No Return (The Internal Defense Series) (17 page)

She wanted to say something that would make him understand. Something that would make this all okay.

She wanted to say goodbye.

I promised you I would—

She pulled the trigger.

Even out in the open, the sound was impossibly loud. Her ears rang as Peter crumpled.

The last of her hearing faded into a high-pitched buzz as her vision went gray.

She didn’t know how long she hung in that empty haze before a sound sliced through her solitude. A voice. “Becca.”

Slowly, a piece at a time, the world came back into focus. The forest ahead of her. The wind, freezing against her skin. The snow at her feet, stained with blood.

And Peter.

“Come on, Becca. We have to take care of this. Before someone sees us here.”

She couldn’t speak. Couldn’t move.

She had told him she would protect him.

“Becca. You can’t help the resistance if you don’t do this.”

I told him I would protect him.

But she had made the rest of the resistance the same promise.

She turned to Kara. Nodded. When she answered, it wasn’t her who spoke. “Let’s go.”

Becca jabbed the tip of the shovel into the dirt. Peter’s body lay beside her, silent and accusing. She turned her head away as she forced the shovel deeper.
Just get it done.

“Becca?”

One small shovelful of earth, hard and clumpy from the cold.
I did what I had to do.
Another.
I had to protect them.
She leaned into the shovel, ignoring the tightness in her muscles.
Don’t look down. Don’t look at him. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter.

“Is there anything you need? Anything you want me to do?” The wind nearly swallowed Kara’s voice.

Half-frozen tears clung to Becca’s cheeks. She kept digging, not bothering to wipe them away. “You said you had a plan. Tell me.”

“We can talk about it tomorrow. A few hours won’t make a difference.”

Becca tossed another clump of dirt and snow to the side. Her hands burned with the beginnings of blisters. “Will it help me save the resistance?”

“That’s the idea.”

“Then we’ll talk now.”

“Are you sure?” Kara hesitated. “It’s only been a few minutes since—”

“We’ll talk now,” Becca repeated.

“Okay. But let me know if you change your mind. I can leave and give you some space, or we can talk about… about what happened, or whatever you want.”

“Just tell me the plan.”

Kara picked the second shovel up off the ground and started working. “I have a few thoughts on the prisoners. You know 117 better than I do, so you’ll need to take the lead on planning the escape itself. But I’ve been thinking about how to keep them all hidden until the lockdown ends, and I—”

“Stop.” Becca paused, her shovel half-buried in the earth. “What are you talking about?”

“The prisoners. The ones the spies turned in.” Kara walked as she dug. Two steps left, dig, toss. Two steps right, dig, toss. “We don’t have much time. They’ll be starting the first round of executions soon. But I’m sure you already have some ideas. I mean, you got a thousand people out, so forty should be no—”

“We’re not getting them out,” Becca interrupted.

Kara stopped. “What do you mean?” There was too much confusion in her voice. Why did she sound so stunned, when she was talking about something she had to know was impossible?

“They’re in 117. There’s nothing we can do for them now.” Forty of her people.
Don’t think about it.
She turned away from Kara. Away from Peter. Back to the unyielding ground in front of her. “We need to figure out how we’re going to save everyone else. The more names the prisoners give up, the less time we have.” Her people, locked in cells on the underground levels, breaking one by one. She gripped the wooden handle tighter as she dug, working the blisters to the surface.
Don’t.

“We’re not going to just… leave them in 117.” There was a question in Kara’s voice. “You know what’s going to happen to them. What’s already happening to them.”

What did Kara think she could do? Did she really think Becca didn’t understand? That Becca would let her people die if there were another option? She couldn’t keep her gaze from dropping to Peter’s body as she spoke. “We don’t have a choice.”

“But… Alia. Sean. I told them we were going to do something big. That we would save as many people as we could. And you agreed.” She turned to Becca, bewilderment etched across her face. “What did you think I meant back there, if not this?”

“I thought you told them what they needed to hear.”

“I told them the truth!” Kara dropped the shovel to the ground. “I told them to believe in you, because
I
believe in you. Because you’re Becca Dalcourt, and this is what you
do
.
”

“I can’t save them.” The words cut into her throat like shards of glass. She fought for control. “They’re in 117. You know what that means. But I won’t lose anyone else. We’ll figure out a plan together.”

“What about the liberation?” Kara challenged. “You rescued a thousand prisoners from 117. Now you’re saying you can’t save forty?”

Becca dug mechanically, barely noticing as she rubbed her hands raw. “The liberation took weeks to set up. And Internal knows what to look for now. Something like that can only work once.”

“So, what, that’s it? You’re not even going to try?”

