“Veronica, coffee,” the General barks as soon as she is comfortable, and I fight the urge to roll my eyes. Reed shows no such restraint and chortles with laughter. Veronica blushes to the roots of her fair hair and scuttles from the room. Everyone starts to talk among themselves and I turn to Michael who is sitting on my left.
“So, big day tomorrow?” I murmur and he grins.
“Yeah! Seventeen! Awesome, right?” Not giving me a moment to answer, he blurts out, “You are coming to the party?”
The party. I’ve heard all about it, of course, Michael’s birthday bash; it’s all any of the kids in town can talk about; self-planned by Michael who seems intent on breaking all the rules. Of course I have absolutely no intention of going, I am far too old for a teenage disco and, as for chaperonage, I am fairly certain that Morgan will curb any immoral behaviour. Michael’s sister is far too old for her nineteen years, even more so after losing her boyfriend Robert Rellis in the final battle.
As if reading my thoughts, she glances down the table at me, and I am surprised by the loathing in her eyes. Morgan and I have always had a tumultuous relationship; she is headstrong and stubborn but, all in all, I like and admire the girl. She is brave and is prepared to fight for her beliefs.
“So, you’re coming, right?” Michael’s voice brings me out of my reverie and I turn back to meet his hopeful gaze. Not having the heart to disappoint him and knowing how much I am going to regret it later, I nod.
“Sure, Michael, I’ll be there.”
Veronica returns with a tray of coffee and we get down to business.
“Joseph Hale seems to have taken over where Dane left off,” the General says. Joseph Hale assumed the position of President of the New United States shortly after Eric’s death, but we are well aware that this is an illusion. Hale had been only a minor player in Eric’s cabinet; he lacks the hunger and drive to legitimately want to be President. Someone else is pulling the strings, someone lurking in the shadows, manipulating the system. An enemy without a face. My husband had implied there was another power player before I broke his neck, but I hadn’t taken him seriously. I didn’t believe him, thinking it was just an excuse, a desperate attempt to save his own life. Not for the first time, I feel a twinge of regret, wondering if I had been too hasty, killing Eric before he could give us any information. The General, obviously thinking along the same lines, gives me an accusatory glare.
“Any news of my father?” I ask, changing the subject. He shakes his head and consults his notes.
“No, your father and the VP are both still missing, as is Quinn.” Quinn is Kenneth Williams’s nephew and he had been working undercover in the States as Eric’s henchman. “So far, our spies have been unable to unearth any information regarding their whereabouts,” the General continues and I slump back in my chair.
I remember waving goodbye to my dad as we left him to deal with the aftermath of the final battle. I had been so exhausted, so physically and emotionally drained, that I had waved tiredly to him and then I had turned away, letting Reed help me back to the Toledo Camp where we had mourned our dead. In the self-absorption of my guilt, I did not realise until the next morning that my father and Vice-President Williams had not returned, and we had headed back to the boundary fence immediately. The strong NUSA presence at the fences shocked us to the core. We believed we had dispatched most of Eric’s soldiers in battle, that we had overcome the Dane Army, but the sheer number that prevented us from re-entering the States was mind-blowing.
“Don’t concern yourself too much with your father’s welfare at this stage, Miss Davis; it’s fairly obvious where he is,” the General booms and I jerk my head back in shock.
“What? Where?”
“Well, he’s obviously at the main laboratory which we know is in the Dane Corp Plaza. There’s no way NUSA are creating the number of soldiers that they are without your father’s help.”
“My father would never help NUSA!” I exclaim angrily.
“Not without cause, agreed, but you don’t know what they might be doing to him; torture, threatening the life of someone he cares about; you should know well enough that there are many ways to make people do things they don’t want to do.”
I am almost on my feet when I realise that, in his own way, he is complimenting me. He is not accusing my father of willingly working against us and what he says makes a lot of sense. My father is the pioneer of the Gifting procedures; he holds the record for the highest success rate in administering them. It makes logical sense that they are using him to increase their army exponentially. I am relieved and terrified at the same time. If they are using my father, it means that he’s alive. But I know Jeffrey Davis; he will not stand by and be used for long. He will find a way to sabotage the serums, or he will try to escape. Either way, he will put his own life in danger as soon as he can, rather than work against the Legion. He is loyal to the cause. He has fought for the Resistance since the beginning, both he and Kenneth Williams.
“It’s the VP,” I breathe. Why is this only occurring to me now? “It’s the only reason he would do what they say; the only thing he has ever put above the cause is the safety of Kenneth Williams. He’s been protecting him since the holocaust; it kept him from his own family. They must be threatening his life.” My father would die before he allowed anything to happen to Kenneth. The General nods slowly, and I can see that it makes sense to him too.
“We need to get them out of there,” I continue. “If we know where they are, we can go in and get them.”
“Not possible!”
“General, this is my father we’re talking about. And Kenneth. They’re crucial to the Resistance, we can’t just leave them there.”
“We can and we will, Miss Davis.”
“With all due respect, General, I am the leader of the Legion,” I remind him firmly. “I decide what we can and cannot do.”
