Alliance: The Complete Series (A Dystopian YA Box Set Books 1-5): Dystopian Sci Fi Thriller

by Inna Hardison

  Fuller shook his head, looking fragile and sad. “So Reston is gone,” he said quietly, shaking his head. And none of it was adding up at all anymore. He seemed sad about a city of Zoriners being gone when he hated them with a passion he never saw in another human being before. And that he knew of Reston at all didn’t make any sense either.

  But he nodded, hoping the man would just bloody tell him something.

  Fuller took a deep breath and stood, then put his hands out for the ties, looking him calmly in the eyes. “You win, Maxton. I’ll tell you what I know, all of you. And when I am done, I would be eternally grateful if you put a bullet in my head. It’ll be the easiest thing you ever did.”

  Lancer tied his hands with a slave band, couldn’t bring himself to use biters on him the way his wrists were. And he thought of how easy it was for him to talk to his lab. How Fuller didn’t argue with him at all over it, just handed him a screen and stood by the cell door waiting until he was done, not saying a word. It didn’t make any sense, not if he knew who he was and what their labs were capable of. It’s as if he wanted them to get rescued….

  “I need to know something, Fuller.”

  The man nodded, keeping his eyes on him.

  “Did you ever want to kill Brody?”

  Fuller winced. “No. But I probably would have if your people didn’t show up when they did,” and he shook his head softly, eyes down again. “It’ll be hard enough for me to go through it once, Maxton. I’d rather you were all there for it.”

  He led him to the flier, Fuller not saying anything. He noted that he wasn’t quite walking okay, as if it was taking him too much effort to just move his feet. He stopped him just before they got to the steps to the flier.

  “Why did you order them to kill that girl, Fuller? Her name was Tishana, in case you didn’t know. You already had Brody… why kill her?”

  Fuller stopped and looked at him for a long moment, knots in his jaw, said, “I didn’t order them to shoot her, though I wish I had done it before those soldiers got to her. They were supposed to take her back to the room…. And I do know her name. I knew all of their names. They would have killed all of those girls in the worst way imaginable if I didn’t get Brody to come back. I always made it a point to learn the names of people I might end up murdering, Lancer, in the same way, I made it a point to learn yours.” He turned away from him abruptly, and walked up the stairs, banded hands gripping the railing.

  Everyone but Brody was there, looking at them, surprised.

  “Have a seat somewhere. We have to wait for Brody,” he told him, but Fuller stood by the door, not moving, keeping his head down, looking as if it would kill him to take another step.

  He sent Riley off to find Brody and watched him. The man was still, but everything about him didn’t seem right. He put his hand on his arm and he flinched and glanced at him, and he could see the sweat on his face, though it was chilly in the flier. Something was definitely wrong with him. He looked for Ella and caught her eye. She seemed to know too, concern on her face as she walked over with her kit already opened, digging in it.

  “Please, don’t, Ella. I am all right,” Fuller asked, not looking at her. She ignored him, taking his vitals, and then shook her head. Not all right then.

  He left them and went to get Drake. He could tell Fuller would fight them on this, but he didn’t care. They would strap him down if they had to. They dragged him to the med bay and made him lie down. He finally stopped fighting then, letting Ella do what she needed to do. Drake went back, not looking at Fuller, his face angry. He didn’t blame him for it. Didn’t blame any of them.

  Ella took him aside after a little while. “I don’t know what’s wrong with him exactly, won’t know until I run some tests, but he shouldn’t be up and about right now. I have to grab my blood kit from Loren. I’ll be right back.”

  He walked over to the bed, unlocked the slave band, and threw it on the counter, Fuller watching him intently. “Who kept you from screaming, Lancer?”

  He froze, stunned, and without thinking, lunged at him and grabbed him by the neck, strangling him. “What do you know? What do you know about me?” he screamed, Fuller not moving, not fighting him, his unnervingly Brody-like eyes looking calmly into his. There was no fear in them now, not at all like he was at Crylo when he did that. He let go of his neck, unspent anger and fear making his hands shake.

