Necessary Sacrifices (The Internal Defense Series Book 2)

by Zoe Cannon

  “I’m sorry,” she whispered. And even now, the mask was in place. Even now, her words were perfectly measured, perfectly calm. Her eyes were dry.

  His struggles became more random, his body jerking forward against her hands, his legs twitching almost like he was trying to stand. His arms fell into his lap. The pressure on her hands eased, and he went still.

  She let go. He slid slowly to the side until his head rested on the floor. He wasn’t breathing.

  The mask shattered.

  When she came back to herself, she was curled in the corner by the bed, back against the wall, knees wet with tears where her head rested. Sobs shook her like electric shocks. Her throat felt raw, like she had been screaming. Maybe she had been.

  Jameson’s body lay across the room. The sight of him, of it, almost made her start screaming all over again. She couldn’t look. She couldn’t go near him. But he was between her and the door, and if she didn’t leave soon, if she didn’t leave right now, her mother would find her here.

  Let them find me. Let them execute me like the criminal I am.

  But she raised herself up on trembling legs, steadied herself against the wall until she could stand on her own again. She took tiny steps, like she had on her way in. One foot after the other. She waited for Jameson to move, to speak, to tell her she had imagined all of it. He didn’t.

  She straightened her clothes. Made sure none of Jameson’s blood had clung to her. She wiped her eyes and steadied her shaking hands. She didn’t let herself look back as she slid the keycard into the lock.

  By the time the cell door closed behind her, the mask was in place again.

  * * *

  Tonight her empty apartment was too full. Jameson lived out the last moments of his life in every room. No matter how tightly she curled her hands into fists, she still felt him straining against her hands. No matter how loud she turned up the TV, she still heard him asking her to kill him.

  She couldn’t cry.

  She had cried in his cell; why couldn’t she cry now? Why couldn’t she let the mask drop and go back to who she really was for a while? Did that person even still exist, or had she died along with Jameson?

  She had asked Micah to do the transcript for her, giving him some excuse about how it would be weird to see one of her mom’s interrogations, so at least she didn’t have those memories on top of the others. But she could imagine it well enough. Too well.

  It took her a moment to realize the knocking wasn’t coming from the TV.

  Just looking up at the door felt like moving through pudding; the thought of getting up to answer it made her want to curl up and go to sleep. And it had to be her mother—the last person in the world she wanted to see with the memory of Jameson’s injuries fresh in her mind—because no one ever came here except her mother, besides Heather that one time…

  Oh.

  Monday night. Wasn’t that what she had said?

  Now it was Monday night, and Heather was waiting outside that door, expecting to chat about guys and catch up on old times.

  The banging started up again.

  Becca muted the TV and forced herself out of the chair. It took her a hundred years to cross the room, every step a separate battle. She opened the door just as Heather raised her hand to knock again.

  Heather’s face broke into a relieved smile. “Good, you’re here. I wasn’t sure. I knocked for a long time.”

  “I had the TV up loud. I forgot you were coming. Sorry.” She stepped to the side to let Heather come in.

  Heather glanced at the TV. “I thought you hated that show.”

  “I wasn’t paying attention.”

  Heather nodded sympathetically. “Long day?”

  “Something like that.”

  Heather slipped out of her coat. She took a longer look around the room. “How long have you lived here?”

  “Four months.”

  “And you still don’t have any furniture?” She hung her coat on the hook set into the door, over Becca’s.

  “I haven’t needed any.”

  “I know a few good places to get stuff cheap. We could go together sometime.” Heather paused. “So, um.” She shifted from foot to foot. “I wanted to talk to you.” That desperation was back in her eyes again. Becca looked away. Whatever Heather wanted, she couldn’t give it. The last time someone had wanted something from her today, he had ended up dead.

  Becca surveyed the near-empty room. It wasn’t set up for visitors. “I guess we can go sit in the bedroom.”

