by Meg Collett
That decided it. Wren couldn’t let anyone else get hurt.
“Let’s go,” she told Roman. “It’s time to call Hazen.”
32:
Wren led Roman down the black hallway and turned down the row of offices. “I can call Hazen from Hutton’s office without being interrupted. Her line to him is the only secure one besides Bode’s.”
Roman stayed silent beside her, keeping pace as she ran to the fourth door on the left.
The third-floor halls were deserted. Perfect, Wren thought. If Hutton stayed busy with the Vik situation long enough, Wren would have enough time to call Hazen and hopefully prevent anyone else from getting hurt.
She grimaced as she slapped her thumb against the reader next to Hutton’s door. “Do you think they’ll be able to alter Vik’s face back to normal?”
The door chimed and Wren shoved it open.
“Definitely.” Roman followed her in and hit the lights. “The Tube can do anything.”
“Lock the door,” Wren said as she rounded the desk. Her eyes landed on the comm phone connected to a cable in the floor.
Roman locked the door. The sound echoed through the room. “You’re sure about this?”
“I am.”
Wren sank into Hutton’s desk chair and grabbed the phone. You’re sure about this, she told herself, but it didn’t make her feel any better. She swiped her finger across the screen. She scrolled through the contacts until she found Hazen’s name with “Secure” beside it.
She pressed dial. Across the small room, she met Roman’s eyes. He stood guard by the door, his expression grim, but he gave her a nod.
The phone rang.
Wren pulled herself forward, the chair’s wheels rolling across the floor. Her knee hit the edge of the desk; she was taller than Hutton.
The line rang again.
She reached beneath the desk to ease herself back so the edge wasn’t digging into her leg. Her fingers met something cool. Something metal.
The phone rang a third time.
Wren pulled the metal tab. Beneath the center drawer, a panel slid out—a secret drawer.
“What’s that?” Roman asked, coming closer to the desk.
The phone chimed in her ear a fourth time, but she didn’t hear it.
Her eyes were on the drawer’s contents.
There was a clear bag packed full of pills with “VC” embossed in their centers. Nearly a hundred more were scattered in the drawer. Wren picked one up, its square edges slightly larger than the pad of her index finger.
Roman had gone quiet, but Wren felt the tingle of his cool gaze on her as she brought the pill to her nose and smelled it. Cinnamon. Her ears began to ring, echoing the phone.
It was an alt pill—to stop the body from protesting its alterations and slipping back into its original form. Alt pills in Hutton’s desk. Surprising, given that all of Wren’s pills had been moved to her room for easy access.
She turned the pill over, expecting to see “SL” stamped on the back, but it read “HR.”
The phone clicked in her ear. “Hello?” Hazen said. “Hutton?”
Wren dragged her gaze to Roman, her heart teeter-tottering against her spine. He returned her stare without flinching. He twisted the silver ring on his hand.
“Hutton?” Hazen barked into Wren’s ear. “Are you there? What do you want? I’m very busy.”
“Oh my God.” Wren dropped the pill. “Oh my God.”
“Hutton? What’s wrong? Is that you?”
“No,” Wren said, coughing.
Roman surged forward. The room was too small, the desk too narrow. She shoved backward and hit the drawer. The loose alt pills scattered in every direction, but there was nowhere to go. Roman’s hand latched around the phone, and he jerked it away from her.
He ended the call with a stab of his finger.
“Wren.”
“No.” She backed away from him, keeping the desk between them.
The door reader chimed. A second later, Hutton stepped inside. She didn’t look surprised to find Roman and Wren in her office with the lights on, or Roman holding her phone, or white pills scattered all over the floor.
She had hundreds, like she needed a supply to last her months, and all with “HR” stamped on the back.
Hutton needed alt pills.
“You,” Wren gasped.
Hutton smiled. She spread her hands wide in greeting, like Wren might come forward and hug her. “It’s me!”
