by Zoe Cannon
“Becca?” He said her name like a question he already knew the answer to. Like a plea he knew would be refused.
She let the door close. There was no point in trying to run now. He had seen her. He knew she was here.
She had always known how this story would end. She had seen it before, lived it before, only now she was on the other side. Now she was the one with the gun and he was the one with the betrayed look on his face. She didn’t look, wouldn’t look, but her mind painted her all too clear a picture.
His name fell heavily from her lips. “Micah.”
* * *
She didn’t resist as Micah pulled her down the hall, back the way he came. She had just enough presence of mind to grab the suitcase; the wheels bounced across the floor behind them as Micah tugged her forward. They passed one door, its makeshift sign labeling it ISOLATION 2, before he yanked her into the next one, marked BATHROOM. She flashed back for a second to Jameson yanking her into the restaurant bathroom a lifetime ago. Then that memory changed to what she had done to Jameson, and what she had promised to do for him.
A promise she had lost her chance to keep. Because she had stopped when she shouldn’t have stopped. Because she had been a second too slow.
Three rickety stalls lined the far wall. All empty. She turned to make sure nobody was behind her—too late, too slow—and saw only a sink and a smudged mirror. That girl in the mirror with the twigs in her hair and the desperate look in her eyes, wearing a uniform two sizes too big like a kid playing dress-up… that couldn’t be her, could it?
The weight of the gun in her hand threatened to pull her to the floor. She could shoot him right here and salvage her chance to rescue Kara, to make a difference. He would never see it coming. She had already killed her mom for this, or as good as killed her. At least this would be more honest than what she had done to her mom.
She tried to raise the gun. But her hands wouldn’t obey.
All those prisoners. Fifty-nine more of that broken girl. And hundreds more, thousands more, if she allowed this to continue. If she let herself be caught. If she didn’t shoot him now.
She couldn’t do it.
Her only chance to do something that mattered before Internal executed her.
She couldn’t.
Her chance to save Kara. To keep her promise.
Her hands remained stubbornly by her sides.
Shoot him. Do what you have to do.
But this was Micah, and it wasn’t like what she had done to her mother; it wasn’t a bloodless conversation in an Investigation office late at night. This was real, as real as Jameson but a hundred times worse because at least Jameson had asked her to do it.
Micah’s gaze lowered to her trembling hand. “You’re holding a gun. Why are you holding a gun?” He tried to take a step back, but came up against the bathroom door. “Why… what… what are you doing here?”
She ran through a hundred excuses in the span of a second. All of them worthless. “You know why.” She could see it in the way he looked at her. Could see the losing battle going on behind his eyes, denial giving way to horrible certainty.
“You’re…” He shook his head wildly, like he could shake the knowledge right out of his mind if he tried hard enough.
She was slime. Scum. She was a traitor. “I’m a dissident.”
“You followed me here.” He slumped against the door. “You know, the funny thing is, I could have sworn I saw your car behind me a couple of times on the way here. I figured I missed you so much I had started imagining things.”
She didn’t respond. What could she say? Yes, I followed you here. Yes, I betrayed you.
Yes. I’m everything you hate.
He straightened his back, crossed his arms. Tried to build a wall between them. But she could see the cracks. The pain of her betrayal was ripping him apart, and he couldn’t separate himself from it. He wasn’t as strong as she was.
But she still wasn’t strong enough to do what needed to be done.
“So, explain this to me.” It was painfully obvious what kind of effort it took for him to keep his voice from breaking. “You followed me so you could get in here? Was this all just about getting here?”
She wanted to deny it. She couldn’t.
Denials never worked anyway. Dissidents like her always confessed everything in the end.
“What’s the suitcase for?” His eyes widened. “Do you have a bomb in there?”
“Where would I get a bomb?”
“You’re a dissident,” he said, as if that were an answer.
“I’m not trying to blow this place up.”
“So what are you doing here?” His voice was tight.
“Saving these kids. Shutting down the reeducation program.” It was almost a relief to say the words. At least now there were no more secrets between them.
Micah gave a choked laugh. “All those things I told you. I bet you thought I was hilarious, didn’t you? I bet you couldn’t wait for some escaping prisoner to put me out of my misery.”
“No!” The word burst out of her in a horrified cry. “I never wanted you to die. I never wanted to betray you. If things had been different…” No. She wouldn’t let herself think about what might have been. “But this is more important than what I want. It’s more important than what we have together. You understand that—I know you do. It’s how you feel about this place. You’re willing to sacrifice everything to help these kids, and so am I.”
“Don’t compare me to you.” Anger flashed in his eyes. “And don’t talk about what we have together. We have nothing. The Becca I loved doesn’t exist.”
It didn’t matter how deeply his words cut, how much they twisted inside her. Their relationship didn’t matter. It never had. If it had, she would never have agreed to use him like this. She pushed away the hurt, the sick regret, the cold sharp knowledge that she had destroyed something irreplaceable. Only her mission mattered. “Listen to me. I know you don’t like what they do here. Some part of you knows it’s wrong. You can still help these kids. Help me get them out of here. Help me destroy this place forever so no one else has to endure what they’ve gone through.”
