Rebellion (2 page)

He presses his mouth to mine, and I believe him.

2

The mess hall is crowded when we arrive. Men and women wearing faded army clothing sit at the round tables with their breakfast trays, some of them playing cards or dice, laughing as they eat, as if this life is normal to them.

I didn’t know what to expect when Beechy told me about this place, when he said the base housed a group of people who’d been working undercover to overthrow the Developers and liberate the work camps. I had no idea the operation was so complex. But I didn’t know a lot of things until a few days ago.

“Clementine, over here!” My roommate, Skylar, waves at me from a table by the wall. She has two open seats beside her.

“I’ll grab you a tray,” Logan says, dropping my hand.

“Thanks,” I say.

As he heads for the counter at the back of the room, I slip between the tables, avoiding people who are trying to scoot their chairs out or stand up. But I bump into a woman on accident, nearly knocking her tray over.

“Sorry,” I mumble.

She gives me a small smile, edging out of my way. I can’t help staring at her. Her face and arms and neck are covered with more bruises than I’ve seen on anyone, all of them horrible shades of purple. Like she was cut up with knives or stuck with too many needles.

I’ve seen another woman with scars like these. She was strung up inside a glass cage when I arrived in the Core after I was picked for Extraction, and Commander Charlie made me shoot her to prove I would do anything to stay alive. He was disappointed when my shot didn’t kill her and someone had to finish the job for me.

Quickly averting my eyes, I hurry past the woman. There’s only one place she could’ve gotten those bruises: Karum. The prison on a cliff above the sea, where Charlie and the other Developers send those they can’t control with their monthly injections. They study them and do everything in their power to break them, and mostly they succeed.

I try to avoid the others who came from there. I know it’s stupid. I was one of them; I was Unstable too. But whenever their eyes catch mine, I see the cell bars reflected in them. I see the doctors leaning over me, and the needles that left marks on my arms.

I see bodies in the sea.

The memories cause my hands to tremble, my throat to clog up, and my chest to feel like it’s about to explode. If I told Logan or Beechy I keep having panic attacks and nightmares, they’d probably tell me to go to the sick bay and have the nurses give me something to help me feel better. Maybe medicine could make all of it go away.

But I don’t trust injections or pills, not even here. What I need more than anything is a distraction. I need to
do
something. It’s taking too long for us to gather the information we need to form a suitable attack plan.

“You all right?” Skylar asks when I reach her. My expression must not be as composed as I thought it was.

“I’m great,” I say, dropping into the seat beside her.

Her eyebrow raises slightly, but she shrugs. “Shiny,” she says, snatching up the set of dice on her tray. Today her shoulder-length blond hair is twisted into a bun at the nape of her neck. Her pilot helmet sits on the table beside her tray. She carries it with her everywhere, so she’ll always be ready to fly.

“Take your roll,” the male pilot across the table says. I recognize him as one of the men who broke me and the other Unstables out of Karum prison.

“What, Buck, are you so eager to lose?” Skylar smirks, tossing her dice on the table. She rolls double sixes. With a hoot of excitement, she throws her hands in the air. The pilots at the table next to ours glance over, some of them laughing, others shaking their heads.

Buck groans and throws the rest of his rusty nails into the pot. “I swear, you’re the vruxing luckiest winger I’ve ever laid eyes on.”

“The
smartest,
Buck.” Skylar scoops up the pot and moves it to her side of the table. She nudges my elbow. “I’m also the youngest person ever to make head pilot. Started flight training when I was ten and got promoted at fourteen.”

Buck rolls his eyes and takes a swig of his drink. “Started bragging the day she was born.”

“Oh, shut up.” Skylar throws a die at Buck, and he fumbles to catch it. “You’ve done your share of bragging too, Mr. No-One-Can-Fly-the-Pipeline-as-Fast-as-I-Can.”

“They sure as moonshine can’t.” Buck curls the edges of his thick mustache. Skylar laughs.

Chewing my lip, I snatch up the other die from her tray and turn it over in my fingers. I want to challenge Skylar, but I need more practice against easier opponents first. She’s won every single game I’ve seen her play. She might be one of the youngest people in the Alliance, but she’s certainly not the least experienced when it comes to gambling games or piloting ships.

