New World Order

by S. M. McEachern

  Doc was in his usual spot, at his table with his computer monitor in front of him. The whir of replicators was louder than usual, and I wondered what he was up to. He didn’t look surprised to see me.

  “I just made a pot of tea,” he said.

  I motioned toward the refrigerator. “Do you have any tomatoes?”

  He exhaled a laugh. “I would have sent for some if I had known you were coming.”

  “Surprised to see me?” I asked, sitting in the empty stool across the table from him.

  He glanced away from his screen to stare at me. “Not really. You’ve proven yourself to be quite capable on many occasions. However, you have completed your mission more quickly than I thought you would. I trust you were successful?”

  “I was, thank you. Jack is home.”

  “Excellent. You must be delighted.”

  “I’m very happy.” I tilted my head to one side and appraised him. “Are you happy he’s back?”

  Some emotion that I couldn’t quite determine flickered across his face. “The Senate hasn’t been the same without him.”

  “No. It certainly hasn’t. Although I’m happy he wasn’t here when you decided to assassinate bourge senators.”

  Doc’s face remained emotionless. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. “I would never have harmed Jack Kenner. He’s too important to my research. But don’t expect me to apologize for wanting to get rid of the others. Powell and West should never have been allowed to run for office. In fact, I’ve uncovered enough evidence to prove that they fixed the election.”

  “So why didn’t you just share that information with everyone? Have them removed from government?”

  Doc jerked forward, an angry glint in his eyes. “I’m not going to make the mistake of playing by the rules with men like Powell and West. If the rules were fair, if they had any moral basis at all, those men would have been tried as war criminals and sentenced to death.” He slapped his hand on the table, startling me. “Why the hell are we still playing their game? It’s bloody well time we played our own.”

  “Does that include killing every bourge with a super virus?”

  His angry expression softened, and his mouth drew into a contrite line. “There is no bourge virus. I haven’t been able to isolate a gene specific to them yet.” I could see no apology in his eyes, only regret. “But I wasn’t going to let Leisel Holt’s threat go unanswered.”

  I blew out a sigh of relief. “So you were just bluffing.”

  “There are lots of viruses, Miss O’Donnell, and I haven’t discounted infecting the Dome with one. It’s a completely sealed environment and would pose little risk to the population outside.”

  “Aren’t there still a few people living in the Pit? Summer’s parents are there.”

  He dropped his gaze. “A small price to pay to stop the threat of nuclear annihilation.”

  “Or,” I said, leaning toward him, “you can make me invisible and I’ll infiltrate the Dome and neutralize Leisel.”

  “And by ‘neutralize’ you mean?”

  “If I can do this without killing her, I will.”

  Doc mimed spitting, complete with the noise. “She’s the last of the Holts. She should have died with her father.”

  “I know you hate her, Doc, but not everyone does. She has a loyal boyfriend, Desmond, who is a trained soldier. The West family has adopted her since her father’s death. She has friends among the Dome’s most influential families. If we kill her, someone will come looking for revenge, kick up a stink, and make a public issue out of it. David Chavez is a prime example—he and his family have received death threats since Powell’s assassination.” I put my hand over one of Doc’s. “Three hundred years later, and the War still hasn’t ended. Someone has to stop it, Doc. And I know how much you hate it when I talk about it, but the Alliance is the way. It’s the common ground between bourge and urchin.”

  He paused, studying me as he considered what I’d said. “Metamaterial doesn’t provide complete invisibility,” he said. “I haven’t perfected the technology yet.”

  “Is it complete enough to fool the cameras in the Dome?”

  He nodded. “Especially if you stick to the shadows.”

  “Do you have enough of it made?”

  “I can fashion you a cape in a reasonable amount of time.”

  “Then let’s get to work.”

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Jack

  Teegan was in the hands of the doctors, tucked into a hospital bed and hooked up to IV antibiotics. She screamed at the top of her lungs when they stuck her with the needle and tried to rip it back out, but someone brought in a bowl of pudding to distract her. It was the first time she’d tasted chocolate. I tried to leave her a few times to go in search of Sunny, but she was too agitated to let me out of her sight. Four hours later she was finally asleep.

  I was a little agitated myself. Sunny should have met me at the hospital hours ago. Was there trouble? I exited the hospital and was greeted by a nearly empty street. A few armed sentries patrolled the sidewalks, but otherwise there were no pedestrians to be seen. The effect was a little eerie, and for a moment I wasn’t sure which direction to go. Then I saw Ted coming out of a building and ran to catch up with him.

  “What’s the latest?” I asked.

  “Everyone is still in a stand-off, and Mom and Dad are stuck inside the Dome with that lunatic,” Ted said, frustration giving his voice a hard edge.

  I was concerned too. Tact and diplomacy weren’t exactly Mom’s strengths, and I almost hoped Leisel had everyone under house lockdown so Mom wouldn’t have the opportunity to aggravate her or the Wests.

  “Have any communications come out of there yet?” I asked.

  “None. The Dome was built to be sealed off, and it is. Where’s Sunny?”

  “I don’t know. I was hoping you knew.”

  “I thought you two were going to see Doc to get an invisible suit,” Ted said with a smirk.

