I’ve already summarized most of the information and shared it with Jordan, Summer, Gabe and Octavia in order to get their help planning our escape. But Cole hasn’t seen it yet, and he needs to. He helped us because it’s us, and he trusts me, but not because he knew RedZone’s secrets. He deserves the truth too.
“Can I have the e-sheet?” I hold out my hand to Octavia.
Before I left RTC with the plan of hiding Kyle, I put all the dirt I’d dug up on The Four onto a data stick. By some miracle, I still have it. It’s been lying at the bottom of my backpack since we left.
It takes a while to go through all the evidence. I spent weeks gathering it, including many sleepless nights. I hacked into the CIA, which was no easy task. But one thing I never did get around to doing was organizing the information. As a result, it’s a rather tedious process for me to walk everyone through the evidence that backs up what I’ve already shared.
But I try my best to explain: RedZone is the code name for the illegal and highly unethical research-and-training arm of The Four. George Malone—AKA Reid Harris and a few other aliases—oversees this particular branch, which is headquartered in a secret facility in rural northern Pennsylvania. Among The Four’s nefarious activities are arms sales; trade in political secrets; and the research and development of high-tech and neurological weapons.
Those weapons include people like me. Like us. The missions we waited our whole lives to be sent on, and the in-field training exercises we completed, were either hits for RedZone or RedZone’s clients.
The evidence to back up these assertions is damning. The CIA has been on RedZone’s case for years with rarely much success. From what Kyle told me yesterday about how his mother was once ratted out while in hiding, it’s no stretch to suspect the organization has a mole or moles that explain some of the CIA’s failure.
Gabe swears after I finish my presentation. “And there’s no one in a position to do anything who we can go to? We have so much more we could tell them. We could lead a team straight into the camp.”
“No.”
I spin around. Kyle’s joined us at last, and I wonder how much he heard.
“I’m sure there are people in the CIA or wherever who we could trust,” he says. “But finding them without RedZone’s people finding out what we’re doing first? I don’t recommend risking it.”
“No. I agree.” Cole’s eyes are unfocused as he stares at the e-sheet. I suspect what I’ve shown is hitting him the hardest. He’s only heard bits and pieces until now, and unlike some of us who have always had a defiant streak, Cole has been the perfect soldier. The perfect unit leader for RedZone. Malone put his trust in Cole, and Cole trusted him right back, far more than the rest of us had any reason to. If learning all this was a punch in the gut for me, to Cole it’s probably more like a bullet to the heart. “Kyle’s right. We can’t trust the authorities.”
I’m not sure what surprises me more—that Cole is agreeing with Kyle for a change, or that he called Kyle by his real name. It must be the shock.
“Well then this is just further proof that if anyone’s going to take these bastards down, it’s got to be us.” Jordan’s expression is unyielding.
“Later.” Cole seems to snap out of his daze and starts pacing in the confined area. “It’s good that Sophia has this information, and we should make copies of it so it can’t be lost. But nothing I said about our plans has changed.”
Kyle unzips his jacket. It’s toasty around the stove, but I also sense he’s preparing for an argument. “You’re no longer at the camp. Why are you in charge?”
“I’m not,” Cole snaps. “But you don’t even know what plans I’m talking about because you ran off in a huff. I’m trying to keep you safe, mutant. Until we know we’ve lost RedZone and you’re out of their hands, we can’t afford to do anything else. If what Sophia shared is true, we can’t let Malone study your genetics.”
“There’s no ‘if’,” I mutter.
Cole collapses to the floor. “I know. I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just going to be a while before I can make my brain fully accept this.”
“We may not have a while,” Jordan says. “Malone won’t expect a quick strike. Surprise is one of our only advantages.”
“Well, we don’t have the resources, regardless.” Cole takes a deep breath. “We don’t even have Lev anymore. There are only six of us.”
Kyle clears his throat. “Seven.”
We all turn to him in surprise. No, I want to yell. Whatever craziness we attempt, I don’t want you along. I don’t want you getting hurt.
But I swallow down the fierce need to protect him. If Kyle wants to help, he deserves the chance. He’s proven he’s not useless, and he’s certainly plenty smart. Plus, he’s the most indestructible of all of us. Odds are he’d survive whatever happens. At least until Malone decides he’s no longer useful to science.
I just don’t have to like it. These damn human emotions are messing with my machine logic again.
Not surprisingly, I’m spared the need to protest. Everyone, except Octavia who’s lost in her e-sheet, jumps in to do it for me. It’s not that the others don’t grudgingly admit that Kyle can hold his own, but they’re convinced that without our years of training, he’d be a liability. Particularly for me.
“Whenever we go after RedZone,” Cole says, “everyone needs to be focused. I can’t have you worrying about Kyle the whole time.”
“So instead I’ll be worrying about the rest of you?” I cross my arms.
Kyle holds up a hand. “I get it. You want me gone. Believe me, I want to be gone. So forget it.”
I don’t want you gone. But Cole’s watching me, and the words dry up in my throat.
