The Society (A Broken World Book 1) (17 page)

"You're setting up an insurrection," I breathed.

Brennan nodded. "Piter is most concerned about getting his hands on more rifles—which is understandable considering they're the hardest part of the equation. I've been slowly satisfying his demand for rifles, but under-supplying him when it comes to the ammunition necessary to make the rifles useful. Victoria, on the other hand, has been forced to make do with just two rifles, but has nearly a hundred rounds for every single rifle I've given Piter."

I shook my head in awe. "You're planning on the rebels being able to take weapons from Piter's men."

"Yes, exactly that. There's still an unfortunate amount of risk, but Victoria's people will have had weeks to identify which of Piter's men have rifles and the best ways to take them out, which means they should have a decent chance of succeeding. If at all possible, we'll support them with an attack by the guardsmen from inside the compound, but that's predicated on Jax's people not being needed to combat one or more of the other gang leaders."

I looked over at the closest target, noting the tight cluster of shots through the center of the paper. They were still shooting from close range, so it was hard to be sure, but it looked like whoever had just finished shooting was a better shot than me. "Even if you succeed, your people could take terrible losses."

Victoria shrugged. "We're all aware of the risks; none of us wants to die, but each of us has lost somebody we care about to Piter or one of his men. Death is better than having to continue living as a slave."

Brennan gave her a sad smile. "As much as I'd like to spend hours down here with all of you, we won't keep you from your practice—I know that you can't linger here without running even greater risks than you're already running."

We all said our goodbyes and the three of us headed back towards the surface. My original appraisal of Brennan had been correct.

There was a lot more going on in this city than I'd realized.

Chapter 12

I hadn't been quite sure what to expect when we got back to the headquarters building and doffed our balaclavas again. It was awfully early in the day to be calling it quits, but for once Jax and Brennan seemed unified regarding what needed to happen.

"You need time to process all of this."

"What's to process? I thought you were awesome, then I thought that you were just as bad as Piter and the rest, then only a few minutes after that I found out that you're even more committed to helping out everyone else in the city than I thought you were. It seems to me like we've just come full-circle."

Brennan shook his head. "It's not that simple, Skye. I wish it were, but it's not. Everything I just showed you was the truth, but that doesn't mean that there aren't gray areas that you're going to have to trust me to navigate."

I shrugged. "My world doesn't have much gray in it, Brennan. Everything is pretty much black and white. People like Piter need to be stopped, and you're the only one who's willing to do it. I'm in. Let's get to work."

"Just like that you're willing to take a bullet for me?"

"The odds of someone shooting at you are pretty slim. We own most of the guns, remember?"

Brennan looked down at his watch, an antique timepiece that had to be more than a hundred and fifty years old, and then turned back to Jax.

"Tyrell is going to need to supervise rebuilding the foundry without me. Can you please head down the bore and let him know that I've been unavoidably detained?"

"Let's go over to Chell's room and see if he's there. He can run the message down."

Jax looked like he was digging in for a fight, but Brennan stopped him with a look. "If I'd wanted Chell to run the message, I would have told you to go ask Chell to do it, old friend. I know that you're nervous about leaving me here by myself, but Skye has had several chances already to kill me if that's what she really wanted to do."

"With all due respect, Brennan, now isn't the time to be risking everything on your gut. With the progress you're making towards completing the prototype it's almost certain that the an—"

"That's enough, Jax. When you signed onto my service you agreed that there were going to be times that I couldn't share the whole picture with you. Sometimes that means that you have to take my decisions on faith—just like everyone else. You're the next most technically skilled person after Tyrell and me in the entire compound. If I can't be down there with him, then I need you to be down there serving as his strong right hand. Trust me on this; Skye isn't going to hurt me."

Jax's lips tightened into a thin line, but after several seconds he nodded and headed back towards the stairs, and it was just Brennan and me. Brennan studied me for a heartbeat or two, and then waved for me to follow him. A short time later we were standing in front of another door, this one made out of heavier steel than mine.

Once the door was unlocked, I followed Brennan inside and realized just how naive I'd been to think that someone like Brennan would live in a room like mine. I'd thought that the amount of space I'd been given here in the compound was excessive, but my room was less than half as big as Brennan's.

That was just the start though. The far end of Brennan's room was filled with a variety of firearms, most of which appeared to be working prototypes that he'd abandoned somewhere along the process. One set of shelves was taken up by a set of rifles that clearly showed the progression he'd gone through in arriving at the current issue weapon that Jax and all of the rest of the guards carried, an all-steel utilitarian weapon that was capable of laying down a devastating hail of bullets from a variety of distances.

I was more interested in the shelf next to it which held a monstrous rifle that was obviously designed for use by snipers. Judging by its appearance, it easily weighed more than thirty-five pounds, and was probably capable of delivering a bullet the better part of a mile away from wherever the shooter was located.

Nobody had briefed me that this was even a possibility. A weapon like that would be only moderately useful without precision optics, but if Brennan could get that part of the system ironed out, he could conceivably kill people across a distance of two or three territories. He'd carved out his territory on the strength of his guards and their fully-automatic rifles, but the weapon I was looking at would be an incredible force multiplier. A small group of snipers could kill dozens—maybe even hundreds—of enforcers while the opposing force was still well outside of the range of the rifles Brennan was slowly letting his enemies get their hands on.

The space between the prototype weapons and us was filled with a startling array of tools and projects, everything from hundred-year-old computer equipment to high-speed lathes. For a moment I felt a flare of hope that Brennan had just taken me to his prototype generator, but nothing in the room looked like a good fit for what the scientists back on the other side of the barrier had theorized the generator would look like. There were no bulky power cables running from any of the machines I couldn't identify, which meant that it wasn't here.

