New World Order (24 page)

Summer and I stood poised and ready to break up a fistfight if it came to that.

“We didn’t
make
you do anything! Your people signed a damn treaty—a treaty that contracted you to do your part in maintaining the only habitable place on earth.” She threw her hands up in question. “What? Did you think it was going to be a free ride? We
all
had a job in keeping the Dome going.”

As much as my
blood boiled listening to her, I knew it was the same propaganda that the Holt regime had fed everyone in the Dome. Before Jack escaped to the Pit with me, he fully believed those twisted lies too. Most people in the Dome lived in blissful ignorance of the conditions in the Pit. The truth was, very few people from the Dome ever set foot down there. Only guards and, on occasion, military soldiers
if we became too riotous. The stories that circulated among Domers about the Pit were just that: stories. They were nothing more than fables to ease their collective conscience.

“Really?” Reyes said in a threatening manner. “If all you bourge had ‘jobs,’ why is it you have to take
our
jobs now that we’re out of the Dome? You were there. You saw that only bourge were hired for the coalmine.”

She let out a huff and threw her hands up in the air. “What are you talking about?
You
were hired. You’re from the Pit.”

“No,” he said with a scornful look. “I was not one of the scabs from the Pit who betrayed his own people by taking a job to train bourge how to mine.”

She looked confused. “But I thought—”

“I know exactly what you thought.” He reached out a hand and brushed the stripes
on her shoulder. “I may not have cute little stripes on my uniform like you, but that doesn’t make me any less official. And if your people haven’t already found out exactly how proud we are to wear it, then they soon will. Because, as you’ve pointed out, all the Pit has ever done is
take
. It’s high time we gave back what we were given.”

The shock of what he’d said hit me like a physical assault.
A shot of adrenaline coursed through me, bringing with it a kind of surreal numbness. Did Reyes just say what I think he had? I looked at Hayley and Summer. They were staring at him too.

I stepped closer to him. “What are you saying, Reyes?” He suddenly straightened in an attempt to regain his composure. “Tell me the Pit isn’t making a move against the bourge.”

Hayley looked from Reyes to
me. “Are you telling me Alex was right? That the Pit plans to start a war?”

Reyes bit his bottom lip and directed an apologetic look at me. “We needed you out of the way.”

Jack

Fadi gave me a hard shove into the shed, and I staggered a few steps before I caught my balance. I rounded on him, intent on slamming my foot into his face, but the shed door banged
shut. I kicked the door instead. I was done with the mind games. My friends were in a hole.
A goddamn hole in the ground!
What kind of person did that to another human being? And what the hell purpose did it serve?

The rational part of my brain—the part that wasn’t in control and that frankly I didn’t want to hear from—offered up the answer: brainwashing. It was a commonly used military tactic
to control soldiers. Physical activity combined with sleep deprivation led to disorientation and loss of awareness. Add to that the horror and claustrophobia of spending the night in the ground, and it could do some serious mental damage.

And now that I thought about it, Ryder’s men had been using a host of brainwashing techniques on us. Like keeping us dehydrated during the trip so that we
were physically weak and mentally preoccupied with water. Making me live like a prisoner while tempting me with the rewards of living an obedient life.

A muffled cry in the corner reminded me I wasn’t alone in the shed. As I surfaced back to reality, I became aware that the sound of my labored breathing was loud in the little room. I looked over my shoulder at the little bundle in the corner,
and big round wet eyes stared back at me. I was scaring her. Closing my eyes, I took a moment to get my breathing under control. I just wanted to get my hands on Ryder and wring his neck.

“Want to see my trick again?” I asked in a voice so calm I actually wondered if it came from me. My entire body vibrated with rage and the need to retaliate for Ryan being discarded as cat food, for the people
who were chopped up and fed to the bears, for the women and children who were raped and tortured, and for my friends who were spending the night in a hole. I forced a smile on my face and turned around to look at Annie. She stared back at me. I worked my bound hands from behind my back to the front. “Ta-da,” I said, wiggling my fingers.

Her tears stopped coming so fast, and she sniffed. I sat
down on the floor and leaned against the wall so I wouldn’t tower over her. “So, Annie,” I began, and she gave me a weird look. “Is Annie your name?”

