by K A Riley
“What about the Insubordinates?” I ask. “We were told we could find them here.”
“These aren’t them, are they?” Cardyn asks in a hoarse whisper. He’s looking around at the Modifieds with an expression that’s a mixture of compassion, sorrow, and steely determination to help.
Caldwell smiles and shakes his head. “No. Though the Insubordinates take care of the Modifieds, because no one else will. It’s been a while since we’ve been raided, but people are still kind of skittish around here. You never know who you can trust.”
“We get that,” I tell him. “But we’ve come too far and been through too much to stop now. Can you take us to whoever’s in charge?”
I expect Caldwell to balk at this, but he seems genuinely relieved. I swear I can see the tension melt out of his face and shoulders. “They’ll be so happy you made it here,” he sighs. “We’ve been waiting for you.”
“Made it?” I ask.
“Here. To San Francisco. I get the feeling you’re exactly what we need.”
“Why do I get the feeling everyone around here knows more about us than we know about…anything?”
“The Insubordinates,” Rain interjects. “You can take us?”
“You’ll need to meet with the Major.”
“The Major? Who’s he?”
“You’ll see.”
24
Caldwell leads us out of the room and up another set of slightly-less rickety stairs to a third-floor office.
After escorting us in, he taps the comm-link behind his ear. “Wait here. The Major’s coming. I’m afraid I can’t stay. I’ve got inventory to look after,” he explains before disappearing back down the hallway.
The room is smaller than the one that housed the Modifieds. There are two synthetic couches and a few matching blue and white striped chairs surrounding a low table of shiny black glass that sits between them. Clean cabinets of white panels and glass line one of the walls. I can’t speak for the others, but when I picture whoever the “Major” is, I’m expecting a barrel-chested, stubble-jawed man with an arsenal of guns strapped to his back and maybe some horrific battle scars on his face.
The person who walks into the room, however, causes our mouths to drop open.
The 5’ 3” grinning, thin-limbed person in slightly baggy khaki cargo pants and a lime-green hoodie doesn’t look anything like the burly, cigar-smoking leader of an underground resistance movement I expected. More like a newborn, spindly-legged foal.
With tears brightening his blue eyes, Brohn cries out “Wisp!” and leaps at her. He gathers the girl up in his arms and spins her around. “You’re the Major?”
Wisp’s long ponytail whips around behind her and settles onto her shoulder as she laughs heartily in her brother’s arms, hugging him back. When he finally sets her down, he stares at her with his eyes as wide as dinner plates. He’s got his hands on her shoulders like he’s afraid she’ll vanish into the ether if he lets go.
I can’t help but laugh. If his smile gets any bigger, the corners of his mouth look like they might make their way around his entire head and meet at the back.
Cardyn, Rain, Manthy, and I rush over and join him and Wisp in a suffocating group hug. All at once, the walls we’ve put up for the sake of survival come crashing down, and we’re laughing, crying, and locking our arms around each other’s shoulders and waists. It’s a hug I wish would last forever, but Wisp finally manages to unlock herself from our combined vice-grip and bring us back to reality.
“Okay, okay,” she squeals. “Talk about getting killed with kindness! I’ve made it this far. I’d hate to get crushed to death after all that by the five of you.”
Laughing and crying, everyone takes a small step back, not wanting to distance ourselves too far from this little, impossible miracle called “Wisp.” A miracle we never thought we’d see again.
Brohn has dropped one hand to his side, but the other is still planted firmly on his little sister’s shoulder.
“But how…?” is all he can manage through his happy tears.
Rain finishes asking the question we all want to ask. “We saw the Valta. It was leveled. There was nothing…no one left.”
Wisp’s eyes fill with tears, but she wipes them away with back of her hand. She lays her other hand on Brohn’s wrist and manages a feeble smile. “Let’s just say, you didn’t exactly leave us in the best hands. The new Sixteens were a joke, only not the funny kind. So I stepped up.”
“Stepped up?” I ask.
