I wake up in a moving vehicle, leaned up against the window in the back seat. A white and blue patterned hospital gown is draped over me like a blanket. I can feel that I’m clothed, but everything feels bunched and twisted.
My waking is unnoticed by the other four passengers who are packed tightly into the speeding vehicle. The car is small, but it’s still much larger than the toy-like electric cars in Miles. Miles! I sit up in a flash and shout over the dull conversation. “Take me back! You have to take me back!”
“Easy now. Easy,” guides Della in the center seat next to me. I ignore her and speak to Cy, whose stunned gaze is upon me.
“It’s not Violet,” I tell him. “It’s Evelette!”
“Okay, good,” he starts.
“No!” I silence him in my need to be understood. “My sister. Her name is Evelette.” I turn my attention to the driver, the one who accused me of being a spy. “You have to take me back!”
He slams the brakes, puts the car into park in the middle of the road, and turns around to face me. “Who are you?” he demands again as he did back in the hospital. Only now, I remember the events before waking up in the hospital. I remember the attack.
I turn back to Cy, just as stunned by what I have just realized as he was a moment ago. “It was you.” I know little about him. In fact, after this revelation, it turns out I knew nothing at all. Yet I feel deeply betrayed, as if by a long-standing friend. He seemed so honest, so true. He played me.
I should run. I should let them see if they can catch me twice, but my rage glues me here. I direct it all toward the man who accused me of being the mole. “And you! You attacked me and injected me with something. So the real damn question is who are you?” I fire at him.
Hot air slides uneasily through his gritted teeth. “My name is Crewe Davids. Cy is my brother. We’re seeksmen. That’s why we took you. Our job is to find refugees from the counties and bring them to Sheridan.”
I don’t know what he’s talking about. It’s not the amnesia—that seems to have gone as suddenly as it appeared. It doesn’t matter.
“I don’t care who you are or why you attacked me!” I interject. “I have a younger sister in Miles. I’m her guardian. You’re taking me back!” I demand.
“Have you talked about being out?” Cy asks.
“What?” I’m so irritated. I told them to take me back, not to waste precious time with stupid questions. Get his gas-guzzling car in gear and turn it around.
“Have you talked about being outside of the county?” Crewe asks, matching the forcefulness of my inner thoughts. “Ever? To anyone?” I inhale to spew something out, I’m not sure what, but I’m stopped by quick words. “Your chip had a mike.”
Had? Panicked, I examine my right wrist. It’s bandaged. They removed my chip and stole with it my identity, my claim to my sister, and the meager funds that will keep us alive.
“Answer his question,” Cy raises his voice, his patience waning.
“Yes! Yesterday. Yesterday I showed my sister how I get out of Miles. We talked, but we were outside—”
“Shit!” Crewe yells as he slams both hands into the steering wheel. He shoves the car door open and slams it behind him, leaving the engine idling. He walks briskly away from the car and squats down, squeezing his head in his hands.
“What else did you talk about?” Cy asks. He’s intense and frazzled too, but he remains composed enough to get the information his brother is too hot to hear.
“I got my sister back two days ago. She was terrified by something. She couldn’t talk to me about it while inside Miles,” I explain. “We went out together yesterday before dawn and talked. She was upset because it looked to her as if our dead mother was still alive.”
“What? What does that mean? What do you mean by that?” Cy stutters.
“The court database showed my mother as the guardian of two foster or adopted girls, beginning the year that she died and continuing until now. I looked up their names but found nothing.”
“What, specifically, did you say about being outside of Miles?” asks the remarkably calm doctor in the passenger seat. “Think about the whole transcript. What, if anything, shows without a doubt that you had escaped from Miles?”
I was distraught then, am more so now, and suffered a dizzying concussion and amnesia in between. The specifics aren’t going to come back to me. I can’t think that I said too much directly, even though I wasn’t concerned with censoring my tongue.
