The Always War (14 page)

“I’m fine,” he mumbled. “I—”

He looked wild-eyed and desperate again, as if he might do anything.

“Careful,” Dek whispered. “Our lives are on the line here too.”

Did she think they were all going to be executed? Was that the punishment for stealing a military plane and flying it into enemy territory?

Whatever Dek thought, her words had an impact on Gideon. He straightened up, his posture changing into an exact copy of the escort’s in front of him. He started walking again.

When Gideon caught up with the lead escort, he leaned forward and told the man, “Dek and Tessa didn’t have anything to do with entering enemy airspace. Let them go.”

The lead escort kept his head facing forward. He didn’t break his stride.

“That would violate orders,” he said. “We have to follow orders.”

They reached the end of the hall. Here there was only one
door in an entire expanse of wall. The door was solid wood, stretching from the floor to the ceiling, bigger and more impressive than any other door they’d passed before.

Tessa felt smaller and more insignificant than ever. She wanted to shrink down and hide behind Gideon. No—she wanted to shrink down and disappear completely, perhaps between two strands of carpet fiber. But she noticed a curious thing: Gideon, the four blue-uniformed escorts, and even Dek all stood taller approaching the imposing door, as if their instincts told them to puff up their chests and try to look bigger.

Even more proof that they belong in the military and I don’t,
Tessa thought.

She expected someone to knock at the door or just open it, but apparently that wasn’t the protocol. Everyone just stood there, in formation, waiting.

“Yes?” A disembodied voice floated out from a speaker beside the door.

“Officer McKutcheon, Squad D, reporting as ordered, with Lieutenant-Pilot Gideon Thrall and two civilians,” the lead escort said, saluting the door.

There must be cameras,
Tessa thought.
Someone’s watching every bit of this.

She resisted the urge to crane her neck and look around to locate all the cameras and listening devices in the hallway. They were probably too well hidden for her to find, anyway.

And then she forgot about all that, because the door began to swing open.

“Squad D, dismissed!” the voice barked from the speaker.

For the first time the escorts seemed to falter. They exchanged puzzled glances.

“But don’t we have to actually walk with the subjects into your—,” the lead escort began.

“I said, dismissed!” the voice barked again.

The escorts, in unison, made an about-face and all but marched away.

So … should we try to run away? Since no one’s guarding us now?
Tessa wondered.
Maybe if we did something to disable the cameras—wherever they are …

She tried to catch Gideon’s or Dek’s gaze, tried to signal that the three of them could make some plan, work together.

But Gideon and Dek were already stepping forward, entering the doorway.

They’re smarter than me,
Tessa thought.
They know what’s possible and what isn’t.

She gulped and stepped through the doorway after them.

The office they entered was luxurious. The first thing Tessa saw was an entire wall taken up with plaques and photos, all very tastefully displayed. Walking past, she saw that the metal on the plaques appeared to be solid gold; the photos were of presidents and generals and other famous people that even she recognized.

Below her feet the carpet was thick and soft. It led up to an imposing desk in the center of a cluster of heavy leather chairs.

A man with perfect posture sat behind the desk. He looked like he might be older than Tessa’s parents—maybe fifty, maybe even sixty. But in Tessa’s experience fifty- and sixty-year-olds looked flabby and sloppy and defeated, their eyes hazy with alcohol or drugs or despair. This man’s green eyes
were sharp and clear and seemed to see even what Tessa and Gideon and Dek were thinking. He had salt-and-pepper hair, cropped so precisely that Tessa suspected he got it cut whenever it grew more than a millimeter too long. And his white uniform looked even more pristine than Gideon’s had, back in the Waterford City auditorium. The collar alone was starched and ironed to such an exact edge that it probably could be used as a weapon.

“Sit,” the man said, nodding toward the leather chairs in front of his desk.

Tessa wanted to object—she and Gideon and Dek were all covered in grease and dirt and sweat. None of them belonged on fancy leather. But Gideon and Dek sat down without saying anything, so Tessa followed suit.

The man—General Kantoff, Tessa realized—leaned forward and lifted a lid from a glass jar at the edge of his desk.

