SAGE
The lunchroom hummed with conversation. My eyes searched for Finn at the long wooden tables, seats already filled with recruits. I didn’t spot him there or in the dinner line. Only when Jack’s fingertips pressed to my lower back and moved me toward the line did I realize I’d stopped walking. He nodded his head, a silent order to get in line, and then turned in the opposite direction before I could ask why I didn’t see Finn yet. Jack had said Finn should be at dinner for sure.
A few guards stood near the exits, and Jack sidled up next to them, clasping his hands behind his back and glaring at me. I glared back but stepped in line behind two girls who were deep in conversation about choke holds.
Windows ran floor to ceiling on the east wall, letting in a full panorama of the ocean. The beauty of the view felt wrong, meant for a different time and place, for families taking weeklong trips, or beachgoers seeking restoration and the luxurious feel of the sand between their toes. Instead, the waterline served as a barrier. The waves mocked me as they rolled off the beach, free to escape, leaving me and Finn trapped on this island.
The food line moved forward, and a tall, thin man wearing a hairnet but without much hair handed me a glass. “Fresh squeezed. You’ll like it.” He held out a glass to the recruit behind me, effectively moving me on. The liquid in the glass was the color of the green oak leaves back home. I hesitated at first, but when the liquid reached my throat, it cooled the raw ache from the day of screaming and salt-water. I emptied the glass before I even took a food tray.
Finn still hadn’t come, so I made my way down the center aisle toward a spot by the windows, far from anyone else. A few recruits at the next table made eye contact, one guy even smiled, but otherwise, I was left alone. Steam wafted off the tray of food in front of me—chicken, rice, vegetables.
I tried to take a bite, but found myself only staring at the cafeteria doors, willing Finn to walk through them. Then, a body appeared behind the chair directly across the table from me.
“Can I sit?”
It was the girl from training, with curly, deep red hair. She had a distinctly Irish accent. She didn’t wait for me to answer before pulling out the wooden chair across from me and sitting down. She held out her hand.
“Imogen,” she said. Her face looked innocent—porcelain skin, a light flush to her cheeks, a round child-like face—but she held a hardness in the set of her jaw.
Reluctantly, I extended my own hand. “Sage.”
“I know who you are. And I know why they brought you here.” She leaned in. “Caesar told me.” She stabbed a bite of chicken. “Not all the recruits are on the side of the Corp, you know.”
No, I didn’t know.
“I’m with Jack,” she said, chicken still in her mouth.
I glanced at Jack, but if he knew what she was saying to me, he didn’t act like he cared. My eyes flickered to the door again. “Have you heard about my brother by chance?” I asked her. If she knew so much, maybe she had the answer to this.
“Brother? No, Jack didn’t mention anything about you having a brother here. He just asked me to come sit by you.” My chest tightened, and I looked at Jack again. This time, he stared with zero expression on his face. I tried to speak to him with my gaze. Where is Finn?
“Do you have other siblings? A mother that goes along with the scientist father you have?”
“No other siblings. Just me and Finn and my mom.”
The last image of my mom in the car with blood on her face flashed through my head, and I set down my fork.
“My mom was a surrogate,” Imogen said, shoving another bite of food in her mouth as if nothing was wrong. If she noticed I was upset, she didn’t acknowledge the fact. “We all had surrogate mothers who signed contracts to carry and raise us.” She nodded her head across the lunch room full of recruits. “The agreement included child support and a substantial payout once the Corp took us.”
Imogen nodded at my raised eyebrows, as if to confirm the truth in her statement.
“They had just one problem,” she said. “When the time came, most of our families didn’t want to give us up.” Imogen stabbed a piece of food on her plate. “Usually it’s a car accident. Sometimes other things, a mom drowns, food is poisoned. It works in the Corp’s favor. They invite us to training school, the whole thing framed as an honor. We think one of the reasons we’re “chosen” is because we’re orphaned, and so we feel indebted to them. We’re grateful to get taken on. No one knows this, of course. I only know it because Jack told me when I got here.”
I struggled for something to reply with.
“I’ll get them back for what they did to her. Someday, I will.” Imogen stared out the window, her mind in another place, her chin set in that sharp, defiant line.
I wasn’t sure who the “her” was that Imogen talked about. Her mother? A sister? A friend?
I glanced around at the recruits, wondering the story each of them had. At one table, a guy tossed his fork in the air in some sort of trick move that made it land perfectly stabbed into his piece of meat. The recruit next to him tried to mimic the same. At another table, a girl with bleach blonde hair stood and did a little dance move, talking loudly, describing her gestures in detail before sitting in her chair again as the recruits around her laughed.
Imogen’s face looked sad—or was it lonely?—as she stared at them, too. “Now that the Corp knows we’re sterile, they’ll use us as private security for their ambassadors. They told us this morning. I don’t think anyone really even cares.”
My eyebrows rose. Jack hadn’t mentioned any of this to me. “Ambassadors?”
“The Corp has a presence in nearly half the world’s countries, each with an ambassador,” Imogen said. “They intend to be within all of them within ten years. They buy prominent businesses to establish themselves within the local government and then slowly purchase land for their crops.”
Imogen shook her head, as if shaking off a bad thought along with it. “Not me though,” Imogen said. “I’m going with you guys.” She smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. “So. You said your brother was brought here with you?”
At the mention of Finn, again I looked at Jack, willing him to feed me answers. He wouldn’t make eye contact with me, and I’d had quite enough of the waiting around. The line had emptied, everyone was at their tables eating dinner. So where was Finn? I was about to stand up and go over to Jack, to demand he take me to my brother, even if his dad would torture me for it—even if Jack himself tortured me for it. But before I could, Jack rolled away from the wall and pushed through the cafeteria doors.