No Return (The Internal Defense Series)

by Zoe Cannon

  Had it happened that way for Ryann, even before she had left home? Had her resistance involvement cost her her relationship with her dad?

  Becca shoved the picture to the bottom of the stack. Not useful.

  She kept going. Pile after endless pile. Photo after useless photo. Ryann had walked to school. She had walked home. She had argued with her guardian. She had curled into a ball on her bed and cried. How was this supposed to tell Becca anything? Was there some kind of hidden meaning that she wasn’t seeing, something that would come clear to her only after it was too late?

  The next sheet. And the next.

  And then a creak.

  The sound of the door opening.

  She had locked it, she was sure she had locked it… but it didn’t matter now. The door was opening slowly, but it was opening; the space between it and the wall widened even as she watched. Becca swept her arms out in a bear hug to gather as many of the papers together as possible, mashing them together without caring what order they ended up in. Knowing even as she did that it was too late.

  “Becca. Stop. It’s me. It’s me.” The voice made Becca freeze. The papers tumbled out of her arms and back onto the floor, fanning out in an abstract collage of treason.

  Kara stood in the doorway.

  “Sorry I scared you.” Kara stepped into the room, neatly avoiding one of the few surviving piles of paper, and closed the door behind her. “You guys need a secret knock or something.”

  Becca glared. Her heartbeat still hadn’t returned to normal; her head still swam with adrenaline and fear. “A secret knock? Do you think this is some kind of game?”

  “It was a joke.” Kara looked down at the scattered papers. “I wanted to talk to you, so I waited outside, but you never came out. I got worried.”

  “If you thought I had been arrested, you should have left.” Becca started straightening the stacks. “You never confront Enforcers on your own, especially not in 117. You’ll only get yourself killed.”

  Kara squatted down and studied the floor. “You’re looking through more of the stuff from Surveillance?”

  “Somebody has to.”

  Kara’s gaze flitted around the room, from Becca to the door to the dead camera in the corner. “Isn’t anyone who works here going to wonder why you didn’t leave with the others? What about the cameras—when do they turn back on?”

  “I’ve done this before,” Becca assured her. “They’re used to me staying a little late sometimes. And they never turn the cameras on until I leave. I had one of Meri’s Surveillance informants check once to make sure.”

  “Good.” Kara gave the camera one last suspicious look. “You want help?” Without waiting for an answer, she plucked the sheets from Becca’s hands and started laying them out again, skimming through them as she did.

  Becca started to say no. But another look around the paper-carpeted room stopped her. Maybe with a second pair of eyes she would be able to leave before midnight. And wasn’t this why she had agreed to let Kara into the resistance in the first place? Because Kara could see things she couldn’t? Maybe she would find what Becca had missed.

  “Thank you,” she said instead. The words came out stiff and formal.

  For a few minutes they searched through the papers in silence. Kara was the first to speak. “No overly suspicious meetings,” she murmured—maybe to Becca, maybe to herself. She stabbed her finger down at a photo. “Any chance this guy she’s talking to could be with Internal?”

  Becca crossed the room to look over her shoulder. “Probably not. He’s as young as she is. Surveillance sometimes recruits teenagers to work for them, but I don’t think any of the other divisions do.” She set down her own stack and picked up another. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

  Kara had already moved on to the next page. “Hmm?”

  “You said you were waiting outside to talk to me.”

  “Oh. That.” Kara squinted down at the transcript in her hands. “You talked to Micah the other day.” She paused. “You were out there for a long time.”

  “Nothing happened. You don’t need to worry about that.”

  Kara shook her head. “I wasn’t worried. I just wanted…” She tapped her fingers nervously against the transcript, studiously not looking at Becca. Her voice was smaller than Becca had ever heard it before. “If something does happen, it’s okay. That’s all I wanted to say.”

  “Nothing is going to happen,” Becca repeated. She thrust the page in her hand toward Kara. “What about this? Do you think it’s suspicious?”

