Necessary Sacrifices (The Internal Defense Series Book 2)

by Zoe Cannon

  If he had been caught, she was doomed anyway. He would give her up under interrogation. It was only a matter of time. If she knew, she could at least be prepared.

  She opened the bin.

  She had just typed in Jameson’s name when Micah rolled his chair over to her desk. “Did you hear?” His eyes shone with an equal mix of excitement and fear.

  “Hear what?” Jameson. They caught him. No. Micah wouldn’t see that as worth mentioning. Internal caught dissidents every day.

  “They caught an infiltrator. Right here in 117.” For an instant Becca’s heart stopped; her muscles clenched as she anticipated Enforcers grabbing her arms from either side, until Micah continued. “She’s been working here for three years, spying for the resistance. Three years, can you imagine? She’s down on the underground levels right now. The interrogation has been going on all night.”

  Becca looked down involuntarily, as though she could see through the floor to the underground levels and her future, and suppressed a shudder. Careful. She had to be careful. “The evaluators must not have been doing their job.” She turned back to her screen so she wouldn’t have to look at Micah, wouldn’t have to see the gossipy thrill he was getting from this. The dissident bin had found thirty-five dissidents with the last name Jameson. Any one of them could be him. Any one of those files could hold his death sentence and her own.

  “It really makes you wonder, doesn’t it?” Micah mused. “Anyone here could be a dissident. We’d never know until it was too late. I mean, they always say dissidents could be anywhere, but you’d think Internal of all places would be safe.”

  Becca shrugged. “Nowhere is ever really safe.” She opened the first file. Scrolled down to the picture. This Jameson, first name Tyler, was a skinny kid with glasses and an unruly mop of hair. Not the Jameson she knew.

  One down, thirty-four to go.

  “But that’s why we’re here,” said Micah. “To make it safe. And we caught her in the end, didn’t we? We always catch them.”

  Next file. Another unfamiliar photo, another shameful burst of relief that this stranger had been caught instead of her contact. The next file was the same, and the next, and the next. The faces blurred together, none of them the face she dreaded.

  Micah placed a hand on her armrest. “Don’t worry, okay? If there are any others, Internal will find them before long.”

  “I’m not worried.” She couldn’t talk about this anymore. Couldn’t think about it. She kept scrolling through files, didn’t let herself deviate from the task in front of her. Another Jameson, and another, and none of them hers. “We should probably get back to work.”

  Micah peered over her shoulder. “What are you working on?”

  She resisted the urge to close everything. That would only look suspicious. “Just something for one of my transcripts.”

  Micah waited. She didn’t say anything else.

  Thirty-four files down. One to go.

  “I guess I should get back, then,” he said after a moment. The weight of his hand disappeared from her chair; a second later she heard him rolling away behind her.

  Three years. An unimaginable amount of time for an infiltrator to go undetected, according to Micah. In three years, she would be twenty-one. If she had gone to college, she wouldn’t even be graduating yet.

  Don’t think about it.

  She opened the last file.

  Gregory Jameson. An elderly man, with white hair and sagging jowls, flinching away from the camera like it might hit him.

  Not her contact.

  Wherever Jameson was, he hadn’t been caught. For now, at least, he was safe.

  She was safe.

  She didn’t hear the footsteps behind her until the hand came down on her shoulder.

  She didn’t flinch. No sound escaped her lips. Jameson would have been proud.

  “Rebecca Dalcourt?” asked a voice she didn’t recognize.

  She turned her chair to face him. When she twisted her shoulder away, he didn’t stop her.

  He wasn’t wearing an Enforcement uniform. If he wasn’t Enforcement, he couldn’t be here to arrest her, right? She searched for any sign that he knew her secret, that he saw her as the enemy. His face was impassive.

  She cleared her throat. “That’s, um. That’s me.”

  He gestured for her to stand. “Report to the fourth floor for evaluation.”

  * * *

  Becca and the evaluator sat facing each other in matching armchairs filled with either concrete or densely packed foam. The glass of water the evaluator had offered stood untouched on the coffee table between them. A fluorescent light hummed overhead, washing out the gray walls to the same shade as the strands of hair the evaluator’s stylist had missed.

  The evaluator—she hadn’t told Becca her name—rifled through the folder on her lap. “Rebecca Dalcourt.” She spoke the name like an accusation. “According to this, you never went through an initial evaluation.”

  Already the walls were closing in on her. She took a deep breath. She could get through this. Jameson had told her what to do. Look relaxed, but not too relaxed. They’ll be watching for people who are trying too hard.

  “I didn’t go through the regular hiring process.” Her voice was steady, with a slight edge of nervousness for the sake of realism. Perfect.

  The evaluator pressed her lips together as she studied her. “You mean your mother got you the job.”

  They’ll try to intimidate you. Unbalance you. Don’t let yourself be caught off-guard. She nodded.

  The woman’s lips tightened still further in disapproval. “I’ll need your answer for the recording. Did your mother get you the job?”

  “Yes.”

  She squinted down at the papers. “This says you initially applied to Surveillance 291 but were turned away. You have a bit of a history with Internal, don’t you?” A satisfied smile curved the corners of her lips, as if this were a competition and she was winning.

