The surface ripples gently. Three’s gone back under. Thankfully.
Closing my eyes, I finish counting down the seconds. Twenty-one. Twenty. Nineteen. Fitzpatrick blows her whistle when I’m only on fourteen. Crap. The cold must be interfering with my processing for me to have lost track like that.
“Out!” she yells at us.
With more effort, I uncurl from the ball I’ve made of myself and push my badly functioning limbs to take me toward the bank. I shudder over and over again as I emerge from the water. My body is like rubber. My fingers are blue.
I’m not cold. I’m not cold. I’m not cold.
And I’m not, even though I’m allowing myself to feel again. This should be worrying, except I’m beyond worrying about much. My brain is frozen too.
Only a few feet onto dry land and my legs give out.
“Get up,” Fitzpatrick says. “You can walk your way over here.”
Easy for her to say. She’s dry and wearing a jacket. But I can’t walk, and I’m not the only one. Nine is also on her knees, and Three, and Eight. Of my unit members whom I can see, only One staggers forward on his feet.
“Two and Ten, out of the water!”
I cringe, wondering if they’re too far gone to swim to shore, and keep crawling. A line of medics stand ten feet away. Some carry blankets and hot compresses, but under Fitzpatrick’s orders, they make no move toward us.
I hate Fitzpatrick. I hate Fitzpatrick. I hate Fitzpatrick.
The thought fuels me relentlessly forward. One finally makes it over to her and promptly collapses to the dirt. She clucks her tongue in disgust and lets a medic tend to him. They take notes on his vitals and steal a blood sample before peeling off his wet uniform.
By the time I worm my way over to them, I’m coated in mud. And when a medic bends down to check my pulse, the world goes black.
I’m not out for long, but Fitzpatrick notices and it goes down in her report about me. That night at dinner, we’re given double portions, but it barely eases the pain. I’m too exhausted to even be happy this particular training round is over, and I hope Two and Ten—who are stuck in the infirmary—recover.
They won’t kill me, I tell myself. Not on purpose.
We have an easy time of it that evening. We’re ordered to rest, like we could do anything else. Nine and Six retreat to our quarters to play chess. After hanging out in the communal area for a while, One decides he’s going to start his new Hungarian books before language lab tomorrow.
I love language lab and am relieved to be returning to normal classes. Taking my cue from One, I head to the girls’ quarters to read Russian, which I was recently approved for. Memorizing the language rules and vocabulary is easy, but I suspect lab, which is where we focus on pronunciation, will be challenging since this is my first Slavic language.
Six is in the middle of talking when I open the door, and she stops abruptly as I enter. She and Nine are sprawled on Six’s bed, and there’s no chess board in sight.
“Anyone else coming?” Nine asks.
“Don’t think so.” I grab my e-sheet and realize she’s staring at me. “What?”
Six shrugs, so Nine takes up the explanation. “We’re plotting ways to kill Fitzpatrick.”
“You’re what?” I laugh once, then realize neither of them seem to be joking.
“One day,” Nine says. “One day I’m getting out of here. I’m going to run and run and never stop running.”
I pull my knees to my chest, wishing I could unhear Nine’s words. “You’ll have to. They’ll come after you.”
“Not if we take them down first,” says Six.
“Damn right,” Nine says. “Teach me how to survive and teach me how to kill, and one day I’m going to put those skills to use.”
Absently, I turn on the e-sheet, but I’ve lost all interest in Russian. I need to talk Six and Nine out of this mutiny before it gets them in serious trouble. “I know what we went through was hard, but Fitzpatrick has to be tough on us. It’s to make us ready.”
“Make us ready for what?” Six says.
Before I can answer, Nine cuts me off. “To keep being their slaves. Come on, Sev. That’s what we are. They’ll do whatever they want to us, and we can’t do anything about it.”
“That’s not true.”
“How is it not true?”
