He shook his head, not looking at him.
Not since that night then, almost three days ago.
He pulled a thermos of tea out of his bag and made him drink that and then, handed him a protein bar, but Riley wouldn’t even look at it. He had to get him back. He clicked in his comm and told Loren to bring the flier, soon as he could make it, and put a thermos of broth in it.
He sat Riley down on the road, kneeling next to him, looking at him.
“You stupid, stupid son of a bitch. Things you do to yourself. You are the smartest person I know, and this, all of it, is pretty much the stupidest thing I’ve ever seen you do. That’s supposed to be my job. Irresponsible, rash, impulsive Brody. Not you. Come here.” He pulled him onto his lap, and sat there, wiping the sweat from his face with his shirt, hoping Loren didn’t take too much longer. Riley let him, not saying anything, barely moving. “Ams loves you, and I know you know that, although I am starting to question her judgment. Everybody bloody loves you. Everybody but you, it seems, and I don’t have the slightest idea how to help you with that.”
Brody saw the flier land by the shimmer of the shield around it, and then Loren was running to them with the thermos and a medkit. Smart kid for not bringing anyone else. He made Riley drink, and after a little while, Loren leaned over him and checked his vitals, shaking his head at him when he was done. Not okay yet. They waited, nobody saying anything, Loren looking concerned. Not angry anymore then. Riley’s eyes were closed, and he suddenly realized he was out, asleep out. He likely didn’t sleep for two days, either. They carried him to the flier, flew back to their clearing, and waited for Riley to wake up. Loren has been watching him for the past hour, so he could get some preliminary planning done.
He went to the med bay after a while and caught them in the middle of a conversation, only nobody noticed him, so he leaned on the door and listened. Loren was telling Riley that he wasn’t angry and that Trelix likely wasn’t angry at him, either, so he should stop beating himself up. Telling him, too, that he gets why he did what he did, even if he isn’t like him. That he grew up in a place where he wasn’t like everybody else and remembers how it was for him, and how he didn’t want to trust anybody after that, so he couldn’t blame Riley for lashing out like that.
He saw Riley look at him, and ran over as if he’d just walked in.
“Can you walk?”
A nod.
He watched him get up, and he was shaky at first, but then seemed okay, only he looked apprehensive when they got in the elevator.
“You don’t need to do this now, Riley. Go get some sleep,” he said softly, but Riley just shook his head and walked to the big room.
He walked over to Trelix and apologized, and by the looks of it, he meant whatever he whispered to him, shaking his hand, face serious, and then Riley turned around and faced the rest of the group, his voice calm, even when he spoke. “I don’t know if I can explain it yet or ever, but I know I screwed up pretty badly a few days ago, and I am really sorry for that. I couldn’t process all those things Drake was showing us without attaching everything else I’ve seen and heard over the years to it. I was pissed off at what I was hearing, because parts of it that I lived through didn’t come together for me in that way before, and I didn’t know how to handle it. Anyway, I am going to try to talk to you guys instead of doing what I did to Trelix and Loren and running off next time, I promise. Here is the important part, something that occurred to me when I was sitting there, staring at those bones. I don’t think the Alliance did this. I think it was a single person or maybe a very small group of people who did this because nothing else makes sense. If the Alliance could make the whole city of people go into the fire, they wouldn’t be stealing kids from their families. They wouldn’t need to kill anybody or do what they did to Trina, they’d just be able to make any of us do whatever they wanted us to. Like Hassinger did with Brody’s crew. Loren says he doesn’t even remember it; like it wasn’t him doing it.”
He got up and walked over to him then. “I was thinking the same thing, Riley. We don’t know how but it’s like what Hassinger did, only these people didn’t have implants in them. Stan says none of them did. But that’s the only difference.”
Drake turned on the holo and was skimming through the images on it, and then he stopped on one of the screens and they were all staring at a room with NeuroTechX on the door, men wearing uniforms hunched over large screens, pressing buttons, typing. Definitely military. The holo panned to the window, Stan staring at it intently.
