Zhukov's Dogs (18 page)

For three days. That’s how long it took me to break him out. Two days of capturing and torturing sources of intelligence. One hour of requesting the Y.I.D. and other agencies to send help, only to be told, even by my own father, that I should look at the situation as a learning exercise. Half a day to make the bombs, get the blueprints, and memorize the patrol patterns of the guards.

By the time I got Aiden to a hospital, he had four broken bones, internal bleeding, and was suffering from violent fits of delusion. Doctors suggested all sorts of lucrative treatments. Many suggested it would be kinder to let him die. I begged them to treat him, but nobody would listen to me. Aiden wasn’t family, and therefore, I wasn’t allowed any say in the matter.

“Amazing he made it back to the States alive. And the first thing you two did when you set foot on American soil was sign over your powers of attorney. Why is that?”

“Because Aiden is family.”

We might not have been related by blood, but I wouldn’t have run around New Zealand, selling off military equipment and fully aware of the illegality of the transactions, for my blood. I wouldn’t have hired six terrifyingly large terrorists to persuade hospital staff for my blood. I’d only do that for Aiden.

Dr. Halliburton waited for me to say more. For several, foolish minutes, she even pretended she could outlast me in the standoff. When it became clear to her I wasn’t going to budge, she sighed and typed something into her tablet. She hit the screen with more force than necessary, lips drawn thin. “Are friends hard to come by in the Y.I.D.?” she asked.

Hard was an understatement. “Real ones are. Acquaintances are easy, but almost all of us are too two-faced to actually get along. Besides, we’re too busy to make time for a lot of friends.”

“You still say ‘we’ like you’re one of them.”

I hadn’t even realized I was doing it until she pointed it out. Knowing I’d somehow been tricked into thinking of myself as a dog again made my throat dry.

Dr. Halliburton clacked her nails against the desk as she said, “If you’re going to declare yourself a traitor, you’d better be more careful about that… So, these revolutionaries. You saw them as the friends you were never able to have here?”

“I’ve seen that in a lot of my targets. The problem was I was starting to look at them as people, not targets.”

“There’s a difference to you?”

“Of course. I’m not The Council.”

She didn’t find my joke funny. I was willing to bet that half the people watching the feed didn’t either and were treating it like the worst swear anyone could ever say. The other half was trying their hardest not to laugh because they, like me, had been a part of one or more of The Council’s ploys in the past.

“You keep mentioning The Council. I bet you’ve never even met one of them,” she said.

“You don’t have to see toxic gas for it to kill you.”

The doctor was usually quick with a rebuttal. This time, though, she just reached into her purse and pulled out a small, white pin. She attached it to her lapel. I didn’t get a good look until she lowered her hands and folded them on the table between us, but as soon as I saw the hollowed white circle, my jaw dropped.

The hollowed, white circle with three horizontal, black bars going through the center was the sigil of The Council. Only ten people in the entire world wore the pin, and one of them was sitting three feet away from me.

Words were suddenly much harder to form. I tripped over them with a small laugh, thinking it was all another one of her jokes. “You’re not… I mean, you’re not just—”

“Cameron Elizabeth Halliburton, Council chair member and head of The Division of Behavioral and Mental Health.” She delivered it like a well-rehearsed speech. “It sounds nicer than ‘toxic gas,’ don’t you think?”

U.S. Bank Centre—Seattle, WA
Monday, November 16th, 2076—6:35 p.m.

e sacrificed all of our extra layers for the sake of getting out of the pit. Fritzi and I braided the clothing together to make a strong, makeshift rope. Gemma volunteered to climb up first and secure the line for the rest of us. She was so small; I feared a fall from any height might kill her, but the way she climbed nimbly and the way her hands expertly clutched uneven surfaces indicated she’d done this sort of thing before.

“Gemma’s our grease-monkey,” piped a voice next to me. I looked down at the young boy, and he flashed me a crooked smile. The fact we were three stories underground, huddled around a single heat lamp for warmth, didn’t seem to bother him one bit.

“My name’s Michael.”

“Michael, I’m Nik,” I said, the boy’s smile contagious. “And don’t you mean she’s your grease-man?”

Michael turned his big eyes up to Gemma and then back to me, saying in the most matter-of-fact voice I’d ever heard, “But Gemma’s a girl.”

“Very observant,” I said, coughing to cover the laugh. As I brought my hand up to cover my mouth, I saw the rips and blood stains in my gloves. Thanks to the cold and general chaos I’d managed to forget about the cuts from earlier.

I left Michael’s side to sit along the wall by myself. I peeled back one of my gloves to see how bad the damage was, only to find that the blood had already clotted to the wool. I had to give the glove a tug to pry it away my hand. The heat lamp cast a warm, orange glow around the cavern, and I turned my hand toward it to see small shards of glass catch the light.

Any hopes I’d had in keeping my injury discreet were destroyed when the redheaded boy, Finn, noticed. “Oh my God, you’re bleeding!”

Every head, even Gemma’s, turned to where I sat against the cement wall, picking bits of glass out of my hand. I wasn’t a fan of all the attention. “It’s only a couple cuts. I’m fine.”

