New World Order (35 page)

“Are we good, Reyes?” I asked without advancing any closer.

“I’m not gonna hurt him,” Reyes said. “He’s too pathetic.”

Ayers balked at the comment and tried to push Ted out of the way to get to Reyes. Jack intervened, grabbing
the man by one arm and twisting it behind his back. He wrenched it up higher, and Ayers grunted in pain.

“Stand down, soldier,” Jack commanded.

“I’m good. I’m good,” Ayers said.

“I’ll let you go, but if you take a step toward him, I’ll shoot you,” Jack said. I didn’t believe he would since he didn’t have his gun. Ayers nodded. Jack let him go. “Over there, and cool off,” Jack said, thumbing
behind him.

“What happened, Reyes?” I asked.

“That friggin’ idiot’s blaming
us
for the fighting. He said, and I’m quoting here, ‘If urchins would just shut up and mind their own business the world would be a better place.’”

Jack pinched the skin on the bridge of his nose. “Ayers!” he said sharply and beckoned him over.

Ayers jumped to attention. “Sir.”

“You will apologize to our friends
from the Pit for your stupidity,” Jack said.

Ayers’ face fell into a look of uncertainty. “Sir?”

“Did you hear me?” asked Jack impatiently.

“Yes, sir!” Ayers stepped forward, rolled his eyes, and said, “My apologies.”

“I feel so much better now,” Reyes said sarcastically. He drew his hand into a fist. “We need to get back and defend our people against the bourge.”

“We don’t even know
what’s going on yet,” I said. “When did you leave, Ted? And what was happening when you did?”

Ted looked at Reyes. “Can we talk about this like adults?”

Reyes curled his lip, and I took a step toward him, but Hayley moved and put her hands on Reyes’ chest and backed him up. “He can,” she said on his behalf.

Jack cocked an eyebrow and looked at me. I shrugged. I still had no idea what, if
anything, was going on between those two.

Ted turned to Jack. “I don’t mean to be disrespectful or start another fight, but their army—I mean the ones wearing those suits—made a move to assassinate Powell, West, and Leisel Holt. Powell is dead. Leisel and Malcolm West have barricaded themselves in the Dome, and Leisel says she has the codes to the nuclear warheads and will set them off unless
the urchins, er, I mean the Pit backs down.”

“You think you’re leaving out a few pieces of information?” Reyes asked.

“I told Jack about the conspiracy to get Leisel into his empty seat in the Senate,” I said to Reyes. I turned to Jack. “The assassination attempt on the three of them was Doc’s idea. He knew I wouldn’t be in favor of it, so he sent Reyes with me to make sure I didn’t return
to the valley before the deed was done. Just like Powell sent Alex to prevent you from ever returning to reclaim your seat in the Senate.”

“That’s not all your Doc has done,” Ted said. “He’s threatening to send a super virus into the Dome’s ventilation system and kill every bourge inside.”

“What!”
I blurted. Was Ted lying? Yet even as my mind posed the question, I knew the answer. Doc had
told me a long time ago that he was working on a genetically designed virus to wipe out the bourge. Is that why he didn’t want me around? In case his science experiment, aka my child, got infected?

“I take it you didn’t know about that,” Ted said.

I shook my head and looked at Reyes. “Did you know?”

“I promise I didn’t,” he said.

Jack pushed both his hands through his hair. “I’m fed up
with the whole nuclear threat and now we have viruses on top of it?”

“You’re not the only one,” Naoki said. “Every time you fight, every time you threaten each other, my people hold their breath.” He stepped forward, his gaze scanning all of us. “This world can’t take another nuclear war. Grow up!”

“Hey!” Hayley said. “This has nothing to do with you or your people. Stay out of it.”

“It
has everything to do with him and his people,” Jack said. “And he has every right to say something. We start setting off nuclear warheads or unleashing super viruses, we not only kill ourselves, we annihilate the entire valley.”

Hayley ignored Jack and continued to stare down Naoki. “We’ll handle our own people; you handle yours.”

Naoki’s face screwed up into an expression of scorn. “You mean
by making slavers your leaders?” He looked at Jack. “Why, after so much fighting and bloodshed, did you let the slavers rule you again? We fought by your side. Our people died to help you!”

