by Sophie Davis
“Honestly, I don’t believe it will provide us with enough intel.”
It felt like an iron fist had reached down my throat and ripped out my heart.
“But it doesn’t hurt to try,” he finished.
“Thank you.” I swallowed around the lump in my throat. “I appreciate it.”
“No need to thank me. I want her back, too.”
Robo Gentry appeared with lunch trays for Ian and me. I wasn’t hungry but managed to eat some of the sandwich on my plate. The ham and cheese could’ve been sawdust for all I tasted. Ian made a series of calls while we ate. The first was to UNITED headquarters, ordering surveillance drones to circle a one-hundred-mile radius near Besançon, France. When that was done, he commed Penny and asked her to set up a live feed on the wallscreen in the study for both the drones in France and the ones in Switzerland.
Several minutes later, she arrived with Brand in tow. I hadn’t spoken to Penny since returning from New Mexico, mostly because I didn’t know what to say. She loved Talia as much as I did, and it didn’t take a mind reader to know that my girlfriend’s disappearance was taking a heavy toll on her too.
Penny and I rarely hugged; our relationship just wasn’t the touchy-feely kind. Nevertheless, she walked straight over and threw her arms around my neck. I patted her awkwardly on the back at first, but then squeezed her tightly. Penny’s frail body trembled against mine. I wanted to comfort her, but I had no comfort to give.
“They’re gonna be okay,” she told me, wiping her nose as she stepped back from the embrace. “They’ll definitely be okay. Right? She won’t…I mean, Gretchen needs them alive. So….”
“Yeah.” I forced a smile. “She does.”
Ian cleared his throat. His dark eyes flicked pointedly toward the wallscreen.
“Right.” She walked over to his desk and shooed him out of the way. “Okay, just give me one minute.” Penny brushed her hair back from her face, flexed her fingers, and set to work.
Brand made himself comfortable on the couch, while I resumed my seat in the armchair. It took Penny all of thirty seconds to pull up the feeds from five separate drones in Interlaken, and five traveling from Bern, Switzerland to Besançon, France. There wasn’t much to see on the latter, so I focused on the ones flying over Interlaken.
The images were crystal clear. From one vantage point, snow-capped Alps surrounded a lush green basin. Two different colored lakes glistened on opposing edges. Small dots darted back and forth below, but the drone was too high to make out any detail.
“Can you zoom in?” I asked Penny.
“I can,” she hedged. “Not much, though. Want me to fly them lower? They might be shot down.” She shrugged. “But UNITED has like a whole fleet.”
Ian was standing behind his niece’s chair and scoffed. “Those are expensive pieces of tech, Penelope.”
She stared up at him with wide, guileless eyes. “I said ‘might’. If I switch to control them, I can probably dodge some bullets. Besides,” she waved at the wallscreen dismissively, “this view isn’t going give us much intel. I’ll engage cloaking.”
“Fine. Go ahead,” he told her.
Penny didn’t need to be told twice. One of the drones took a nosedive, speeding toward the earth below. The moving shapes came into sharper focus, and it wasn’t long before I could make out road vehicles weaving in narrow streets. Simple wooden structures lined dirt pathways. Large canvas tents were set up in grassy clearings.
Most of the figures milling around were dressed in white. They all wore blank expressions.
“Privileged soldiers,” Penny muttered. An involuntary shudder ran through her.
“What are those silver markings on that guy’s face?” Brand asked.
With a few taps, Penny grabbed a closeup shot of an iridescent gash across the guy’s chin and one on his earlobe.
“Scars,” Ian answered. “My guess is Gretchen puts a great deal of value on wounds received in combat. They prove the solider is battle-tested. They look like badges of honor.”
“What’s going on with drone four?” I pointed to the wallscreen, where one of the images showed a caravan of buses rounding the bottom of a mountain passage.
Penny overrode the autopilot and switched to manual control of drone four. She navigated it closer to the caravan. The image switched to thermal briefly, and then dozens of red dots appeared inside each of the buses.
