THE room began to spin. I braced myself against the counter, vaguely aware that Billy and Wallace had left.
“Ember,” Chase said slowly. He did not approach me.
“Why would they do that?” I asked weakly. But even as I asked I knew it was possible. I’d been in the checkpoint on Rudy Lane when the MM had found the carrier.
“We don’t exactly fit the bill for a new, moral country,” said Sean grimly.
I rounded on him.
“You knew. At the reformatory. You knew when I was trying to escape and you didn’t tell me.”
He shifted uncomfortably. “I’d heard rumors. You have to understand, I thought you were going to tell Brock about Becca and me. I thought if you didn’t have a reason to leave, you wouldn’t have a reason to keep the secret.”
“Get away from me.”
He backed up.
“Ember.” Chase cradled my name as though it was an injured bird.
He’d known this all along. He’d hidden the truth. Why hadn’t he told me?
“We have to leave.” I shoved past him, sprinting to our room. People were out in the hallway watching me, but I barely noticed them. The fear was so thick in my body that I could hardly swallow. My knees felt very weak, but I knew I had to be strong. Yes, now I had to be especially strong.
I threw the backpack over my shoulders too quickly and had to grasp the wall to steady myself.
“Damn it, Ember. Hang on.” Chase tried to pry the pack off. His face was pallid in the candlelight.
“Don’t. We’re going. We don’t have time!” I yelled at him. “What’s wrong with you? We have to go!”
“Ember, take off the pack.”
“Chase! She’s in danger! They’re probably looking for her right now! We have to find her!” Hot tears, full of confusion and terror, ripped from my eyes. I wasn’t angry with him. I was too frightened to be angry.
“We can’t go. Not now.”
“She’s scared! I know her. No one takes care of her like I do!”
He backed away from me into the wall. His eyes were enormous, glassy, and just as terrified. I thought for a moment that he finally understood. But I was wrong.
“Ember, I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry! Let’s just go!”
“Ember!” He punched his own leg. The move was so violent it stopped me cold. “She’s dead.”
What a horrible thing to say. That was my first coherent thought. What a cruel, hideous thing to say.
The bag seemed very heavy now. It was pulling me backward. It slid to the floor with a thump.
“What?” That voice sounded distant to my ears.
He moved his hands over his mouth, as though to heat them with his breath.
“I’m so sorry. She’s gone, Em.”
“Don’t call me that,” I snapped. “Why are you saying that?”
“She’s dead.”
“Stop!” I screamed. The tears released in full force. I could barely breathe.
“I’m sorry.”
“You’re wrong. You’re wrong!”
He shook his head.
“I was there.” His voice cracked. I felt the wall support my weight.
“You… were there? What are you talking about? We have to go.” This time my voice had no volume. No conviction.
Somehow we were both on the floor. He grabbed me, pulling me hard against him. I was too shocked to struggle.
“I thought if I told you, you wouldn’t come with me. Or that you’d run away. I know it was wrong, Ember, I’m so sorry. I needed to get you safe first. I was going to tell you once we got there.”
He wasn’t deceiving me. His tortured face spoke the truth.
My mother was dead.
I became aware of a screaming pain at two points. The front of my head and the center of my gut. Icy knives of reality stabbed into those places. Stabbed at me until I bled. Until my body was turned inside out.
I could hear her. I could hear her voice. Ember. She called my name. How could she be dead when I heard her so clearly?
“I’m so sorry,” he repeated over and over. “I didn’t want to hurt you. I just wanted you safe. I’m so sorry.”
He was too close to me. Crowding me. I pushed him away.
“Get back,” I groaned.
“What do I do?” he asked me desperately. “I don’t know what to do.”
“What happened to my mother?” I asked him.
He hesitated. He wasn’t going to say.
“Tell me!” I insisted. “Why is everyone hiding everything from me? Tell me!”
“Ember, she died. That’s all you need to know.”
“Don’t be a coward!”
“Okay. All right.”