“I’m not going to throw lives away on a futile rescue mission.” Becca winced as the skin of her palm split, but she didn’t stop working. “You said it yourself. I know 117. I know it better than any dissident ever has. So I understand the odds. The chance of saving them isn’t worth what we’d lose by trying.” Steady voice. Steady hands. One clod of dirt after another. The burning in her hands didn’t matter. The executions that would begin any day now didn’t matter. A trickle of blood ran down her palm. “I need to focus on saving the people who still have a chance. And I need your help to do it.”

“Is that what I was to you three years ago? A number? An acceptable risk?” Kara kicked the shovel she had dropped. It clattered away from her and hit the nearest tree with a clang. “Did you sit around calculating whether my life was worth saving?”

“This isn’t the same.”

“It’s exactly the same! I should have died in there. I should be
dead
.
And you…” She stared at the ground. “I thought you…” Her throat worked. She didn’t finish the sentence.

“I don’t know how to save the resistance.” The words leapt from Becca’s mouth before she knew she was going to speak. She stopped digging, and felt the ache in her shoulders for the first time. “But I will. I have to. Which is why I need your help. You joined the resistance because you can see the possibilities I can’t. We need that right now. Without it…” She swallowed the thought before she could speak it aloud. “Help me save them. Please.”

“But not all of them, right? Just the ones who still matter to you.” Kara flung the words at Becca. “I joined the resistance to help Becca Dalcourt. You’re not Becca Dalcourt. I don’t know you.” Tears glinted in her eyes as she turned and began to walk away.

Becca let the shovel fall from her fingers. “Kara, wait.”

“You want help?” Kara called over her shoulder. “Go ask someone whose life is worth something.”

“Kara—” But Kara was running now, her muffled sobs drifting back to Becca on the wind as her feet crunched through the snow. She darted through the trees too fast for Becca to catch up.

And then Becca was alone. Alone with nothing but the body of the friend she had killed and the tired echo of the same empty thoughts.
I will save them. I will. I will.

She picked up her shovel and kept digging.

* * *

Three more days. Seven new arrests. Still no plan.

Since Becca’s last visit to Lucky’s, the restaurant had transformed. The once-empty tables burbled with excited chatter. Patriotic music blared over the speakers. A banner draped along the far wall announced,
We’re taking our town back! Celebrate with FREE drink refills.

Becca tried to close her ears against the sounds as she picked her way across the crowded floor. She stretched her lips into a smile, already planning out what to say. The arrests had kept everyone too busy to come to dinner last week, which would make this the first time they had all gotten together since it happened. That meant tonight would be for cheers and congratulations and a long night of celebration.

Good job, Vivian. I knew you could do it.

They’re starting the executions tomorrow, did you hear? You must be proud.

She kept her eyes on the table as she slid into her seat. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Vivian yet. Her cheeks ached from the effort of holding her smile in place.

Congratulations on killing my people, Vivian.

Her head throbbed in time with the music. She kept smiling.

“Congratulations—” she began.

As she looked up, the words died on her lips.

Vivian looked worse than when she had come to Becca’s apartment last week, if that were possible. Her eyes, focused on some point in the distance, were red and swollen with tears. Lines of mascara trailed down her cheeks; she didn’t seem to care. Her hands gripped her paper napkin so hard that she had almost torn it in two.

“Vivian? What happened?” But Becca could already guess. The arrests hadn’t been enough for Internal after all. They saw the program as a failure, and they were blaming Vivian.

“She wouldn’t tell me,” said Ramon. “Not until you got here.”

“I need to talk to you both,” said Vivian, her voice clenched as tightly as her hands. “Together.”

Vivian would die for what she had done to the resistance. For what she had done to Becca’s people.

Becca’s friend of three years, one of the only people who had kept her going while she had floundered through her first months of leading the resistance, would die.

I can help you run,
she wanted to say. And,
I’ll turn you over to Internal myself.

But Vivian’s next words chased the thoughts from her head. “It’s about Heather.”

“Heather?” Becca frowned in confusion. For the first time, she noticed the empty space at the table. “Where is she?”

“I told her we canceled.” Vivian crumpled the napkin in her fist. “I needed to talk to you alone.”

“Come on, Vivian. Spit it out.” Ramon’s voice was teasing, but gentle. “What’s going on?”

“She’s… I think she…” Vivian looked from Becca to Ramon, then past them to the crowded tables. She clamped her lips shut. She fumbled in her purse until she pulled out a pen, then smoothed the napkin out in front of her. Shielding it with one hand, she scribbled something down with the other. Her face was white as she pushed the napkin across the table.

Four words. Tiny, barely readable, written in a scrawl nothing like Vivian’s normally-neat handwriting.