Jack’s face flushed with guilt, and I moved to stand next to him. Naoki glared at him with a pained expression, waiting for Jack to respond.

“You don’t understand,” Jack said. “We fought to be free of a
dictatorship, so we couldn’t very well turn around and
thrust
a way of life onto everybody. We attempted to create peace between our races by allowing the people to choose their leaders and have a say over their own lives, and I stand by that. We just—” He paused and rubbed a hand over his eyes. “We just forgot to factor in all the lies, corruption, and betrayal.” He kicked at a tuft of dead grass,
uprooting it and sending it flying.

“Where I come from,” Naoki said. “You have to
earn
your place as a leader.”

I looked behind him to where Jin-Sook, Eli, and Talon stood, bobbing their heads in agreement.

Summer crossed her arms over her chest. “Or at the very least, don’t allow slavers to run for office.”

If this argument kept going in the direction I thought it was going, we’d be
squaring off against each other before we even made it back to the valley. Hayley’s words came back to me:
At least until we get home, right? Then we’re back on opposite sides of the fight.

I took a step toward the group. “We can’t change what’s already done, and arguing about who is right or wrong isn’t helpful. The real question now is where do
we
go from here?” I made a circular motion with
my hand to include everyone in our group. “And by
we
,
I mean all of us. Are we going to fly back to the valley, depart that aircraft, and take up arms against each other?”

Jack moved next to me. “Sunny’s right. We are not each other’s enemy; the people threatening to blow us all up with nuclear weapons or use biowarfare are. It’s time to stop letting the Holts of the world win when we have the
power to end them.”

“End them?” Hayley echoed. “What are you suggesting, Jack?”

He didn’t answer her. Instead he looked at me, seeking my approval.
End them
, he had said. The words rang in my ears, and their meaning seeped in. We had been fighting for freedom since our accidental marriage. Fighting for peace since the liberation of the Dome. Together we had created the Alliance, toppled the
Holt regime, and reinstated democracy. And yet it wasn’t enough. We still walked a tightrope between urchin and bourge, and bourge and the Nation, trying to maintain peace and avoid bloodshed.

I cupped the side of his face with my hand and gave him my approval. “It’s time to stop fighting for a better life and start living one.”

“Jack?” Ted prompted.

Jack held my hand as he turned toward
the group. “I’m suggesting a coup. We work together to overthrow the government.”

Jack

Sometimes I missed the days when Sunny and I faced the world on our own. Not that I wanted to live under the threat of execution again, but she and I worked well together. She was the creative one, always coming up with ideas; I was the pragmatic one, always trying
to figure out if they would work. But as we sat there with ten other people trying to make a viable plan to depose our government, I totally understood the old cliché of too many cooks in the kitchen.

I took Sunny’s hand and said to the group, “We should check on Teegan.” I led her back onto the Osprey.

“I gotta pee,” Sunny said. “Is there a toilet onboard, or do I have to go in the great
outdoors again?”

I had been on the Osprey a few times while it was being constructed and knew there was a tiny water closet. I went with her and moved the bikes out of the way so she could get the door open.

Teegan was still sleeping, and I knew it wasn’t due to the acetaminophen tablet I had given her. She was emotionally and physically exhausted.

Sunny came out of the washroom, found
her backpack, fished around under the seats, and came up with bottles of water. “Do you want one?”

I nodded, sat down, and patted the seat beside me. She sat next to me, perched her sunglasses on top of her head, opened one of the bottles, and took a few gulps. “Your child constantly wants water, and when I give it to him, he just makes me pee it back out.”

She handed me the bottle and I
drained it, still thirsty after being shot up with devil’s blood. “Him?” I asked with a smile. “I was thinking it was a
her
.”

“But I’ve already named him ‘little guy.’”

“That’s not a name, Sunny.”

“Better than ‘it.’”

“True.”

She looked over at Teegan. “How is she doing?”

“Her fever is down. She needs penicillin, though.”

“Can I ask how you two ended up together?”

I still wasn’t
ready to go there, but I supposed I could tell her without going into a lot of details. “Ryder made her my responsibility to use her as a… kind of emotional control over me.” I huffed a disgusted laugh. “I guess it worked.”

