by Meli Raine
“You think that my dad got spooked, went off the grid, took us further and further away from society, and that they came and found him… found us? Why would they kill him? Because he knew? That’s enough?” I ask, knowing damn well what the answer is.
“They don’t need a reason.” Drew leans in even closer, mint on his breath. I can feel the tension radiating out of him. “They don’t need a reason, Duff. You know that as well as I do.”
“I know. But you’re saying that John, Blaine, and Stellan’s parents were part of all that? Then–were they stateless?”
“No. They were all born too soon to be part of it. Just a year or two before it really began in earnest. But they were…” He hesitates.
“What?”
“They were trained.”
“What do you mean, ‘trained’?”
“John, Blaine, and Stellan were all trained in the ways of the stateless, even though they were documented.”
“Trained? They have a special training program?”
“The Stateless Project has a special everything,” he says. “There’s a hardcore philosophy for what they do with children.”
“Children?”
“The babies. The toddlers. They start them young.”
“How young?”
“Newborn, now.”
“Jesus Christ, Drew, you’re talking about taking children—babies—away from parents, never recording their births, and then turning them into some kind of a deep-state army?”
“That’s exactly what the Stateless Project is.” He looks nervously around again. I wonder if it's because he has his own baby now. How would it feel to have Emma taken away for a deep-state government project.
One that might be run by his own father-in-law?
“Why are you so jumpy? What’s going on?”
He just sighs.
“Is it about Emma?”
Alarm fills his face. “What about her?”
“She's your baby. We're talking about children being taken by shadow government actors for an espionage project.”
His jaw tenses. “No. She and Lindsay are safe. I'm not worried about them.”
“It’s about Silas, isn’t it? Is he mixed up in all this?”
“More than he knows.”
“What the hell does that mean, Drew? Just spit it out. You’re telling me that John, Stellan, and Blaine, who attacked you and Lindsay and were supposed to have attacked Jane that night six years ago, were all part of Stateless? Was that some kind of a... training exercise?” The words come out caustic. I’m not joking, but then it hits me.
I’m closer to the truth than I want to be.
Pained eyes meet mine. “Yeah, Duff. Exactly. It was a training exercise.”
“Holy shit.”
“It gets worse.”
“Of course it does.”
“The first batch of truly stateless kids, the ones born directly into the program, the ones taken out of their parents’ homes or volunteered for the project, were kids my wife’s age.”
“Harry wanted to hand Lindsay over to the project?”
“No.”
“Monica did?”
“No. Your brother was supposed to be handed directly over, but as a preschooler. He would have been the first. There’s someone else who was supposed to be among the first crew of Stateless.”
“Who?”
He looks around again and finally whispers a name I never expected to hear.
“Jane. Jane Borokov.”
Chapter 8
Lily
“Stateless,” Romeo says, the word stretching out like taffy in my mind, each of the nine letters pulling further and further apart, until looking at them in my mind’s eye shows nothing that resembles a whole.
“Stateless,” I say, drawing out the final s. “Without state. Unable to state.”
“State what?” His eyebrows go down. “Are you on something?”
I shake my head.
“Or are you possibly having a stroke?” He seems to relish the idea.
I don't answer. Am I? How do you know if you're having a stroke if a stroke takes away parts of your mind?
“Then what do you know, Lily? Make it easy. Make it easy for yourself.” Soothing tones like caramel poured over ice cream make me want to sink into it. Swim in it.
In that instant, it becomes easy. He’s right.
“What is stateless?” I ask.
“Don't ask questions you already know the answers to.”
“I know that it means someone has no birth certificate, that there’s no record of their life. But you’re alive. You’re right here in front of me. You can’t be real and dead at the same time.”
He chuckles. “That’s exactly what I am. I’m very real, Lily.” He reaches down with the tip of his finger and slides it along my cheekbone, so slowly. His touch is cold, like a piece of ice being dragged across a dead body. “And we're going to make a better world.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Because we’re so much more. We’re building a new state, Lily, by creating an army of stateless people. The stateless are stronger, better, more evolved than anyone else. We have no attachments that blind us to the truth.”
“The truth?”
“The truth that people are society's greatest flaw.” He lets out a huff, a sound that could either be a laugh or disgust. It's impossible to tell which when it comes from Romeo.
“I’m grateful to Gentian for showing me this place,” he continues in a creepy voice, the kind that slithers and slides into your ear like a worm you don’t want in a place so close to the parts of your brain that process terror.
“Why?”
“Because it's like being stateless. No one's watching here. No surveillance. No cameras. No way to communicate in or out. It's a blank slate, one that people can use to become whatever they want. Slip into any sexual identity and live freely. That's what we do, too, although it's not limited to sexuality. We are the future. We are free.”
“What does that mean? Free?” I sense he wants to talk. I ask questions because I can. Because the more he talks, the longer I live.
“We live in a world of Big Data. How do you fight the synergy? The singularity? By creating dataless people.”