Four words that made no sense.

Heather is a dissident.

Becca looked from the napkin to Vivian, waiting for an explanation, waiting for Vivian to tell her this was nothing more than some tasteless joke.

The look in Vivian’s eyes told her it wasn’t.

Becca’s resistance instincts took over.
Damage control. Don’t let anyone else see.
She snatched up the napkin. Before either of them could stop her, she began tearing it into pieces, snowflakes of paper too small for anyone to piece together the words.

Ramon’s gaze followed the scraps as they drifted onto Becca’s empty plate. For a second, his eyes met hers; then he looked away. He didn’t speak.

Careful,
she warned herself too late.
Don’t draw attention.
But the warning barely penetrated her fog of panic-laced confusion. “Did someone turn her in?” she asked, her voice low and urgent. “Is that what this is about?” The empty space beside her—the space Heather should have filled—yawned open like a wound. “Has she been arrested?”

Vivian shook her head. “No one else knows. Only me.”

Becca’s heart stuttered back to life. “So then what is this about?” she demanded. “Why would you say something like that?”

“Look, I know it doesn’t make sense,” said Vivian. “I didn’t want to believe it either. But after she took over the program—”

Becca blinked. “After she what?”

“She didn’t tell you?” Ramon’s eyes showed a flicker of genuine surprise.

“We haven’t really talked since the arrests started.” One two-minute phone call the night of the first news broadcast—Heather making awkward small talk as she tried to ask circumspectly whether Becca was okay. Nothing since then. Becca had been too focused on the resistance to wonder about Heather’s silence, but thinking about it now, it seemed strange. After all of Heather’s worries, all her frustration at being kept out of the loop, now that her fears had actually come true she was nowhere to be found.

She brought her attention back to Vivian. “You shut the program down.”

Vivian frowned, the pain on her face morphing into confusion. “Heather really didn’t tell you about any of this?”

Becca shook her head, her own confusion growing. What had Heather kept from her? What was going on?

“I thought you two were closer than—”

“The fine art of tact might come in handy here, Vivian,” Ramon interjected.

Vivian shook her head. “Never mind. I guess it doesn’t matter now, does it? I’ll start from the beginning.” She took a long, steadying breath. “The day after I made the call, the directors ordered me back to my old job, as if the whole thing had never happened. At first I was just glad they hadn’t thrown me in a cell for shutting down the program too soon. But it seemed… weird. This plan was supposed to help Investigation get their reputation back, right? And now everyone is celebrating because of something we did.” She waved her hand to indicate the crowded restaurant and all it implied. “But it was like they didn’t even want to take credit.”

“Public Relations wondered about it,” Ramon confirmed. “A few of us started to ask around, but Investigation made it pretty clear that there would be… unpleasant consequences… for anyone who had too many questions.”

“Heather came to talk to me a couple of days later,” said Vivian. “To apologize. She assumed I already knew.”

“Knew what?” But a suspicion had begun to form in Becca’s mind.
No,
she pleaded inwardly, although she knew it was too late.
No, Heather. Tell me you didn’t do this.

“The program never ended,” said Vivian. “Everyone from my old team—they’re all still working on some secret plan. But with Heather in my place.”

Heather, tell me you didn’t—
But a sudden spike of fear pushed her concern for Heather to the back of her mind. “The spies are gone, though. Aren’t they?”

“They’re not using spies anymore,” said Vivian. “They’re doing something else. Heather said she couldn’t tell me more.”

Becca didn’t let herself feel relieved at that. There was still a new threat out there—a threat Becca knew nothing about. And if she was right, Heather was in as much danger as the resistance. “But what does this have to do with you calling Heather a…” She looked around at the crowd—at the tables full of listening ears—and didn’t finish the sentence.

“She told me they didn’t know why they had chosen her,” said Vivian. “I figured it was the same reason they chose me. I mean, with her family problems, who would make a better scapegoat than her, right? But I started hearing things. Rumors. Whispers when people thought I couldn’t hear. You know how it is—you can never keep anything completely quiet inside Internal.”

“Rumors about what?” Becca asked when Vivian didn’t continue.
Heather… what did you do?

“People were saying…” Vivian’s voice trailed off. She gritted her teeth and continued. “They were saying Heather had been working against me for weeks. Spreading lies about me. Talking to people close to the directors. They said what I did with the spies was exactly the excuse she needed.”

Heather, what did you—

But she knew. Some part of her had known with Vivian’s first mention of Heather taking over the program.

If I had Vivian’s position, they’d have a reason to listen to me.
Heather’s words. The words Becca had almost forgotten.

But Heather hadn’t forgotten. Heather had done it. Somehow, she had stolen Vivian’s place.

