by Natalie Reid
Jessie was surprised by his compassion. She let her face soften as she admitted, “Actually, I’d feel better if I came with him. That way I know things don’t get out of hand.”
He nodded, and they wordlessly started walking again, sauntering down the purple lit street at an easy pace.
Jessie cleared her throat before saying, “But I have been thinking…I don’t think we’re going to find The Thirty the way we’ve been going.”
“I’ve been thinking the same thing too,” he said, rubbing a hand across his forehead. “Things are taking too long, and with what could be happening to The Thirty, we can’t afford to waste any more time.” He stopped in his tracks, looking burdened by the decision before him. “There is one way I could try and find out where they’re being held, but…” He sighed and tilted his head up to the lights.
“What is it?” she asked, starting to feel the beginnings of apprehension in her stomach.
Jason glanced around them before saying, “There’s an agent on Task Force that I have something on. I haven’t pressed him too hard because I’ve been holding out for a rainy-day, but I think that day’s finally come.”
Jessie felt a sharp stab of panic. She knew he was talking about Ritter. If Jason really did capture him, their whole plan would be thrown out the window; she would never get her mom’s location out of him.
Trying to keep a level-voice, she asked, “You really think this agent would just tell you where they’re being held?”
“With the right pressure point, I can get him to tell me anything I want to know.”
She shook her head. “I wouldn’t be so sure of yourself. Task Force agents are trickier than you might think. One second you think they’ve let their guard down, and in the next, you find yourself walking head first into an ambush.”
“I don’t think I really have a choice,” he said, snapping in anger.
She stared up at him intensely, saying in a low voice, “I am telling you as a friend, and as someone who knows what they’re talking about; never trust an agent. I don’t care what you have on him.”
“Then what do you want me to do?!” he whispered furiously, taking a step closer to her. “Do you want me to just twiddle my thumbs down here while thirty good people are subjected to every whim and fancy of some of the most merciless people left one earth?!”
She tightened her jaw, holding his gaze. If she was in his position, she would be tempted to do the same thing. But, if there’s one thing that the military taught her, it’s that there’s more than one way to enter a fight. With that thought, an idea struck her. The hint of a smile curled up her mouth and filled her eyes with mirth.
“We could trick it out of them,” she said.
“What do you mean?” he asked, some of the anger draining from his face.
She straightened her back a little, and explained, “In the military, we had to go through a training camp in the woods. During that time, each soldier was grabbed and tricked into thinking that they had been taken up to a Bandit ship. Under duress, most soldiers didn’t realize that it was all staged.”
“But in this scenario, we really are their enemies,” he reminded her.
“Yes, but my point is that, whenever we as soldiers were told that the whole thing was fake, we immediately let our guards down. If we snag a bunch of new recruits, haul them into the tunnels, and then tell them the whole thing was a test, they’ll believe it was just hazing. That’s when we can try to get as much information out of them as we can. We just pretend we know everything already.”
He was silent as he stared down at his shoes. “We’ll have to do it at night,” he finally said, causing Jessie to let out a silent sigh of relief. Gesturing to her, he continued, “The second they see your face, the whole thing is blown. And we should stage this inside of the drainage system far away from any of our entrances. It might fool them into thinking they’re in our tunnels. When it’s all over, they’ll realize they were just a few inches underground.”
“We’ll need more than just four people,” she added. “We have to be careful not to hurt them when we grab them.”
Jason nodded, and then shook his head with a disbelieving smile. “With a little dumb-luck, this thing might just work.”
It was ten o’clock at night by the time their party of seven slipped out through a man-hole cover near the east side of the city. They were all dressed in black, and a few of them were carrying bags of equipment they would need in order to pull their plan off. As they walked through the streets, Jessie’s eyes darted about her. Ritter’s warning was still fresh in her mind. She could think of a dozen reasons why he would urge her to carry a gun, and if the warning came from someone as tough as him, she knew it must be bad. But this could be her last night with the Resistance, and she didn’t want to give up on an opportunity to find The Thirty just because she was scared for her life. She had to be willing to sacrifice her safety in order to help these people.
As they walked through the east end, signs of life buzzed about them. The day did not end early for these people. Yet, despite the number still awake, there were many places behind buildings and in between apartments that people could move unnoticed in shadows. Some said that the east-end was Aero City’s closet, where anything and everything happened in the dark. If they were going to find a group of rookie Task Force agents, it would be here with the lowest of the low.
After several minutes of searching, Kurt found an abandoned building that was poorly lit. The building to its right had been torn down, and the building on the left was a shop that had closed up for the night. On the street in front was an entrance into the drainage system.
When they stepped inside the building, Liam and Alex set down their bags and took out a pair of black machines. The machines were about the size of a small microwave, and had a series of vents crossing over the top. Once they lured the agents inside the building, they were going to release a purple smoke that would incapacitate them within seconds.
Jason, who had insisted on playing point in this operation, unzipped his own bag and began throwing gas masks to each person. Jessie caught hers and slipped it over her neck, but did not secure it around her mouth yet. She wanted to breathe the fresh air a little while longer.
