This Shattered World (19 page)

THE BASE IS STILL IN CHAOS.
The air smells of smoke and acrid chemicals, and though all the civilian staff have been removed, it’s busier than I’ve ever seen it. Everyone has a job—or if they don’t, they’re hurrying in search of one.

I only stop long enough to change my clothes. With Cormac’s assurance that Davin Quinn has no connection to McBride, it’s unlikely the bombing was a declaration of war. I don’t need armor for what I’m about to do. I peel the suit off with difficulty; it’s stiff and sour-smelling with smoke, and I kick it into a corner of my room to deal with later. Even after I’ve put on fresh fatigues and my faux leather flak jacket, I still smell like fire. I should take a shower—hell, I should take a nap. But Cormac probably doesn’t have that kind of time.

Maybe I shouldn’t have lied to him. Maybe I should’ve told him what I was planning. But I’m starting to know Romeo, and how he thinks, and I know enough to see he’d never let me go through with it. Maybe he’s the smart one.

The security office isn’t far from my quarters, but my legs are so tired that starting the walk there feels impossible. So I break into a jog, trying to inject a little life into my muscles through sheer force of habit. My lungs start burning almost immediately, and I can’t help but think what Cormac’s must feel like, having inhaled so much more smoke.

When I reach the security office, it’s crawling with staff coming and going. Even though the bomber’s been identified and confirmed dead in the blast, our people are busy finding out everything about him, about the bomb itself, about how he did it. My heart pounding with unfamiliar uncertainty, I nod to the private stationed outside and then slip in through the door.

Security was one of the first permanent buildings erected on the base. No flimsy composite walls, no prefab rooms. All thick, solid plastene and concrete. The main room is the surveillance room, and my eyes flick to the banks of screens connected to the various cameras around the base. The footage itself is stored and accessed on a server down the hallway, but I can see the feed for the camera monitoring Molly Malone’s.

I half expected the bar to be a ghost town, but Molly’s is doing a stiff business right now. Another form of treatment, for the soldiers whose wounds can’t be healed at the hospital. I scan the picture, eyes narrowing. No wonder they felt confident they’d be able to clean up the footage enough to identify my abductor. The image is low res, but there’s a clear view of the spot where I usually sit, the spot where Cormac first pulled his gun on me.

I swallow, pushing thoughts of him back down. I take a step backward, intending to head for the room where the footage is accessed, but I collide heavily with someone behind me.

“Captain.”

My stomach drops. “Commander.” I step away from her, stiffening to attention automatically.

“I thought I told you to take the next couple days off.” For once, Commander Towers isn’t perfectly put together. Her blond hair is still tied hastily at the nape of her neck, her uniform still disheveled. Her face reveals none of her exhaustion, though, a quality I envy. I must look like I haven’t slept in a week.

“Can’t do it, sir. Too much at stake.” That, at least, is no lie.

She nods almost absently, as if she’d expected that response. She seems distracted, anyway, her eyes going to the screens I’d been studying. They oversee every inch of the base, from the barracks to the bar to the very room we’re standing in now. I can see myself at an angle, standing a few feet from the commander.

“Will you come with me, Captain?” Her voice is oddly formal under the circumstances, making my heart skip a little.

Stop acting like a guilty child,
I tell myself sternly.
They can’t read your mind.

“Of course, sir.”

Commander Towers leads the way down the hall, scanning the rooms as we pass for an empty one. Eventually, she just sticks her head through a doorway and barks, “You—out.”

A pair of startled privates come spilling out, eyes flicking from the commander to me. I follow Towers inside, only to have my muscles seize up as I realize where we are.

The security footage repository.

Commander Towers heads for one of the desks, pulling out a chair and sliding it across the floor toward me. Then she retrieves one of her own and drops into it heavily. I sink down more gingerly, keeping an eye on the commander while trying not to be too obviously nervous. If they’ve finished cleaning up the footage, then I’m too late. They’ll have a clear view of Cormac’s face. They’ll know he’s right there in our infirmary, and I’ve been to visit him more than once. And Commander Towers will know I lied to her.