  If you look at all guilty, if you look at all afraid, you will never leave that building. “It wasn’t a problem for 117. They hired me right away.”

  “After your mother applied considerable pressure.” She closed the folder and regarded Becca with a gaze twice as probing as Vivian’s had been the other night, and twice as unnerving. “Why go to all the trouble of getting a job here, after Surveillance’s unwillingness to take you on? Surely there were other, easier paths you could have taken.” She tapped the folder. “And according to this, before the… incident… you expressed no interest in following in your mother’s footsteps, and in fact were vocally opposed to the idea on more than one occasion.”

  Becca molded her face into a look of bland sincerity. “What Internal does is important. I wanted to be a part of that.”

  “That’s a platitude, not an explanation.” The evaluator sat with her pen poised above a fresh sheet of paper. Her eyes didn’t leave Becca’s face. “Explain it to me.”

  Becca took a moment to consider what to say. The short answer she had given the others at Lucky’s wouldn’t satisfy the evaluator. For her explanation to be believable, it had to be big. It had to have weight to it. It had to matter.

  She spoke around the cold mass of fear lodged in her throat. “I never wanted to be my mother. I knew if I came to work here, or anywhere in Internal, I wouldn’t be Becca Dalcourt. I’d be Raleigh Dalcourt’s daughter. I wanted to find someplace where my mother’s legacy wouldn’t follow me. Nothing I did would ever measure up. I’m proud of everything she’s accomplished, but I wanted there to be room for my own achievements too.”

  The evaluator’s hand flew over the page, scrawling unreadable notes as Becca spoke. She said nothing.

  “But after… after what happened… I saw things differently.” You have to tell yourself you mean it. If you can’t convince yourself, you’ll never convince them. “I always knew how important Internal was, but you can’t really know it, deep down, until someone you love is threatened. After my mother almost d
ied, I knew it didn’t matter whether I’d always be living in her shadow. That’s a selfish way of looking at things. What matters is that I have the opportunity to help protect this country. After I almost lost my mother, how could I turn my back on that?” She paused for breath. “My mother fights for what she believes in. She’s given up more than I can know, but whatever she has to do, she does it without hesitation. Because she knows it’s necessary. If that’s what following in her footsteps means, the only question is whether I can live up to her example.”

  “Well said.” The evaluator’s expression softened for an instant—or had Becca imagined it? Before she could decide, the evaluator spoke again. “Tell me about what happened two years ago.” Her face tightened once again as she dissected Becca with her eyes. The moment was gone.

  Becca’s muscles ached with the tension of holding her body exactly right. Relaxed, but not too relaxed. She took a breath and gave the answer she had practiced while pacing back and forth in her living room and trying not to think about how easily her evaluation could go wrong. “In my junior year of high school, I started dating a boy who later turned out to be a dissident plotting to kill my mother.”

  “He tried to recruit you, didn’t he?”

  She had rehearsed this part, too. But saying these words alone in her apartment was different than saying them here, in 117, to the enemy’s face. I’m not telling them anything they don’t already know, she reminded herself. “Before I knew his real plan, he started telling me things. About how the government was corrupt, how it needed to be destroyed. I didn’t report him. Internal found out, and I…” Her throat closed for a second as she remembered what had come next. Enforcers yanking her arms behind her back to fasten handcuffs around her wrists. Leading her through the corridors of the underground levels. Shoving her into a cell. “I was arrested.”

  The evaluator flipped through the pages in front of her before she landed on the one she was looking for. She frowned. “You lied consistently in your interrogation. You claimed not to have helped Jake hide from Internal, when in fact you not only warned him he was in danger, but gave him and his father—also a dissident—a place to stay where they wouldn’t be found.”

  They must have learned all that from Jake’s interrogation. Images flashed through her mind—Jake in one of those videos, Jake screaming in futile defiance. Jake with his head hanging low on his chest, defeated. They hadn’t tortured Becca, at least; her mother had rescued her before the interrogation could get that far. Jake wouldn’t have been so lucky.

  And what had happened to him after his interrogation? R100. What did it mean? What fate had she sent him to when she had turned him in to protect her mother?

  “And now you’re working for Internal.” The evaluator leaned back, the same satisfied half-smile playing over her lips. “That’s a rather… abrupt turnaround, wouldn’t you agree?”

  Jameson had told her what to say here. Her heart threatened to beat its way out of her chest, but she spoke as though she had nothing to fear. “I learned from what happened. I was stupid. I trusted someone I shouldn’t have trusted. And my mother almost died because of it.” She made her voice catch a little. “Now I know better than most people how dangerous dissidents can be. And I’m willing to do whatever it takes to stop them.”

  “I see.” The evaluator scribbled down a few more notes. Something shifted in the room’s atmosphere, and when she spoke again, her tone wasn’t quite so pointed. “And how were you hoping to do that? You must have had a particular placement in mind when you started working here.”

