“Don’t you like insufferable men?”
She could see that Jackson immediately regretted the words.
“I’m sorry,” he said to the ground. “That was unnecessary.”
“I’m sorry, too.” She waited until he lifted his face to her. “Not for—I’m happy now. I really am.” She couldn’t help the smile that tugged at her lips. “He may be insufferable, but he makes me happy. I am sorry you were hurt. I thought you’d made your choice, Jackson, and it wasn’t me.”
Jackson shrugged. “Guess I should’ve been more like Alex.” A world of resentment welled up in the tight words.
She snorted and shook her head. “I fell for you because you weren’t like him. Which is ironic now….”
A flash of something crossed his face. Disgust? Regret? Lena wasn’t sure, and she wasn’t sure whether it was aimed at her or at himself.
“Mmmm,” he agreed. He swiped his finger over the dust on his boot. “And then I lost you for the same reason.” He took a deep breath then swallowed. He met her gaze for a second before his swerved away. “It’s fine. I understand. I just hope you know what you’re doing.”
“I always know what I’m doing.”
“Like running away from your boss and jeopardizing everything?” He shook his head in disapproval. “I get that he’s obnoxious. My understanding is he’s also vain, egotistical, and stupid. That’s why Alex was able to finagle you a spot. It would be a shame if everyone’s hard work came to nothing because you couldn’t deal with a difficult personality for a few hours.” Jackson bounced twice on the balls of his feet, working his knees, before he rose to continue his patrol.
She picked at her dinner. Why had he bothered to say he understood, to apologize for Dust’s sake, if he was just going to swipe at her?
What the Dust did Jackson know anyway, she seethed. He had the job he’d always wanted, and he’d used her to get it. He had no idea how much it had hurt. That she’d gotten over it and found unexpected feelings and happiness was irrelevant. He had no idea what she’d been through in the last few hours, either, and he felt perfectly free to criticize her for wanting a harassment-free dinner.
What really infuriated her, though, was that he was right. She shoved the last of the stewed pork into her mouth, even though it had lost its flavor, then hauled herself to her feet to carry her plate back to the kitchen. She grabbed her fry bread, scraped the rest of her dinner into the bins, and then stacked her plate for washing.
She trudged back through the darkness to Domenico’s kitchen car. Tomorrow, tomorrow night, the next day, she told herself, counting down to her actual escape and the revenge she’d waited for so long. You can do this. She finished the last of the fry bread and wiped her hands on the back of her pants. One last deep breath of cool night air fortified her before she slid the door open.
“Oh! Has my wayward charge actually returned?” Domenico’s voice, dark and still angry, twisted its way down the aisle to her. “I should make you sleep outside with the bugs for your disrespect!”
You can do this.
The Councilor always slept through breakfast, so they were officially off-duty for the morning meal. Three’s senior staff had to eat with the rest of the rabble or go without. Lena and Domenico made their own light breakfast, as they had the day before on the road. In spite of the uncomfortable night, she found she had energy to spare as she buzzed with secret excitement. By that night, she’d have an accomplishment to show the memory of her parents.
In the afternoon, Fort Nevada agents would flow down over the caravan, creating a distraction while Lena went for the Councilor. By the evening, there would be no more Three. There would be one less corrupt Councilor ordering behind-the-scenes torture and death. Her girls would be one step closer to safe. As they got back underway, she lost herself in fantasies of how she’d do it. Suffocation? Little heart attacks? Stroke?
First they had to make it around the wastelands. She had been to Albuquerque and seen the charred areas where the pipeline still smoldered beneath the city. But nothing had prepared her for the Black Lands of Colorado.
The caravan made its way past what had been Denver, the caravaners tense and ready for attacks by Neo-barbs or Scavengers. The annual caravan made too attractive a target, and the rocky forests of Colorado were ideal for ambush staging.