But she isn’t looking at the screens or the servers. “Captain, I wanted to see how you were.” Her eyes meet mine, and though there’s sympathy in them, I can see something else behind it. A keen interest, sharp and perceptive. “You’ve had a lot to deal with over the past few days.”

“I’m okay.”
Another lie.
A few weeks ago I would’ve been comforted by my commander taking a personal interest in me. Now it feels like she can see through my treachery, straight to the truths I’m hiding.

Towers nods, watching me a moment longer before letting her eyes fall to the floor between us. “I’m sorry about Lieutenant Alexi. I know you two had a history.”

I fight to keep my throat from closing. Giving my head a brisk shake to clear it of the image of Alexi’s ruined face, I say shortly, “Thank you, sir.”

“We’re still trying to figure out how it happened. Why it happened. The bomber—this Quinn man—came out of nowhere. We’ve got footage of him walking toward the barracks, right up until the explosion happened, and there’s nothing. Our best behavioral researchers are analyzing it and there’s just nothing there—no hidden aggression, no signs of guilt, nothing to suggest he was about to murder dozens of people.”

I grit my teeth. It matches what Cormac said, that Quinn couldn’t have been the bomber, that he wasn’t the type. And yet, he was found with the detonator in what was left of his hand. Could it be he didn’t know what he was doing?

“This place,” murmurs Commander Towers, her eyes shifting to gaze past me. “It’s eating away at us, bit by bit.”

“Someone has to be here, sir.” But it’s a pale comfort when even in the depths of the security office we can both still smell the burning plastene. It clings to our hair, our clothes, ingrained in the pores of our skin.

Towers’s eyes snap back to mine, and she nods shortly. “Of course. Sometimes I just wonder how long it’ll take for Avon to consume us all.”

It’s unlike her to be so pensive. It’s one of the things I like about the commander, that she and I are both outward people, preferring action to introspection, momentum to idle consideration. And yet here she is, her shoulders sagging a little, her eyes seeking mine as though I have answers for her.

But I’ve got nothing. For a wild instant, the truth bubbles up inside me, begging to be let out. I press my lips together tightly.

Commander Towers sighs, straightening. “Chase, I wanted to ask you about what you said during your debriefing after your capture and subsequent escape.”

I try not to stiffen noticeably. “Sir?”

“You mentioned that the rebel thought we had some kind of base or facility out to the east.”

I lean forward a little, unable to conceal the sudden spark of excitement leaping inside my rib cage. She knows something. “Yes, sir.”

She leans forward a little too, mirroring my body language, picking up on all my cues. She’s far more skilled than I am at interrogation and manipulation. I have to watch my step. I let my hands dangle where my elbows are resting on my knees. Casual. Easy.

“I’ve been wondering why he’d think that,” she continues. “It seems an odd thing to believe. The locals know the terrain here so well.”

I hesitate. She’ll see it, know it’s uncharacteristic of me, know I’m hiding the truth. But there’s too much to consider. On the one hand, Towers could be an ally. I’m only a captain—but she’s the commander of an entire outpost here on Avon, and if she’s alerted to the possibility of a LaRoux Industries facility out there below the radar, she could be the key to finding out more.

But what if she’s in on whatever strange conspiracy is unfolding out in the fens? Surely the person in charge of the base would have to be a part of the con?

I clear my throat. “That’s what he said.” I have to tread carefully, watching her face for any reaction, however small, that might tell of what she knows. “Sounded crazy to me too, but I went along with it while I waited for my chance.”

Commander Towers doesn’t react, listening to me with what seems to be polite interest and no more. Still, there’s the faintest of twitches along her jaw, and my eyes seize on it.

“I’m sure there was nothing in it,” I say dismissively, leaning back in my chair again. “Not unlike the fairy tales they tell to keep themselves company in the evenings. Stories about how they keep moving it and it’s never in the same place twice, that sort of thing.”

Towers nods. “Anything else?”

I shake my head. “Only rumors.”

The commander straightens, running a hand over her hair and then getting to her feet. “Thank you, Captain.”