I scroll through the books on my e-sheet, as if searching for a good answer. “We want to be here. They’re giving us better lives, making us into better people. And one day, we’re going to make the world a better place.”
Nine snorts. “Yeah, that’s what they tell us. But did you choose to be here? ’Cause I didn’t. They’re not making us into anything. They made us. End of. That means they own us. And they’ll do whatever they want to us. You know it too.”
“I don’t.” My earlier anger at Fitzpatrick resurfaces, this time directed at Nine. It’s partly because I’m scared, and partly because there’s truth in what she says and I’m not ready to face it.
But what she says is also selfish, and I’m disappointed in her. That’s the only part I can deal with. “You have shelter, food, a purpose, and you’re being taught all kinds of things. Yeah, they made us, but they made us to be better than most people. There are millions of people out there who’d give anything for what we have.”
Six hangs her head, but Nine still looks like she wants to beat somebody up. “Millions of others have something we don’t have too.”
“What?”
“A family. Somebody who cares about them.”
I slide off the bed and hug her. “I care about you. You are my family.”
She hugs me back, and we pull Six in with us.
“Sev’s right,” Six whispers. “We’ve got to stick together. Maybe Fitzpatrick’s trying to help. Maybe not. But even One says it—we’ve got to have each other’s backs because no one else will. Someday we’ll be bigger and stronger than Fitzpatrick, and then we’ll see where things are. But our unit always comes first. Swear it.”
So we do.
Six years later, I’m not bigger than Fitzpatrick, but I am stronger. I’m damn sure I’m smarter too. Yet she still makes me feel like that hungry, exhausted thirteen-year-old freezing in the camp lake as I follow her out of the mess. I won’t bring dishonor to my unit by glancing at them for support, so I hold my shoulders back and my head high.
The sun stretches over the mountains, as weary as I am. Clouds rolled in during the night, and the sky is flat and gray to the west. The dullness is spreading, and I detect moisture in the air. Snow is coming.
Fitzpatrick doesn’t say a word. She just leads me two buildings down into a tiny room that smells faintly musty. It must be her office because a large photo sits on the desk. In the picture, Fitzpatrick poses on a porch with fifteen others, many of whom share similar features. They range in age from probably about eight to eighty, and they’re all wearing camo and carrying rifles. The youngest girl’s rifle is pink. The children must be her nieces and nephews, I decide, because I can’t imagine Fitzpatrick having any of her own.
While I’m pondering the horror of mini-Fitzpatricks, the original one shuts the door and points to a chair. “Sit.”
I obey without thinking, like I was trained to do.
Fitzpatrick sits across from me and stares at me for a solid minute. Is she waiting for me to say something? If so, she’s out of luck. The memory of how I’m supposed to behave is missing.
I use the time, instead, to study her face. She’s aged a lot since that memory of her lording over us while we froze in the lake. This close, her skin is leather and heavily lined. But the one thing that hasn’t changed is her eyes. They’re as cold as the sky outside and just as gray.
I hate Bitchpatrick. There was no conviction in thirteen-year-old me’s defense of her.
The silence persists
for five more seconds. I’m better at staring. Fitzpatrick blinks.
“Malone briefed me last night,” she says. “You failed your mission. You’re an embarrassment to this unit.”
Whatever I was expecting—and I’m not sure what—it wasn’t that. I try not to squirm, but the way she looks at me makes me want to punch her. “Something happened to me. The doctors think I’ll get my memory back.”
“Something happened to me.” She mocks my voice. “Listen to yourself. You don’t even have the guts to admit you were attacked and lost the fight.”
My jaw clenches. “We don’t know if that’s what happened.”
“Wrong. You don’t know, but I do. I’d bet on it. And why don’t you know?” She pauses as though waiting for my response. “Because you failed.”
No shit, I failed. It’s all I’ve been able to think about when I’m not busy thinking about Kyle or wondering what’s going to happen to me. So I don’t need Fitzpatrick getting in my face about how much I screwed up. “I’m aware of it.”
