“I haven’t said anything,” I protested, my voice hitching as the blade dug a little deeper. A droplet slid down my throat to my collarbone. “You’re in charge. They’re all yours. I don’t want them.” In that moment, that had never been more true.
For a second I thought he was going to do it. His mouth twisted and his shoulders braced. I could already feel, with a chill washing through me, the way the knife would slice clean into my neck, the gush of blood, the shock of pain. Then he shifted back, just an inch.
“Good,” he said. “I’m going to help you remember how much you don’t want it.”
He pressed the blade in an arc from one corner of my jaw down across my throat to the other corner, splitting my skin in a thin, stinging line. A dribble of blood, not a gush. My hands leapt to cover it as he stepped aside.
“Remember,” he said again, and stalked out.
I grabbed my least favorite T-shirt to stop the bleeding, sat down on the cot, and stared at the wall. The stinging deepened into an ache that radiated through my body. My hand holding the shirt was quivering.
If this was a test, I was almost definitely failing it.
Had I controlled that situation at all? Maybe I’d managed to blurt out the right thing to diffuse Nathan’s anger. Or maybe he’d only ever intended to give a warning. Maybe he’d never even believed I’d spoken against him, just seen it as a convenient excuse to mess with my head.
There were several words I’d have had for Michael right now, even with that damned revolver on his desk. He hadn’t wanted to deal with Nathan, so he’d handed the problem off to me. Well, it was still going to be Michael’s problem if I ended up with my throat slit and Nate brought the whole Toronto operation crashing down.
Then what? Michael would take it as definite proof that ingenuity and evenhandedness couldn’t work?
That was too much responsibility for anyone.
The thought reminded me of Zack’s comment, the night before I left. With great power... God, did I wish he was here, ribbing me and quoting his comic books. Reminding me with his solid presence that I wasn’t the only person left with a sense of morality. That at least one person would care if I died.
I bowed my head. A few speckles of my blood dappled the floor. My door was still ajar. Anyone walking by could have seen our altercation. I stretched out my leg to kick it shut.
I didn’t really wish Zack was in the middle of this, his life on the line as much as mine was. But knowing that didn’t quench the longing that had risen up. There was no one I could talk to here. My probing conversations yesterday had revealed that. I wanted Zack. I wanted my family. Mom, with that calm but firm tone that said her pacifism didn’t make her a pushover. Dad, who despite how much we’d argued, would have sat down and helped me analyze the facts.
I’d never had a chance to ask Kaelyn how he’d died.
I knew what she would say. I could remember clearly the tenor of her voice amid the crackle of radio static when she’d asked how I could have joined Michael. What the hell are you doing? The look on her face when she’d accused me of choosing the Wardens over her, because I’d stayed back rather than run with her to the CDC.
Then, I’d been so sure the ends justified the means. I could compromise a few morals if it allowed me to stay alive and to protect her too. My skill with electronics had kept me off the streets. Kept me from having to threaten and steal and kill with my own hands, like most of the Wardens did. Which didn’t make my hands exactly clean, but it was a stain I’d been able to live with. Even hearing about the girl who’d been shot during Kaelyn’s escape, a girl whose name I’d never gotten, I’d told myself I was doing all I could. That I didn’t really have a choice, any more than Zack had.
But that wasn’t true. As Michael had said, there was always a choice. I looked at my jacket hanging on the wall, the lump of the pistol in its pocket. What the hell was I doing? Michael had given me the means and his permission to destroy Nathan. Every day Nate was out there antagonizing everyone he spoke to, I was allowing that to happen. Because the other choice would make me an outright murderer.
I’d thought I was so freaking smart, joining the Wardens, creating change from the inside. Forgetting that I’d never actually worked from the inside before. I had no practice at playing things this way. All my experience was from the outside, against the status quo—where everyone around me was on my side, not another enemy. It was a miracle I’d survived this long.