  Fuller’s eyes were on his face, looking at him with concern almost, his voice a tired whisper when he spoke. “Whoever it is, they’ll find them if they need to. If you get yourself caught, they’ll find them, and they’ll kill them,” the man said and closed his eyes.

  Ella was back, drawing blood from Fuller’s arm and running her tests. He turned away, waiting, thinking about Telan, about what it meant that Fuller knew this about him.

  He felt Ella’s hand on his shoulder after a while. “He lost too much blood is what’s going on. We need to give him some, only he’s got a rare blood type, and the only person here with that type is Brody. He is in the flier now. I’ll go get him.” She turned to go, only Fuller screamed after her not to do it, to please not do it. He tried to stand up, but he couldn’t do it quickly enough, and Ella was gone.

  Lancer shoved him roughly onto the bed and strapped him in by his waist and wrists, Fuller’s eyes on him.

  “Lancer, please don’t do this. I am begging you as a soldier to please not do this. I have enough juice in me to tell you what I promised, I swear. Please, don’t let her bring Brody here.”

  He turned away from him, from the begging look in his eyes. “You almost whipped him to death not two days ago, and now you’re trying to save him from a needle in his arm. I don’t think I’ve ever been more confused in my entire life.” He looked at him again. Fuller’s eyes were shut tightly and there was an unmistakable trail of tears tracking unevenly down his temple, and he knew for sure he misread this man. That whatever else was going on with him, he loved his son, loved him enough to die from something as stupid as blood loss if it would spare Brody pain.

  Brody looked pale when he got there, fear written all over his face. He yelled at Ella to bloody tell him what was wrong with him, only she was trying to get him to calm down first. He did, after a while, and she told him softly that his father needed blood and he was the only one here with the same blood type, Brody just nodding to her. Fuller waited until she was done, and without opening his eyes asked her again to please not do it. Brody seemed confused too now, looking at Ella and then at him, but he just shook his head at him.

  “Brody is severely anemic. Always has been. It’s genetic for him. What I am saying is, after all the blood he’d already lost, it’ll hurt him, so please, don’t let him do this.”

  Ella just smiled. “It won’t kill him, Max, and now that I know, we can fix that too, with a bit of time. Now, let me do what I need to do, in peace.”

  He helped her move a bed for Brody, so it was close enough. The kid lay down without a word and handed Ella his arm. He was watching his father’s face, and after a while, his eyes were closed and he seemed asleep. Lancer let them be, hoping that in a few hours they’d both be okay, and they could finally get it over with. He needed to talk to Fuller again, needed to know how he knew what he knew about him; needed to know that Telan was still safe. And he hoped that whatever Fuller had to tell them would make this easier for Brody. That whatever secrets the man was keeping Brody could live with. That they all could.

  21

  Confession

  Brody, June 15, 2236, The Flier

  Ella’s soft voice woke him up. She was trying to get him to drink something, but it wasn’t anything he knew, wasn’t tea or coffee. He gulped it down, the liquid tasting tart and bitter on his tongue.

  “How is he?” he asked, afraid.

  Ella smiled a small smile. “He lost a lot of blood, so he might need a bit more time to recover, but he’ll be okay. Let him wake up in his own time.”

  Brody got up and stretched, his s
houlders creaking, and he felt the scars on his back burn, making him wince. He looked at his father’s sleeping face. He looked calm, nothing of the man who whipped him in it. His hair was graying slightly at the temples and he could see a maze of tiny fracture lines around the corners of his eyes, but except for that, he looked the same as how he remembered him. He was lying on his stomach, face toward him, and he saw with dismay a few pink streaks on the sheet covering him. He pulled it down gently and gasped, couldn’t help himself. Lancer really hurt him.

  “I’m all right.” A whisper, and then he was up, looking at him calmly, and holding his hands out for the band, nodding toward the counter.

  “Are you going to run?”