He kneeled in front of me, his arms now crossed over his midsection. His shoulders were shaking. A line of sweat poured down his temple.
“Fighting didn’t turn me, so my command needed something else. Tucker showed them letters. Ones I had written back to you. I thought they’d been mailed but… he’d been hoarding them. They learned who you were. That I didn’t end it with you like I was supposed to. They told me I had to buy in or… Jesus. Or you’d be hurt. So I cut a deal. No more fights. No more you. And they’d promote me to show the others that the system always wins. I did whatever they said. I thought it would work, that they’d leave you alone, but it didn’t matter.
“It was the final test. Your extraction. They used you to break me.
“We took your mom to a base in Lexington, with all the other Article 5s in the state. She was put in a detention cell. My unit leader, Bateman—he was pissed off by what happened at your house. That I didn’t follow orders and stay in the car. He said I was out of line. I was a failure as a soldier. He reported me to command.”
He stopped there and leaned over his knees like he might vomit.
“Finish,” I demanded. I could barely hear him over the screaming in my brain.
“They brought me in front of the board for discipline. My CO was there. He told me that it was time to put my training into effect. That I could still make captain someday. He told me I could redeem myself by… by executing the detainees, starting with your mother. I told him no. I’m just a driver. I just transport. I told him to kick me out. Give me a dishonorable discharge.”
Chase punched his thigh again. I wept softly.
“He told me to follow orders. That if I didn’t do what he said, someone else would. That they’d pull you from school and do the same. I didn’t know what to do. The next thing I knew, Tucker was escorting me to her detention cell, and I had a gun in my hand.”
I wanted to scream at Chase to stop. But I had to hear. I had to know. The tears ran from his eyes freely now.
“Your mom. God. She had been crying. Her shirt was all wet. She saw me and she smiled, and she ran over to me and grabbed my jacket in her hands and said, ‘Thank God you’re here, Chase.’ And I was there to kill her.
“I held the gun up, and she backed into a chair and sat there, watching me. Just watching me. I thought for a second I was going to do it. That I had to. But nothing happened. My CO was behind us. He told me to pull the damn trigger or I’d watch them murder you. Your mom heard him. She grabbed the gun in my hand, and she leaned in close and told me to find you, wherever you were, and take care of you. ‘My baby,’ she called you. She told me not to be scared. She told me not to be scared.
“And then he shot her. And… she died. A foot away from me. I don’t even know what happened afterward. I ended up in a holding cell for a week.”
Silence. Long, suffocating silence.
I felt my brain twisting, trying to understand, even as it was trying to erase the last thirty minutes.
“Maybe if you would have talked to your officer. Maybe if you had tried to tell him that she didn’t deserve this….” My voice sounded small.
“It wouldn’t have made a difference.”
“You don’t know that! You didn’t even try! You could have talked to them and… and… you could have never come home…. In training you could have not been so… you! You could have told us to run!”
I felt as crazy as I sounded.
“I know.” He had no conclusion to this statement.
A frozen hammer against my skull. I knew the truth, even if I didn’t want to.
“She’s dead,” I realized.
He nodded. “Yes.”
“You lied to me. You let me believe she was alive. In some safe house!” I screamed suddenly. Now there was anger. Hot and vicious and poisonous within me.
“I know.”
“Were you ever going to tell me?”
“I would have, once you were away from all this. Maybe not all of it. I didn’t want you to know all of it. No one should have to hear all that.”
“So you can take it but I can’t? She’s my mother, Chase!”
“I didn’t mean you can’t handle it. I just mean… I don’t know. I didn’t want to hurt you.”
“You’d rather me believe a lie than be hurt? Who the hell gave you that authority?”
“I don’t know.” He was honest. He didn’t know what he was doing. His hands lay open on his knees before him, begging for some shred of direction to which he could cling.
I was rolling now. A snowball plunging down a hill. Knowing that at the bottom there was a brick wall that would smash me. That would break me into a million pieces.
“You knew all this from the very beginning. From the day you got me at school. You knew she was dead. You’d seen her dead. And you kept that from me.”
