Three (Article 5) (35 page)

“What was his name?” asked the man.

“Jennings,” said Tucker after a moment.

I jerked involuntarily at his name. He was here.

“Ah,” said the man in charge. “You’re probably wondering if he’s alive.”

I stared straight ahead.

“He is. And he will continue to remain so if you answer a few of my questions.”

“Like I believe you,” I said, despite myself.

“Reformation is built on honor,” he smiled. “Had you completed rehabilitation, you might have known that.”

I nearly laughed.

“How long have you worked for the rebel organization Three, Ms. Miller?” He lowered so that our gazes held a straight line. His breath was rank with onions, but his teeth were impeccably clean.

I turned my face away.

He stood slowly. Then wheeled back and slapped me.

My vision exploded in fireworks of color. The skin felt like it had been ripped off the side of my face. Tucker caught me again; I hadn’t even noticed the chair had tilted over on two legs.

The man cleared his throat. “Captain Morris, your knife please.”

Tucker released the chair and stepped toward the man, handing him the switchblade from his utility belt. I stared at the gun in his holster, willing it into my hands.

“No, no, you keep it.”

Tucker hesitated, but the older man had already turned back to me. He swung my necklace in front of my face, a blur of silver and gold. Behind him, over his right shoulder, the camera stayed pointed in my direction.

“All right, Ms. Miller, we’re going to make this quick, because as you undoubtedly have heard, I have a party to attend.”

Chancellor Reinhardt,
I realized. The Chief of Reformation. I nearly laughed. I’d made it into the Charlotte base after all. If DeWitt had only known I’d be within inches of the most hated man in the FBR.

“What is Three planning? Why issue this pathetic call to join the resistance and fight? And don’t say my assassination, because you’ve already tried and failed.”

I forced myself to smile. We’d heard of the attempt on his life when we were in Knoxville. What a shame that he’d recovered.

“You need to think about it. I understand. Captain Morris, was she an Article Four Violator? I forget these things.”

Tucker leaned over me, the marks from the beating I’d thought he’d endured as a prisoner still marring his jaw. A bead of sweat dripped down his brow and splashed on my swollen cheek, and I focused on the single gold star pinned beneath his name badge. With one hand he held my shoulder still; with the other, he brought the knife to my skin and slowly carved a line into the flesh, close to the three DeWitt had left.

I didn’t make a sound. But the adrenaline scored through my veins, making me shake.

“I’m going to ask you a second time, Ms. Miller. What is Three planning?”

I stared straight ahead. I thought of Chase, walking barefoot on the beach. Sneaking through my window at home. Combing his fingers through my hair.

Reinhardt sighed. “No, that’s right. Article 5 violation. That’s what Ember Miller was charged with.”

Tucker leaned down again.

“I should have killed you when I had the chance,” I whispered.

Tucker cut me again—a swipe crossing the others—and this time I did cry out.

“That must hurt,” said the chief with a wince. “You know we’ve captured your leader, correct? Three is finished. There’s no need to continue to protect him. He didn’t protect you, after all.” The chief crouched down before my chair. “He sold you out. He told us where your posts were hidden. He told us where to find your base in the Red Zone.”

DeWitt couldn’t be the one ratting out the posts. He’d only just been captured.

“Yes,” said the Chief, as if reading my mind. “Aiden DeWitt’s been in contact with me for some time now.”

Don’t listen to him, I told myself. I thought of Sean finding Rebecca, going to Mexico. I’d miss them.

“It was luck, really. We didn’t realize Carolyn was his daughter when Captain Morris brought her to us for the sniper murders. She wasn’t in our cells for more than a week when DeWitt called me on the radio. Funny how people pop up when you’ve got something they want.”

Rebecca had told me the doctor and his wife had been hiding Article violators, and that when the MM came his daughter had supposedly been killed in the crossfire. He’d taken down five soldiers in response.

We’re not so different, you know. They took my mom, too. For harboring the enemy.

I pictured Cara as I’d last seen her—broken and beaten and woozy with pain pills, but under that I saw a different girl, one who was young and pretty, with dirty blond hair. I saw how she might laugh without bitterness, and smile warmly.