“That’s a lot of people,” Brand mumbled needlessly. “More soldiers, maybe?”
“Can you fly next to the bus windows?” I asked.
“Yep.” She switched back to normal imaging and smoothly piloted the drone. It was quickly flying evenly beside the last bus.
“They’re not soldiers,” I mumbled. Leaning forward in my chair, I examined the faces peering through the windows. “Those are refugees, and they don’t look so great.”
Without warning, the feed from drone four turned to static.
“Damn. Guess they saw through the cloaking.” Penny wrinkled her nose and shot her uncle an apologetic look. “Sorry.”
Ian shook it off. “Pull up the last frame, if you can.”
Penny complied, and four faces appeared on the screen.
“Try to run facial rec. I want to identify as many of these people as possible,” Ian instructed. “Let’s see if we have any allies on the ground.”
“No problem. Might take a while, though. Without knowing where they’re from, I’ll have to check them against all civilian databases,” Penny warned.
“I know,” her uncle replied.
She engaged manual flight for drone one again and flew the tiny hover toward the buses. This time, Penny made sure to keep an adequate distance to avoid detection. The four of us watched as the buses wound through the dirt pathways to the tent encampments.
Ten white-clad Privileged soldiers stood in a perfectly straight line atop a raised dais in a clearing at the center of the camp. Behind them, three flags flapped in the breeze.
“Can you get closeups of the emblems on those flags?” Ian asked.
“That depends. Are the shots worth losing another of UNITED’s expensive toys?” she grumbled.
“As long as you get the faces of the soldiers on the platform, too,” he said wryly.
Penny smiled. “Not a problem.”
Sure enough, the drone only managed one sweep past the dais before the feed dissolved into snow. True to her word, when Penny pulled up the stills, there were clear images of each soldier’s face and all three flags.
“That can’t be good,” Brand groaned when a familiar emblem filled the screen.
“Why do they have the UNITED flag?” I asked. Turning to Ian, I raised an eyebrow. “Did we put that there?”
He shook his head and sighed loudly. “Enlarge the other two and put them all side by side,” he told Penny.
With a flick of her finger, she sent images of all three flags to a separate part of the wallscreen. In addition to the UNITED flag, there was one with a decorative eye drawn in black on a white background.
“It’s just like the tattoos,” I remarked. “Ernest Tate has one on his neck. So does Gracia. And the Clearwood kids, too.”
“It must be the symbol Gretchen is using for the Privileged,” Ian agreed.
“The Eye of Horus,” a tinny voice interjected.
We all turned as Robo Gentry slipped through the study doors.
“Excuse me?” I asked. “The eye of who?”
“The Eye of Horus. It is from Egyptian times and represents sacrifice,” Robo Gentry explained.
“Weird,” Penny mumbled. Her tone was so low, I was the only one who heard her.
“I don’t know,” I mused. “It’s sort of fitting.” Pointing to the third flag, I directed my question to the droid. “What’s that one mean?”
Robo Gentry studied the dark gold symbol of interlocking, twisted flames set against a black canvass. “It is not in my database. Would you like me to posit a theory?”
�
�Yeah, sure. Why not?” I replied.
“Unity and rebirth. The joined circular shapes are frequently associated with unity in many cultures. Flames or fire are most commonly used to represent rebirth.”
“Thank you, Gentry. That will be all,” Ian dismissed the droid.
On the wallscreen, there were still three live feeds from the remaining drones in Interlaken. According to the location stamp in the corner of each of the other five drones, they had crossed over the border into France. So far, the images coming in were only of rural pastures.
I focused on drone two in Interlaken, which had the best aerial view of the encampment. Penny directed it slightly closer to the platform, then she zoomed in. The buses had parked. Dozens of men, women, and children were streaming from the open doors. Privileged soldiers organized their charges into neat, single-file rows in front of the dais.
The ten soldiers standing on stage all had their hands behind their backs, feet shoulder width apart. Penny inched the drone closer, and we could see the soldiers’ gazes move in unison as they watched the exiled Talents.