  “No, Brody, I won’t run, but you still need to put it on me.”

  The soldier in him knew he was right, so he put the band around his wrists and locked it in place with a universal lock, one that any of them could open, and led him into the flier proper, hoping everybody would be there now, desperately wanting to get this over with.

  Loren met him at the door and told him they were all at the clearing. He led his father to the fire and pointed to an empty log for him to sit on, only he shook his head at him and stopped where he was. He looked around at them, waiting, Loren finally joining them, his screen in his hand. He hoped he could take it, whatever he was about to tell them, hoped they could all take it. He could see the fear on the girls’ faces, and Lancer didn’t even look up, just sat there with his head in his hands.

  He sat down next Riley and nodded to his father that they were ready. The man was looking at him when he finally spoke, as if he was doing this for him alone.

  “Two years before we had Brody, we had two girls, identical twins. I was a soldier then and we lived outside of Carthage on one of the bases. They tested our girls, of course, like they do everybody’s, only we didn’t know the results. Nobody ever did…. Brody was a week old when they came into our room, and they must have known that threatening Alana and me wouldn’t amount to much, so one of the men walked over to the little crib Brody was in and put a gun to his head. He had just fallen asleep, his little hand still curled around the bottle….” His voice cracked, and he stopped and put his head down, banded hands curled into fists. Nobody was making any noise now. Brody couldn’t even hear anyone breathing.

  He felt Riley’s arm around him, pressing him close, and he let him. He had sisters. His whole life he wished he had a sibling, someone like Ella, someone who’d know him in a way nobody else ever could. He looked at his father and he was looking at him again, only his eyes were strange, shining as if he would cry, and he wanted to tell him that he could stop, that it didn’t matter what else he needed to say, only he knew that it did, and that he needed to let him talk, needed to let him keep going. And after a while, he did.

  “I used what resources I had access to after that to try to find them, to figure out which compound they took them to. I didn’t care about my service anymore, I just needed to get my girls back. A year went by like that. I was staying up nights, going through every thread of every chat I could find on the nets. I was so angry at the Alliance, I wanted to destroy them for what they did. I was young…. Anyway, I ran into this group in my research. They called themselves the White Eagles. Everything I saw in their chats appealed to me. They wanted to make the Alliance pay for all the people they took from everybody, for the laws that allowed them to execute children at 14, all the rest of it…. I joined with them, not giving any of it a second thought. I was too angry to keep digging, I just wanted my girls back.”

  He stopped again, and looked at Loren. “I need to borrow one of your untraceable screens, if you have any. I have to show you something.” Loren nodded and ran into the flier, coming back with a few screens, and handing one of these to Fuller, only Trelix stopped him. “How do we know he isn’t calling the cavalry on us?”

  Fuller looked at him for a while, said quietly, “You don’t, son. I won’t touch it if you don’t trust me not to get you killed. It’s all right.” He handed the screen back to Loren.

  “Let him, Trelix. I trust him. Let him do what he needs to do,” Lancer’s said. It surprised Brody that he, of all people, would stick up for him like that. Something must have happened between them that he wasn’t aware of. His father took the screen again and typed into it for a little while, handing it to Loren when he was done. They all clustered around Loren, looking at two dozen different colored dots on the map, numbers under them. He didn’t know what they were looking at, none of them seemed to.

  “The yellow dot in the middle is Reston. The number under it is last known population, 4,723.”

  His father looked at Lancer. “You didn’t kill them, Maxton. They did. The other dots are all the other Alliance-built Zoriner cities that I know of, and their population numbers. These places, the cities, they were designed to help bring Zoriner populations up to speed, technologically and medically, after denying them access for so long. The group I joined all those years ago… they did want to bring down the Alliance, just not for the reasons I thought. The councils at the time already knew that they couldn’t keep the population numbers growing, not unless they were willing to clone people. They’d been working for decades to fix the damage that was done to the image of Zoriners, all the propaganda that was fed to everyone for generations from a young age. That’s why they built all those cities and the orphanages…. The group I was a part of couldn’t bear allow the walls to come down, for Zoriners to live among them, to be able to marry and have kids with their kids and grandkids. It simply amounted to keeping what little was left of their bloodlines pure for them. The compounds they took the girls who didn’t have the broken gene to weren’t Alliance. They were ours. That’s why they were always so far outside of Alliance centers…. May I please have some water?”

