Read Resistance (Replica) Online

Authors: Jenna Black

Resistance (Replica) (26 page)

“I imagine it’s harder on someone your age,” Athena said, giving her a motherly smile of sympathy. “But it gets better. You have my word on it.”

Nadia tried to return the smile, but she suspected the expression looked more sickly than anything. Their lunches arrived, saving Nadia from having to respond. The bacon cheeseburger looked and smelled delicious, but there was an odd combination of hunger and nausea in her stomach that gave her pause.

How long did she have before Gerri acted? Was she already too late? How could she sit here and indulge in a hamburger when her sister’s life was in danger?

“What’s wrong, dear?” Athena asked, her fork poised above an elegant salad. “You’ve gone quite pale.”

Nadia tried to pull herself together. Tormenting herself with her fears wasn’t going to help anything. She had to do something more productive than that, had to channel her energy into figuring out a way to salvage the situation. She didn’t have time for her usual caution, nor did she have time to sit and contemplate Athena’s potential motives.

She needed help; she needed it now; and Athena was the only person she could imagine might give it to her. Swallowing her misgivings—and ignoring her food—Nadia clasped her hands together in her lap, leaned over the table, and spoke in a voice low enough she could be sure no one overheard.

“I have a desperate need to contact someone on the outside,” she confided. “And I mean desperate as in life or death.”

Athena nodded and frowned sympathetically, but Nadia could tell at once that she was having the typical adult response to a teenager saying something was life or death. The same response Nadia’s own parents had had, that had kept them from letting her talk to Gerri before she was carted away.

“I swear I’m not exaggerating,” Nadia said. Her voice rose, and she forced herself to lower it once more. She didn’t know what might happen to her if her words were overheard, especially by a member of the retreat staff, but she didn’t want to find out.

“Look,” she continued, “my sister has reason to believe I have blackmail evidence on the Chairman.” The spark of renewed interest in Athena’s eyes suggested Nadia had chosen the right course to pursue. “It’s not what she thinks it is, but I’m afraid she’s going to try to use it to force the Chairman to reinstate the agreement between our families.”

Athena leaned forward conspiratorially. “What is it you really have?” Her eyes were alight with the thought of sticking it to the man she called Rat Bastard.

“I can’t tell you,” Nadia said, because while she was throwing caution to the wind, she didn’t dare let herself go too far. “I can tell you that I recorded him saying something incriminating, but I have to leave it at that. The problem is, the Chairman knows I have the recordings and knows I have them hidden. Right now, there’s no way he can find them. But my sister can, and I’m terrified that she’ll lead him right to them. I have to find a way to contact her and warn her away.”

The skepticism was back in Athena’s eyes. Nadia realized how outlandish her story sounded. Hell, for all Athena knew, Nadia had been shut up in the Sanctuary because she was a pathological liar.

“I
have
to get to a phone,” Nadia concluded. “I thought maybe someone who’s been here as long as you have might have some idea how I could do it. I don’t care if I get caught or get in trouble, as long as I have a chance to make that call first.”

Nadia swallowed hard, fighting back a rising tide of panic as her fears resurfaced one by one, tightening her chest and making a trickle of sweat run down her back. She was calling attention to herself, and one of the uniformed servers was heading toward the table. Her untouched burger was getting cold, and Athena had done nothing more than rearrange her salad on her plate as she listened to Nadia talk. Their eyes met across the table.

Athena shoved a forkful of salad into her mouth. Then she reached over to pat Nadia’s hand, looking relaxed, if a little bit sad. Nadia’s stomach was doing flips, but she took her cue from Athena and forced herself to take a bite out of her burger.

“Is everything okay over here?” the server asked. Her name tag identified her as “Susan,” and she had the overly bright smile that Nadia was beginning to think was a prerequisite for retreat staff.

Nadia’s mouth was so dry she could hardly chew, and the lukewarm burger felt like a lump of clay. Fortunately, Athena answered for both of them.

“We’re fine,” she said. “We were talking about Ellie, and it made us both a little sad. But life goes on for the rest of us, so we’ll talk about something else from now on.”

