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The office-and-storage room next to the clinic was stacked with jars of meds and piles of folded blankets wedged between boxes marked ‘first aid’. Jac was sitting on one of the crates at the far end of the room, scanning TV newscasts on Lizzie’s silver handset plugged to the wall screen. The encrypted messages on Lizzie’s unregistered had revealed nothing significant apart from Beau’s report about the missing bodies.
Kit limped in to watch with her, his bloodstained jeans roughly patched over the bandage covering the stitches.
“Jac? Anything new?”
“Not yet.” She waved the silver device resignedly. “Just repeat screenings of the interview I’ve already seen. How’s the leg?”
“Mending.” Kit pulled up another crate and eased tense shoulders against the wall.
Jac saw how exhausted he looked. He had been dealing with a lot of responsibility for someone not long turned twenty.
“Kit? You all right? Or maybe finally allowing yourself a few minutes rest?”
He managed a self-conscious grin. “The problem of having someone in my team who has your level of perceptive talent... I’m finding it impossible to hide the tiredness and uncertainty when I’m supposed to be the reliable leader keeping up everyone’s morale.”
Since being thrown together in their escape to the city, Jac had often sensed the strain Kit usually managed to hide beneath his dark good looks and air of quiet confidence, but it was only now she saw the real extent of it. She tried to reassure him.
“Hey. I don’t go round snooping in everyone’s head if that’s what you mean! Anyhow, you would notice straight away like you did that first time. But I still can’t control it. I mean, I always pick up on what people are feeling––then sometimes I get unexpected glimpses of what they’re thinking as well. But I can’t see how I would ever be able to do it to order. It seems to either happen or it doesn’t. And then not very often.”
She pushed the handset aside. “Look, why not make the most of having someone to talk to? I’m not going to undermine your leadership by gossiping with the others.”
He seemed to relax a little. “Thanks. It’s not easy to admit that I’ve found this unplanned operation in the city difficult. Too many unpredictable new things happening one after the other. And I’m worried about Luc and Karim. It felt wrong leaving them on their own in the metro station. With this new surveillance crisis keeping everyone busy, I couldn’t find out if anyone managed to get down there to keep an eye on them. They do have a habit of going for things and then thinking it through afterwards. Which doesn’t usually work out too well.”
“Raine’s orders. You only had one choice. And they should be safe if they stay down there. I think Razz said that apart from the car rental franchise on the top level, the whole place underneath had been officially sealed off and abandoned.”
“I still feel responsible for them, that’s all.”
Jac noticed him moving the blue phoenix leader-medallion through his fingers, as if constantly reminding himself of the responsibility it carried.
“Did you and Bel start leader training at the same time?”
“Two years ago. It’s hard, but I can’t imagine living any other way now.”
“I don’t understand.”
“It’s not easy to explain. It’s...” Kit scrolled through his handset archive to a teaching video. “Look. Maybe this explains it better than I can.”
The vid started with a sequence of Raine training new recruits in the forest clearing near the Warren, his voice clear and compelling even through the handset’s tiny speaker:
“When you can really lieth-focus, your communication becomes instant and intuitive, and you can have total trust in your team. You move as one. Watch.”
He tied on a grey harness and joined a group of rangers with dark camouflage clothing, armed only with arrows and knives. Six others in thick body-shielding and face masks carried training guns. Communicating with eye contact and hand signals, Raine’s team moved as if choreographed, expertly avoiding being marked by a hit and outmaneuvering the team with guns until they had scored on each of them.
The defeated team pulled training arrows from the body-shielding and removed their thick masks. It was obviously hot in there. They all congratulated each other, laughing.
Jac watched, amazed. “Raine’s team were all communicating beyond those physical signals. You can see the pattern of it from the coordinated way they move together.”
Kit stopped the sequence in surprise. “You figured that just from watching the vid?”
Jac closed her eyes, trying to imagine how it would feel to bond so intuitively with a whole group.
“I’ll never be able to do anything like that.”
“That’s exactly what those new recruits were saying after they watched the exercise. But they did learn the technique, with time and hard work.”
“How do you know?”
“I was one of them.”
“But if it’s only like that when you have the life-or-death incentive of fighting someone?”
“No. It’s the same helping Fin with a medical emergency. That all-encompassing, shared focus on saving a patient... You end up totally exhausted, drained, but the intensity of it draws you back, over and over again. It’s when things are comfortable it gets hard. Easy to get lazy, scrap self-discipline... It feels good at the time, but not for long.”
“How do you hang on to that focus?”
“Pendrac.”
“Oh.” Jac had never met the legendary Resistance leader said to be coordinating a hidden base somewhere in the western mountains. The old maps had marked that region ‘Wales’ but as it was now illegal to mention the old place names, most people had forgotten them along with most of the country’s history. Comparison with life before the crash was a recipe for discontent and even the old-timers who could still remember... well, they often chose to say nothing.
Jac was curious about Pendrac. “Raine said he really looks up to him, feels inspired and encouraged by his ideas. But Pendrac is based so far west––I didn’t know other people had formed that kind of inspirational relationship with him.”
“When I start to feel it’s all hopeless I study his training vids or his writing. His ideas keep us all going.”
There was something about the way Kit said it...
Jac stared at him. “It’s just a story isn’t it? An ideal. To keep up everyone’s morale. He is dead...”
Kit hesitated. “When we’re through this, you’ll go there. The western mountains. Then it won’t matter if you find a person or a story.”
“Why not?”
