by K A Riley
Wisp nudges past me to lean in over one of the monitors. “Now let’s see what we’re dealing with, exactly. Olivia, can you give us externals on Pacific Avenue?”
“Initiated.” In the now-cramped and very dark fragment of the Intel Room, Olivia calls up a display showing the outside of the Style and now adding the surrounding area within a few blocks. Things look normal. Except for the line of Patriot military vehicles rumbling this way. Wisp is just leaning in to get a closer look at the approaching enemy when the images pixilate away.
“With Render out of commission, that’s all I’ve got,” Olivia apologizes. “Their surveillance systems are still too secure for me to infiltrate totally. But as you saw, they’re definitely headed in our direction.”
“Can you at least access the surveillance system from the lobby?”
Olivia says, “Initiated,” and the lobby of the Style pixilates into a slightly fuzzy focus. And then Olivia’s monitors flicker and go dead white.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “Their firewalls are too strong, and their network paths are constantly being reconfigured.”
“That’s what I was afraid of.”
“What?” I ask.
“The communication problems we’ve been having. The interference with the comm-links. Our inability to communicate with you and Brohn when you were out in the city. The partial and sometimes plain wrong intel we were getting before you and Render got us the good stuff. The fact that we can’t even access our own monitoring systems. Ekker is tracking our frequencies somehow. He’s patched into the code that operates our surveillance.” Wisp turns to Manthy. “This is why I needed you. We need to see what’s happening. Can you help Olivia get our eyes back?”
Working with Olivia in the cramped space, Manthy is able to circumvent Ekker’s security overrides to do what the security cameras downstairs can’t: show us the men who are pulling up outside the building to kill us.
As we watch the monitor in front of Olivia, a squad of twenty angry-looking soldiers leaps down from military mag-jeeps and accompanies Ekker and the mystery woman in red up to the front of the building. At the same time, another group circles around back.
Ekker and his men enter through the building’s front doors and go storming into the lobby.
To our surprise, we see three people we don’t know scrambling for cover as the Patriot troops follow Ekker inside. They run full-tilt toward a door on the far side of the lobby only to be met by more soldiers. They slide to a stop, turn, and run back the way they came, but it’s too late. They’re surrounded in the middle of the lobby with no way out.
“Damn it!” Wisp says, slamming her fist down on the table. “No one’s supposed to be down there!”
“Who are they?” I ask. “Insubordinates?” The two men and the one woman on the image appear older than most of the Insubordinates we’ve met so far and don’t look familiar.
“They’re not Insubordinates,” Wisp informs us without taking her eyes off the monitors. “Not exactly. They’re from Haven House. They sometimes help Caldwell take care of the Modifieds. Damn!”
As we watch helplessly, Ekker interrogates them.
With Manthy’s help, we can see and hear everything that’s happening.
Ekker paces around the men and the woman and accuses them of being Insubordinates.
They deny it, except for the middle-aged man with glasses and a salt-and-pepper beard. He tells Ekker that he is, in reality, the leader of the Insubordinates. “They call me the Major,” he declares through a choked-back laugh. Forced by the Patriot soldiers onto their knees, the man’s two partners stifle laughs of their own.
Ekker steps forward, grabs the chuckling man by the scruff of his neck, and shoots him right through the eye. The back of the man’s head bursts open, and we all step back, shocked at the sight of the uncalled-for execution played out on the holo-display in front of us.
Leaping to their feet, the other man and the woman scream and tear themselves away from the grip of the Patriots. They run across the lobby and dash up the stairs where they disappear from view.
Ekker turns to the woman in red. She taps a comm-link behind her ear and makes a circular motion in the air with her finger. Instantly, the Ekker’s soldiers go bounding through the lobby and up the stairs after the man and woman, firing at them as they flee.
What we’re seeing is shocking. The slaughter of the man and woman is as barbaric as it is complete. The parts we hear are every bit as horrifying as the parts we see.
Ekker stands and watches, his arms folded across his chest, as his soldiers drag the man and woman down the stairs, back into view, and up to his feet like dogs returning a stick to their master.
Cardyn turns away, not wanting or needing to see or hear anything else.
The rest of us watch on Olivia’s holo-display as Ekker says something we can’t hear to the woman in red. Like before, she taps her comm-link. This time, she points around the lobby and up the stairs with both hands, and the squadron of soldiers marches forward. The soldiers unclip some kind of scanning or monitoring devices from their belts and call up infra-red displays that appear in front of their faces.
“They’re going floor by floor,” Olivia says. “They’ll kill anyone they find.”
“They won’t find anyone,” Wisp says.
From the safety of the Intel Room, we watch as the Patriot troops march down the long hallway of each floor, kicking some doors open and shooting through others before shouldering their way in.
In each case, exactly as Wisp promised, they find nothing. Just empty rooms.
Terrified, we watch for a full twenty minutes as the invasion continues until Ekker, the woman in red, and the other soldiers finally give up and reunite in the lobby.
Ekker turns to the woman in red. “You said they’d be here. You swore this was the place.”
In a voice largely muffled by her hood, the woman in red says something about recognizing a black raven and following him.