“People leave footprints.”
“Footprints, yes. Fingerprints–no.” He wiggles his fingers at me. “I am in no database. A record of me doesn't exist.”
“Army,” I say, words coming out slower, fewer.
His head jolts. “Ah, you do know more than you let on!” He grins as if this arouses him.
“Mom told me,” I lie, my stomach twisting.
He frowns. “I did tell Bee, didn't I? She was so easy. So simple, Lily. Your parents are good, salt-of-the-earth folks. The kind we want more of, because they do as they're told. Pushing to keep you alive was not my first choice, of course, until I saw how he handled it.”
“He?”
“Duff. The man you call Duff. When I realized he was attached to you, I understood how to use your mother's determination against my enemy.”
“Enemy? Duff is your enemy?”
“Once I understood that he was searching for his brother, yes.”
“Why not kill him?”
“You think in black and white, Lily. See? Simple. Like your mother.”
“I like simple.”
Booming laughter shakes the world, turning it side to side, my vision changing into a kaleidoscope of color.
“Of course you do. Leave the complicated parts for people like me.” His eyes move with blunt objectivity to the dead man at our feet. “He was also simple.”
The threat is obvious.
“You have no idea how far this all goes, Lily. It goes deeper and wider than anyone ever dreamed. Unless you are one of the dreamers, like those who keep this going. The true believers.”
“Like you?”
“Like me. Like all of the Stateless. Especially the new crop.”
“Crop?”
“We grow them. Just wait. Just wait until the full power of our project is revealed.”
“That's why you want Duff? He threatens the project?”
“It's too important to let anyone expose it.”
“Is that why you wanted to kill me?”
“You? You were an accident. Collateral damage. Others, though...”
“Like Duff? Who else?”
“Alice got too close.”
“What does that mean?”
“She had to be eliminated.”
“What about Jane?”
A shadow crosses his face, the first sign of uncertainty. “Jane is complicated.”
“The president's daughter,” I whisper.
One corner of his mouth rises slowly as he nods. “She is complicated. More than you could possibly understand.”
“I'm simple. Jane's complicated. What's Duff?”
“An obstacle.”
“Lindsay Bosworth? What about her?”
A long, regal sigh slides out of him. “It was so inconvenient that they chose Lindsay. To this day, no one truly knows why.”
“They?”
“Her attackers. John, Blaine, and Stellan were the first group of trainees from the project, the beta class, so to speak. Trained from early childhood, but not born directly into the program. When Jane left that party, it was foolish of them to choose Lindsay and Drew as fallback targets. It was a tactical error, the kind our people do not make. But then again, they were never our people.”
“They were her friends. Or, at least, Drew Foster's friends.”
“They were friends to no one.”
“What do you mean?”
“Friendship is such a simple concept. Who are you friends with, Lily? Why? What draws you to another person? A need for attachment, no? For shared experience? For a confidante? A sense of community, perhaps. Turn it around, though.”
“Around?”
“Friendship has a dark side.”
“It did for Drew and Lindsay.”
“And for you.”
“Me?”
“I shot you thinking you were Jane Borokov. Your friend,” he spits out.
“That was your fault. Not hers.”
“Are you sure?”
“Sure?” My mouth slurs the word.
“How do you know she didn't set you up? That she didn't know I was coming to kill her and sent you out to the counter instead?”
“What? Why would she do that?”
“Ask yourself that question, Lily: Why would she do that?”
Duff's words about his training come back to me, a slice of memory that cuts through the burning haze of my draining mind: “What we do, Lily, is weed through mind fucks.”
And then Silas's words:
“It’s about innuendo and starting rumors that shake people’s confidence. It’s about manipulating and using people’s psychology against them.”
Romeo is trying to make me paranoid on purpose. To turn me against Jane.
Why?
Why now, when I have a dead man at my feet, nowhere to run, and he has complete control over my body and mind? My life is leaking out of me, one neuron at a time, and he's choosing this tactic.
“Why are you telling me all this? You're just going to kill me.”
“Because I can, Lily. Because I can.”
Duff
“How long has he known?” I ask Drew, as Silas appears.
It’s clear from the look in Drew’s eyes that I’m supposed to say nothing about Jane. Jane is safe back in Texas, surrounded by a security team with one purpose: to keep her alive. Meanwhile, the woman I love is somewhere on the other side of a wall in this godforsaken place, and I can’t even find her to save her.
So I don’t give a damn about Jane right now.
“How long has he known what?” Drew asks me.
“How long has Romeo known about my true mission?”
Anguish, genuine yet calculated, ripples across Drew’s face. “No clue, but long enough.”
Long enough. The words echo through my mind like a gong, the sound traveling back in time. Months? Years? How long has he known? But more important, how long has his knowing put Lily in danger?
“If I’m the lure,” I say to both of them, Silas slipping seamlessly into the conversation, “then I need to trade myself for her.”