“Yes.”
Faster, I rolled on.
“How could you do that?”
He shook his head.
Twisting inside of me. Nothing is real.
“You said… you said all those things… and… I believed you.”
“Wait. Please. That was the truth,” he was pleading now.
I shook my head. There was no truth.
“Ember, I love you.”
His words hacked a bright new pain into me. I stared at him for a full second, horrified, recognizing that this was the first time he’d said these words. Thinking maybe the opposite was true. That Chase might actually hate me. That was why he lied about everything. That was why he kept hurting me. How could someone be so cruel?
His eyes were filled with what I’d once thought was honesty.
“I shouldn’t have said that now. It’s too much. I’m putting too much on you. But… Christ. I mean it, I—”
“No! I trusted you, and I thought it was right and it wasn’t right. It was a lie.” I felt ill then, disgusted by my own self. I wanted to crawl out of my skin, to leave it in this dirty room with its ugly truths.
“It wasn’t like that. You know. Please know.”
His reached out to touch my hand.
“No!” I bawled. “Don’t touch me. Don’t you dare touch me. Not ever again.”
I struck the wall. My world was crashing down. Everything I believed was scattered. False.
I didn’t think. I couldn’t. I rocked forward and hit him as hard as I could. My hand seized with pain from where it had connected to his jaw. I hit him again. Again. He didn’t try to stop me. He placed his hand beneath my elbow, giving me the strength to hit him harder.
When I had no punches left, I folded over my reeling stomach. I was no better than Roy, hitting my mother. I wanted violence to resolve my anguish. To show Chase how wrong he was. The parallel made my reality infinitely more devastating.
“It’s okay. Hit me. I deserve it.”
As though that would make it better. As though that would fix anything.
“No more,” I moaned.
He lifted his hands in surrender. “Ember, I’ll do whatever you want. Just please let me get you somewhere safe. That was the whole point in this. I knew that once you found out, you’d want to get as far away from me as possible, and if you believed your mom was in South Carolina, you’d let me take you there. I told you in the beginning, if you want me gone after that, I’m gone.”
“I’m not going anywhere with you.”
“Please. Just let me get you somewhere safe.”
All the slashes of pain inside. All the losses. My mother. Chase. Beth. Rebecca. Trust. Love. I had nothing left but the skeleton of integrity.
“No.”
“If you won’t listen to me, do it for her. Lori wanted you away from all this.”
“Don’t!” I cried out. I could not bear to hear her name.
He hung his head. “I’ve messed everything up. From the beginning. I’ve done nothing right by you. By your mother. She loved you so much, Ember.”
“She’s dead because of you!”
And what was worse was that she was dead because of me, too. Because if I’d never told Chase to leave, he wouldn’t have gone into the military. They never would have targeted him. They never would have used us to break him. Through some twist of fate, I had killed my own mother. The shame was so thick I could not speak it.
He rocked back onto his heels and then stood. I knew I had wounded him. I had done so deliberately. I wanted to injure him. To make him hurt as deeply as I did. But how could he?
“Yes,” he said simply. “She’s dead because of me.”
“Get out. Get away from me.”
Minutes passed. But he did leave. I heard the door close softly behind him.
I SOBBED for hours huddled in a clenched ball. I cried until the tears dried up. And when they did, my body cried without them.
Every image that entered my mind pained me. Every thought led me to the same conclusion.
I was alone. Absolutely alone.
When I could breathe again, I forced myself up and stumbled toward the window. I could hear other people in the hallway asking Chase what had happened. He didn’t answer. It didn’t matter.
My arms were heavy. My head felt heavy. Bloated.
Air. That feels nice, I thought absently.
I slid over the ledge and out onto the fire escape, needing the cold to stop the fever. The balcony was too small. I could climb down the ladder. I could get to the street. It looked like a black hole from up here. Maybe I could disappear inside it.