Ekker pauses, clearly suspicious, but there’s simply nothing here. Cursing, he leaves with his men and with the woman in red.
“Do you think he’ll be back?” I ask.
Wisp shakes her head. “Doesn’t matter. By this time tomorrow, we’ll either be celebrating or else Ekker will be dancing on our graves.”
Olivia plugs back into the system she used to hide us and transforms the building back to its original configuration. Shuddering and then gliding along, our room reverses its path from before. The walls drop back into place, the ceiling slides up, and the Intel Room returns to its normal size and shape.
A minute later, the small door opens in the wall, and Granden, crouched low, shuffles his way out with the Insubordinates right behind him.
Granden stands and brushes his hands on the thighs of his pants as he walks over to Wisp. “It’s pretty cramped in the access shafts,” he exclaims. “And dirty. But at least the Safe Rooms are all in good shape.”
Wisp gives him a sad smile and tells him “Thanks. Thanks for taking care of everyone.”
With the last of the Insubordinates emerging from the dark crawlspace into the once-again crowded Intel Room, Wisp hops up onto a mag-chair and announces the all-clear to everyone in the overcrowded room.
“Ekker and the Patriots are gone, but not before they did their damage.”
“What damage?” one of the Insubordinates asks above the hum of the crowd. “Granden said we were all accounted for.”
“Except for the six Insubordinates who are out on supply runs,” Granden adds, tapping his ear. “And I haven’t been able to contact them.”
Wisp lowers her head. When she looks up, her eyes are wet and red. “Xander, Jerred, and Annalisa. The ones who help Caldwell with the Modifieds. They were in the lobby…They didn’t make it into a Safe Room in time, and Ekker…Ekker caught them before they could slip out the back.”
Someone in the crowd screams out, “No!” and several Insubordinates put their arms around a young gir
l whose body is wracked with spasms of grief.
“Jerred was her father,” one of the Insubordinates standing next to me explains.
The hum around us turns into a dead silence and then a disgruntled rumble. There’s no need for Wisp to describe what we saw. Everyone in this room knows what the Patriot Army is capable of, what they live for, and what they kill for.
As the anger in the room threatens to seethe over, Wisp hops down from the table and orders the Insubordinates to follow Granden, Brohn, and Cardyn upstairs for their last round of battle preparation. As Cardyn is walking past me, Wisp clutches his arm and draws him aside.
“That’s Alessandra,” she says, nodding toward the girl whose agonizing cries of grief ring out in the somber quiet of the Intel Room. “Can you take care of her?”
Cardyn nods his response without looking at Wisp and walks over to where Alessandra is being consoled by the other Insubordinates. The crowd parts for him as he approaches and then watches through tears as he puts his arm around the sobbing girl and guides her toward the door.
Wisp turns toward me. “They drew first blood,” she says through a fierce scowl. “Let’s make sure we draw last.”
20
Brohn, Cardyn, and Granden head upstairs to the fifth-floor training rooms.
Watching Brohn leave makes me sad, and I’m wondering how our budding romance will ever evolve with each of us constantly going our separate ways. On top of which, we could be dead in less than twenty-four hours.
When the room has emptied out, Wisp drops heavily into a mag-chair, her head down, her arms draped over her knees.
“Kress,” she says quietly. “I need you, Rain, and Manthy to help me with one final surveillance and strategy session.”
Still dressed in her usual lime-green hoodie and khaki cargo pants, Wisp sounds exhausted and looks somehow different, worried, like the weight she carries on her shoulders is about one ounce away from being too much. Normally, that would make perfect sense. After all, she’s a fourteen-year-old girl who was raised without parents in a tiny mountain town that was bombed out of existence, leaving her alone and on the run until she made it to San Francisco, where she assumed command of a small group of inexperienced rebels who are now a day away from staging an audacious midnight attack on the president of the country and on his trigger-happy personal army who are all stationed in and around an impenetrable fortress.
So, yes, a lot of fatigue and worry are understandable. Except this is Wisp. The Major. The survivor. The unwavering leader who commands respect with her presence, with her brilliance, and with her unshakable confidence. This is the girl who, mostly before we arrived but also before our eyes over this past week, has saturated those around her with an abundance of optimism, confidence, and ability. She’s seen death before. We all have. But somehow the sight of those three people getting executed seems to have hit her especially hard.
Rain walks around the table and sits down next to Wisp. “You knew them well, didn’t you?” she asks.
Wisp glances up at Rain and nods. “All three of them. From when I escaped from the Valta. They were part of the group that found me, that brought me here. They were the first ones who introduced me to the Modifieds and told me about the Emergents. They were the ones who showed me what I was capable of.”
Wisp is quiet again for a minute and seems content to spin the holo-schematic in front of her and watch the multiple lines of code scrolling underneath.
“Last week when you first got here,” she says at last. “I told you about being on the run after the Valta got attacked.”
“We remember,” I say.
“And I told you about how someone attacked me when I was on the road, threw me into the back of a truck, and basically beat the hell out of me?”
Rain and I both nod our heads.
“Well, Xander is the one who threw the bag over my head and tossed me into the truck. Annalisa is the one who beat me up. And Jerred interrogated me for a few hours before they finally figured out we were on the same side.”