I scan her face, looking for something, anything, that will explain her sudden interest and her just as sudden dismissal. There’s little to read there—the men call me Stone-faced Chase, but I’ve got nothing on Towers when it comes to playing our cards close to our chests. But her gaze moves too quickly, lips thin, shoulders rounded more than usual. She’s on alert, edgy. And I don’t think it’s solely from the bombing.

“Of course, sir. I don’t think it’s anything to worry about, though. Just stories.”

She nods, lips curving in the barest hint of a smile. “Understood, Captain. Carry on—I’ll be in touch.”

I can’t explain why, but I have the strongest sense she’s not involved. That she’s every bit as driven as I am to find out what’s happening out there. Her movements are quick, jerky, anxious. She wants to be out of here as badly as I want her to go. I haven’t forgotten why I’m really here.

For half an instant, I want to blurt the truth. But to do so would reveal my part in all of this; that I could have captured a key player from the Fianna and didn’t, that I’d let him escape from me not once now, but twice. It would reveal that I’d betrayed my purpose here.

Most of all, it would betray Cormac.

And so I bite down hard on my lip and get to my feet, flashing a salute at Commander Towers as she turns and strides from the room. I stand there, gathering my wits, and then close the door lightly behind her.

By clearing the room of the techs, she’s unwittingly given me my opportunity.

With one foot I nudge a desk chair over so that the door, should anyone open it, will hit the chair with a clatter. A locked door would scream guilt, but the chair might distract anyone entering long enough for me to distance myself from the consoles and hide what I’m doing.

Drawing in a deep breath, I drop into another chair and start hunting for the files I need.

It takes me several long moments to navigate to the places where the surveillance footage is stored, but that’s not the hard part. Deleting those files is the work of a few seconds. The real challenge is locating the places where the various files are backed up.

My fingers know the way, my brain only half-focused on what I’m doing. One of the men I trained with taught me how to do this, and he learned it from a kid who did this for a living. My old captain, when I was a corporal, let us learn on the sly. You never pass up anything that can be used as a weapon, he said, any way of fighting that doesn’t involve bloodshed. I chafed at the instruction at the time—why would I ever need to learn how to hack into secure files?—but now, I mouth silent gratitude for my old captain and his foresight.

I try to focus. I can’t stop to think about what I’m doing, because it betrays every oath I’ve ever taken, every order I’ve ever received. It betrays everything I believe in. It’s a violation deep enough to make my soul, whatever shreds of it are left, ache. I’m helping a rebel. A criminal. A person whose friend just killed over thirty people, including someone I loved like a brother.

My eyes blur with exhaustion, and I have to pause to wipe my sleeve across my face. It leaves behind a darker patch of sweat and grime on the fabric. Now and then footsteps approach the door, but they always continue on past, striding away in time to the pounding of my heart. Still, at any moment someone might pop their head in.

There
—finally. The fourth and final backup. The military always does things in fours—three being the natural number, four to be safe. The system spends a long breath-stealing instant thinking about my deletion command—and then the file vanishes. No fanfare, no sign it was ever there. No trace of the treason I’ve just committed.

I quickly close down the computer, taking care to erase any record I was ever poking around in there. The monitor closed, the chair shoved back where it belongs, I slip out into the corridor and let the room close behind me.

Mind blank, ears roaring, I float down the hallway toward the exit, limbs starting to shake. I swallow hard, fighting nausea. I need to get back to my quarters. Have a shower, lie down for a few minutes. Let myself think, breathe. Find a way to get Cormac out, now that we have some time to work with.

The corridor opens up into the main room, where the techs from the surveillance repository have joined the officers currently on duty. They’re all crowded around one of the monitors, which is no longer split to show the live feeds from the base. Instead it’s playing the same three or four seconds of footage over and over in a loop.

I take a few steps closer, peering silently past their heads—and my heart stops. It’s the footage I just painstakingly erased. One of the techs must have had it on a local drive so they could keep working while evicted from the repository.

Because not only is it the footage—they’ve finished cleaning it up and enhancing it. The clip playing over and over again shows him clearly: the handsome chin, the thick brows, the arrogant smile.