Roman closed the door and locked it. Suddenly, the room became too small, the air too hot. Wren clawed at her throat. She’d forgotten to breathe. She sucked in a long breath.
“Wren—” Roman said again.
“I want to hear her say it,” Hutton interrupted.
Wren’s back pressed against the wall. Bodies consumed all the space in the office between her and the door.
“You can scream,” Hutton said, reading Wren’s mind, “but the offices are soundproofed.”
“You …”
“Say it.”
“You’re Sloane Lux.” To them both, Wren said, “You’re with the Whitebirds.”
33:
“You’re an anarchist.” Wren shivered in wild, adrenaline-fueled waves. “You’re with them.”
When she suspected Bode was a Whitebird, she’d been stunned and hurt. But this, from Hutton? From Roman? It was crippling, because this was Roman. He’d kissed her hair last night and held her while she told him everything. He wasn’t an anarchist.
“That’s cute.” Hutton smiled at Wren. “Did you expect more from us? Expect us to be good little VidaCorp tin soldiers with oil for hearts and bolts for brains?”
“Stop, Hutton.” Roman stepped around the desk. Wren didn’t flinch. She wasn’t afraid of him, not even now.
“Shouldn’t you call her Sloane?” Wren lifted her chin as she stared him down. “That’s who she really is, after all.”
“Sloane Lux,” Hutton said, her smile gone, “was a lie. Killing her was the best thing that ever happened to me because I got to start over.”
“Then what happened to the real Hutton Ramey?” Wren feared she already knew the answer. “Did you kill your assistant?”
“Roman wouldn’t let me. She was truly awful. Got my coffee wrong all the time. On purpose, I think,” Hutton pouted.
“She’s safe, Wren.” Roman drew her gaze back to him, and she was powerless to stop it. “I promise.”
Promises were worthless. She clenched her jaw until the sting in her eyes was gone. Then, she asked, “How do you have the alt pills? You couldn’t have stolen them.”
“Oh!” Hutton spotted a pill on the floor and bent to pick it up. She pressed it between her teeth and gnashed. When she smiled at Wren, a fine white dust coated her teeth. “We have insiders all over the place. That was the easiest part, silly!”
Sloane Lux stood just a few feet away from Wren. Her body was utterly different, transformed, but the mannerisms Wren had adopted—mannerisms that had become more ingrained than her own—were mirrored back to her. The cock of an eyebrow. The smirk. The gleam in her eye that said Wren was nothing more than a joke.
“How?” Wren choked out, her anger and confusion falling amongst the pill sat her feet. “How did you make VidaCorp believe you were dead?”
“I was dead.” Hutton pursed her lips at Roman. “For longer than planned. You lied to me.”
“You wouldn’t have done it otherwise,” Roman said without taking his eyes off Wren. He was trying to tell her something without speaking, but she’d never been good at reading him. He’d never shown her his true self, his anarchist side.
“But the autopsy. VidaCorp would have—”
“Autopsies are tricky business when you’re trying to hide someone’s death,” Hutton said, brightening at the subject. “Especially when DNA is involved. Those tests run through databases that can’t be bought off through corrupt officials. Suffice it to say, a smoking hot cadaver is sitting in a back room, chillin
g her pretty head off.”
“The ultimate insider,” Wren murmured. “No one needed to orchestrate your death. You volunteered.”
“I would do anything for Ro.” Hutton sidled up to Roman and slunk her arm around his waist.
She’s out of practice, Wren thought as she watched Hutton turn her unfiltered, too-open gaze on Roman. It was adoring and loving. She worshiped him. He didn’t push her away, and for some stupid, stupid reason, that hurt Wren.
Roman checked the clock on Hutton’s desk. “Not much time left. You should go watch for the confirmation.”
“Yes, boss!” Hutton saluted.
When the door closed behind her, it was just Roman and Wren in the narrow office. He waited for her to speak first. Even now, even with his secret revealed, he remained calm and cold.
“You could’ve done all this peacefully,” Wren said into the silence. “No one had to get hurt.”
