“Have you ever lied to get out of trouble?”
I pause for a fraction of a second, then say, “No,” thinking specifically about the time Robin and I denied drinking half of Dad’s bottle of orange liqueur.
“Have you ever deceived a person in authority?”
“No!” I say quickly, remembering the time I switched out my half-face respirator for a lighter E97 mask when Mom couldn’t see. I bite down on my tongue until it hurts, figuring this should rev up her graph lines.
“Have you ever cheated on a school test?”
“No.” This is the truth. I take a deep breath and relax.
“Have you ever stolen anything?”
“No!” Of course I have. Cookies from the cookie jar after bedtime. Batteries from my mother’s secret stash. And once, a beautiful piece of rose quartz as big as my fist, which pretty Linda Langton brought to our first-grade show and tell and left on the nature display table. I’d slipped it into my schoolbag, but once I got it home, I hid it in case Mom or Dad spotted it. When the teacher asked who’d taken it, I sat on my hands and said nothing, though I’m sure now that my face must have been glowing hot with the shame burning inside me. I allow that guilt to rise again now.
“No,” I repeat.
Then the questions turn serious and I make a real effort to stay calm. Since I don’t know what body language will indicate that I’m lying, I play it safe and sit perfectly still. I use my sniper’s tactical breathing methods to keep my heart rate steady and my anxiety at bay. The antiperspirant stops me sweating. I try to find an element of truth in every deceiving answer and focus on that, while making myself believe the lies.
“Do you know Quinn O’Riley well?”
“No.” Apparently not. Else I wouldn’t have hoped.
“Did you know him before you met him on the transport to ASTA?”
“No.” True.
“Do you know what the rebels are planning?”
“No.” I don’t know, not for sure.
“Do you know where Quinn is now?”
“No.” Haven’t got a clue.
“Did Quinn take Bruce’s weapon?”
“Yes.” When I handed it to him.
“Did Quinn force you to shoot the power lines?”
“Yes.” My hand was forced — how else could I have gotten him out of there?
“Do you still care for Quinn?”
“No.” This time I allow myself to feel the lie. Her eyebrow lifts a fraction as she watches my reaction on her screen. Ha!
She repeats some of the questions, or comes at them from different angles. It seems to take hours. At the end of all the questions, the operator fixes her yellow gaze on me for a long minute, then gives a tiny shrug and enters something into her system. I reckon I passed the polygraph.
As she removes the bands and electrodes, she gets very friendly and chatty, tells me she’s never conducted a test on someone so young before, touches my bandaged head very gently and asks me if I’m feeling okay. I sense a trap.
“You were very calm in that test,” she says.
“You told me that if I didn’t lie, I had nothing to worry about. I assumed you were speaking the truth.”
“Hmm. But I could tell you were lying on some of those items. You can tell me now, you know, we’re no longer recording.”
Liar. I spotted the tiny fisheye lens in the corner of the room as soon as I entered.
“I mean, I actually think it’s wrong to do a test like this on an asset as young as you. You’ve obviously had a tough time of it, and hell, you’re just a kid!”
“Are we finished here?”
She frowns at me. “Take her back,” she tells the guard.
Back in my cell, there’s nothing to do except repeat the address of this place to myself over and over, and try to ignore my various aches and pains. I bite the ragged fingernail with my teeth until it tears away, and my finger starts bleeding again. I rub at a tickle on my cheeks, and my hand comes away wet. I’m not actually crying, I don’t think, just leaking tears. I can’t seem to stop them coming. There’s no one to talk to and nothing to read or look at except the walls, which are painted a greenish-yellow color that reminds me of vomit. I have the rest of the day (at least, I think it’s a day, I have no actual idea of the time) to sit and think.
And what I think about is how much I hate them. I like that feeling, it dries my eyes and stills my trembling.
I hate them for what they’ve done to my father, for what they’ve done to this country, and especially for what they did to me yesterday. For what they’ll soon be doing to Quinn’s brother.
