by Zoe Cannon
Another girl blocked their path, arms folded across her chest. “No. She’s right. We can’t leave.”
“I don’t care what you do, but I’m going home.” The boy tried to push her aside.
She absorbed his shove easily and caught him by the shoulders. “This is our chance, and we’re running like a bunch of cowards. Don’t you want to make them pay for everything they’ve done? All the people they’ve killed? We’re not leaving until we tear this place apart.”
Murmurs of agreement rose around her.
No. They had to stop this. If the kids tried to get revenge, if this turned into another incident…
The kids had no idea of the scale of the death their actions would cause.
Micah leaned in to say something, speaking too quietly for Becca to hear. Whatever he said, it wasn’t enough. The girl shook her head angrily, while rumbles of discontent rose from the others.
Becca hurried toward them, unsure of what to say but knowing she had to do something—but Kara was already striding forward, stepping between Micah and the girl. “Tear it apart with what?” she asked, voice low but fierce. “Where are your weapons? Get out first, then worry about revenge. It won’t mean anything if you’re dead.”
“But you know what they—”
Kara’s voice turned dangerous. “If you want to get yourself killed, that’s fine. But try to convince anyone else to go along with your insanity and I will shut you up however I have to. So you can leave right now and try to kill them with no weapon and no plan, or you can stop talking.”
For a few seconds, nobody moved as Kara and the girl faced each other down in a silent standoff.
Then the girl stepped back. “Fine,” she muttered. “Let’s go. We’ll come back and take care of them later.”
Micah crossed the last few steps to Becca. He let the knife fall to the floor. There was new blood on it. Becca didn’t ask.
“Are you okay?” she asked him as they hurried forward.
His voice only shook a little. “I’m okay.”
So much she wanted to say.
She forced her attention to the prisoners. Did a quick headcount. Sixteen of them. Sixteen out of sixty. Less than a quarter.
But it was something.
It was enough.
She slowed as they approached the exit. “You go ahead,” she told him. “Climb the fence. Go anywhere as long as it’s away from this place. And away from populated areas, and…” Her voice trailed off. What was she thinking, expecting him to be able to hide sixteen escaped dissidents from Internal?
“I’ll handle it.” Kara stepped around to her other side. “Dad taught me how to stay hidden, if anything ever went wrong. I’ll keep them safe.”
She shot Kara a grateful smile. “Good. Follow Kara, then. I’m going back for the rest.”
Micah frowned. “But—”
“The others deserve a chance at freedom too. Go. I’ll find you when I’m out.”
Her mask wasn’t as airtight as it had once been, and Micah had always come dangerously close to seeing through her. Maybe if the training hadn’t left him so disoriented, he would have questioned her more. Maybe he would have asked how she expected to find him and Kara afterward, or why she was taking this risk so soon after telling him they shouldn’t try to get everyone out.
But it had. And he didn’t.
“Good luck,” was all he said.
She nodded. “You too.”
She turned away before she could change her mind. Before she could say anything else, anything that might give her away.
Micah and Kara’s urgent encouragements to the rest of the prisoners faded into the distance as she walked in the opposite direction, further into the reeducation center. She didn’t let herself look back.
She had never intended to leave with the prisoners.
She had never intended to escape.
The guards would find her soon. Once they did, she could slow them down. Misdirect them. Give Micah and the others more of a chance than they would have had otherwise.
And after that…
After that, it didn’t matter.
She had done what she came here to do.
She kept walking, making turn after turn until she didn’t know which way led out anymore. She passed doors with signs reading 5 and 6; from inside the room marked ISOLATION 2 came the faint sound of crying, the exhausted kind that had passed its peak and turned into something jagged and hiccupy.
How long before she was the one sobbing in a cell somewhere?
It doesn’t matter.
Just keep walking. Keep walking until they find you.
She heard the woman’s crisp voice before she saw her. “—plan to issue a formal complaint. Investigation has no business intruding here. The existence of this facility, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you, is highly classified. There will be an inquiry, at the very least—I’ll make sure of it.”
“There won’t be any need for that.” She would have recognized the second speaker even if he hadn’t rounded the corner just then. With a smile of vindication, Milo Miyamoto pointed straight at Becca. “The intruder I warned you about is standing right in front of us.”
Chapter Twenty
So this was it, then. This was how it would end.
She reached for her gun, more for show than anything else. Before she could so much as touch it, the two guards flanking the woman had their own weapons out, pointed directly at her.
She lowered her hand.
One guard kept his weapon trained on her as the other rushed forward. She didn’t resist as he yanked her gun away. He wrenched her arms behind her back and slammed her against the wall. Her head hit with a crack; her vision went white for a second as the breath flew out of her. A whimper escaped her as the guard fastened his handcuffs around her wrists.
How many times had she imagined this moment? And yet even now, it didn’t feel quite real. Even now, even knowing that she had chosen this, some part of her insisted, This isn’t happening.
The guard’s gun pressed into the space between her shoulder blades. “Don’t fight,” he said against her ear, “or I will kill you right here.” His tone dared her to try.