She shook her head.

“What’s your name?”

She was silent. For the first time, I noticed that the branded cross on her cheek looked a little too red. Then I remembered she had been sweating during the day.

“Mine’s Jack.” I waited for her to
tell me her name. She didn’t. “Is your mom or dad in the city here too?”

She nodded. Progress.

“Have you seen them since you got here?”

She shook her head.

“You miss them, don’t you?”

More tears accompanied by a sob.

I would’ve tried to comfort her, but she was still afraid of me. “I miss my mom and dad too. And my wife. I miss her a lot.” A lump sprang to my throat as I said
it, and I found myself blinking back tears. Pinching the bridge of my nose, I inconspicuously blotted them away. “Her name is Sunset, and she’s really pretty and really brave. You know what color her hair is?”

She was looking at me, her expression still wary, but the tears had stopped.

“Red,” I said. Her eyes opened bigger. “I know, right? Who has red hair? But that’s why her mom called her
Sunset. You see, where my wife and I come from, we never had the chance to see a real sunset, or any sun at all, until just last year. You know why?”

She shook her head, her rapt attention now on me.

I made a show of looking around and then whispered. “It’s a secret.” She nodded. “Because we were born and raised inside a mountain. We believed the world outside our mountain was still too dangerous
to live in after the War. Last year was the first time anyone left our Dome.”

Her mouth parted slightly as she watched me. “For real?” she asked.

It was a small victory, but a victory nonetheless. I might not be able to rescue my friends, but I could at least ease the fears of a little girl. “For real.”

The shed door opened, startling us both. Annie, or whatever her name was, recoiled farther
back into the corner. I jumped to my feet. Fadi and Amos were at the door, Amos carrying a tray of food and Fadi a knife—presumably in case I caused trouble.

I appealed to Fadi. “I need some boiled water and a clean cloth.” I motioned to Annie. “Her face is getting infected.”

“I’ll ask,” Fadi said.

Amos set the tray on the shed floor and nudged it toward me with his boot. They shut the
door and slammed the lock in place. I wanted to turn to Annie and tell her not to be afraid, that the men wouldn’t hurt her while I was around. But I couldn’t promise her that because I was just as vulnerable as she was. The need to protect her was overwhelming, and yet I couldn’t do that any more than I could rescue my friends. It was tearing me apart.

And as I looked at her tiny little figure,
curled into a fetal position in the corner, I knew exactly why Ryder had “given” her to me. Goddamn him.

“You have to eat, okay, Annie?” My hands were tied, so I used my foot to slide the tray across the floor to her. “Wait, Annie isn’t your name. You still haven’t told me.” I sat down again, this time closer to her. She didn’t move away.

She swallowed hard as she looked at the food. The steam
coming from the hot food warmed the little shed and filled it with spicy aromas. I was happy to see the white, flaky meat of fish next to the vegetables.

“Teegan,” she said in her small voice.

Despite my mood, I was able to muster a big smile for her. “That’s a pretty name. I like it.”

She swiped the back of her hand against her damp cheek but jerked it away as soon as it came in contact
with her burn. “Not as pretty as Sunset,” she said.

“I think it’s just as pretty.” I nudged the tray closer to her.

Finally she reached for the food, tore off a piece of bread, and used it as a spoon. I reached for my own plate and ate my meal with as much decorum as I could with my wrists tied together. Teegan didn’t seem to mind my lack of manners, though. To keep her talking, I asked her
some questions about her family while we ate, not really listening to the answers. I was too preoccupied with thoughts of escape and revenge. Tomorrow I would have to play it cool, let Ryder think all this brainwashing was actually working and he was winning me over. I needed to convince him to take me on a tour of the plastic factory so I could find a shiv, cut these damn plastic ties off my wrists,
and find a way out of this shed. Easier said than done, I knew.

We had barely finished our meal when the door opened again. The woman who had stood over me while I bathed came in carrying a basket in one hand and a lit lantern in the other. Fadi and Amos came in behind her. Without a word, she knelt down in front of Teegan, took the girl’s face in one hand, and shone the light on her cheek.
She made a clucking noise when she saw how red it was.

