“What if this is never over? What happens to us then?”
“It will be,” I said firmly, my frustration turning to anger. “If you want to give up on it, fine—but I’m not.”
He gave me a watery smile. “I wish you were right.” Stepping aside, he opened the bathroom door for me and said gently, “This is the last time, Kitty. After this, either you stop risking your life, or I stop depending on your heart to fuel mine.”
I didn’t trust myself to speak. Instead I slipped into the bathroom and closed the door behind me, leaning against the painted wood as I struggled to breathe without breaking down into sobs. I couldn’t do this now. I wouldn’t do this now. He was wrong—there would be a then. And when I got back, we would figure this out. Because even though he was right—even though right now, Knox and the Blackcoats and the hundreds of millions of people depending on us were the most important people in my life—I refused to live without Benjy.
He wasn’t there to see me off. I knew I shouldn’t have been surprised; that was the worst fight we’d had in recent memory, and both of us needed the chance to breathe away from each other and gain the perspective everyone seemed so crazy about lately. But it still hurt enough that, when Knox greeted me in front of the military plane waiting for us near the edge of Sector X, I didn’t feel the least bit guilty about flashing him a small smile. And why should I have felt guilty for being kind to him, anyway? We were friends.
Theoretically. When he wasn’t being a jerk.
We boarded last, behind the six volunteers who were risking their lives to give us the chance to sneak into Somerset and steal the file on Victor Mercer. As I passed them in their uniforms and winter military gear, part of me was terrified Benjy would be among them. But Knox wouldn’t do that to me. Benjy wouldn’t do that to me. Or the mission.
Thankfully, while a few of the faces were familiar, none of them were his. Still, after the plane took off, leaving the muddy gray of Elsewhere behind for the muddy gray of D.C., I joined Knox toward the front of the plane, where he sat in a jumper seat. The others lingered near the back, laughing and playing a card game as they ignored the bumps and rattles of the plane.
“We should be doing this alone,” I said to Knox, sitting down in the seat across from him.
“Who says we aren’t?” He flashed me a ghost of a smirk, but it was hard to believe it when I could see the weight of the entire war resting on his shoulders.
“So what’s the plan?” I said. “We’re using the tunnel, right?”
“Unless you know of another way inside without the Shields finding us.”
“But Celia knows about it.”
“She’s probably using it, too,” he said. “If we do run into trouble, we’ll tell them we’re there to meet with Celia.”
The plane rattled unexpectedly, and I gripped the armrests. “So we probably won’t get in and out undetected?”
He shook his head. “But we’re still Blackcoats. We’re still on the same side.”
“Didn’t seem like it from your performance this morning,” I said, and he shrugged.
“Celia brought that on herself. If she can’t play nice, then we don’t include her. Plain and simple.”
“But she runs the other half of the army.”
“I know,” he said, but he didn’t elaborate. It seemed like a dangerous proposition to me, cutting them off from our plans, but maybe he would be more lenient once we had the file in our hands.
We sat in silence for a few minutes. Knox stared out the window, and I listened to the men and women in the back. They didn’t invite us to play their game, and I realized, with somewhat of an epiphany, that I didn’t expect them to. Knox was their commander, and while I might have had little to no real power over the Blackcoat army, I was still a figurehead. We were separate from them the same way VIs were separate from IIs, and something about that thought made me squirm.
Benjy was right. There would always be leaders, and those leaders would always be set apart somehow, even if it was only as trivial as not being invited to play a card game. I had no doubt that if I asked to be dealt in, they wouldn’t argue, but I would be unwanted. A threat, in some small way, to their fun. Different, no matter what I did or where I was raised. It was one more thing to look forward to after the war ended, I considered bitterly—a lifetime of exclusion for no other reason than who and what I was.
“Why are you doing this?”
Knox’s gaze drifted back toward me, and he raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t you just ask me that earlier?”
“You didn’t give me a straight answer,” I said. “And I don’t mean why are you doing this now. That’s obvious. I mean—” I gestured toward him. “Why did you start? What made you wake up one morning and decide to try to take down the United States government?”
“It wasn’t that easy,” he said, but the hint of a smirk returned. “Is that how it was for you?”
“I woke up in a body that wasn’t my own, looking like the mouthpiece for the revolution,” I said. “Didn’t exactly have much of a choice.”
“Sure you did,” he said, leaning back in his seat. “You had plenty of choices, just like the rest of us.”
It hadn’t felt like it at the time, but I didn’t regret it. And truth be told, if I’d known then what I did now, I would’ve done the same thing. No—not the exact same thing. I would’ve done some things differently, like all my arguments with Knox. The recklessness that had landed me in Elsewhere. I could’ve been a better team player, and I was working on that, slowly. But I didn’t regret the risks I’d taken and would continue to take as a member of the Blackcoats.