I don’t know about Rain, but I’m not sure how to respond to that. Finally, I clear my throat. “It sounds like a…traumatic experience.”
“They were the first people I ever met outside of the Valta. They were the first ones who told me the truth about the Eastern Order. They were the ones who got me into the war and who introduced me to the reality of what the world has become.”
“You’re talking like getting kidnapped and assaulted is the best thing that ever happened to you,” I say.
“Up until then, it was. And you know why? Because it led to the truth. And I liked it. As depressing and agonizing as it was,” Wisp adds with a small, unamused laugh, looking from me to Rain to Manthy, “it was better than living a lie. And I was hooked. I got hungry for it. I started seeing things differently. Stopped taking everything at face value. There are forces at work, girls. Forces that make this world what it is. No one is rich or poor, free or enslaved, fearless or afraid by chance. Xander, Jerred, and Annalisa…they opened my eyes. And now I can see the puppeteers behind the curtain.”
“It sounds…liberating,” I say, still not totally sure how to react.
“It is,” Wisp smiles. “But it’s like our rebellion. Liberation comes at a cost. And right now, I think I’m paying it.”
Wisp smiles at us and suggests we get back to work.
After that, our time in the Intel Room drags on, and Wisp returns to driving us and herself with relentless, nearly dictatorial determination. Her eyes, once filled with thoughts of justice, have smoldered into eyes brimming with vengeance.
“This isn’t a game,” she reminds us, her hands a blur as she whips through the countless holo-images we’ve assembled over the past few days. The cityscape skims above the surface of the table, the green parks and tall towers combining into a wash of color. “We can’t just resign and say we didn’t understand the rules.” She pauses for a second, her hands suspended over a series of images outlining one of tomorrow’s paths of attack. “Hm. I think we’ve been compromised.”
“You mean because of the comm-link problems?” I ask.
“And the network glitches. And Ekker finding you and Brohn. And then him finding this building.”
“One of the Insubordinates?”
“I don’t think so.” Wisp sighs and turns back to the schematic above the table and runs her eyes over a series of info-tags. “They’re all accounted for.”
“What about the ones you’ve been sending out on missions? Brohn and I ran into four of them in the city. You said yourself that surveillance has been a big problem, and I can’t imagine you can keep total track of all these kids and their families and friends. What if one of them had a change of heart? Or if the Patriots got to them somehow?”
“I’ve considered that. But my gut tells me no. And trusting my gut is one of the first things Xander, Jerred, and Annalisa taught me.”
Zooming in on the Armory and expanding two of its points of entry, one on the ground floor and one on the roof, Wisp flips the images, assigns some time-signatures, and tags them with a code for later reference. “This’ll be a problem,” she mutters under her breath.
I feel like I should ask her what’s wrong, but I’m tired. It’s getting late. I miss Render who’s downstairs with Caldwell, and I miss Brohn who’s upstairs continuing to teach fifty kids how to invade an army garrison without getting killed, and I’m in a generally rotten mood, overall. A few hours ago, the violence we’re about to leap into literally showed up on our doorstep. Now, we’ve got Wisp’s unnerving worry on top of that, which is making me worry in turn.
I figure maybe I can reassure her and set her busy, overworked mind at ease. “We know everything we’re going to know, Wisp. We’ve been over the plan a million times. Nothing we do at this point is going to help us or hurt us one way or another.”
Wisp slows but doesn’t stop her active hands, but she does sigh before telling us she has a confession to make.
/> “Let me guess,” I say. “You’re nervous about the possibility of betrayal. And about facing the Patriot Army tomorrow. We’re all edgy. But even if we lose, we’ll go down fighting, and if we hit them hard enough, maybe we’ll expose a weakness, some flaw that others can exploit after we’re gone.”
Now Wisp does stop, which makes the rest of us stop, too. She’s an active, multi-tasking kind of girl who is in constant motion, always planning, calling out orders, talking strategy, and accomplishing more in ten minutes than most people can manage in a day. To see her suddenly dropping her hands and sitting stone still is a little disconcerting.
“I am nervous,” Wisp confesses. “But that’s not what this is about. And it’s not even really about the possibility of an infiltrator.” She pauses and gives us what I think is supposed to be a reassuring smile, but it comes across as a little forced. “I know I exude confidence, but I’m not ignorant about what we’re up against, and I certainly don’t have a death wish.”
“What then?” Rain asks.
“I can’t not be the Major,” she admits, head down now, palms flat on the table. It sounds like a confession, a statement of fact, and a regret all rolled into one very odd emotion.
“Nobody can help but be who they are,” Rain assures her from across the table without looking up, her eyes, instead, scanning a bunch of running lines of communications code along with Manthy.
But Wisp shakes her head like Rain isn’t understanding her at all. “That’s not what I mean.”
“It’s okay,” I say. “You can tell us anything. We’re family. We have been all our lives.”
“I know that,” Wisp says with a genuinely appreciative smile. “I really do. But one of the drawbacks of family is that it’s for life, and I can’t appreciate what we all mean to each other because of who I am. What I’ve become.”
