Resist (20 page)

Part Three

Truth is so rare that it is delightful to tell it.

~Emily Dickinson~

Chapter Twenty-Two

Monday Morning: Present

My eyes fly open, and disorientation leaves me gasping. The blankets over me are familiar, and the room is dark and quiet except for the hum of a heater. A second later, it comes to me that I'm in my bed in our quarters.

I'm home. Then I curse the word because I do not want this place to be my home.

Calming down, I press my hands against my head and imagine my skull feels fuller. It's taken almost four days, but in the end, Summer and Octavia came through. The program they installed in my implants to backup and restore my memory files has finished loading the deleted data. My memories of Malone sending me to RTC, of meeting Kyle, of my failed plan to hide him when I learned the truth about RedZone and of our subsequent escape from the camp—they're all here as though they were never erased. Every detail, even the part where I shot Fitzpatrick, has been returned.

I am fully me again. Whole.

Yet I'm no less terrified than I was when I was mentally lost. Four days have passed since I returned to the camp. Four days in which many things could have happened without my knowledge. Our plan could have already fallen apart.

Rolling over on my side, I check on Sky and Eva. They both sleep peacefully, probably pleased with the commendation we received for our assistance in taking down the E last night. It had to be done, but the memory doesn't sit well with me. We all deserve our freedom from this place.

The E isn't the only memory bothering me either. Aside from coordinating about the E, I haven't spoken to Cole since I flung accusations at him in the woods yesterday. Although my words weren't off base, I have to admit there was more going on than Cole betraying me. Assuming he does intend to go through with our plan, I can forgive him.

After all, if I can't allow him to atone, how can I expect Kyle to allow me the same?

I only wish Cole had told me more once he realized my memories were returning. A low anger simmers in my blood when I recall how he kissed me recently. How he's taken advantage of my confusion to win me back. In some ways, that's less forgivable than his betrayal. We will have to have a talk about that. But first I have more pressing issues.

Falling back to sleep is impossible, so I wait out the next two hours planning my moves. It's challenging when I don't know what Malone or Fitzpatrick have in store for me today. More tests? I seriously hope not.

When the lights come on, I fall back into years of routine. Our morning run. Breakfast. A review of the day's schedule while we eat. Cole has been given the information to share with us, and for everyone, it's a typical day. The surprise is that it's meant to be a typical day for me too.

“Welcome back, Seven.” Alan clamps me on the shoulder. “Guess you've been allowed to reintegrate.”

“She's been rehabilitated,” Cole says.

Yes, by the attempted deletion of my personality. Lovely.

I smile, pretending to be pleased. “I'll be happier about that if there are no more Es on the loose.”

“Won't we all.” Cole's tone is light, but his gaze is full of questions. Is he asking whether I remember? Whether I'm still angry with him?

I need to find time to talk to him in private, but our schedule is not conducive to that until late morning. Today, we spend time atop the ridge that overlooks the camp, drilling on how quickly we can assemble, shoot and disassemble the camp's latest model of sniper rifle. Though the sun shines, it's nonetheless a cold December day, and we can't wear thick gloves to do the work. Accuracy with our shots counts as well as time.

The repetition is dull, but the actual shooting is challenging enough to occupy my thoughts. As usual, I'm neither the best nor the worst at this sort of task. Not as usual, Fitzpatrick spends less time than normal berating me for my so-called failure. I'm determined to believe it's because of her leg. Even if I'm not supposed to remember shooting her, she would. And since I'm the one currently holding a rifle…

“Pack up and go to lunch,” she says at last, sticking her gloved hands in her pockets.

Grateful for the reprieve, I take apart the rifle for the last time and stick my hands in a pair of gloves. As Cole does the same, I give him a significant look. He nods almost imperceptibly, meeting my eye.

Taking my time to brush snow off my clothes, I let the others rush to get off the ridge. Fitzpatrick's already gone ahead to get out of the cold, allowing Cole and me to linger.

“How are you?” he asks. The snow cushions the noise, but he wisely speaks in a low voice.

I lug the rifle case over my shoulder. Someone will notice if we fall too far behind. “Back to normal.” I raise an eyebrow, assuming he'll catch my meaning.

He reaches for my hand, and I stuff it in my pocket. Cole flinches. “Good. I was starting to worry.”

“Really? Because you seemed to enjoy the fact that I forgot about…” I don't want to risk saying Kyle's name, but Cole gets the implication.

“Sev.”

“Seriously? That was a shitty, underhanded, manipulative—”

“Sev—”

“You knew.”

Cole kicks a fallen branch off to the side of the path. “Did I? You sure seemed to enjoy kissing me back, and before you left for that damn college…” He swallows, and my heart can't help but beat once with pain for him in spite of everything. “I meant it when I told you I love you, that we were—we are—perfect together.”