The last few days have changed me. I am not who I was a week ago. I feel old and grim, as if I screamed out every ounce of trust and joy and optimism while I was in that chair, in that room with the mirror on the wall and the drain in the floor.
I seethe with a cold fury at how they’ve lied to me and deceived me. Now that I know who they are, what they do, what they’re capable of, and how rotten they are at the core, I want something different.
I have a new goal. If there’s any way I can bring them down, I will. If there’s anything I can do to thwart them, to undermine their power or expose their crimes, I’ll do it. Any chance I get to uncover what those other divisions are doing, I’ll take it.
My fingers crush the Styrofoam cup and tear it into pieces. I pile them up in a tiny hill of white fragments while I consider what I could do and how. And where.
I don’t reckon there’s much I can do from home. I’m pretty sure that if I had been able to click on the screen of notes on my computerized file, I’d have discovered that I’m to be put under surveillance too. Roth strikes me as a very thorough woman. My every future call, email and internet action will surely be run through intel, and a spook will be on my butt if I leave the house.
Back when I won The Game and was offered a chance to train at the Academy, I jumped at it because what I wanted most in the world was to be free and away from my mother’s smothering overprotectiveness. I thought that leaving home and going to ASTA would bring me that. It didn’t. I was less free there than I had been at home, and if I’m sent back there, I’ll be subject to even more scrutiny. But at least at the ASTA compound there is stuff to be investigated, people who know things and who may be in a position to help, opportunities to exploit.
Though I dread it with every fiber of my being, I need to go back.
Probably, it will be my next stop anyway. I don’t reckon they’ll allow me to go straight home from here — they won’t want my family to see me all battered and bruised. But I’m guessing the resignation I submitted to Sarge just yesterday morning will be accepted within the next week or two, and they’ll send me packing.
They won’t easily believe that I want back in, not after what they’ve done to me, but somehow I need to convince them that is exactly what I want. Somehow I’ve got to get Sarge and Roth to trust me again. What spin can I put on my about-face so that they buy it?
My hands push the pieces of Styrofoam, smudged with blood from my finger, this way and that, making patterns on the floor, while I weigh up the possibilities. By the time the third energy bar and cup of water of the day is shoved through the cat-flap type opening at the bottom of my cell’s door, I’ve got a rough idea of what I’ll say to Sarge.
As I bite into the dense coconut-flavored chewiness, I realize that somewhere in this building, Connor has passed at least twenty-four hours with almost no food, water or sleep. Guilt sits heavy in my chest.
I’ve got to figure out a way of getting him freed. He’s in here because of me, so I need to help get him out. I have a new mission. Failure, as I have spent the last three months telling myself, is not an option. And I will not quit.
My fingers have arranged the white scraps on the floor into a rough approximation of an eye, with a hooped earring through its brow. I brush them aside.
If I assume that the O’Rileys have a way to get a message to Quinn or the rebels, the
n I need to get a message to them about where Connor is being held.
And I may just have an idea about how it could be done.
Chapter 9
Back and forward
That night I sleep restlessly. I dream I am sitting beside Quinn on a bed and we’re kissing, deeply. He pulls me into his lap, murmuring Irish endearments and touching my face tenderly. I feel safe and cherished. And excited. I push myself tightly against his chest, my fingers knot themselves in his thick, mahogany hair, but he grabs my wrists and pulls my hands away. Then he places his phone into my palms.
“Look who it is!” he says, gray eyes blazing.
I look down at the screen and see it’s me, on the metal chair in the torture room. There are real flames in my eyes.
“You see?” he says, shaking his head down at me. “You see?”
I wake up sweating. The antiperspirant’s twenty-four-hour power has expired.
After I’ve had my water and power bar — apri-peach this morning — the cranky guard comes to fetch me.
“You’re being released.”
“I’m going home?”
She laughs sourly at this. “Not likely.”
She tosses a disposable personal protection equipment suit on the floor next to me and instructs me to change. I peel off the stinking pink dress, hissing as it sticks and has to be ripped off a burn on my shoulder, then kick it into the corner. They haven’t given me fresh underwear, so I’m stuck in what I’m wearing under the PPE suit, unless I go commando.
