Jax is avoiding us. I don’t know for certain, but he just kind of disappeared. He’s here but he’s not. It’s my fault, I told him to leave me alone. To stop making my life harder, but I didn’t mean for him to drop off the radar entirely. The only time I’ve seen him in the past few days is when he’s asleep. This is the least time that I’ve spent with him since we met in autumn.
That’s why, now, I’m in our dorm, sitting on the side of my bed watching him like a total loser. Not tugging my joggers on and getting out of here like I should. He always sleeps without a shirt and right now he’s sprawled out on his back, one arm flung above his head and kind of crooked around it, and the other resting over the sheet that covers his stomach. The top of his chest is exposed and, boy, you can tell he’s spent his whole life training. But the defined muscles aren’t what caught my attention. That would be the bruise on the top of his arm so big it just about wraps all the way around the muscle. Deep purple and red; the colors of a new injury. When the heck did that happen? And how? It must hurt like hell.
A noise—the door closing—and Ace raises his head from where he’s curled around Jax’s feet like a shaggy black and white blanket. I turn to the door, too, and Will’s poised, one hand on the knob, watching me. Dressed for duty in his jeans and black tee, he doesn’t smile or frown, just holds that impassive expression that’s almost sad.
I tug my boots on properly and jump up, moving across the room with lightning speed. It’s time our day started; a quick breakfast then straight to the scanner, that’s pretty much the routine. I want to do more—need to—but at the moment, saving every life we can has to be our top priority, no matter how desperately I want to track down my mother or make contact with Cynnie. I never would have thought it possible to grow so close to someone in such a short time; maybe it was the trauma, or her kindness. Either way not seeing her everyday has been an adjustment and with the way she feels about the founders’ ideals—
“Come on, Mae.” Will holds the door open until I’m through then clicks it closed behind us.
We don’t talk as we walk through the halls and downstairs. Will’s thinking, the slight movement of his jaw is a dead giveaway, like he’s gritting his teeth. We’ve been friends for long enough that I don’t need words to know how he’s feeling. I’d be nice to slide my arm around his waist in that easy way we used to have, a comfort against whatever horror we’ll face today, but I can’t. Instead I keep my arms by my sides.
The mood in the dining hall isn’t much different than Will’s. It’s almost empty, what with A crew sleeping and C still on duty, that leaves a handful of Bs and those people not in the fight physically, like Beau. He strides toward us before we’re even fully in the door. A man on a mission with his shoulders squared, his expression stern.
Will groans. “Whatever it is, can’t we have breakfast first?”
Beau blinks then shakes his head as if the thought never occurred to him. “Yes, of course.” He moves over to one of the tables and takes a seat beside Lilly, who unlike Will and me, is not dressed for combat: she’s wearing the white dress again. The same one she wore to Garrett’s funeral. She needs to move forward and get on with life; says the girl who’s still not over her mother walking out almost a decade ago. If only I knew how to help my poor friend. She’s hurting every day and I’m no better than a freaking statue.
A loud laugh draws my attention across the hall to my father, the only happy person in an otherwise somber room. I guess Beau keeps him out of the loop, as he does the other refugees. No point in Dad worrying when he doesn’t fully comprehend the situation. The people he’s with chatter happily, other workers in Martha’s new income creating plan no doubt. After another guffaw his attention snags on me and a slow smile spreads across his face. Some days he still doesn’t know me, but it looks like today he does. I smile back. I’ll catch him after breakfast when my mind isn’t preoccupied with whatever Beau wants.
The hall crammed with old kitchen tables feels so different to the farm. It’s much colder than the camaraderie of everyone eating together. In fact, most tables have only one person seated at them. Like the stranger at that round table in the center, staring vacantly at the wall. She’s not a woman I’ve seen here before. She must be a transfer.