I saw the picture DeWitt carried with him.

He had traded so many lives for his daughter.

In my silence Chancellor Reinhardt groaned, annoyed. He followed my burning gaze to Tucker. “I’m sorry, it must be difficult seeing Captain Morris again after all you’ve been through. Perhaps there’s something you’d like to say to
him
if not to me?”

Tucker stepped back, staring straight through me without any acknowledgment of what we had been through together. He folded the knife and put it away.

I had plenty to say to him, but I kept my mouth shut.

“Nothing? After he set up a fire in Knoxville that killed so many of your friends?”

My teeth began to ache from pressing them together so tightly.

“Not even after he led us straight to the Chicago resistance? I haven’t a clue how you made it out of
there
alive.” He chuckled bluntly.

“I’m not sure how he made it out, either,” I muttered, jutting my chin at Tucker.

A tight-lipped smile darkened Reinhardt’s hollow cheeks.

“Some people are willing to die for their cause, isn’t that right, captain?”

“Yes, sir,” said Tucker.

My interrogator folded his hands behind his back. “I wonder, Ms. Miller, if you are one of them.” He stared at me for one bone-chilling moment with his black ferret eyes, before heading toward the door held open by New Guy. Tucker followed.

“Is that what you told the insurgents?” I asked.

They both paused.

“Yeah, I know about that,” I said. “And I know you paid off their families to keep them quiet about it. They must have been in a pretty bad spot to take money from you.”

He laughed, but behind his back, his hands were folded, and they tightened, making his fingertips turn white.

“Don’t think I haven’t heard that before,” he said, turning slowly. “
Reinhardt preyed on the poor. He promised their families would be taken care of if they served their country, gave their lives in the ultimate act of patriotism. Then blamed the acting administration for the war they started.
Is that the way the story goes?”

I felt the blood rise in my cheeks. “That’s about right.”

“You see, you can’t tell me anything I don’t already know.”

“You’re wrong.” My voice was hoarse.

They both paused.

“You keep acting like Three is one man,” I said, a reckless bravery controlling my words. “You’re wrong. There’s thousands of us. There’s more of us than there are of you.”

Despite everything I’d seen, despite everything DeWitt had done, I clung to this. I did because my life depended on the secrets I knew, and if I gave them up I was as good as dead.

The cuts on my shoulder stung.
“We carry them,”
DeWitt had said,
“because they remind us we are not alone.”
I was not alone. Chase was with me. My mother was with me. Jesse, and Sean and Rebecca, and everyone else who had been wronged by the MM was with me, and that filled me with a freedom he couldn’t understand.

Tucker did not turn around. As he stared at the door, I watched his fists clench and release.

“No, Ms. Miller,” said Reinhardt. “There is but one man with a thousand hands. Cut off his head, and his limbs lose their purpose.”

“I guess that’s why we keep coming after you then,” I said.

His lips pulled thin, and grew dark white. Then he inhaled loudly through his nostrils and smiled. “Yes, that’s why.” On his way out, he added, “I’ll be back later to check on you, Ms. Miller. We’ll see how much you have to share then.”

The door closed, locked in place by a deadbolt.

*   *   *

MINUTES
passed, stretched by my impatience. Dark thoughts gathered at the edges of my mind like storm clouds, but I kept them at bay, refusing to give in. I twisted my wrists within the cuffs, straining to pull my numb hands through the metal rings. My skin grew raw.

“You did well, Ember.”

I looked around, but the room was still empty.

“I’m officially losing my mind,” I said quietly.

A soft chuckling could be heard, and then the voice, weak and crackling, came again. “It’s Aiden. I think I’m in the room next to you. Or maybe below. It’s hard to say.”

I’d never heard him refer to himself by his first name before.

My gaze lowered to a drain in the floor where the sound had emanated.

“You heard everything,” I said.

He waited a moment. “Yes.”

If I was honest with myself, it was good to hear his voice; it didn’t make me feel so alone.

“Is it true? Did you sell out the posts?”

Another moment passed. “I don’t suppose it matters anymore, does it?”

“Endurance wasn’t empty.”