She ran a finger down the side of my face and along my jaw. “Of course it worked. You have a big heart.”

I caught her hand and kissed her fingertips. “And I was there the
night she was taken,” I said in a whisper, just in case Teegan woke up. “The men in our recruiting party came across a settlement and…” I couldn’t say anything else. I wasn’t ready.

“A settlement? By a lake?”

I looked at her. “Yeah. How do you know?”

She reached for her backpack, rummaged through it, and pulled out a handmade doll. She gave it to me. “This might belong to her.”

I stared
down at the doll in my hands as the information that Sunny had been there—at the same settlement that haunted me—sank into my brain. “You were
there
?”

She nodded, her face sad as she glanced at the doll. “I won’t soon forget it either.”

I realized I didn’t need to come up with the words to describe that night. She already knew. I pulled her against me, and we held each other for a few moments
until she kissed my cheek and pulled away.

Swinging her legs onto my lap, she leaned her side against the seat so she was facing me. I wrapped both arms around her legs and hugged them to my chest.

Smiling suggestively, she asked, “So, did you bring me in here to get me alone, Mr. Kenner?”

“There’s that,” I said with a smile. “And you and I work better on our own.”

She breathed out a
laugh. “They might end up killing each other before we even get back to the Dome.”

“How should we play this, Mrs. Kenner?”

“You’re asking me?”

“You always come up with the most creative ideas.”

“Creative?” she repeated coyly. “That’s an interesting word to use.”

“Mmhm.” I smiled and massaged her calf.

“Since you asked, I have been giving it some thought.” She opened her food pack and
poured some water into it.

“I knew you would.”

“Remember the tunnel we used to get everyone out of the Pit? We can get into the Dome through there.”

“Leisel knows about the tunnel, though. She’s probably taken steps to close it off.”

“But she doesn’t know about these suits,” she said, tugging the sleeve of her exoskeleton. “Even if the tunnel is barricaded, it’s still a weak point we can
get through.”

“Okay, say we get through. How do we get to Leisel without her setting off the warheads? The Dome’s full of cameras, and she’ll see us coming.”

“Jack, have you ever wondered if there are actually any warheads? I mean has anyone ever seen them?”

“Do you think the Holts have been bluffing for almost three hundred years? That would be the biggest con job in history.”

“I don’t
know, I’m just saying
what if
.”

“What if they’re real?” I countered. “I think it’s better to err on the side of caution.”

“Okay, so we need to come up with a way to get to Leisel without her setting off the warheads.” She took a drink of water. “The last time I needed to get into the presidential suites, she fell for my ploy to make a trade for you. We can come up with something like that
again.”

“She’ll be a lot harder to fool this time around.”

“Maybe we could disable the cameras. Or you could hack into the main computer and take control over the camera feeds like you did when we first met. Remember? That’s what you did to sneak me into Leisel’s the day of the wedding. You did it again after the wedding, when we were locked up in your apartment.”

“I need to be inside the
Dome to do that. And if I could get inside the Dome unnoticed, then I could just go straight for Leisel and not worry about the cameras.”

“So we need to get in unnoticed.” She suddenly sat up straight, almost spilling her mush. “It might be a long shot but… before I left on the search, Doc showed me something he had been working on. Metamaterial, he called it.” She looked at me with bright,
excited eyes. “It’s invisibility, Jack.”

I tried not to laugh. “Invisibility, Sunny?”

“You laughed about nanotechnology until you found out that Doc’s nanobots healed you. And you didn’t think these suits were conceivable until you saw mine in action. Is invisibility really that impossible to imagine?”

She was right. I had been proven wrong too many times. “I have a confession to make,”
I said. “Doc’s nanobots are still working. I should have died several times by now.”

Sunny smiled, leaned forward, and gave me a big kiss. “I was counting on it. It’s how I knew you were still alive.”

“So how does this metamaterial work? Is it a suit or something? Can he replicate it?”

“First we need to figure out how to get it from him,” she said. “I mean if he’s holed up in his lab threatening
to unleash a super virus, he might not open the door to me. The whole reason he had Reyes come on the search was to make sure I didn’t come back too soon. Although I’m not sure if he wanted me out of the way because of my influence with the Alliance or to protect our baby from his designer virus.”