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
My mouth dropped open. 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.