“That wasn’t possible, not with a corporation like VidaCorp. We have to use their tactics against them. Otherwise, they’ll just cover everything up.”
“Their own tactics …” She cocked her head at Roman, her voice tight with tears. It crashed into her then, all of it. The realization that the man she loved was a liar. “Roman.”
His jaw clenched as her voice cracked around his name, but he held himself back as Wren weathered the pain of finally fully understanding.
“You’re going to kill me.”
The words hurt him, but he took the pain with a grim set to his mouth. His nostrils flared around a long, deep breath. Perhaps he needed to steady his nerves. Did anarchists even get nervous?
“Using Sloane’s death against VidaCorp was part of the original plan.”
“Was?”
“Wren,” Roman said, his voice strained, “it was never going to happen. You know I’d never hurt you. You’re—” He cut off, shaking his head. Wren had never seen him struggle with so much emotion, the battle written plainly across his face as he pulled himself together. “VidaCorp wants to rally the citizens around a martyr, but we can’t let that happen. Our plan—”
“Stop.” She couldn’t take it. She couldn’t stand there and listen to him lay out her death. She just wanted one answer. “VidaCorp was going to fake my death, but were the Whitebirds actually going to kill me?”
He wanted to lie; it threatened to slip between his lips as he ground his teeth together. He twisted the silver ring on his finger. He hated the words, but he said them anyway. “That was the original plan.”
“You bastard,” Wren hissed.
She launched forward and swung at him. Her fingers grazed his shredded cheek before he caught her wrist and trapped her arms to her sides.
“Stop,” he said, struggling to hold her back. “Stop!”
Her instincts told her to fight, to kick and scream her head off, but he had her trapped in the small office, his body blocking the door. She’d never fight her way past him, but she could think her way out.
Once she had herself back under control, he released her. She retreated and put the desk between them again. “Tell me why you had to burn Vik.”
“Right now, Vik is unknowingly transporting more than a hundred microscopic metal chips in her skin to VidaCorp’s lab. Once she’s stabilized, the doctors will scrape off her burnt skin, and it’ll be incinerated with other bio-hazardous waste. The chips can’t be burned, and they’re light enough to be blown into the incinerator’s air vents.”
“Why the vents?”
The pride in his plan—in burning someone—shone. “The vents connect to the cooling system in a very secure and very guarded server room.”
Wren hadn’t expected the Whitebirds’ operation to be so advanced. “You want to hack into their servers?”
“Not just hack,” Roman said, eyes dancing with feverish excitement, a wolf on the prowl. “We’re going to set Hazen Bafford up to take the fall.”
“The fall for what?” This was the question he’d wanted her to ask.
“VidaCorp invented the chemicals that purify the city’s water supply. At any given time, they can adjust the amount that’s dumped into the water at the treatment facility based on the real-time reports of environmental toxins.”
Roman radiated an energy and earnestness that burned her skin. He was the one who’d torched Hazen’s car. He was the one who’d looked into the camera, exuding hatred and fervor. She shuddered.
He leaned forward on the desk, eager to deliver the final blow. “VidaCorp has been illegally dosing Hollywood’s citizens with Pacem for years.”
The blow was dealt, and it had the impact Roman had intended.
Wren was stunned speechless. Her mouth went dry. She felt as if she’d stepped into a great void and the ground had whooshed out from under her feet. “That’s illegal. They can’t. Pacem isn’t even legal in the United States. It hasn’t been tested in human trials …”
“On Hazen’s authority, VidaCorp has been testing and tweaking the formula for years to expedite the human trial phase once Pacem is legalized. Do you think Hazen is still such a nice guy? A good man trying to run a life-saving corporation? He’s not, and it’s time the government found out about this and everything else.”
“There’s more?”
“So much more. I can show the world they already know what Pacem is. They just know it by another name.”
He waited for her to ask the question that was already on her tongue. “What is it?”
“It’s the world’s nightmare,” he said. Then he landed the blow. “It’s serk. Pacem is serk.”