There was no trace of affection in his eyes. “Shut up, dissident.”
She flinched like he had slapped her.
It doesn’t matter.
But neither did her mission, not anymore. It was too late.
“Call the guards, then. Get it over with.” She drew her mask close. Steady hands, steady voice. When they came for her, they wouldn’t see her fear.
Micah’s throat worked. His gaze flicked to the gun again. “Why haven’t you shot me?”
“Because I can’t.” She let the gun slip from her fingers. “Because I love you—no matter what else I lied about, I never lied about that. Because I’ve already killed one person I care about and condemned another to death, and I won’t do it again.” She kicked the gun across the floor to him. “So call them. Just do it already, okay? There’s no point in dragging this out.”
Micah kicked the gun back to her.
She looked at him in confusion. “What—”
“You have fifteen minutes.” The naked pain in his voice ripped her wounds open all over again. “In fifteen minutes I’m telling the first guard I see that there’s a dissident with a gun in the building. You should have enough time to get away. Barely.”
She picked the gun back up off the floor. “Why are you—”
Micah stepped away from the door. “Just go.”
Fifteen minutes should get her out. Assuming no one had discovered the guards’ bodies yet—which was an assumption she had to make, because otherwise she was doomed no matter what—she could make it out of the building and over the fences. By the time the guards started looking for her, she would be back in her car.
She looked down at her suitcase.
How many of those rooms could she get into in fifteen minutes? How many prisoners could she find?
When she thought abou
t it that way, there wasn’t a choice. Not really.
Micah had given her a second chance—and she was going to betray him one last time.
“Thank you.” Guilt clung to every word.
Micah didn’t answer.
She reached for the door—but it opened before she could touch it.
* * *
Becca bolted for the stalls as soon as the door began to open. From the corner of her eye, a reflection in the mirror showed Micah stepping to the side, shielding her from view. She eased the stall door closed behind her as two women—she didn’t risk more than a second’s look at them—walked in.
She slid the lock into place with a nearly imperceptible click, then climbed up onto the toilet seat so her feet wouldn’t be visible. She pulled the suitcase up after her. The unwieldy weight of it nearly toppled her over, until she managed to balance it precariously atop the back of the toilet, hugging it to keep it from moving.
“Excuse me, this is the ladies’ room,” snapped one of the women.
“Sorry. I didn’t know.” Micah sounded breathless. Guilty. “I’m new, I just got here, and I got lost trying to find orientation, and the door just said bathroom, and… sorry.”
“Go easy on him,” the second woman admonished. “He’s from the new batch of trainees.” She addressed Micah. “Do you have your ID on you?”
“Yeah. Of course. Hang on.” A rustling sound as—Becca assumed—Micah searched for the ID. Then a pause.
The first woman’s voice warmed only fractionally. “You should be on the opposite side of the building. Turn left out of here, then left again, then right. The room will be labeled. You should hurry—you’re already late.”
“I will. I mean, thank you.” Footsteps, and then a squeak and a thud as the door opened and closed again.
Every second that went by was another second someone could discover the guard’s body. Hurry, Becca whispered silently to the women. Get out of here. She poked her head up over the divider just long enough to see one of the women squinting into the mirror as she freshened her makeup. She ducked again before one of them could spot her.
“It wouldn’t kill you to be a bit nicer to them,” said the second woman. “The training is hard enough on them as it is.”
Becca’s feet wobbled as she listened. Please just leave.
“Before they worry about sending us a batch of replacements to train, they should start thinking about making sure we don’t need to replace anyone in the first place.” A thud as someone set something down on the counter harder than necessary. “I haven’t seen any changes in security since the last incident.”
“With all these dissidents in one place, there’s only so much they can do.”
Becca’s foot slipped. She caught herself, but not before the suitcase shifted. The knives slid against each other with the tiniest clink.
Becca froze.
But the women must not have heard, because the first woman answered as though nothing had happened. “They don’t have this problem in the processing centers, and even the smallest of them has more dissidents than we do. When’s the last time someone escaped from a processing center?”
“Last week.” The sound of someone rummaging through her purse. “Processing 149. It was in the news.”
“Well, that proves my point for me, doesn’t it? It was in the news because it was news—it hardly ever happens.”
The second woman spoke over the sound of running water. “It’s because our work is more dangerous than theirs. The risks are higher. We knew that when we agreed to be part of this.”
“It’s because they’re not funding us.” The faucet shut off. “The processing centers have all the guards they could want, cameras in every cell… hell, they probably serve caviar in the cafeteria over there. Meanwhile, we can barely keep the lights on.”
A pause. Nobody spoke. Had they left so quietly that Becca hadn’t heard the door open? She began to peek her head up over the divider—and quickly lowered it as the first woman spoke. “Ever wonder if it’s more than that?”
