“Take the papers out,” I instructed Xona, my heart thumping in my chest now.
She reached in carefully and retrieved them.
I raised the door gently off the floor where it had landed. Xona’s eyes were wide as it floated past her and fitted it back onto the hinge as best I could. I forgot how much my glitcher power unnerved her sometimes.
Xona handed the papers to me. “Let’s go.”
I flipped through the top few pages. There were charts and schematics, none of which I immediately recognized. Xona headed for the door when I noticed my blinking arm panel. “Wait,” I said. “Ginni’s messaging—”
But Xona had already opened the door. Three ex-Regs stood in our path, tranq guns pointed toward us.
Chapter 24
XONA TENSED AND REACHED for the ten-inch blade holstered at her waist. I felt rather than saw the ex-Reg closest to her twitch his finger closer to the trigger. This was about to get bad quickly.
I looked at the ex-Reg in the middle. Cole, the boy who painted in color and wanted to feel human. “You don’t have to do this.”
He didn’t say anything.
“You know I can rip these guns apart with my telek before you ever get a shot off.” My voice was low and dangerous.
“We have orders to apprehend anyone who sets off this alarm,” Cole said.
“Cole, you know us,” I said. “We’re part of the same team. You know we would never work for the Chancellor. Don’t you want to see what we found?” I raised the pages in my hand. I may not have known what the plans were for, but I knew they were important.
I could see the conflict on his face. Taylor was at the top of his command structure now. If there was one thing that was ingrained in Regs since childhood, it was to obey orders. But I was the one who’d freed them. He trusted me, I could feel it. And there was something about the way Cole’s eyes kept flicking over to Xona. Where did his loyalties lie now?
“We don’t need to know,” said Eli in a monotone. “We have our orders.”
Unlike Cole, I knew there was no reasoning with Eli. His finger twitched on the trigger and I yanked the gun out of his hands with my telek before he could fire. He’d been gripping it so tightly, his whole body was jerked forward.
Xona attacked the third ex-Reg right in front of her the same moment. She kicked his gun upward so the tranq dart lodged into the ceiling. Her victory was short-lived, however, because the next second he had her by the throat up against the wall.
“Stop!” Cole and I said at the same time.
Xona struggled violently against the ex-Reg’s grip. She was strong, but her eyes betrayed a terror I remembered well. She was thinking of her mother again. Her knife clattered to the ground and her blows landed harmlessly on the hard metal plating of his chest. He held her throat so tight she couldn’t scream.
“Let her go.” I worked hard to keep my voice calm. I stared at the ex-Reg’s hand holding Xona’s throat. There was a line where the fingers had been fused back together. “Wytt,” I said, “Please let her go.”
Xona turned her head sideways to free her windpipe. “Just rip his arm off already,” she growled hoarsely.
I turned back to Cole and laid a hand gently on his forearm. “Please.”
A long moment stretched. Cole swallowed hard and then his body relaxed. He dropped the gun to his side.
“Release her,” he said.
“But there are orders—”
“Do it!” Cole’s voice was commanding and Wytt finally obeyed. I grabbed Xona’s arm the second she was released to keep her from grabbing the knife from the floor and attacking Wytt. I could see her fury boiling. She managed to restrain herself, if only barely.
Some of the papers I’d been holding had dropped to the ground and gotten shuffled. I picked them up hurriedly, but I froze when my eyes stopped on a diagram of a shape I recognized.
I gasped as I pulled the sheet closer. “You all need to see this. But we’ve got to get out of this hallway.” I looked around us. “No telling what else Taylor has set up in case of a security breach.”
Xona pinned Wytt to the wall with her piercing glare, but she spoke to me. “Fine, but if he tries anything, I’ll blowtorch him in his sleep.”
Judging by the look on everyone’s face, it was clear no one doubted her.
* * *
Tyryn and Ginni met us in our dorm room. Ginni didn’t wait for us to speak.
