by Zoe Cannon
Voices began to murmur above her. At first she couldn’t make out any of the words. Slowly, disconnected phrases began to filter down.
Bringing a spy here.
Risked all our lives.
Raleigh Dalcourt’s daughter.
Becca hugged herself as she strained to hear more. The voices—at least four, both male and female—came from directly above her. She recognized Jameson’s voice as a clear sentence came through. “I’ve been working with her long enough to feel fairly confident in vouching for her.”
A man’s voice, hard and angry, answered. His reply came to Becca in scattered fragments. “Don’t care… you trust her. You had no right… her here. You violated every…” The rest was too muffled to make out.
Becca eyed the bookcase in front of her. After a moment of speculation, she rested one foot on the lowest shelf, then jiggled her leg up and down to test her weight. The shelf barely moved. She brought her other foot up to join the first. When she was sure the bookcase wasn’t about to topple to the floor and trap her underneath it, she kept climbing until she reached a point where, if she strained, she could press her ear to the ceiling.
The voices were still faint, but she could make them out better now. “She could already have brought Internal here,” a woman worried in heavy tones. “Maybe they followed her. Or she might have a tracking device on her.”
“You searched her for tracking devices, I assume?” asked the woman who had answered the door.
“They’re all subdermal now.” Jameson’s voice, already familiar to her, was easier to understand than the others. “Searching her wouldn’t have helped.”
Another man’s voice, slow and quiet, as though he was carefully considering each word before letting it leave his lips. “If she brings Internal here, we’ll blow the building. We’re prepared for this. They won’t have a chance to interrogate us.”
“Right,” answered the angry man, sounding even angrier now. “Let’s wait and kill ourselves instead of taking care of the problem right here. That’s a brilliant solution.”
“She could lead them back to us as soon as we let her go,” said the worried woman. “Even if she doesn’t have any contact with us, she knows about this place now, and that’s enough to put us at risk.”
“I’ve seen her type before,” said Jameson. “Young. Impatient. Usually quick to get themselves killed. I doubt a spy would try to fake that mindset.”
Becca might have been offended, if he hadn’t been trying to save her life.
“Have you all forgotten whose daughter she is?” the angry man asked in disgust.
“She didn’t choose her parents,” the quiet man responded. “If she knows what her mother does, that may be all the more reason for her to go over to our side. And do you really think Raleigh Dalcourt would put her own daughter into danger?”
The angry man made a dismissive noise. “Raleigh Dalcourt would kill her daughter with her own hands if it meant breaking a dissident. And she’d smile while she did it.”
“We need to decide whether this is a risk we’re willing to take,” said Jameson. “Given what I know about Becca, and considering that if she’s been working for Internal all along we’re in danger no matter what we do, I think trusting her—for now—is the most reasonable choice. But we need to weigh her life against the possibility of what will happen if I’m wrong.”
The woman from downstairs spoke. “Assuming she’s telling the truth, Becca Dalcourt has already accepted nearly certain death in order to help our cause, and has done so without hesitation. Would we repay that sacrifice by killing her in cold blood? Is that who we are now? Are we no better than Internal?”
“We have to try to protect ourselves,” said the worried woman, her words flowing as slow as syrup. “We’ve lost enough people as it is.”
“Exactly.” Restless excitement laced the angry man’s voice. “And I don’t know about the rest of you, but I wouldn’t mind a little payback. Killing her doesn’t just mean shutting down the threat—we can show Raleigh Dalcourt what it’s like to lose someone. Two birds, one stone.”
Becca didn’t know she was shaking until the shelf trembled underneath her. She took a deep breath and steadied herself. She had come here knowing the danger. Knowing what they might decide.
That didn’t make it any easier.
“I won’t be a part of this.” The quiet man didn’t raise his voice, but his words commanded attention anyway. “I won’t kill an innocent girl. Not for revenge, not even to protect the resistance. Not unless we’re sure.”
Becca could hear the sneer in the angry man’s voice as he spoke. “We’ll see how you feel after you’ve been around a little longer. After you’ve seen a few of your friends disappear. If you make it that long, that is. With an attitude like yours, it’s not likely.”
Another tremor ran through the shelf.
Becca looked down at her hands. They remained steady. She wasn’t shaking this time.
She had only an instant to process what was happening before the shelf buckled under her weight and sent her tumbling to the floor.
She lay spread-eagled on the wooden floor, trying to regain her breath. The pain barely registered next to the fact that she couldn’t hear what was going on upstairs anymore. She looked up to assess the damage—only the one shelf had broken, but it was enough to keep her from climbing up again.
She pushed the fallen books off her feet and sat up, wincing. The room had other bookcases she could climb, but her shaky legs warned her not to risk it. She pulled her legs under her and listened for the few phrases she could make out.
Could be useful to us.
Can’t take the chance.
I think we should kill her.
She kept going around in circles in her mind. Kept coming back around to I shouldn’t have come here, and then to But I had no choice. She sat with her head in her hands, trying to control her trembling. She didn’t want to look weak when they came back for her. She wanted to look like one of them.
