All they could do now was wait. He knew Brody would be on comm, and Trelix would be his backup, given that Loren was still wherever he was with crazy Stan.
He felt Ella’s hand on his shoulder, squeezing it gently.
“He’ll be okay, Riley. I promise. So long as we can get those meds, he’ll be okay. And if we can’t, I’ll just have to hunt these woods for things we can use instead. I am not going to let him die, not from this.” She whispered it, so it was just for him, and smiled at him, confident old-Ella smile.
He saw Ams and Laurel walk in, staring at the couch.
“What’s wrong with him, Riley?” Ams’ voice. He loved her for being blunt most of the time, but her asking this now annoyed him.
“His wound is infected. I must have screwed something up when I stitched him up before. Ella had to cut him open to clean it, and Brody is trying to get him meds for it.” He said it matter of fact like, flatly, without looking at her, and then he watched, confused, as she walked over to the couch and crouched by the man’s head, his eyes still closed, and without saying anything or asking permission, started running her small hand through his hair, smoothing the loose strands away from his face, as if he were a small child she was soothing to sleep. This gesture was so gentle and so soft, so old Ams, he couldn’t stop watching.
Maxton kept his eyes closed for the longest time while she did that, and when he finally opened them, he could tell the man was crying in his own way. His eyes were wet, not spilling any water, but wanting to, only he wouldn’t let himself. “Thank you, Amelia.” He looked embarrassed.
Ams just shook her head at him softly and kept going, telling him that it was okay to sleep for a while until Brody got back anyway, and he seemed to after that.
And after waiting for longer than he thought they would, Brody and Trelix were there, Brody panting, hard, as if he ran the whole time. He handed Ella a small black box, and she smiled at him, took one of the syringes out, and went to Maxton. He would be okay now, he knew, and he ran over to Brody, who had his hands on his knees, still panting, and he hugged him, hugged him with everything he had.
“Riley, I can’t bloody breathe as it is, go easy on me, will you?” But he was smiling, old-Brody-like, full-on smile.
Everybody was going to be okay now.
9
The Dress
Laurel, June 5, 2236, Reston
Stan was beaming at her, holding a flowing white dress out in front of him, the dress almost touching the floor.
“Ams already got hers. It’s exactly the same, only I stitched a tiny “L” into the neck of yours, so you didn’t get confused, because you are a bit taller than Ams, and other things are different too. Sorry… put it on.” He turned around.
“Stan, I am not doing it with you here. I’ll just come out to the big room when I am done, okay?”
Laurel waited for him to leave, then held the dress to her chest, feeling the silky fabric against her skin, weightless and soft, petals soft, butterfly-wings soft. It was so white that she was worried it wouldn’t really cover her; that all of her skin would still show through it. She peeled off her pants and shirt and remembered that she didn’t have a white bra, and she hoped this weightless fabric would cover her nipples, or she’d have to ask Stan to find a way to make her a bra, and the thought of doing that made her giggle. She was in one of the rooms nobody ever used for anything, and it had nothing but basic office furniture in it. There were no mirrors and the window was tiny, too small to see anything in. She slipped the dress over her head, and pulled it down over her body, letting it go. She felt naked in it, the fabric warming up against her skin as soon as it touched it and clinging to her in a way nothing she’s ever worn did. She took a tentative step forward, hearing the swoosh of the folds by the floor, and she worried she’d tear it by stepping on it, only the dress moved with her, moved the way she did.
She looked down and couldn’t see anything that would embarrass her showing through. She really needed to find a mirror. There was one in the large bathroom attached to the big room, but that meant everybody else would see her in this thing before she did. It meant Brody would see her in it before she did, but it couldn’t be helped. She walked slowly, still getting used to the feel of it. She was worried about Brody seeing her in this, the same dress Trina died in. She hoped he could take it.
The door to the big room was opened wide, and she heard the chatter of voices coming out of there. She stopped, listening, trying to get her face to look calm for them, for Brody, and finally, walked in. The voices stopped.