  Kara’s brow furrowed as her eyes scanned the photo, which showed Ryann deep in conversation with a store clerk. “I don’t think so. It’s too out in the open. But it’s a possibility.” Her frown deepened. She drummed her fingers against the floor. “We shouldn’t be looking for signs that she’s been meeting with Internal—we probably won’t find them. Internal will be too careful for that, and so will the spies. We need to focus on signs that she’s been in reeducation. I don’t care how careful she is, she wouldn’t be able to hide that.”

  Kara had talked a little about that at the meeting, but she hadn’t had a chance to go into it too deeply. “What should we be looking for?”

  “Reeducation is…” Kara swallowed. Her fingers twitched almost violently. “It changes you. Drives you to extremes. If these people were dedicated before, they’ll be twice as dedicated now—or they’ll act like they don’t care at all. They’ll hate being alone, or they’ll refuse to talk to anyone. They’ll love everyone or hate everyone. Extremes.”

  Without looking up from the papers she held, she picked her way across the floor as she spoke. “Instability is another thing. You can’t put somebody through something like that and expect them to be the same after.” She reached the far wall. Turned around. Back and forth. She picked up speed, still managing to avoid the piles of paper. “And these spies are going to be under constant stress, having to pretend to believe in the same things they were tortured for believing in just a few weeks ago. They’ll be able to hold themselves together—Internal wouldn’t have risked sending them in otherwise—but they won’t be able to do it perfectly.”

  She reached the far wall for the second time and stopped. She turned to face Becca. “That’s what we need to look for. Anything that makes her look not quite right, or different than she was before. Anything that makes her look like she might be about to snap.” She pointed to Becca’s end of the room. “You start on that end. I’ll stay here and work my way to you.”

  The room fell silent again as they got back to work.

  More of the same. Transcripts, logs, photos. The minutiae of everyday life. But this time, Becca knew what she was looking for.

  “She almost never leaves the house,” she murmured.

  Kara raised her head. “Ryann?”

  Becca nodded. “She goes to school under the identity the resistance gave her, but other than that…” She skimmed the paper in her hand. It showed the same thing all the others had. “She left home twice in the ten days that Meri’s people were watching her. Once to buy clothes because the woman she’s living with told her to. Once to meet with her resistance contact. And when she’s at school, she hardly ever talks to anyone. Her teachers have started worrying about her. Look.” She tapped the transcript, even though Kara was too far away to read it.

  Kara frowned down at the sheet she was studying. “That fits.”

  Becca didn’t want it to fit, she realized. She wanted Ryann to be innocent. “It might not mean anything. She could just be shy. And she had to leave everything behind—that changes people too.”

  Kara didn’t say anything.

  “It won’t be enough for Meri. Not when the life of one of her people is at stake.” Making excuses. Stop defending her. Becca would do what she had to do, whatever that was. With or without Meri’s support.

  She would do what she had to do.

  “It might not mean anything,” she repeated.

  Ka
ra held up the sheet in her hand, face grim. “I found something too.”

  Becca started picking her way across the room toward her. “What is it?”

  “Nothing worse than what you found. Like you said, it could be nothing.” She offered the paper to Becca as Becca reached her.

  Becca scanned the transcript. “She started a fight at school.”

  “She doesn’t talk to anyone. She doesn’t make trouble. And then suddenly she’s breaking someone’s nose. It doesn’t look like she had anything against this other girl, either—they hadn’t said a word to each other before this.”

  “Not that Surveillance picked up, anyway. Meri’s people weren’t able to watch her all the time. They might have missed something.” Excuses again. Stop.

  “Or maybe she’s only a frustrated dissident,” said Kara. “I remember what that was like. I hated Internal, and I couldn’t do anything about it, so I took it out on the rest of the world instead. I bet you went through the same thing when you first started questioning Internal.”

