by Ramona Finn
I lunged forward, but stopped as the two security members on the rooftop started toward us and the helicopter lifted off the roof.
“No!” I cried out, but the whipping propellers drowned my voice.
It lifted above us before the two security members charged. One shot at us and downed two of our rebels, leaving three of us to watch the helicopter depart.
The two security members shot off in either direction. Both rebels went after one while the other came straight for me. I lifted my gun, but I didn’t have enough time before he used the front of his weapon to knock mine out of my hands. A debilitating vibration forced me to drop the weapon, but instead of being the victim I’d been before, I grabbed the pistol tucked into my waistband and brought the muzzle around to his face.
He was too close and it smashed against his helmet; he dropped his gun to the ground. Without wasting a moment, I grabbed his hand and turned him around as quick as I could, shoving his wrist up his back. He cried out and dropped to his knees.
The other security member was already on the ground, unmoving, while one of the rebels came over to me, holding a restraint in his hand. He tied it around the security guard’s wrists while I homed in on the other rebel—who was aiming his gun toward the helicopter.
“Wait!” I cried out, louder than I had ever screamed before, and I took off toward the edge of the rooftop.
He glanced over his shoulder with a furrowed expression.
“You can’t,” I said when I reached him. “If it crashes, John and Marisha go with it. They might not survive.”
The rebel screwed up his mouth and lowered his gun.
We watched the helicopter disappear into the distance, taking with it John, Marisha, and any hope of producing a cure for New Zero.
Chapter Five
With John and Marisha gone, and the two BioPure security members captured, there was nothing else we could do other than pick up the pieces and figure out what to do next.
And how to get our people back.
The helicopter was a dot in the distance before I could tear my eyes away from it. The more distance the helicopter put between us, the more my heart was torn from my body until it carved out a hollow shell in my chest.
John—my father—was gone.
And he was on a hit list along with Mom and me. What would happen after they interrogated him and Marisha? Would they survive? Was there any hope of him coming back? I doubted they would set him free since they had been looking for him and my family for a while. The idea of that happening seemed laughable, in fact.
Why hadn’t I convinced him to stay safe and allow the Unpaired to do their jobs? We had stuck our noses in where they didn’t belong and now he was gone.
The remaining rebels on the roof called for back-up to help the fallen throughout the building and on the roof. They strode to the stairwell leading to the ground floor. I followed behind them with heavy strides and continued on my route down to the basement. They had other plans to clean up this mess, but after everything that had happened, I had to see what was left of the cure. There was no research without John, but at least if the samples were okay, then it was possible we could continue on in his absence.
My body went numb as I thought of John and what they were doing with him right now, though. Would they interrogate him while he was in the helicopter? Wait until they were on the ground? Or not bother at all and just shoot him at the very moment he stepped out of the chopper?
I choked back a sob as I bumped into a rebel sprinting up the stairs. She threw a quick apology behind her.
The rebels left the building with the security prisoners while I continued down into the lab. On the way, I noticed Unpaired soldiers were flooding the building to find any survivors from our side and any security members who might have been left behind. I had no idea what to expect when I arrived at the lab.
Two rebels walked through the threshold of the lab, carrying a stretcher with Khalil on top of it. A white sheet was tucked against his body, with red stains spreading across it. His eyes were open, but barely. He was still alive.
They rushed him from the hallway, and I wasn’t going to get in the way.
As I walked up to the doorway, my throat clenched. But it wasn’t until I took in what the security forces had done that I gasped for air. Before, I’d been too focused on getting to the roof to notice. Now, I couldn’t help but take it all in.
I stepped over the threshold as the weight of what they had done washed over me. Every computer had at least a few bullet holes through the screens and towers. The scanning machine had pockmarks all over it. There was no more humming coming from the lab. It was the quietest I’d ever heard it. I almost wished I was inside of the scanner so that I could hear everything in working order again.
There were streaks of blood across the floor, these having come from the rebels, Khalil, and security. Maybe some of that was from John and Marisha. I had heard her scream…
I shoved the thought from my head. There were enough terrible memories from real life in my mind; I didn’t want to add more that might not have happened.
Checking the floor, I avoided the blood as much as I could while holding back the urge to gag.
I wanted to give up, but John’s voice in the back of my mind told me to move forward. With him in my head, I thought of where I’d last seen him. He’d gone toward our storage refrigerators. His back had been the last thing I’d seen as he’d rushed off to save our only hope of surviving New Zero.
The doors were open on all three refrigerators, and one of them hung there only by a hinge. Liquids doused the floor, and that tightening sensation in my throat returned.
I closed the other two doors as best I could and reached inside the third. The blue test tube rack holding tubes of the serum which had been separated for testing was almost entirely destroyed. A bullet hole at the back of the refrigerator had shattered seven of the ten tubes which held the remainder of the serum we’d had left. The tops were covered and the insides were free of glass, which was the only thing I could be thankful for.