“You’re still dodging my question,” I said, crossing my arms. They’d given me a leather bomber jacket for the mission, and it was the warmest thing I’d worn in weeks. “I agreed because I believe in the same things Lila was talking about. Because I believe in what the Blackcoats are trying to do. I’ve lived at the bottom, and I know how awful it is—I know how unfair society can be. But you were raised with a silver spoon in your mouth, and even if you weren’t, you didn’t have the Blackcoats back then to voice what was already going on in your head. So—what made you speak up? What made you risk your life and your family’s legacy for a bunch of people that, if you wanted, you’d never have to acknowledge? You could’ve been a Minister, like your father. You could’ve been living a cushy life in your own little bubble. And that’s what I don’t get—why aren’t you?”
Knox closed his eyes and leaned his head back, and several seconds passed in silence. I thought he wasn’t going to answer. He probably thought he wasn’t going to answer. But in a low voice, barely audible over the hum of the engine, he finally spoke.
“I had a brother.”
“You did?” Never, not once, had Knox mentioned a brother to me. I couldn’t remember him bringing up his family at all, really, except his father.
He nodded, opening his eyes once more. He refused to look at me, however, focusing on his hands instead. “A twin brother, actually. Fraternal. Everything was fine for the first couple years, but then he started acting—strange. Or maybe he had always been acting strange, and it was only because I was different that my mother noticed as early as she did.”
“What kind of strange?” I said, confused.
“Quiet. Stared at his blocks for hours instead of playing with them. Didn’t speak like I did. Always seemed a little behind.” Knox shrugged. “I don’t remember the details much, and my mother rarely talked about it.”
“What happened to him?” I said, almost afraid of Knox’s answer. But maybe that was the point.
“Most of the time, when there are—moderate deficits in a child, they’re given a chance to take the test at seventeen anyway,” said Knox. “But because my father was concerned about the family’s image, and because my brother eventually stopped communicating altogether, th
e process was—sped up.” He cleared his throat, his expression growing pinched. “When we were six years old, they declared that by keeping him within our society, we were only delaying the inevitable, and—the sooner he was declared a I, the easier it would be on me. So they took him away.”
I stared at him in horror. I had never met a I before I’d arrived in Elsewhere. Somewhere in my mind, I’d expected vegetables—faceless, comatose people who had no sense of self or place. Not real people with real lives. Not a little boy who was too quiet for his father’s liking and didn’t play with blocks the way he was supposed to.
“I’m so sorry, Knox,” I said softly, because there wasn’t anything else to say. I couldn’t imagine that level of pain, either for Knox or his mother. And selfishly, I didn’t want to. “Did you— Have you looked up his records in Elsewhere? Maybe he’s still—”
“He’s not,” said Knox. “I wouldn’t be surprised if he never made it to Elsewhere to begin with. A young child like that...his organs would have been valuable and needed.”
A wave of nausea hit me, and my grip on the armrest tightened. “But—he was your brother—your father’s a Minister—”
“Not even Ministers’ children are immune to genetic or developmental anomalies,” said Knox. “I didn’t fully understand what was going on. I still remember my confusion the day they took him away and I was told he would never be coming back. My mother was a wreck. She never recovered, and she—” He cleared his throat again. “Anyway. She’s the reason I got to this point. My father never said my brother’s name again after they took him away. All the pictures of him disappeared, and if you’d met my family after, you would never have known there should’ve been one more of us. I think he was hoping I would forget about my brother.
“But my mother made sure I didn’t,” he continued. “She used to tell me stories about how we played together when we were young. That was one of the few times I ever saw her happy after that. And once I was old enough, she used to tell me about what the country was like before the Harts took over. I began to see injustice everywhere I looked, and once you see it, you can’t unsee it. And I couldn’t ignore it, regardless of the privileges and advantages I would have had if I did. She’s the reason I do this. My brother is the reason I do this.” Finally Knox looked at me. “Is that what you wanted to hear?”
“I wanted to hear the truth, that’s all,” I said, at a loss. Something inside me felt hollow, and instinctively I started to reach across the space between us, needing to offer him some form of comfort. But he shifted awkwardly and crossed his arms, hiding his hands. I dropped mine back in my lap. “I just—I never understood how you and Celia and Lila could risk it all when you had everything to lose. It wasn’t like that for me.”
“Yes, it was,” he said quietly. “It was almost exactly the same. The only difference between us was the fact that you knew what it was like, having nothing. You knew the value of what you were betting, and yet you did it anyway.”
I didn’t know what to say to that. He must have known what he had to lose, too. We all did, and yet we all chose to do this. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For trusting me. I know I’ve given you every reason not to.”
“Yeah, well. We’re in this together,” he said with a sigh. “And since you’ve decided to stick around, it’s the least I can do until you prove I can’t anymore.”
“That’s not going to happen. Not this time,” I said, and that ghost of a smile returned.
“Don’t make promises you can’t keep, Kitty. We both know eventually you’re going to directly disobey me and do something monumentally stupid, and once again, I’ll be the one cleaning up the mess.”
“I’ll try my best not to, then,” I said. He nodded.
“That’s more like it.”
A moment passed, and we could have easily slid into comfortable silence. Instead, I watched him, and he held my gaze, and in that moment, I felt as if I could ask him anything and he wouldn’t say no.
