Article 5

dead. Those lifeless globes tracked me like the eyes of the Mona Lisa.

I took a step back before my knees began knocking. Within seconds, my whole body was shaking. I couldn’t stop staring at the dead man. My brain morphed his face into Chase’s face. His dark, probing eyes gone dim. If caught, this would be his fate.

Even now, I didn’t want Chase to die. I hoped he was far away. That he’d run once he’d found me gone.

Delilah heaved the body into a seated position. I felt the bile scratch up my throat. Deliberately, I swallowed. She rolled the body sideways into the laundry cart, and it thudded against the metal base.

I felt ill. I forced my mind to focus. To magnetize some semblance of strength.

“You still upright?” Delilah asked as she pushed the cart down the hall, the opposite direction of the stairs.

She wasn’t looking at me, but I nodded, trailing behind her slightly. I watched my feet, one after another. It was the only thing I could focus on without vomiting.

“It helps if you don’t think of them as people.”

Yes. I imagined that would help.

At the end of the hallway was a freight elevator. It was black and greasy and had poor lighting. She pushed the cart inside, and I tried to tell myself that there wasn’t a body within it.

We got off at the bottom floor and exited through an unguarded door, which Delilah unlocked with the same key from around her neck. She pushed the cart down a narrow back alley until we reached a high fence with rolls of barbed wire cresting its ridge. There was a gate there, manned by two soldiers in a guard station. They saw the cart and let us pass without a second glance.

“I guess they know what we’re doing,” I observed.

“You gonna help?” Delilah asked as she began to labor. I slid beside her, checking my nausea, and grabbed one side of the slick metal handle. Together, we pushed the cart up a steep asphalt embankment lined by flat- topped hedges that curved around the back side of the station. I was sweating by the time we reached the top.

A single cement building, flat and square, came into view. It was surrounded by lovely drooping trees, a contrast to the black factory smoke puffing from the chimney. The air reeked of sulfur. The driveway arched into a teardrop before the entrance.

“Just over to that door there.” Delilah pointed. I helped her push the weighted cart to a side exit with a canvas shade awning. She rang a buzzer. Then, without waiting, she walked away.

“We just leave him—it—here?” I asked.

She nodded. “The crematorium.”

My stomach churned.

They took my mother somewhere like this. I was flooded with so much horror I could barely stumble behind her.

The sickness numbed, and I was able to follow Delilah weakly back to the highest crest of the hill. Here she paused. I tracked her gaze, feeling my feet stabilize under me for the first time since we had entered that third room.

Before us stretched the FBR base. The buildings all matched, gray and drab, some with stout additions, others slender. All variations on the same deathly theme. Little manicured lawns cropped up between them, and white walkways bounced from entrance to entrance. It reached on for miles, surrounded by the high steel fence that we had passed through below. In the distance I could see the river and the hospital where we’d left the car. The square would be nearby, as would the Wayland Inn, where the resistance plotted.

Oh, the information I could offer Wallace. The layout of the detention center. How many guards roamed the halls. The geography of the base. I’d doubted my use to the resistance before. I didn’t now.

I felt a flame flicker inside of me. A feeling, almost unrecognizable.

Hope.

What if I could find a way to tell Wallace? Even if I was doomed to die, the information I had might save others. Innocent people like my mother. It physically hurt to think that the information I now had might have helped someone save her.

I turned around and saw the remains of an abandoned town. Probably some residential offshoot of Knoxville. Twisting asphalt avenues were lined by crowded duplexes and condos. From the distance, their tiny yards did not look overgrown or weed eaten. The tagged walls and broken windows were too far away to see clearly.

An old sign posting fuel prices reached up atop the horizon, drawing my attention. A main street ran down the left side of my view; a straight line away from me.

“Is that all part of the base, too?” I asked.

“No. The base is just over there. This side of the city is evacuated. A Red Zone.”

I felt my brows draw together.

“Do you mean that we’re not currently on the base?”

“You’re a bright one,” she mocked.

Anxiety shimmered through me.

“How often do you come out here?” I asked.

“Every time I have to take out the trash.”

I grimaced at her analogy. “And you’ve never thought to just keep walking?”

“I think it all the time.”

“Why don’t you?”

She looked at me, her face tired.

“If there was anything for me out there, I’d be gone.”

She looked at me in judgment, sizing up my intentions. Apparently, my thoughts were as transparent as her eyes.

Beth was still out there. Rebecca was in danger. Wallace and the resistance could use me, and after my mother’s murder, how could I not help them? There were too many people like me who didn’t know just how lethal the MM was. Too many people dead, while their loved ones remained hopeful for a reunion.

I had to do something, no matter how small. Something. For my mother.

If I ran now, Delilah didn’t have to go more than ten feet to flag down the guard at the watch station. But Tucker had said I still had three days before my trial. If I could earn enough trust to make it outside on my own, I might be able to escape.

“You want a bullet in your back, don’t you?” She wasn’t looking for an answer.

She trudged down the hill. And I followed, scheming.

CHAPTER 15

DELILAH didn’t speak to me for the remainder of the afternoon. As the day shift dwindled on, she tasked me to fold towels in the supply room, not bothering to conceal her annoyance that I hadn’t been returned to a cell.

At curfew, a buzzer sounded, and the power switched to a generator. Not many were there to hear it; apart from the stairway guard, the hallway was already empty.

Tucker was finishing some paperwork when I finally dragged myself to his office. “What do you want?” I asked.

He slid his gun out of the holster, and I thought, This is it. He’s going to kill me. I braced for the pain that was sure to come. But instead, he deposited the weapon within a safe in the back corner, locked it, and placed the key inside his desk drawer. The breath reentered my lungs in one hard whoosh. He waited a beat, eyeing me with a strange expression.

“You aren’t married, are you?” He said it as if he were a ten-year-old talking about broccoli.