I close my eyes, forcing the tightness behind them to go away. Although I might be angry, it doesn't change how much I care about him, and I wish I could say something to alleviate the pain my words cause. “I do love you, and maybe once that would have meant something different than it does now. But I changed, and when you've been on the outside for a while too, you'll change. We were all we knew then, and we hadn't lived.”

Cole's jaw hardens, and his grip around his case strap leaves him white-knuckled. “I've only and always wanted what's best for you.”

I don't reply because I'm no longer sure I can believe that. Taking advantage of my memory loss could be a part of that in a warped way, but does it matter? It was still a shitty thing to do.

“I'm sorry.”

With a sigh, I pause and kiss his cold cheek. “Maybe I expect you to be too perfect. I'm guilty of the same unrealistic expectations as everyone else around here.”

Cole smiles sadly. “I've never claimed to be perfect. Only that we should strive to be.”

“Well, it's a pretty unrealistic goal.” I slow my steps because I fear we've been catching up to the others. “You could have told me more when it was obvious I was starting to…”
Get my memories back.
Again, I don't want to say the words.

“I thought about it, but since I didn't know what tests Malone might run, I figured anything I told you could be a problem. I was trusting…”
That Summer and Octavia's fix was working.
I hear the words as though on his breath. “I'd have filled you in eventually if it didn't appear to be happening.”

“How long would eventually have been?”

A cloud passes over the sun, and the temperature drops. Snowflakes swirl from the delicate tree limbs and land on my face.

“Very soon. We've run into a snag.”

I stop abruptly as my heart rate shoots up. “What does that mean?”

Cole doesn't answer, and at the same time, I detect a change in the voice patterns ahead of us. He reaches over, places a hand on my cheek and pulls me in for a kiss. Even having returned to myself and loving Kyle, some vestigial chamber in my heart aches with Cole's touch. Part of me will always love him the way he wants all of me to, I suppose.

The voices down the trail fade away. The rest of our unit has no desire to see us locked at the lips, obviously what Cole was counting on and why I didn't pull away immediately. Now that they're gone, though, I do. “Back to my question.”

Cole zips his jacket higher and picks up the rifle case he set down. “I've established a way to communicate with the others, just like we planned. It works fine. What's not working is Malone. It's my fault for making assumptions.”

“He doesn't trust you anymore.”

“He doesn't trust anyone with this information.”

“What information?”

“Where the meeting will take place.” Cole frowns. “I assumed it would be at the camp, but all I've managed to figure out is that it's not. Malone's assistant has been making travel plans, but I can't find out where to. And no one around here seems to know besides the two of them. He's keeping everything close to his chest. I'm starting to think his driver won't even be told the destination until they're on the road. The only upshot is that with so much secrecy, it's got to be happening. No other reason he'd take such precautions.”

I rub my eyes. “Great. The meeting is going down, and we're cut off. This doesn't help. We need a way to steal that intel. Oh, and that's not all, is it? We need to figure out a way to get to wherever the meeting is.”

“That's easy for me. Malone is taking me along as part of his security detail, and presumably to introduce me in person to the other three.”

That doesn't relax me. “What about me? You're not pulling this off without my help, damn it. I have to be there.”

Cole laughs without any humor. “You know what it's like trying to leave this place without permission, and you really can't imagine there's any way Malone will give it to you.”

“Why not to show off how well he destroyed my memories?”

Cole's expression is one part pitying, one part don't-be-an-idiot.

“Fuck.” In my frustration, the word comes out louder than I'd intended, and I cringe. We're alone however, stepping out of the woods and onto the salt-soaked asphalt. “I'm going.”

To my surprise, Cole doesn't protest, but his face says it all about what he thinks the likelihood of that is. “First, we need to find out where the meeting is so I can alert the others.”

Scowling, I nod and wet my dry lips. “Fair enough. How much time do we have?”

Cole's hesitation makes my stomach sink. “Not long.”

“Could you be a bit more precise?”

“Tomorrow.”

Slack-jawed with the impossible timeline, I step right into a parked jeep.

Chapter Twenty-Three

Monday Evening: Present

If I don't make a total fool out of myself the rest of the day, it's only because everyone expects me to be behind in my training. My RTC mission took me away for over three months. During that time, my unit had moved on, and regardless of my escape, I would have been playing catch-up. For this reason, my instructors, other than Fitzpatrick, tend to leave me alone. And if my expression seems spacey, they probably attribute it to me being lost.

In reality, my mind is simply not present. Unless forced to pay attention to what I'm doing, I'm grappling with the dilemma Cole presented earlier, desperately trying to work out a solution to a problem I would normally consider unfixable.