I moved three chairs in front of the closed refrigerator doors to keep what was left inside of them cool until we could figure out another plan. Now that I knew what we had to work with, I had to take stock of what was left and usable in the lab. I didn’t have anything else to do. I was the only one left for now, and I wasn’t actually a scientist, but I knew my way around. Besides, I had no idea where Syeth was, and I wasn’t going to go looking for him while the Unpaired were scattered all over town after the fight. It wasn’t as if I could confide in my parents, either. Telling Mom about John would send her into a spiral for whatever time she was lucid.
I inhaled a deep breath and let it out slowly. It was what John always told me to do when I was stressed about my parents or the fact that we weren’t as far as we needed to be with the cure. I had to keep my head level and work toward a solution to our problems instead of wallowing in them.
Several rebels marched down the hallway, and I peered out there. One stopped near the lab. It was a female. I spotted her Unpaired armband wrapped around the upper arm of her uniform. She let out a low whistle, then a curse.
“Do you need medical attention?” she asked me.
“No, I’m fine. Do you know where Syeth Rothkind is?”
She shook her head. “I’ll radio to him and let him know you’re down here. Lora, right?”
“Yes,” I said, wondering how she knew my name.
She clicked her tongue and grinned. “He talks about you a lot.” Then, she disappeared down the hall to follow the others.
I turned in a circle, wondering where to start. Spotting a flash of blood in front of me, I turned toward the wall. Khalil’s bloody body appeared in my mind with perfect clarity. I shivered violently as my stomach roiled. I whipped away from where he had been and spotted a blinking green light on one of the computer towers.
I approached the workstation. It was a smaller one near the back of the room. Th
ere weren’t any bullet holes in this screen. My stomach swooped as I clicked on the mouse. The screen lit up and a password prompt appeared. I sank into the chair and tapped my ten-digit password against the keys.
To my surprise, my main screen opened and I choked out a sound between a laugh and a cry. The workstation was close enough to the back of the lab that they must have missed it when they’d destroyed everything else.
I clicked on the database with our research and sat back against the chair, my jaw slung open as I clicked through the files. They were all there and uncorrupted. If security had come to the building to destroy our hope of finding the cure, they had missed the server computer entirely. If they’d wanted to cripple the rebels’ research efforts, they would have destroyed every single computer with precision. And I knew enough about dealing with security to know that they rarely made mistakes; we’d gotten lucky.
I continued to sift through the files absently as my mind turned over the events of the day. They could easily have completed the job since they’d destroyed most of the equipment in the lab. Had they gotten lucky, or was there something else going on here?
One or two hackers could have done the job as quickly as Syeth. By uploading a virus or some software, they could have destroyed all of our data for good. They were destructive, sure, but equipment could be replaced or rebuilt eventually.
It didn’t make sense.
But maybe that hadn’t been their primary intention, and the destruction had happened only because they’d had the opportunity. If their mission hadn’t been to destroy our lab, but to retrieve the leader of the resistance against the treatment which BioPure was handing out daily to its citizens, then this computer being overlooked might make sense. By their cutting off the brain of the operation, in that sense, we were crippled when it came to the fight to reach our goal. We would either have to watch our loved ones lose their memories and lives to the virus or submit to the corporation for their treatment. John would rather have New Zero than allow BioPure to inject him with anything from their labs.
Thinking of John and death brought another wave of sadness through me. It pressed on my body like a boulder and I slumped over, dropping my head into my hands.
With Marisha and John gone, along with Khalil having been incapacitated, the core of our team was lost. I had no idea who else had been injured, or how we could go on without my father, regardless. He had been at the heart of every breakthrough the rebels had ever had against Zero and New Zero.
Moving forward with the research was at the back of my mind now, as I knew we couldn’t do it without him.
After a few minutes of crying over John, I wiped away my tears and went back to work. I wasn’t sure if the primary server had suffered any damage, so I loaded our research onto back-up drives, which took the better part of an hour.
When I was about to head out and look for Syeth, he appeared in the doorway. His vest and pants were covered with dried dirt. Streaks of it marred his face, but he seemed to be uninjured.
His mouth hung open, and it closed a few times as he took in the room. “I heard you and John came to the lab. Lora, what were you thinking?”
“I’m sorry.” I stood, wobbling to the side after sitting for so long.
Syeth strode across the room, his gaze darting across my face. “The others told me John was taken. Lora, I thought the worst. What happened? I thought you were going back to the hospital.”
“We couldn’t,” I said.
It took a moment, but then he nodded in understanding.
“The cure is what our fight is all about right now. We had to come back to protect it. But it turns out we should have listened. They weren’t after the cure; they were after him. They took Marisha, too. Almost killed Khalil. The other Unpaired—they just killed them without a second thought.”
“Shit,” Syeth said, glancing at the computer I’d been seated at. “What about the research files?”
“They destroyed everything but this computer. That’s how I figured out that they weren’t after the research. What’s inside John’s head is more valuable than that.” I wondered how long John could keep himself alive by concealing his knowledge of a cure for New Zero. Would they extract it from him or wipe his memory?