“If it keeps us together, focused on what we have to do, does it matter what it is?” He could see she wasn’t convinced. “Jac, I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be evasive. Everyone who goes to the mountains swears never to speak about what we’ve seen. As you will.”
Jac knew she would have to accept it for now, although it left her feeling curious about Kit, something missing in her understanding of him, something she couldn’t put into words. Her new relationship with Raine had changed the way she could relate to other men without becoming restless every time someone new and attractive came along.
Raine’s wiry strength and rugged looks were not handsome in a conventional way, but reflected his concern and skill in dealing with those under his command. It had touched a chord within her, a connection with the care she felt for her patients. The uncomplicated friendship she had been able to form with Kit was something new, and she was curious to explore.
“Kit? Why did you choose this life?”
He shrugged, as if searching for a simple answer.
“I think it chose me. Most refugees are running from debt-slavery or worse, but my family is wealthy. I was being groomed for a glossy political-corporate career within the Avarit faction. And I didn’t want it. A life of luxury from exploiting people who were born outside the elite? Not for me.”
“So you came to the Warren?”
“As soon as I turned sixteen I joined the military and my father was furious.”
“You wanted to be with them?”
He was a powerful fighter but it had never occurred to her that he had voluntarily been part of a military machine that habitually abused its power.
“I wanted to protect people. Then I learned what my privileged life hadn’t shown me. Instead of protecting, I was half the time pointing a gun at them.”
“Couldn’t you leave?”
“No. You have to sign for a fixed contract.” He didn’t meet her eyes. “After a year I was transferred to sanitizer support force. Helping them poison Outlanders’ food crops.”
Jac’s heightened senses could feel the shame Kit still felt even though he had left that life behind. She made an effort to keep her voice neutral, concealing her lifelong fear of the hunger and hardship the sanitizers inflicted on the Outland farmers.
“Go on.”
“Deserters who are caught are shot. If they do evade capture their families are sanctioned. I started to understand why there are so many suicides in the security forces.”
“So how did you get out?”
“A few weeks after my transfer we were in a fight with a family of Outlanders who, not surprisingly, didn’t want us there spraying toxic defoliant on their food. They made the mistake of trying to resist––and even though they didn’t have heavy weapons to match ours, the unexpected battle separated me and my friend Daniel from the rest of our unit. Daniel knew I was desperate to get out of the military any way I could without harming my family and he suddenly saw an opportunity to do it. He told me to run, said he would report me missing in action.”
Kit laughed bitterly as he described the insanity of that moment. “I wanted it to look convincing so I ran straight at the three Outlanders firing at us from the forest and somehow I didn’t get hit. I took out one of them, crossed their line and kept going.”
The smile faded as he recalled what happened next.
“A minute later the airstrike came in and there was nothing left of that part of the forest or anything in it except a load of burning wreckage.”
“Did Daniel get away with filing his fake report?”
“He was fine for almost a year. Then he tried to help another friend get out the same way. They were both caught and shot as deserters. Avarit media made a big thing of it.”
He fell silent and Jac suddenly understood what had happened back then.
“And he’s the reason you push yourself to be what Raine needs you to be. Someone to support Bel when she takes over from him. It’s for Daniel isn’t it? Because he gave you the chance to be here, to help people the way you always wanted?”
Kit watched her for a long moment.
“You don’t miss much do you?”
Jac gave a diffident shrug. “With someone like you it’s not difficult. Since we left the Warren I’ve watched you hiding your doubts about your decision-making––but you don’t lie and you always look out for everyone in your team before you think of yourself.”
She glanced back at the wall screen. “Now I’m meant to be using my supposed skill to figure out the motives of someone I don’t know––and what I’ve seen of him on TV so far quite frankly gives me the creeps... Hang on, more vid-news coming in.”
She turned up the volume and stared at the images. The interview followed the usual pattern; President Moris holding forth on how fortunate citizens were to have his firm hand in control, a strongman who could defeat the terrorist threat and rebuild their damaged country to achieve its former greatness. Twenty-three dangerous insurgents taken down before they could carry out a deadly attack in the city, and the hunt was on for the rest of the gang...
Jac kept her eyes on the president’s bland expression. Dark hair slicked back above a pale face almost gave him an air of cool professionalism, but his eyes were shifty and when his hands twitched there was a pattern there that didn’t quite fit...
“Kit, twenty-three bodies... that matching number, it’s too much of a coincidence. The lies I’m detecting have to be connected with the plague victims from that transporter that went missing. Moris is using those corpses as fake evidence that he just thwarted a terrorist attack. But there’s something more than that. I just can’t see it yet.”
Kit reached for the borrowed night-sights Razz had given him. Jac caught the movement out of the corner of her eye and laid a restraining hand on his arm.
“Kit, don’t go out there. You should rest and look after those stitches. It’s too late to contact anyone on the surveillance team and in any case I haven’t been able to give you any definitive intel about what to look for. The team can’t use the airwaves now the op is underway, not with staz monitoring every transmission.”
Kit fingered the night-sights restlessly.
“Any extra detail just might help someone on the front line figure out what we should to look for. It’s no help if you notice something and then we don’t use it. Never mind the coms blackout, I’ll go find them, pass the message on directly.” He winced as he heaved himself to his feet. “Jac, promise you’ll stay here in the clinic? It’s too risky for you outside with all this going on.”
“Sure. I’ll be well occupied helping out with patients.” Jac shrugged disparagingly. “In between watching our creepy president spin a few more versions of alternative facts.”