Rebellion (16 page)

“And these are the Core fugitives who’ve been identified?” the tech asks. It sounds like he’s clicking through all the data that popped up from the card.

“Correct,” Mal says. “We believe some of them may be working in this sector.”

“How do you know?”

“There was a situation on the Surface, while the departures were under way. Three patrol ships were sent out to intercept unidentified transports that were believed to be from the insurgent base. The ships lost communication, and only one came back. There was a second ship on its tail, with a fugitive on board. He was captured. Thanks to him, we know the rebels were trying to sneak into the lower sectors, though we don’t know for sure if they were successful.”

He’s talking about Beechy. Beechy was captured.

“Well, we’ll be sure to keep an eye out for any more of them on the cams,” the tech says.

“Wonderful. Keep up the good work, gentlemen.” Mal moves to the exit door.

“Thank you, sir.”

Mal pauses as the door slides open. “Oh, and I was told to inform you that the girl, Clementine, is of particular importance to Commander Charlie. Her official status is unknown; she may not have survived the skirmish a week ago. But if you see any sign of her, it’s imperative you let someone know right away.”

“Can I ask why she’s important?”

“I don’t know his reasoning; I don’t question my orders. Neither should you. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

With that, Mal exits the room.

“We should go,” Hector whispers.

Vaguely I’m aware of Hector scooting back in the tunnel so he can replace the vent cover. But I can’t focus; my mind is moving too fast.

I was right; Charlie is looking for me, even though he doesn’t know for sure if I’m alive. He named me before all the others. What does he want with me? I know his plan was to have me return to the Core after my stay in Karum prison, but I never learned why he wanted to keep me alive. And I was sure he’d changed his mind after I helped the Alliance screw up his plans and hijack his bomb.

It doesn’t matter what he wants with me. The more important thing Mal shared is that Beechy was captured. He must still be alive—Charlie would keep him alive, since he’s married to his daughter, and since he’s the only person in Charlie’s custody who knows everything about the Alliance and their plans.

Beechy hasn’t given us up yet, or I’d be in a holding cell right this second. But I’m afraid he might not hold out much longer. Charlie has ways to break a person. All Beechy has to tell him is that I’m in the work camp and my name is “Brea,” and I will have nowhere to hide. Even if I stayed up here in this tunnel, Charlie’s men would find me.

I don’t have many days left. I need to use them well.

14

Hector and I don’t say much on our way back down the maintenance corridor. He asks me what I think about what we heard, but I don’t give him an honest answer. I’m too worried, and it would take too long to explain why.

Images keep flashing through my mind of Beechy in a dark place like my Karum cell, or on an examination table with electric wires making his body convulse until he tells Charlie what he wants to hear.

Please stay strong,
I want to tell him.
Please don’t die. We’ll find a way to rescue you.

But I don’t even know how I’m going to escape this camp alive.

We climb down the ladder through the trapdoor and sneak back to the cave room where Arthur, Evie, and Lucy are fast asleep. I’m so tired from worrying, I knock out seconds after I lie down on the hard floor.

It feels like only a minute later that my eyes are opening again, to the sound of guards stomping into the room.

“Everybody up!” an official shouts. “Inspection time.”

The force of his voice urges me to my feet. He and the other officials come around to everyone, checking ID tags. Everyone who falls between the ages of thirteen and seventeen is told to go with the escort guards.

I lower my eyes as a man steps up to me and grabs my wrist. I want to slip away and hide in the maintenance corridor, but there are too many guards and cam-bots around. It’ll be hard enough to keep my face from showing up in a recording.

I’ll have to think of some other way to keep from getting the serum shot. I have to assume that’s what it’s for, to prepare for the worst.

The only good thing about this is that there’s a chance I might see Logan in the quarantine facility. If all the twelve- to seventeen-year-olds from Camp B have also been called for inspection, he’ll be there too. I could learn whether or not he’s still okay. That thought keeps my feet steady as I trail after Hector and Arthur, and all the others who will soon do anything Charlie says, if I’m right about the submission serum.

I hope I’m wrong.