He dug his fingers into her shoulder as he spun her to face the woman. “What do you want done with her?”
The woman was already snapping orders through her radio. “Seal the building. Alert the guards at the fence.” She eyed Becca with wary regard. “How did you get here, dissident?”
She straightened. Ignored her pounding head, ignored her racing heart. Her fear didn’t matter. Her pain didn’t matter. Whatever they did with her next didn’t matter. One thing mattered—Micah and the kids and what she could do to buy them time.
Mask on. Give nothing away.
Now more than ever, her act had to be perfect.
She put everything she could of her mother into her tone of calculated contempt. “You’re too late. The prisoners I’ve freed have probably killed half your people by now. I gave them the revenge they deserved.”
This place only had so many guards. Not even enough to keep the fence protected. If the woman believed Becca had freed the prisoners in order for them to kill the counselors, she would send the guards through every inch of the building looking for them. Which meant fewer guards searching the woods.
Only for a few minutes. Only until they realized the escaped prisoners weren’t in the building anymore. But that was a few minutes Micah and the others wouldn’t have had otherwise.
The woman didn’t respond. She addressed the guard. “Take her to…” She paused, considering. “Take her to Isolation 3. Don’t let her out of your sight. I’ll figure out what to do with her once the situation is contained.” She turned to Milo. “Go with them. Stay out of the way.”
The guard kept his gun jammed into Becca’s back as he marched her down the hallway. Milo walked beside them, legs stiff, looking straight ahead. Behind them, Becca could hear the woman speaking into her radio again. “The
y’re still in the building. This is an attack, not an escape. We need as many people as possible in here. Focus on the administrative wing and the…” Her voice faded into the distance.
She had done it.
She was done.
They reached a dead end. The guard lowered his gun to open the door reading ISOLATION 3. Inside, the room was the size of a closet, or an upright coffin. It would have taken Becca less than two strides to cross to the far side. The heavy smell of sweat clung to the walls and spilled out into the hallway. Overhead, a single bulb kept the room in perpetual twilight.
“Get in,” the guard ordered, prodding Becca with the gun.
The walls of the room closed in around Becca as she obeyed.
The guard blocked the door with his body as he addressed Milo. “We don’t know if there are others, or if they have keycards like she did. It could take a while to shut down their keycard access. It would be better if you waited outside, so you can warn me if you see them coming.”
He shut the door in Milo’s face before Milo could protest.
With the door closed, the room’s ripe smell lodged in her nose like a physical thing. The walls seemed to pulse in the half-light. Her breathing echoed in her ears, ragged and unsteady.
The guard leaned against the door, facing Becca. “You know,” he said in a conversational tone, “we’ve had a lot of escape attempts in the past. A lot of dissidents trying to get their revenge, just like you said. Half the people I used to work with are dead because of it.” He paused. “Do you know the difference between those ‘incidents’—” he spoke the word with a curl of his lip “—and this one?”
Becca didn’t know whether he wanted an answer or not. She shook her head.
“All the other times, the kids were responsible,” he said. “And unless you’re a counselor, the kids are untouchable.”
The punch to the stomach caught her completely off-guard.
The second punch dropped her. She landed on her arm, and cried out as it twisted underneath her. As she tried to catch her breath, the guard casually drove the toe of his boot into her ribs. Another kick, harder this time, sent her into the wall.
Her two attempts to stand up ended with her flat on the floor, biting back screams. After that she stopped trying. She curled her legs in and tucked her head to her chest as the blows kept coming. Kara. Think about Kara. Think about Micah. The kids we freed. She told herself she had bought them enough time. She imagined Micah and the kids running through the woods, escaping to freedom, until the pain shattered the images into tiny shards that rained down on her like the guard’s fists.
An eternity later, the door opened.
The guard stepped back. Through her swollen eyes, Becca could see him standing over her with professional rigidity, as though he planned to claim she had done this to herself.
The woman who had sent her here squeezed into the room, with Milo a step behind her. The woman glanced down at Becca, then shot the guard a look of mild rebuke. “At least you didn’t break anything. They’re going to need her functional for interrogation.” She returned her attention to Becca. “Apparently the prisoners were more cowardly than you anticipated—they didn’t even try for the revenge you wanted them to take. They ran the second you turned your back on them.”
Did you find them? She didn’t dare ask the question. For a few minutes, at least, she’d had the guards focusing their attention in the wrong places. She could only hope it had been enough.
The woman looked Becca over, eyes narrowed in speculation. “Of course, it might be simpler if there weren’t an interrogation at all. I don’t know how you learned about this facility, but your confession could present a problem. As far as I know, there are no interrogators who are authorized to know we exist—and you, of course, will tell them everything.”
The guard rested his hand on his weapon. Waiting for his chance. He eyed Becca with barely-disguised eagerness. Becca twitched away from him without meaning to; pain shot through her arms at the movement, and she swallowed a whimper.
Any second now, the woman could give the order.
This room could be the last thing she would ever see.