“Think about what your sister said too,” Galvesten adds. “You had an extremely high-powered mike, like we haven’t seen before. We can assume it picked up your sister’s voice too. That is, if she doesn’t have a mike of her own,” he hypothesizes.
Why would the two of us have microphones in our chips? I’ve never even heard rumors of such things. It was clearly a shock to Crewe when he came in the room demanding to know who I was. I can tell it’s not something they’ve seen often. Who am I to the county? What threat am I that they would need to tap my conversations?
“My sister said, ‘It’s beautiful out here.’” There’s one thing I can remember. “I told her I would show her around.” Oh no. My memory doesn’t fail me. I have a bad feeling about telling them the next piece of information. But if I’m going to tell the group, the time is now when the threatening member is still having a tantrum on the roadside.
“Later on, I told my sister what our way back inside Miles would consist of, so that she’d have an idea before we attempted it.”
“Try to retell exactly what you said yesterday,” Cy advises.
Rage builds. I have a pressing determination to return to Evvie right now.
“Listen, I know I’ve given you no reason to trust me,” Cy says, “but try to understand that finding out what you said is every bit as detrimental to your sister’s safety as heading back toward her.”
I listen to Cy. I close my eyes and take a deep breath to travel back to yesterday. “I told her we were getting close to our way back in. I told her we were going to do the timing game again and that she could follow me.”
“What’s that? What’s the timing game?” Galvesten asks. Cy rests his brows on his enlaced fingers. He doesn’t present a need to listen as I answer the doctor.
“It’s where we run from tree to tree while the camera scans the opposite side of our location,” I answer as I study Cy. His head remains in a position of defeat. “I don’t even know if the EPA 8-9 camera is in range of my reentry point, but I do it anyway to be safe.”
“What else?” Galvesten insists.
“I told her we were going to climb high in a tree after the timing game. I told her that the tree has two branches that we were going to walk across above the barrier, and then we’d jump down.”
“Crewe?” Cy calls as he opens the back car door opposite me.
“What?” his brother snaps.
“She talked about her way back inside Miles—about the tree,” he confesses brokenheartedly.
“Directly?” Crewe asks with an eerie calm.
“Clear as day,” Cy sighs. He hangs his head and waits for someone to give us all direction.
“Let me talk to her,” Crewe says. I’m out the door the second I hear him say it. As I approach this perilous man, I notice his demeanor has altogether transformed. “Sit down,” he states as he does so himself. He peers into the vast expanse of overgrown fields and forestry ahead.
“No. We’re wasting time! If someone inside has a reason to listen to my sister or me, then they’ve heard everything.”
“And just like they used satellite radio to pick up your conversation outside of Miles they used infrared or satellite imaging to track everywhere you’ve been since. Do you understand we’re being watched right now? We won’t make it to your sister. They’ll take us down as soon as we’re in range, long before we reach the barrier.”
“I’m not asking you to join me,” I tell him. “I can see that’s not going to happen. You need to understand
that it’s my job to protect my sister. I won’t let anyone stand in my way when there’s a chance that someone might hurt her.”
“They’re not just anyone.”
“I wasn’t talking about them.”
“What’s your name?” he asks me out of the blue.
“Sydney.”
“Sydney who?”
“Layton,” I lie. I don’t trust Crewe. He attacked me, sedated me, and is now holding me against my will. The last thing I want to do is tell him who I am.
“They’ll kill you, Sydney. I’ve seen it done. They know your face. They’re tracking you now. You get anywhere near your sister and you’re dead. What good does that do her?”
What if he’s right? What if trying to save Evvie is a suicide mission? I still think I have to go. I have to try. I’m infuriated that he’s done this. He’s put my sister in harm’s way and has caused my looming death for trying to protect her. It’s impossible to save her and impossible to stay and save myself. The latter is my own fault, but it’s only been made necessary because of him.
“So that’s what you do then?” I scream as I shove the powerful Crewe to the ground. “You abduct people from their families and then turn your back on whoever’s left behind!” I shriek as I relentlessly push him into the gravely roadside. My hands clutch the lapels of his jacket and I press my weight into his chest to pin him down.