*   *   *

The walls inside the quarantine facility are a drab gray color. The front room smells strongly of bleach, the kind of strong that can only mean they’re trying to cover up something worse. When they burn corpses in the furnaces, no doubt the stench spreads.

The nurses who greet us are smiling.

“This way, children,” one of them says. She has dimples in her cheeks and wears a pale blue lab coat. “Some of you will come with me, and the rest will go with the other nurses.”

We follow her down a corridor. I keep my face calm, composed, especially when we’re passing the guards who patrol here and there.

Every door we pass could have a kill chamber behind it. But none of them have windows, so I can’t know for sure. They remind me of the doors in Karum, thick enough to drown out the screams of the prisoners behind them. There are stains on a couple of the doors, blood someone didn’t completely scrub away.

I wonder how many people have died here. How many girls and boys only a few years older than me have seen these bleak walls and known every step they took was one step closer to their last. These are the last hallways they see. The last faces. I get the feeling the smiling nurses aren’t around for that; it would only be the stone-faced guards.

“Brea,” Evie whispers behind me.

“Yeah?” I whisper back. No one else is talking, so I hope our voices don’t carry that much.

“This … serum you said you heard the guards say they’re giving us,” she says, biting her lip. “What did you say it would do?”

Behind her, Lucy seems to be listening in.

I check to make sure there aren’t any officials up ahead. The only one I see is still a ways down the hallway.

“They said we wouldn’t disobey any orders after they gave it to us,” I say quickly. “It sounded like some kind of controlling serum—something that makes us weak-willed. So don’t let the nurses give you any shots, if you can.”

“They’ll call for guards if we don’t cooperate,” Hector says, in front of me. “How are we supposed to stop them?”

I’m unable to fight the sinking feeling in my stomach. He’s right; no one will let us leave this place without the serum in our systems. If we struggle, they might decide throwing us in a kill chamber is easier.

“I don’t know,” I say.

The nurse at the front of the line stops abruptly and turns around. We’ve reached a place where the hallway splits four ways. A nurse’s station sits at the corner.

“Please stay in the line,” our nurse says. “We’ll get you all in and out of the examination rooms as quickly as we can.”

Another nurse walks over from the station, carrying a tablet. She says something to the first person in line, and directs the girl around the corner, down one of the corridors. The next person is directed around the corner immediately after.

Slowly, the line moves forward. When Arthur is called and I’m almost to the front, I can see around the corners better, enough to tell we’re being directed into exam rooms. There’s another line of kids at the end of the right-hand branch of hallway. They might be from the other camp. Logan could be down there in line. If I could just slip away; if I could just run to find him without anyone noticing—

“Go into room seven,” the nurse says to me with a smile, pointing me down the left-hand corridor. Hector’s already been called away, and it’s my turn now.

I give the nurse the best smile I can muster, and head to room seven. If there weren’t guards stationed outside the doors, I almost really would run. But it would do more harm than good.

Room seven’s door slides open when I approach. The guard outside barely glances at me as I walk in.

The room is small with a cushioned examination table against the far wall. To the left is a counter with a sink and jars of supplies—antiseptic patches and strips of gauze—and to the right is the woman who will be examining me, I assume. She’s wearing a white coat instead of a blue one, so she must be a doctor. Her dark hair is tied up in a knot at the back of her head. She smiles when she sees me, as she strips off her surgical gloves and tosses them in the trash receptacle.

“Hello, I’m Dr. Piper,” she says. “What’s your name, sweetie?”

“Brea.” I’m amazed I manage to sound normal.

I’ve hated examination rooms ever since I was a child, thanks to the earliest days of my life, when I lived in the sanitarium until I was old enough to work in the camp. Those days were so long ago, all I can remember are flashes of images: nurses leaning over me; needles glinting in the light; voices saying,
This is for your own good
.

Now, when I look at the exam table, I also see the table I had to lie on for hours in Karum, sometimes awake and sometimes under the influence of a sleeping drug, while the doctors poked and prodded me, and did things I’d like to forget.

“How are you today, Brea?” Dr. Piper asks.

Not okay, not okay at all. I need to get out of here.

