“I think you’re both crazy,” she said bluntly. “I think you’re fooling yourselves.”
Ant glanced between Jace and me, before nodding.
“I think you’re right, Jackie,” he told her. “But I also don’t think we can just quit.”
He turned toward her.
“We need those techs if we’re going to rescue our friends and Abe. If there’s a chance that Naomi was involved with Nelson and that’s how she got caught…” He bit his lip. “What if the next house is just fine, and we find who we’re searching for, and they’re able to help us get in touch with the others? It will have been really stupid if we gave up before we found that tech, and just threw it all out the window.”
She sighed, and I thought she was going to tell us all that we were going to have to go without her, but then she gave Ant an affectionate look and smiled.
“Well, I guess that answers that. Where’s our next stop?”
“Voceville,” I said, relieved. “There are two techs there, within blocks of each other. We can hit them both at the same time, and with luck, we’ll find what we’re looking for.”
I hoped I was speaking the truth. There was a part of my brain that agreed with her that we were crazy to take the risk of walking toward another bombed-out building. The man back at Naomi’s had been looking right at us, and I had a bad feeling that he had been suspicious. That he could have radioed ahead to the other addresses on our list, warning the rest of his team to be on alert for people matching our description.
I had a quick thought that we should perhaps split up, in case they were looking for four people, rather than two, but immediately put it to the side, still convinced that we were stronger as a group than we were apart.
I also didn’t want to run the risk of losing any more of my friends. I’d already lost enough of them.
23
We got off the train in Voceville not ten minutes later. It hadn’t been enough time for my stomach to settle. I was terrified that we were walking into a trap, and it would be my fault. I was terrified that we were going to find another burned-out building, terrified that we might find something even worse.
I’d been to this train station before.
I glanced nervously around the warehouse-like building, wondering what might be hiding behind the plain metal columns, or around the corrugated metal corners. No one had tried to make this station or city look beautiful, and there was a part of me that appreciated that. Sedgeville had been a lie with its vegetation and landscaping. It was just something the government used to fool the residents into thinking they were in a different sort of world than they were. The truth was, we were all under the government’s thumb, all of us prey to their whims and commands. They could dress it up all they wanted, but that didn’t change the fact that they could kill you at any moment.
And no one would be able to help you if the government decided you were an enemy.
The thought got my feet moving toward the flashing green exit sign, my mind flying ahead to what we were going to find at the next stop.
“Jackie, do you have the address we’re looking for?” I asked quietly.
“Sure do,” she replied, panting behind me. “Maybe ten minutes from here, if we walk quickly. Though, I think we should probably follow the same plan as before, and at least try to blend in.”
“Walking quickly should achieve that,” I answered, pushing through the door and into the light of the outside world. I looked to the left and the right, taking in the crowds of people on their lunch breaks. Voceville played host to a number of factories, which meant that everyone there was following the same sort of schedule I would have been, had I been at work that day. Now, the workers were out for their half-hour break, but they wouldn’t have time to dawdle. Thirty minutes was never enough, and if they got back to the factory late, they were docked half a day’s pay. “Everyone else is walking quickly, trying to either get to the factory or get away from it. Walking slowly here is what would get us caught.”
I turned sharply to the right and pushed through the crowd, making my way rapidly toward the next address on our list. The others followed, Jackie calling out directions as we went.
“Well, we need to take a right at the road ahead, and then go left at the first light,” she told me. “And as long as you’re the one leading us, shouldn’t you be the one looking at the directions?”
I grimaced and slowed a bit, allowing her to catch up. Seconds later, the boys appeared, and we made our way forward as a group. Rushing to the location wasn’t going to change what I found there, I realized, and I’d rather see it for the first time with my friends than on my own. If it was a trap, we’d have a better chance of getting away together than separately. At least, that was what I told myself as I linked my arm through Jace’s. I did my best to act like he was my boyfriend and we were just out for an afternoon walk.
We took the right Jackie instructed us to make and walked a very short block to the next street we needed. From there, it was straight on to Bobby’s address. He was one of the other high-level techs, and he’d also been working with Nelson on the raid, though I didn’t think he’d been as involved as Naomi had.
At least, not publicly.
Based on his location on the list and what we’d guessed about it, he was still one of the best we had.
If we could manage to get in touch with him, perhaps he and Nathan would be able to do something about OH+, or at least get a new system up and running.
I had a feeling that we were going to need to make personal visits to everyone from the site—which made me rethink my harsh judgment about Nathan potentially having our personal addresses, because at least this way, we had a way to find our people again. Once we had everyone regrouped, we’d want a portal for easier communication. Particularly if we were going to go up against the Ministry again in an attempt to rescue our teammates.
I was thinking about how we might be able to get in touch with everyone without making these trips to their addresses when we came upon the address we’d been seeking.
It was… intact.
I stared up at the apartment building, unsure whether I should be shocked or pleased that it was still there.
“How refreshing,” Ant murmured. “A building that hasn’t been burned down.”
“Refreshing,” Jace repeated. “But is anyone else feeling like that’s suspicious?”