The journey back to ASTA is a repeat of the one that brought me to the interrogation center (green doctor, office 303, 16-001, Auburn, Sodo). I’m blindfolded and escorted into a van, and accompanied by a silent guard, but this time my hands aren’t tied. It’s stuffy in the van, and I roll up my sleeves, wishing I could open a window, stick my head out and allow the wind to scour my brain clean of the last few days’ memories.
My guard tugs off the blindfold as we pull into transport bay C at ASTA, and the driver tells me, “End of the line, kid.” He says it like it’s a joke, but it sounds like an ominous prediction.
Sarge is waiting for me. I don’t know what I feel towards this man. He won my respect and even a grudging affection during my time in his unit at ASTA, but then he earned my hatred for allowing me to be tortured. Then, too, I feel an unwilling gratitude that he came back to the interrogation room and stopped the pain. My emotions are all mixed up inside me, like tangled clothes in a drier.
“Blue,” he says, rubbing a hand over his shaved head.
“Sarge.” The tic in my eyelid has started up again.
“I didn’t think … I didn’t expect them to —” He interrupts himself, clears his throat and looks away. “You’ve been scheduled for a hearing at oh-eight-hundred tomorrow.”
“Another one?”
“It’s regulation. You are to proceed directly to your quarters and you are not to discuss the last forty-eight hours with anyone, do you understand?”
I nod.
“Dismissed,” he says and stalks over to the decon unit.
I trail behind, pressing my fingers against my twitching eyelid, trying to press my anxiety back inside. Waiting for me on the other side of the decon unit, inside the main building, is my unit of cadets. Or what remains of my unit, since there is no sign of Leya. It seems like an age since I’ve seen them, like the world has changed in just a few days, although really, it’s just me who has.
I hear Bruce curse when he sees me, but it’s Tae-Hyun — still slim and still wearing his hair in a thin ponytail — who speaks to me first.
“Hey,” he says, clicking his tongue-stud against his teeth as he always does, and giving me an elbow bump.
Mitch — tall, dark and built like a brick outhouse — follows suit. “What up, Blue?” he asks. “Are you back?”
“Don’t know, I’ve got a hearing tomorrow. I guess they’ll tell me then.”
“Good luck,” says Mitch.
“Yeah, well, we’re off to the range. See you later?” says Tae-Hyun, and they walk off. They clearly aren’t eager to hang out with me. Maybe I smell like trouble.
Maybe I just smell.
Quiet Cameron, with his geeky glasses and scarred upper lip, enfolds me in a big, gentle hug. I know he is safe, but my body panics at the contact. I want to push him off me and run away.
“You okay?” he asks softly beside my ear, and for a moment tears threaten at the real concern in his voice.
“Yeah. Yeah, I’m okay.” I pull back before I can start blubbering.
“We’ll talk later.”
He ambles off after the other two cadets, and I am left alone with Bruce. He’s a couple of years older but not much taller than me, though his muscled shoulders are about twice as wide as mine. I notice that he’s had a new pattern shaved into the buzz-cut hair at his temples.
“Blue,” he says, scanning my damaged face, twitching eye, bandaged head, and filthy, tangled hair. “What the hell did they do to you?” He sounds genuinely shocked.
It occurs to me that ASTA has allowed me to return to the compound in this state as a lesson to the other cadets — a kind of show-and-tell of what happens if you don’t toe the line.
“I’m not allowed to talk about it,” I say.
“I know — they’ve ordered us not to ask you questions but, damn, you look like … like you’ve been banged up pretty bad.”
“Yeah. Well, you know, they wanted some answers.”
He curses, stares down at his boots. “I am so sorry, man. I didn’t think they’d go so rough on you.”
I shrug. I didn’t either.
“You’re a cadet, not a mook!” He seems to be struggling to understand how the ASTA he’s been so loyal to could have done this to one of their own. Welcome to the club, Bruce.
“Hey, I’m sorry, too,” I say, “for you getting darted and stuff.”