“I’ve been monitoring Taylor. She’s on her way back to the Foundation.” She brightened when she saw the ex-Regs come in behind us. “Oh, hi Wytt, hi Cole, hi Eli.” None of them responded.
“What’d you find?” Tyryn asked.
I hurried past them and laid out the schematics on the table. Cole and Xona pressed in, almost bumping heads. Xona pulled back distastefully, and Cole stared at her for a moment before looking back down at the spread-out papers.
Ginni, who’d been peering over Xona’s shoulder, straightened after a moment. The confusion was clear on her face. “Is that a—”
“Nuclear weapon.” Cole’s eyes widened.
“That’s what I was afraid of,” I said quietly. The diagram showed a large missile; I’d just been hoping it wasn’t nuclear.
“But surely Taylor’s not that stupid,” Xona scoffed, looking up. “She wouldn’t risk starting another D-day.”
“Maybe she would if she were desperate,” I said.
Tyryn pointed to the top diagram. “It’s clearly a nuke, and it’s a big one.”
“Where would she even get nuclear material from?” Xona asked. “It’s the most carefully regulated and guarded substance on the globe after D-day.”
My eyes widened as I made the connection. “Like something the Underchancellor of Defense would have access to. What if this is what General Taylor was after in the raid?” My mind spun. Henk had told Jilia that Taylor had tracked down the missing component. And that he was building the rest of the device for her. Henk, who was the Rez’s weapons specialist. All the pieces clicked into place. I put a hand over my stomach. I was going to be sick.
“What would be her target anyway?” Tyryn asked, his eyebrows furrowed. “It’s not like Comm Corp is a snake you can kill just by cutting the head off. Uppers are spread out in cities all over the Sector.”
“And in other Sectors across the globe,” Ginni said.
“Maybe she doesn’t care about killing the snake.” I thought about Adrien and his visions. “She wants to do something big, to make a difference. Maybe she simply wants to do the most damage she can.”
“Here’s the trajectory path,” Cole said. He picked up one paper on the end and put it in the middle. The page was filled with numbers and readouts that were gibberish to me.
“You understand it?” I asked Cole.
He nodded.
“What’s the target, then?” Xona asked.
“That’s what’s strange.” He frowned. “These altitudes. It looks like they’re planning to launch it up out of the atmosphere, but without it ever coming down.”
“What’s the point in that?” I asked.
Cole stared, his eyes widening in understanding. “It’s an EMP.”
“A what?” Ginni asked.
“Electromagnetic pulse,” Cole said. “It’s a burst of magnetic energy that disrupts electrical fields. You make one by detonating a nuclear weapon outside the earth’s atmosphere.” He pointed at the page with all the numbers. “And this one, set to detonate three hundred miles up, could burn out every electronic circuit over the entire continent. The radiation wouldn’t affect humans physically, but all the energy grids would fail. All of Sector Six would go dark.”
“But what’s the point?” Ginni asked, cocking her head to the side.
“The EMP is the point,” Xona cut in. “Don’t you get it?” We all looked at her. “Zoe, you said they were calling the operation Kill Switch. Think about it. Fry all the electronic circuits, and you fry all the V-chips.”
My mouth dropped ope
n. Ginni’s head swung back and forth as she looked around the room at our stunned faces.
“What is it? What am I missing?” she asked. “Isn’t that a good thing? All the drones will finally be free of their hardware. They’ll be able to think and live and feel like us. Isn’t that what we want?”
“Not the adults,” I said. “Everyone older than eighteen relies on the adult V-chip to regulate their limbic functions. It controls them completely. Without it, they’ll all die.”
Ginni gasped.
Cole shook his head in disgust. “It would be mass murder.”
“So all the teenagers and kids are freed from the Link, and the adults are made catatonic or killed,” Xona said. “But that doesn’t make them free from the Community. What are they supposed to do?”