The rain was soothing. The first soothing feeling I’d felt in what seemed like an eternity. It soaked through my clothing, my hair. It washed away the salt on my face. It entered my eyes by way of my matted lashes and cleansed them.
I walked. And walked. Unable to focus on anything. Remembering nothing.
The lights didn’t surprise me. They barely roused my curiosity. But soon the car had stopped alongside the sidewalk where I stood. Men got out. They spoke to me in harsh tones I didn’t understand. They grabbed my arms. They dragged me into the backseat, where the rain no longer reached me.
A CLANG on the metal door. My eyes blinked open, unfocused. A fluorescent light directly above my head buzzed and flickered. The ceiling was pocked with dried peels of white paint. Mildew and body odor soiled the mattress I laid upon. I had no pillow. No blankets.
Where was I? How long had I been here? It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered.
“She won’t eat.” Someone’s voice came muffled through the door.
“I don’t give a damn.” Another male.
“Me neither,” the first scoffed, “but she’ll be dead before her trial if she keeps this up.”
“Then she’ll be dead. Wouldn’t be the first time.”
I closed my ears to their callous disregard. I closed my mind to all consciousness.
A HAND was shaking my shoulder. Then a hard pinch to the sensitive skin on the underside of my arm. The pain snapped my eyes open. Apparently I could still feel some things.
“You need to get up. Get up!” A woman’s voice now, warped with annoyance. I moaned and rolled away. My face pressed against the cool, cement wall.
“If you don’t knock this off, I’ll get in trouble for it.”
“Leave me alone,” I managed weakly.
“You’ve had three days of that already. Now you’ve got to get moving.”
She shook my shoulder again. When I rolled onto my back, she grabbed my arms and pulled me into a seated position. My head went very fuzzy and dim.
“Hey.” She slapped my cheek lightly. “Are you going to throw up?”
“No,” I said feebly.
“Hmph. You’ve got nothing to throw up anyway.”
She shoved a plastic bowl onto my lap. It was filled with something that resembled soupy oatmeal. I stared at it blankly.
“Unbelievable,” the woman said. She picked up a spoonful and shoved it into my mouth.
I sputtered and choked. But the tasteless, lukewarm mush slid down my throat and entered my starved stomach. Soon my mouth was watering for more.
I ate, focusing for the first time on the woman. She had gnarled, arthritic bumps on her hands and deeply etched creases beside her mouth. Her face held a look of concern it seemed would never fully dissipate, and her eyes were almost translucently blue. It wouldn’t have surprised me if she were blind, but her movements dictated otherwise.
Her hair was gray and wavy, and she wore a navy pleated skirt and button-up blouse. The uniform covered her sagging body the way a burlap sack covers potatoes.
Haven’t you ever seen the Sisters of Salvation? I heard Rosa say in my mind. They’re the MM’s answer to women’s liberation.
It was like I’d never left the reformatory.
In the tiny cell, the narrow bed reached out from the wall and nearly collided with a metal toilet at its foot. There was barely enough room for the woman to remain standing in front of me without our knees touching.
“Where am I?” I asked her. My voice cracked. It had not been used in some time.
“Knoxville Detention Facility.”
So I had been captured after all.
It won’t be long until they kill me, too, I thought, in a completely detached way.
“Finish up, Miller.” She slapped the side of my bowl, and some sloshed onto a paper gown, like the kind people wear in hospitals. Somewhere along the line someone had taken my clothes.
“You know my name.” My haircut hadn’t disguised me in the end. Oh well.
She huffed. “Put the dress on. You can’t stay in that.”
With no notions of modesty, I stripped down to my undergarments and slid into the oversized Sisters of Salvation uniform, forgoing the handkerchief. My appearance now matched the clear-eyed woman.
“Now what?” I asked.
“You wait until someone comes and gets you.” She knocked twice on the door. It opened from the outside, and she slid out of view.
I stared at the wall across from me, my mind blank.
SOMETIME later I heard keys jangle against the door, then a metallic squeal, and the barricade was removed, revealing a lean soldier with a broad chest. He had a slight face. Piercing green eyes. Golden hair slicked to one side. One large hand held a clipboard and a pen. His other arm was casted from the elbow down.
