“We’ll stay out of your way.”
“Hmm.” She’s annoyed, but also curious. “See that you do, then.” Innes sits back down, spins around in her chair, and continues doing whatever she was doing. Matching up clients with strikers, extracting finder fees, tracking those who might not be so eager to transfer said fees. Her fingers tap out a light staccato on the screens. It’s soothing, like birds chirping.
I watch as Chord and Auden take in the room and see what they see.
A small basement with dingy gray walls. There are no windows, the only light coming from the three cheap bulbs hanging from the ceiling over the beaten metal table centering the room. Mismatched chairs are scattered loosely across the concrete floor. A cool, earthy dampness in the air that I can feel against my skin.
It’s jarring to see anyone other than Dire and Innes in here. If I let my eyes blur just a bit, it’s Chord and Luc, scoping out the potential of new tech pieces to bring home and refurbish, reconfigure. A scene from life Before—as in, Before Chord got his assignment, Before Luc died, Before I ever killed my first strike.
I blink and it’s Chord and Auden again. Chord, much as he was upstairs: wishing he didn’t have to be here. And Auden, seeing for himself the rival of the very system that feeds him, makes him who he is, who he will be. As a future Operator of the Board, this will be a threat, but right now, as an Alt running from that same Board, it might give him a chance at safety.
“My father,” Auden says. He looks at Dire. “Do you think he’s in danger?”
“I don’t know. Depends on why Sabian wants you dead.”
Auden feels for his cell in his jeans pocket. “I should warn—”
“If Meyer is the same Meyer I remember, you don’t want to call him. He’ll never be able to keep himself from confronting Sabian. Your old man wasn’t one to climb rank and had the most laid-back attitude of anyone I ever knew at the Board, but he was also a hothead when he had to be. Right?”
Auden exhales. “Yeah, he is.” Reluctantly he lets his hand fall from his pocket. I know how he feels. There’s nothing harder than watching from a distance as a predator approaches someone you love. That the smart thing to do is let it happen.
And it hits me for the first time that Meyer is also Luc’s father, as much a part of him as the father he and I shared. So that’s where Luc got it from, then—that easy way he had of always sensing what were the little things that could slide and what was worth sweating over.
Dire mutters a command for the time:
14:48.
“How much time does that give you?” he asks me.
“Seventeen hundred is the next given time on Auden’s spec sheet. An endurance training facility in Leyton. After that, the only other possibility is tomorrow morning, when he’s signed up to leave headquarters for drill training.”
“So that’s when Sabian’s going to expect you to complete the strike, seventeen hundred.”
“Right. Sabian would never expect Auden to be on guard enough to kill
me
—as a complete, Auden wouldn’t suspect an attack. So since I haven’t reported Auden’s death from my first opportunity, when he was arriving at the training arena, Sabian’s probably thinking I either passed up the chance or just missed it. He’s going to assume I’m simply waiting now and that Auden’s about to head out to endurance training from”—I look at Auden, double-checking—“headquarters, right?”
“School, yeah,” Auden adds. “Normally I would just take off right from the class wing. We never see any of the ranking Operators during regular school hours.”
“Which is why Sabian won’t expect to see you until after you get back from this next session,” Dire says. “From endurance training.”
Auden nods. “But I’m not supposed to get there, am I?”
“No, you’re not,” I say. “He didn’t want me trying to track you on your way
back
to headquarters, because then I would find out you weren’t just any Alt. So it’s either this chance tonight or the last entry on the spec sheet—early tomorrow morning, when you’re supposed to arrive somewhere else. Which means you’d have to go home and hope you can fool Sabian.”
“Not going to happen,” Dire grunts. “Like tossing sheep right to the wolf.”
Footsteps come down the stairs and Baer enters the room.
He’s grim and weary-looking. Beneath the bare lightbulbs strung from the ceiling, his skin is a landscape of scars, all bleached crescents and pale red moons. His clothes are wrinkled from the drive over, and I wonder how fast he must have driven to get here so quickly.
It hits me that this is the first time I’ve seen both Baer and Dire together in the same room. Both of them play such significant parts in my life—it seems wrong that it took this long to happen.
“Dire,” Baer says with a curt nod and a slight narrowing of his eyes. “It’s been a while since we last saw each other.”
Dire scowls. “Not long enough, I’m thinking.”
“Fourteen years, if I’m counting correctly.”
“That’s all?”
Baer nearly grins at that. Nearly. Smiles don’t come easily to someone like Baer, who is surrounded by classrooms half full of the future dead, day after day. “I’ve missed you as well.”