“I don’t think it works that way,” Silas says. “This isn’t about bodies. I don’t think this is even about lives. He doesn’t care about her.”
“Of course he doesn’t care about her!” I argue. “But he cares about me. He wants me. I’m his endgame.” A sick feeling roils through my torso, my gut twisting.
I’m not afraid to die. I’m not afraid to feel pain. I’m not even afraid to hand myself off to that lying fuck. The only fear I possess is a fresh terror on Lily’s behalf. What she’s experiencing right now, second by second, in his hands, is my vision of hell.
I look at Drew. “We need to find him, and her, now. We need to stop this now. We may be too late. But if his goal is me and I don’t get there in time, then I might as well be dead anyhow.”
Drew takes one long, slow, deep breath that echoes as he exhales, the sound bouncing off the walls in the dark hallway. As he breathes, I can feel her. It’s as if she’s crawled into my head. Somehow, I hear her voice inside my skull as Drew’s respiration takes over.
There’s a spark of her, a connection, an ember.
Chills travel up and down my body, on my skin, through my bones, vibrating into my toes, my fingertips, my eyelids, the crown of my head. I stop breathing. I close my eyes and go inward, deep into a part of me that I didn’t know I possessed.
And then I open my eyes and start running.
The first door is easy. I bang on it hard, expecting no answer. I call out, “LILY!”
I move on to the second door.
The third.
Drew grabs my arm, Silas the other. They pin me back against the wall.
“What the fuck are you doing?” Silas rasps.
“I’m finding her! I need her!”
“Why now? Why the freakout now, Duff?” Drew hisses in my ear as he nearly covers my mouth. He's so close, I can see the bruised blood vessels on his face from my punch this morning. My arm's tight behind my back and I know I'm two seconds away from being dropped.
“Because I can feel her! Feel her dying, Drew!”
“I think I know which room she’s in, if it's the same one Jane was in,” Silas whispers before Drew can answer. My arm's suddenly freed, though. “Come this way.”
“If you keep this shit up,” Drew says in my face, “and ruin the element of surprise, you’ll kill her!”
“He’s killing her right now, I told you, Drew!”
“How do you know?”
“When someone’s hurting Lindsay, do you know? Do you just feel it in your bones?”
Without another word, we both take off after Silas, who’s running soundlessly.
“Here,” he says, using the keys he took off Busy’s body, opening a door.
“This isn’t it, they’re not here!” I hiss, right behind him.
“They’re next door,” he mouths, the words barely audible. He turns on the overhead light and then kneels down to an electrical outlet on the side wall. Using a small tool on the keychain, he backs out the screws, pulling the plate off.
“Peephole,” he whispers.
“What?”
“A peephole. It’s a feature, not a bug.”
“You have got to be kidding me. A hidden peephole?”
“It's for the voyeurs.”
“No shit.”
“Management doesn't use them anymore. I only know about them because I searched them all for bugs back when I was assigned to clean the club.”
“Does Romeo know these exist?”
“No. You can use this to take him out.”
“How?”
“Gun.”
I give him a silent, but grim, thumbs u
p.
Drew bends down low, one eye over the narrow opening, and then pulls back fast, hand on his holster.
“Do it. Now!” he spits. “He's killing her. Shit!”
Eye to the hole, sighting what he saw, I find Romeo choking Lily.
With a smile on his face.
Chapter 9
Lily
My ears are ringing but my eyes work just fine. Romeo's head suddenly stretches up on his neck, gaze turning towards the door, head tilting just so, listening.
He hears something.
Or someone.
Peering intently at me, he steps on the dead guy's arm, the callousness shocking. Blinding pain shoots up into my left eye, like it's my body he hurts.
Like I'm connected to the dead man in ways we cannot understand.
“I suspect it is finally time for you, my dear, sweet Lily.” His hand goes to his belly, thumb grazing his belt buckle. My legs tense, the core of me clenching.
His eyes take me in, tongue slipping out between his lips, as if he's contemplating something more than just killing me.
Nerve pain is a whole different world from regular muscle or bone pain. It diminishes you, amplifies all the horridness of existence, and makes you wish you were dead. In my normal life, when it flares up, it strips every moment of joy.
Right now?
It makes me want to grab his gun and put it in my mouth.
Bending, Romeo touches my hip, fingertips grazing the dress's seam all the way down to my knee. “You're really something, Lily. Surgeons knit you together with glue and fishing line, and yet here you are. Still going.”
Flowers bloom behind my eyes, metallic and sharp, the petals shredding my corneas. I try to say something but the words get stuck in my tonsils.
Moving closer, his face is inches from mine, sprouting color like a fiddlehead unfolding in spring, only with fireworks.
“You are having a stroke,” he says in awe, wonder filling his voice with a rasp that I can't even react to. “Right before my eyes. Oh, Lily.” One corner of his mouth tightens. Pity fills his eyes, but then they turn into spiders.
“Huh,” I say. Help. Help me.