“Fine? Will you be fine when it gets infected and your fingers fall off?” Fritzi asked, walking over to take a look for herself.

Finn gave a small, squeamish groan. “Fritz! Gross!”

Fritzi ignored him and held her hand out toward me. “Give me your bag,” she said. I handed it over, and she dug past the sandwiches Anya packed for us, retrieving a small bottle of vodka. I certainly hadn’t packed it. Maybe Anya thought it would go well with the sandwiches.

“Take the other one off and get as much glass out as you can,” Fritzi instructed.

I did as I was told while Finn and Michael helped themselves to the sandwiches. Finn kept his back to me, but Michael watched with great interest even as he inhaled his food. “Wah ‘appened?” he asked through a mouthful of bread and turkey.

“See that car up there with the broken window?” I pointed to the pancaked car I’d clung to.

Michael looked up and filled in the rest, muttering to himself in awe, “That’s so badass.”

When I couldn’t see any more glass in my hands, I held them out to Fritzi. She unscrewed the bottle of vodka and poured half of it over the cuts. It burned something fierce, but it was better than risking infection. I rested my arms on my knees and stretched my fingers out so they’d dry quicker.

“The rest of that bottle for you, Fritz?” I asked, half-joking.

“It’s for whichever idiot gets hurt next.”

“You’re so optimistic.” I chuckled.

Fritzi rolled her eyes and walked off to join Jayne by the wall where he was spotting for Gemma on the off-chance she fell. I shut my eyes, trying to think about anything other than the pulsing pain in my hands, as I stretched my fingers again. The scuffling of feet tugged me out of the trance. Val had finally decided to stop brooding on the other side of the garage and join us by the heat lamp.

“You okay?” he asked, hands in his pockets and eyes looking anywhere but mine.

“I’m fine,” I said. Val looked uncomfortable enough without me bringing up the pain in my fingers. “What about you? How’s your head?”

“It’s fine.”

Finn looked over his shoulder at him. As soon as Val met his gaze, Finn looked away and got to his feet. “Michael, why don’t we give these two some alone time?” I knew Finn meant to be polite, but his words made everything worse.

“It’s not like that!” Val insisted.

Finn flinched and turned quickly so his back wasn’t toward him. Even Michael looked upset by Val’s outburst. To put them both at ease, and to help Val salvage the small pieces of dignity he seemed to have left, I said, “Really, it’s not… Give us a minute, would you?”

Finn started to lead Michael away, but I called them back and pulled the last sandwich from my bag. I told them they ought to eat it so we had less to carry and weigh us down. Truthfully, I just didn’t like seeing people go hungry. They happily took the sandwich around to the other side of the cavern to split.

“This is probably the worst field team I’ve ever seen,” I said under my breath so the others wouldn’t hear.

Val laughed a little and sat down on the ground a few feet away from me. “They’re great. Take my word for it. They just weren’t prepared for a situation like this.”

“What about Michael? He’s so young.”

“Kid’s the toughest thirteen-year-old in the city. He works just as hard as the rest of us.”

I was hardly the person to judge Michael. I spent my thirteenth birthday running through Red Square in the middle of a Moscow air-raid. With my cuts clean and dry, I shook my hands and pulled my gloves back on to warm up. Above us, Gemma whistled. The melancholy tune sounded familiar, and I strained to remember where I’d heard it before.

“It’s
God Save the Queen
,” Val said.

“Ah, that’s it. Haven’t heard that one in years.”

Val scoffed. “For obvious reasons.”

Gemma’s whistling echoed through the cavern eerily. The silence between Val and I was just reaching the point of awkward when I worked up the nerve to ask, “What’s up with that guy anyway?”

“Jayne?” Val asked, as if it wasn’t obvious. “He’s always been like that.”

“He’s always trying to kill you? I can see why you keep him around.”

Val shrugged the sarcasm off and looked at Jayne. “He’s a valuable member of our group… Plus he’s in charge of our east office, so I don’t actually have to see him much.”

I wanted to ask. I shouldn’t, but I wanted to. Ignoring the voice telling me not to, I asked, “Is that
all
he is?”

“Yeah. I mean, I thought about giving it a try back when first met. Didn’t last long, though. Jayne’s kind of a homophobic ass,” Val said with a small smirk.

I noticed the fingers tapping against the cement underneath him and mimicked them with my own. Val instantly stilled his hands. I chuckled as he rolled his eyes.

“Where did you find him?” I asked.

“Ran into each other during a job I was working out of state.”

“After you left the factories?”

Val turned his attention back toward me, eyes narrowing. He seemed surprised I knew about that, so I explained, “Anya told me.”

“Yeah… It was after I left.”

“Where did you go?”

I worried I was pushing my luck, but since Anya mentioned his disappearance earlier, I was too curious not to ask. Val looked away. His hand reached into his jacket pocket, rummaged through, then moved to the other. He was patting the pockets of his jeans when I held up the packet of cigarettes and lighter he was looking for.

“You dropped these while you were getting beat up,” I said.