  Loren handed him a thermos, and he took a few small sips and gave it back to him.

  “When I figured out what they were doing, I pulled out. I was furious, mad as hell, so I quit, only I didn’t know about the compounds yet, that they controlled them and not the Alliance. That’s when they made us go to Waller, made us collect footage of Zoriners going after my son. It was that or they’d kill my girls…. By then I’d already given up on ever getting them back, given up on ever seeing them again, I just wanted them to live, so I did what I was told. But I misjudged them. The resources and the tech they had. They were recording us in Waller, only I didn’t have a bloody clue about it. They got their hands on footage of me with Riley, and it was over after that. They came and got Alana and me when Brody was in school. They wouldn’t even let us get to Andy or tell anyone so that he had somebody.” He shook his head, looked down. “I am pretty sure they are the ones who took Ella and Riley’s parents after that. I did that…” He looked at Riley for a beat, eyes wet, and turned away from them, scars on his back making him feel every kind of wrong for letting Lancer do it to him. He faced them finally, and his voice was barely above a whisper when he spoke again.

  “They fast-tracked my military rank because now they owned me, and they needed someone in Crylo, so they moved us there almost four years ago now. I didn’t know about the lab and what they did there until I got there, but I was more careful now, had to be. One day they brought in a flier full of Zoriner girls, and just looking at them, I knew they weren’t even old enough to have kids. I stuffed them into a room in the basement for a day and spread a rumor that one of them had a contagious disease and they all had to be put down. I let them go in the middle of the night, alone, so nobody would see me do it. The next day they came into my quarters. Alana was sitting on a couch, reading one of those old books she liked to read on her screen. They strapped me down into a chair and taped my mouth shut. And then two men I’ve never seen before walked up to Alana and slashed her wrists. The other two held me down while they did it, forcing me to watch, not letting me move or close my eyes.”

  His head was down, banded hands covering his eyes, hiding the tears, but
he could hear it all in his voice, could hear his rage and helplessness in it.

  “Afterward, they made it look like she did it to herself, and broadcast it to all of Crylo. Wife of a top military official commits suicide. That’s how I learned they were watching my every move, every word—”

  He couldn’t take anymore of this, not now, maybe not ever. He got up and ran, not looking at anybody.

  He found himself by the stream in a little while, though he didn’t remember choosing to go there. He walked to the rocks Riley took him to that day and sat, staring blankly at the water glimmering darkly in the distance, wanting more than anything to not believe what he just heard, but he knew, could tell that he wasn’t lying, not about any of it. He put his head down into his hands, wanting to cry, but not finding any tears, just anger, rage maybe. He heard footsteps after a while. He didn’t want any company, so he screamed angrily at the sound of whoever it was for them to please, leave him the hell alone. A heavy hand landed on his shoulder, his father’s. Somebody unlocked the band for him. So they didn’t think he was lying either, and it made him feel worse than anything that they didn’t. He felt him sit down next to him, not touching him now. He glanced at him, but he couldn’t see his face, his head down, eyes hiding in the shadows.

  “I asked your friend, Lancer, to shoot me before, to spare you from this, Brody. I wish he had. I’m pretty sure you can guess the rest of it, but there is something else I have to tell you, and it’ll hurt worse than anything….” He stopped, not looking at him, but waiting, as if for permission to do it, to tell him this last thing.

  He felt his stomach clench and the little hairs on his neck moved, tickling his skin the way they always did just before a lightning strike hitting too close or whenever he saw one of the poisonous snakes underfoot.