And then Brody was up, looking embarrassed, walked up to her, and leaning close to her face, whispered, “I don’t think I can do this, seeing you in this. I know I have to somehow, but I just can’t yet. I’m sorry,” and he was gone, and everybody looked at her with sadness in their eyes, everybody but the new guy, the soldier.
He walked over to her, smiling, a soft smile. “He’ll be all right. He’ll have to be. For what it’s worth, you look like you just stepped out of a really sweet dream, full of mist and beauty. I’ll talk to him, but you should be there for it.” She let him take her by the hand out of the room, looking for Brody.
He was in the windowless closet room, sitting on Maxton’s old cot, head in his hands. She stood by the door, letting the soldier walk over to him alone, wanting to be able to leave quickly if she had to. The soldier crouched in front of Brody and put his hand on his shoulder.
“Look at me, Brody, if you can.”
He did.
“From what Loren has been able to crack, there are twenty-two of them now at Crylo. I don’t know if he told you yet. Twenty-two girls, Brody. I know you are stronger than this…. Everything about this is going to remind you of her. You need to bury it and keep going, you have to. You don’t get to walk away from this now. Not with everyone depending on you. Not with all those girls at Crylo.”
Brody shoved at the man’s chest and jumped up, and Maxton was up too, his face flushed, and she heard him breathing hard. Brody hurt him. She didn’t know if he meant to. She hoped he didn’t.
“You’d know about that, wouldn’t you, about walking away?” Brody screamed.
Maxton didn’t move away from him, his voice gentle when he spoke. “Yes, Brody. I do know about that. If you need to lash out at me, do it. Let it out.”
She couldn’t take it, Brody being like that to this man, punishing him for something he was feeling, for being right. She walked over, trying to get in between them, but Maxton stopped her, gently, still looking at Brody. “It’s all right. He isn’t wrong. Not about this.”
Brody looked at her and dropped his eyes. “I’m sorry. I know there is no other way for us to do this. I just can’t not see her in that clearing…. Can’t get that picture out of my head, and you wearing this… I can’t get past it.” He put his head down as if embarrassed.
Maxton put his hand on his shoulder. “Twenty-two girls, Brody. You can and will get past it,” he said softly, and it surprised her that this man truly seemed to harbor no anger for Brody after what he did to him and one of his men. He seemed sad for him, worried maybe, but not angry. She decided she liked him the way she liked Drake. That she could trust him to do the right thing without anyone needing to ask anything of him.
Brody turned to face Maxton, looking up at his face. “I spent the last few days trying to find a way of apologizing to you, and I still can’t. I think I would have killed that kid if Riley didn’t stop me. I need both of you to know that. I lost control. I saw that woman in him, couldn’t help it. If you feel I can’t be trusted to lead this, I’d rather it was you than my crew. They are too young and inexperienced, though as well trained as I could make them.” He turned away from them, walking to the door, head down, Maxton watching him.
“Brody.”
He stopped, right at the door, not turning around, his head still down.
“I trust you just fine. But you and I need to come to an understanding. I won’t try to apol
ogize to any of you for what I did anymore, and you need to learn that I don’t hold grudges against people who consider me their enemy at the time. We all do what we have to, under those circumstances, you know that. The way I see it, what happened then wasn’t between you and me, but different people and those people are gone now. Gone for good. Ellis is gone. Alliance Maxton is gone. There is just Brody and Lancer. Can you live with that?”
“I don’t know,” he said quietly and he was gone.
Maxton turned to her, gray eyes serious, worried. “I think he might try to use you to punish himself somehow. Don’t let him. The way he was with Brandon, it’ll take him a long time to get over that. It’s the hardest thing to live with.”
She thought as much already, but hearing Brody say it so flatly, that he almost killed that kid, surprised and scared her. “Is it true? What he said about almost killing that kid?”