“What was your brother’s name?” I said, before I even realized I was speaking. But I didn’t regret it, unlike most things I blurted out, and while his eyebrows twitched upward, he didn’t shut me out like he could have.
“Maddox,” he said. “I called him Max, because I couldn’t pronounce Maddox. He couldn’t say Lennox, either.”
“And that’s where Knox came from?” I said, and he flashed me a tight smile.
“Exactly.”
Despite the pain in his eyes as we spoke about his brother, there was also a warmth that emanated from him, unlike anything I’d ever seen from him before. He told me about some of his favorite memories with his brother who barely spoke—only to him, he admitted, and even then, those instances were rare—and as he went on, answering my steady stream of questions openly, I realized what was different.
I’d never seen him talk about someone he loved before.
This was the Knox who was my friend. The one I trusted, the one I believed in. And there, in the middle of the sky, with nothing but air between us and the rest of the world, I was grateful to have a glimpse of him again.
Eventually our conversation died down, but I sat across from Knox for the rest of the flight, staying away from the others. Occasionally one of us would say something, spurring a short exchange, but we always reverted back to companionable silence. It was nice, in a way. But it didn’t do much to quell the anxiety forming in the pit of my stomach over what we were about to do.
As we began our descent outside D.C., I couldn’t help but wonder how many of us would make it back alive. Because if there was one thing I’d learned working with Knox, it was that nothing ever went completely according to plan.
“Soldiers,” said Knox as soon as we’d landed in the middle of a snowy field. “Your job is simple. Protect the plane.”
Several of them gaped at him. “Excuse me?” said one man with a blond goatee.
“You heard me. Protect the plane,” said Knox. “It’s our ticket back to Elsewhere. If the government spots it, we’re on our own, and believe me, it’s a very long walk back to safety.”
He led me down the ramp and across the snowy field, toward a waiting black car. I glanced over my shoulder to see the soldiers circling the plane with their weapons at the ready, as if there were battalions of government agents waiting for us to land in this very spot. At least they were taking their mission seriously.
“They thought they were going to come with us into the city,” I said as I climbed in on the passenger side. Knox sat in the driver’s seat and turned the key hanging in the ignition.
“Strand and Benjy and the entire lot of them would never have let us come if they knew it was only the two of us,” said Knox as the engine purred to life. “We’re both too important to go anywhere without a security detail tailing us.”
“But that’s exactly what we’re doing.” I wasn’t afraid, not exactly, but the more guns we had, the better our chances were. If someone took Knox out, I would have no idea what to do or where to go. And if someone took me out—Knox didn’t know where to find the file. Our mission would be a failure.
“What they don’t know won’t hurt them, and the only way to get this done quickly and efficiently is if it’s essential personnel only,” said Knox.
“Us,” I said, and he nodded.
“Us.”
I examined the screen on the dashboard. The radio was muted, but red arrows pointed along the road, no doubt heading straight for Somerset. “Did this car appear out of nowhere?”
“I made a call before we left. Celia restored communications after she took over Somerset, and Sampson dropped it off for us. No one knows we’re coming but him.” Knox pressed the accelerator, and we took off down the dirt road. “Where did you hide the file, Kitty? Are you going to have to go into the vents to get it??
??
I nodded. “It won’t take me long.”
“Are you going to tell me where it is, or am I going to be surprised?”
I shifted in my seat to face him. “Remember when you pretended to kill Benjy in front of me and let me believe he was dead for days?”
Knox’s grip tightened on the steering wheel. “Surprise, then. Never been a fan.”
“Like I said back in the manor, even if you knew where it was, you probably wouldn’t be able to get to it anyway.”
“Fair enough,” he said with a sigh, and I knew the hardened, exasperated Knox had returned, burying the vulnerability so deep inside him I doubted he even remembered it existed.
I settled back and gazed out the window as we drove toward D.C. We weren’t far—an hour at the most—and part of me was eager to see my home again. I hadn’t grown up in Somerset or anywhere near it; I’d grown up in the Heights, the poorest part of D.C. But the city was still my home.
“Is that your go-to plan?” I said after a minute. “Faking a death?”
He glanced over at me, his gaze lingering for longer than it should have, considering how fast he was driving. “What are you talking about?”
“I mean—that’s what you did for Lila. You helped her fake her death. You faked Benjy’s death. I’m never going to be able to fully believe you’re dead, you know. Part of me will always be absolutely positive you’ve faked your own.”
“Oh? And who says I’m dying before you?”
I shrugged. “You’re the one who left our security detail behind.”
“True,” he allowed with a smirk. “Maybe you’ve got a point after all.”
When D.C. finally came into view, the knot in my stomach grew into full-on nausea. It was one thing to sneak into an office to steal a file or overhear a crucial conversation. It was another thing entirely to walk in right under our allies’ noses, knowing full well we were keeping secrets that could win or lose the war.
Driving through the streets and seeing the gradual shift from poverty-stricken and hungry to rich and well fed was even more striking now that I’d spent so much time in Elsewhere. Knox and I were both silent as we took it all in, and at last he pulled up to the side of the street in one of the most affluent areas of D.C., only blocks from Somerset.