  Becca allowed herself to relax a little. Maybe the worst was over. “Interrogation analysis. I think I’d be good at it.” That was what the resistance had decided on for her, after Surveillance had fallen through. There she could alter the perceived threat of prisoners as she saw fit, while passing on names and alerting the resistance of security breaches from the safety of a little office on the second floor.

  The evaluator raised her eyebrows. “Most people come here intending to work as interrogators. A placement in analysis is generally a disappointment for them.”

  “If I went into interrogation, everyone would expect me to be my mother. Besides, I’m not…” I’m not a torturer. “I’m good with people, but not like my mom is. She knows how to intimidate people. How to manipulate them. How to tell when they’re lying. I don’t do that.” She struggled to put it into words, the thing she had known since she had accepted her mother both as a torturer and as so much more than that. “I know how to see who they are. I don’t think I could interrogate a dissident myself, but—with the right training, of course—I could look at what a dissident says and does in an interrogation and understand what it means.”

  The evaluator wrote something down. “Now, tell me what your first three months in 117 have been like for you.”

  The questions continued for hours—about her high school classes, her time in transcription, where she wanted to end up. She answered each question the way Jameson had taught her, keeping her responses safe and her voice steady. The evaluator gave no hints as to what she was thinking. Her earlier hostility had softened into a demeanor of cold professionalism, but her eyes bored into Becca as if she could see the mask, as if with every word she was searching for the cracks.

  At last the evaluator closed the folder on her lap; the sound echoed through the small room with the finality of a gunshot. “I think I’ve heard enough for now. Everything you’ve told me will be taken into consideration in determining your final placement, which should be decided in the next few weeks.” She tucked the folder under her arm and stood. “Wait here for just a moment.”

  Becca had done it. She had survived. She stopped herself from sagging back in her chair as the evaluator crossed the room and stepped through the door. She couldn’t drop her guard quite yet. Soon. When she got home, she would sleep for a week.

  The door clicked shut as the evaluator pulled it closed behind her.

  Becca knew that sound.

  She was locked in.

  It probably locked automatically. Nothing to worry about.

  Outside the door, the evaluator murmured something, her voice too low to hear.

  Probably just telling somebody she had finished Becca’s evaluation.

  Nothing to worry about.

  Becca crept across the room and pressed her ear to the door.

  “—several red flags,” the evaluator was saying. “And her responses sounded too rehearsed. Like someone had told her what to say and how to say it.”

  The air disappeared from the room all at once. The walls drew in closer, too close, threatening to crush her. She spun in a circle, searching for an escape route, even though she already knew what she would find. Three windowless walls and one locked door.

  If you look at all guilty, if you look at all afraid, you will never leave that building.

  She had done everything Jameson had told her to do. And it hadn’t been enough.

  “Taken by themselves, none of her responses indicated a significant security risk,” the evaluator went on. “But considering her history—” She stopped midsentence, as though someone had cut her off.

  You will never leave that building. Jameson’s voice echoed in her ears, mocking her. You will never leave.

  “I’m aware of that.” The evaluator’s voice sounded clipped now, annoyed. “But I’m not talking about Raleigh Dalcourt here, I’m talking about her daughter. You can’t expect me to ignore a potential infiltrator just because—” Another pause, longer this time. “Fine. But I intend to recommend that her time at work be carefully monitored. Any piece of information that passes through her hands will be checked and double-checked. If she so much as sneezes, it will be recorded for later analysis. I trust no one will object to that, at least.”

  The door handle began to turn. Becca scurried back to her seat just as the door opened.

  “We’re done here.” The evaluator had her own mask on now. None of her frustration br
oke through. “You can go.”

  She could go. She was free. Her mother’s position had saved her once again.

  “Thank you,” Becca murmured. She left the room with even steps, as if she hadn’t just escaped a death sentence. As if she hadn’t just been handed a sentence of a different sort.

  I intend to recommend that her time at work be carefully monitored. Any piece of information that passes through her hands will be checked and double-checked.

  She was alive. That was all that mattered. She was alive, and walking out of here of her own free will.

  And she would never be able to help the resistance again.

  As soon as the resistance saved one of the dissidents she told them about, Internal would know. As soon as she accessed a file unrelated to her transcripts, Internal would know.

  Unless her mother intervened for her one more time.

  Chapter Three

  Stepping into the apartment where she had grown up always felt like pulling on a shoe that didn’t quite fit. When she had started working for 117, she had gotten her own apartment in Internal housing, right next door in the building whose construction had woken her up on too many mornings in high school. Her new apartment was a mirror image of the old one, and now her visits to her mom came with the disconcerting sense of entering a world where everything was the opposite of what it should be.

  The smell of macaroni soup tickled Becca’s nose as soon as she entered the living room. She followed the smell to the kitchen, where her mom stood over the stove, swirling a spoon through a pot of soup much too big for the two of them. Becca winced. Her mom had been prone to overdoing it ever since Becca’s arrest, like she needed to prove to herself that she was a good mother. Now that Becca had moved out, every dinner together was an event, filled with nostalgic childhood meals and forced reminiscences and her mom’s too-eager smiles.

  Normally it only made her uncomfortable, eager to get back to her own sterile apartment. Tonight, though…