“Of course you miss me. When you gotta settle for being around your sunny self all the time?”
Laughter wants to bubble up my throat. Sadness, too. What had happened to end what must have been a close friendship?
“I was surprised to hear from you,” Baer says. “To say the least.”
Dire shrugs. “Grayer’s involved. I knew you’d want to help.”
I hate knowing that my decisions have affected my friends.
“You were with the Board longer,” Dire continues. “Might know something about Sabian I don’t.”
“Just by months.”
“Might be enough.”
“Hello, Baer.”
Baer looks over at Innes. She’s turned around in her chair again, and as his face warms, I begin to wonder more about this woman who’s shown nothing but disdain toward me. “Innes, how are you?”
She gives him a smile that actually reaches her eyes. For one second. Then her face turns serious again. “I’m sorry it’s been so long. And now this.”
He turns, sees Auden, and the sight of Luc’s Alt leaves Baer visibly shocked. Luc was once a student in his weaponry class, and an exceptional one. How strange for Baer to now meet the very person he once hoped Luc would beat.
And now the one he has to help.
“So Dire says you’re Meyer’s son,” Baer says quietly. “Auden, correct?”
“Yeah.” Auden looks puzzled and a bit annoyed. Too many people, too many questions, not enough answers. “Who are you?”
“My name’s Baer. I used to work with your father, a long time ago. How is he?”
A cautious shrug. “Fine.”
“You were three years old when I left the Board, and the loudest kid in the whole damn building.”
Dire barks out a laugh at Auden’s expression.
“Once you learned how to talk,” Baer says to a dumbfounded Auden, “believe me—you were not above tattling. It seems you’ve learned to rein in the talking a bit.”
I feel a pang of jealousy. My history with Baer and Dire is far from these happy childhood memories.
At the sight of Chord, Baer nods in greeting. Not happy to see him here, but not unhappy, either. For me.
He turns to me next.
Baer walks over. I don’t let myself back down from his glare, though I think I can hear every single thought going through his head. Each one is well deserved. For all their animosity, in this Baer and Dire can agree on their disappointment, anger, and worry. I escaped a beast only to willingly stroll right back into its den.
“As a complete, you were done with the Board,” Baer says to me, his voice flat. “You should have been satisfied with that.”
Echoes of what Chord’s already said to me, and I can only nod.
Dire pulls out one of the chairs from the table in the center of the room and sits down heavily. “Okay, Grayer, let’s hear it. Tell us what the hell you’ve gotten yourself into.”
I shake my head, make no move to sit down. My thumbs are hooked tight into the straps of my bag, the canvas digging into my skin—proof that this is all real. “Why didn’t you ever say anything about working for the Board? That you and Baer
both
—”
“Not so fast. That news is old enough to sit a bit longer. You came to me asking for help.
Twice.
Your turn.”
So I start talking, right from when I saw that Operator standing outside of Julis’s office. I hide nothing. Auden grabs a chair and sits at the opposite end of the table, away from everyone else. Chord is too wound up to keep still; his pacing follows the flow of my words. Only when Dire throws him a pointed look does he force himself to lean against a wall.
It’s when I get to the part about not killing the idles that someone else finally speaks.
“So
that’s
what you got out of my telling you about that gun?” Dire’s disbelief has me hunching my shoulders.
Everyone in the room is still. Innes, even, has given up all pretense of work to turn around from her computer to listen quietly as we discuss what she herself created.
“First of all,” Dire says, “me telling you that the gun created non-Alts was supposed to scare the crap out of you, Grayer, not show you how to do it.”
“I did mean to kill them,” I say quietly. “Right up until the second I was about to pull the trigger. When I couldn’t, I had to think of a way out for them.”
“For you, too, as it turns out,” Dire says. “Don’t forget that part of it.”
I know he’s thinking about what he said to me about a striker not leaving loose ends. I’ve failed him, too.
“Grayer, you told them to go to the Surround?” Baer now. He sounds uneasy more than angry, which shakes me up even more.
“West, you didn’t,” Chord says. He takes a step closer to the table and then stops, falls back to lean against the wall again. His face is very pale. “Please tell me you didn’t tell them about the disrupter.”
“I didn’t because they don’t need it to get through,” I said weakly. “The poison permanently neutralized
everything
about the Alt code, even its shell.
We’re
the ones who’d still need the disrupter to neutralize what’s left of our Alt codes if we wanted to get past the barrier. And the effect would only last as long as we were holding it.”
