Article 5 (Article 5 #1)(86)

Before us stretched the FBR base. The buildings all matched, gray and drab, some with stout additions, others slender. All variations on the same deathly theme. Little manicured lawns cropped up between them, and white walkways bounced from entrance to entrance. It reached on for miles, surrounded by the high steel fence that we had passed through below. In the distance I could see the river and the hospital where we’d left the car. The square would be nearby, as would the Wayland Inn, where the resistance plotted.

Oh, the information I could offer Wallace. The layout of the detention center. How many guards roamed the halls. The geography of the base. I’d doubted my use to the resistance before. I didn’t now.

I felt a flame flicker inside of me. A feeling, almost unrecognizable.

Hope.

What if I could find a way to tell Wallace? Even if I was doomed to die, the information I had might save others. Innocent people like my mother. It physically hurt to think that the information I now had might have helped someone save her.

I turned around and saw the remains of an abandoned town. Probably some residential offshoot of Knoxville. Twisting asphalt avenues were lined by crowded duplexes and condos. From the distance, their tiny yards did not look overgrown or weed eaten. The tagged walls and broken windows were too far away to see clearly.

An old sign posting fuel prices reached up atop the horizon, drawing my attention. A main street ran down the left side of my view; a straight line away from me.

“Is that all part of the base, too?” I asked.

“No. The base is just over there. This side of the city is evacuated. A Red Zone.”

I felt my brows draw together.

“Do you mean that we’re not currently on the base?”

“You’re a bright one,” she mocked.

Anxiety shimmered through me.

“How often do you come out here?” I asked.

“Every time I have to take out the trash.”

I grimaced at her analogy. “And you’ve never thought to just keep walking?”

“I think it all the time.”

“Why don’t you?”

She looked at me, her face tired.

“If there was anything for me out there, I’d be gone.”

She looked at me in judgment, sizing up my intentions. Apparently, my thoughts were as transparent as her eyes.

Beth was still out there. Rebecca was in danger. Wallace and the resistance could use me, and after my mother’s murder, how could I not help them? There were too many people like me who didn’t know just how lethal the MM was. Too many people dead, while their loved ones remained hopeful for a reunion.

I had to do something, no matter how small. Something. For my mother.

If I ran now, Delilah didn’t have to go more than ten feet to flag down the guard at the watch station. But Tucker had said I still had three days before my trial. If I could earn enough trust to make it outside on my own, I might be able to escape.

“You want a bullet in your back, don’t you?” She wasn’t looking for an answer.

She trudged down the hill. And I followed, scheming.





CHAPTER


15



DELILAH didn’t speak to me for the remainder of the afternoon. As the day shift dwindled on, she tasked me to fold towels in the supply room, not bothering to conceal her annoyance that I hadn’t been returned to a cell.

At curfew, a buzzer sounded, and the power switched to a generator. Not many were there to hear it; apart from the stairway guard, the hallway was already empty.

Tucker was finishing some paperwork when I finally dragged myself to his office. “What do you want?” I asked.

He slid his gun out of the holster, and I thought, This is it. He’s going to kill me. I braced for the pain that was sure to come. But instead, he deposited the weapon within a safe in the back corner, locked it, and placed the key inside his desk drawer. The breath reentered my lungs in one hard whoosh. He waited a beat, eyeing me with a strange expression.

“You aren’t married, are you?” He said it as if he were a ten-year-old talking about broccoli.

I felt a light flush creep over my skin, a subtle reminder that I was still a living, breathing human.

“No.”

“What’s with that ring?”

I was almost surprised to see it still on my finger.

“Nothing. It’s just something I found.”

It was the ring Chase had stolen for me from the Loftons’. When we’d been pretending to be married. A lot of things had been pretend with him.

Because Tucker was watching, I didn’t take it off, but it suddenly felt much too tight. His expression returned to the normal haughtiness.

“I talked to my commanding officer. You’re sleeping up here until your trial.”

I’d figured as much but still shuddered. Who would still be alive in the morning?

“I saw the result of one of your trials today,” I said accusingly.

I remembered how the soldier’s face had become Chase’s face, right before my eyes. I wondered, for a fraction of a moment, if Chase felt that same sick terror whenever I’d mentioned my mother. If the fear cut fresh with each recall. But then the feeling was gone, clouded by betrayal.

“And?” Tucker said. As though an execution were nothing. “The quickest way to stomp insubordination is to strike fast and sure.”