No Return (The Internal Defense Series)
Read No Return (The Internal Defense Series) Online
Authors: Zoe Cannon
Zoe Cannon
Kindle Edition
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Cover Art:
Hands image © Tracy Hebden (quayside) / Bigstock.com
Forest image © ando6 / Bigstock.com
Cover Design:
Zoe Cannon
This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
“Why are we here?”
Becca didn’t allow herself to flinch at the hostility in Alia’s voice. She took a deep breath, schooling her face and body into the hard lines of authority, smoothing her thoughts free of the anxiety she couldn’t afford. “We’re doing what we can. It may not seem like much, but—”
“Don’t give us that crap again,” Alia interrupted with a scowl. “Every week it’s the same. You tell us we’re doing what we can, and we sit around arguing and doing exactly nothing. So why are we even here?”
Alia sat across from Becca in the circle of folding chairs, directly below a faded poster that proclaimed,
The fight against dissidents begins with us!
Above the poster, a ceiling-mounted camera fixed its dead eye on the group. Its darkness and stillness—and the fact that they hadn’t been arrested yet—assured Becca that it had been turned off.
Beside Alia, Sean nodded his agreement. But Jared formed his hands into fists, fixing Alia with a hard glare. “You have no right to speak to Becca like that.”
Peter, sitting on a stack of storage crates in the corner, hunched his shoulders inward; his lip quivered. Meri took his hand in a motherly gesture, a troubled frown growing on her face as she watched the scene unfold.
Becca cut him off. “It’s all right, Jared.” She cast her gaze around the circle, meeting everyone’s eyes in turn. Showing them what they needed to see: the leader of the resistance. Capable, confident, unshaken.
This is who I am now,
she reminded herself.
I can do this.
I don’t have a choice.
She didn’t look away as Alia’s eyes burned through her. Her chest tightened. She pushed the feeling aside as she forced another breath into her lungs. She couldn’t allow herself uncertainty. Couldn’t allow herself fear.
I will be who they need me to be. I will.
But the rift between her and the others that had formed in the aftermath of the liberation hadn’t healed. Instead, it had gotten worse with every meeting—with every challenge from Alia and Sean, every disapproving look from Meri. With every time Becca had to say,
We’re doing everything we can.
“We can’t risk hijacking this transport.” Even now, three years after taking over the resistance, the hardness in her voice still unnerved her. Every time she spoke, she heard an echo of Raleigh Dalcourt—Internal Defense’s most feared and celebrated interrogator, the mortal enemy of the resistance.
Her mother.
This is who I am now. This is who I have to be.
Still, she tried to soften her words as she continued. “I want to save those prisoners as much as you do. But Enforcement has already started another wave of crackdowns. If we do anything visible right now, it will only make things worse. We need to lie low.”
“We’ve been lying low for the past year,” said Sean in his flat voice. “We need to send a message.”
Alia huffed. “Forget about sending a message. How about protecting innocent people from being tortured and killed—you know, what we all signed up for in the first place? Okay, so maybe the liberation was a mistake. It drew too much attention. But for two years before that, we saved lives a handful at a time. We hijacked prisoner transports. We got warnings out to dissidents who were about to be arrested. We gave people new identities and helped them run. We let them know there was hope in the world, like you promised we would when you recruited us.” Her narrowed eyes sparked with challenge. “How many people have we saved since the liberation? And how much time have we spent sitting around talking about lying low?”
Three years ago, that could have been Becca. Three years ago, it
had
been her, trying to convince the old resistance to act while they talked to her about caution and risk. Their deaths, and her failed attempt to singlehandedly stop the reeducation program, had done what their words couldn’t. She had learned the necessity of prudence, of choosing her battles.
Or so she had thought.
Then she had found an opportunity bigger than anything she had imagined even in those naïve early days. An opportunity to free every prisoner in Processing 117—the country’s largest and most notorious processing center, where dozens of dissidents were tortured and executed every day while hundreds more waited their turn in the building’s vast labyrinth of underground cells. She had taken the chance. Given the order. And because of her, nearly a thousand prisoners had gone free.