  A faint smile ghosted across Heather’s face. “Just like old times.”

  Over the years, they had spent an uncounted number of hours sitting together on Becca’s bed or Heather’s. Helping each other with homework, talking about nothing, taking turns comforting each other—though usually it had been Becca comforting Heather—after tiny tragedies that seemed ridiculous now. But tonight they walked to the bedroom on stiff legs, neither of them speaking; they kept stepping in front of each other and stopping at the wrong moments to let each other past.

  Becca stopped in the doorway, suddenly unable to breathe. The bare room, with nothing but an expanse of white space between her and the bed she had shoved against the far wall, reminded her of nothing more than Jameson’s cell.

  “Are you okay?” asked Heather from behind her.

  “I’m fine.” So easy to sound normal. Too easy. She stepped into the room.

  The bed was the same one where she and Heather used to sit, although the master bedroom dwarfed it—Becca still occasionally thought about moving to the smaller bedroom, the exact mirror of her room back home. The fluffy bedspread was the same, and when they sat down it crinkled under them in a familiar way. Becca crossed her legs under her and shifted. Had this ever been comfortable?

  Heather sat cross-legged facing her, fingers laced together in her lap so tightly they were turning white. “Thanks for inviting me over.”

  You pretty much invited yourself, Becca thought but didn’t say. She tried to focus on Heather, tried to let the images in her mind—her hands cutting off Jameson’s air, Jameson struggling, Jameson slumping lifeless to the floor—fade into the background. “What’s bothering you?”

  If this were high school, Heather would have already been curled up in a ball of misery, soaking the bedspread with tears. Instead she pressed her lips together until they turned a shade of white to match her fingers. Her eyes darted from side to side like trapped birds fluttering against their cages.

  She could be a spy. It could be an act. You know all about putting on an act.

  Heather shrugged lightly. The movement didn’t match the tense misery radiated by the rest of her body. “It’s been tough at work lately. Especially now that half the televised executions these days are people whose parents turned them into dissidents.” Her voice cracked on the word dissidents. “I never talk about my parents, but everyone knows anyway. And they all think it’s only a matter of time before I turn out the same. Milo stops it whenever he can, but there’s only so much he can do.”

  Oh, are people being mean to you at work? I’m so sorry. I killed someone today. She bit back the angry words. She and Heather didn’t live in the same world, hadn’t since before their friendship had ended. Maybe in Heather’s world, this kind of thing mattered. She tried to call up the sympathy she had felt when Heather’s former followers had all turned on her at school after her parents’ arrest. All she could find within herself was jealousy, acrid and bubbling and toxic.

  “It’ll get better once you prove yourself to them. And that’s only a matter of time.” The words were empty. She tried to fill them with real emotion, but there was nothing there. She could pretend, though. She knew how to pretend. She was sure Heather couldn’t hear the hollowness to her comfort.

  “And anyway, it doesn’t matter,” she continued. “Because you’re doing a lot of good already. You helped bring down an entire dissident group, less than six months after joining Internal.” Her throat tightened u
ntil she could barely speak. “And that’s why you came to work for Internal in the first place, isn’t it? To be part of something bigger than yourself. To—” To betray your parents’ memory. To undo everything they worked for. “To be different from your parents.”

  Heather spoke so quietly that Becca almost couldn’t hear her. “Why did you?”

  Stop asking me questions. Feel better and get out. “Why did I what?”

  The words were even quieter this time. “Join Internal.”

  Alarm bells began going off in Becca’s head. “I explained the other day at Lucky’s, remember?” But maybe Heather wanted to see if Becca would give a different explanation every time, or if her story seemed too carefully rehearsed. Looking for holes, looking for reasons to suspect. Spying for Internal.

  “I know. But… after everything that happened last year…” She whispered the next words. “You were a dissident.”

  Becca’s muscles clenched, ready to bolt off the bed, even though if Heather accused her, if Heather reported her, there would be nowhere to run. “I grew up.”