“Fine,” I manage.

“Can I see the number on your arm?”

I hold it out to her. The skin around the new numbers is still tinged reddish pink, but no one’s seemed to notice so far, so I try not to worry. Dr. Piper doesn’t scan the number or anything—she just glances.

“You were one of the Surface transfers, correct?”

“Yes.” Something about my tag must give it away.

“Okay. If you could take a seat on the bed over there for me, I’ll get you out of here real fast.” Dr. Piper crosses over to the sink and turns the water on to wash her hands.

Wiping my sweaty palms on my pants, I walk to the table and sit down. I’m going to have to get through this, even if she gives me the shot. It won’t make me mindless, anyway. It’s the old serum, and all it will do is make me sick for a little while. I can handle that. I can hide it, as I did before, and then Mal and Skylar will help me escape from the camp. I won’t have to follow any of Charlie’s orders; we will find a way to screw up the next part of his plan.

All these words sound so nice in my head, but I don’t believe any of them.

“Now,” Dr. Piper says, turning around and sticking the ends of the stethoscope around her neck into her ears, “take a deep breath for me.”

She presses the silver disk against my chest. My first breath is a bit shaky, but I control the second one better, and the ones after that, as she moves the disk an inch or two each time. She doesn’t need to know how nervous I am.

Soon she pulls the disk away and replaces the stethoscope around her neck. “Good. If you could lie back for me.”

I stretch out on the table. There’s a small mesh pillow for my head, identical to the one that was on the surgical table in the Core, when the doctor operated on me and made me stronger, and covered up the old scar on my jaw—before Charlie gave me a new one. The memory makes my body tense again.

Calm down.

Dr. Piper reaches for the hem of my shirt. “Is it okay if I pull this up a little? I’d like to take a look at your skin, make sure it’s looking healthy.”

If she’s asking me permission, I guess she must not be planning on doing anything too terrible. “Okay.”

She rolls my shirt up. With gentle fingers, she touches the skin of my belly, poking it here and there. “Have you noticed a rash, or anything? Or had a fever?”

I shake my head, no.

“Lucky girl,” she says, pulling my shirt back down. “I’ve seen a couple Surface transfers with horrible rashes. Exposure to small amounts of moonshine can cause that. It’s horrible that all of you had to deal with that, even if it was only for a few days. They transferred you to the city, right?”

“Right,” I say, even though I don’t know for sure. But that must’ve been what happened, or there would’ve hardly been any work camp survivors.

“I heard there were quite a few tragedies before the transfer, though,” Dr. Piper says with a sad sigh. “Thankfully Commander Charlie was able to move the rest of you underground.”

Her worry seems so genuine, I wonder if she even knows the whole thing was caused by Charlie in the first place. Maybe he wasn’t going to save her, or any of the other personnel in this facility. Maybe they were going to die with us when the world exploded.

“All right, well, you seem pretty healthy,” Dr. Piper says, moving over to the sink. “But I would like to give you some medicine before I send you back to the camp. It’s a preventive sort of thing. We wouldn’t want to bring you down here to keep you alive, only to let you get sick a few days later.”

I sit up on the table, digging my fingernails into the cushion. Dr. Piper opens a drawer and pulls out the essentials for the injection—a vial of the serum and a fresh syringe wrapped in plastic. She rips off the plastic.

I can’t let her do this. I have to make her stop.

“Is it really necessary?” I ask. “I’m actually allergic to some vaccines.”

As soon as I say that, I regret it. Charlie might’ve mentioned my allergy in whatever description of me he passed around to all the guards.

“You won’t be allergic to this one,” Dr. Piper says, drawing the serum into the syringe. The serum is a dark, hazy blue instead of the orange color I remember. Must be a new variety. “It’s been well tested. It’ll be quick, don’t worry.”

Smiling, she turns around with an antiseptic wipe in hand. I expect her to roll up one of my shirtsleeves, but instead she pushes down the collar of my shirt and dabs antiseptic on the skin around my clavicle, over my trachea. I’ve never heard of an injection being administered there before, unless someone needed a tube to help them breathe. This can’t be good.