“Cigar?” he asked Gideon.

Gideon looked at the general.

“You offered me a cigar the last time I was in your office, after I killed all those people,” Gideon said, in a voice that he seemed to be struggling to control. “I haven’t killed anyone this time. I violated the military code, sections 45, 832, and 368. But I didn’t kill anyone.”

The general watched Gideon for a moment. Then he put the lid back on the glass jar.

“I’ll take that as a no,” the general said.

He sat back in his chair.

Gideon had his head down, waiting. When nobody said anything, he looked up again.

“Didn’t you hear me?” Gideon asked. “I violated three sections of the military code! I just confessed! Any one of those should be grounds for a court-martial!”

“I am aware,” the general said dryly, “of your indiscretions.”

“Indiscretions?” Gideon asked. “Those are crimes! Crimes that I alone committed—they had nothing to do with it!”

He waved his arm wildly toward Tessa and Dek, seated on either side of him.

“Well, that’s settled,” Dek said. “How about if Tessa and I just show ourselves out?”

Nobody answered her, and she made no move to leave. Tessa thought, G
uess we should take that as a no too.

The general had his eyes fixed on Gideon.

“Lieutenant-Pilot Thrall is a very sick young man,” the general said speculatively.

“Sick?” Tessa echoed in surprise. “I thought he was supposed to be a hero! That’s what everyone said—that’s what the military said!”

It startled her to hear her own voice. After everything that had happened, everything she’d found out, everything she’d witnessed with her own eyes and ears—did she still think she could believe in Gideon as a hero? If the general intoned in his most solemn voice,
Yes, yes, Gideon is a hero
, would she automatically agree? Would she think that whatever he said was right just because he was the one saying it?

The general didn’t say that Gideon was a hero.

He gave a sigh, and murmured, “Ah, yes, the heroism factor. You, Ms. Stilfin, have hit upon the crux of our dilemma.”

Gideon made a small, strangled noise deep in his throat.
The general shifted the focus of his gaze to Tessa.

“As you undoubtedly realize, Ms. Stilfin, people have certain … expectations … for their heroes,” the general said. “When we anoint someone with that title, we have to, let’s say, keep up the image. We have to keep a close watch over how people see their heroes.”

A close watch,
Tessa thought.

She remembered way back when she’d gone to see Gideon at his mother’s apartment, how he’d kept insisting that he was being watched. Someone had been watching him—or watching the apartment, anyway. The military hadn’t wanted him sneaking out and doing anything to hurt his heroic image.

Which was exactly what he’d done.

If anybody else ever found out.

The general kept watching Tessa, almost as if he thought he could hypnotize her. Almost as if he thought he had the power to make her shut up, to make her forget everything she’d seen.

“But do you think Gideon’s a hero or not?” Tessa asked, persisting in spite of herself. Because, somehow, this mattered. This was something she cared about.

The general let out another heavy sigh.

“War,” he said, “is a complicated thing. From a distance it looks black and white—us and them, life and death, heroes and enemies. But … up close … the boundaries are never so clearly drawn. There’s a reason the hallways of our headquarters are painted gray!”

He chuckled, and Tessa thought that he had probably used that line before.

“I killed one thousand six hundred and thirty-two people,” Gideon said. “That was evil, but you said it was good. Then I went to apologize. That was good, but you’re going to say it was wrong. You’ll say it was a crime. You’ll punish me for it.”

“He called it an indiscretion, not a crime,” Dek hissed at him. “He’s giving you a way out. Take it!”

The general and Gideon both ignored her.

The general shifted in his chair. Then he leaned forward, peering straight into Tessa’s eyes again.

“As long as there has been war, there have been problems with—shall we call it battle fatigue, as our ancestors did?” the general asked. “Shell shock? Posttraumatic stress disorder? You see such horrible things in war. It twists the mind.”

“I didn’t see anything but a computer screen,” Gideon said. “I sat in a comfortable chair. I was the one who
did
the horrible things.”

The general kept watching Tessa. It was like he hadn’t even heard Gideon.

“When we switched to fighting with drone planes, piloted from remote locations miles from the war zone, we thought that would diminish the psychological toll on our young warriors,” the general continued. “But, somehow, the psychological scars only got worse.”