I nodded.
“Yes. But maybe it really does mean that Naomi was helping Nelson and got caught during the sting.” I looked at him, wishing like hell I could actually believe that, wishing like hell that I wasn’t sure we wouldn’t get to Bobby’s apartment and find something a lot worse than a bomb.
Jace turned his gaze from the building and met mine. I could see my wish mirrored in his eyes, but there was doubt, too.
A fear crept up in me that I could never have imagined. It was worse than when we ran missions with Nelson’s crew. We’d been in plenty of dangerous situations then, and we’d almost been caught plenty of times, but that was nothing compared to this. We’d never gone against the Ministry directly. Fighting it in a passive-aggressive way, yes, but setting ourselves up in its direct path? No way.
We would have called that stupid when we were working with Nelson, and we would have been right.
Jackie pushed my arm, then, and I wondered if I’d missed part of the conversation.
“What? Huh?” I asked.
“I said, do we go up to his floor and see if we can find him, or are we going to stand here staring up at the building like it might sprout wings and fly away?” she asked sharply. “Because on the list of obvious actions, I think standing here like a bunch of gaping idiots is a pretty big one.”
I cleared my throat and nodded, then took a step forward.
“Yes, we go up. We have to know if he’s here or… not.”
Before I could take another step, Jace put out a hand to stop me and pulled me back.
“We go up,” he growled
. “But I go first.”
He stuck his hand into a pocket of his coat and gripped something. I could see that he had a gun in there.
I didn’t have mine. I’d had it during the raid, but I’d left it at Jace’s after we found Nelson’s office. I’d feared that if I was caught with it by a Ministry agent, it would draw even more suspicion to me. No innocent citizen would be walking around with a hidden weapon.
But I wished now that I had thrown caution to the wind, because the feeling that everything was about to go sideways hadn’t gone away. In fact, it had somehow gotten worse.
“Ant, you got that gun I lent you earlier?” Jace continued, balancing on his toes like he was about to start sprinting.
“Yup,” came the answer from behind us.
“Then you bring up the rear,” Jace replied, then started toward the front door.
Jackie followed, with me behind and Ant at the back, and I was glad that we at least had two guns with us.
As we closed the distance, I had a minute to think about how weird we must have looked, creeping toward the door in a perfect line, but realized a moment later that it didn’t matter. No one on the street appeared to be watching us. And if they were, it was probably because they were part of the Ministry and already knew who we were. In which case, it wouldn’t matter how we handled ourselves going forward. We could have strapped on big plastic sandwich boards that said, Hello, we’re the ones you’re searching for, and it probably wouldn’t have made things worse.
Probably.
The building was newer, made of smooth, white concrete, and the steps leading to the entrance were void of decoration. I glanced up again, taking in the flat, featureless face and its boring, utilitarian windows. The structure looked like some kind of white, distorted waffle.
We walked through the black glass of the front doors—kept that way to save on energy, I’d been told—and once inside the lobby, we paused again. It was done in a dingy brown tile, with walls to match. There were elevator banks to the right and stairwells to the left with very little else to look at.
“This place makes me want to puke,” Ant muttered. “Haven’t they heard of this thing called color? What are we doing, Jace, the elevators or the stairs?”
Jace glanced to his left and right as if trying to orient himself.
“What floor does he live on?”
“Fourth,” Jackie answered. “And just for the record, I vote stairs. Elevators give me the creeps.”
“Stairs it is,” Jace said.
I didn’t like elevators, either. Enclosed spaces made me feel trapped, and if we were being watched, it seemed to me that the elevators were a prime place for someone else to get at us.
We all turned left, maintaining our order, and made quickly for the stairs. It was then that I noticed there was no one else in this building, or at least no one within sight. It was like a ghost town.
“Where are all the people?” I asked, my voice hushed. “Why isn’t anyone walking around in the lobby or riding the elevators?”
I glanced over my shoulder and saw that the elevators rested on the bottom floor. I gulped, but there wasn’t time to think too much about it. Jace had already entered the stairwell and started climbing up the steps. Jackie and I followed, trying to keep our footsteps as quiet as possible. I heard Ant come through and close the door softly behind me before climbing the steps.
They were short flights, courtesy of the low ceilings places like this liked to employ—more floors in a shorter height, for better efficiency—and within ten minutes, we paused on the fourth-floor landing, looking at each other with wide eyes. We still hadn’t seen or heard anyone else in the building, which was clearly making us all feel more and more uneasy.
“Unless this entire building is condemned, this is definitely weird,” Ant said. “I’ve never been in an empty building before. Why would everyone have cleared out of it?”
“And if there’s something wrong in here, why were we allowed in?” I asked, taking the next logical step aloud.
“There’s only one reason to have let us in when no one else was allowed,” Jace whispered, and suddenly I was afraid that the worst had happened, that we’d walked right into another catastrophe. Like the idiots we obviously were, we’d marched up the stairs, making any sort of escape impossible.
If this was a trap, it was going to work exactly the same way the snare on OH+ would have worked, by allowing only specific people to sign in. The moment we did, the Ministry had us.