  “Mostly I was just scared.” But thinking about it, she could remember the frustration Kara was talking about. She had almost thrown her life away on more than one futile rescue attempt because of it. She had crashed a resistance meeting because of it.

  Maybe Ryann’s fight didn’t mean anything more than those things had.

  “Have you found anything else?” asked Kara.

  Becca shook her head. “You?”

  “Nothing.”

  Not enough to justify killing her. Too much to justify letting her live.

  Do what you have to do.

  Becca took a deep breath. When she spoke, her voice was flat. “I’ll talk to Meri tomorrow. I’ll make her understand.”

  “You’re going to do it.” Kara’s face didn’t reveal anything.

  “We’re not likely to find anything more conclusive. And we don’t know how much time we have.” She ignored the worm of doubt in her stomach, the memory of Ryann’s face in the photograph as she stole a glimpse of her parents. The memory of her own sixteen-year-old self. It needs to be done.

  She bent down and started gathering papers into her arms. “Help me pick these up.”

  Kara placed her hand on top of the stack Becca was trying to grab. “Wait.”

  “You won’t convince me to compromise the safety of the resistance.” Not any more than I already have.

  “I know.” Kara didn’t move her hand. “But there’s something else we can try.”

  Remember what Kara’s plans have already led to, she told herself. Remember Terrence.

  But she asked anyway. “What is it?”

  “We talk to her. Face to face.” Kara stood, eyes alight with inspiration. “I know reeducated kids. You know how to do your evaluation thing.” She gestured at the papers around them. “Put us in a room with her together, and we won’t need any of this.”

  If Becca had a chance to meet Ryann in person… to sit down across from her in an evaluation…

  Spotting spies. Uncovering hidden loyalties. This was what Internal had trained her for. Exactly this.

  She shook her head. “It’s too dangerous. If she’s working with Internal and she finds out who I am, I’ll be handing her the resistance.”

  “We won’t tell her our names.” Kara was already starting to pace again. “We won’t tell her you lead the resistance. All she’ll know is that we’re offering her an opportunity. A chance to do something big.” Back and forth. Back and forth. “If she’s innocent, she’ll be flattered. If she’s a spy, she won’t be able to resist. Either way, she’ll want to talk to us.”

  “It’s still a risk.”

  Kara stopped. She met Becca’s eyes. “You were right before. We aren’t going to find anything else like this, no matter how many of these reports we get. So we either do this, or we kill her now.”

  Becca knew what she had to do.

  Call Meri. Give the order. Sacrifice Ryann’s life like she had sacrificed so many others.

  “We’ll talk to her,” she heard herself say. “I’ll have Meri set up the meeting.”

  * * *

  Another handful of stores had closed since Becca’s last trip to the mall. Almost half the storefronts had gone dark, with banners from their hasty going-out-of-business sales still hanging in the windows. Other windows, the ones with lights still on inside, displayed signs that read things like Stand strong against dissident terror and They can’t scare us away—and, in one tasteless instance, 50% off RUNNING SHOES: You’ll need them when the DISSIDENTS come for you!

  Two Enforcers stood at one end of the food court, checking IDs at the outer entrance and glaring at anyone who had dared to come out shopping. Most of the tables were as empty as the stores, but at a few, people sat talking in muted tones, murmuring words like dissident and bombing and breakout. And in the corner, a girl a few years younger than Becca hunched over her plate as if trying to avoid the gaze of the Enforcers.

  A girl whose face Becca already knew from the surveillance photos.

  Ryann.

  Had Becca looked that young when she had joined the resistance? No wonder they had seen her as a kid.

  Becca jerked her head in Ryann’s direction. Kara nodded. Together, they strode to the table, where they each took a seat—Becca across from Ryann, Kara beside her.

  Ryann’s eyes widened in alarm. She tensed, like she was getting ready to run.

  Kara started to open her mouth. Becca spoke before she could. “It’s all right,” she told Ryann in a low voice. “We’re friends.”