After toasting a few slices of bread and smearing them with honey, I pour a mug of coffee and make my way to Beau, who’s now got Lilly’s little brother Levi, hanging off his side. Hopefully he doesn’t have more bad news. It would be better if he were here to tell us that the resistance has shored up all the holes, provided protection for everyone who ever came into contact with me. God knows, they need to.
I slip into the chair directly opposite him and Lilly doesn’t lift her attention from her bowl of oatmeal, just swirls her spoon making patterns in the trails of brown sugar. The kid takes one look at us, and jabs his father in the ribs, then scoots off. Scowling, Will drops into the seat beside me, half a loaf of toasted bread piled on his plate as if he’s going to share with the entire base. Martha must hate the huge dent he leaves in her food supply. Probably wishes he hadn’t told his folks he had a job with Beau, thus needing him to move here.
I take a bite of honey toast and it scratches on the way down as if all the saliva fled from my mouth. My tummy flutters nervously; maybe eating first wasn’t such a good idea.
“Any news on the school?” Will asks.
“That attack hurts.” No one at school would even know who I am, thanks to the Collective and their tech erasing me from my old life when I activated my mother’s cover-up. I’ll probably never finish my schooling, at least not in the near future.
Beau’s hands clench tighter around his steaming mug, and he blows into it, wafting the smell of his stronger-than-nails coffee through the air. “There’s nothing to find out,” he says. “There are no leads because it was just another attack. The Collective flexing their muscles. Trying to threaten us with their strength. That’s all.”
“It just doesn’t seem . . .” Fair, right. I was going to say ‘like them’, but really, I have no clue what’s normal for them. It’s not like I’ve been involved in this fight for a long time. It could be a cycle . . . but it’s more likely a reaction to the hit they took when Will rescued Jax and me.
“Look,” Beau says, “that’s not what I wanted to talk about. I need to take you off the field, Mae.”
“Great idea.” Trust Will to jump in.
I pierce him with a glare, then address Beau. “Ah, why? I have to be there. We need every set of hands we can get and I need to fight them. After everything . . . the Collective . . . Manvyke. They’ve uprooted my whole life.” My mother’s face flashes before my eyes, followed closely by my father’s. “I have to be on active duty.” To find her.
“That’s just it.” Beau cradles the coffee mug. “We need as many hands in the fight as we can get, or we’ll never put a stop to this.” His glance slides across the room to the woman staring at the blank wall. “With all the recent activity, there have been more refugees than ever before.”
Lilly stops studying her oats. “Before you guys, there hadn’t been any new blood since Jax.”
“I’m not quite sure where you’re going with this,” I say.
Beau sets his cup down. “I need someone to train the newbs who have flowed in from all the recent attacks. The Collective aren’t usually so sloppy.”
I shake my head. “Are you crazy? Lilly just said, we’re the newest resistance members, which makes us the most inexperienced. I can’t train people.”
“Newest, yes, but most inexperienced?” Beau’s face scrunches to one side. “Quite the opposite.”
Will places a half-eaten slice of toast on his plate. “I think it’s a good idea, Mae. We’ll be helping people and—”
“And we’ll be doing nothing to stop Manvyke. Nothing to find my mother. I may as well go back to school and making coffee at Joes.” I laugh. “If only I could.”
“Yes, we will. We’ll be increasing our numbers and the more fighters we have, the better our chances of bringing him down.”
“What about Manvyke—my mom? It’ll take months to train these people, Will. Besides, half the time I can barely hit a target.”
Lilly swirls her cup on the table. “Don’t cut yourself short. You’re good.”
Her too? They’re all freaking ganging up on me. Where the hell is Jax? He’d agree that I need to be in the thick of Collective activity.
“But it’s not something I’ve done my whole life, like you have. Or like my photography. I don’t know how to teach people to fight!”
“Mae.” Will lays his hand on my arm. “I think Beau’s got a good point.”
“No.” I glance at the woman who’s now staring at us. “You just want to keep me tucked away where it’s safe. I’m not a porcelain doll, Will.”