She didn’t know how long she waited. When the door finally opened, she forced herself to her feet, steadying herself on her still-wobbly legs as Jameson stepped into the room.
“I’m sorry we had to leave you in here.” His voice gave no indication of what they had decided.
She tried to find a diplomatic way of asking, Have you decided whether to kill me?, but came up with nothing. “It’s okay,” she said instead. “I understand.” Mask on. Neutral. Calm. She wouldn’t show him the immature child he expected. She wouldn’t let him see her fear.
“Follow me.” He turned around and left the room, glancing back at her over his shoulder.
The aftereffects of her fall, and the knowledge of what might be waiting for her, made her steps plodding and unsteady. But she followed.
* * *
Jameson led her along the back wall to another door. He opened it, and a flight of stairs stretched out in front of her, battered wood covered by ragged carpet.
“Follow me. Close the door behind you.” He started up the stairs, looking behind him to make sure she was coming.
With leaden feet, she followed him. One way or another, it would be over soon.
The room she emerged into at the top of the stairs was half the size of the store below. The same tattered carpet, its edges unraveling, lay crooked over the floor. A couch with a patch over one arm lay against one wall, with an unmatching armchair jammed into the facing corner. A heavily pregnant woman sat alone on the couch, while the gray-haired woman perched straight-backed at the edge of the armchair. Two men—one paunchy and bearded, the other with messy brown hair that hung over his face—sat in folding chairs next to her.
This was the resistance? This was the mysterious group she had been working for? Four people—five, counting Jameson—in a dingy apartment?
She hadn’t expected the mythical resistance movement with its secret bases and military-level organization, the one she had heard about in hundreds of televised fal
se confessions.
But she had expected more than this.
One by one, they locked their eyes on her, and her disappointment was forgotten in the reminder of the danger she still faced. Their eyes froze her in place, paralyzed her vocal cords. She wasn’t even sure any of them were blinking.
Jameson crossed the room to sit next to the pregnant woman. She leaned into him as he clasped her hand in his, and Becca had to stop herself from gaping. She had known that he had a family, that he had a life outside his meetings with her—he had already told her about his daughter, after all. But seeing the evidence of it here felt like intruding on something private, trespassing somewhere not meant for her. Jameson was her contact, nothing more—cold and constant and implacable. He had always been careful not to show her anything else of himself.
At last, Jameson spoke. “We’ve decided—”
“Or some of us have,” the brown-haired man muttered, watching Becca with a predator’s eyes.
“—that the possibility of you spying for Internal isn’t strong enough to warrant any extreme actions. We won’t harm you. We’ll allow you to continue working with us, as long as nothing like this ever happens again.”
Her legs nearly buckled under her. They weren’t going to kill her. They weren’t even going to kick her out and leave her stranded with no way to make a difference.
She still had a chance.
“And we’ll hear you out, although I can tell you in advance what our answer will be,” Jameson continued. “Say what you came here to say.”
It didn’t take her long to run through what she had learned. She tried not to squirm under the weight of their attention as she spoke. Tried not to think about how she was the youngest person in this room by at least a decade and probably looked to them like she was still in diapers. Tried not to remember that, moments ago, some of these people had argued in favor of killing her.
The brown-haired man started nodding almost before she had finished speaking, his animosity toward her apparently forgotten. “We can’t let them do this.” His legs jiggled with restrained energy.
“They’re torturing children,” the bearded man agreed in his slow voice. “If there’s anything worth standing up against, this is it.”
But Jameson was already shaking his head. “We don’t have the connections to shut something like this down from the inside, and we don’t have the manpower for something more direct. Maybe ten years ago we could have done it, but not now.”
“I don’t see how we can stop it,” said the pregnant woman. Becca recognized her voice as soon as she spoke—she was the worrier, the one who thought Becca might have led Internal to them. “But we have to try, don’t we?” She turned to Jameson. “Think of Kara. Think of the baby. We can’t let them end up in a place like that.”
The gray-haired woman let out a heavy sigh. “As much as it pains me to say it, we can’t afford to take this risk. There are only a few of us left. None of us wants to admit it, but we’re barely holding our own. Something like this could be exactly what Internal needs to destroy us for good. What help will we be to those children or anyone else if we die for the sake of an impossible mission?”
She had talked so much about principles when she had argued in favor of sparing Becca’s life. About how they were better than Internal. This was where her principles led her? “We can’t just—”
The angry man spoke over her. “So you want to let Internal kill all those kids? Or turn them into mindless propaganda-spewing zombies? We have a chance to strike a real blow against Internal here. To finally do something that matters.”
“No.” The gray-haired woman closed her eyes as if in pain. “We don’t.”
The pregnant woman rested her hands over her belly as though she could shield the child inside. Jameson placed his hands over hers. “You know I don’t want that for our children any more than you do,” he said quietly. “But dying won’t help us protect them.”
