This was what I knew about John Alban from personal experience: he’d formed an organization called the Children’s League but was only willing to break kids out of camps whom he saw as powerful. Useful. And that if the man was one to hold a grudge, there was a decent chance I’d be punished for making that plan as difficult as possible for him.
We walked to the other side of the loop. Cate tapped her ID against the black pad there, waiting for the beep. A part of me already knew to hope it wouldn’t flash green.
There was no trace of heat left as we made our way down the cement stairs. The door slammed shut behind us on its own, sealing with a sucking noise. I turned back, startled, but Cate gently nudged me forward.
It was another hallway, but different than the ones I’d seen upstairs on the first level. The lights here weren’t as powerful and seemed set on a flickering loop. One look was all I needed to rear back, my heart climbing into my throat. This was Thurmond—this was a piece of what it had been to me. Rusted metal doors, solid cinder-block walls only broken up by small observation windows. But this was a prison with twelve doors instead of dozens, with twelve people instead of thousands. The rancid smells tinged with a hint of bleach, the barren walls and floors—the only difference was that the PSFs would have punished us if we’d tried banging against the doors the way the prisoners currently were. Muffled voices were begging to be let out, and I wondered, for the first time, if any of the soldiers had felt the way I did now—sick, like my skin was tightening over the top of my skull. I knew exactly when their faces found the windows and their bloodshot eyes followed us to the end of the hall.
Cate tapped her ID against the lock on the last door to the left, turning her face down into the shadows. The door popped open and she pushed it in, motioning toward the bare table and set of chairs. The hanging bulb was already on, swaying. I dug my heels into the tile, pulling away from her.
“What the hell is this?” I demanded.
“It’s all right,” she said, her voice low and soothing. “We use this wing to hold assets or rogue agents we’ve brought in to question.”
“You mean, interrogate them?” I said.
“I don’t…” I began. I don’t trust myself. I don’t want to do this. I don’t want any of this.
“I’ll be here with you the whole time,” Cate said. “Nothing will happen to you. Alban just wants to see what your skill level is, and this is one of the few ways we can show him.”
I almost laughed. Alban wanted to make sure he had made a good deal.
Cate shut the door and drew me into a seat at the metal table. I heard footsteps and started to rise, only to be guided back down. “It’ll just be a few minutes, Ruby, I promise.”
With the size and shape of the door’s window, I couldn’t see much more than Alban’s dark face when it appeared there, flanked by a half dozen other men. His voice filtered in through a crackling intercom. “Are we ready to proceed?”
Cate nodded, then stepped back, murmuring, “Just do as you’re asked, Ruby.”
The door opened and three figures appeared. Two male agents, beyond fit in their green fatigues, and a small woman between them, who had to be dragged in and bound to the other chair with plastic ties. There was some kind of burlap hood over her head, and judging by the grunts and moans of protest, her mouth was gagged beneath it.
A prick of dread started at the base of my neck and slowly zigzagged its way down my spine.
“Hello, my dear.” Alban’s voice filtered through again. “I hope you’re well this evening.”
John Alban had been an adviser in President Gray’s cabinet until his own child, Alyssa, had been killed by IAAN. The way Cate explained it to me was that the guilt of it became too much for him; when he tried to take the truth—not the glossy, sugarcoated version of the camps—to the major newspapers, no one had been willing to run the story. Not when President Gray had wrangled an iron-fisted control over them. That was the legacy of the DC bombings: good men gone unheard and bad men taking every advantage.
His dark skin looked weathered by middle age, and the heavy bags beneath his wide eyes made his whole face sag. “It is a pleasure to have you here, of course. My advisers and I would very much like to see the extent of your abilities and how they might benefit our organization.”
I nodded, my tongue fixed to the top of my mouth.
“We believe this woman has been passing information to Gray’s men, sabotaging the operations we sent her out for his benefit. I would like you to explore her recent memories and tell me if this is true.”
He thought it was that easy, did he? A peek inside, and there are the answers. I squared my shoulders and gazed at him through the glass. I wanted him to know that I knew—that I was well aware of the fact he was standing behind that door for protection not from this woman but from me.
All I had to do was earn his trust, gain a tiny bit of freedom. And when the time was right, he’d regret ever giving me someone to practice my abilities on; he’d wake up one morning to find me gone, every trace of me erased from this hole in the ground. This was a waiting game for me. Once I confirmed the others were safe, I’d get myself out. Break the deal.
“You’ll have to give me a specific operation to look for,” I said, wondering if he could even hear me. “Otherwise we might be here all night.”
“I understand.” His voice crackled through. “It should go without saying that what you hear and see when you are on this hall is privileged information your peers will never have access to. Should we find that any of this intel is being shared, there will be…repercussions.”
I nodded.
“Excellent. This agent recently went to meet a contact to pick up a packet of information from him.”
“Where?”
“Outside of San Francisco. That is as precise as I’m able to get.”
“Did the contact have a name?”
There was a long pause. I didn’t need to look up from the woman’s hooded face to know the advisers were conferring with one another. Finally, his voice filtered back through. “Ambrose.”
The two soldiers who brought the woman in retreated back outside. She heard the door lock, but it wasn’t until I reached across the way to touch her bound wrist that she tried to jerk away from me.
“Ambrose,” I said. “San Francisco. Ambrose. San Francisco…” Those words, over and over again, as I sank into her mind. The pressure that had been steadily building from the moment I boarded the plane in Maryland released with a soft sigh. I felt myself lean closer to her, a rushing stream of thoughts filtering through her mind. They were blindingly bright—there was a painfully intense sheen to them, as if each memory had been dipped in pure sunlight.
“Ambrose, San Francisco, the intel, Ambrose, San Francisco…”
It was a trick Clancy had taught me—that mentioning a specific word or phrase or name to someone was often enough to draw it straight into that person’s forethoughts.
The woman relaxed under my fingers. Mine.
“Ambrose,” I repeated quietly.
It was noon or near to; I was the agent and she was me, and we shot a quick glance up toward the sun directly above us. The scene shimmered as I ran through a deserted park, black tennis shoes gliding through the overgrown grass. There was a building up ahead—a public restroom.
It didn’t surprise me, then, that a gun suddenly appeared in my right hand. The better I got at this, the more senses came to me with the images—a smell here, a sound there, a touch. I’d felt the cold metal tucked into the band of my running shorts from the moment I stepped into the memory.
The man waiting at the back of the building didn’t even have time to turn before he was on the ground, a