“What are you talking about?”
“Think about it. Our success rate keeps going up. There are all those rumors floating around about splitting us off from Processing soon and making us official. They should be giving us whatever we want, or at least more than we had when our best successes were dissidents with their brains too fried to remember their own names. Instead, we’re seeing less and less funding.” She paused. “And more and more incidents.”
The second woman’s voice was suddenly guarded. “What are you trying to say?”
“Some people want this program to fail.” The first woman’s voice was hushed now. “They want it to fail badly enough to keep fighting the funding. That’s not news. What if they want it to fail badly enough that they’re willing to… help things along?”
“You need to think about this. Don’t say anything you can’t take back.”
But the first woman continued. “Maybe it’s not just the lack of security. Maybe those dissidents had help.”
“Stop talking. Now.” The second woman’s voice had lowered to a hiss. “I could be arrested just for listening to this. You’re lucky I don’t report you.”
“I’m not saying it’s likely. But I’m saying it’s possible. You heard what people said at our last presentation. All their talk about how unsafe it will be to release dissidents back into society with no proof the changes will hold up long-term. They don’t just think we’re a waste of money—they think we’re dangerous. Who knows what they’d do to stop the program if they thought it was for the greater good? Think about it—if the program fails, they get their backup plan. All children of dissidents executed along with their parents. No release. No second chances. No danger.”
The other woman made some sharp response. Probably another warning about the dangers of making accusations like that out loud. Becca didn’t know. She wasn’t listening anymore.
She had assumed that after she shut down the program, things would go back to the way they were before. Dissidents’ children, as long as they weren’t dissidents themselves, would be sent to live with relatives the way Heather had been.
She hadn’t known.
If the program failed, all the kids who would have ended up here would instead be taken to Processing along with their parents, and, like their parents, they would never leave. There would be no semblance of fairness. No chance at a normal life like Heather had gotten. Just a bullet to the head.
All those kids, the countless future victims, the ones she was fighting for. If she went through with her plan, she wouldn’t be saving them.
She would be killing them.
Maybe the woman had gotten it wrong. But Becca didn’t think so. She had spoken like this backup plan was something everyone knew about—everyone involved with the reeducation program, at any rate.
The door creaked open. Slammed shut.
They were gone.
She had to get out of here. Now. Before someone discovered the dead guard and his missing keycard; before Micah decided her fifteen minutes were up.
It doesn’t matter. Not anymore.
Her plan was useless. Worse than useless. Her chance to make a difference—gone. What did it matter if they caught her now?
But she ran anyway.
Chapter Seventeen
Nobody followed Becca as she pulled away from the reeducation center, as she followed the map in her head toward home. No sirens sounded. Micah had kept his promise.
She didn’t think about Micah.
She didn’t think about anything. She didn’t feel anything. She just drove.
The light faded as she traveled. The first hints of darkness crept over the sky, trying to weave its fingers past the numbness she clutched around herself. But it didn’t touch her. It couldn’t touch her if she didn’t think. If she didn’t feel.
About halfway home, her phone rang. Heather. She didn’t answer.
Three more calls. All Heather. She
let them all go to voicemail.
Whatever Heather wanted, whatever she needed, it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter.
The sun had vanished into night by the time she arrived home. Her leg nearly buckled under her as she stepped out onto the pavement. She looked down at her leg in confusion. It was shaking. Her whole body was shaking. Why was she shaking?
She stumbled into her apartment. Stared blankly at the empty living room, at the sterile white walls. It almost looked as if she had never existed.
She felt like a ghost as she moved through the apartment to the bedroom. A shadow without place, without purpose. She lay down. Closed her eyes. Sealed herself behind her mask, away from everything she didn’t want to think about, everything she didn’t want to feel.
Someone knocked on the door.
Don’t answer that.
But her weak legs carried her back to the living room. She opened the door to find Heather standing in front of her, wearing an expression of… pity?
Why was Heather looking at her like that?
“I heard this afternoon,” said Heather. “I tried to call, but you didn’t answer. I got here as soon as I could. I’m sorry, Becca.” She shifted awkwardly for a second before reaching out and pulling Becca into a hug.
But Heather didn’t know about the reeducation center. She couldn’t know.
Why was she…
The pity on Heather’s face deepened. “You haven’t heard, have you?”
Why…
“It’s your mother. She’s been arrested.”
* * *
Her mother was gone.
“You’re going to get through this, okay?” Heather’s arms encircled Becca like a cage.
Her mother was locked in a cell on the underground levels right now. Maybe being tortured. Maybe waiting out the last hours or days of her life in isolation.
“I know what it’s like. I remember.”
Unless the execution had already happened.
“I know it feels like nothing makes sense. Like nothing will ever be okay again.”
Because of Becca. Becca had condemned her. Betrayed her. She had sacrificed her mother’s life.