It wouldn’t take much to convince the right people that Vivian wasn’t up to the job. And that I’d do better as the hero of their story than she ever could.

Heather had lied to Becca from the beginning. She had never intended to give up on her plan.

She avoided Ramon’s probing eyes as she slammed a lid down on her fear, on the sudden rush of fury boiling through her veins. A response—she needed a response. What would she say if she were the person Vivian thought she was? “They were wrong. Heather would never do that.”

“That’s what I said at first too. But the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. The things they said she did—the words they said she used—it sounded like Heather. And Heather never wanted me working against Micah—what if this was her way of stopping me? So I went to her office to talk to her.” She paused.

Becca waited.

And waited.

“What did she say?” she prompted when Vivian still didn’t say anything.

“I never talked to her. When I got to her office—my old office—I could hear her talking to someone. So I waited outside.”

Another pause. Becca pressed her lips together to keep herself from screaming.

“I heard her talking about…” Vivian gripped the table as if for support. “She said they needed to find a way to delay the interrogations. To stop them until her plan could move forward. I don’t know what plan—she didn’t say. But that doesn’t matter. I heard enough.”

Heather had said that in the middle of Investigation 212. In a room that was probably bugged. Where people out in the hall could overhear. It took more effort for Becca to tamp down the anger this time. “It probably had to do with whatever the program is working on now.”

“That’s what I thought at first,” said Vivian. “Nothing else made sense. But I kept listening. I heard her promise the person a high-level job inside Investigation if the plan worked.” She paused again. Becca wanted to scream. “And I heard her threaten to frame him—or her, for all I know—for dissident activity if any more dissidents from the group were arrested.”

Vivian was right. There was no misinterpreting what that meant. There would be no explaining it away.

But Becca tried anyway. “It might not mean what you think it means. She might have been—”

“Oh, come on, Becca,” Vivian snapped. She wiped her eyes, where new tears had begun to form. “You know what it means.”

Becca waited for Ramon to back her up. But he remained silent, his face impassive. Becca couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

“I’m…” Vivian gave up on trying to hold back the tears. They trickled from her eyes as her face settled into an expression of grim determination. “I’m doing it tonight. I thought the two of you had the right to know.”

Doing it tonight.
She couldn’t mean… “You’re turning her in?”

“Don’t try to talk me out of it. I didn’t come here for advice. I know what I—” Vivian drew in a sharp breath, halfway between a gasp and a sob. “I know what I have to do.”

Becca started to protest. Vivian spoke over her. “Look, I don’t care if she’s a—” Vivian stopped short of saying the word. “I don’t
care
.
She’s still Heather. I’d do anything for her—you know that. I’d die for her if I had to.” She tightened her jaw, her breathing ragged as her tears dripped down to the table. “But this isn’t about me. It’s about what will happen if Heather’s plan works. You said it yourself, Becca—I can’t put one person’s life ahead of stopping these dissidents. Even if that person is Micah. Even if it’s me. And even if it’s Heather.”

“She’s not a… she’s not what you think she is. You know her better than that.” Becca’s words sounded hollow even to her. Hadn’t she thought she knew Heather? Hadn’t she thought she had convinced Heather to drop this?

“Stop it!” Vivian squeezed her eyes shut, sending more tears spilling down. When she opened them again, her voice was only a little calmer. “I don’t want advice. I don’t want you to talk me out of this. Just let me do what I have to do.”

“At least wait until you get more evidence.” Becca’s words came too fast. Too desperate. “Once you do this, you won’t be able to take it back. Don’t do it until you’re sure.” All she needed to do was buy a little time. Then she could help Heather run.

She’ll get caught. No one makes it out during a lockdown.

Or she could convince Vivian somehow.

Vivian knows what she heard.

She could fix this. She would fix this.
I’ll save Heather. I’ll save all of them.

Ramon still didn’t protest. With a thoughtful expression, he watched the scene unfold in front of him—but he wasn’t looking at Vivian. His gaze never left Becca’s face.

“By then it’ll be too late.” Vivian shook her head harder than she needed to. “Internal gave me this job, and I’m going to do it. Nothing else matters, right? Nothing but stopping these dissidents. That’s what I agreed to when I signed up for this. I had to work against Micah, and now I have to turn Heather in.” Too loud. As if she meant the words for herself as much as for Becca. “I have to.”

“Heather is not a dissident!” The forbidden word leapt out before Becca could stop it. She fought to control her breathing as the table went silent. She was slipping. Losing control.
I won’t lose anyone else. I won’t lose anyone else.

Ramon broke the silence. “I hate to say it,” he said, “but I agree with Vivian. If Heather really said all that, there’s not much else it could mean.”