Surprisingly he does not look at all flustered by my declaration, he simply turns to Reed and Kwan who are sitting to his left.
“There’s no way, Tiny,” Reed begins, sounding sympathetic. “We’d never make it through the fences, not armed the way they are.”
“It would be suicide,” Kwan agrees, looking down at the table, reluctant to meet my eyes.
“The last thing we need is more innocent people getting hurt.” Morgan’s low rebuke is barely more than a whisper, but her accusation comes through loud and clear.
“What we need to focus on is increasing our numbers.” The General smoothly changes the subject, now that his point has been made.
“Aren’t there enough of us already?” Michael asks naively. “I thought we already had too many mouths to feed.”
“He means soldiers,” I clarify. “He wants us to create more Gifted soldiers.” The General does not miss the note of disgust in my voice.
“Well, what would you have us do, Miss Davis?” The General’s voice is dripping with contempt. “We are outnumbered by about twenty to one. Your little adventure four months ago lost us valuable resources and saw us lose our one chance at getting any answers. A dead man can’t talk.”
“People die undergoing those procedures!” I exclaim, deliberately ignoring yet another attempt to reproach me for killing Eric. “Losing our people in battle is one thing, but asking them to risk their lives before they are even in danger, is another!” I take a deep breath, trying to calm down. “Besides,” I continue, only marginally less angry, “my father is not here. And without him we haven’t a hope in hell of successfully Gifting soldiers.”
“Nice try, Miss Davis.” The General sees through my feeble attempt at bringing everyone around to my initial idea. “But we are not launching a suicide mission to extract your father. And in case you’ve forgotten, three of the soldiers at this very table were Gifted right here at headquarters. Successfully, as you can see.”
He is not wrong. David, Smith a
nd Wakeford were all Gifted right here in the Rebeldom. One of the first things the Resistance did when my father secured his position in the NUSA laboratory was to secure enough equipment and research materials to set up a fully functional lab of our own – millions of dollars’ worth of scientific testing apparatus. We run the bigger, electronic machines on generators, but mostly it is very delicate manual work, compiling and testing the serums, studying DNA, using a multitude of high-tech lab equipment. How he managed to get it all out of the States without anyone suspecting him, is beyond me. The Resistance has been creating soldiers for years, since long before my time, and has always been cautious, taking its time, and aiming for success as opposed to quantity, which is why our numbers have never been anywhere near the NUSA army’s numbers. What the General is now suggesting though, is mass-production; Gifting as many people as we can in as short a time as possible.
Most of the Legion were Gifted here in our lab, only a few were found in the States when we were hunting for the individuals on Eric’s Gifted list. The exceptions, like the source of Kwan’s and the Kellys’ abilities, are a mystery. The Kellys, Gifted by their mother, do not remember much about their procedures. My gaze comes to rest on Kwan. It is no secret that he had his procedure done in order to seek vengeance on Eric for the death of his wife, but he has never divulged the source of his ability.
“What are the numbers?” Reed breaks the silence, sounding far more strategic than shocked at the General’s suggestion.
“We’re down to about two hundred soldiers, our estimates put NUSA defence at around four thousand, maybe more,” the General answers.
“We might need to consider it,” Reed looks down the table at me, and I gape at him.
“Reed!” I can’t believe he would side with the General on this, regardless of how strained things are between us.
“I only said consider it, Tiny; don’t get your panties in a twist.”
“What about Adam Vincent?” I address the General, trying to keep the disrespect out of my voice. Just before his death Eric had told me to find Adam Vincent. I had not thought much of it at the time, but when it became apparent that NUSA was not defeated with Eric, I realised that finding Adam Vincent might well provide the answers we are looking for.
“No news,” he answers. “None of our people have managed to find any trace of him. I am inclined to believe that Dane was manipulating you; there is no way Vincent could have survived the Washington blast.”
Adam Vincent, the son of President James Vincent, who was our nation’s leader when World War Three took place, was supposedly killed along with his father in the blast that tore through Washington DC. They were aboard Air Force One, but the jet never made it to safety.
“You survived the Pentagon explosion,” I counter, and the General sighs in exasperation.
“We’ll keep looking. But the chances of a seventeen-year-old boy surviving the holocaust on his own, in such close proximity to a direct blast, are highly unlikely.”
“But it’s not impossible!” Michael’s own almost-seventeen-year-old self is bristling with indignation beside me, and my mood lightens considerably.
“Exactly.” I smile at him.
Chapter 2
I emerge into the sunshine feeling no sense of achievement. We are not getting anywhere. I see Kwan and Morgan chatting amiably, heading for the mess hall. Michael trails behind them until a few other kids his age call him over to the sports field to join a game of football. I can’t believe I promised I would make an appearance at his party. I am wondering idly if he would notice if I wasn’t there, when Reed saunters up beside me.
“Look, Tiny, I . . .” I turn on him, expectantly, and he shrugs his broad shoulders.
