Resistance (Replica) (35 page)

“Sorry,” Dante said, with an edge in his voice. “I gave my chef the day off.”

He’d probably grown up eating this stuff, and having three Executives turn up their noses at it was putting the habitual chip back on his shoulder. Nadia couldn’t blame him, though based on the spark in Nate’s eye, he wasn’t as forgiving.

“So what are we going to do now?” Nadia asked, then shoved a spoonful of stew into her mouth and tried not to make a face at the taste. She gave Nate a pointed look, and he meekly obeyed by taking a bite. Agnes was still stirring the stuff around, looking a little green.

“I suggest we all try to get some sleep until Bishop gets here,” Dante said, with his mouth full.

According to Nate, Bishop was planning to show up with costumes in hand around nightfall.

“And then we go to the Basement,” Nadia said.

Dante nodded.

“And
then
what?”

That was a question no one had a good answer to, so they all spooned up some stew and chewed in silence. Even Agnes, though she seemed to chew the tiny nibble she’d taken far longer than necessary, as if she couldn’t quite force herself to swallow it.

“Then I guess we just try to stay alive,” Nate said grimly, when no one else spoke.

“That’s it?” Nadia asked. “We just turn a blind eye to everything we know? We let the Chairman get away with murdering my sister and trying to murder me?” Nadia had spent most of the previous night feeling helpless and afraid; now she gave in to fury. “And what about Thea? Do we just figure she’s someone else’s problem now? We have to
do
something.”

Nadia looked around at her friends’ faces and didn’t like the expressions of defeat they all wore.

“I don’t like it any better than you do,” Nate said, “but what can we do?”

She knew he had a point, but she kept pressing anyway. “I bet your plan to get me out of the Sanctuary seemed impossible at first, but you didn’t let that stop you. And you got me out.”

“Getting you out of an Executive retreat is one thing,” Dante argued. “Going up against the Chairman is another.”

“Isn’t that what your resistance is all about?”

Dante gave her a pointed look and jerked his head toward Agnes. Nadia would bet her right foot that Agnes had already figured out Dante was involved in some kind of resistance movement, but even if she hadn’t …

“She’s in the same boat as the rest of us,” Nadia said. “Who’s she going to tell? Now how do we sign up?”

“What?” Dante asked, his voice just short of a yelp.

Nadia had been hesitant to dub the resistance the good guys in the past, afraid of their plans and their motives. But that was before she’d known Thea was still alive. Even if the resistance hoped to spark a civil war, it might be worth it if that’s what it took to stop Thea. The A.I. had no moral compass and no regard for human life. She was a menace to society, and the longer her research was allowed to continue, the more dangerous—and more powerful—she would become.

“The resistance,” Nadia said. “I want to
do
something instead of running away and hiding. So how do we sign up?”

Dante shook his head. “You don’t.”

Nadia opened her mouth to protest, but he wasn’t done.

“They’ll kick me out on my ass once they know what I’ve done. They don’t like loose canons. And there’s no way in hell they’d want anything to do with the Chairman Heir or either of his supposed fiancées.”

“But we
know
things—” Nadia started.

“Doesn’t matter,” Nate interrupted. “I already had this conversation with Bishop a while back. Executives are the enemy to them, and the three of us are as Executive as you get.”

“So they’ve never heard of
the enemy of my enemy is my friend
?”

“Even if they believed you were their friends, they wouldn’t have you,” Dante said. “You’re all way too high-profile. Too dangerous to touch.”

Nadia wanted to hurl her bowl of cooling, congealing stew across the room. “So that’s it? We’re just going to cower in the Basement and hope for the best?”

“No,” Nate said. “You’re right: we have to fight back somehow. If the resistance won’t have us, then screw them! We can be our own resistance movement, just the four of us—and Bishop, if he wants in.”

Dante gaped at him. “You can’t be serious.”

“Why not?” Nate asked. “We’re all smart, and resourceful, and highly motivated. Nadia and I managed to beat Dirk Mosely against all odds. And Nadia escaped the retreat after surviving a murder attempt. We’re not pushovers, no matter what my father may think.”