While I struggle for something sensible to add to the conversation, Octavia changes the subject. We’re all tired and hungry, and there are watch shifts to assign and food rations to deal with. The lunacy of a mere six or seven of us bringing down RedZone single-handedly must be put aside to deal with more pressing problems.
But the idea of it hangs in the air, tantalizing and out of reach. Like safety.
Like Kyle.
Chapter Fourteen
Tuesday Night: One Day After Escape
The cars don’t make for the most comfortable of beds, and by the time my watch shift arrives, I have a crick in my neck. I stretch incessantly as I make my passes around the perimeter.
The warehouse is undeniably creepy in the dark. Once the sun set, we opted to make do with as little artificial light as possible. At this point, we still haven’t a clue how RedZone is finding us, and although a faint glow emanating from the warehouse’s windows is unlikely to be what tips them off, there’s no need to risk it. Besides, we need to make our batteries last, and the six of us have excellent dark vision. The bioengineers who tweaked our DNA made sure of it.
For that matter, Kyle seems to have much better than average night vision too. I wonder if his mother was one of the RedZone scientists who developed the engineering technique.
Even with our extra rod cells though, the whispers of moonlight that slip into the warehouse cast eerie shadows. I can’t stop shining my flashlight into the dark nooks and corners every time I hear a strange noise. Most of it is scuffling, probably mice. Some is from the occasional train. We passed tracks on the way here. They’re over a mile away, but in the middle of the night, it sounds as though the train is right on top of us.
One rumbles by now, and thanks to it, I only hear Kyle coming up behind me when he’s already disturbingly close. If he’d wanted to, he’d have had a good chance of taking me down.
I curse the train and my own ineptitude. “Why don’t these things run silently? It’s not as though they’re touching the tracks.”
Outside the warmth of our makeshift camp, Kyle’s bundled up, and so am I. “Safety. When the trains were first designed to hover, a lot o
f people got injured because they couldn’t hear them coming.”
I frown. “That’s why there are gates lining the tracks.”
“People jumped them.”
“Seriously? Sometimes I wonder if we should be trying so hard to protect people from themselves.” I cringe and point the flashlight at my toes. “Never mind. That sounds like something Fitzpatrick would say.”
Kyle chuckles. “She wouldn’t be the only one.”
“No, but I’d rather not share any opinions with her. If she said the sky was blue, I’d convince myself it was red.”
Kyle switches off his flashlight. We have enough light with just the one. “You know, you shot her. Maybe you should consider letting go of some of your anger.”
I raise an eyebrow.
“Okay, maybe not. But you should be glad I don’t hold a grudge like you do.”
“You don’t?”
He yawns and wanders over to a patch of moonlight that seeps into the old foreman’s office. The window muntins turn the light into squares, and the pattern reminds me of a poster Audrey had hanging in our dorm room at RTC. It was of some famous book cover, and it showed a young boy staring into the night, the moonlight shining down on him like it shines down on us tonight.
My heart constricts with how much I miss Audrey. I miss my other friends at RTC too, but I especially miss her.
“I think Cole’s trying to get rid of me.” Kyle stares out the window, much like the boy in Audrey’s poster, and his face is just as wistful.
“He’s trying to protect you.”
Kyle turns sharply, the wistfulness replaced by something I can’t quite catch. “Maybe, but I don’t trust him. I get that you do, and that’s fine. But I also think Jordan’s right—we should split up.”
I click off the flashlight because it’s bright enough in the office without it, and I stuff my hands in my pockets. Providing an opinion either way is challenging because I don’t like my options. “There are good reasons to split up, but I’m not sure it’s the best idea.”
“Because Cole doesn’t think so?”
“You don’t have to sound so bitter, but no. It’s not because of Cole. It’s because we just escaped, and the idea of leaving some of them behind—I don’t like it. Also, whatever you think, Cole does have a point about us being stronger together.”
Kyle circles around. “Jordan has a point too.”
“I admitted it.”
“But you’re choosing Cole’s side.”
I want to throttle him for making this personal rather than practical. Yet part of me is delighted that he must care enough to do it. “I’m choosing my side. What I want most is to keep you out of Malone’s hands. This is my fault. My mistake to fix.”
“Then you should consider my opinion more. You should come with me.”
“What?”
He pushes the old desk chair out of the way so he can stand closer. “Somehow RedZone can find us, and since I can guarantee that I’m not the one who’s bugged, the biggest threat to me is one of you. So just hear me out.”
I close my mouth and gesture for him to continue.
“I can’t reach my parents. You’re probably right that if Malone caught them, he’d make sure we knew about it. It’s not as if he hasn’t been able to find us. So if they’re on the run, and if their phones got lost or damaged, I need another way to contact them. You said you’d have a hard time concentrating if you were worried about us? Well, I have the same problem worrying about them. I need to leave so I can find them.”
I nod slowly, listening to the warehouse creak in the wind. “I understand that. I do. But how are you going to find them?”
Kyle gets that contemplative expression on his face, one I’ve started recognizing as the look he has when he’s debating sharing secrets. He taps his gloved hands together with nervous energy. “Before I started at RTC, my mother opened a safety deposit box. She was concerned that something could happen while I was away at school, and we’d need a securer way to communicate than our phones.”