“It is. But it’s also true that he didn’t see that kid when he did it. I could see it in his face. In his own mind, he wasn’t swinging the knife at a young kid, but the woman who savagely beat Riley, the woman who killed the girl he loved the way she did, and I can’t say I blame him for it.”
Everyone was back in the room when she walked in, Maxton following. Brody was up and pacing in front of the window, nobody saying anything. Ams was sitting by Riley, wearing the same dress she had on and she couldn’t stop staring at her. She looked entirely unlike the Ams she knew; nothing of a girl in her, all woman.
Brody turned to her, finally noticing them. “Loren was going through all the chatter earlier, and… the Selection was a week ago, Laurel. They know you are missing, everybody knows you and Ams and Hassinger are missing now. So far they just sent out the names, but I am sure they’ll send out the images in short order. I don’t know why the hell I didn’t think about that before. Don’t know what to do about it, either.” Brody went back to his pacing.
He was right, of course. They had kept track of the Selection Day from the beginning, but then with everything else that’s happened, nobody remembered it anymore. Stupid of them not to. They couldn’t go to Crylo like that, not if everyone was looking for them. Stan was doodling something on Ella’s pad next to her. Everybody else just had their eyes on Brody, faces serious, and then Stan was up whispering something to Brody, and Brody nodding his head at him, and Stan was gone after that. Brody told them that there might be a way to change the images of the girls before they go out, they would just need to find replenishers nobody would recognize, girls from a few years ago at least, and replace the faces and the vitals. This way they would be safe until someone saw their tattoos or ran a DNA scan on them.
It made sense, what he was saying. They would need to come up with different names for this too, just in case. She looked at Ams, and it hit her. They could just get rid of the damn tattoos. There had to be a way to do it.
“Ella, can you get the tattoos off of us somehow? It’s just two letters, so it shouldn’t be too bad. And we’ll have to put in the letters for whatever new names we come up with,” she asked.
Ella shook her head. “I can, but it won’t help. You got these tattoos years ago. I can’t age the new ones like that or hide the scars from getting rid of what you have.”
Maxton was tapping his fingers on the table next to her, lost in thought, everybody watching him now, but he didn’t seem to notice, and then he stood. “Can Stan make uniforms with whatever he used to make these dresses? I think we can still do this, even with them knowing that the girls are missing, but we’ll need the right uniforms to pull it off.” He laid out his plan, quickly, rushing through it, not having thought through all the details yet, and Brody and Riley seemed to like it well enough, only Drake was shaking his head, worry all over his face. Maxton looked at him and nodded for him to just say whatever was bothering him.
“I don’t know if I am comfortable with this kind of risk for the girls, is all. If something goes wrong and they are taken from us, I don’t know how we would ever get them back from that place,” Drake said.
Maxton paced behind her quietly for a few minutes, and said very softly after a while, “We’ll just have to make sure nothing goes wrong then, Drake. We’ll run through everything as many times as we need to before we get on that flier. We’ll plan for all the what-ifs that we can, and we’ll have Loren and Stan plug into their comms before we go, so we know what they are planning in real-time. Nobody will be looking for these girls in that city. They have the best chance of any of us of blending in.” He sat back down, looking at Laurel apologetically for some reason, but she just smiled at him. She liked his plan. It seemed solid enough. Even if they got caught, she couldn’t imagine anyone in Alliance wanting to harm them, given what they were, at least not unless she and Ams had to shoot at them, and by then, they’d be in danger no matter who anybody thought they were.
Stan came back in, out of breath, a defeated look on his face. He couldn’t do it then, change the images. “They loaded them to the nets already, Brody. I’m sorry….”
It looked like Maxton’s plan would have to be it then. She looked over at Ams, and she smiled at her. A small smile, but she knew she was okay with it. They’ll make it work, and maybe Brody would stop beating himself up, and this new man she liked could sleep again, and Drake and Ella would find a place they liked enough to call home. Maybe all of them just needed for all of this to be over, so they could stop running, stop putting holes in trees, and mostly, so they could all laugh again like they did at that waterfall.