  “Yeah, it sounds stupid, but...” I glanced at my brother out of the corner of my eye and wondered how he would react to the knowledge that I couldn’t die. “Nanotechnology is real. I have... personal knowledge of it.”

  “Do you have a suit too?” he asked. “Because those things are sweet. I want to know how I can get one.”

  “No, I don’t have a suit, but I’d like...” And then a thought occurred to me. Would Sunny go to Doc alone for fear of me being infected with a virus? Was she going to head off to the Dome on her own? “I gotta go.”

  I ran in the direction of the medical center, wracking my brain to remember where the entrance to Doc’s underground lab was. I had only been there twice, but if I remembered correctly, it was about twenty-five feet into the woods directly behind the medical center, sandwiched in the crevice between two large boulders. I prayed Sunny wasn’t there alone, in a locked office with that madman. If he was capable of killing a bunch of bourge, who’s to say he wouldn’t kill her too since she was a bourge lover?

  I left the back parking lot of the medical center and entered the forest, dead leaves and pine needles crunching under my feet. I was so intent on saving her that I almost ran right into her.

  “Jack,” she said, a little startled. “What are you doing here?”

  I took a moment to catch my breath. “No, what are you doing here? You were supposed to meet me at the hospital.”

  A guilty blush stained her cheeks. “I thought it was best to deal with Doc on my own.”

  “He’s a madman, Sunny!”

  “He’s a little eccentric. And he really does hate the bourge, which is why I thought it was better to talk to him by myself. I knew he wouldn’t hurt me.”

  I grabbed her by the shoulders. “Sunny, I will lose it if you pull another stunt like you did last year. You should never have gone into the Dome without me.”

  It was a moment I couldn’t forget. Right after the battle with the bourge, as we were securing Powell and his soldiers in the corral,
she’d just disappeared. I had been insane with worry, and then she’d called me from the Dome. From President Holt’s office! It was a nightmare. And there was no way, after spending the last few weeks tied up and forced to endure one atrocity after another without being able to lift a finger to stop them, that I was about to go through it again.

  “You don’t leave my sight! Do you understand me?”

  She grabbed my wrists, her eyes wide with shock. “Jack! What’s gotten into you?”

  I folded her into a hug and pressed her against me. “I’ll kill anyone who touches you.”

  We stood quiet for a few minutes, hugging each other. How many times over the past two weeks had I dreamed about holding her against me? Feeling her warmth, her breath against my neck, her strength seeping into every inch of me? And when I finally had her right next to me, my first reaction was to be angry with her.

  “I’m sorry,” I whispered.

  She pushed a little bit away from me so she could see my face. “While I was helping Doc put together the cape, I realized something: it was a year ago today that I was sent to serve at your bachelor party. A year ago today that Leisel Holt put into motion her plan to betray us both, frame you for treason, and try to claim the title of president for herself.” She traced my bottom lip with her finger. “You and I have come a long way since then. The Dome and the Pit have come a long way. But Leisel Holt is still playing the game. She’s still trying to become president.” Sunny took my face in her hands and kissed me. “Let’s go finish this, Jack. Let’s finish the game.”

  There were no tears in her eyes. No fear for the journey she was about to embark on. No fear of dying. But what she didn’t understand was that she and the child she was carrying were my world. And I was still reeling from all the evil our planet held. Could I take the chance of losing them?

  “But what if she wins?” I asked.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Sunny

  The riots had stopped, and the streets were now devoid of people, save for the official-looking Domers patrolling the sidewalks. I wondered where the Pit militia was. They should have been there, alongside their equals, ensuring peace while we tried to defuse Leisel Holt.

  Jack and I borrowed a bike parked in the street and set out for the hidden entrance to the Pit. There was something poetic, if not a little desolate, about Jack and me racing out of an empty town all on our own, headed back to a place we hadn’t stepped foot in since we’d left it last year. Jack’s question—What if she wins?—echoed through my thoughts, and I clung to my husband tighter, refusing to believe that all of the hardships of the past year had been for nothing. That years of slavery and suffering would never be avenged. That in the end a Holt would triumph and finish the job they had started three hundred years ago.

  If ever there had been any doubt in my mind that Leisel was not my sister, the fact that she could so conscionably threaten thousands of people was overwhelming proof that she was not. She was a Holt through and through.

  The sun was just beginning to set as we passed the corrals. Jack turned the bike offroad and navigated the stony trail to the tunnel. Oddly enough, I wasn’t afraid. It was as if we had always been meant for this moment, Jack and I, and it occurred to me that defeating Leisel had never been about saving ourselves. From the very beginning, we had accepted that we would eventually be executed, and so we lived our last days in the name of saving humanity, making alliances, bridging enmity, and falling in love along the way. The seeds of betrayal so carefully planted by Leisel had failed to produce their crop. Solidarity had grown in their place.