“I know.”

“The safe house wasn’t empty.”

Down the hall, someone was yelling. The guards responded, harsh words and the clang of metal hitting metal. I couldn’t make out what they were saying, and somehow that made me even more afraid.

“No,” he said finally. “It wasn’t. Once the Bureau knew the location, there was nothing we could do.”

Without blowing the mission. Even now I was afraid to speak it out loud in case someone was listening.

“Our people at the mini-mart. They were all dead when we got there.”

My hands hurt, like pins and needles digging into my skin. They’d been tied too long; I could barely feel my fingers.

“I’m sorry to hear it,” he said.

“Are you?”

He chuckled humorlessly. “In medicine they call it triage. Prioritizing where to allocate your resources.”

“Prioritizing who lives and dies, you mean.”

“Yes,” he said. “Essentially. I made a call. We didn’t have enough people to send.”

Even with everything else, I was relieved to hear he hadn’t sent a team to execute them, as Chase had suggested. But the fact that we’d both considered it made me question our purpose all over again.

“What are we doing?” I asked. So many lives lost. They hit us, we hit them back, but in the end, what would we gain? The removal of the MM only mattered if it was replaced by something better, and right now Three didn’t seem much better. I hoped the old president had something better in mind.

“Protecting our families. Our mothers and our fathers,” he said, just as he’d told me in the cemetery before he’d given me the three scars on my chest. “Our sons and our daughters.”

But it wasn’t all the sons and daughters he fought for. It was one daughter. His. Cara.

“They let her go, you know,” I said. “I saw her. Alive.”

I could hear his breathing then, and only after a moment realized he was weeping.

“Thank you,” he said quietly.

A moment later there was a screeching of metal.

“Let’s go,” I heard a muffled voice say. DeWitt didn’t answer, but from the sound of it he was pulled from his cell and taken away.

I was alone.

CHAPTER

23

THE
deadbolt slid back, and the door pushed inward.

Sweat broke out on my brow. I tried in vain to jerk my hands free. All I could think of was my mother. This was how she’d spent her last moments, too. In a cell, awaiting a grim fate.

Tucker entered the room. He hobbled toward me quickly, wincing, one hand gripping his thigh where he’d been shot.

“Well if it isn’t
Captain
Morris,” I said.

He moved behind me, favoring one leg, and I did everything I could to make it hard for him to grasp the cuffs that bound me in place. The cuts on my shoulder burned like fire as I twisted away.

“Hold still,” he ordered.

A second later the latch popped, and my hands were free. As he knelt on the floor to remove the restraints around my ankles something beyond my control took over. I dove on top of him, bringing the chair to the ground with a crack that echoed off the walls. My thumbs wrapped around the soft tissue of his neck, but were uselessly numb from so many hours confined, and he peeled them away easily.

He rolled, and ended up on top of me, pinning my shoulders in place with his knees. My legs twisted, still attached to the chair.

“Hold. Still,” he repeated.

“Where’s Chase?” I gasped. “What did you do to him?” I bucked my hips in an attempt to dislodge him, but he sat on my chest, crushing the air from my lungs.

From his pocket came my necklace that Reinhardt had torn off, and he held Chase’s mother’s ring directly over my face.

“You want me to tell you, hold still.”

I stopped.

Slowly, Tucker eased back and released my legs. I snatched the necklace up and hurriedly put it back in place over my head.

“You have two minutes before surveillance comes back on,” said Tucker. He lowered to my ankles and again, the metal popped. “Then the control station will see you on the camera feed.”

My gaze flicked up to the box in the corner. “Can they hear me?”

Tucker shook his head.

“Where is he?” I stood, rubbing my hands together.

“He’s being moved. Everyone on this floor is being moved. You included.” He seemed to read my mind and added, “What are the chances that you’d escape twice on my watch.”

The door rested on the deadbolt. He hadn’t let it close completely.

“Where are they taking him?”

“The party. The chief is about to show us what happens to terrorists.”

It was like the rehab hospital in Chicago where they’d kept Rebecca. The circus, Truck had once called it. Where they exploited the injured to deter noncompliance.