“I know that place. I thought it looked familiar, just didn’t click until now. It’s the Dorrington Tower, a five-minute walk from here, only it’s been empty for years. It used to have a chem lab on the top floors. They made drugs or something, but they closed it down years ago. I haven’t seen anyone go in or out of that place long before—” Stan pointed with his head at the wall with the drawing on it.
Brody sent Loren to go back to the flier and scan the building for heat signatures and any transmissions coming out of there. They were all waiting for him to get back when Ams stood up, looking a little embarrassed.
“We need a hostage, Brody. Just one. We need to take one of those men and he’ll tell us who did all of this, who killed all these people. It just has to be the right one.”
“How do we know which one is the right one, Ams?”
She looked at him, thinking for a beat. “It can’t be the strongest or the weakest, so not the one in charge, and not the first one to flinch when you guys barge in. Any of the other ones should work.”
Brody was impressed by this girl. It didn’t make sense for her to have just come up with it, not without military training, but her instincts were good, dead-on good. He nodded to her, and went back to the holo, trying to read the men in it.
The one in command was a stocky, gray-eyed man with a permanent scowl on his face. He seemed too pissed off at the world to care about anyone in it. The other ones didn’t face him for the duration of the footage they had, except for just once. There must have been a knock on the door or some other sound that surprised them and two of the men jumped. He memorized their faces. Any of the other four would work.
Loren rushed into the room, surprisingly out of breath, hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath enough to speak. Drake handed him some water, and he took a small sip and spat out, still panting: “Building is live. Definite heat sigs, but everything else going in or out is blocked, the kind of blocked I can’t crack, which usually means top-level secret fac, sorry, facility, something nobody is supposed to know about, not even us. It doesn’t make sense that we’d have captured the holo of that room somehow… Anyway, I counted six distinct ones, but it’s not a hundred percent. It could be seven. He might have been behind something that blocked the signal when I scanned. But it’s at least six live ones.” He sat, still breathing hard, for some reason looking at Riley, and Riley nodding back to him.
Riley was staring directly at him now, and speaking in his calm way: “We can’t barge into a secure facility without a legitimate reason to be there, not without all sorts of alarms going off. We need a reason to be there and I can’t think of one except to let them take one of us, and then, it’s a rescue op. I’ll go, and then you can all come in to get me back. Your prisoner or whatever trying to escape and ending up on that building. They likely have cameras all over the place, so all I have to do is make it to the roof and they’ll grab me.”
As always, Riley volunteering to do something decidedly stupid or dangerous. “No, Riley. You can’t. You haven’t even recovered from what you did to yourself the last two days. Never mind the way you look. They’ll shoot you on sight, Riley. They won’t take you as a hostage, is what I mean, and there won’t be anything to rescue. None of the Zoriners can go,” he said.
Ams stood up, looked right at him, her face decidedly serious. “Brody, you know you have to let me. I am your best bet for this. You or your boys can’t go because you are like them so
they won’t take you hostage. Laurel is a better shot so if I don’t make it, you don’t lose that for Crylo, and I am better than she would be for this. I can buy myself enough time, I promise I can. They won’t touch me because of what I am. I just need to cover my freckles….” She didn’t even wait for him to say anything, just turned and ran out of the room.
Brody looked at Riley’s face, but he seemed calm enough, and he didn’t chase after her. Stan was calculating how much of everything he’d need on one of Ella’s old pads. He kept them, for some reason. He made a list of things: rope, carabiners (6), sticky charge, flint, and handed it to Trelix, and then went back to drawing pictures again.
Riley finally walked over to him and gently took him by the arm. “I need to talk to you. In private, Brody.” He walked him out of the room and down the hall to the comm room. It was empty now. Riley closed the door softly behind him. He didn’t seem angry at him or Ams and Brody distrusted it.