And everything that happened next… that was because of her too.
For longer than Becca had been alive, Internal had kept people afraid with stories of a vast resistance movement intent on tearing apart the fabric of society and replacing it with lawlessness and anarchy. The reality couldn’t have been more different—dozens of tiny groups working in isolation throughout the country, barely able to keep themselves alive, much less plot revolution. But Becca’s actions had given Internal’s bogeyman a form, and Internal had leapt at the opportunity to demonstrate the dangers that dissidents posed.
They played endless coverage of the few prisoners who had used their newfound freedom to take revenge on the ones responsible for their capture. They paraded prisoners in front of TV cameras and forced false confessions out of them, ridiculous stories about a grand scheme to transform the town into a resistance base starting with Processing 117. They arrested resistance members and innocents alike, subjecting them to the processing center’s worst tortures in their single-minded quest to find the leader of the group responsible for the mass breakout.
Now, too late, Becca understood what Jameson—her old resistance contact—had tried to tell her years ago. Now she understood the costs of visibility, of overreach.
She understood. But the others didn’t.
Sean was speaking now. “It’s not just about saving lives. I got into this to wake people up. To show them what Internal is doing to them. The liberation was a good start, but we need more.”
“And while you waste time trying to figure out how to get your message across, people are dying,” Alia snapped.
Meri let go of Peter’s hand to spread her arms in a gesture of peace. “Enough. This isn’t the time. Right now we need to focus on this transport. It’s leaving in three days. If we’re going to plan a mission, we need to start now.” She paused, looking at Becca like a child asking for permission to stay up past her bedtime—a strange thing to see from a woman three decades Becca’s senior. “One of the informants in my network has all the information we need about the transport’s itinerary and how well-guarded it will be. From what I’ve seen, it shouldn’t be difficult for Jared’s contacts inside Enforcement to set up an ambush and take control. Obviously the safety of our people is our first priority, but I’ve examined the risk, and I think it’s worth it.”
But that was what Becca had said about the liberation. And look how that had turned out.
She shook her head. “We can’t.”
Peter’s liquid eyes met hers. “You know what will happen to those prisoners if we don’t save them. We have to do this.” The quaver in his voice made a sharp contrast with his usual optimism. “Saving people from Internal—that’s still what the resistance stands for, isn’t it?”
He spoke the words like a genuine question. As if it were actually in doubt. Becca fought to keep her voice and thoughts level. Emotion had no place here. Not frustration with Peter’s question, not sympathy for the prisoners she was condemning to death. “It’s about what’s best for the resistance. You know how bad things are out there right now. We can’t risk it.”
“Have you thought about Internal will do to them? Do you even care? Your
mother
is going to torture them.” Alia spat the word
mother
like a curse. “And when she’s done making them confess to whatever crimes Public Relations invents for them, she’s going to shoot them in the head. They’re innocent people, and they’re going to die. Just like the ones we didn’t rescue last week, and the week before that.”
I know. Don’t you think I know?
But it wasn’t her job to feel regret. It was her job to make the hard choices, the choices no one else was willing to face. It was her job to protect her people. No matter what.
Bodies slumped against a concrete wall, a neat bullet wound at the base of every skull.
That was where everyone on that transport would end up.
But it hadn’t happened yet. They were still alive. She could still save them.
If she was willing to expose the resistance further. If she was willing to send up this flare telling Internal where to find them.
She shoved the image from her mind.
The old resistance would have let them die. Jameson would have let them die.
“Please, Becca.” Peter’s voice was barely a whisper.
Becca shook her head. “It’s not going to happen. We need to move on.”
“And what, let you throw their lives away?” Alia rose from her seat. “Sit back and watch while Internal murders the people we’re supposed to save?” Her voice rose into a shout, louder with every word. “The people we joined your resistance to—” She cut herself off midsentence, blood draining from her face, as the echoes of her anger rang from the walls.