I remembered the rest of what I’d overheard. “Start a revolution against the Uppers who’ve been controlling them this whole time. Drones outnumber Uppers fifty to one. If there were some way to organize everyone quickly, they could fight back and defeat the Uppers. They could help us finally win the war.”
Tyryn ran a hand over his head. “It’s not a bad plan.”
“It’s not worth the cost,” Cole spoke up angrily. I looked over at him. I’d never seen so much emotion displayed on his features.
Tyryn’s lips tightened. “The Rez is getting stamped out. Children and whole families are being murdered. So many have already died.” His eyes flicked over to Xona and then back down. “In a way, the adult drones are lost already to the V-chip. There’s no way for them to ever be normal again.”
Henk had said the same thing when he was talking to Jilia. If the adult V-chip was like a death sentence, was it still murder to shorten the adult drones’ lives by a few years? I shuddered. I couldn’t even consider the question.
“So that means their lives aren’t worth anything?” Cole asked, his voice spiking half an octave.
Tyryn’s eyes flashed. “I’m not saying that. I’m just saying if this plan works, we would save the next generation and all of the generations after. Every war has casualties, but this could end the war forever.”
Xona hesitated, then reached out and put her hand on her brother’s arm. “We can’t do this. Remember what Mom always said? No matter how hard things get, there are lines we can’t ever cross without becoming just like them.”
There was a long beat of silence.
Finally Tyryn met her gaze and nodded. “But what else can we do?”
“What if we came up with another viable plan?” I asked. “Taylor’s been taking a hardware approach. But what if we came at it from another angle? Maybe there’s a way to hack the Link programming itself somehow.”
“I’m sure they’ve already tried it,” Tyryn said.
“Maybe,” I said. “But with our powers, we can get to places the Rez couldn’t before. Taylor hasn’t even been taking us into account. She doesn’t like us. Doesn’t trust us.”
I looked at Ginni. “How much time do we have before she gets back?”
Ginni closed her eyes a moment. “She’s half an hour away, but she’s moving fast.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll go get Adrien. We could use his techer expertise on how the Link code works.” As much as I was still uncomfortable around him, it was time to bring him in. Ending the V-chip was everything both of us had hoped for. I knew he’d help.
“But what are we gonna do when Taylor gets here?” Ginni asked, her voice high.
“Try to convince her that we’re on her side but that we can’t let her use the EMP. Not when we know it will kill millions of innocent people,” Cole said. I nodded.
“I’m not sure she’ll be receptive,” Tyryn said.
I had a feeling that was an understatement.
“Then we’ll improvise,” Xona said, her hand resting on the weapon holstered around her hip. Cole grinned at her.
I walked away, my heart racing. I didn’t know what the General would do, or if there was any way we could get her to listen to us. But we had to try.
I softened the sound of my footsteps as I approached Adrien’s dorm. I winced at the slight grating noise the door made as it opened. But no one seemed to have woken from it. The room was totally dark. I touched my arm panel and it lit up in response, giving enough light for me to creep toward the beds without stumbling on anything.
I held my breath and climbed up the short ladder to reach Adrien’s box, alert to any sign of the other boys waking up. No one stirred as I pulled back the curtain on his bed.
I couldn’t see much in the dim light. Adrien’s blanket was pulled up to his chin and his arm was slung over his face. I reached for his shoulder and he shifted in his sleep, dropping his arm.
I gasped in shock.
Because it wasn’t Adrien sleeping in the bed.
It was Max.
Chapter 25
I FELL BACKWARD in my surprise, tumbling off the lip of the box and falling hard on my tailbone. I barely looked up in time to see a dark shadow jumping deftly down from the bed.
“How are you here?” The breath was knocked out of me from my fall and the question came out as a whisper. Max was alive!
But then my eyes widened with the ramifications of what Max being here in Adrien’s bed meant. How long had he been impersonating Adrien?
Max’s bulky frame towered in front of me, his shock of blond hair catching the light from my forearm panel before it turned off again.