“It’s not like that,” he defends himself from underneath my hostile grasp.
“No? What’s it like then?”
“I didn’t mean for this to happen, Sydney. I didn’t know,” Crewe yells back. He drops his skull to the gritty ground and surrenders. “We see you out there all the time,” he says softly, sorrowfully to the blue sky above. “Usually that means the person is alone, that they don’t have a family. They’re trapped in a damn Petri dish with a bleak future. That’s what we saw for you, Sydney, and we wanted to change that. We were trying to help.”
They’ve seen me out there all the time. How long have these brothers been watching me? Long enough to study me and to wait for what they thought to be the most opportune time. Crewe’s right about being confined in a Petri dish. Strange. That’s what I call the counties too.
It’s completely his fault that we’re in this predicament, and I hate him for it, yet I see that Crewe is not all bad. He believes he has a worthy duty. The truth is that I might sympathize with his cause, if Evvie and I weren’t victim to it. I let him up, knowing that I couldn’t have held him if he tried to be released.
“Why didn’t you just talk to me?” I ask.
“They watch for us. It’s a good thing anyway since you have a mike. We sedate people and prep them for chip removal. We do the explaining later. Talking was tried before Crewe and I started seeking, but some people decided not to leave their county. Back inside they’d talk. They were tortured for their privileged knowledge and killed for the threat that it brought to their county. Seeksmen were hunted using the citizen’s information, their fate being the same. Seeking has to be done the way we do it.”
“Well, you were wrong about me—I have a family.” I turn and look into the troubled eyes of my abductor. “I know the risk, but you have to understand that it doesn’t matter to me. You need to let me go.”
“I’ll go with her,” Cy says, revealing himself from behind where we sit.
“Cy,” Crewe warns.
“No. She’s right, Crewe. You know she has to go. And we did this. We were wrong. We should go with her.”
“I know that she has to go,” Crewe says as he rises to his feet. “I also know there’s a good chance that she’ll die if she does.” Crewe approaches his brother. “You know that too. Don’t try to be a hero.”
“You’ll let her go alone then? She knows our names and she knows about our town. They’ll suck that and more from her, Crewe. We can’t keep her and we can’t let her go alone. We have to fight.”
Crewe’s hands cover his face again and he begins to pace. “Alright,” he compromises. “I’ve got a plan.”
“What?” Cy and I inquire together.
“We’ll go back to the safe house,” he tells Cy. The next part of his plan is directed more toward me. “We’ll head to Miles tonight. We’ll hope for the chance that they’re expecting this; that for whatever reason, and without knowing it, you are a trap. We’ll hope they aim to keep you alive. Did your sister know that you were jumping this morning?”
“I left a message.” Crewe covers his face and Cy hangs his head. That’s evidently not what they wanted to hear. “It was written. Evvie will know to burn it when she realizes something is wrong, and that won’t be until late. My tablet isn’t on if my boss has been calling.” Both men regain a little faith with this.
“Will she call your boss when she starts to worry that you haven’t come home?” Crewe asks.
“I don’t think so. She’ll be careful if she thinks there’s a chance I never made it to work.” She’ll be terrified, but she’ll be smart, I hope.
“Well, we’ll hope for that. The five of us will hide out around the arc of Sector Seven at dusk. We’ll wait and watch to see if your sister comes. If she does, we’ll be ready. Can you handle a weapon?”
“I’ve never tried.”
“Can Della handle one?” Cy asks, trying to be funny in an untimely manner.
“They’ll both learn,” Crewe says.
“Sydney, you have to know there’s a chance she’ll get taken out. My brother is right, this is our fault, and we’d be wrong not to help, but you have to be sure this is what you want. They might just let her be inside.”
“And they might torture her, right?”
Crewe answers with, “I’m sorry,” and heads back to toward the car, knowing what my answer is.
Concealed in the Shadows Page 14