“Put up the shots of the ringleaders’ face,” Ian instructed Penny.
Using several swift hand movements, she reconfigured the drone inputs on the wallscreen. Decreasing the size of those from France, Penny made room for the still shots of the men and women on the dais. My gaze landed on a girl’s face. I’d once found her green eyes vibrant and beautiful, but now they turned my stomach.
“Anya,” I grimaced.
After the initial shock wore off, I realized that I’d known I would see her again. There was a thin line between love and hate. Anya’s feelings for me had crossed that line and sent her running to Gretchen. A part of me felt bad for driving to her to such extremes. Another part, a larger part, hated Anya for her role in Victoria’s murder.
“Oh, my god. Is that…,” Penny jabbed a finger toward the wallscreen. “Janet?”
“Janet?” I parroted.
Sure enough, Janet Evans, former Headmistress of the McDonough School for the Talented, stood in the center of the dais. Her reddish-brown hair was pulled into a tight bun at the nape of her neck. At nearly six feet, she was several inches taller than the man beside her.
Tals is going to be crushed, I thought numbly. Janet had been something of a mentor for my girlfriend, though she’d also been very close to the McDonoughs.
“Do you know any of the others?” Brand asked.
I surveyed the eight remaining soldiers, and none were familiar. I shook my head.
“Me neither,” Penny added.
“Run facial rec,” Ian started to say.
“One step ahead of you,” Penny interjected.
“Do these things have audio?” I asked.
“If we can get one close enough without it being shot down,” Ian replied.
Penny cocked an eyebrow in her uncle’s direction. He made a go-ahead gesture with his hand, and she brought drone two closer to the action. Soft murmuring filled the study. The drone’s mic picked up random bits of conversations here and there, but there wasn’t anything useful. Then, the man beside Janet stepped forward.
“Welcome, my brethren,” he called, his voice booming across the encampment. The crowd quieted instantly, though many looked around uneasily. “Please, I know you all are scared. These last few days have been trying for our kind. I promise, you have nothing to fear from us.”
“Who are you?” shouted a woman in the third row.
“My name is Sir Ronan. I come with a message from our savior, the Dame,” he announced. With a flourish, Ronan turned and gestured behind him. The other soldiers onstage rotated in unison as Gretchen’s larger-than-life hologram appeared.
“Greetings to you all,” she said warmly.
Some muttered a greeting, but most of the crowd looked baffled.
“Some of you may know me as Gretchen McDonough. My late husband, Danbury, was Director of TOXIC until his murder.”
That statement got people’s attention, not all of it positive.
That’s a relief, I thought. Still, by the time Gretchen finished what was surely a carefully planned spiel, I had a bad feeling there would be some converts.
“I am sure you have heard many things about Danbury,” Gretchen began. Her icy blue eyes surveyed the crowd. “I am sure you heard a great many lies about his alleged offenses. In time, the truth will come out. For now, I want you all to ask yourselves just one question: Would Danbury have allowed the Coexistence Treaty to fail?”
Again, she panned the crowd with that intense gaze.
“The answer is no. UNITED, the same organization who claims to protect our kind, they are the ones responsible for our exile. Ian Crane, the traitor, is responsible.”
Oh, she’s good, I thought.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t the only one thinking it. Already, some of the people in the crowd nodded along. Several even cheered. I glanced over my shoulder at Ian. He shrugged and rolled his eyes.
“The McDonoughs have always had charisma, I’ll give them that,” he said.
Gretchen smiled serenely. “However, I am not here to lay blame.”
I snorted. “She’s a piece of work.”
“I am here to offer you all an opportunity; the chance to join my soldiers and take back this world from the unworthy.” She paused as though expecting applause. Only a smattering of claps came from the crowd. Gretchen wasn’t deterred. “The norms have sent our kind into exile. They’ve driven us from our homes and destroyed the one place we could truly call our own.”
I leapt to my feet. “Are you serious?” I shouted at the wallscreen.