“When did you two join the Alliance?” I ask.

Beechy told me he and his wife, Sandy—Commander Charlie’s only daughter—founded the Alliance a little over a year ago, with a few of their closest friends. It took months and months for the insurrection group to grow to the size it is today. Now they have about two hundred people working to overthrow the Developers. Most of them aren’t here; they are still undercover in the Surface settlement or in the lower sectors.

“Sandy recruited me about two months ago,” Buck says.

“I joined a couple weeks ago, after Commander Charlie made his announcement,” Skylar says. “If Beechy or Buck here had trusted me more, I would’ve joined a hell of a lot sooner.” She snorts, but a subtle hardness seeps into her expression.

“Yeah, I know how you feel,” I say, setting the dice back on the table.

Beechy didn’t use to trust me either. He was my friend in the Core, but he didn’t confide in me about his plan for an uprising until after he rescued me from Karum. Until I’d already been captured.

Instead of being part of something, I thought I was alone. I thought everyone in the Core was a mindless soldier and I had to stop Charlie with absolutely no help.

Logan takes the seat beside me and hands me a food tray. Today’s breakfast offering: yellow hash beans and dried shir bread.

“Thanks,” I say.

“Sorry, they were all out of the stew,” Logan says, unscrewing his water canteen.

Bansa stew is my favorite. But all the food we’ve had in the compound has been better than the food I used to eat in the Surface work camp, so I’m not about to complain.

“This looks good too.” I spoon a bite of hash beans into my mouth. There are hardly any in my bowl, but at least they’re sweet and aren’t too watery.

We’ve been rationing the nonperishable food from the storage rooms, since there are thirty-five of us to feed. We don’t know how long we’ll be holed up in here, nor when we’ll be able to find fresh food. There used to be herds of animals roaming the snowy mountains outside, but it seems many perished when the deadly acid seeped into Kiel’s atmosphere. Even though the protective shield was down for only an hour, the acid had plenty of time to contaminate the air and everything on the Surface that wasn’t indoors. Even vegetation in the ground probably isn’t safe to eat.

Beside me, Skylar stands up and dumps the remaining contents of her tray in the trash receptacle. Taking her seat again, she pulls a rag out of her pocket, spits on it, and rubs her helmet to make it shiny. “So, you two ready to fly today?” she asks.

“Definitely,” Logan says through a mouthful of bread. He swallows before he continues, “Are we going out in the tunnels again?”

“We are, presuming Beechy gives us the go-ahead.”

“Have you seen him today yet?” I ask before taking a sip from my water canteen.

“He’s been in the command center all morning, keeping an eye out for the scout ships to give his wife and the other techs a break.”

Of course that’s where he’s been. Beechy’s been spending all his time overseeing repairs, plotting strategy with the heads of our flight and ground specialist teams, and keeping all systems in the command center running. I’ve hardly spoken to him these past few days, not since he helped me return from the moon and brought me here to safety.

“There’s been no word from the scouts yet, has there?” Logan asks.

“None,” Skylar says.

It’s not a good sign. We sent two scouts outside the compound to bring back news of Charlie’s movements since our battle with his men one week ago. Cady—an Alliance leader who helped Beechy break into Karum—and her copilot were supposed to make their way to the Surface city and attempt contact with some Alliance members working as officials. The mission shouldn’t have taken more than a few days, unless Cady and the other scout ran into trouble.

Skylar rubs her helmet harder with the shining rag. “I’m not sure it’s smart to keep waiting for them. We need to make a move before Commander Charlie does.”

Buck takes another swig of his drink. “Problem is we don’t know what to expect out there. Could be everyone’s dead on the Surface ’cept for us. Moonshine could’a killed everyone in the work camp.”

An image of my old friend Grady crumpled up on the ground outside his shack, his face charred away by the moon’s deadly acid, flits through my head.

I set down my spoon, not sure I can eat another bite of food. I want to believe he’s alive and okay. But Buck is right. Grady and the others in the camp might not be.

“The people in the city could’ve survived,” Skylar says. “They have well-fortified buildings. They have safety suits to wear if they need them.”