My attention shifted to the rucksack lying by the cot, my small stash of extra food, the matchbox, the compass. I could take off. That was a choice too. Try to recreate the dynamic I was used to, call up the other survivors who were tired of the Wardens’ tyranny.
Before I’d even finished picturing it, I knew it wouldn’t work. We’d had a measure of safety before with the presence of police, the media, laws that prevented the powers that be from crushing those who opposed them. That was all gone. Any good I’d done, any wrongs I’d righted with my speeches and petitions, that was all gone too. The sting of pain along my throat made those efforts seem pathetic. If I walked out of here, by tomorrow every Warden in the city would have orders to kill me on sight. Anyone standing with me they’d massacre like they had the Strikers in those early altercations. I couldn’t talk my way out of that.
I pulled the shirt away from my neck. A splotchy red line colored the fabric. I put on my jacket, folding the collar up to hide the wound, and slipped out to the bathroom.
The bleeding appeared to have stopped. I washed the cut with soap and covered it again. The last thing I needed was the other Wardens seeing how Nathan had marked me—how incapable I’d been of stopping him.
The gun was a steady weight in the side of the jacket. At this point, it wouldn’t be so much murder as self-defense.
When I walked into the common room, the guys carrying off the latest payments and standing guard by the vaccination table glanced at me and then glanced away again. My skin tightened. Had someone seen and already spread the word? I resisted the urge to adjust my collar.
Janelle was in the kitchen, rinsing a plate. “You said you have a practice range set up here?” I said when she turned.
“You’re wanting to work on your shot?” she said dryly.
“Seems like a good idea, these days.”
Her gaze dipped to my neck, and then I was sure everyone knew. I guessed I could kiss good-bye any fragment of respect I’d managed to gain. My teeth gritted, but she didn’t comment, only tilted her head.
“I’ll show you. I wouldn’t mind blowing a few things away today.”
The range was set up at one end of the apparatus bay, sectioned off from the garage area by partitions that must have been lifted from some office building. Janelle showed me how to load the practice ammunition they’d found, and we set up a couple rows of emptied cans and other containers along the tables that stood near the back wall.
Her weapon of choice was a heavy revolver. She planted herself, aimed, and knocked off five targets with just a beat in between. I adjusted my fingers around the pistol’s grip and trigger. Sighted. Missed the first can by at least a foot. Janelle rubbed her mouth as if she were covering a smirk.
“Been a while?” she said.
Only two months since I’d done my training, but those lessons obviously hadn’t stuck. I repositioned myself and tried again. Nicked the mouth of a jar enough to send it smashing to the floor. That was satisfying. I sucked in a breath and fired off three rounds, setting the can clattering, missing another, and hitting a cereal box dead center. I paused, feeling a little pleased with that one, and raised the pistol one more time. Imagined that last can was Nathan’s face. I pictured him sneering at me. My arm twitched as I pulled the trigger.
“Close,” Janelle said.
I watched as she reloaded and blasted away the rest of her targets, as well as a couple of mine. She lowered her arms with a thin smile. She could do it, I thought. If Nathan pushed her hard enough, she’d snap.
/> That wasn’t the answer, though. Mutiny would be bad for discipline, bad for morale. If one of the Wardens killed Michael’s representative without Michael’s backing, they were setting themselves against Michael too, and that would be an even bigger mess.
It had to be me.
I wondered what Nate would think if he saw me here with the pistol in my hands. He’d probably laugh. Say, “Bring it on.” He lived for this. What had Michael called it? A “penchant for violence.” I looked down at the gun, and my stomach turned.
“You want another go?” Janelle asked.
“No,” I said, shoving the pistol back in my pocket. “I’m good.”
I wasn’t. But killing Nathan couldn’t be the only answer. If I let him push me to that, I’d still be failing. I’d be proving his way right even as I took him down.