Susan gave them both sad eyes, then patted Nadia’s shoulder. “If you need anything, please don’t hesitate to let us know. And we do have grief counseling available, if you—”

Nadia managed to swallow the lump of burger and shook her head. “Thank you, but like Athena said, we’re fine. I was very young when I last saw Mrs. Hayes. I’m sad about what happened, but I don’t need a grief counselor or anything.”

Susan nodded and patted her shoulder again. Nadia had to fight her desire to pull away. “All right, honey. But if you change your mind…”

Nadia nodded solemnly. “I will definitely let someone know.”

She let out a sigh of relief when Susan wandered away.

“They mean well,” Athena said with a roll of her eyes.

“Uh-huh.” Sometimes, meaning well just wasn’t enough. Knowing her stomach was going to protest, she took another bite of her burger, figuring if she ate, it was less likely there’d be another well-meaning intervention.

“Getting to a phone will be quite a challenge,” Athena said, looking at her salad with great intensity as she speared a cherry tomato. “The staff are forbidden to bring phones with them to work here, so you’d have to get to one of the land lines in the business offices.”

At Tranquility, sneaking into one of the offices would have been hard, but not impossible. But here, where there were key cards and curfews and security cameras …

“It can be done,” Athena said. “Not without getting caught, though.”

“What happens if I get caught?”

“They deactivate your key card for a while so you can’t get out of the residence hall. No library, no gym, no movies, no classes. Nothing. And they’ll deliver food to your room, because you can’t get to the dining hall. Depending who’s on duty at the time, they might also confiscate any books or paper you have in your room. It’s death by boredom, and it’s no fun.”

“Sounds like the voice of experience.”

Athena grinned, but neither confirmed nor denied Nadia’s guess.

“So if I’m willing to pay the price, how would I go about sneaking into one of those offices to use the phone?”

Athena grinned again. “Well, if you happen to be lucky enough to know someone who knows the master override code for all the card readers…”

 

CHAPTER NINETEEN

 

Waiting
was pure hell. Nadia knew that every second she delayed was one more second for Gerri to get her hands on the recordings. But regardless of how urgently Nadia wanted to warn her sister, there was no way she was getting to a phone at the Sanctuary during the day. In fact, Athena had suggested she wait until 3:00
A.M.
to have the least likelihood that anyone would be up and about to stop her. So she struggled her way through the day, trying not to act as if she wanted to crawl out of her skin.

She retired to her room shortly after dinner, which she could barely manage to choke down thanks to her nerves. And that was when the true waiting game began.

She had too much time to think. Too much time to imagine what Gerri might be up to, and to deride herself for not telling Gerri the truth in the first place. As long as she was dwelling on her worries, Nadia couldn’t help wondering about Athena’s motives in befriending her so quickly—and giving her the override code to the doors. When Nadia had asked her how she’d gotten the code, she’d blithely described how she’d seduced one of the retreat staff who worked the night shift in the dorm.

“She’s quite a sweet little thing,” Athena had said with a conspiratorial wink. “A little naive, perhaps, but she has an adventurer’s soul and loves taking risks. Fooling around with one of her Executive charges strikes her as something excitingly dangerous, and she never noticed how closely I watched when she used the override code to open the doors without leaving a record.”

“And your trysts aren’t caught on the security cameras?” Nadia had asked.

“They would be if she didn’t turn them off for the few seconds we need them to be off.”

Athena’s attitude had been careless to say the least, although her actions could have cost her lover her job—and possibly put the kind of black mark on her record that would make it impossible to find another. Nadia wondered if Athena would feel bad if her lover ended up in the Basement when their affair was over, and it didn’t exactly make her feel confident that Athena was the compassionate friend she pretended to be. But Gerri didn’t have time for her to indulge in second thoughts.

Time ticked away with exquisite slowness. The bed check happened precisely at eleven o’clock, and though she could stay up as late as she wanted as long as she was in her room, Nadia turned off the light to give any patrolling staff the impression that she was asleep.