Wisp hangs her head before looking back up at the five of us. “The Recruiters came again just a few months after they came for you. Way too early. Caught us off guard. Most of us knew right away they were up to no good. We’d already started to doubt what we were seeing on the viz-screens. Well, some of us did, anyway. It wasn’t even news anymore, just a bunch of revolting propaganda put out by Krug’s new Patriot Party. But the Sixteens of the 2043 Cohort were still gung-ho about the war. Spence, Vella, Talia…all of them. They were always so competitive with your Cohort. They figured if the war wasn’t over by now, you must’ve failed, so it was their job to turn the conflict in our favor. But a lot of us were starting to feel skeptical. Suspicious, even. Things just weren’t adding up.”
“Adding up?” Brohn asks, finally dropping his hand from Wisp’s shoulder.
“I don’t know how to explain it. There was something in the air. We just sensed something wasn’t right. When I noticed that some of the war footage was the exact same as footage they broadcast a couple of years ago, and I mean exactly the same, all those suspicions kicked into high gear. I tried warning the Sixteens, but they didn’t buy it. They said it was probably just a glitch in the viz-cast or that maybe I’d only imagined it. But I was sure. When the Recruiters showed up, the Sixteens figured they’d been called up early to contribute to the war effort. They rushed out to give the Recruiters a big welcome, but the rest of us stayed back in the school or else dashed off to try to hide in the woods. Sure enough, the Recruiters went after us.”
Wisp pauses. Her voice suddenly drops off a cliff to a near whisper, like she’s forgotten how to talk for a second.
“Those Recruiters…they killed us. Slaughtered us all.” Her eyes fill with tears again, but there’s some strength or defiance inside her that refuses to let them fall. “We ran, hid, fought…did whatever we could. But there were too many of them. And we didn’t have weapons…”
“It’s okay,” Brohn says, his voice as soothing and reassuring as a soft, warm blanket on a cold night. “Did anyone else…?”
Wisp drops her head and doesn’t say a word. She doesn’t have to.
So now we know. They’re gone. They’re really all gone. Everyone but her. Everyone we knew, loved, protected, and cared about. The Neos and Juvens. The Sixteens. The friends we laughed and cried with, struggled to survive with…all gone. I look at Brohn, Cardyn, Rain, Manthy, and Wisp. If Adric and Celia are taking care of Kella as promised, that makes seven survivors, including me, from a town that doesn’t even exist anymore.
“I shouldn’t have survived,” she says. “I shouldn’t even be here.”
“You’re strong,” Brohn says. “You’re clever. It doesn’t surprise me that you did.”
“That’s not what I mean. I mean I should have died with our friends. It’s not fair that I made it out and they didn’t. I feel like me being here…it disrespects their memories somehow.”
Brohn tells her he’s sorry but she’s wrong. “Your being here is exactly what every one of them would have wanted. If you had died back there…well, there’d be no one here to honor their memories at all.”
Wisp sighs, reaches up to give Brohn’s cheek a gentle pat, and calls us over to the cluster of furniture around the low, oval-shaped teleconference table. We all sit down, our images reflected in the black glass table between us, and she finishes telling us about her escape from the Valta. “I knew about Kress’s hiding place down the ravine on the far side of the plateau where she
used to go with Cardyn and that bird of hers.”
“Render,” I say.
“Right. Render. What ever happened to him? He disappeared soon after you left with the Recruiters.”
Cardyn chuckles. “Oh, he managed to track us down.”
Rain tips her chin toward the ceiling. “He’s flying around out there somewhere right now.”
“Got us through a lot of tough times these past few months,” Brohn says. “Honestly, we wouldn’t be here without him, and we would never have found you.” He looks over at me and gives me a wink and a silent thanks. “We owe him a lot.”
“Then I definitely need to thank him. Seems I have a lot of thanking to do. I only survived because I had help—"
Behind Wisp, a young woman with her arms clamped around a clipboard appears in the doorway. Her eyes are down, and she taps lightly on the door frame with her knuckles to get Wisp’s attention.
Wisp excuses herself and turns toward the woman. “Is this about the inventory?”