She stared at the door. She didn’t have to explain what she was thinking.
Had the sound of her yelling made it to the hallway?
Had anybody heard?
Around the circle, nobody moved. Nobody dared to breathe.
Alia’s outburst hadn’t lasted long. A few seconds at most. But here in Processing 117, the smallest mistake could be fatal.
This building was, paradoxically, the safest place the resistance could meet. If they had started holding regular meetings anywhere else, Surveillance would have become suspicious long before now. It was exactly the kind of thing Surveillance was trained to look for—people who shouldn’t have any reason to talk to one another, suddenly spending too much time together.
So three years ago, once she had decided to rebuild the resistance, Becca had gone to the directors of Processing 117. She had asked for permission to start a support group for people who worked for Internal and were struggling with the special challenges their jobs presented. It would be a place for the interrogators who had nightmares about all the dissidents they had tortured and killed, the Surveillance agents afraid of beginning to sympathize too closely with the people they watched day in and day out, the Enforcers who had let dissidents escape rather than subdue them with the necessary force. The group would give these people a chance to bring themselves back from the edge before they crossed over into outright dissident activity, and let them get their doubts out of their system someplace safely away from the public. And, most importantly—if the cameras were off, and everyone in the room knew it—it would give them a chance to speak freely… while Becca would take careful notes and report anyone whose thoughts had become too dangerous.
If anyone else had suggested it, the directors probably would have said no. But a few months earlier, Becca had stopped a dissident plot to frame her mother for treason—at least that was the official story. They had given her a job as an evaluator—searching for dissident sympathizers among Internal employees, the perfect job for someone trying to recruit new members for a resistance group—but it wasn’t enough to repay her for what she had done, and they knew it.
They owed her.
A week later, they had come back to her with an answer. They would give her a room three nights a week. In exchange for her reports, they would shut off the cameras.
And just like that, the resistance had a way to meet.
Becca had set up three weekly groups. The first two had quickly filled with people who signed up after Internal started quietly advertising the program. In those groups, she did exactly what she had told the directors she would do.
The third group was for the resistance.
She had expected her ruse to be discovered long before now. It was sheer dumb luck that it hadn’t. Dumb luck and the fact that they were all very, very careful.
Except on nights like tonight.
“I’m sorry.” Alia’s voice was a whisper now. “I wasn’t thinking.”
Lecturing her wouldn’t help anything. “It’s all right. Nobody heard.” If they had, they would have broken down the door already.
She waited another beat. Watched the door. Waited for the guards’ shouts to break the stillness.
Nothing.
“Nobody heard,” she repeated.
Around her, everyone let out their breath.
“I’m sorry,” Alia repeated. A little louder now, a little more confident. “I shouldn’t have lost my temper. I shouldn’t have risked all our lives like that.” She paused. “But everything I said is still true. We’re still sitting around doing nothing. We’re still letting innocent people die. And it’s gone on long enough. We’re stopping this transport, Becca. We’re rescuing these prisoners. None of us is leaving this room until we work out a plan.”
The familiar tightness squeezed Becca’s chest again. She was being the leader they needed her to be. She was giving them all she could give. Did they expect her to ignore her responsibilities, to ignore the safety of the resistance, just so a few more prisoners wouldn’t have to die?
Bodies slumped against a concrete wall…
“The answer won’t change.” Her mother’s voice.
Meri’s phone beeped. Meri frowned down at the screen. “Do you mind if I take this?”
“Go ahead.” Becca nodded her permission before turning her attention back to Alia.
“That’s it?” Fury and disgust mingled on Alia’s face. “That’s all you’re going to say? Their lives mean that little to you?”
“You already know the reasons.”
Jared stood. “Enough, Alia.” His voice was a growl. “We follow Becca. We trust her to lead us. You can accept her answer, or you can leave.”
Alia whirled on Jared. “Are you going to throw me out,
Enforcer?
Maybe smack me around until I say what you want—”
Meri’s voice, urgency flattening her usual warmth, cut through Alia’s protests. “We have a situation.”