He had a gun holstered beside the nightstick on his hip. I wondered if he was here to shoot me, the way Chase’s commanding officer had shot my mother. I was surprised that I didn’t much care. At least this nightmare would be over.
There was a dreamlike quality about him. I felt like I recognized him from somewhere. Pieces began to pull together, one at a time.
“Your knuckles look like hell. What have you been doing, cage fighting?”
I glanced down, thinking that my hands actually looked pretty good. The scabs had peeled, leaving behind thin, white scars. Most of the darker bruising had faded. I wiggled my fingers. Just a dull ache.
“You have no idea who I am,” he said, stealing a look back toward the door.
I saw three discolored lines on his neck. Fingernail scratches. My scratches.
“Tucker Morris.”
“Yeah,” he said slowly. As if this were the most obvious thing in the world.
Silence.
“Aren’t you even curious why I’m here?”
“Does it matter? I’m sure I’ll be executed either way.” My voice was flat. Emotionless.
“That’s morbid.”
“Am I wrong?”
He smirked. “Where is he?”
“I don’t know who you mean,” I said with my jaw locked.
“Withholding information won’t help your case.”
“What will help my case?” I asked sourly.
“Being nice to me might.” There was a buoyancy in his tone. Almost as if he were flirting. I nearly gagged.
“I will not be nice to someone who participates in the murders of innocent people.” The words burned my tongue but did nothing to my dead heart.
“So he told you? I thought he’d chicken out. Just like he did with her.”
There was a flash of anger. I wanted to claw at him again, like I had when he’d taken my mother. But then the desire was gone. All that remained was bitterness.
“You’re a bastard, Tucker.”
“I should say the same.” He grinned at his own cleverness. “But watch your mouth. You can’t talk to a soldier that way.”
I scoffed. What was he going to do? Kill me? Get in line.
He hesitated. “Jennings already has abduction of a minor, assault with a deadly weapon, theft of federal property, and at least ten other petty charges tacked onto his AWOL. This isn’t someone you want to protect. He obviously wouldn’t return the favor.”
I hadn’t given him the chance to protect me—I’d left when he’d been guarding my door. By the time he realized I was gone, I’d probably already been thrown into this cell.
I wondered what my charges were. Something about running from the reformatory. Theft and assault. What else? Fraud for our non-government-approved marriage? For some reason, I found the tally mildly amusing. I didn’t even care if they pegged me as the sniper now.
“Why are you even here? I thought you were in a transport unit or something.”
“I made rank. I’m on a fast track. I’ll probably be an officer soon.”
“Congratulations.” I said. My tone didn’t faze him.
“Your trial’s been moved to the end of the week.”
“Damn. You couldn’t fit me in today, huh?”
“I bought you three more days to ponder your fate. I’d like to make sure you get the full experience of incarceration. That’s as a favor to our mutual friend.” His jaw twitched as he spoke.
Tucker was flat-out evil. He was even more despicable than Chase.
“I’m detailing you to cleanup until your sentencing.”
He opened my door and motioned for me to step outside into the hall. My legs were weak from days of not walking, and my head spun for a few seconds. I was surprised Tucker let me out without handcuffs.
The woman who had woken me earlier in the day was busying herself scrubbing floors. She had a sudsy bucket beside her and wore elbow-length rubber gloves.
“Delilah, this is Ember Miller,” said Tucker from the doorway.
She glanced up and then hoisted herself to her feet.
“Yes, sir.”
“She’ll help you until her trial.”
Delilah nodded submissively. Tucker pulled me aside before turning to go.
“I’ll be down the hall at that office. Come see me when she’s done with you.”
“I can’t wait.”
He chuckled as he walked away.
“Grab a brush. We’re scrubbing floors. And then it’s cleanup of another kind.” Delilah wasn’t much for small talk.