The woman looked down and closed her eyes. “I want to save them from this,” she said, almost whispering. “But I don’t see how we can.”
“So you’re saying we should just sit back and watch it happen?” The angry man’s legs bounced harder.
“No one wants this,” said the gray-haired woman. “But we need to understand our limitations. We’ve heard these arguments before. We’ve let ourselves be swayed by them. And look where it’s led us.” She gestured around her at the assembled group. “Raleigh Dalcourt isn’t the only one to blame for what’s become of us. For all the people we’ve lost. Nothing about this choice is easy—but the life we’ve chosen is full of hard choices. This isn’t the first sacrifice we’ve had to make, and it won’t be the last.”
She was saying they should sacrifice everyone in the reeducation center right now. Sacrifice the countless children who would be sent there in the future. This wasn’t the same as writing off one prisoner as insignificant. Maybe Becca should have been able to let it go as easily as they could; maybe the fact that she couldn’t meant she really was the child they saw her as. But she still couldn’t do it.
She had chosen to sacrifice her life for the resistance. Jake hadn’t made that choice. All the future kids who would end up in that place… they hadn’t made that choice.
“They’re not—” she began.
The gray-haired woman interrupted as she turned to the angry man, whose feet drummed out his disapproval on the floor. “We all want to make them pay for the lives they’ve taken. But this isn’t the way to do it. We need to wait until we can make a real impact. We need to wait for a battle we can win.” She nodded to the bearded man next to him. “And none of us likes the idea of what Internal will do to those children. I know I won’t be the only one thinking about them at three in the morning when I can’t fall asleep. But if we die trying to save them, we’ll be abandoning the people we have a real chance of saving. There will be no one left to help them.”
The bearded man looked sick. But he nodded. The angry man gave a reluctant jerk of his chin.
Becca was losing them. Losing her last chance.
Jameson met her eyes. He didn’t say anything; he didn’t have to. She knew that look. It was the same look her mother had given her when, after insisting she was going to befriend the stray cat from the playground down the street, she came home with nothing but a full bag of cat treats and an arm covered in claw marks.
She had given up on the cat. She wasn’t ready to give up on this.
She cleared her throat. Forced the words out before anyone else could speak. “We have a chance to stop this before it becomes official. Once Internal puts the program into place, they’ll put up reeducation centers all over the country. We’ll have no chance of stopping it then. Right now there’s only one center, and they’re still trying to figure out whether to build more. All we need to do is give them a reason not to. There won’t ever be a better opportunity.”
She kept her voice calm. Reasonable. She couldn’t give them an opening to see her as reckless, impulsive, a shortsighted child. Someone like that would never persuade them.
“It will be more difficult later, yes. But that doesn’t make it any more possible now.” The gray-haired woman faced Becca with pity in her eyes. The kind of look someone would give a child too young to understand that magic wasn’t real. “I’m sorry. It’s too great a risk.”
What is it you do here if you aren’t willing to take any risks? Becca wanted to ask. Why am I putting my life in danger to help you do nothing? But saying something like that would mean giving up any chance of them taking her seriously.
“If this isn’t worth risking our lives for, what is?” she asked instead. “Can we live with ourselves if we know about this and don’t do anything? If we don’t even try?”
“There’s nothing we can—” Jameson started to answer.
This time Becca was the one to interrupt. “You say you can’t stop it. But what happens if you don’t? There’s a good chance Internal will find all of you eve
ntually, and you know it. You’ll probably last longer than an infiltrator like me, but people guilty of much less than this—” she gestured to indicate the meeting, the bookstore, the resistance, all of it “—are arrested every day. I know—I’m the one who types up their interrogations. So what happens when it’s your turn?” She looked first at Jameson, then at the pregnant woman. “You said you don’t want your kids to end up in that place. But if you don’t do anything to stop it, they will. It’s not some distant possibility. If you’re arrested—and you probably will be—that’s exactly what will happen to them once this program goes into place. Maybe next week, or next year, or five years from now… but it will happen.” She broke eye contact with the pregnant woman to face each of the others in turn. “What about the rest of you? How many of you have families you’re willing to sacrifice?”
Silence hung over the room.
“We can’t risk it,” said Jameson, his voice tight. Becca didn’t know whether he meant stopping the program or allowing it to continue.
The pregnant woman started to cry. Becca fought back her guilt. She had needed to say it. She had needed to make them understand.
“It may be a sacrifice we’ll have to accept,” said the gray-haired woman. “No matter how intolerable the consequences of the reeducation program, it’s very likely that there is nothing we can do to stop it.” She paused. “But we can gather more information before we make our final decision.”
Around the room, the others murmured their assent.
She turned back to Becca. “Find us more information. Pass along whatever you learn. Then we’ll discuss what can be done.”
Chapter Six
Becca collected the information from her mom’s files the next day, copying everything she could find about R100 in a nervous few minutes as her mom cooked dinner in the next room. She gave it all to Jameson the day after that.