Cole hasn't been slacking either. He's in a position to pick up on clues or other tidbits that could help, and he works his limited power and all the respect he's earned among the staff to uncover what he can. When he has the chance, he passes the information on to me, and I incorporate it into my schemes. Sometimes, the information makes our situation appear less dire. Most often, it has the opposite effect.

Nonetheless, by dinner, I have enough details to toss together another hasty, dubiously workable plan. And I'm pretty sure I'm pushing my luck with this kind of preparation.

Cole has not gotten a location, but he has been given an ETD for tomorrow. We don't know when the meeting is exactly, which would help narrow down a location, but Cole was able to ascertain that he would be returning to the camp in the evening. That there's no overnight involved and he's traveling by car means the meeting can't be too far.

Cole has also been able to learn that the meeting information is not stored on the camp's servers, which means we can't find a way to hack inside. Besides Malone himself, therefore, the only single person who is guaranteed to have access to the meeting information is his assistant because she made the arrangements. But if we're going to get it from her computer, we have to access it directly.

Figuring out how to do that without getting caught is the question I've been pondering for the last hour. In my head, I can hear my internal clock counting down the minutes we have left, and when I consider everything that must be done, it's not looking promising. Even if we're successful in finding out the location, we still have to risk sharing it with the rest of our unit, and I still don't have a reason or a plan for going along. While letting Cole and the others handle The Four without me wouldn't be the worst fate, as long as it got done, it would piss me off.

I swallow down my frustration with my food. The first task must come first. I have to get the location. Then I can worry about the rest.

I explain my thinking to Cole as we return to our quarters, and he rubs his chin in thought. “The guard station across from the assistant's desk is always manned. How do we get the guard away without giving him reason to raise the alarm?”

“We don't.” I nudge a pebble down the path, pretending to play a modified soccer game with it while Cole and I speak. “We give him no reason to raise an alarm. All we have to do is set off a small, directed, energy pulse, like an AAD-style blast near his computers. It'll knock them out temporarily without an obvious cause.”

“We'll have to steal the equipment for that, but I suppose it's doable. I'm working on a project in the engineering labs, so I have after-hours access.” Cole kicks the pebble back toward me. “So protocol dictates the guard will have to investigate the disruption himself before he calls it in so he knows who to call—security or IT. But that's only if there's no immediate threat. We're considered potential threats, even me, and one of us has to be close enough to set off that small of a pulse. Real close. In that case, the guard doesn't leave his station.”

I step on the pebble. “Right, so we're not there when the pulse goes off. One of us does that via the ventilation system.”

“The ventilation system?”

I cough. “Some of us have been known to sneak meetings in the middle of the night by entering the system through the nearest bathroom. We can do that here. Once inside, one of us crawls through the building into the lobby and sets off the pulse. Since no one's around, the guard goes to check things out, and the other of us runs inside while security is disabled and searches the assistant's computer.”

Cole lets out a long breath. “It's not going to give us a lot of time, and this feels extremely complicated.”

“The information shouldn't be hard to find as long as we can get on the computer quickly enough. It's the best I can do on short notice. If you have a better idea, this would be an excellent moment to suggest it.”

“Nope. I didn't think of using the ventilation system, so you got farther than I did.” Cole makes a face, and I realize he's checking the time internally. “We have close to ninety minutes until lights out. We'd better get started if we don't want to add an extra layer of complication by sneaking out of our quarters.”

“Should I—?”

“No,” he says, not bothering to wait for my question. “You can come with me to the engineering labs. You have every reason to want to stop by the academic building and pick stuff up since you're behind in your training.”

As long as Cole thinks my excuse is believable, it's easier to do this than it would be to concoct an excuse for heading back outside later. We split off from the walkway when the fewest number of people are paying us attention and double back toward the other building.

“You'll have to be the one in the vents,” Cole says. “I don't know how large they are and whether I'll fit. If the heat comes on, it could get very warm.”

Inside the lab, Cole pretends to show me a bunch of files I should download onto an e-sheet. It's information we learned while I was gone. In truth, I load the sheet with the schematics I'll need to build a makeshift pulse device, but the ruse will ideally throw off any guard who might catch a glimpse of us during a routine security check.

The device itself is going to be a crude yet weak thing, but it should do. Cole gathers the actual pieces and tools required, and he throws a couple pairs of insulated gloves into his pockets as well. We're done in short order after I double-check his packing.

The most risky part in the whole plan comes when I enter the nearest bathroom to the Building One lobby. I take the bag of supplies from Cole and mentally sweep away my nerves. Action is calming, just like a drill, but so much is hanging on us pulling this off successfully. All it would take is a camera to have passed over us at the wrong moment. Then security sees me carrying a bag into a bathroom, and everything falls apart before it begins. Or if someone enters the bathroom as I'm unscrewing the ventilation grate.