We went room by room, cleaning the floors, making the beds, scrubbing the toilets. Only two of the rooms were occupied, and those we did not enter immediately.
While I was working, a handcuffed man with sallow skin and bruises on one cheek slumped down the hall. He was accompanied by four guards, one of whom carried a silver briefcase. They pushed him roughly into an empty room. A few minutes later, all four guards disappeared the way they had come.
“Just gone to trial,” commented Delilah. I wondered morbidly what the outcome had been.
When we were finished, I followed Delilah downstairs to the cafeteria, where we picked up two trays of gray mush from a soldier wearing a hairnet. I watched as several soldiers were cleared in and out of the building’s main entrance by a guard behind a thick plate of glass. Every time the door opened, a spine-curdling buzz spiked my eardrums.
Back upstairs, Delilah used a key hanging on a thin metal chain around her neck to open the door.
The man inside was curled into a ball on the back side of his bed. He wore a canary yellow jumpsuit and rocked back and forth pitifully, muttering something to himself.
“Food,” Delilah said, laying the tray on the opposite side of his bed.
She shut the door, and marked the checkbox beside MEAL on the clipboard hanging from the handle.
In the next room, a man with olive skin leaned against the wall, biting his nails.
“You got a blanket or something?” he said quickly. “Oh. Hey there,” he added when he saw me. I stared back at him curiously.
“Food,” Delilah said again, leaving the tray on his bed.
A guard passed by, heading down the stairs.
“Where’s he going?” I asked Delilah.
“Rounds. They walk the halls every thirty minutes.”
“It seems like there should be more security for a jail.”
She shook her head. “This is a small detention center. Only holding cells. Temporary stays. It’s minimum security. The prison’s in Charlotte.”
Delilah was very matter-of-fact.
“Hope you have a tough stomach,” she said.
“Why?”
“Now it’s time for the real cleanup.”
I followed her to a storage room, which held supplies. Bleach. Gloves. Prisoner uniforms. Towels. Blankets. I thought she would grab one for the man in the cell, but she did not. Instead, she retrieved a deep laundry cart with a metal cover. Then we headed toward the third occupied room, the one holding the soldier who had just completed trial.
I looked at his clipboard. In large letters was written one word: COMPLETE.
There was a fleeting moment where I remembered a conversation between Rebecca and me at the reformatory. Sean had told her that he had heard the term complete used for the Article violators. That was when I’d naïvely thought my mother had been sent to rehab.
I knew when the door swung open why Delilah had asked me about my stomach.
The man before us was lying twisted on the narrow bed. His knees were stacked on the mattress while his shoulders faced the ceiling. His brown hair was still tangled, and a bruise still blackened his pasty cheek.
But he was now dead.
My mind conjured an image of the man who had starved in the square. How thin and fragile his body had looked. How I assumed he had fallen asleep, when really he had wasted away.
This was different. This man looked dead. Not peaceful. Not sleeping. But ashy and cold and tortured, as though his mind had been taken by death before his body was ready. I knew then why people close the eyes of the dead. Those lifeless globes tracked me like the eyes of the Mona Lisa.
I took a step back before my knees began knocking. Within seconds, my whole body was shaking. I couldn’t stop staring at the dead man. My brain morphed his face into Chase’s face. His dark, probing eyes gone dim. If caught, this would be his fate.
Even now, I didn’t want Chase to die. I hoped he was far away. That he’d run once he’d found me gone.
Delilah heaved the body into a seated position. I felt the bile scratch up my throat. Deliberately, I swallowed. She rolled the body sideways into the laundry cart, and it thudded against the metal base.
I felt ill. I forced my mind to focus. To magnetize some semblance of strength.
“You still upright?” Delilah asked as she pushed the cart down the hall, the opposite direction of the stairs.
She wasn’t looking at me, but I nodded, trailing behind her slightly. I watched my feet, one after another. It was the only thing I could focus on without vomiting.
“It helps if you don’t think of them as people.”
Yes. I imagined that would help.