The woman nods. She looks to be in her twenties or early thirties, but she has the meek nervousness of an intimidated ten-year-old.
“Tell Pim to have his team take inventory of the rations in Shelter Two and Three and leave the weapons count to Holly. And have Orion fix those receiving pads in the comm-links. We’ll meet in H.Q. Central at twenty-one-hundred to review logistics.”
The woman nods again and gives us all a half-smile before turning around and disappearing from the doorway.
“That’s Sabine,” Wisp explains, turning back toward us. “She’s quiet as a mouse. She never sleeps, and she gets more done in an hour than anyone else around here gets done in a week. I would have introduced you, but she’s a little skittish about meeting new people.”
Brohn looks several levels beyond impressed with his little sister. I don’t blame him. The last time we saw Wisp, she was being tossed around by one of the Recruiters like he was a pit-bull with a squeaky chew-toy. Now she’s sitting here, apparently in command of an improvised, ragtag army and doling out commands like a veteran field general.
“You’re really in charge of people here?” Rain asks, her voice filled with admiration and with what sounds like a hint of jealousy. “You didn’t even train. You didn’t get recruited.”
Wisp gives Rain a dismissive shrug. “I don’t like to think of it as being in charge. There are a lot of folks here who are angry, desperate, or in need of guidance. I just help to nudge them along. Turns out that living like we did in the Valta gave us certain survival skills a lot of people around here don’t really have. It’s one thing to know an injustice is happening, but it’s another thing to be able to do something about it.”
“So what happened to you after the Recruiters left?” I ask. “After…?”
Wisp gives me a knowing look. “At first, I didn’t know what to do. I considered just throwing myself off the nearest cliff and ending it all. But I couldn’t do that when I didn’t know what had happened to all of you. So I gathered whatever supplies I could carry and headed west. I made it nearly three days on foot when I felt I couldn’t take another step. That’s when I got lucky, and someone threw a bag over my head, tossed me into the back of a refrigerator truck, and started beating the hell out of me.”
“Yikes,” Cardyn exclaims. “Really?”
“Oh, it was as real as it gets.”
“And that was ‘lucky’? I’d hate to hear what you consider unlucky.”
“Could’ve been worse,” Wisp says, tilting her head and pointing to a jagged scar running down the side of her neck.
Brohn’s face goes into a contortion of confusion and fury. “Who did that to you?”
Wisp holds up a hand to both of the boys. “They were on the run. Like me. They’d escaped from somewhere down south. They didn’t know who I was. They said they thought I was with the Eastern Order. Of course, when they heard me and saw me, they realized there probably aren’t too many thirteen-year-old, hundred-pound girls from the Eastern Order wandering around alone through bombed-out towns and strips of desert. So, I explained my situation and latched on with them. They knew people in San Francisco, brought me along, and eventually got me here.” Wisp makes a sweeping gesture with her hand. “You’re sitting in the heart of the rebellion. This old building was once an office for immigration lawyers before they all got shut down. It was called Fields, Evans, and Style after the legal team who owned it. Now we just call it ‘Style.’”
Wisp goes on to explain her time with the Insubordinates and how they took her in, nursed her back to health, and eventually turned to her for leadership. “They didn’t know what they were doing. It was all just fear and in-fighting. They were too scared to even admit they were scared. A few of them came from towns like ours. Others had escaped from the few big cities left, like Salt Lake and Reno.”
“We know Reno,” Rain pipes in. “Unfortunately.”
“And, from what I’ve heard, they’re just getting worse,” Wisp says. “What do you know about the Order?”
“That they’re a hoax,” Rain snaps. “At least, that’s what it sounds like.”
Wisp raises an eyebrow in mild surprise but then nods as if this were the most expected and obvious answer in the world.
“There are a bunch of people out there who’ve been suspicious about this so-called war for a long time. There are even a few who have figured out something close to the truth. But there are only a handful of us who know for sure, and most of them are right here in this building where we’ve been setting up headquarters.”
“Headquarters? For what? What exactly is it you do here?”