“What’s a disrupter?” Auden asks, sounding absolutely confused.
“A mistake,” Chord says, and his voice is chilly.
“That was very poor advice, West,” Baer says. “Sending them over there.”
“I said
if
they had to escape—”
“The Surround is
no
escape. If these kids choose that route and they’re discovered over there, you can be sure that our enemies will try to re-create that breach in the barrier. Somehow.”
“You better hope those targets of yours decide to stay right here in the city,” Dire says. “Not that we’ll ever be able to ask them nicely. Roark guns wipe out any way of tracking them.”
“So now you’re on the run, with Sabian on your heels and short on time.” Baer exhales heavily and says nothing else, as if there’s no point. Because it’s not long until Auden’s expected to show up, either dead or alive. And figuring out Sabian before he figures me out means doing something that still comes hard for me—staying still and not running, asking for help instead of thinking I can do it all myself.
“Getting involved with the Board was your first mistake, Grayer,” Dire says. His voice has an unmistakable edge to it. “Thinking you could win was your second.”
I swallow thickly. “I know that.
Now.
”
“You don’t know the Board like I know it,” Dire says. “So if you want a chance to get out of this alive, then listen. Because I have a story to tell you.”
“I was twenty-one years old and still a Level Three Operator alongside Baer and Meyer,” says Dire. “Meyer was five years older than us, but like I said, content enough just to float along with wherever the Board wanted to place him. Sabian was the same age as Meyer and already a Level Two.
“I was in no hurry to advance, even though the Board already told me I showed enough tactical skill that they intended to push me through to Level Two soon. Thought I had all the time in the world, you know? I was complete, a Board member living in Leyton—and I had Freya.”
I pull out a chair to sit, letting my bag drop into my lap and positioning myself directly across from Dire so I can see him and make sure this is real. Dire as a recruiter of killers makes sense; Dire as a young man in love does not.
“She was eighteen, the daughter of a respected Level Two Operator. If things went the way they were supposed to—meaning she’d complete when she finally got her assignment—Freya would have been a Level Two tactical Operator within a few years. As it was, she still had lots of training to finish and qualifying exams to pass. She was doing some research in the data logs, studying techniques and strategies, when she came across a bunch of old miscoded files that had gotten dropped into the wrong data log. Turns out one of them was about a side project conducted by Kersh’s bio lab fifty-five years ago.”
Dire breaks off abruptly and glances over at Innes, who’s listening as intently as the rest of us, her work at the computer still forgotten. Then Dire continues as if he never stopped, as if we couldn’t have noticed.
“Finding cross-filed data itself wasn’t that big of a deal. There were lots of different data logs, and sometimes mistakes happened. But Freya had never heard of this side project before, so she kept the file to analyze later. It was just a partial one, just bits and pieces of jumbled, miscoded information that didn’t mean anything in and of itself. It was innocent curiosity, that was all.”
From the corner of my eye, I see Baer start moving across the room, pacing. Now he’s the one too restless to stand still. “Start from the beginning, Dire,” he mutters.
“As a Level Two Op in training, one of Freya’s Board duties was to check on the training facilities throughout the ward. Make sure the equipment was still working fine and all that. There were usually enough trainees at any point that a schedule was kept to track who was going where and when. So it wouldn’t have been hard to figure out where Freya’s next check was going to be. Where
she
was going to be.”
I rub at the sudden chill on my arms. Dire’s words tell me he’s haunted. And beneath the room’s cheap lighting, he looks nearly old, worn down. Not strong.
“It was a brand-new building, not yet open to the public,” he continues. “The skill stations were still being set up. Freya was there looking over the latest shipment of bullets that had come in when the whole place just blew.”
There’s a noticeable break in Baer’s step before he continues pacing. I look over at Chord to see him watching me, eyes very dark. Auden is pale. Innes doesn’t react at all.
“Gas leak,” Dire says, his voice harsh. “They eventually said it was because of a glitch in the computer program that regulated the gas flow. But, you know, nothing like that’s ever happened since. Not in Leyton, or any other ward in the city.
“I had my own facility to be checking at that time, at the other end of the ward. But I wanted to be with Freya and decided to go with her instead. It was five weeks before I woke up in the hospital. Nothing but minor burns that were already healed. And Freya—” Dire’s voice breaks off.
“Was she okay?” Chord asks.
