The Sowing (25 page)

Suddenly, at the thought of Eli and his lopsided smile, his ridiculous antics, I feel my breath short and I can’t quite catch it back. The force of recent memories rocks me. Everything that’s happened. The mission, Vale’s interrogation, Aulion’s drugs, the needle piercing my shoulder, the hallucinations. I close my eyes and press my head back against the pole, trying to calm myself. I can’t seem to relax. Philip, Vale’s dad, looking on casually while his guards electrocute me. Claiming Vale authorized the torture. Is it true? True or not, it’s too much to bear. My breath catches in my throat and I feel like the air is being pressed from my lungs. I pull in a wheezy breath and shut my eyes against the world.

“Remy, it’s okay,” Soren mutters, his voice soothing, calling me back. “We didn’t break. What they did to us was bad, yes, but it wasn’t that bad. More surprising than anything. No permanent damage, no long-term pain. They did it to scare us, to shake us up. But we didn’t break, Remy. We didn’t give anything away. You hear me?” He bumps his shoulder into mine, and the touch comforts me. I straighten up and draw in clean air.  “We might be starving and exhausted, but we’re still alive. Okay? There’s still hope. Eli might be on his way with a team right now.”

He leans his head back against mine and I find myself relaxing. It strikes me that I’m glad we’re here together. And then I think back to how we’ve always been at each other’s throats, and I can’t help but laugh.

“What?” he says. “What’s so funny?”

“I was just thinking.”

“Thinking what?”

“That I’m glad you’re here with me. Can you believe it?”

He laughs hoarsely. “Jahnu and Kenzie would be proud of our newfound friendship. But seriously, Remy, they’re not really trying to kill us. What would that get them? They’re just trying to scare information out of us. But we’re not going to let them. Right?”

“Yeah.” He
is
right. I can see the logic now. What would they gain from killing us? Nothing. Of course, it’s what they’re willing to do to us in the meantime that worries me.

Just when I’m starting to contemplate that happy possibility, I hear a dim clicking from somewhere.

“Soren. Shh. Did you hear that?”

“Yeah,” he says. “You probably can’t see it from your angle, but one of the cameras just moved.”

“Shit,” I swear.

“No, it’s okay,” he whispers. “I don’t know why, but it’s pointing up towards the ceiling now.” I hear the same clicking again, this time from a different location, and I look up to see one of the cameras in my field of vision swerving slowly up towards the ceiling.

“What’s going on?” I muse.

“This is either really good or really bad,” Soren says tersely. Then there’s a click to my left and I look up to see the door swing open. My heart jump-starts and my breath quickens again. But it’s not Aulion, or Philip, or Vale—it’s the soldier who was with Vale. He has a stack of clothes in one arm and two backpacks draped over the other. He drops one pack each in front of us, separates the pile of clothing into two identical stacks and drops one at my feet, one at Soren’s. He pulls out a bolt cutter and, in about five seconds, cuts through the bindings around our feet and hands. His movements are clean, efficient, and precise.

“Get up,” he says, and Soren and I scramble to our feet, motivated by his tone of command. My leg is still stiff and sore, and since I’m not drugged at the moment, I feel the pull of my stitches. And I’m so hungry that I’m woozy.

“What the—” Soren starts, rubbing his freed wrists, but the man cuts him off.

“I’ll explain later. If you want to get out, do as I say.” He picks up the uniform at my feet and hands it to me. It’s a food-service uniform by the look of it. The clean laundry scent wafting from the clothes reminds me of fresh air, childhood, and freedom. “Change now. We have maybe five minutes, tops.”

Soren and I exchange glances, worried, awed, and confused.
Can we trust
him?

“Now!” the soldier snaps, startling me into action. I stop worrying and start obeying.

We jump to do his bidding. Without a thought about privacy, I slip my ragged, destroyed, dried-pee pants off and pull my shirt off. It’s a relief to have those dank clothes off. I try not to look at Soren as he strips, too, but my eyes keep tugging in his direction. I turn away. Shivering and cold, I pull my uniformed pants and shirt on as quickly as possible. The uniform fits me perfectly, and I notice Soren’s is equally well-tailored. How observant is this man?

“Stuff your ruined clothes in the backpack,” he says, and we quickly obey. He hands each of us a cap, and we put them on. “We don’t want to leave evidence that someone helped you out of here. Don’t worry about shoes. I’ve got boots for each of you in your packs, but right now we don’t have time. Follow me.” Wordlessly, we shoulder our packs and obey.

He leads us out of our cell, beyond the room with the two-way mirror, and into a long hallway. The lights are off and the halls are lit only by low green lights on the floors, so I assume it must be nighttime. It’s hard to see, and I wish for my infrared contacts, but the doctors took those out. I follow our mysterious rescuer by the sound of his footsteps, and Soren takes up the rear. My stomach burns from emptiness, and my body feels like it might implode. Standing up and walking of my own accord is a lot harder than I thought it would be. My stitches threaten to rip apart, and I grit my teeth with every step. I distract myself by wondering who this man is. But I keep my questions buttoned up inside my mind and pad softly through the darkness in my strange uniform.

We come to a door, and the soldier punches in a code and scans his palm print. The door opens, revealing a flight of twisting stairs going in only one direction: up. I shudder a little. So they were keeping us in the basement—the dungeon. Just like the stories my dad used to tell me when I was little. I wonder if there’s a dragon outside, and then think: Yes, there is. Her name is Corine Orleán.