The smell struck her first, an acrid, choking burn sneaking into the cars through cracks in windows and doors and catching in the back of the throat and nose. Domenico, a veteran of many Council trips, had already dampened a cloth and wrapped it around his face. She followed suit. Of course, where Domenico had a beautiful custom square of fabric, Lena had a dishcloth.
They stopped for lunch immediately north of Denver. It wasn’t ideal, but they wouldn’t be clear of the stink for hours anyway. The sooner they served, cleaned, and packed back up, the sooner they could leave again. Once Domenico took Three’s luncheon out to the main cars, Lena leaned out to peer away from the caravan.
To the east, broken, black ground stretched as far as the eye could see. In a few places, steam still rose from the cracks, curling and toxic. The damage extended through what had been Kansas and Oklahoma and down into central and east Texas—the no man’s lands which had borne the brunt of the immediate, fiery death that erupted over two hundred years before.
Sobered, she climbed back up into the car and began the clean-up. She tried to push away the imagined horror of the deaths of those trapped by the fumes but not incinerated by the flames. And then, of course, millions died afterward, of poisoning, of thirst, of starvation or disease once everything had collapsed. She couldn’t shake the feeling of darkness and despair that seemed to creep in with the bad air.
What would she have done, if she’d been alive then? Would she have tried to flee?
I’d do whatever it took to find Alex.
It wasn’t because the Alex she imagined from that time would be able to save them. At the root of the longing was the simple acknowledgment that she’d want to see him again, to hold him before death claimed them.
She pressed a hand to her chest, where an ache grew at the thought. She had always been about the physical. If she didn’t care, it couldn’t hurt. Where had this maudlin woman come from? Yes, they’d been through so much together, come so far since the day he’d walked into her home in the desert and changed everything. But this? She didn’t love him, did she? No. They were friends, partners in revolution.
She swallowed back the ache in her throat and chest.
When the Dust had that happened?
A motion out the window to her right caught her eye. She moved closer and peered through the curtains. Alex stalked toward her car, his face set in grim lines. A huge, bald man with a bushy blond mustache paced him. Behind them, she could make out the legs of a smaller, slighter man, but the rest of him remained hidden.
Her glance strafed the area around her, recognizing movement everywhere as people were moved away. Agents, some of whom she recognized as Alex’s who’d slipped in to leave reports at the safe house for Jackson to pick up, slipped into positions around the car. Around her.
Around her? But it was too early. The attack hadn’t started. They weren’t in position. She caught another glimpse of his face as he moved in. It was dark, set, and not with anger alone. She recognized the expression. He had closed off, exactly as he had the day he’d stepped up and looked down at her strapped to the table in the Council building.
Her heart caught, twisted, and then began again, the slow, loud thumping a contrast to the panicked skittering of her thoughts. She stood, clearly visible through the window, as still as a rabbit that hoped it wasn’t the prey being sought.
Alex moved around the front of the truck, out of view for a moment. When he appeared again, he roughly shoved the third man to the side, out of her view. Alex and the bald man moved into position on either side of the door.
He reached and slid it open. Alex called out as he met her frightened stare, “Magda
lena Gracey?”
It isn’t time. This isn’t the plan.
Lena swallowed. “No. No. There must be a mistake. My name is Mina Gardin. I have papers.”
He nodded at her, a small, comforting movement. It was a move designed to placate and disarm a suspect.
What was going on?
“Miss,” he told her firmly, as if they hadn’t spent as many stolen moments together over the past few days as they could manage, as if the whispered endearments that had made her feel like glowing Dust filled her chest hadn’t come from his lips. His eyes were blank, like he’d never seen her before in his life. “If you could please step out of the car now, I’m sure we can clear this up.”
It wasn’t time yet, but he played his role so well.
It’s a role. It’s just a role….
She looked again out the window to peer through the gap in the curtains. Nothing moved. The agents had disappeared, and the caravaners were hiding. Was Jackson out there, too?