34:
Wren waited for Roman to correct himself. It wasn’t possible. Serk was a drug craze; it killed people. Addicts went insane on it.
“It’s not true,” she said when he took too long to refute his claims. “Pacem is supposed to cure people.”
Pacem was supposed to cure her.
“VidaCorp has abetted underground gangs in circulating a sedative-enriched version of Pacem under the name ‘serk’ for years. They’ve been using the entire city in Pacem’s human trial stage to rush the drug to market once it’s legalized. Wren, it’s dangerous. If Beau wins the election and Pacem is legalized, it’ll kill millions of people.”
“How can you know that? How can they test people’s reaction to the dose? Someone would know. That’s insane.”
The sadness in his eyes scared her, because his sadness was for her. “They use the data collected for their water purifying chemicals. The government literally hands them everything they need to know.”
It was in the water. How much of it had she drunk while in the city? “We drink that water all the time,” she started, but then she had a horrible realization. “But not you. Not Hutton. You drink from water bottles.”
“Hazen doesn’t drink it either.”
Roman’s comment triggered a memory from Sloane’s penthouse: Hazen had a water bottle; he said he needed special fluoride for his teeth, but he didn’t drink the water because he knew what was in it.
Serk. Pacem was serk.
Wren tried not to panic. She pictured herself breathing evenly and deeply, but even that terrified her. How much longer would she feel this delirious high of breathing so freely? “Is the Pacem in the water killing us or curing us?”
“The dose isn’t enough to cure you. It’s helping, but it’s not enough. The dose in the water is creating a slow-burning addiction to serk without people knowing. If they ever try serk, just once, they could be addicted for life. But the Whitebirds have proof of the long-term effect of Pacem on a user.” His body pressed toward her with unrelenting intensity. “It makes them go permanently berserk.”
“People would know,” she argued, shaking her head. “If someone went crazy like that, it would be reported.”
“The dose in our city’s water supply hasn’t reached the side effect’s tipping point yet, but it will—and soon.”
“How do you know?”
Sadness lingered in the edges of Roman�
�s mouth. He knew he was about to take something from her, and Wren clutched it desperately to her chest. It was crueler, but he waited for Wren to realize it for herself. It crashed into her, and her knees gave out. She sank into the desk chair. “Muja,” she whispered.
“Muja,” Bode confirmed. “VidaCorp poisoned that entire town, and when they realized what happened to long-term users of Pacem, they blew up all those innocent people to hide what they’d done.”
“I don’t believe it. I can’t. How could they do that?”
“VidaCorp isn’t the savior you think they are, Wren. They’re killers.”
Her heel crunched a pill. “How have they gotten away with this?”
“We know VidaCorp is using the water here, but we can’t prove it. On the outside, it looks like they’re simply purifying the water. Pacem is hidden inside legal chemicals and doesn’t show up on tests. Trust me when I tell you the Whitebirds have tried every way to prove their crimes, but they’re good. They don’t leave a trace behind.”
“I was going to take it.” She didn’t even sound like herself, like Sloane. “It’s why I’m doing all this.”
Twenty-three days.
Without VidaCorp and the pill they’d given her to pause her cancer, she’d be dead by now. One of their pills, even though it wasn’t Pacem, had saved her life already.
“You lied to me,” she whispered, “from the very beginning. You told me you wanted a fresh start after the show.”
“I said I wanted to make a difference. I want a better existence for everyone—without VidaCorp poisoning them.” He took a shuddering breath. “I wanted to tell you so badly, Wren. Please believe me. I wanted you to see VidaCorp for what they are. Knowing you were fighting so hard for a cure broke my heart.”
Wren scrambled to her feet and the chair crashed against the wall. “Broke your heart? It broke your heart?”
Roman took the lash of her anger without flinching. “I know. I know they promised you the world and it was all a lie. But the pain you’re feeling? Imagine every person in this city feeling that way.”
“They aren’t dying.”