  “When we found that dissident group, and then when they… when the building exploded… I was afraid. I thought you might be…” She let her voice trail off. “I almost warned you.”

  “You thought wrong. I’m still here.” She started to give Heather one of her meaningless smiles, but let it die halfway through. Who would smile after being half-accused of dissident activity? “I’m as loyal as you are.”

  Heather looked down at her lap. “So then how did you do it?”

  “Do what?” Every instinct warned her to get up, to get out, to get as far away from Heather as possible.

  “Grow up. Shut it off.” When Heather raised her head, her eyes were filled with fear. “I’m not a dissident. I believe in what we’re doing. But sometimes it’s… it’s hard. Like yesterday. Knowing all those people died because of me. I know they were dissidents, and I know we couldn’t just leave them alone, but… my parents were dissidents too.”

  Becca should have felt a twinge of sympathy. Some measure of understanding. Something. She knew those doubts; she knew the dizzying sickness they brought with them.

  But all she could feel was anger.

  The last time Becca had tried to talk to Heather about her parents, Heather had dismissed them like they were nothing. They were dissidents, Becca, she had said. Like they had never mattered to her at all. I wish I had never known them. She had stood there with cold eyes and told Becca that her parents had deserved to die. And then she started working for the people who killed them. She had learned the same things as Becca—the regime’s lies, the false confessions—but she hadn’t cared. She hadn’t cared about all the innocent people being sent to their deaths; she hadn’t cared about her own parents.

  What right did she have to grieve for them now? She had thrown them away. She had gone against everything they had stood for, everything they had died for. She had helped to kill some of the only people fighting against the evils she had so willingly embraced, and now she wanted to claim it as her own personal tragedy.

  “You’re not going to turn me in, are you?” Heather practically whimpered. “I’m not a dissident. I’m not. I just wonder sometimes. About my parents. And now all those dissidents in that house… I was up all night thinking about them.”

  “Don’t worry. I won’t turn you in.” When Becca spoke, she heard echoes of her mother. She hadn’t known she could sound that cold.

  Heather visibly shrank under Becca’s tone. “I’m not a dissident,” she whispered. “I thought… I thought you might understand.”

  “Or you thought I might confess to something.” She didn’t need tact here, didn’t need her mask. Anger wouldn’t look suspicious; anyone would be angry at insinuations like these. She clutched the excuse to her like a security blanket as she let herself speak the venom seeping through her thoughts. “Did they send you here?”

  “No one sent me here!” Tears rolled down Heather’s cheeks. Some distant voice in Becca’s mind told her she should probably feel bad about that.

  But she had been friends with Heather long enough to know that Heather’s fake tears looked just like her real ones.

  “You’re not a dissident,” said Becca. “I believe you. I’m not a dissident either. If someone told you to spy on me for them, you can go back and tell them that. I was a stupid reckless kid, and I didn’t know what I was getting into, and I’m not anymore, okay? So whatever you thought you were going to get from me, forget about it.”

  Heather bent almost double, tears flowing faster. A few drops landed on the bedspread. Just like old times.

  Maybe Heather wasn’t faking. Maybe her doubts were real. Maybe she needed a friend right now, as badly as Becca had a year and a half ago when Heather had turned away from her. Becca could be there for her. Help her through it.

  But it was too late. Heather had had her chance. She had made her choice.

  “You should leave,” Becca said quietly.

  When Heather got up, Becca didn’t follow.

  Chapter Ten

  Jameson’s death played and replayed in Becca’s dreams all night. But when she woke the next morning, it wasn’t the memory of his struggles that made her stomach churn as she stared up at the ceiling. It was what she had said to him. The promise she had made.

  If Kara had been sent to the reeducation center, there was nothing Becca could do to get her out. Nothing she could do to keep her promise.

  Nothing she could do to make up for what she had done.