“That was Quinn?”
“Yeah.”
“I figured. Then he took my weapon and made you take out the power lines?”
I nod.
“That was some shot, dude, respect!” he says, grinning widely.
“It wasn’t bad,” I admit.
My own smile cracks a cut on my lip open again, and I dab at it with the back of my hand.
He stares at the smear of blood, the section of raw nailbed where my fingernail used to be, the angry red welts on my hands and the bandages on my wrists, then his eyes travel up my arms to fix on the spots below my shoulders where the burn wounds have seeped through the dressings and the disposable fabric of the PPE suit.
“Man, this blows big time,” he says. “This pisses me off majorly.”
I start walking towards the west wing where my quarters are, and Bruce falls in beside me, in the place where Quinn always walked. He opens the fire doors for me just as Quinn always used to. I flinch when they bang shut behind us.
Out of the blue, Bruce says, “I wouldn’t have shot him, you know. Quinn, I mean, on the operation. I was just bluffing.”
He sounds sincere, but I don’t automatically believe what people tell me anymore. I study him for a moment. “Were you? Really? You sure sounded like you meant it.”
“No way. I was just angry, and jealous, I guess. But I would never have shot a cadet.”
“Good to know.” Wish I’d known it then. “So, what are these new symbols?” I brush my hair at the temple where he has a shaved section on his own.
“It’s Korean — Tae-Hyun helped me. It means be cautious. It’s a reminder to myself not to trust things just because they look good, to look a little deeper.”
“It reminds me of Leya’s tattoo.”
She had a tattoo of what looked like a Chinese character at the outer corner of her left eye. I never did find out what it stood for.
“Yeah, well, that’s part of the reminder. Effing rat! I’m still bummed about that, man. I didn’t hardly believe you, but you were right.”
“She’s gone?”
&n
bsp; “She’s gone. Splitsville. Sarge just told us she ‘won’t be returning’ to the unit. Probably been reassigned to spy on someone else. That is just so not okay. We ought to be spying on terrs, man, not each other. I mean, just who are we fighting this war against?”
It’s a very good question. I let it hang in the air between us for a while. Before I ask my next question, I check around us, but no one’s near.
“Did you tell them? That I knew about Leya?”
“Nah, I figured you were in enough trouble already. Besides, I’m still mad as hell. What happened to loyalty and trust? I dunno, Blue, if they set a rat to spy on us, it makes you wonder what else they’ve been doing.”
I glance at him sharply. Is Bruce starting to question things a bit more? Or is he fishing to find out my feelings?
“Yeah, it does,” I say.
Alone in my quarters, I strip off the PPE suit and shove it in the bio-disposal unit, along with the awful hair ribbon and my underwear — once I’ve carefully removed Quinn’s earring from my bra strap. In the bathroom, I remove the bandages in front of the mirror and run my fingers over the shaved band of scalp and the spiky row of stitches beneath. The right-hand side of my face is a swollen blue-and-purple mess intersected by the vivid red scar of the cut, and crowned by a puffy and purple eye. Dark shadows arc beneath my eyes. I look older. I feel ancient — heavy with things no sixteen-year-old should know. The image in the mirror blurs as tears well in my eyes. Cut it out! I have to stop this incessant weeping. It’s pathetic.
My wounds smart and throb in the hot water of the shower, but it feels good to scrub myself clean from top to toe and to wash the caked blood out of my hair. The adhesive dressings on the tops of my arms come off in the water, and I see that there are two red and angry-looking burns, the size of quarters, beneath. It’s like I’ve been branded by ASTA.
After my shower, I rummage around in the first aid kit Mom packed for me when I left home all those months ago, and find a sealed pack of Band-Aids. I stick one over each burn mark, and another two over my head stitches. They don’t stick very well and it looks ridiculous, so I pull them off again. I leave my bruised wrists unbandaged, swallow some Tylenol, then wrap a towel around myself and pass out on the bed.
The Recoil Trilogy 3 Book Boxed Set: Including Recoil, Refuse and Rebel Page 26