“What have you done?” I shrieked, my voice finally back. “Where’s Adrien?”
I heard Rand swing his curtain open. “What’s going on?” He sounded still half asleep and couldn’t see us in the dark.
Max swept to the side and twirled behind me. One of his thick arms slipped around my neck, choking me so I couldn’t call for help. Any question of Max’s intentions were answered. After all the excuses I’d made for him, here he was attacking me after impersonating Adrien for who knew how long. The buzzing exploded in my head. I used my telek to send a shoe across the room, hitting the alarm button. A siren began wailing and the lights turned on bright overhead. Just in time for me to see Max reaching for a knife at his ankle and swinging it toward me.
I ripped the blade out of his hand with my telek and flung it to the ground.
Rand and Juan jumped down from their beds, ready to attack. I lifted a hand, trying to warn them to stay back. I knew everyone in the compound would be here any second, and we needed Max alive and conscious to find out what he’d done with Adrien. My buzzing power swarmed around him, but I was sure I would kill him in my panicked rage if I used it. He squeezed tighter, cutting off my air supply, and pulled me backward toward the exit. The pressure squeezed tears out of my eyes.
I turned my head sideways in his grip like Tyryn had taught us in training and then with my free arm reared back and elbowed Max hard in the stomach.
With a surprised gasp of pain, he lessened his grip, and I used the moment to drop to the ground and wriggle out of his grasp. Rand was on Max the next second, catching him and pinning both of his arms behind his back.
“Who are you? What are you doing here?” Rand growled as the door opened. Sophia ran into the room, with Tyryn and Professor Henry right behind. Tyryn started typing on his arm com and firing off commands.
“Where’s Adrien?” Sophia asked, swirling one way and then the other as she searched the faces in the room.
All I could do was stare at Max. He blinked hard, like he was just waking up. Everyone was talking at once. Max looked down at the knife on the ground, then back at me.
“I didn’t mean to attack you, Zo, I swear! Chancellor Bright must have implanted some kind of sleeper compulsion to kill you if my cover was blown. I would never hurt you, you have to believe me!”
It felt like I was watching the scene through a marbled pane of glass, separate from it. None of this made any sense.
Sophia screamed, knocking Max out of Rand’s grasp and kicking him hard in the gut when he hit the ground. “Where is
my son?”
Max didn’t say anything and she kicked him hard again.
“Stop it, Sophia!” I crouched down beside him. Even though it repulsed me, I put my hand on Max’s face. “If you ever had any love for me, just tell me where Adrien is.”
Max looked up at me, his eyes unsure. “I don’t know, Zoe, I swear. The Chancellor took him.”
My legs threatened to give out from under me. “How long? How long ago did she take him? How long have you been here pretending to be him?”
Max looked down, avoiding my eyes. “Since your raid on our facility.”
I stepped backward. No. It couldn’t be true. He’d been imitating Adrien for a month and a half? I would have noticed. How could I not have noticed?
The buzzing became a screech in my head and I lost control for a moment. The table and chairs flew against the wall with a loud clatter, startling everyone. I backed up a few steps. None of this was real. It couldn’t be.
A sudden explosion of pain across my cheek startled me back into my body. Adrien’s mom had slapped me. I blinked and looked at her as she raised her arm to strike me again. Tyryn grabbed her, trapping her arms against her chest to hold her back.
“I knew you’d get him hurt!” she shrieked, fighting to get free from Tyryn. “I tried to keep him away from all this. But he wouldn’t listen, because of you!”
Everyone’s attention was turned toward us. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Max disappear. Literally disappear.
One moment his body had been clearly there on the ground, and the next there was only air. I gasped and lurched forward to the space where he’d just been.
Tyryn turned to his com again. “Lockdown! Full facility lockdown,” he said. It lit up everyone’s forearm panels and came over the loudspeaker. “Intruder alert. I repeat, intruder alert. Everyone rendezvous at the training center and await further instructions.”