His words from her first night in the caravan came back to her. He would do whatever he had to do to ensure the plan went forward. He had made it clear that so should she.
She stepped one foot forward and reached up to pull the damp dishtowel from around her lower face. It fell to the floor beside her. Alex reached in, extending a helping hand.
She should go with him, shouldn’t she? If this was all a part of the plan, or a contingency? Her heart thudded in her ears. She trusted him. It must be a change in plans.
She remembered his arm reaching out to her before—to shoot her with the electric barbs of a Taser. In the end, he’d made it right. He’d made his decision, but he’d done whatever it took to get her free.
“My name is Mina Gardin,” she repeated. She couldn’t read his eyes.
They looked nothing like they had two days before when he kissed her goodbye, fingers framing her face, forehead pressed to hers, reminding her to be careful. She couldn’t read him at all.
It’s a role.
She stopped and started to turn back. “I can get my papers.”
They’d said to keep them on her at all times, hadn’t they?
“No,” Alex said. “We can get them in a minute, miss. You come on down, please.”
She couldn’t read his eyes.
Lean swallowed and stepped forward. She took the first step down and reached for his offered hand.
His fingers closed on hers like a vice, and he yanked her from the car.
She stumbled, caught herself, and then fell off balance again as he spun her around by her arm and pressed her against the hot metal side of the car.
He pinned her, one hand holding her wrist to the middle of her back, his knee pressing into the small of her back.
“Stop! What are you doing?” Terror filled her voice. Shame flooded through her, and she didn’t know if it was because she couldn’t make herself trust Alex or because she had ever trusted him at all. “Please, stop! You’re making a mistake!” She tried to push against him but he was immovable.
“Shut up.” A voice growled in her ear. Not Alex.
A hand fumbled at the back of her neck.
“Stop! Stop! This isn’t what I wanted!” Another voice shouted at them. Danny’s voice?
Lena tried to turn her head and look, but Alex held her fast. Another hand came up to push the side of her face against the car. Not Alex’s hand. Why did it matter?
“You should have thought of that before,” Alex snapped. The rage in his voice wasn’t directed at her, and it wasn’t an act. This was real. “What you want is irrelevant now, Mr. Gracey.”
Danny did this? Her body sagged as her knees went loose. Her brother had seen her. He had reported her. She had been wrong. Her brother had done this, and Alex had no choice.
The hand fumbled against her neck again, pushing her hair up and away.
She felt the icy prick of awareness a moment before she heard the snick of connection. She bucked against them, desperate, wild for only a second. The Dust gathered within her chest, ready to burst out—
And then it scattered as the collar powered up, and the current surged through her.
29
As soon as the collar snapped into place, Alex stepped away. He forced himself not to avert his eyes as Lena fell into a boneless heap. Boneless, but not unconscious.
She stared at him, even as she blinked uncontrollably.
It didn’t matter that he hadn’t had a choice from the instant Merritt appeared at his shoulder just as Danny was asking why his sister was in camp, working with the Councilor’s chef. At that point, her arrest wasn’t in doubt. Alex made the decision to use her arrest to get her in front of Three instead of sneaking her in later. He’d be damned if he’d allow himself to look away from what he’d done.
His stomach heaved. His well-trained mind might be racing, picking through available choices and making strategic decisions, but his body fought his control. Even his chest felt hollow. He swallowed back the bile and tried to control the trembling of arms that wanted nothing more than to rip the collar from her now.
It’s temporary. Ah, Dust, Lena, it’s temporary, I promise!
He pulled the gloves from his belt and shoved his hands inside of them. When he knelt and reached out to touch her, intending to lift her to take her to the main car where Three waited, he could feel the charge surrounding her.
“Are you trying to give her a heart attack?” He reached his fingers around to adjust the current himself.
“If necessary.” Merritt’s response was even and satisfied. “And don’t touch that collar, Reyes. This little bitch is the strongest Spark ever born. I saw what she did to the Council building. She gets max volts or she gets a bullet in the brain.”
