yell, slamming my fist on the desk and causing my video feed to stutter. “Is there — a cure?”
“I don’t know,” she whispers. “Look . . . I’ll take responsibility for my actions. I made a mistake, and I have to live with that. But I never meant to hurt anyone. I thought these people were trying to expose the truth . . . take the compound leaders down a peg. That’s all. I never thought they would try to kill thousands of innocents.”
“Well, clearly you teamed up with the wrong people,” I growl.
She nods, not breaking eye contact. “That’s true. But whatever I’ve done, it has nothing to do with my son. Please don’t punish him for my actions. He’s all I have left in this world.”
“Well . . . I’m sorry, but . . . you don’t have him, either,” I say, fighting the lump in my throat. “He’d rather die in here with his friends than leave with you.”
“Wait!” she cries, suddenly panicked. “Don’t do this! Please! Please just tell him —”
I don’t give her a chance to finish. I end the video call and boot her off the network. Then I close up the pinhole I created to keep her from breaking through our firewall again.
As I close up the tiny hole to the outside, a larger hole opens up in my chest. Loud, dry sobs work their way up my throat, and I fold forward over my keyboard, shaking with anguish.
Whatever part Robin might have played in the outbreak, I let her into our network on Jayden’s orders. I might as well have handed over those plans — whatever they are.
Everything I’ve done over the past few weeks has been for nothing. Infiltrating Constance, standing by while they locked up Harper and tortured Eli — all of it was to learn more about my mom.
I thought the truth would somehow make me feel better, but it hasn’t. If anything, it’s just made me feel more broken and alone.
I’m furious with her, but I also feel like a hypocrite. I’d always worried that I’d turn out like her, and I have — just not in the way that I feared.
Any time I was burned and depressed in Neverland, I’d think, Like mother, like son. We would have been great friends, she and I.
But my mother wasn’t a junkie. She was just a Systems worker who got fucked and then threw in her luck with a group of people hell-bent on killing her friends.
Robin and I might be on different teams, but we’re cut from the same cloth.
twenty
Eli
The sound of a gunshot is unmistakable. Even two hundred yards away from the compound, I feel it reverberate in my bones.
I wheel around to face the airlock doors and freeze.
Harper is still inside, and somebody just got shot.
The flow of Recon workers marching through the solar fields stops. A cluster of panic-stricken cadets stand stock-still, and a chill passes over the crowd as we all take inventory of the situation: There’s a viral outbreak in the compound, we’re being banished to the Fringe, and somebody inside was just shot.
There’s no coming back from that. We are at war with our own people.
“Keep moving,” barks an ExCon foreman I recognize.
Nobody moves.
“Go on, now.”
The others resume their slow shuffle through the rows of solar panels, looking oddly foreign and robotic with air masks covering their faces. I stand still and wait for the pair of cadets who just left the compound.
“Did you see Harper Riley in there?” I ask a petite blond girl.
“Who?”
“You know . . . a pretty cadet . . . dark hair . . . gray eyes . . . about this tall?”
I know exactly how tall Harper is. Her head fits perfectly under my chin when she hugs me, and I hold up a hand to show the girl.
“Yeah,” she says, sounding a little uncertain. “I think she was in the group that was holding up the line.”
“Holding up the line?” I ask, unable to keep the panic out of my voice.
She nods.
“What happened to that group?” I ask, wondering if I even want to know the answer.
&nbs
p; “I don’t know,” she says. “That guy she was with was making trouble, but I got out of there as fast as I could.”
She gives another shrug and quickens her pace to rejoin her friends walking out into the desert.
“Hey,” says a voice behind me. I turn and let out a sigh of relief when I see Miles striding toward me.
“Hey.”
When Miles reaches me, he holds out his arms, and I go in for a brotherly embrace.
“I was worried about you,” I say, clapping him on the back. “I saw you go down in there.”
“Yeah. Asshole tagged me right after I got out of the megalift. I was trying to get to the stairs so I could go find Brooke . . .”
“Have you heard from her?”
“Nope. And she’s stuck in tier two.”
My heart sinks. If she was anywhere near the commissary when the virus was released, there’s a good chance she’s infected.
“I can’t find Harper,” I say. “And I just heard a gunshot.”
“Yeah, me too,” he mutters, looking unnerved. “Shit. What the hell are they thinking sending us out here? They’ve brought out all these tents and supplies like they expect us to set up camp or something. But they can’t keep us out here . . . can they?”
I shake my head, fuming with anger. “I think they can do just about anything they want with us.”
Miles sighs, and we both fall silent, worrying about the girls we love.
“We should keep moving,” he says finally. “Figure out what’s what before it gets really hot out here.”
But I haven’t taken my eyes off the compound. I keep waiting for Harper to materialize, but no one else has emerged since I heard the shot.
“You go on,” I croak. “I’m gonna wait.”
“You want me to stay with you?”
I shake my head. Miles gives me an understanding nod and claps me on the shoulder as he leaves.
The sun continues its steady climb into the sky, and beads of sweat spring up all over my body. I can feel the rays burning the back of my neck, but I don’t move.
Finally, the airlock doors slide open, and a cluster of Recon workers emerges. I stare past the privates I know, searching for a dark head of hair.