She paced back and forth and heard the camera hum as it swiveled to follow her; she sat on the bed and watched the stain on the floor grow. She slept a little, and drifted in and out of nightmares indistinguishable from her reality. When she woke up, it took her a moment to realize this wasn’t just another dream.
Her stomach was growling. She felt weak with thirst. She waited for food and water—they had to give her something eventually, they couldn’t just let her die in here—but it didn’t come.
Nobody came.
She had run out of tears. Her eyes felt like they had been rubbed with sandpaper. Her throat burned with thirst; her tongue kept sticking to the roof of her mouth. Every part of her body ached—whether from sleeping on the hard mattress or from the constant trembling, she didn’t know.
She lay down again. Maybe this time, if she managed to fall asleep, she wouldn’t dream. Maybe for a while she could turn her mind off and forget where she was.
Becca drifted from one half-dream to another. The lights blazed through her eyelids into her brain. She got up, paced the room, lay down again, sat and stared at nothing, until she wasn’t sure whether she was awake or asleep.
Her mother came. She called Becca a dissident, and Becca couldn’t speak. She took a gun from her belt and aimed it at Becca, and Becca couldn’t move. Her eyes were cold as she pulled the trigger. Becca woke wiping away tears that weren’t there. She had no water left for tears.
Her stomach was twisted in on itself, trying to devour itself. She felt shriveled. Empty. Her tongue was swollen in her parched mouth.
The door opened.
Becca jerked up from the bed as a man ducked through the doorway. She rubbed her eyes and looked again. He hadn’t disappeared. And he seemed brighter than the vision of her mom. More solid.
She recognized him. He was the one she and her mom had talked to the other day.
The one who had killed Anna.
She fought back her initial fear and revulsion. She had seen the way he had looked at her mom, how eager he had been to help her. If her mom couldn’t come herself, maybe she had sent him to get her out.
She got to her feet, then steadied herself against the wall as her legs threatened to give out under her. “Did my mom send you?” The words scratched against her throat like tiny nails.
A flicker of emotion crossed his face, too fast for her to read. “I need you to come with me.”
Her mom had to have sent him. He just couldn’t say it here, because… because of the camera. Or because her mom wanted to keep her scared for a little while longer, to teach her a lesson.
His face was expressionless.
His height no longer made him look awkward; he loomed over her as he took a step closer. He held out a pair of handcuffs. “You’ll have to be secured.”
Maybe her mom had arranged this whole thing. Maybe she thought watching Anna die wasn’t enough to keep Becca from turning into a dissident. Her screams as the Enforcers had led Becca out the door… all part of the act.
Wordlessly, Eli pulled Becca’s arms behind her back and fastened the handcuffs around her wrists. She let him. It would only be for a few minutes, only until he brought her to her mom.
He took hold of her arm the way the Enforcers had.
“I’m sorry it has to happen this way,” he said softly as he led her out the door.
Becca expected another room like her cell, like the room where Eli had shot Anna. Or maybe something bigger, with a single chair in the center and torture implements laid out in neat rows along a metal table.
She didn’t expect anything like what she saw when he opened the door and motioned her inside.
Unlike everything else she had seen on the underground levels, this room didn’t have even a hint of gray. The walls, though still noticeably rough concrete, had been painted a warm tan. The carpet was the soothing blue of the ocean, the color of Becca’s bedroom walls at home. A wooden desk, big enough that Becca wasn’t sure how it could have made it through the door, took up most of the space in the small room, and a chair made from the same dark wood sat to either side.
A camera, identical to the one in her cell, watched her from the corner.
Becca stepped into the room. Eli unlocked the handcuffs and gestured to the chair nearest her. “Sit down.”
She almost fell crossing the short distance to the chair. Eli made his way around the desk and folded himself into the chair opposite her.
There was a glass of water on the desk, next to a small stack of papers. Once Becca spotted it, she couldn’t see anything else. She imagined reaching across the desk and grabbing it, feeling the cold on her tongue as she poured the liquid down her throat. Her hand twitched.
Eli pushed the glass across the desk. “Have as much as you want.”
Her hand felt weak and trembly as she closed her fingers around the glass. She gingerly brought it to her lips, afraid she would drop it. She took a small sip first, then gulped faster until the glass was empty. The coolness of the water spread from her stomach out through the rest of her body. Not enough. But she felt a little better.
She glanced at the closed door. Any minute now, and her mom would walk in, ready to take her home. Any minute now…
The door stayed closed.
Her mom wasn’t coming.
Why had she even bothered trying to fool herself? If her mom had been able to save her, she would have stopped Enforcement from taking her in the first place. If anyone cared whose daughter she was, they would have released her by now.
Her breaths grew ragged as the truth closed in on her. There would be no rescue. They would get whatever confession they needed from her, and then they would kill her just like Anna.
“You have to let me go,” she told Eli anyway. She tried to sound unafraid, but her voice, weak and rough from crying, broke on the first word. “Before my mom finds out I’m here.” Her words echoed with the hollowness of her threat. Her mom already knew she was here.
“I wish you didn’t have to be here.” His regret sounded genuine. Not that that meant anything. “Raleigh Dalcourt is my role model. I respect her more than anyone else I’ve ever met.” He paused for a moment, straightening the papers on the desk. “But as much as she matters to me, our purpose here matters more. Nothing can get in the way of that purpose. She taught me that.”
“I haven’t done anything.” Why had she bothered to say it? She knew it didn’t matter what she had or hadn’t done.
“I want this to be over just as much as you do. I want to get you back home with your mother where you belong.” Eli rested his arms on the desk and leaned toward her. “We can do that. Nothing you’ve done is that serious. It’s obvious you’re not a threat to society.”
Becca tensed, wanting so badly to believe him, waiting for the catch.
“All you have to do,” he said, “is tell us where to find your friend Jake.”
Jake. Of course. That was why they had brought her here. Somehow they had found out about her warning.
Jake, hiding with his dad in the playhouse. Had he started wondering yet why she hadn’t come to bring him more food?
What would happen to him if she never got out of here?
Eli had said she could go home.
All she had to do was give him Jake. Trade Jake’s life, and his dad’s, for hers.
Maybe he was lying. She knew all about Internal’s lies. She wanted to believe he was lying; that was easier than wondering whose life was worth more.
Eli flipped through the papers on his desk until he found what he was looking for. “We know you’ve been helping him hide from Enforcement. We heard your phone call warning him.”
She should have expected it. Should have known better than to think she could do something like this— helping a dissident evade Internal, dissident activity by any definition—without ending up right where she was