The seven waited in the shadows as they kept a look-out on the street. Nearly half an hour passed until they saw the blue outline of Task Force hover bikes rolling down the street. There were five of them traveling in a pack.
Jason gave the signal, and immediately Jessie ran out from the building. Kurt, Liam, and Alex ran out after her, pretending to chase her down.
“Please help!” she cried out to the agents.
The second after she said this, Alex grabbed her from behind, and the men surrounded her. The agents, still halfway down the street, shouted that they were with Task Force. Jessie cried out to them for help again as the men pretended to drag her back into the abandoned building.
They waited with baited breath in the shadows as they watched each bike slow to a stop and park across the street. Their footsteps ran towards them, but it was hard to see them in the dim light of the east-end.
Jessie finally placed her gas mask on when they were at the door, and the two men working the machines flicked them on. There was a quiet whirring noise, but it was muffled by the sound of the approaching agents. The men ran past where they were hiding by the front wall, and stopped once they were inside the center of the room. By the time one of them thought to turn on a light, the purple smoke was up to their waists.
Immediately the men aimed their guns and started looking in every direction around them. In the light, Jessie noticed something troubling. Only four of the men had come inside. One of them must have been smart enough to circle around back.
Darting from her hiding spot, she ran towards the men. Already three of them had fallen to the floor. One of them was conscious enough to see her coming, and aimed his gun at her. She ducked and angled herself up and into the man, knocking him to the f
loor and at the same time snatching his gun. She gripped it firmly in her right hand as she made for the back exit. When she was far enough away from the smoke, she ripped her gas mask from her face. Finding the back door, she pushed herself through and came out in a back alley. However, it wasn’t just cold air that greeted her, but the raised gun of a Task Force agent.
Without thinking, her finger squeezed on the trigger in shock, and a loud blast echoed through the alley and vibrated in her hands. The agent dropped his gun and fell to his knees. Jessie could hardly believe what she had done. She hadn’t meant to shoot anyone. She had devised this whole plan to avoid anyone getting hurt. But she had pulled the trigger and sent a bullet flying into another human being.
She lowered her gun and looked down at the man to see where she had hit him, hoping that he would make it out alive. However, when she looked down, terror tore through her body like a shock wave.
“Dale?” she whispered out in disbelief.
She had known that Trid’s brother was still considered a Task Force rookie; it just never occurred to her that he would end up being one of their victims.
Dale gripped at his leg where the bullet had torn through, and then glared back up to her in pained disgust. His face looked so much like his brother’s in that moment, that Jessie felt as if she might as well have shot Trid.
With a mouthful of hate, he spat out the words, “Racking Bandit!”
She didn’t see as his hand moved to his belt. She was too mortified to move as the realization hit her that she had just shot her best-friend’s brother.
Dale slumped to the side, losing blood fast. She dropped to her knees and left the gun on the ground as she reached for his wound to try and apply pressure. Her hands were still pressed to his leg when she saw his own hand rise from his side. He was holding something. It was a blue, shining disk. She had never seen anything like it before, and didn’t know to be afraid. Only when he began to raise the object up to her face did she react.
She tried to jump back, but he had pressed a button on the disk in that same instant, and she could not fully avoid the blue beam of light that shot out towards her. When it hit her, her right eye filled with intense light, and her head scorched in pain. Her body thudded to the floor, and she tried to scream out, but she couldn’t even hear her own voice. The thought occurred to her that this was what Ritter had been trying to warn her about, before the light and the pain stopped, and her body lay limp on the ground.
Chapter 16
Shifting Perspectives
Griffin sat slouched in the window seat of the Ancient Ramen. He clasped a mug of tea in his hands. His stomach did not feel up to eating solid foods. Even the smell of the tea turned sour in his nose. How could he consume anything when his best friend could be suffering through torture this very moment?
“Not hungry today?” Kenji asked, taking a seat across from him. “Or is my food just that bad?”
Griffin mumbled, a kind of low grumbling noise that sounded like a rumbling stomach.
“How’s the quest for the truth going?” Kenji asked. “You get anywhere with that girl?”
“Turns out it was the wrong girl,” he admitted, taking a quick sip of his tea.
“Sorry to hear that.” Kenji shifted in his chair and looked out at his customers before turning back to him. “Maybe you should talk to my boy. He’s going through something of a heart-ache himself.”
“Oh, this isn’t heartache,” Griffin retorted, almost defensive.
“Then what is it?”
“It’s me deciding whether or not I should do something incredibly stupid.”
Kenji gave out a loud laugh, causing several of the customers to look their way. “I always feel a man should do something stupid at least several times in his life. It’s a good way of reminding him where his place is in the world.”
Griffin scrunched his brow. “Really? I would have thought, I don’t know, avoiding stupidity was a good thing.”
Kenji tapped his hand on the table and stood to his feet. “When you’re my age, son, you come to see things as they truly are.”