Alex looked up and sneered at the man. “Scared, Merritt? I’ve faced her twice now and lived to talk about it.”
“Yes, you have.” Merritt made it clear the fact made his skills, or him, suspect.
Merritt had responded to Three’s selection of Alex as Security Chief by making the transition as difficult and tedious as he possibly could. Alex’s original plan had been to simply wait the man out, until he’d discovered Merritt had been in charge of the long-ago interrogation and disposal of Lena’s father. It wasn’t shocking in itself, nor was it something he hadn’t had to do himself in the past, but the mere fact of what it had done to Lena made him lean toward simply ridding himself of the man responsible.
It factored into his decision to bring the man on the trip. It had been widely assumed that Alex planned to leave Merritt as his Interim Chief while Alex was gone. Any Senior Agent could hold down the city, he told Merritt, but he needed the man who’d been responsible for the creation of the security plans to travel with them. Who better to deal with any lapses of security if they occurred?
Who better to take the fall? The lapse, and Merritt’s subsequent fall, was already planned.
Alex held Merritt’s cold stare as he adjusted the current. If Merritt’s hand so much as twitched toward his gun, he would drop the man where he stood, even if he had to hunt down every witness watching the scene from in and behind the cars around them.
The big man was clearly unhappy, but he didn’t make a move.
Alex lowered his attention to Lena. Her lids stopped spasming, but current still raged through her, rendering her powerless. He hoped somewhere in her was a kernel of trust big enough to know he’d get her out of the collar and safe. She might forgive him if he could get her to understand why he’d made the choice, a combination of tactics and knowing her resilience. The collar was a means to an end. He only had to make her see it.
She has to see. His mind tried to spin away to what would happen if she didn’t, and his chest clenched, panic taking his breath. Focus, Alex.
He stood, watching Daniel Gracey now from the corner of his eye as he dusted off his knees. The young man was quite an adroit actor, although his emotions were probably real this time.
Lena’s brother stood behind Merrit
t looking down at his sister in horror. He sobbed in great silent heaves, tears and snot flowing freely down his face.
That’s right, he urged the young man’s emotions on silently, think about how you’ve betrayed your sister and the memory of your father. You betrayed your dead mother, too, and everything they ever asked of you.
Instead of giving voice to his thoughts, he simply growled, “Get over here, Gracey, and make yourself useful.”
Danny looked up and took the few shuddering steps over. He managed to get out, “This isn’t what I wanted.”
“I don’t give a shit.” He waited for it to sink in. It was the truth. “Now, pick her up. You can carry her back to the Councilor. We’ll see what he wants us to do with her.”
It was needlessly cruel, especially considering the true circumstances. He had no intention of allowing the Councilor to decide to do anything with her, but his people knew he couldn’t abide stupidity. Danny approaching Alex directly about his sister qualified.
The kid stared at him. He looked down at his sister and then back up. He made a feeble gesture with his hand. “But…the current. I don’t have any of those gloves.”
“And you barely rate as a Spark.” Merritt moved closer, threatening. “It’ll hurt, but you won’t be incapacitated. Pick her up. Now.”
The muted sound of rapid footsteps falling on packed earth had both Alex and Merritt straightening. Alex had sent a message to Jackson before he and Merritt had taken Danny to see Three. He’d hoped Jackson might beat them here, so Lena would at least have notice of what was coming and steel herself for it. It hadn’t happened. Jackson had been too slow. There’d been no warning for her.
Jackson rounded the edge of the car now and skidded to a stop, his focus going immediately to Lena on the ground. He froze. Panic and fear flared across his face. His blurted words, a shocked, “What are you doing?” made Alex silently curse him.
“Agent Lee,” he snapped, “pull yourself together.”
Jackson managed to recover, dragging his shocked stare from the collar around her neck. “Did you need me to transport her, sir?” he managed.
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