  Ryann looked from Becca to Kara. “Where’s Liam?”

  Her contact. “Don’t give out his name so easily,” Becca admonished. “You have no way of knowing who we really are.”

  A flush spread across Ryann’s face. “Sorry.”

  “Liam told us about you,” Becca lied. “He said you have potential.” She paused just long enough to let the praise sink in. “We’re considering you for a special assignment.”

  The memory of the last time she had said those words shoved its way into her mind. The tiny table, the crowded café, the eager-eyed girl across from her. She pushed the images away. “If you’re successful, it could lead to a position of greater responsibility inside the…” She glanced across the court at the Enforcers. She had to be careful about how much she said. “Inside our organization. You’d have your own network of informants reporting to you—and, most likely, direct contact with the inner circle.”

  Ryann’s eyes went wide again, but not with fear this time.

  “Are you interested?” asked Becca.

  Ryann nodded too hard. “Yes.” Her voice came out as a whispery squeak. She tried again. “Yes. I’m… yes. Just tell me what I have to do.”

  The yearning in Ryann’s eyes was almost too strong, so intense it hurt to look at. Because she sees a chance to betray us? But Becca could still remember her early days in the resistance—how desperate she had been for a chance to do something that mattered. If Jameson had made her the offer she had just made Ryann, she would have given him the same look.

  “We can’t share any details yet,” Becca answered. “Right now we need to determine whether you’re the right person for this job.”

  “Ask me anything,” Ryann urged in her quiet voice. “I’ll tell you whatever you want to know.”

  Becca settled into her evaluation posture—leaning forward slightly, expression on the pleasant side of neutral, hands clasped in front of her on the table. “First we’d like to know a little more about your background.” In an evaluation, she always started with the simple things. Facts. History. Questions the subject could answer automatically. People revealed a lot more when they didn’t have to think too hard about their answers. She smiled at Ryann, the same smile she used in her evaluation room half a dozen times a day. “Tell us about how you came to join us.”

  “My parents work in Surveillance.” Ryann whispered the words to the table. “I came downstairs one night after
they thought I had gone to bed, and I heard them talking about Sophie. She was my best friend back then, besides my dad. My parents were saying Sophie was… that she was going to be… They had evidence against her. They were trying to figure out how to tell me.”

  She gripped the edges of the table with both hands. “I knew what could happen to me if I warned her. But…” She forced her eyes to Becca’s. “But she was my best friend,” she said, her voice filled with the same determination that Becca had heard in herself every time she had spoken to Jameson, every time she had tried to convince him to let her do more. “I had to protect her.”

  Becca’s mind jolted back to a night five years ago. Standing outside 117, preparing to step through those doors for the first time. Knowing what Internal could do to her just for crossing that threshold, but driven by one single overriding thought. Heather is in there.

  She blinked, and the image disappeared. Focus.

  When she looked at Ryann again, it was with an evaluator’s eyes.

  And she saw… nothing. No telltale indicators of dishonesty. Anxiety, yes. Ryann was terrified—of her, of Kara, of losing this opportunity. But anyone could have seen that. And while it could be a sign of guilt, it could just as easily be an ordinary reaction.

  “Sophie belonged to the… she was one of you.” Ryann dropped her gaze to the table again. “I didn’t know until that night. She introduced me to Liam. Sorry—I mean her contact.” Her cheeks threatened another blush. “Anyway. That’s how I joined.” She cringed back a little, as if afraid she had given them the wrong answer.

  “It’s okay,” Kara reassured her. “We’re on your side here.” She placed a hand on Ryann’s shoulder.

  Ryann jerked back, nearly falling out of her chair. Her blush spread. “Sorry. Sorry. You startled me.”

  “I’ve been told you’ve given us some useful information over the past few months,” said Becca. Maybe praise would work better to relax the girl than Kara’s gesture had.