“Freya was … fine.” Dire frowns, and he rubs the side of his face, as though to wake himself. His blue eyes are very bright as he looks over at Innes. Her expression is impossible to read. “She was more than fine actually,” Dire says slowly. “She told me that while I was recovering, she got notice that her Alt had been killed in a train accident. So she was finally a complete, just as I’d been for nearly four years.
“For weeks nothing was clear, like I was looking through fog, and my head felt like crap. But Freya helped me get through it; pain aside, things were good. We had both made it through a freak accident, both of us were completes, and our future positions in the Board were secured. Eventually I felt right again. Except the more right I felt, the more wrong Freya started to seem.”
My throat, dry as dust. “ ‘Wrong’?”
“Off,” Dire says, correcting himself, the word curt. “Different. At first I thought it was just me still recovering. Then I thought it was just her worrying too much. But, yeah, different. Small things, like forgetting the name of someone she’d known for years but hadn’t seen in a while. Tilting her head to the wrong side when she laughed. Not eating her favorite foods.”
I guessed the truth then. “It wasn’t Freya, was it?”
“No, it was her Alt.”
“Her Alt.” Chord repeats the two words, as though doing so would make it less crazy.
“Something about that side project from the bio lab that she found,” I say to Dire. “Was that it?”
He nods. “Someone was threatened by what she found, or
would
find if given more time. By the time I was okay again, her notes and the file were gone. And her Alt had, of course, lost interest in it.”
“You’re saying the
lab
was behind the explosion?” Chord asks. “Because we all know the Board runs the lab.”
“That makes no sense!”
Heads swivel toward Auden. His face is still pale, but set. This is his world we’re dissecting and deciding it’s rotten inside.
“Level Operators are valuable assets,” he says. “Years of training, inherited in-house knowledge, access to elite facilities—all to form the best soldiers. The best citizens. It makes no sense why they would just kill Freya and then go to such lengths to save Dire. Not only save, but also trick into thinking nothing had changed.”
Dire lifts an eyebrow. “You’re sharp, kid,” he says. “It took me a bit longer to reason that out, and then to discover the answer.”
“So? What did you come up with?”
“It wasn’t the Board,” Baer says quietly, finally stopping his pacing. “It was only a single Operator, acting on his own.”
“Sabian,” I mutter.
“Sabian,” Baer says with a nod.
Dire says nothing, and as though sensing Dire’s weariness, Baer continues.
“After Dire got Freya’s Alt to confess—that it was Sabian who bribed her with life as a complete, as a Board member, and a guarantee that her family would never run out of resources, all to impersonate someone else for the rest of her life—he confronted Sabian at headquarters with everything he’d learned.
“Freya’s lab project actually uncovered data about Kersh’s true beginnings. It had been accidentally miscoded to look like a lab project, don’t forget.”
“ ‘True beginnings,’ ” Auden repeats. He sounds about as cold as when he was demanding answers from me, out there on that street in front of the training arena. “You have
got
to be kidding me.”
“Kersh provides safety for its people from the Surround,” Dire says, still sounding tired. “But it’s also a prison. Now listen, this city really started out as an off-limits zone, a place for prisoners of war, criminals, the diseased. You have to remember the Surround was chaos, anyway—it made things easier just to lock up those they didn’t want around. The Board could control the amount of resources going in. And what did the Surround care about the prisoners eventually dying out?
“But things were going from bad to worse out in the Surround, and three members of the Board began to be particularly vocal about trying to change things.”
“The Founders,” Chord says.
“You bet. Cris, Jackson, and Tamryn. They decided they had to start small if they were going to make much of a difference in the long run. What better place than a prison, already barricaded and self-contained? Over time, they convinced the prisoners to fight back against the Surround. The Founders left the Surround for the last time, crossed the barrier, and Kersh was born. And so here we are—and the Surround continues to want the land back under its control.”
“The part about us being prisoners now, though,” I say, shaking my head. I look over at Chord, and then Auden. They look about as lost as I feel. “How?”
“We’re still prisoners because the Board keeps us here in order to keep them safe from the Surround.”
“But if it weren’t for the Board, we wouldn’t even be here,” Auden says. “We’d have died out ages ago.”
“We also wouldn’t have any Alts to kill.”
Auden says nothing.
“So Sabian was acting on his own when he killed Freya?” Chord finally asks. “Why? And how did he know this about Kersh, when you and Baer didn’t?”