At the end of the hallway was a freight elevator. It was black and greasy and had poor lighting. She pushed the cart inside, and I tried to tell myself that there wasn’t a body within it.
We got off at the bottom floor and exited through an unguarded door, which Delilah unlocked with the same key from around her neck. She pushed the cart down a narrow back alley until we reached a high fence with rolls of barbed wire cresting its ridge. There was a gate there, manned by two soldiers in a guard station. They saw the cart and let us pass without a second glance.
“I guess they know what we’re doing,” I observed.
“You gonna help?” Delilah asked as she began to labor. I slid beside her, checking my nausea, and grabbed one side of the slick metal handle. Together, we pushed the cart up a steep asphalt embankment lined by flat-topped hedges that curved around the back side of the station. I was sweating by the time we reached the top.
A single cement building, flat and square, came into view. It was surrounded by lovely drooping trees, a contrast to the black factory smoke puffing from the chimney. The air reeked of sulfur. The driveway arched into a teardrop before the entrance.
“Just over to that door there.” Delilah pointed. I helped her push the weighted cart to a side exit with a canvas shade awning. She rang a buzzer. Then, without waiting, she walked away.
“We just leave him—it—here?” I asked.
She nodded. “The crematorium.”
My stomach churned.
They took my mother somewhere like this. I was flooded with so much horror I could barely stumble behind her.
The sickness numbed, and I was able to follow Delilah weakly back to the highest crest of the hill. Here she paused. I tracked her gaze, feeling my feet stabilize under me for the first time since we had entered that third room.
Before us stretched the FBR base. The buildings all matched, gray and drab, some with stout additions, others slender. All variations on the same deathly theme. Little manicured lawns cropped up between them, and white walkways bounced from entrance to entrance. It reached on for miles, surrounded by the high steel fence that we had passed through below. In the distance I could see the river and the hospital where we’d left the car. The square would be nearby, as would the Wayland Inn, where the resistance plotted.
Oh, the information I could offer Wallace. The layout of the detention center. How many guards roamed the halls. The geography of the base. I’d doubted my use to the resistance before. I didn’t now.
I felt a flame flicker inside of me. A feeling, almost unrecognizable.
Hope.
What if I could find a way to tell Wallace? Even if I was doomed to die, the information I had might save others. Innocent people like my mother. It physically hurt to think that the information I now had might have helped someone save her.
I turned around and saw the remains of an abandoned town. Probably some residential offshoot of Knoxville. Twisting asphalt avenues were lined by crowded duplexes and condos. From the distance, their tiny yards did not look overgrown or weed eaten. The tagged walls and broken windows were too far away to see clearly.
An old sign posting fuel prices reached up atop the horizon, drawing my attention. A main street ran down the left side of my view; a straight line away from me.
“Is that all part of the base, too?” I asked.
“No. The base is just over there. This side of the city is evacuated. A Red Zone.”
I felt my brows draw together.
“Do you mean that we’re not currently on the base?”
“You’re a bright one,” she mocked.
Anxiety shimmered through me.
“How often do you come out here?” I asked.
“Every time I have to take out the trash.”
I grimaced at her analogy. “And you’ve never thought to just keep walking?”
“I think it all the time.”
“Why don’t you?”
She looked at me, her face tired.
“If there was anything for me out there, I’d be gone.”
She looked at me in judgment, sizing up my intentions. Apparently, my thoughts were as transparent as her eyes.
Beth was still out there. Rebecca was in danger. Wallace and the resistance could use me, and after my mother’s murder, how could I not help them? There were too many people like me who didn’t know just how lethal the MM was. Too many people dead, while their loved ones remained hopeful for a reunion.
I had to do something, no matter how small. Something. For my mother.
If I ran now, Delilah didn’t have to go more than ten feet to flag down the guard at the watch station. But Tucker had said I still had three days before my trial. If I could earn enough trust to make it outside on my own, I might be able to escape.
“You want a bullet in your back, don’t you?” She wasn’t looking for an answer.
She trudged down the hill. And I followed, scheming.