  She’s fine, she told herself. She’s safe. Most dissidents’ kids didn’t end up in the reeducation center—not yet, anyway.

  But if Kara was one of the unlucky ones…

  It would not be an empty promise. It would not. She would not break her word to the man she had killed.

  I’ll save her. I’ll figure something out.

  Because if she didn’t…

  If she didn’t, then there was nothing left but her and a broken promise and the memory of killing Jameson.

  Every time she opened the dissident bin at work that day, she fought the temptation to type in Kara Jameson and find out for sure. With everything she did at work under scrutiny, looking up a file belonging to the daughter of a recently-arrested dissident—a file unrelated to any of her transcripts—would give her away in a second.

  But someone else could make the search without anyone batting an eye.

  After work, she didn’t drive home. Instead, she drove to her mom’s apartment.

  Her mom never got home until well after dinnertime, except on the evenings she set aside to spend with Becca. Becca would have a couple of hours at least, and she didn’t need nearly that long. Just a few minutes to access her mom’s files. To prove to herself that Kara was safe.

  She turned her key in the lock and pushed open the door.

  And found her mom standing in front of her, watching the doorway with wide startled eyes.

  Her mom took the few steps to the couch and all but collapsed into it. “Becca. What are you doing here?”

  Becca tried to calm her racing heart. Tried to calm the irrational panic that screamed, She knew you were coming. She’s been waiting for you. “I could ask you the same question.” She kept her voice light. “It’s a little early for you to be home, isn’t it? Don’t you have dissidents to catch?”

  Her mom rested her head on the back of the couch, letting her eyes drift shut. “I’m taking a couple of weeks off. Between the infiltrator in 117 and now this new dissident group, I need a breather or I’m going to start losing effectiveness.”

  Becca stood back and watched from somewhere deep in her mind as her mouth continued the conversation on its own. “I didn’t think they could afford to lose you for that long. Besides, wasn’t the dissident from the transcript the last one left from that group?”

  “That’s what we thought. Now we’re not so sure.” Becca’s mom rubbed her temples. “I assume I can trust you not to s
hare any of what I’m about to say. This is highly classified until the situation is resolved.”

  She suspected she already knew what her mom’s next words would be. Please don’t tell me. Please don’t talk about this. Usually she encouraged her connection-starved mother’s tendency to share information she shouldn’t really be sharing. But not this. Not today. “Of course.”

  Her mom sighed heavily. “The dissident is dead. Someone got into his cell, turned off the cameras, and killed him.”

  “And they don’t know who?” She carefully kept the fear out of her voice, made it sound like nothing more than concern at the thought of another traitor inside Internal.

  “They have a few suspicions, but nothing that holds up.” She motioned Becca over to the couch; Becca obeyed the gesture out of habit. How many times had they sat here like this as her mom helped her work through some problem or another? She let herself sink into the couch’s familiar folds. If only she could ask her mom for help now. If only she could surrender her struggles to someone else’s authority, someone else’s wisdom.

  But that had been a different life, a different world. Being here like this felt familiar, but it wasn’t the same. The couch sagged more than it used to; there were new lines around her mom’s eyes. The view of never-ending construction work out the window had been replaced by a view of a finished building—the building Becca lived in now.

  And in this new world, there was no advice from her mother; there were no lectures from Jameson. Becca was alone.

  “How do you live with it?” The words left her mouth hesitantly, creeping forward like escaping prisoners. Careful. Be very careful. But she needed to step into that other life for a moment. She needed the illusion, if only for a little while, that someone else could solve her problems for her.

  She kept going. “You kill people every day. You…” Her voice trailed off as she remembered what her mom had done to Jameson, what she had reduced him to. “How do you… make it okay?” Half of her nearly sobbed at the relief of asking, however obliquely, for her mom’s help—at the relief of pretending her mom could help her. The other half deliberated over every word, made sure she was giving nothing away.