“Oh God,” Jackie murmured. “Oh God, oh God, oh God. This is a trap, isn’t it? We’ve just walked right into a trap, haven’t we?”
Jace put up a hand and moved toward the door, bending to peer through the window.
“We don’t know anything yet,” he said quietly. “It won’t make the situation any better for us to jump to conclusions and get ourselves all freaked out. Just be quiet while I try to see if there’s anyone in the hallway up ahead.”
He was silent for a long, pregnant moment, and when he turned around, his face was white and his eyes were staring.
“We have to get out of here. Right now,” he said firmly.
“Jace?” I asked, taking a step toward him. “What’s going on? What’s in that hallway?”
His eyes moved to me, and then he was suddenly striding forward. He spun me around and pushed my body toward the stairs.
“Nothing you need to see,” he muttered. “Suffice it to say that Bobby’s dead, and he didn’t go in a pretty way. The building might not have been burnt down, but they got him anyhow. We have to get out of here before whoever did that to him finds us and does the same to us.”
I didn’t know who started running first, but within seconds we were all sprinting down the stairs, skipping them if we could.
Bobby was dead. And Jace, whom I’d never really seen bothered by anything, hadn’t wanted to tell me how it had happened.
I suddenly had visions of people above us shooting to kill, bullets raining down on our heads, and ducked instinctively, fear pulsing through my veins.
When we reached the last flight of stairs, I almost cried out with relief. The exit door was right there. If we got through it, we’d be able to run through the lobby and get out of the building…
But then a voice rang out from above us.
“Stop! What are you doing in here? Who are you? State your names!”
I hadn’t thought it would be possible, but we were suddenly sprinting faster, sliding down the steps in a heap of people moving too fast.
“Don’t. Look. Up,” Jace ordered in a monotone. “Don’t let them see your face.”
“But… cameras…” huffed Ant, and Jace’s hand snapped out in response.
“Don’t look up. They don’t have time to get to the cameras if they want to chase us right now. If that guy is a Ministry agent, he’s going to be chasing us in a minute. It will be a lot harder for him to find us if he doesn’t know what we look like.”
Jace grabbed my hand and yanked me down the last two steps. He shot through the door with me in tow, leaving Ant to protect Jackie. We dashed headlong through the lobby and toward the exit door, with voices shouting out from behind us, telling us to stop in the name of the Ministry.
The steps in front of the door took only a matter of moments to jolt down, and then we drew back into an abrupt walk the minute we were in the outside world again. Jace pulled me close to him and hissed. “Walk normally. Act like we’re on our way back to the factory or something and that we’re running late. We can’t go dashing down this sidewalk, or we’ll immediately attract attention.”
“But the guys who are chasing us are definitely going to be running,” I pointed out, logically. Somehow my reasoning still worked amidst my panic.
He shook his head.
“They might be, but that’s not going to do them one bit of good if they don’t know who they’re searching for.”
A moment later Ant and Jackie caught up to us and began walking at our pac
e, their breathing heavy. Jackie looked like she couldn’t decide whether to be angry or sick at our situation. I worried that our escape was going to be hampered by her stopping to throw up in the bushes. Which reminded me—
“Where are we going?” I whispered. “Shouldn’t we get back to the train station, get out of here?”
Jace shook his head and pulled me sharply around a group of people who were walking right toward us, talking about the day they were having at work.
“The train station is the first place they’ll look,” he said. “And unless there’s a train conveniently waiting with its doors open, we’ll be trapped. I don’t want to take the chance of that happening, do you?”
I shook my head, but the question remained.
“If not the train, then where? We can’t just walk on the street forever.”
Jace pressed his lips together and pulled me closer.
“We head for the next address on the list. If we find a member of our team there, we can hide in their apartment and figure out what to do.”
“And if we find another dead body?” Ant asked.
“Or another Ministry agent?” Jackie added. “Because I’m not keen on the idea of walking into another trap.”
“We’re not actually going to go into the building, or make ourselves obvious,” Jace said. “I just need a direction for the time being, until I figure out what we’re going to do. Standing still is not an option. Not if we want to stay away from the Ministry.”
24
“Who’s the next target?” I asked, then bit my tongue, hating that I’d actually used the word “target” for a member of our own team, like we were going to attack them.
We’re not the ones they need to worry about.
“The next member of the team,” I corrected myself. “Who are we going to find next?”
“Smith,” Jackie said, glancing at her phone. “We take a left up there, and it should be right across the street.”
We walked along the sidewalk, doing our best not to draw attention, but I didn’t think that was going to be a problem. We were on the run from agents of the Ministry, and we were still having trouble keeping up with the people around us. They flooded down the street, their faces twisted into scowls, and I wondered suddenly if I looked that way when I was on my way to or from work. Of course I do, I told myself. I hated going to work, hated that I was wasting my life in a demeaning, menial job that gave me absolutely no reward. A job I had to keep because the powers that be had declared me ineligible for anything better. They’d declared us all ineligible for anything better, I realized. They’d put an entire class of people below them—and now they were working to keep them there.