“I know what you are thinking, Brody, but you‘re wrong. I won’t ask you not to let her do this. I promised Ams that I would never do that to her again, so I won’t. I can’t. But… Ams is afraid of heights. I don’t know if she forgot that or didn’t realize that’s what it was when she learned but I promise you she is. She almost fainted standing at the window in one of these rooms before and being in the elevator did to her what it did to you.”
Brody blanched, embarrassed, but Riley ignored it.
“I don’t know how she plans on flying from roof to roof on a rope, Brody. Don’t know if she can do it, and I don’t want to be the one to question it with her. We should probably take her up on the roof here first and do a practice run, is what I am saying, and you need to be the one to bring it up, not me. And Brody,” he was looking at him old-Riley-like, concern on his face, “Drake and I or one of your boys and I can take her. You don’t need to be there for that.”
He nodded to him and threw him an unasked-for hug. “I think I can learn to like you again, Riley, if you just stop screwing up like you’ve been,” he said, smiling, and was rewarded with a sharp jab in his shoulder.
Ams was back inside, not a freckle on her, perfectly calm, chatting with Laurel in that casual way they had.
“Ams, we need to do a dry run, this roof to the next, so we can make sure you get the hang of what you’ll need to do beforehand. It’s a tad harder than it looks in these doodles Stan’s been making,” Brody said, keeping his voice even.
She was up as were Stan and Drake. He already knew Drake would want to come and there was no need for him to argue that point. They took the elevator to the top and then Stan took them to a staircase they didn’t know was there that led to the roof. Riley was up first, standing there, breathing the wind in, eyes closed, as if he was enjoying this. Maybe he was. He wished he was all right with this, but he felt all sorts of shaky, and he was thankful that he was at the tail of this procession up the metal steps with far too much space in between, plenty of space to fall through, and he hoped that when he finally made it to the roof everything he was feeling didn’t show on his face.
He watched Ams carefully for any signs of discomfort but she seemed okay. Serious but okay. Stan wound the belt around her waist, measured what he needed to, and took it off, making notches in it with a small knife. Brody watched him throw the end of the rope with a spiky arrow on it over the edge and light the wire that ran alongside it. After twelve seconds, the rope flew up and over, landing with barely a thud on the roof of the building across from them. There were roughly forty meters between the two. They tugged on the rope, all of them but Ams, and it seemed stuck to the other roof solidly enough. It didn’t budge at all. Stan put the belt on Ams and told her how to unhook herself from the rope when she made it to the other side, making her do it a few times. She turned to all of them, and he saw it then, though she was smiling, the fear in her eyes. And he could see the sheen of sweat on her forehead. She was afraid but making herself do it anyway.
“I’m ready boys. I think somebody is supposed to give me a push here or something,” she said and turned away from them.
Riley had his hands on her shoulders. Brody watched as he leaned in and gave her a quick kiss on the top of her head, and said calmly, “See you on the other side, Ams. I’ll be right behind you.” He ran her to the edge and very softly told her to push off and close her eyes if she needed to.
He only heard that part because the wind carried it to him. And she was gone, not screaming, not flailing, just flying on that rope like it was no big deal and nobody could tell if she had her eyes closed or not. They just knew she made it as they watched her standing there, waving at them, screaming something meant for Riley that they couldn’t decipher. And then Riley was flying to where she was, only Brody could tell he was enjoying it. Son of a bitch was grinning. He had his arms out to the sides, running his fingers through the air. It struck him as strange that he never knew this about his friend. They all climbed a few trees together but everybody in Waller did that. This kid was at home up here. Maybe that’s why he picked the tallest damned building in Reston for them to camp out in and spent so much time standing at that window, staring at the world.
Going back down on those metal steps was worse, a lot worse. Stan was already in the hallway to the elevator and it was just him and Drake a few steps above him. He felt his hands get slick with sweat and he worried he might let go, without meaning to. He had to stop, but he didn’t want Drake to know. He looked down and there were only a dozen steps left, but still too high to jump from without at best breaking his legs.