“What about you?” I asked, changing the subject.
He raked a hand through his hair and several pieces of debris fluttered to the floor. “They came to the warehouse, too. Everything we had procured for the lab is gone, as well as a lot of the treatment. They wanted to take down our only defenses against New Zero, and they certainly did that.”
I moved away from Syeth, digging my hands into my hips. My breathing intensified as I thought of all the work we had done, and the fact that the New Zero patients would be in further danger if they weren’t given what treatment we’d been able to create in the lab. It wasn’t a cure, but it had been something. And now even that was gone?
Heat burned my cheeks and prickled my neck. The corporations had run my entire life and targeted my family. But this felt different. Now they had attacked my family directly.
“Lora, what’s on your mind?”
“Everything, Syeth!” I snapped. I wasn’t upset with him, but the prospect of losing everything to BioPure. “Even if we can use this research with the few lab workers we have, Mom, Dad, and everyone else affected by New Zero are going to lose more of their memories while we waste time building up the supply again.”
I imagined going to visit my parents—or anyone else visiting their loved ones over the next days and weeks—and watching their passive faces trying to recognize us. All of this was too overwhelming. Too close to losing.
“This was a targeted attack. How did BioPure know where our facilities were? How did they get in and out so easily?” I demanded.
Syeth shrugged. “No data security is foolproof. They could have spotted our dedicated server. Or maybe they captured a rebel and cracked them during an interrogation. They could have hacked our own security. The Unpaired are already working on it. But, either way…”
“What’s done is done,” I said, feeling more defeated than ever. “We have to get them back.”
“We will—”
“No, we have to get John and Marisha back. I’ll leave the retaliation to the Unpaired for now, but we have to get them back. My father’s place is here. It’s the only way we can fight and win. We have to finish the cure. There’s no way we can continue to live like this. Not after that attack. We’re always one raid away from disaster. We need all of the rebels to have their minds, and we need the numbers to fight back.”
Syeth inhaled sharply and pulled his hands through his hair.
“Are you with me?” I asked.
He locked eyes with me. “You know I am.”
Chapter Six
The first thing we needed to do was come up with a plan to rescue John and Marisha. While I scoured the encrypted database for any information on where BioPure would have taken them, Syeth made a list of rebel fighters who might be willing to help us.
In that time, the remaining lab workers arrived at the lab within ten minutes of each other. All six of them had the same shared expressions of shock and sadness. One of them told me that Khalil was alive and recovering, but would be incapacitated for a while. I was relieved that he was okay, but it fueled the fire within me to reunite the lab and my family.
The lab workers enlisted about a dozen Unpaired to help move and separate equipment we could salvage, putting aside pieces that were lost for good. It broke my heart to see more equipment in the “to be trashed pile” than not.
The most important piece—the scanner—had a lot of cosmetic damage, and some that was more serious, but Quill, one of the night shift workers, wanted to work on it. His gray eyes met mine when he’d said it, suggesting how serious he was about finding a way to get it back to working order. I wasn’t sure if he could do it, but the scanner was one of the most important pieces of equipment when it came to mapping the alpha version of
the virus. John and the others had worked hard at deciphering the scans, and if we needed to continue alone, we needed it.
I wasn’t prepared to think about moving on without John when it came to finding the cure. That would be something to worry about if we failed.
But we wouldn’t fail.
Working with Syeth in this way brought me back to every other mission before we’d arrived in Chicago. He made his list and interviewed several soldiers within the lab who were helping us out, and I trusted him to do his part while he allowed me to do mine.
The only information we had on BioPure entailed the locations of a few of their main facilities in the downtown area. We had photographs of schematics of the buildings that had been taken during a few raids. I memorized all of them while I contemplated where security would have taken John. He was an important piece of the rebel forces, so they would have to bring him somewhere with high security. They wouldn’t be dumb enough to think that we weren’t going to attempt a rescue mission.
Since BioPure always seemed steps ahead of us, I wasn’t going into this mission without knowing all of the angles. My skin crawled as a new idea came into my mind, but I wasn’t sure if I was willing to go that far yet. Isra—Jarid’s ex—was one of the top generals of the Unpaired, which meant she was at the helm of most of the raids. I hadn’t spoken to her face to face since she’d given Syeth and me that note from Jarid, telling us that he was going to the corporations to turn himself in and try to rebel from the inside.
She hadn’t been the happiest of people after that, and continuously called him a traitor whenever he was brought up. At least, that was what Syeth had told me. The most I had seen of her in the six months since we arrived had been whenever the Unpaired were preparing to leave for a mission. She was always stern-faced and at the front of the group.
Admittedly, I had avoided her when I’d been able to. I would always be on Jarid’s side, and it seemed as if she already knew that. Since she called him a traitor, I wondered if she thought of me that way, as well, even though I was on this side fighting the corporation. From what I knew of Isra, she had strong convictions about her beliefs. If Jarid acted like a traitor, then, to her, he was one. There was no room for gray—only black and white.