“It’ll free up more time for us to research—”
“No, it will take away time I should be spending with Dad. I won’t let anything interfere with the little time I have with him and this . . . this sounds exactly like the sort of thing that would. He needs me. Maybe you can train these—”
Beau clears his throat. “Sorry, Will. You’re too valuable on the field. You won’t be in on the training.”
Halle-freaking-lujah. No wait . . . Will’s important on the field, but I’m not? No way am I swallowing that crap. The anger building inside me is about to explode, red and hot and argh! “And I’m not valuable?”
Beau takes a deep breath. “You are more valuable than almost any other person, Mae. No one else has seen the Collective from the inside and—”
“Except Jax.”
Beau sighs. “Yes, except Jax. I’m not asking—”
“You want us both to—”
“Be quiet for two bloody minutes, and listen to me. I’m not asking you to teach these people how to fight. I’m asking you to teach them what they’re fighting.”
Freaking hell. Jax is indispensable too. Apparently I’m no better than little Levi.
“Teach them about the Collective?” Lilly says.
Beau leans back, slinging an arm over the back of his daughter’s chair. “Yes, about the Collective. I don’t want these newbs going in with any false ideas. They need to know what they’re getting involved in and they need knowledge of how it all works—tech and whatnot—to make them better able to help. They already know the bare basics, but—”
I blow out a long breath. “Isn’t Jax better suited to that? He knows the Collective better than anybody.”
“He can’t do it.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
No way in hell would he put up with this. Beau responds with one of his looks that feel like an order. Training people is a waste of my time. Heck, I don’t even want to run missions, or be in the fight. What I want is to track down my mother. More than anything else, I need to go back for her and hopefully it’s not too late. Like when she was dragged out of Manvyke’s office with a stoic expression, Bia’s bony fingers curled around her arms. It was too late then; Jax, pulled me past the door under the stairs—the place Bia would have erased her memory.
A shiver creeps down my spine.
No matter what state she’s in when we find her, it’s beyond important that we bring her to safety. Hopefully someone like Cynnie and Xane noticed her absence and went looking. We’ve got to get to her soon. The constant attacks just aren’t allowing the time though. Maybe teaching these recruits will mean less hours on the clock, which could give me a sliver of free time to save her. That would be a sliver more than I have now.
“Okay. All right. I’ll do it.”
Beau’s gaze levels with mine. “I’m not asking you sit out the fight forever.” He leans his elbows on the table and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Lilly can help you.”
“Sure,” she says, without even a protest.
A smug smile stretches across Will’s face. Traitor.
***
This place has more rooms than Swiss cheese has holes. Sleeping areas fill the third floor, and the ground is all living; kitchen, dining, common, headquarters—as Beau and Charlie call the office. The port room, weapons room and whatever take up the entire second floor. But boy, it’s easy to get lost. Even worse than the farm was at first.
Now, five of us sit around a table in a second-floor room: Lilly to my left, and the woman from breakfast, a guy a little older than us, maybe twenty or so, and an older man. The two men look angry. Hopefully it’s not directed at being stuck in a classroom—because that’s exactly what this feels like—with me and Lil as the teachers.
I swallow the ball of nerves in my throat and make eye contact with the woman, whose mousy hair needs a good brush.
“You all know that the Collective are responsible for many of the attacks we’ve seen recently. What you may not know is they are a secret society hell-bent on keeping advanced technology under wraps. They believe that it will corrupt society and ultimately cause its downfall. But on top of that, they also believe that humans need guidance. That we are incapable of peace and prosperity, and as such they need to steer society in the right direction. They use their advanced technology to do that.”
“To put it bluntly,” Lilly chimes in, “they’re all-controlling tyrants on an inflated ego kick.”
“Well, not exactly.” I glance at my friend. “Mostly they think they’re doing the right thing.”