It doesn’t matter anymore.
Milo frowned. “Doesn’t Processing have procedures in place for this sort of thing?”
“Someone would have to be given special clearance. It’s a solution, yes, but far from ideal. Part of my responsibility here is to ensure the secrecy of this program, and a situation like this would… reflect badly. There isn’t just the interrogation to consider, after all. There’s the fact that you followed her here—acting in a capacity normally reserved for Surveillance, not that it would be the first time Investigation has overstepped its bounds—and are now aware of not only our existence but, I presume, our purpose.” She eyed Milo as if he were a troublesome bit of paperwork that someone had inconsiderately sent across her desk. “It would be easier for everyone involved if she were to die here, and if you were to remain silent about this program’s existence in exchange for my not having you arrested for trespassing in a classified area.”
Becca’s vision blurred as she listened. The voices started to fade out. She forced her eyes to stay open, forced her sluggish brain to focus. If these were her last few minutes of life, she wanted to be awake for them.
“If you don’t have her interrogated, you’ll never know where the breach in your security came from.” Milo’s disapproval took on a superior tone. “Surely that’s more important than your own reputation and convenience.”
The woman’s voice went dangerously quiet. “You don’t want to play this game with me. Your reputation got you this far, but it’s not the place of Investigation to decide what Processing does with its prisoners, and it’s certainly not your place to dictate how to handle a situation in a facility where your clearance level isn’t high enough for you to scrub the floors.”
Milo’s confidence didn’t waver. “Be that as it may,” he said, the faintest hint of smugness coloring his voice, “this dissident happens to be Raleigh Dalcourt’s daughter. Whatever the state of Raleigh Dalcourt’s reputation, if her daughter disappears, people will ask questions. If you want to keep your program secret, that isn’t the way to do it.”
There was a long silence.
When the woman spoke again, her voice was carefully restrained, as if the slightest lapse in control would have her at Milo’s throat. “You didn’t think you should have told me this when you first got here?”
“I didn’t think it was relevant. It didn’t occur to me that you might consider carrying out an unauthorized execution.”
The woman looked from Becca to Milo as if she wasn’t sure which of them she wanted to kill first. “I can’t involve Enforcement, of course. Bringing them here would only make the situation messier.” She gave Milo a tight smile. “Since you’ve seen fit to involve yourself already, you can transport her to 117.”
She paused, as if waiting for Milo to argue. He stayed silent.
Her face fell slightly at his lack of reaction. “When you get there, tell them R100 has sent a blue-flagged dissident for them. They’ll know what to do.” She turned away. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have prisoners to recapture.”
She left the room.
The guard’s hands on her arms brought Becca out of her hazy stupor. She bit back a yelp as he hauled her to her feet. The room wobbled around her, and she swayed, held upright only by the guard’s rough grip. Tiny dots of blood colored the floor where she had been lying. Her blood.
Milo held up a hand. “I’ll take it from here.”
“She’s all yours.” The guard let go.
Milo caught Becca before she could fall. His arm tightened around her shoulders, digging into her bruises as he held her upright.
The guard unlocked the door. He spat on the ground as Becca passed. “Have fun in 117, dissident.”
Becca hobbled out of the room, letting Milo hold her up, and tried not to think too hard about what was
coming.
* * *
Milo didn’t start shaking until they passed through the gate.
His hands trembled as he clenched the steering wheel. “What I did back there…”
Becca spoke thickly through swollen lips. “It’s going to be okay.”
He held himself rigidly, as if the slightest movement could shatter him. “It was dissident activity.”
Becca shifted to stop the handcuffs from digging into the small of her back. She winced at the movement. A smear of blood spread across the spotless leather where her head had rested.
“I could be executed.” Milo’s words echoed hollowly through the car as the reeducation center disappeared into the evening shadows behind them.
“You won’t be.” Becca tried to form her scattered thoughts into words. She tried to break through the haze of pain, through the fear that wouldn’t go away no matter how many times she told herself her life didn’t matter anymore. “You’ll take me to 117. I’ll confess to working to destroy the reeducation program, and claim my mother put me up to it. I’ll be executed, my mother will be executed, and you’ll be a hero.”
Before she had made the drive to the reeducation center, she had gone to Milo. She had told him everything she knew about the reeducation program. Told him exactly what Internal planned to do to the people he had devoted his life to protecting.
And she had told him, I can help you save them.
She had laid out her plan for him. He would follow her to the reeducation center. While she freed as many prisoners as she could, he would attempt to warn the center about her, claiming she was a dissident he had been tracking. After they caught her, they would take her to 117, where she would accuse her mother of sending her to spark a riot in the reeducation center and destroy the program.
Milo would get what he wanted—a few of his people would escape Internal’s brainwashing and torture, and the evidence against Raleigh Dalcourt would be so damning no one would dare contradict it. He would be known not just for bringing down a dissident at the highest levels of Internal, but for saving the reeducation program, at least among those who knew it existed. He would have more influence inside Internal than he had ever hoped to obtain.