Buck gulps more of his drink, which I’m beginning to suspect might be something stronger than water. He wipes his mouth and mustache with the back of his hand. “The point is, we don’t know what we’re up against. We can’t make smart tactical decisions until we do.”

“The scouts will come back,” Logan says firmly. “I’m sure the mission just took longer than they expected.”

“It’s been six days. They could be lying in a ditch somewhere. They could’a deserted.”

“Cady wouldn’t desert,” Skylar says. “She helped found the Alliance—”

“Could’a changed her mind.”

Frustration makes me ball up my hands into fists under the table. “Then what do you think we should do, if you don’t want us to wait for them and you don’t want us to start fighting?”

Buck gestures to the room, to the people chatting at the other tables. “To be honest, I’m happy sitting right here. I’m pretty comfortable.”

If he thinks this place will protect us forever, he’s an idiot.

“We can’t abandon the people outside,” Logan says, his nostrils flaring in annoyance.

“Besides, Charlie knows some of us survived,” I say. “If we sit here and do nothing, he’ll come looking for us, or he’ll build another bomb that’ll blow up the entire Surface—including our headquarters.”

“That’s just it, we ain’t safe anywhere.” Buck’s voice grows louder and gruffer than before. “We don’t have the numbers to launch a full-scale attack against the Core. Maybe if we had all the kids from the camps on our side, maybe then, but that ain’t gonna happen. We’ll die before we get there, if we don’t die in here. Maybe today, maybe tomorrow. Don’t make a difference to me.” He scoots his chair back and stands, grabbing his tray.

“Buck, come on, relax,” Skylar says.

He doesn’t turn around. He nearly walks into several people as he heads for the door, making me wonder how much of his non-water he’s had to drink.

“Is he serious?” Logan asks.

Skylar rolls her eyes, but her knuckles whiten as she balls up her shining rag. “I doubt it. He can be a real pain in the ass sometimes, but I know he believes in what we’re trying to do here. He wants to overthrow the Developers. He just gets scared we’re going to lose.”

I stare at the door to the mess hall, swinging shut behind Buck’s angry figure. He might be right; our fight might be hopeless. But even if it is, we can’t give it up. We can’t forget those who are still imprisoned in the work camps, especially now that there’s acid descending on them from the sky. They already lived in fear of death, and now they have one more way to die.

They deserve freedom. But even if the scouts return and bring us news so we can launch an attack, it will take a lot more than a single battle to liberate everyone in the camps.

Our uprising has barely begun.

*   *   *

After breakfast, Logan and I go to the flight port with Skylar. The port lies at the center of the KIMO facility, spanning a width of about thirty yards, filled with ships of varying sizes and models. The port separates the mess hall and bunk rooms on one side of the compound from the training rooms and medical ward on the other.

The buzz of drills grows louder as we walk through the doors. Sparks fly to my left, where a man wearing a mask over his eyes drills underneath a flight pod. The rebels brought six pods with them from the Core, and two bigger hovercraft. One is the hovercraft Beechy and I flew back from the moon—the one that used to carry the bomb that would’ve destroyed us all. We landed the ship out in the valley, but we couldn’t leave it there, in case Charlie’s people found it.

I hate that it’s here, reminding me of what happened aboard it every time I walk into the port. But we didn’t have a better place to hide it.

The only other ships in the compound are the four old Davara jets left behind from KIMO corporation. They sit front and center in the hangar, in varying states of repair. My other roommates, Fiona and Paley, feed an oil line into the fuel tank of one of the jets. With both of them in matching mechanic uniforms and their dark hair tied up in ponytails, it’s difficult to tell the twins apart.

Skylar whistles. “Beauty, isn’t she?”

Logan casts an amused look in her direction. “Don’t you mean ‘they’? They’re identical, aren’t they?”

“Oh, come on, I meant the ship. I took her out for a test drive yesterday and got pretty attached. Though the girls aren’t half bad either.” Moving closer, Skylar calls to the twins: “How’s she coming?”

Fiona looks over at us and waves. Her smile stretches the dark mole on her upper lip. “She’s ready to fly, if you want to take her out again.”

“Maybe later,” Skylar says. “Got some newbies to teach first.”