“Brody, hand me your belt,” Drake’s voice reached him, sounding far too calm for what he was feeling.
He couldn’t take his belt off without letting go of the step he was suddenly stuck to. He shook his head and forced himself to drop his foot down a bit, looking for a foothold, feeling frantic now. He felt Drake’s hand grab onto him, holding him up by the front of his jacket.
“Would this be the wrong time for me to tell you that I am afraid of heights, Drake?”
And of all things, Drake laughed at him. “So am I, Brody. So am I. All you need to do is slide your feet down step by step. I got the rest of you and I’m not letting go.”
He was sweating and breathing too fast when his feet finally touched the floor, solid, without any spaces to fall through in it, Drake standing over him with a concerned look on his face.
“I’m all right, Drake. How the hell did you do that, if that’s true? If you’re afraid of heights? I could have just killed you….” He was too embarrassed to look at him. “I’ll catch up, Drake. I just need a minute.”
Drake crouched in front of him, looking at his face. “Brody, there isn’t a person in the world that’s not afraid of something. The heights thing, I’ve been afraid my whole life, but then I had to climb that damn tower at the compound every day, didn’t have any kind of a choice about it, and after a few months, I wasn’t afraid anymore. It just stopped bothering me. I saw your face on that roof and I knew because I knew what to look for. Ams, too, but I’m pretty sure you know that already. So now that everybody knows what they need to know, get up, soldier, and let’s go do this thing.” He pulled him up by the shoulders, still watching him carefully for some reason. “Brody, if you need to find something to be embarrassed in front of me over, make it count, okay? Because this isn’t one of those things and something tells me you’ll try to fix it anyway. Let’s go, kid,” he snapped at him and he did then, still feeling a bit out of sorts over the whole thing.
Everybody was geared up and ready to go when they finally made it in. Laurel and Ella were in charge of comms, and Loren just finished walking them through everything they’d need. Trelix had everyone but the girls in body armor already, and they were running through weapons and comm checks. Brody grabbed his suit and had Trelix try to find a large one for Drake, only there weren’t any that would fit him. Drake didn’t seem to care about it, telling them that he’ll be okay and they still had to let him come.
After a few more minutes they seemed as ready as they were going to be.
The plan was simple enough. Ams had a comm unit in her ear. It would stay on the whole time, so they could hear everything. She had to let herself get caught and simply find a way of telling them how many they were up against and anything else they might need to know. Loren tried hacking the security for them to get through the door but it was no use, so he did the next best thing: reprogrammed their cameras so they’ll shut off, once they had contact with Ams.
Brody was only half-listening, trying his best to hide the apprehension he was feeling about jumping from roof to roof on a bloody piece of rope, but there wasn’t a thing he could do about it. Stan took Ams up to the roof. They couldn’t afford to expose anybody else yet. They waited. He could hear Stan’s final instructions to her and the click of the carabiner around the belt loop and then, the swooshing of the wind, much louder than he hoped—that. And after a beat, another click of metal, only he couldn’t tell what it was.
“I am Amelia. Nice to meet you. There doesn’t seem to be anybody left in this whole place. I could use some company.” She sounded like she was smiling at whoever she was talking to.
“Dyrig. You always bring weapons to first dates?”
And then just footsteps and another swoosh of some kind he couldn’t figure out. After a few moments, he picked up footsteps again and the sound of a door swinging open, one of the old heavy ones, all-metal or concrete, bullet-proof.
“Hey, guys. I am Amelia. I see there are five more new faces I get to meet. I’m awfully sorry I can’t shake your hands. Mine seem to be tied up. Then again, yours seem busy with them big ugly guns you have. So… how are you?”
Suddenly, there was a thud and a much louder thud after that and the comm went dead.
Alliance: The Complete Series (A Dystopian YA Box Set Books 1-5): Dystopian Sci Fi Thriller Page 36