“Good planning.”
Kyle snorts. “My life has always been about planning. She figured one day RedZone would discover she was alive. Anyway, we have money in the box, fake IDs, new phones and more. If she had to flee, that’s where she’d go first to leave me a message. I need to get there, and I’ll do it alone, but I’d rather you come with me.”
“Of course I’ll come with you. We should all come with you. We don’t have any other—”
“No.” He grips my arms. “It’s not that I don’t trust all of you but… Okay, I don’t trust all of you. But it’s more than that. We don’t blend in. We’re being hunted. We don’t know how we’re being found. And honestly, the fewer people who know what bank I’m talking about, the better. I don’t want RedZone possibly trailing us there and staking the place out. Sophia, please.”
I swallow down a curse, accepting these arguments. If I wasn’t so unhappy about the possibility of leaving my unit behind, I’d have made the same ones. But I’m torn. My unit comes first; they always have. I’ve trained in many situations where the addition or subtraction of one person on the team has made the difference between success and failure. Life and death. If I leave with Kyle, what if someone in my unit suffers for it?
But then, what if something happens to Kyle because I’m not there to help him? Yes, my unit’s always come first, but I’ve never had anyone in my life who is as important to me. I might only have known Kyle for four months, but they have been an intense four months. My heart doesn’t care about the time. It only cares about how much he’s come to mean to me.
I can’t leave Kyle, and if I can’t persuade him not to go, then he needs someone with him to help and protect him. It makes no sense for anyone else to do it.
Kyle lets me go, and his eyes bore into mine. “You’re going to try to talk me out of leaving, aren’t you?”
Yes! That would be a good plan. If it would work. Which it won’t.
“That would be a waste of my breath.”
“Yup, it would. And you’re not going to try to stop me instead?”
“How would I do that?” I kick at the air just because I need to lash out at something. “We ran so we could be free. I’m not going to hold you against your will. This was always about being wild and free, right?”
Tension melts from his face. “That’s what you said at the dance, the night before all the craziness began. ‘We’ll go wherever the mood strikes us. Wild and free.’”
“Because that’s what you told me you wanted. Remember that day at the aquarium? I told you I’d fly you away with me.”
“I might not have perfect recall like some people, but I wouldn’t forget it.” Kyle takes another step closer, and we’re practically touching.
I remember how close we sat that day at the aquarium, the casual and familiar way he took my hand and traced it on his sketch paper. It’s the small, comfortable gestures that I once took for granted that leave me feeling so empty with their lack.
“Did you know all this about RedZone or The Four back then?”
I drag my thoughts away from visions of kissing his adorably pouty lower lip. “I knew about RedZone, or most of it. But not about you.”
Kyle merely nods, and I get the sense he only asked as a way to fill the space between us. It’s narrow, but achingly wide. The lies we’ve told each other, the pain and the mistakes are thick in it. He can’t reach forward and kiss me, but as long as we talk, we have an excuse for standing this close.
“So will you come with me?” he asks at last.
It kills part of me to leave my unit members behind, but there’s only one possible answer. And on the upside, maybe alone time with Kyle will help clear out some of the ickiness. I can’t help but hope part of his insistence that I come with him is for that very reason.
“Of
course I’ll come with you. Dork.” I poke him in the arm like I used to do. “What did you think I’d say?”
Kyle pokes me back, and some of the slime in the space is burnt off by his smile. “Not sure, but I didn’t think you’d call me a dork, Hernandez.”
Chapter Fifteen
Sunday Afternoon: Present
Kyle’s accusation rings in my head. You went along on Malone’s orders.
No way. No fucking way would Cole betray me and my unit like that.
Betray. The word rattles around in my head. Cole couldn’t betray me if I was merely misguided in my escape attempt. The fact that betray is the word Kyle used, and it feels like the right word, puts my past into sharper focus.
My memories from the warehouse—of my feelings for Kyle, the escape from the camp, all of the information I showed the others about who Malone is and what RedZone does—I remember all of it, and I believed it at the time. Absolutely believed it. I’m dying inside from a thousand details that had been wiped from my head.
Could I have been confused or simply wrong? It’s possible, but it doesn’t feel so likely. I knew exactly who I was running from when I broke Kyle out of the camp. He hadn’t been planting ideas in my head. I was the one who had the knowledge and made the decision.
I’d already been heading toward the conclusion that something wasn’t right about either the camp or Malone, but even the certainty that I was acting on my best available intel when I ran proves nothing. It definitely doesn’t prove that Cole is guilty of betraying me. Sure, he’s been acting strange lately, but then so have I. The memory loss is messing with my head. Cole’s strangeness could be the result of his loftier responsibilities around the camp or his unhappiness about my feelings for Kyle.
But if Cole’s content with his new responsibilities after everything I told him, does that mean he’s ignoring it? Or have his memories been erased too?
Or is Kyle right—has Cole been on Malone’s side all along?
Myriad thoughts and denials pound in my head with each heartbeat. I don’t know what to think or who to trust.
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