“This is bad and maybe too far gone. Why didn’t you tell someone about it?” she asked the girl in a harsh voice.

Tears welled up in Teegan’s eyes.

“Maybe because you people scare the hell out of her,” I said.

Fadi kicked my foot. “Never speak to one of Father Ryder’s wives without permission.”

The woman glanced at me out of the
corner of her eye, upper lip curled. Ignoring me, she set about cleaning Teegan’s burn and applied a salve. It took only a few minutes, and then she was packing up her basket and leaving. As soon as the door was closed, Teegan burst into tears.

I reached for her, silently cursing my tied wrists. “Are you okay? Of course you’re not okay. Does it hurt more?”

She nodded her head. “It really hurts!”
she cried.

“Come here,” I said, gently tugging her arm. “Let me see. I promise I won’t touch it.”

She complied, raising her cheek for me to take a look. Her show of trust wasn’t lost on me. True to my word, I didn’t touch it, but I couldn’t really see it either. It was dark in the shed, but the salve Ryder’s wife had applied was milky white and looked suspiciously like devil’s blood. I wondered
if she used the poison as a sedative, in which case it wouldn’t help the infection, it would only put Teegan to sleep.

“Is it the stuff she put on it that’s hurting?” I asked.

She nodded. “It stings.”

There were no sterile pads available, and I didn’t want to use my dirty shirt to wipe it off. My cup of water from dinner was still untouched, though. A little awkwardly, I picked up the cup
with my bound hands and gripped it tightly. “Lie down and I’ll rinse it off, okay?”

She gave me a dubious look, but laid her head on the floor with her cheek raised to me. “Put your hand over your eyes,” I said. Once her eyes were protected, I rinsed off as much of the salve as I could. The water was cold, so I knew it would have a soothing effect. “Better?” I asked when I was out of water.

She nodded, even though she was still crying. “A little.”

Our blankets from the night before were right where she’d left them in the morning, and I picked them up and tried to wrap them around her, but with my wrists tied together it was difficult. She took the blankets from me, pulled them around herself, and then surprised me when she nestled her bony frame against my side. I shifted to lean
against the wall and get comfortable for a while.

“Can you tell me about your mountain?” she asked.

“Yeah,” I said, trying to think of what to say. “It’s a pretty cool place, I guess. Although the whole time I lived inside I wished I could go outside.”

She turned her face up to look at me. “How did you see? Wasn’t it dark in there?”

I grinned. The stuff I took for granted growing up were
unbelievable wonders to people who had never seen that kind of technology. “It was never dark inside the Dome. We have electricity—do you know what that is?” She shook her head. “It’s a power source that lets us run things like artificial lights, replicators, televisions, computers, anything we need power for.”

She yawned. “What are those things?”

Knowing she was tired, I raised my bound hands
and she ducked under my arm to lay her head on my chest. As she snuggled against me, I felt her heartbeat, which was as tiny and fragile as she looked. Silently, I cursed Ryder again.

“Well, replicators are machines that make things—anything we want, really. They make clothes, building supplies, weapons, televisions.”

“What are televisions?” she asked in a slow, sleepy voice.

“It’s a big
screen where we can watch shows and movies that were filmed before the War.”

“Movies?”

“Hmm…that’s hard to explain. Did you ever pretend you were someone else? Like playing make-believe with your sister or a friend?” She nodded. “Movies and TV shows are kind of like that. They’re stories someone made up and other people act them out. It’s recorded so anyone can watch it.”

“That sounds like
fun.”

“I’ve never made a movie, but they are fun to watch.” A cold draft whistled through a crack, and I pulled the blanket snugly around her. “We use the big screens to play video games too, which I personally think are way more fun than movies. My brother Ted and I always played them. I liked games of strategy best because I always beat Ted. In fact, I wrote my own game a few years ago with
over twenty levels to get through, and last time I saw Ted he was still trying to make it past level fifteen.” I laughed at the memory, suddenly missing my brother a lot. “Ted always beat me at simulator games, though. You need fast reflexes and coordination for those. He was such a whiz on the aircraft simulator at school that he was chosen to train as a pilot for our air force—” And then it hit
me. That whirring, whooping mechanical sound I had heard.