She watched as everyone started to file out of the room, and suddenly Brody was right next to her, picking her up by her hand and wrapping his arms around her, face worried. She smiled up at him and put her arms around his neck, not caring that whoever was still in the room was likely watching them, not caring about anything but making this boy smile again.
She kissed him, softly, pulling him toward her by his neck, and whispered just for him, “Ams and I both think we can do it. That means we can. And I like you too much to not want to come back from it in one piece.”
He smiled back at her, she saw it in his eyes, all the sparkles in them, looking at her as if she were something magical, the way she looked at those glowing birches in their old clearing, making her blush from that look, making her wish she never had to let go.
10
Suicide Squad
Maxton, May 6, 2218 (16 Years Prior), Camp Copley Military Academy
He knew he had to pass these last few tests if he had any hope of staying here. He could, too, easily enough. The trouble was simply that he didn’t belong here anymore, not with these kids who got off on hurting each other, bloodying each other’s faces the way they did. He wanted out, so doing badly on everything was deliberate, only, of course, he had no place else to go to now. They would put him into one of those orphanages if he flunked out, they would have to…
Stranton told him what they did, quietly, just laying it out as if he wasn’t talking to a kid. In a way, he wasn’t. None of them were kids anymore. But the man could have at least kept some of the things from him, could have tried to protect him. He remembered sitting in his office, staring at these images of unrecognizable burnt bodies of what he was told was left of his parents. They scanned them. They were sure. The bloody animals downed their flier and torched it with everyone on board, women and all. He asked to be taken to wherever that place with the bodies was. He wanted to say goodbye to something other than these frames shoved at him on a screen. He needed to know for sure, and somehow, he felt that he would if he could see them, but of course, they wouldn’t take him. He knew they wouldn’t, but he couldn’t help asking anyway.
That was forty-three days ago. He was put on suicide watch, though he told them, Stranton and the medic, that he didn’t need it, didn’t need any of it. He was fine, truly. He didn’t even cry. He couldn’t cry, and that was the strangest thing of all, the not crying about it. Everyone in his dorm left him well enough alone, the only bloody good thing to come
out of it. He hated most of these kids, all but Soren, but even Soren was letting him be.
He must have closed his eyes, as he felt Soren standing over him, but didn’t see him approach. He was hiding from everybody in the little stretch of woods in the back of the camp, leaning against a tree he liked, running his hands through the grass, and just breathing. That’s where he spent all of his free time now; alone. It was the only place he felt free enough to think, and maybe, one day, to cry.
“Hey, Lan. Can I sit?”
He nodded to his only friend, not looking at him.
“I need to ask you something, Lan. Look up. It’s important.”
He did, Soren crouching in front of him, face serious.
“I don’t want to end up like one of these drones, Lan. I don’t want the implant. It scares the shit out of me to say it, but I know it’ll do something permanent to me, something that I won’t ever be able to undo. I’m running, is what I’m saying. I’ve planned it all out already. I have enough basic supplies saved up to last a week or so… for two people if you want to come. I can’t see you turning into one of them, either. I know you wanted to be a soldier; I did, too, only I don’t think we knew what the hell any of it meant… Come with me. We’ll be all right on our own somehow, I know we will be.”
He stood up, waiting, not saying anything more. Nobody ever ran away from these camps. It just wasn’t something you did. It was crazy to even think about it, but he knew Soren was completely serious for once, not even a smirk on his usually smiling face. And he could picture it in his head, him and Soren running through the woods, the soldiers having no way to trace them. Days of just the two of them, hiding in thickets and caves, if they were lucky to find a few of those until finally, everybody gave up looking for them. Soldier boys were plentiful. Nothing special about any of them, not until they got their implants. A week should be more than enough time for them to get far enough away from local patrols, and nobody else would have any reason to search for them then.
Alliance: The Complete Series (A Dystopian YA Box Set Books 1-5): Dystopian Sci Fi Thriller Page 41