“Only a few of the most senior Level One Operators are ever supposed to know the truth about Kersh once being a prison,” Dire says. “At the time, one of them … well, she had a major weakness for smooth-talking younger guys and eventually got sloppy about keeping Sabian away from her records. And once he knew the secret, he went from not even qualifying for Level Three to becoming Level One within just a couple years. I’d already left the Board by the time he got there. And the Board wasn’t aware that Freya had found anything—only Sabian knew after he overheard Freya telling me about that damn file she was so curious about. When his plan went to hell because I got hurt, the Board was furious that he took matters into his own hands and not only lost one asset but also perhaps two. And that’s why they decided to bring in Freya’s Alt. Damage control. I would never have to know.”
“What did you do when you found out about her Alt?” I ask him. Suddenly this, of all the things I just learned, seems most important of all.
He sighs, rubs the back of his head. “The mind’s a messed-up thing, Grayer. I believed what I wanted to believe. And by the time I realized I was wrong, it was too late. Freya or not, I did love her, even as I was devastated to lose the person I’d thought she was.”
Chord shakes his head, his eyes black fire, lit with indignation. “You’re saying one Alt is interchangeable with another. That one isn’t different enough from the other to matter.” I can guess what he’s thinking. Chord wants nothing to do with his own Alt, the person who killed his best friend.
“I’m saying I was too sick to notice,” Dire nearly snarls at Chord.
“In the beginning, maybe,” Chord says. “Not later.”
“Listen, kid—”
“Just looking like someone and sounding like them and behaving like them—it shouldn’t be enough to
be
them,” Chord says. “Loving that Alt as though she were Freya, you’re saying everything that happens after birth means nothing.”
“Loving her Alt didn’t mean I felt less for Freya, you got that?”
“You really loved both, then?” I ask Dire. “Her Alt lied to you. How could you … how could she—”
“I did lie, but only at first.” Innes’s sharp voice cuts through the room.
Shock strangles us into momentary silence.
Innes is Freya’s Alt.
It’s Auden who breaks the silence first. “But now you’re both here, recruiting strikers to work against the Board.” He glances between Dire and Innes. “Why did the Board let you leave, if they wanted so badly to keep you both as Operators?”
“I knew the truth. About Kersh—about Freya and Innes. Sabian confessed to the prison, to the explosion, and to switching Alts. Everything I knew was enough to make them let me walk.” Dire glances up at Baer. “And I told them that I left all that info with a friend. So if anything happened to us, it’d all come out.”
Baer. He’s still standing there, listening, and it’s hard to imagine him as a twenty-one-year-old. I try to picture him and Dire both at that age, and Baer keeping such a secret for all these years to secure safety for his friend.
“Did you blackmail the Board so you could leave, too?” I ask Baer now.
He nods. “Not long after, a few months. And then I found out Dire was a recruiter of strikers. I understood his grievances against the Board—what I couldn’t understand was his chosen method of fighting back. He called me a weakling.”
Dire snickers. “Actually, the word I used was—”
“Hush, you two,” Innes says. She turns her head to look at Auden. Her green eyes make me wonder about her Alt, how different or similar Freya would have been. How I’d feel living in the shadow of another, forever trying to be both. “So now the question is,” she says, “why does Sabian want
you
dead?”
For a second, Auden says nothing. Then he pulls out his cell from his jeans pocket. He taps it awake, opens it to a file, and hands it over to Innes.
She takes it from him, and whatever she reads there has her green eyes widening in shock. “These are Freya’s notes on that old file.” Her finger slides across the screen, moving across the page. “And the miscoded file itself.”
“What?” Dire’s voice is uneven. He steps over and looks at the screen with Innes. “That’s Freya’s handwriting … and a copy of that file she found. …” He shakes his head and stares at Auden. “Where did you get these? The file went missing after she was killed.”
“I found them in a folder in the old research section of the lab,” Auden says. “They were old enough that … well … I read some of it, and I got curious, so I scanned it all with my cell before putting everything back. It’s all gone now, anyway. They’ve just cleared out that whole paper section to make room for digital storage.”
“Why were you in the lab in the first place?” Innes asks, surprised. “Most Level Alts choose active training to fulfill their qualifying hours.”
“I think the technical side of things—like our gene maps and why we’re still sterile—is pretty interesting, too.”
“I agree.” And now Innes is looking at Auden more curiously. The more she talks, the more I can see past her catlike beauty so she’s less intimidating, more human. “It’s just another way to approach a fight, isn’t it? With a different kind of weapon—knowledge.”
I think of Innes and her tracking chips in striker marks, her binding agent to speed healing, her poison in the Roark guns. I never thought of knowledge that way before—how it’s not whether things hurt or help that’s important, but the knowledge that led them to exist in the first place.