“Why are we learning this drivel?” the older guy asks. “I just want to fight them. I want to get out there and make them pay. My wife—my wife—” his voice breaks “—she was killed in that bombing.”
“It’s important.” I catch his eye; try to hold it. “This knowledge will help you stop them for good. Not just kill a couple of agents in one lousy battle. We need to stop the war, the oppression, and for that we need to know them better than they know us.”
It’s not just them though. The bigger battle is with Manvyke, rather than the Collective, but these people don’t need to know that.
“So why’ve I never heard of them before then, hey? Tell me that.”
Lilly clears her throat. “Umm, secret means not public.”
“Something that huge can’t be secret.”
This guy just doesn’t get it. “That explosion you were in. If you hadn’t been brought here, what would have happened?”
“I’d have gone to hospital then gone home. Shit, I dunno. Could’ve ended up anywhere.”
The other two examine the peeling paint, the dust-filled lampshades.
“I mean what would have you have thought was the cause?”
“Terrorists.” He doesn’t even miss a beat. “Or maybe a psychopath, an activist group or something.”
“Right, because a bunch of other things like this have happened before, haven’t they?”
“Well, yeah.”
“What if I told you all those disasters—wars, terrorist attacks, mad gunmen—were the Collective?”
“But why?”
“Because they need to start a war, end a war; who knows what their exact reasons were.”
The three refugees snap their focus back to me. Maybe this hour won’t be so long after all.
***
“I’m over this,” I say to Lilly as we walk out of the room. “Is your dad ever proactive? I mean, I feel like all we ever do is react to the Collective. We never preempt and strike first. It’s just so . . . useless. We’ll be stuck in the same cycle forever.”
Our strides match as we walk down the hall and she weighs me up with a look. “What are you saying?”
“We can’t just leave my mother there as Manvyke’s plaything . . .” I swallow. The way he called her Annie, and made eyes at her, doesn’t sit right with me. “I don’t think she was ever with the Collective of her own accord.”
A shine bursts into her eyes, an excitement that I haven’t seen since Garrett. “Will’s going to flip.”
“Will’s going to have to deal.”
“What makes you say she didn’t choose to be there? She seems pretty resourceful, with all she did to help you and Jax. Surely if she wanted to leave she would have.” Lilly pauses to scratch her cheek, her expression thoughtful, and I get the feeling she’s choosing her words wisely. “She could have left at any time in the past ten years.”
She doesn’t say it, but the question hangs in the air between us. Did my mother choose them over us? Maybe she didn’t want a family. Maybe she didn’t love Dad and me at all. A lump springs into my throat and I swallow against it.
“I don’t know, Lil, but I have to find out. Besides, what if she needs help and I don’t do anything. I’ve been sitting quiet all this time, waiting on Beau, but recently it’s like there’s a knife twisting in my stomach with each new attack.”
Lilly stops mid-stride, her foot poised at the edge of the stairs, seriousness surrounding her very stance.
“We’d better talk to the boys, then.”
Asking for Jax’s help is a great idea; it might actually make him come around to talking to me again. Regardless of that though, I’ve never run a mission without him. It’d be weird to start now. And Will, if I don’t share this with him, I can kiss our friendship—and whatever else is between us—goodbye.
Lilly turns back the other way, and heads straight to the port room.
We enter to Will sitting around with the rest of our crew, all of them sprawled out like it’s been a quiet shift, which is good. Slumped on the floor with his back against the wall and one knee pulled up, acting as a prop for his elbow, Will twists a port band around his fingers. He sees us right away. “How’d it go?”
“All right, I guess. Boring.”
Lilly slides down the wall, landing beside him. “What about here?”
“Boring, too. Nothing much has happened, but I guess that’s good.”
I cross my legs, sitting grade school style on Will’s other side. With only two other people in the room, this crew is far too small with us gone. Jax isn’t here either and the others—neither of them Sam or Evan—leave Will as the best on this shift.