“Because it wasn’t kill or be killed anymore,” Gideon said. “The enemy and I weren’t in equal danger. I was killing while I stirred my coffee!”

“You had to!” the general thundered, and for a moment it seemed as though he was answering Tessa’s question from long ago, when Gideon first told her what he had done:
Wasn’t
it … necessary?
The general’s face was turning red now. “You were protecting your entire country! You were protecting people like her! You’re a hero for her!”

The general raised his arm and pointed directly at Tessa.

Tessa shrank in her seat, wanting to disappear again. The general was saying Gideon was supposed to be a hero for her. He wasn’t saying that
he
thought Gideon was heroic. Just that Tessa and people like her were supposed to think so.

But Tessa wasn’t the same girl who’d stood in the Waterford City auditorium, dazzled just by the sight of Gideon. She wasn’t so sure she needed a hero like Gideon anymore.

“I was in the war zone myself,” Tessa said in a small voice. It got stronger with every word. “I didn’t mean to go there, but I did. I saw what we’re fighting over. And … there’s nothing there. Why are we fighting over nothing?”

“Tessa!” Dek hissed. “Stop! Don’t say that!”

The general’s face, which had seemed so open and almost kindly a moment ago, hardened into a rocklike expression.

“You’re as crazy as he is,” he said.

“Not me!” Dek said. “You let me go, I’ll slip back underground; you won’t hear anything else from me!”

Tessa whirled on Dek.

“How can you say that?” she asked. “Don’t you want answers? Don’t you want the truth? Don’t you want to know what any of this means?”

“No,” Dek muttered. “I’ve seen enough truth to last my whole life.”

“
I
deserve answers,” Gideon said, standing up. “No more lies. What’s really going on here? Why doesn’t the war zone
look like the satellite footage? Why don’t the bombs fall when you say they’re going to? What happened out there?”

“Delusional,” the general muttered. “Irrational. All three of them are out of their minds.”

He must have tapped some control underneath his desk, because suddenly two doors opened behind him. Lines of officials in dark blue uniforms streamed in.

“You called out the psych squad?” Gideon asked, sounding incredulous. “But—we’re not crazy! We’re telling the truth! We saw—”

“Too much,” Dek mumbled. “We saw too much.”

One of the dark-uniformed officials advanced toward Gideon with a syringe in his outstretched hand. Gideon stood frozen until the needle of the syringe was almost level with his arm. Then suddenly he whirled to the side and kicked the syringe out of the man’s hand. He grabbed the man’s arm and twisted it around. In seconds he had the man squirming helplessly in a choke hold.

“Now, now,” the general said soothingly.

“You taught me that!” Gideon snarled. “The only thing I learned in the military was how to fight!”

The other men swarmed toward Gideon, but Gideon held a hand out warningly.

“Stay away!” he commanded them. “You get too close, I’ll choke him to death! I will! What’s one more death on my conscience?”

The dark-uniformed men seemed uncertain, like they needed time to think about that one. Gideon was already backing toward one of the open doors.

“Tessa, Dek, come on!” he shouted.

Dek grabbed the huge glass jar of cigars off the general’s desk.

“Somehow I feel like I need a weapon too,” she said.

“Put that down!” the general commanded. “That’s thousands of dollars of the best cigars in the world!”

“Okay,” Dek said, and she smashed the jar over the general’s head. He slumped forward.

All the uniformed men crowded around him.

“Sir! Sir!” they shouted.

Then they began yelling at each other: “Check his pulse!” “Check his pupil dilation!” “Is he okay?”

Tessa didn’t stay to find out. She ran after Gideon and Dek. They were in a small antechamber now. Gideon snatched open a closet and shoved the man he’d been holding inside. Then he slammed the door and propped a chair against it.

“They’ll hear you screaming when you come to, and they’ll rescue you,” Gideon said. Tessa realized that the man had passed out. From fright? Because Gideon had nearly choked him?

Tessa didn’t know.

“This way!” Dek yelled, and Tessa was right behind her, dashing out into a maze of hallways like the one they’d come through before.