“No, I don’t think you are.”
I bite down on my tongue and concentrate on the pain to keep myself from saying something I’ll regret.
Fitzpatrick gets up and paces. “Countless research hours went into designing your brain.”
Yes, but I could count them if someone gave me the data.
“More went into engineering you the right DNA.”
An average of 1.2 lectures a day since I was five years old equals 6,132 lectures. At 1.73 minutes per lecture, that’s just over 10,608 minutes—the equivalent of 7.4 days—of my life that have been spent listening to Fitzpatrick bitch at me.
That took me less than a second to compute. See how well I can count?
Fitzpatrick is oblivious to my mental math. She probably needs all her fingers and toes to count to twenty. “Nineteen years went into training you how to use that brain and body of yours.”
Actually, it’s seven thousand eighty-one days to be precise. More counting.
“And what do you have to show for it? You were at that school for three months. What were you doing the whole time?”
Enough counting. How about a little Emily Dickinson to explain?
If I can stop one heart from breaking,
I shall not live in vain;
If I can ease one life the aching,
Or cool one pain,
Or help one fainting robin
Unto his nest again,
I shall not live in vain.
That sums it up. And see? Sum! A pun. Bitchpatrick needs a sense of humor.
“I told Malone two months ago that you should be recalled because you clearly weren’t up for the task. You remember what I said to you that day in Boston?”
I can’t take it anymore. It’s time to sing. Mary had a little lamb, little lamb…
“How hard could it possibly be to find one student—”
LITTLE LAMB!
“—out of eight hundred possibilities?”
“Eight-hundred-seventy-seven possibilities. Of which I narrowed down the possibilities to forty-six within the last month. I can’t help it if Malone didn’t keep you briefed on my reports.”
She gapes at me. I gape at me.
To start, mouthing off to Fitzpatrick was definitely not a good idea. To middle, I wasn’t even supposed to be paying attention to her. And to end, where did that forty-six number come from? Had I really done that? I want to be cheered by this memory’s return, but Fitzpatrick looks murderous. Her face has gone totally red. She might explode. I’ll be covered in Fitzpatrick debris.
“What?” Her voice booms like thunder.
“I did.”
“Let me be clear, HY1-Seven.” Although she’s burning up with her blood pressure, Fitzpatrick’s voice is as cold as her eyes, and she sticks her face in mine. Her breath stinks of coffee. “If Malone didn’t have such misplaced trust in your abilities, you would have gone nowhere. I knew you couldn’t handle such an important and difficult mission. But while Malone and the doctors keep faith that your memories will return, I have no such misguided beliefs. I’m not waiting for you to fix yourself. We’re going to spend today figuring out how broken you are. Now get out of my sight until I see you at the gym.”
I go, hoping that doesn’t mean another dunk in the lake.
Sucking in the winter air, I head back to the mess. It’s nice to know some things haven’t changed around here. I still hate Bitchpatrick. It’s almost reassuring.
Yes, but… This new thought buzzes around my brain like a gnat.
Yes, but Fitzpatrick gets orders from somewhere too.
I ball my hands into fists, and start humming “Mary Had a Little Lamb” again. But blocking out Fitzpatrick is one thing. Swatting a mental gnat is another.
Malone supervises everything that goes on at the camp. That means Fitzpatrick works for him. That means Malone signs off on everything she does, whether it’s starving us for three days then throwing us into the lake, or simply being a mean old bitch.
I don’t like this realization. I don’t like many of the realizations I’ve had in the last twenty-four hours, but I especially don’t like this one because it makes me feel even more unstable. The one thing I’ve been relying on is this: the people I work for are good people. Whatever morally questionable things I might have done in the past, they were done because good people believed they were the right thing to do.
But what sort of good person lets Fitzpatrick abuse a bunch of children? And if I question that, do I need to question my other assumption?