Wisp slips out of her hoodie and lays it over the arm of the couch. “We investigate. We plan. We inform. And, eventually, we’ll fight.”
I can’t believe that Wisp—our little Wisp from the Valta—has turned out to be such a bad-ass. She’s still small and baby-faced, but she exudes an aura that’s tough-as-nails. It reminds me of her brother, this hidden, secret strength inside her. Only, coming from her small frame, it seems even more surprising.
She stands, crosses the room, and taps a panel on the wall. A small door whooshes open to reveal a refrigerator lined with tall, cylindrical vials of ion-water. She tosses one to each of us as she walks back to sit on the couch. She laughs as she tells us that the Insubordinates who saved her and the ones she’s been gathering still call her “Wisp.”
But the truth is, it hardly seems a suitable name anymore. She’s got to be a good three or four inches shorter than me and she’s slender from top to bottom. But seeing her from any kind of distance, the way she moves like a jungle cat, her lean muscles rippling under her black tank-top, her eyes flashing fire as she tells her story, I’d guess she’s at least seven feet tall, strong as a horse, and big across as a barn.
“You really came out here and set all this up on your own, huh?” Brohn asks as he beams with brotherly pride.
Wisp laughs and taps a comm-link she has just behind her ear. She holds up a “just a minute” finger to us, listens for a second, and nods. “Things may have just turned in our favor,” she says to the person on the other end of the conversation. She laughs and says, “Copy that,” before tapping her comm-link off and flicking her thumb toward the doorway. “In answer to your question, I hardly did this on my own. I had help. My lieutenant and right-hand man is just coming down the hallway now. He’s the one who told us the truth about the Order, the Processors, and Krug’s N.P.P. That’s his New Patriot Party. He’s the one who helped get us set up. He helped me do the best I could with the others while we waited and hoped you’d find your way here.”
With that, she turns toward the doorway. “Ah. Here he is now.”
For the second time in fifteen minutes, we’re stunned into silence by a familiar face.
Wisp’s lieutenant strides in, and she stands up to welcome him before turning back to us.
“I think you know Granden.”
25
I sit up straight, stu
nned at the sight of the man I both hoped and feared I’d see again someday.
Granden pauses and runs his fingers through his tidy, light brown hair and makes a couple of micro-adjustments to his belt and shirt collar like he’s preparing to walk into a fancy dinner party. He gives us a half-wave as he steps fully into the room.
He’s dressed in civilian clothes, which is a strange sight and a look I’ve never seen on him before. When I knew him, he was almost always decked out in his black and green military uniform. Most of the time, he had an array of weapons on him, a bunch of pistols, knives, or rifles for our training sessions. Now, he’s outfitted in the combination of loose, weathered black jeans and the tailored white button-shirts we saw people wearing back in Salt Lake City. His boots are those retro-fitted synth-cloth kind made to look like leather, and his black pea-coat is just long enough to cover the holster and the slick golden Sig Sauer .320 slung around his waist.
I don’t know whether to hug him, thank him, or kill him. He may have helped us in the end, but he was also part of a whole network of lies told by a team of government agents dedicated to weeding out special kids to help them keep those lies going. At least according to Hiller. The sight of him makes me realize just how little the other Seventeens and I have pieced together, how much was guess-work, and how much might be completely wrong. It’s like I’ve been working on an impossible puzzle all these months, and the potential answer key just walked into the room.
So what do you say to the man who trained you, lied to you, aided in your physical and psychological torture, and maybe saved your life?
I can tell the others are just as conflicted as I am. Despite Granden’s warm smile and his promise that he’s “really one of the good guys,” Brohn leaps up in a territorial show of defiance. Rain jumps up to stand next to him. Cardyn stands with them, his fists on his hips, and scowls at Granden. Manthy doesn’t stand up, but she crosses her arms tight, gives Granden one vicious, evil-eyed stare, and then turns her gaze to the floor. I decide to join Brohn, Rain, and Cardyn. I’m just standing up when Wisp waves for all of us to sit back down, but we don’t.