Nathan called on me to help him transport the latest influx of his personal supplies late that afternoon without any nod to our recent confrontation. He didn’t want anyone else knowing where he was stockpiling the stuff—and maybe that performance with the knife had only been a blip in his day. I drove the delivery van over and unpacked it while he stalked around the storage area, muttering to himself like always. Despite the numbers he’d marked on the outside of the boxes, he still opened and sifted through them before seeming satisfying. Or somewhere close to satisfied. I was sure now the figures he’d marked on the walls, whether they were goals or something else, were a lot higher than they’d been five days ago.
“You’ve almost filled the place already,” I commented when I’d hefted the last of the gas tanks onto the tower in one corner. Since relying on the gun or the other Wardens were both out, I had to focus on Nathan again. I’d accomplished what I had before by getting Michael to trust me and then directing events that had come into my control. Maybe I hadn’t tried hard enough with Nate. I wasn’t giving up.
“We can use the front room next,” Nathan said with a frown. “And then there’s upstairs.”
I glanced at the stairwell, steep steps showing raw wood where the paint had been worn down. While he said “we,” I’d be doing the heavy lugging. Well, building a little muscle couldn’t be a bad thing these days. Although...
“It’d be easier to move everything in a hurry if you took over one of the places next door and stuck to the lower levels,” I said, remembering his remark before about the vicinity of the freeway. “If that’s part of your plan for all this.” I kept my tone carefully light.
“Always have plans,” Nathan said, staring at the numbers on the wall. “Always be one step ahead.”
I supposed that was a kind of answer. “I agree,” I said. “And you know, if you find you need more or less of a specific thing, I’ll make sure the collection guys adjust their payment instructions.”
He turned, and I braced for him to tell me off. But apparently I hadn’t pushed quite too far. All he said, evenly, was, “Thank you, but I can talk to them myself.”
“Well, Michael put me at your disposal,” I said, risking a little more. “Just trying to make sure I’m pulling my weight.”
He smiled then, with a manic quality that made me regret the comment.
“You’ll know when I need more from you,” he said. “As long as you’ve proven you’re ready.”
“What would ‘ready’ look like?” I asked as we walked back to the vehicles. “If there is something else you want me to be taking care of...”
“Ready would include knowing without having to ask,” Nathan snapped, and hopped into his convertible.
I pulled into the station just behind him and followed him up to the common room. A trio of Strikers had just come into the entry hall, wearing yellow cloths tied around their biceps to identify themselves. They’d been showing up in small groups as they gathered the extra resources to meet Nathan’s inflated vaccine price. This trio had pushed in a couple trolleys stacked with boxes with a grocery store logo, a few 5-gallon gasoline tanks, and a carton of ammo. The Wardens at the inner door were looking it over, one inspecting the boxes’ contents while the other stood poised with her submachine gun. I paused, thinking I could make a show of confirming Nathan’s haul went to the right place while he was here to see it.
Nathan strolled right over. He nudged one of the gasoline tanks with the toe of his black leather Oxford and his lip curled disdainfully.
“Not enough,” he said.
The Strikers stared at him. “What do you mean?” said the guy closest to Nathan, his thin eyebrows pulling together. “This is everything we were asked for.”
“The price just went up,” Nathan announced. “Come back with twice that, and you can have your shots.”
The three barely moved, but I caught the way their bodies shifted: shoulders squaring, hands dipping a little closer to concealed weapons. What was Nathan thinking? He’d already doubled their price once.
“Says who?” one of the Strikers asked, almost a snarl.
“Says the guy who runs this city,” Nathan said. He didn’t look ready for a fight. But then, Nathan pretty much always was, without any indication at all. Even so, there were three of them. I got a flash of an image: the Strikers bursting into the common room, a hail of bullets from both sides, blood all across the floor...
I pulled my spine up as straight as it would go and strode over. “Is there a problem?” I said, fixing my gaze on the Striker who’d last spoken.
The trio glanced from Nathan to me. “I don’t think there’s a problem,” Nathan said with a warning edge. He didn’t like me interfering—I could be undoing any small gains I’d established with him earlier. But his good will wasn’t going to solve my problems if a gang war broke out today.