“I only hope I make it that long,” he mumbled, staring out the window at the softly falling snow.
The front doors opened, and a customer stepped inside, shaking off the winter flakes from his jacket. Kenji told the man he would be right there. “It seems to me, Griffin, that all you need to ask yourself is this. Are you afraid of dying young? Or are you afraid of regret? Figure out which you’re more afraid of, and then make your decision.”
He left to take care of his customer, and Griffin took a large swig of his tea. Death or regret. He lifted the glass to his lips one more time, downing the rest of it. What was a little death anyway?
The gray building on Sprocket Street was not that hard to find. Griffin’s heart pumped wildly in his chest as he stared across at it, wondering where Harper was being kept and imagining the possible horrors that were being done to her. He parked his bike out of sight and casually walked across the street, stopping at the shop next to it. He studied the building a little more closely now. There was blue window trim painted on the outside, but no actual windows in between. Aside from a front door, the only other way inside was a vent on the top of the roof.
Reaching into his pocket, he pulled out a small ball. It was one of his inventions. It resembled a tiny mass of wires no bigger than the tip of his small finger. If a button was pushed, it could extend itself half a foot.
He gripped the small device in between two of his fingers and gulped down some courage. Walking up to the door of the building, he gave it a sharp knock. Nothing made a sound inside, so he knocked again.
“Hello,” he called out. “I think I was supposed to meet someone here.”
He wrapped on the door harder. A moment later it swung open, and a rather angry looking Task Force agent stared down at him.
“I’m so sorry!” Griffin exclaimed. “I have the wrong place!”
As he said this, he lifted his hand up to the door frame where the hole had been cut out for the lock, and slipped the metal ball inside. The agent had been too busy staring at his face to notice what he had done. Behind the agent he could see a front room with a computer, and a back hallway that no doubt led to the prison cells.
“Get out of here!” the agent yelled gruffly.
Griffin stumbled back a few paces and, hoping that the door would still be able to close, began to hurry down the street. The agent slammed the door in anger, and it locked back firmly in place with the ball still inside. Griffin breathed a sigh of relief and walked back to his bike, feeling like he was going to throw up.
* * *
Nausea washed over Jessie’s body like a wave of suffocation. She couldn’t see anything. Her hands reached up to her face to find her eyes. Her palm pressed into her left eye-lid, but when her hand reached her right eye, an immense pain exploded in her head, and she screamed out. Her voice sounded weathered and tortured, like so many old soldiers that woke up in the night, screaming in a hot sweat.
“It’s okay, it’s okay,” a voice said from above her.
Nimble fingers pried her hands from her face and placed something wet and cool on her forehead. Like so many times after waking up, she half expected Tom to be there, taking care of her. But the voice did not belong to him, and the hands that had touched hers were not familiar.
“Why… why can’t I see anything?” she breathed out in panic.
“I snuffed out all the light, remember?” This time she recognized Jason’s voice as he spoke. “You were screaming about…” he stopped himself. “I put out the light so you couldn’t see them anymore.”
Her arms shook underneath a thin sheet, and the rest of her trembled with terror for something she couldn’t even remember. She thought she felt the tickle of moisture falling from her eyes, but she did not feel as if she was crying. She could hardly move the muscles on her face, and the water coming out of her eyes felt more like a leak.
“See
what?” she asked. “I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t remember—”
“That’s good,” he said, putting a hand over the washcloth on her forehead.
“Please Jason,” she breathed. “Tell me what’s happening.” She shifted her hands and realized there was cloth wrapped around them. “Why are my hands bandaged?” she asked.
“You were gripping them so tightly they started to bleed,” he told her in a whisper.
Something in his voice irked her. It sounded as if something was scaring him, and that in turn scared her.
Her blank eyes stared into the darkness, not even able to see his outline. The right side of her face burned in pain. She needed to know what she looked like. Queasiness gripped her throat again, and the mystery of not knowing became too much.
“I can’t take this,” she told him. “I need to see.”
“Jessie, that’s not—” he started to say, trying to keep her down, but she would not be held back.
She dashed up on weak legs from what she assumed was the bed in her room, and rushed over to the window. Her hands blindly tried to scratch off whatever it was that was covering them, but nothing gave way. She breathed in deep gulps to try and calm herself and keep down the lump of sickness waiting to come up from the back of her throat.
She stumbled over to the desk at the wall, and her hands scrambled over any object she could find. Empty bottles of water fell to the floor, but soon her hand touched something smaller and cylindrical. She recognized it as the tube of purple light that Jason carried with him, and turned it over frantically in her hands to push the button and light the room in a purple glow.
There was a mirror on the desk in front of her, and when she looked inside it, she gripped her hands around the sharp corners of the desk to keep from falling down. She could see Jason standing behind her, but the room was wrapped in dark shadows like the smoke of the Bandit. It swelled and wavered, and her vision would cloud in total blackness one moment, and subside the next. She felt her body pitch and sway with the movement of the black as if the ground underneath her was moving and making her head boil with a rising feeling of sickness.