But so far, all appears well. I pop the grate, toss in the supplies and hoist myself upward. This duct is wider than the one in our quarters, but it's still too cramped for comfort. Replacing the grate behind me, I adjust my position and turn on my headlamp. “I'm in.”

Out in the hallway where he'd been keeping watch, Cole confirms and goes to take up his position. He'll stand near the building entrance, out of sight, so he can dart in the moment the guard leaves.

The metal duct is as warm as anticipated, and before going far, I attach one set of the insulated gloves to my knees with nylon straps, and I put the other pair on my hands. They're far too large, and the empty fingers flop around as I push the supply bag forward.

In my head, I count my paces, overlaying what I see within the ducts to what I know the building interior looks like. I've seen part of the building schematics once, years ago, but since it's not a memory that Malone's ever messed with, it's as clear in my head today as it was then. People at the camp haven't been so careless around us in a long time.

I work my way up and over to the Building One lobby. It's a challenging maneuver, particularly since I'm trying to be quiet. Between the exercise and the warmth, sweat drips down my forehead by the time I think I'm in place. Wiping it away with my arm, I pause for a second then get out the e-sheet and my equipment.

My mouth is horribly dry from the way I've been sweating, and the moisture on my hands makes me work slower. Dropping part of the equipment could be disastrous. The guard below me is certain to hear it. Fortunately, most of the work on building the pulse weapon is already done. I merely need to assemble the parts in the right configuration. It's not all that different than rifle practice this morning, though with rifle practice, I didn't need to consult diagrams to make sure I'm attaching pieces correctly.

When at last I have the device ready, I worm my way to the spot that should be closest to the guard station. At this level of precision, I have no option but to guess. Guess and hope. I'm only going to get one shot at this.

The device fires silently, sending an electromagnetic pulse down into the lobby, and I hold my breath. Thirty seconds passes without confirmation from Cole. Sixty.

“The guard's checking his equipment,” he says into my ear.

Eighty-two seconds.

“He's gone. I'm going in.”

Some of my tension drains away, and I let my muscles relax a little. It's in Cole's hands now.

I pack up the device and crawl back toward the vent where I entered the duct. Noise alerts me that someone is using the bathroom, and I turn off the headlamp. On my stomach, motionless in the dark, I'm acutely aware of every bead of sweat on my neck and the way they each roll down my skin. The way they itch.

Get on with it,
I will the person at the sink.

Whoever it is finally leaves but only as the transmitter in my ear comes to life. I can't hear what the guard said, but Cole's response is loud and clear. “Just a minute ago. Isn't Malone in? I wanted to talk to him about the trip tomorrow.”

Shit.
Cole, tell me you got what we needed.

“Nah, phone's out of juice, so I thought I'd stop by instead. He's not usually busy in the evening.”

I swear silently again. The guard must be suspicious about why Cole didn't contact Malone directly. Another pause follows.

“What? Of course not. Why?”

That doesn't sound good.

With trembling hands, I open the grate. I have a new dilemma. What to do with the equipment we stole? Since I don't know exactly what's going on, I don't know how long Cole is going to be delayed. I need his access to return it. But if we're not going to have time tonight, then it's safest to leave it in the vent where it won't be discovered for a while.

“Not necessary,” Cole's saying. “I'll check in with him tomorrow morning.”

This time, I can pick up on some background noise—the guard's voice, but not his words. Then there's loud static and a clunking in my ear, and the transmitter goes silent.

My heart beats faster. Not good. Whatever just happened is not good at all. I have a bad feeling Cole just smashed his transmitter, which suggests he's afraid of it being found, which suggests the guard is being way too suspicious. Damn.

I drop out of the vent, leaving the equipment behind. Without knowing what's going on with Cole, I have to hope we can still pull off our plan. Missing equipment from an engineering lab is only a minor concern. If we're lucky, Cole and I will be gone before it's noticed. It's not as ideal as no one discovering it was ever borrowed, but it could be worse.

It could be much worse. Cole might not be able to talk his way out of this. Cole might not have gotten the information we need. I have no way of knowing, and my insides flail.

Checking the time, I casually make my way to the spot where we planned to rendezvous before returning the equipment. We have twenty minutes until lights out. Twenty minutes until Fitzpatrick stops by our quarters to make sure we're there.

Come on, Cole.

Never mind the cold, a growing panic, a certainty that something is very, very wrong makes me break out in an all-new sweat as I wait. Fifteen minutes. Ten.

At five, I do the only thing left. I give up waiting and return to our quarters alone. The whole time, I hope with everything I have that Cole is somewhere right behind me, or better yet—already there. That he forgot about the rendezvous.

But we don't forget things like that without someone screwing with our heads, and Cole isn't in the building. I lay in bed all night, listening for the sound of a door opening, for a quiet knock to let me know he's okay.

None comes.