“Despicable organizations like Sons of After are not satisfied with exile. No, they want to see our kind eradicated.” Gretchen shook her head sadly, and more people in the crowd began to nod in agreement.
This is how it begins, I thought.
“I ask you, my brethren, why should we stand for this? Are we not the genetically superior beings? Are we not the next step in human evolution?” Gretchen curled her hand into a fist, shaking it to punctuate each statement. “We should not have to live in poverty, in squalor. I intend to fight for what is rightfully mine. I implore you all to join me!”
As far as fanatical speeches went, hers was pretty good. She’d said all the right things to rile up an already angry crowd. The smug smile on her face was proof she knew it, too.
“War is scary,” she continued. “I understand. So, I do not ask you to make this decision lightly.” Gretchen spread her arms wide. “Take the next forty-eight hours and speak with my ranks. Make an informed decision. Should you elect not to join the rebellion, you will still receive what is yours when we succeed.”
Long after Gretchen finished speaking, her holographic image remained.
I didn’t recall where the butter knife came from or how it ended up in my hand. When I hurled it at the wallscreen, it wedged between her feverish eyes.
Chapter Forty-One
Talia
My parents’ faces floated above me like clouds in an impossibly blue sky. I reached a finger toward my mother’s cheek, wanting to touch her one last time. She extended her hand down to meet mine. Instead of a nice, loving squeeze, she grabbed my wrist and yanked. Hard.
“Talia,” a raspy voice snapped. It didn’t belong to my mother. It barely sounded human.
Memories flooded my mind with places, people, and things I hadn’t thought about in years. Squeezing my eyes shut, I tried to block the pain in my head. The fingers wrapped around my wrist were too strong, and the nails bit into my flesh. It hurt. After another hard tug, I sat upright and gasped for air.
“Talia, what are you doing here?”
I recognized the voice. Sort of.
“Open your eyes, dammit.”
My head spun, and I thought I might be sick.
“Natalia Lyons,” the voice hissed. “Look at me.”
Suddenly, my cheek was on fire. “Owwww,” I moaned.
The second sla
p was even harder, like maybe a few teeth were knocked loose. Still, it had the desired result. I opened my eyes and looked up into a face. While not my mother’s, I did know the features. Kind of.
“Cadence?” I mumbled, tilting my head to one side. My neck muscles didn’t work right, and my head flopped awkwardly onto my shoulder. “You don’t belong here,” I slurred.
“Neither do you,” she snapped. “Now, come on. We need to get you out of this tank.”
“Tank?” Once again, my speech was off. “What’s wrong with my mouth?”
Cadence rolled her eyes. Looping my arm around her neck, she slid hers beneath my back.
“Am I naked?” I asked, sounding like my mouth was full of cotton. When I looked down, my chin hit my chest.
With a groan, Cadence lifted me in her arms. “For someone so tiny, you’re awfully heavy,” she complained.
“Thanks, jackass,” I muttered.
She snorted. “Oh, good. You’re in there. I was worried Gretchen might’ve zapped the snark out of you. Or maybe I was just hoping she would.”
“Gretchen.” Her name brought my mind into sharper focus. This time, the flood of memories was from recent events.
“Alex. Where’s Alex?” I demanded.
Cadence put me on my feet, keeping her arm around my back to support my weight. She nodded to a clear glass tank full of blue goo. A small body was suspended inside. I started toward him but only made it two steps before my knees buckled.
“I think you need to wash this crap off before your body will work right,” Cadence said uncertainly. We stumbled to a shower in the attached bathroom.
The frigid water washed away the lingering cobwebs inside my head, and I felt more like myself. Once the thin layer of blue gel was off my skin, my motor functions returned to normal.
“Where am I?” I asked.
Cadence had her back to me as she rummaged inside a supply closet. Hopefully she was looking for some clothes. Because, yes, I was naked.
“Gretchen McDonough’s messed up cult compound.” She turned and tossed me a pair of black scrubs. “Get dressed. Now.”