“I say we shouldn’t have to pay anything,” the first Striker muttered, and the guard lifted her gun.
“I don’t see what you need the vaccine for if you’re determined to die in the next thirty seconds,” I remarked, and then, to Nathan, “Sorry. Obviously you can handle these idiots yourself.”
I only backed up a step, but he smirked, so I must have hit the right note—and the third Striker was eyeing the submachine gun. “You take most of this and get yourself fixed,” he said to the first guy. “We’ll come back. It costs what it costs.”
“No,” the first guy said, “we’ll come back together. Maybe with better odds.”
“I’d like to see that,” Nathan said.
As the three slunk off dragging their trolley, the Warden with the submachine gun turned to Nathan.
“Is that the new policy for everyone?” she asked. “Double payment?”
“Hmmm?” Nathan said. He’d already started to drift away. “No. Just that crew. If they can afford it, we should make them pay it.”
I could imagine what Trang would have to say about that. I might have averted a disaster, but only the most immediate one.
When a call came through from Georgia that evening, relayed through Pittsburgh, Janelle summoned me from my room. She left the radio area as I sat down at the transceiver, but my skin prickled at Tyler’s presence across the table, the figures lingering outside the door.
“Michael wants to know how the situation’s shaping up,” said the voice at the other end.
It’s not shaping up so much as it’s falling apart, I thought, but I couldn’t admit that.
“We’re getting organized, proceeding as planned,” I said.
I waited through the pause as he conveyed that information to Michael and got an answer. “Any additional assistance required?”
“No,” I lied, feeling Tyler’s gaze on me and the itch of my scabbing throat. “Everything’s under control.”
If I was going to have time to get things under control, I needed to nip this latest stirring of unrest in the bud. So the next day I wandered over to the neighborhood that had once been known as Seaton Village, peering through the darkened and mostly smashed windows of the stores along Bloor Street, a medical face mask protruding from my jacket pocket—the pocket that didn’t
hold my pistol. The Wardens were the only people in the city with proper masks to wear, since Michael had instructed us to hoard all the hospital supplies we could find. They served a second purpose as a visible warning to other survivors that this wasn’t someone they wanted to mess with. Or, in this particular case, as a signal I wanted passed on.
I’d just turned down one of the residential streets, ambling past boxy two-story homes along a road matted with unraked autumn leaves turned mushy by the spring melt, when a car roared down the street and swerved onto the sidewalk in front of me. I flinched backward before seeing the other pulling up behind me. My hand leapt to my gun. I’d expected some sort of reception, but not one quite this aggressive.
Trang leaned out the window of the car in front of me, smiling hard. “You looking for someone, Warden?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said, gathering myself. My pulse was still thudding. “I was looking for you. We need to talk.”
“I’d say we need a little more than that,” he said. “It’s about time your boss found out exactly what kind of enemies he’s making.”
“No,” I said quickly. “Nathan’s an asshole, you won’t hear me arguing against that. But your group and ours can still keep the arrangement we’ve had working. I told you I’m handling Nate, and I am—it’s just a slow process. So I came to make a deal. You meet his new price, and I’ll see the extra payments get returned to you without him knowing, until I can talk him down again. Then he’s happy and you’re happy, and you don’t have to start some crusade that’ll leave all of us hurting.”
The more attention Nathan had been giving his private stash, the less he’d been checking on the public stockpile. I ought to be able to lift a few boxes and convey them over here without repercussions.
Trang made a scoffing sound. “He’s got you cringing like a kicked puppy, doesn’t he? We don’t tiptoe around that kind of disrespect. And I’ve got an idea your own people aren’t so eager to keep tiptoeing either.”
He didn’t say it outright, but at that moment I knew. The Strikers were making allies among the Wardens. I’d been seeing them and my colleagues as two separate issues, but if they joined forces to take Nathan down, that was two problems added up to one much bigger than the sum of their parts. Michael would lose the city completely. There was no question.