“I know, okay, I know how hard this is for you, how badly you want to get him out, I get it. I care about him too but it would be a massacre. You can’t expect me to agree to lead our people to their slaughter.”
“We only need to subdue the soldiers along one stretch of fence; it’s obvious that’s where they are focused.” I am reaching and he knows it.
“They would call for help, Rebecca. We would be overwhelmed before we even reached the city centre, and can you even imagine how many soldiers there are in the city itself, considering how many are manning the fences? We would never make it to Chicago, let alone the Plaza.”
“That might not be entirely true,” David Riley interrupts suddenly from behind us. He is panting slightly. David may be Gifted with strength, but his fitness is still well below average. I make a mental note to get him into Kwan’s training programme as soon as possible.
“What do you mean?” I ask, looking to Reed for an answer, but he simply shrugs again.
“I’ve been studying the Illinois blueprints,” David begins, and then, at our blank stares, “you guys know I was an engineer, right? For the Chicago city planning office?” I shake my head. “Aw, come on! I was planted by your father. I would still be there if I hadn’t been in the Unit Three camp visiting my kids when those soldiers arrived.”
I think back to the first time I met David when we were evacuating the Unit Three camp. I hadn’t paid much attention at the time, but I vaguely recall him and my dad poring over what looked like a bunch of maps. If he was working so closely with my father, it also explains where David got his ability of strength, although he told his wife he lost a poker bet.
“Get to the point, Specs,” Reed says, and David reddens slightly before addressing me directly.
“There’s an old underground freight system beneath the city, about 62 miles of tunnels and connections. They haven’t been used since before the war, but,” he lowers his voice conspiratorially, “there are connecting shafts into quite a few buildings, mainly business premises and hotels, and one is just a few blocks from the Dane Corp Plaza, in the Macy’s sub-basement.” He pauses, waiting for our reactions, but I am trying to get my head around this new information, and Reed is waiting for David to get to the point.
“Look, these tunnels are forty feet below street level. They’re the perfect place to hide, the ideal location to launch our attack!”
“How do we access the tunnels?”
David’s face falls slightly at my question. “The best place for us to get in is a shaft near the river.”
“Which river?” Reed demands, and David’s voice drops even lower.
“The Chicago River.”
“Chicago? So we have to be within the States for this master plan of yours to work? I don’t know if you’ve been listening, but the whole point is that we can’t get into NUSA, Sparky. Little problem called the heavily manned boundary fences . . . or did you miss that part?” Reed sounds exasperated.
“What about the Ottawa River?” David argues. “It’s only about five miles north-east of Toledo, and it crosses the Ohio-Michigan state line about a mile before it reaches Lake Erie.”
“The fences can’t cross the water,” I murmur, hope flaring in my chest, but, conscious of Reed watching my reaction, I force myself not to show it.
“See if you can get us in,” I order David, who nods immediately. “Let me know if you find anything.”
“Rebecca, I . . .” Reed trails off, but before he can continue, I interrupt.
“Look, if you want to pull out, I understand. Things have got a whole lot more complicated, a lot has happened . . .” I can’t find the right words to express what I am feeling. Things are weird between us, they have been for a while.
“Are you questioning my allegiance to the Legion?” he raises his eyebrows, completely misunderstanding what I am trying to say.
“No,” I answer, “but this thing between you and me, I think we . . .”
“Seriously, Tiny, let’s not even go there,” he cuts across me, and then turns on his heel and walks away, leaving me mid-sentence. I fight the urge to stamp my foot in the dusty gravel.
“I
don’t know how you keep your hands off that man,” a female voice croons behind me. I whirl around.
“Jenna! Alex!” I bend down and scoop up my son who has a rucksack thrown over his shoulder.
“I thought I’d pick him up from school for you. I figured you might run late. Elizabeth said to tell you she set him a few words for homework,” Jenna grins and I nod.
“Thanks.”
It’s strange to think that Jenna Larsen was my childhood nemesis, my rival for Aidan’s affections. Of course, Aidan had only created that illusion in my mind to tease my younger self. In reality there was never anything to worry about, but Jenna had certainly fancied him, even if the feeling was not reciprocated. Jenna had grown up in the same town as we had, in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and we had attended the same school. When I had left to marry Eric, my father had insisted my adoptive family be protected and I had cut all ties with them. They had stayed within the States until Aidan had come onto Eric’s radar, after a heated discussion during which Aidan had let his temper get the better of him. My father had smuggled them all out into the Rebeldom; Aidan and Alex, Aidan’s father Jonathan, and my aunt Jessie, my mother’s sister. They had taken as many people with them as were willing to go, Jenna Larsen being one of them. She had stayed close to Aidan over the years and was very fond of my son Alex.
“Hey Mom! Can I go play?” My five-year-old son points at the older boys kicking a ball around.
“Sure, but just for a bit,” I call after him as he streaks towards the field before the words are even out of my mouth. I watch as he gives Michael a high-five.
“So, seriously, you haven’t even . . .” Jenna starts, still watching Reed’s departing figure.
“Don’t even go there,” I say, echoing Reed’s earlier words.
The Legion Page 2