“Sam needs to do some shuffling, this crew’s too light.”
Will looks around like he hadn’t noticed. “It is small, now.”
I scoot in closer to him and lower my voice. “I’m going back.”
“What?” He snaps around to face me. “Mae, that’s dangerous. You can’t stroll into Collective territory. They all know your face. You’re probably a wanted person or something.”
“Told you he’d flip,” Lilly coos.
“I’m not flipping out.” He glances at the other two crew members—a couple about Sam’s age—watching us intently from the other side of the room, then nods toward the door. “Hall. Now. Lilly, let me know if there’s a call.”
“Sure.” She takes the port bands from his outstretched hand, then leans her forehead on her knees. If only I could rewind the last few months, and undo everything that lead to Garrett’s death. Heck, I wish I could rewind the past ten years and have both my parents back.
Will climbs to his feet and holds his hand out. I grab it and he pulls me up, but doesn’t let go when I’m standing. Instead, he pushes his fingers through mine touching our palms together. It’s kind of comforting, so I don’t let go even though I should as he leads me out of the port room and tugs the door closed behind us.
The hall stretches away on both sides, long and dim and empty. Will squeezes my hand. “I know how important this is for you,” he says, “but you can’t go rushing in recklessly. What if . . .” his gaze slips away from mine.
I’m tired of everyone tiptoeing around it. “What if she doesn’t want to be rescued? Well, we’ll jump that snag when we get to it, but she won’t harm me. She risked so much to help Jax and me. She cares, Will. I know she does.”
His free hand slips around my waist and he pulls me closer. It feels good—I’ve been so alone lately, with none of our usual hugs or banter. No contact at all. I lean into him, inhaling his smell; that familiar, safe scent that’s Will. Will who’s always understood me, always was my best friend. I close my eyes and the heaviness in my chest consumes me, weighing me down with memories.
“Anamae,” Mommy scolded, “don’t play with that. It’s not a toy.”
I placed the glowing thing on the bench. It was so pretty and I’d never seen anything like it. I shouldn’t have brought it down here though, should have played with it upstairs instead. But when I found the ‘thing’, I wanted to show her. Mommy snatched it up, moved her fingers over its flat front and frowned. She climbed the stairs into the attic, mumbling with each step. Why couldn’t I look at it? Maybe it was a gift for Daddy if she was hiding it in the attic. I snuck up the stairs behind her. The attic was Mom’s room—the place she hid things. Like Christmas presents and pretty glowing things, old treasures Daddy called junk and sometimes even jewelry. But never the flower necklace, that one she never took off. Ever. It hung around her neck right now all beautiful-like.
I stopped three stairs from the top. Shuffles and the sound of her feet scuffing the bare floorboards didn’t hide her voice.
“I will never do that. Why can’t he just let me go?” She sounded sad or maybe angry. That made me feel sad too.
A loud thunk made me jump so high I nearly fell off the step. Then she was right in front of me, staring down at me and I reached out to cuddle her.
“This attic is out of bounds, Anamae. Do you hear me? You are not allowed up here.”
I flinched again, not used to being shouted at. I nodded quietly and tiptoed downstairs.
My chest heaves at the memory from the year before she vanished. That screen-thing—so much like the Collective’s school slates—must have been just that, a way for her to keep in touch with them. What if Will’s right? What if she never wanted a family, never wanted to leave the Collective, never even wanted me. My stomach roils up a storm and I take a shaky breath.
Will pumps my hand with his. “I’m not stupid enough to think you won’t do this just because I think it’s a bad idea. Let me catch some sleep and we’ll figure it out, okay?”
I wind my arms around his waist, taking another deep breath for comfort. We will figure it out. We have to. He squeezes me tighter and his lips press against my forehead in a reassuring gesture. Will’s right. Closing my eyes, I rest my head on his chest, until he pulls away.
“Okay, tomorrow.”
It feels good to know we’re a team.