  The hidden entrance to the Pit was located at the base of the mountain peak that contained the Dome, through a crevice and at the back of a cavern. It was a small, narrow tunnel that had formed due to a collapse. It was thought that the collapse occurred during the first major battle with Domers last year, but since it was located in a closed-off section of the Pit, it could have happened at any time and gone unnoticed. The truth was that prior to liberation, both the Dome and the Pit had exceeded sustainable living conditions, and excavations to make room for a growing population had to stop because we were coming dangerously close to the outside world. Now that I lived in the outside world and knew of all the caverns that ran beneath the valley, I wondered how it hadn’t happened earlier.

  As we came up to the entrance to the Pit, we were surprised to see several soldiers milling around.

  “Uh oh,” I said. “What are they doing here?”

  “They probably caught wind of what we were up to.” Jack slowed the bike and brought it to a halt.

  I tensed, ready for a battle, but the soldiers did the unexpected. They formed a line and saluted us.

  “What the...” I said.

  We dismounted the bike and one of the soldiers stepped forward. “We’re proud to serve the Alliance, sirs.” He motioned to the others. “And we all appreciate the risk you’re about to take.” He stood aside to give us access to the entrance.

  Jack saluted them and I breathed a dumbfounded thank you.

  We crawled through the crevice, followed the light coming from the far end of the cavern, and came upon a sight I thought I’d never see in my lifetime: Domers and urchins working side by side. Yeah, I knew we had managed to overcome our differences to look for Jack, but throughout the entire search there had still been an underlying current of mistrust, epitomized in Hayley’s declaration that when we returned home we’d be fighting on opposite sides again. And yet there they all were: Reyes, Summer, Hayley, Ted, Bron, Raine, Mica and a few others I didn’t recognize. Even Ayers, Ted’s bitter copilot, was getting his hands dirty clearing rocky debris away from the entrance to the Pit.

  Hayley was the first to notice us. “Hey, I was beginning to wonder if you two were ever going to make it.”

  I thumbed to the backpack slung over my shoulders. “I had to stop and get something.”

  “Hey, Ted,” Jack said. “You didn’t tell me you were on your way here when I saw you in town.”

  Ted shrugged. “Bron was just leaving town with a group of Alliance. She said she was coming here to help pave the way for you two, and I asked to come along. Brought some help with me too,” he said, motioning to Ayers.

  Ayers rolled his eyes. “Penance, I guess.”

  “So you two don’t think you’ve had enough of the Holts?” Ted asked. “You’re going back for more?”

  “Yeah.” Jack laughed softly. “Life’s been kind of boring lately. We thought we’d spice it up.” He walked to the entrance and examined the debris that barricaded it. “Was this a natural cave-in?”

  Reyes paused in his efforts to move the boulder he and Mica had been working on. “No way,” he said. “We had that tunnel braced well enough to last for at least a hundred years. My guess is that a charge was set off from the inside.”

  Bron nodded. “I worked in the Pit for over thirty years, and if there’s one thing I had complete faith in, it was a miner’s ability to stabilize a mine.”

  Mica snorted. “When you actually live in the mine, it’s called home maintenance.”

  Reyes laughed, teeth flashing against his dirt-smeared face. These were the boys I remembered from the Pit, coming up from the coalmines always joking about something, even when there was nothing to joke about. It both warmed my heart to see their bond and saddened me knowing how it had been forged.

  I looked over at Summer. She was moving rocks, but I didn’t think the tension I saw on her face was due to exertion. When the Dome doors had been opened last year, a lot of people had decided the great outdoors was not for them. They were too scared of radiation poisoning, or the sun was too bright, the air too cold or too hot, and on and on. The truth was, the biodome, including the Pit, had been the only home we had ever known, and some people were afraid to leave its safety. Summer’s parents were two of those people.

  I walked to where she was working at removing debris. Her face was dirty and her hair stuck to her sweaty forehead. “How a
re you doing?” I asked, shrugging off my backpack.

  “How do you think?” she countered, without pausing. “I’m praying to a god I don’t even know that Leisel Holt hasn’t shut off the ventilation system. Or that the explosion she set off to block this tunnel didn’t cause more cave-ins.”

  I dug into the debris, working alongside her.

  “Hey, Mrs. Kenner,” Jack said, pausing in his task to look at me. “Pregnant ladies don’t pick up giant boulders.”

  I cocked an eyebrow at that. “But they go on covert missions to defeat evil whackadoodles who have their finger on a button to set off nuclear warheads?”

  “That’s different.” He threw a rock onto a pile of other rocks. “If a nuclear warhead goes off, we’re all dead.”

  “We could use a drink of water, Sunshine,” Hayley said.

  I rolled my eyes. “You know my name’s not Sunshine, right?”

  “Yeah, I know.” She smirked, although I was pretty sure I wasn’t supposed to see it.

  “We’re through,” Raine called out. He had been wedged into the tunnel and backed out of the narrow opening. “There’s one big rock on the other side that needs to be moved, but the ceiling will go if we don’t brace it first. Where are the jacks?”

  A large pack sat off to the side, and Reyes grabbed it and took it to Raine.

  It took about fifteen minutes to get the jacks in the right place and about two minutes with the combined strength of Reyes and Raine’s exoskeletons to roll the boulder out of the way. Smaller rocks clattered to the ground when the big rock was moved, but the ceiling of the tunnel stayed in place.