Renegade (The Elysium Chronicles #1)(65)

She shakes her head. “I always thought that was the Palace Wing.”

Fair enough. “Okay, well, Gavin and I found an abandoned Sector. And it looks identical to Sector Two. I think that’s Sector One.”

Her eyes widen. “What?”

“There’s no one living there. Hasn’t been for a long time, if the dust is any indication. About thirty years or so.”

“What happened to all the people?”

I open my mouth to tell her, but no sound comes out. I can’t force myself to tell her. I look down at the floor instead.

Gavin squeezes my shoulder. “We think they were killed.”

She sinks down so she’s sitting on the couch again. “Why?”

“Because they were trying to escape.” I keep my attention focused on the tips of my shoes. “Even then, Mother had strict rules.”

“From what we can gather,” Gavin continues, “someone snitched, and they had to escape quickly, but we’re not so sure any of them actually made it.”

I go on to explain the journal entries in detail.

“Oh, Mother,” Macie said. Her face is as white as her walls. Her blue eyes pop in contrast. “So, she just erased them? Like they didn’t exist?” Then she sighs. “Of course she did. Hasn’t she been doing that with the people who disobey her? Just on a smaller scale. I’ll bet that’s why she came up with the Enforcers.”

I nod, pleased she is taking this better than I’d expected. “Exactly. In fact it says right here”—I point to further down on the screen—“the Enforcers gave her the idea for genetic manipulation. So, it all leads back to Sector One.”

That reminds me about the files I found with my name on it, but I go back to reading Mother’s journal. I’m hoping that maybe the answer to my problem is in there. If not, I can always dive into the other files.

The entries are full of fear and deep gratitude for the safety of Elysium. I can’t make sense of it all. There seems to be entries missing, and sometimes she devolves into some kind of code. I think she was getting paranoid. And the more paranoid she got, the more she wanted total control.

She grew to hate free will. She believed she had a pure vision of a perfect society—a perfect family—but the Citizens did not comply. She saw the city falling apart before her eyes. The harder she worked to bring her vision to the city, the more the people rebelled against her rules. She wanted them to be more docile, so she worked with a scientist to experiment with gene manipulation.

At first it was only by controlling breeding, like cross-pollinating plants or breeding out the venom in bees as we’ve done. Then her experiments with creating the ideal secret police force began, and her experience in training the Enforcers showed her she could get even better results with Conditioning—an idea Dr. Friar had brought with him from the Surface.

There’s a large section in her personal code around this time, but eventually she achieved her dream. The entries are filled with tales of her success and the development of the Citizen’s Code of Conduct.

Then I reach another section in code. I can’t make out much, but the dates correspond with the journal from Sector One. Finally, I find a blue hyperlink within the code and I know I have to see where it leads.

I sneak a quick glance over my shoulder and click the link. The screen shimmers, then another window pops up and shows me what looks like video footage of Sector One. At first there doesn’t appear to be anything unusual. Just the normal wanderings of Citizens milling around the Square. But at two minutes and fifty seconds in, a man in a white coat dashes across the Square. It’s hard to see him in detail, but he seems familiar to me.

He runs toward the wall where Gavin and I found the room, followed by a swarm of others. The man in the white coat doesn’t make it far, though, when he grabs his head with both hands and falls to his knees. His mouth is open in what appears to be a scream, but there’s no sound.

A nearby woman reaches out to him, presumably to help him, before she, too, grabs her head and falls over. The rest of the people gathered around quickly follow suit, and by five minutes and fifty seconds into the video, everyone in the Sector has collapsed and is lying on the ground.

I narrow my eyes when Mother steps into the camera view and walks over with a group of Guards behind her. She gestures to the bodies and one of the Guards kicks the woman hard in the ribs. She doesn’t even flinch. Mother glances up at the camera, then says something and walks away.

The video continues for another few minutes while the Guards pack the bodies into black bags, proving what I already know. The Citizens are all dead.

Macie makes a small noise and, startled, I glance over. She’s staring at the screen, her eyes filled with tears, her hand covering her mouth.

“She’s insane!” Macie whispers.

“Well, yeah, that’s nothing new,” Gavin says.

“No, I mean, really, really insane. She should be locked in a padded cell in the Medical Sector,” Macie says. She moves her eyes from the screen to mine. “You guys need to get out of here, now. There’s no time to waste.” She’s quiet for a moment as she glances over the screen, where the video has started to replay. She stares at it for a long moment, before meeting my eyes. “And I’m coming with you.”

Gavin and I exchange a look before he shrugs and I nod. “Absolutely.”