Something fierce and proud stirred in Nadia’s heart. They were
not
going to accept defeat. They were going to do something more than run for their lives. And she was personally going to make the Chairman pay for what he’d done to her sister.

Dante still looked skeptical. “That all sounds great, but I don’t think—”

“You were so committed to your cause you joined the Paxco security department to spy on them,” Nate interrupted. “You were ready to take a cyanide pill to keep from being captured. Are you seriously telling me you’re too chicken to keep fighting?”

Dante bristled, clenching his fists. “I am
not
chicken! And I didn’t say I didn’t think we should keep fighting.”

Nadia suppressed a smile. Nate had always been a skilled manipulator. Just this once, she was glad for it.

“So who’s with me?” Nate asked. He thunked down his bowl of stew and held out his hand, palm down, fixing Dante with a challenging glare.

Nadia quickly crossed the distance and put her hand on top of his. Dante made a low growling sound in the back of his throat, but he followed suit.

Nadia expected Agnes to balk. After all, she couldn’t have had a clue what she was getting into when she left the theater with Nate last night, and never in her wildest dreams would she have considered she might be joining some half-baked Paxco teen resistance movement. But she raised her chin high and stuck her hand in the circle with barely a hesitation.

“We are a force to be reckoned with,” Nate said with conviction, “and we’re going to win.”

And for that moment, Nadia allowed herself to believe it.

*   *   *

The
plan to spend the daylight hours sleeping made perfect sense. They were all exhausted, and if anyone had slept at all on the ride back from the Sanctuary, it had been for scant minutes at a time.

Nadia and Agnes shared the bed that had once belonged to Dante’s parents, while Dante slept in his own bed and left the couch for Nate. If Dante was trying to needle Nate by relegating him to the couch, it didn’t work. Nadia felt oddly proud of him for his lack of reaction.

It was actually Agnes who felt the most obvious discomfort at their surroundings, looking at the double bed she was to share with Nadia with distaste.

“Beggars can’t be choosers,” Nadia told her as she pulled back the covers. “And right now, we’re beggars.”

“I know,” Agnes said, chewing her lip. “But … I’ve never slept in someone else’s bed before. I mean, in a guest room, sure, but, you know…”

“There’s a first time for everything,” Nadia said, because apparently she was too tired to speak in anything other than clichés. She couldn’t think of a time when
she’d
slept in another person’s bed before, either, but that didn’t stop her from sliding under the covers and laying her head on the lumpy pillow with a groan of relief. She hoped she was tired enough for sleep to overwhelm her quickly, rather than leaving her trapped with her own thoughts.

Agnes clearly wasn’t as adaptable. She took off her shoes and earrings, and she took down the elaborate updo she’d worn for the opera, but she couldn’t quite bring herself to get into the bed, so she merely lay on top of the covers instead. In her strapless evening gown, which likely had hard metal stays in its bodice. How was the girl going to survive the hardships of the Basement? She had been remarkably brave and cool last night, but she had been raised to slavishly follow the rules of Executive society, and to say she was now a fish out of water was an understatement.

Then again, Nadia had been raised the same way, had long lived in dread of taking a single misstep. Defying authority was hardly in her blood, but necessity had changed her. Maybe it would change Agnes, too.

Discomfort from the evening gown aside, Agnes seemed to fall asleep about five seconds after she lay down, her breathing growing deep and even while Nadia found she couldn’t even keep her eyes closed. Instead, she lay on her side and stared at a hairline crack in the paint of the far wall. And with no immediate threat bearing down on her, with no decisions to be made right this moment, she couldn’t stop herself from thinking about Gerri.

Tears ran sideways down her face and soaked into the pillow, pain wrenching her heart. Gerri had died because she’d wanted to save Nadia from a lifetime in the Sanctuary. And because Nadia had refused to tell her the truth about what was on those recordings. Because Nadia hadn’t trusted her own sister to do the right thing.

Nadia’s shoulders started shaking, and she stifled a sob. The last thing she wanted to do was wake Agnes and have to deal with a near-stranger’s pity. Unfair, perhaps, when that near-stranger had very possibly destroyed her whole life in an effort to help her, but feelings don’t care whether they’re fair or not.