The area closest to us had several chairs and a couch which was little more than a stainless steel frame that supported large swathes of sturdy fabric. None of the furniture looked particularly comfortable, but it was a clear attempt at giving visitors a place to sit and converse. It made me wonder how frequently he entertained in his room, which brought my eyes over to the thing that I'd been steadfastly trying to ignore.

Surprisingly, his bed wasn't any different from mine. It was a simple gray hammock dangling from two bolts in the ceiling, and I was relieved to see that it was much too small to accommodate a second person. The Society in general was relaxed when it came to people sleeping together, but not for people still in the juvenile dormitories, and even once someone left the juvenile dorms, it still was frowned upon until after they'd earned their franchise.

I hadn't really thought that Brennan was bringing me into his room so that he could seduce me, but as odd as he was acting, almost anything was possible.

"Go ahead and sit down, Skye."

I took a seat in one of the chairs, worried that picking the couch might give Brennan the wrong idea. "You're acting a little crazy, Brennan—more so even than usual. What's going on?"

Brennan dropped down onto the couch and sighed. "You're in, Skye. You passed the test. You were angry that I was helping Piter out—I could tell—and it wasn't because you wanted vengeance of some kind or another. You sincerely thought it was terrible that anyone would help him keep all of those people subjugated."

I shook my head in astonishment. It was hard to keep up with Brennan. "I thought you felt like I needed time."

"I do, but that's not because I don't trust you."

"Really? Because it kind of feels like you don't. If you really trust me, then let's get back to work."

My voice had gotten a little…testy. I was trying not to let the situation get to me, but I was undeniably uncomfortable. This mission was supposed to have been a simple information-gathering project. I was supposed to figure out where the generator was being built, and then radio back in for additional instructions. I'd known going in that I was going to have to deceive people, but I'd been mentally preparing to deceive people like Beth, Jerome, Billy and Del.

None of them had been idiots exactly—actually, that was a pretty good description of Jerome and Del—but convincing a team leader, or even a foreman like Tyrell, that I was nothing more than just another teenage grubber girl was a completely different undertaking than lying to someone as intelligent as Brennan.

All of my test scores had indicated that I was possessed of above average intelligence, but I was still a ways below genius level, and the more time I spent around Brennan the more convinced I was that he was the real deal. He was the kind of mind that only came along once in a century.

If he'd been born two hundred years ago he would have probably spent all of his time sitting in front of a computer screen. He would have been skinny and so focused on his chosen profession that he probably wouldn't have noticed if a bomb went off a block away from wherever he was working. Maybe if he'd been born back then he could have invented something that could have stopped the Desolation, but he hadn't been born two hundred years ago.

He'd been born now—within a year or so of me. That meant that he'd survived—and even prospered—in a lethal environment. It meant that he had the broad shoulders and hard muscles of someone who'd spent long hours doing the manual labor required to begin rebuilding the technology base that had been destroyed in every part of the world not protected by the barrier.

It meant that he wasn't oblivious. He was sharp as a whip and more than capable of ferreting out my secrets—only he seemed to have some kind of odd blind spot where I was concerned.

Somehow along the way he'd decided that I was to be trusted—decided that off of very flimsy evidence. All of my training said that this was the time to jump in and see how far his trust extended, but a tiny voice in the back of my mind was screaming it was a trap. A man capable of rediscovering lost processes and technology that was little more than myth to the rest of the grubbers wasn't the kind of person who would accept things at face value like this.

That kind of person would relentlessly question everything he believed, seeking for discrepancies between the way he
thought
the world worked and the way it
actually
worked.

"I know how this must sound, Skye, but I believe that once you agree the broad principles in life, all of the little stuff eventually takes care of itself. If you can get people headed in the same direction because they agree about the most important stuff, then everything else is just minor details.

"I saw that you care about how people are treated, that you have an innate sense of justice. I talked to Beth and she said that you were a good worker. Not just smart, but that you seemed to enjoy the satisfaction of a job well-done. I can work with someone like that. The only question is whether you can work with someone like me."

I shrugged. "I'd say yes, but you're obviously not convinced. Go ahead and let the other shoe drop."

"Okay, that's a fair challenge. The long and the short of it is that I believe everything Tyrell says in his recruitment speech—that's why I let him give it the way he does rather than focusing on something else. I'm going to take the fight to the ants, Skye. What do you think about that?"

All of my instincts screamed at me to jump him right then and there. The Citizen-President had said that Brennan was a threat to our way of life—to the precepts. I'd nearly been taken in by the facade, nearly believed him to be some kind of harmless inventor, but this was unarguable proof that my briefings had been right all along. Brennan was dangerous.

I'd spent enough time among the Society's military recruits to understand that there were real, serious threats to our Society. Our population was less than a fraction of one percent of that of the rest of the world. Conservative estimates indicated that there were more than two billion people out there on this side of the barrier who wanted nothing more than to kill every last franchised citizen.

If every single franchised citizen had been willing to take up a weapon in our defense, we still would have been outnumbered. When you compared all of the grubbers to the small number of men and women who chose to enlist in the military, the ratios were even further against us.

If all of the billions of people in the world were able to assemble themselves into one giant body and throw themselves against the barrier, it would come down, overloaded from the effort of holding back an inexorable tide. The last thing the world needed was for the masses of grubbers to be led by someone like Brennan, someone capable of molding the world around him with nothing more than the brilliance of his mind and the unrelenting power of his will. If left unchecked, Brennan would destroy hundreds of years of civilization and progress simply to see our Society—my Society—burn.