The cold wind bites at my ears. Block it out, I tell myself. Block out the cold and the doubts.
I console myself with the knowledge of how busy Malone is. He’s always coming and going, and we are not his sole responsibility. Maybe Malone isn’t aware of everything that goes on. Maybe he trusts Fitzpatrick to train us how she sees fit and doesn’t pay much attention, or maybe he didn’t approve of that lake exercise and that’s why it didn’t happen again.
It didn’t happen again, did it? How would I know?
“Sev!” Jordan waves and jogs over to me. “Welcoming you back, was she?”
“Oh, yeah. By making it clear what a screwup and embarrassment I am.”
“She said that?” Jordan kicks a chunk of broken asphalt down the path. “Please. If she could do any better, then why is she here torturing us and not off somewhere saving the world on her own? Ignore her.”
I unclench my hands but can’t relax. This time at RTC I’d still be in bed. The dining hall didn’t even serve breakfast on Sunday until seven. I’d eat with Audrey, meet up with Kyle, then spend the morning in the library pretending to catch up on my assignments with them. Since I didn’t usually need those hours to do my own work, I’d help out when I could or find some random book to read. Often I’d work on mission planning or reports, but that depended a lot on whether I could sneak away from everyone. Part of my mission required I remain unnoticed and unremarkable. That made life difficult.
It also, frankly, made life fun sometimes. That is, when I could justify hanging out with people as part of maintaining my cover.
What happens to those people now? What did Kyle and Audrey and Chase think when I didn’t return last night? Did Kyle tell people what happened, and if so, what will he think when he hears about the excuse Malone planted? He’ll know it’s a lie. But then, if Kyle works for the enemy, maybe it doesn’t matter.
And what about Audrey? Did she go to bed worried? She can’t afford to be distracted, not when we have our physics final coming up this week. Damn it—I really need a way to send word to RTC, but how?
“Sev?”
With a start I realize I’ve stopped walking. Jordan is way ahead of me. “Sorry. The memories are coming back fast and furious this morning.”
“Ooh, that’s good. A
nything useful?”
“Yeah, my cover identity has a physics final on Wednesday.”
“You had to take physics at that school? Damn, you must have been so bored.”
I grimace. “Yeah, horribly.”
As Jordan fills me in on the day’s schedule, I gather the courage to ask about the issue weighing on my mind. From my limited recall, I trust Jordan won’t be bothered by my questions. I’m just not sure I want to know what she’ll say.
When we reach the newest building, I draw her aside. “That time when we were thirteen and Fitzpatrick made us go in the lake—did we do that more than once?”
Jordan stuffs her hands in her pockets and checks around us. “How many times do you remember?”
“Just the once.”
“Lucky you. We did it five times.”
“Five?”
“Five. They made us do it until we could all hold out in the water for as long as they demanded.”
I shiver in sympathy with my younger self. “Malone would have had to authorize that, right?”
“Malone authorizes everything, doesn’t he?”
“But they could have killed us.”
Jordan throws me a pitying expression. “You think that’s the worst thing they did to us? You need to get the rest of your brain working.”
She reaches for the door, and I grab her arm. “It’s not right.”
Her hand drops. She seems to consider something, then presses that hand to the cut on my forehead. “What did you do to yourself? This isn’t like you.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you were always on Cole’s side. You know, the ‘they’re tough on us because we need to be tough’ line. And ‘we’ll thank them for this when we’re older.’ And my personal favorite: ‘after they did so much for us, it’s our duty to be as good as we can for them and our country.’ Now you sound like me.”
The breeze picks up and blows hair in my face. “What do you sound like?”
“Oh, you know. ‘We’re all a bunch of slaves, and I don’t care if our country needs us to defend it. One day I’m going to burn their house down.’ That’s my line.” She yanks the door open. “If being on the outside’s changed your attitude, you’d best keep quiet about it.”
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