Swallowing convulsively, trying not to gasp too loudly for air that suddenly seemed thin and inadequate, Nadia slipped out of the bed. The pain of guilt and loss doubled her over, and she put her hand over her mouth to try to hold it all in. Agnes didn’t stir, but Nadia knew it was only a matter of time. She staggered out into the hall, planning to lock herself in the bathroom and sob her heart out, but when she turned to close the door, she saw Nate draped awkwardly over the living room couch.

As if he felt her gaze upon him, Nate turned his head and opened his eyes. Her face must have looked awful, because he sat up quickly and held his arms out to her. The idea of crying in the bathroom lost its appeal, and Nadia quickly crossed the distance between them and practically flung herself into his arms. She tried her best to muffle her sobs against his chest while he held her tightly and rocked her back and forth, an anchor in her storm of emotion.

She cried until her throat was raw and her head felt swollen to twice its normal size. Her eyes burned and her chest ached. Mingled with the devastating grief was a rage so enormous she didn’t know how she could ever manage to hold it in, and if Chairman Hayes were to appear before her, she knew she would happily kill him with her own two hands.

“I’m so sorry, Nadia,” Nate said into her hair, his own voice choked with sympathy. “There’s nothing I can do to make this right, but I swear to you, if it’s in my power, I will make my father pay for what he did.”

Nadia squeezed him tightly, grateful for his steadfast support. Cold logic told her that their impromptu teen resistance movement was just a pretty fantasy to hang their faltering hopes on, but she didn’t voice her doubt.

“Thank you.”

And although she figured she should wash her face and get back to bed, Nadia found she needed the warmth of Nate’s friendship too much to go anywhere just now. She’d bask in it just a little longer before she made another attempt to sleep …

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Nate’s
foot was going numb, but he didn’t have the heart to move and risk waking Nadia. She had fallen asleep on the heels of her violent burst of emotion. He considered picking her up and carrying her back to her bed, but figured that if she’d found rest in his arms, he ought to leave her there. He closed his own eyes and hoped he’d drift off, but there was little chance of that. The couch hadn’t been that comfortable to start with, and it was even less so now that he was semi-sitting up and had Nadia sleeping on him.

In truth, Nate didn’t think there’d been much chance of him sleeping anyway. He was mentally and physically exhausted, but not enough to make his mind shut up.

It was all well and good for the four of them to run to the Basement and hide out with Kurt somewhere. Certainly it would lower the chances that they’d be apprehended by Paxco security officers. But it was hardly what you’d call a permanent solution. After all, even in the Basement, you needed money, and they didn’t have any. And how were three Executive teens and a Paxco security spy going to survive in the Basement? All well and good to declare they would set themselves up as their own resistance movement, but the
real
resistance movement had money and connections and resources … It was hard to put up much of a fight without any of that.

If Paxco security didn’t track them down and arrest them all for treason, then the more predatory of the Basement-dwellers would probably pick them off one by one as they tried to adapt to a life they weren’t suited for. Hell, for all he knew, Dante’s resistance buddies would be after them, too, wanting to eliminate the potential danger they could represent if they were arrested. Unless they could somehow, impossibly, beat the combined forces of his father and Thea, the future was looking far from bright.

Nate sighed and shifted around a bit on the couch, drawing a sleepy protest from Nadia.

No matter how he looked at it, he couldn’t see a way out. His father had all the resources and power of Paxco at his fingertips; Nate and his friends had nothing. How could they possibly hope to do battle with, or even hide from, the Chairman of the richest, most powerful state in the world?

As the day crawled endlessly by, Nate kept chewing the problem over, his mind going in endless circles until eventually, the pull of sleep became too strong.

*   *   *

Nate
awoke to the feel of a warm hand resting on the side of his face and an even warmer pair of lips brushing against his. He blinked his eyes open to find the living room cloaked in darkness. Kurt was squatting on his heels next to the couch, a fond smile on his face barely illuminated by the streetlight that shone right outside the closed blinds.