And the staff
did
patrol the hall, whether they called it that or not. They wore soft-soled shoes, but as one by one the residents of the dormitory turned off their lights and went to sleep, the silence that descended made even soft footfalls noticeable. Nadia sat on her bed, fully clothed, listening carefully to those footfalls, getting a feel for how often the patrols occurred.

At first, it seemed that someone traveled the length of the hall every fifteen minutes. That lasted until about midnight, when the patrols started to happen less frequently, the intervals between them stretching to twenty minutes, then twenty-five, then thirty.

Adrenaline helped keep Nadia awake, even though she was sitting in the dark and hadn’t gotten much sleep the night before. Thirty minutes was almost certainly enough time for her to slip out of her room, sneak downstairs, and slip into the office to make her phone call. When the two o’clock patrol passed by her room, it was all she could do not to set out immediately, wanting more than anything to get this over with. She didn’t think she could possibly tough it out until three, no matter what Athena had advised, but she gritted her teeth and told herself to stay put.

Nadia sat on her bed, staring at the clock as her pulse began to speed up in anticipation. Sneaking out of the dorm and into the office seemed like a relatively small thing, compared to the other dangers she’d faced in recent weeks. She wasn’t looking forward to facing the consequences of her actions, but she wasn’t
afraid
of them.

No, what had her pulse racing and her hands going clammy was the thought that she might make it to the phone and be unable to reach Gerri. Of course, that wouldn’t necessarily mean anything had happened to Gerri, but it would elevate Nadia’s fear for her sister to epic levels.

Nadia muttered a curse under her breath when she heard the sound of footsteps in the hall at 2:15. If the patrols weren’t as regular as she’d come to believe, it made her chances of getting to the phone before being caught lower.

But it didn’t make sense for the staff to suddenly be making sweeps every fifteen minutes now, when they’d tapered off to every half hour. Why would anyone imagine there was more need for them at this time of night?

Come to think of it, the footsteps sounded different. Still soft-soled shoes on a hardwood floor, but instead of the steady, march-like pace of the patrolling staff, these were slow, hesitant-sounding.
Sneaky.

The hairs on the back of Nadia’s neck prickled.

It could be she wasn’t the only person planning to sneak out of bed tonight. The footsteps could easily be those of another inmate. Certainly in a facility completely devoid of men, Athena wasn’t the only woman in the Sanctuary to be looking for love in alternative ways. With their reputations already in tatters, no one here had to worry about being forced into reprogramming, no matter how strong the Executive prejudice against homosexuality was.

Nadia closed her eyes and willed those footsteps to keep right on moving past her door, to prove themselves to be some harmless distraction having nothing to do with her. Maybe Athena had been right when she’d suggested Nadia wait until three. Maybe that was late enough that any nighttime trysts would be over and everyone would be back in their own rooms.

But the stealthy footsteps stopped right in front of her door, and she could see the shadow of two feet in the space between the floor and the bottom of the door.

Her doorknob began to turn.

*   *   *

Nate
had never hated the opera quite as much as he did tonight.

He’d gone to his first opera when he was about seven years old, when his mother had still been part of his life. It had been his first time wearing a tux, and he’d felt very mature and adult, even if people did keep telling him how “cute” he looked. That first time, he’d found himself bored before the overture had ended, and he probably never would have remembered anything about it if it weren’t for the fact that it was Mozart’s
Don Giovanni.
There was a terrifying scene at the end, when Don Giovanni got his comeuppance and was dragged down to hell. Between the loud and darkly ominous music, the special effects, and the costumes, Nate had practically peed his pants in fear, and he’d had nightmares for weeks afterward.

That, however, had been more fun than his current outing. One arranged by his father, of course, under the guise of entertaining the Belinskis during their visit to Paxco. Nate would have hated it under any circumstances, but since the news had finally trickled down to him today from Dante—who had officially begun work as his valet—that Nadia had not come back from the Sanctuary, he was in a particularly foul mood, and less inclined than ever to spend time with his father and the Belinskis. Unfortunately, it was his duty as the Chairman Heir to help his father play host to the visiting dignitaries, and with Dorothy lurking in the wings, shirking his duty was a very bad idea.

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