Inside the stairwell, the lighting is a little better. We trot up the twisting stairs, barefoot, and the metal is cold on my feet. I pray the man has done as good a job guessing my shoe size as he has with my clothes. After a few twists of the stairwell, we alight on a different floor and the man palms and codes this door open as well. The halls here are dim and green as well, but I can see a hallway up ahead with brighter lighting. We push through wide swinging doors and find ourselves in an enormous industrial kitchen filled with 3-D printers, and I feel horribly exposed. Someone’s going to recognize me or Soren—after all, his mother was chancellor years ago, so he had his moment in the spotlight. But everything is quiet and empty. Even in the kitchen, the lights are dimmer than they would be during the day, and the shadows we cast are ominous and dark. It’s almost creepier than it would be if it were pitch-black.

We zig-zag around printers and packaging machines and come to another door. Our rescuer—if indeed he is rescuing us—pushes it open. There is a gentle
whoosh
, and I feel a breath of fresh, cool air on my face. It’s an exit, I realize, and the man holds the door open for me.

Just then, the room erupts in throbbing high-pitched noises.
The alarms!
Did we trigger them just now? No, not possible, they would have gone off immediately after he opened the door….

“Aulion must have found your empty cell,” the man says, appearing unconcerned. An automatic voice comes over the loudspeaker system.

“All available Sector military personnel to guard stations. Code Red, Code Red. All available Sector military personnel to guard stations. Initiating building lockdown in ten seconds.”

“Get outside,” the soldier says. “We need to get to the PODS.” Soren and I jump out the door and now my feet are freezing. Fortunately, there’s a POD glistening not fifty meters away.

Before we can make a dash for it, though, the man throws a hand out to stop me from running. He points up slowly—far too slowly, given our predicament—at a camera trained broadly around the exit. He pulls out a handheld Bolt and takes careful aim, fires. The blue light flashes around the camera and when it dissipates, the light on the camera is off.

“Now we run.” The three of us sprint to the POD, and the man punches in an emergency override code. They’re not supposed to be running at this hour, but apparently our rescuer has a way around that. The POD door slides open and starts to shimmer, indicating that it is active and receiving passengers. We slide in and the door shuts, and the POD starts to roll us through the capital, to an unknown destination. Soren and I sit down side by side, and the man sits across from us.

“You’ll find your boots in the bags, along with several spare pairs of socks. I recommend putting them on now, because we’ll need to move quickly once we arrive at the end of this line.” He pulls his own pack off his shoulders and digs through it. He pulls out some antiseptic wipes and bends over me. “You’ll need to pull off your pants for a minute. I need to check on your stitches.”

“I can do it perfectly well,” I respond curtly. The idea of getting naked yet again in this tiny enclosed space does not appeal to me. He looks up at me and shrugs. He hands me the wipes, and I start to roll my pants down exactly as much as is necessary for me to see all the various places where they’ve stitched up my thigh. I unroll one of the wipes and start to gently massage the dried blood off my skin. It stings, but it’s nothing compared to the pain of the electroshocks from earlier. Once I’ve finished and the wounds are tingly clean, he takes the used cloths, douses them in rubbing alcohol, and pulls out a lighter. In the corner of the POD, he lights them on fire, and they incinerate.

“No DNA evidence this way,” he says. I nod, looking at the little scorch mark on the POD.

“I didn’t have time to get much food, but this should do for now,” the man says, handing each of us a little round sticky fruit ball and some preserved meat. Soren and I eye the food lustily, but we don’t dare take it. Who knows what the Sector could have put in it?

“It’s okay,” he says, with a trace of a smile. “I have my own personal supply of food, untainted by the Sector Dieticians.”

“How is that possible?” Soren asks, grabbing the fruit bar and stuffing it in his mouth.

“Who are you?” I demand.

“That’s not relevant now.” I stare at him. I should feel grateful that he just rescued us, that he is risking his life to get us out of the Sector’s hands, that he’s done so much for us, but all I feel is a frustration at our helplessness. Why won’t he tell us anything?

“We’ve put our lives in your hands—” Soren says with an edge to his voice. I’m glad he’s on my side.

“You’re not safe yet,” the man interrupts.

“Maybe not, but the least you can do is tell us who we should thank for getting us out of that cell.”

“Chan-Yu,” he says, softly. “Chan-Yu Hayashi. That’s my name.” 

20 - VALE

Fall 91, Sector Annum 105, 03h41
Gregorian Calendar: December 20

Jeremiah sits opposite me, eyes closed, head back, chair tipped up on two legs against the wall. I’ve been briefing him on everything I found at my mother’s lab—about Hawthorne, the DNA, and the massacre. I haven’t even mentioned Remy and Soren yet. Now he’s quiet, still, and I know he’s deep in thought. Usually he’s a blur of movement, always tapping his fingers or his feet to some unknown or nonexistent rhythm. It’s only when he’s quietly contemplating something that he stops moving. It’s as if all the energy in his body flows directly to his brain, and everything else stops. I can’t even see him breathing. I can’t help holding my breath myself—will he believe me?

When I left Chan-Yu in the hallway and headed up to the rooftop flight deck where my Sarus was parked, I had every intention of going home like he said. I even had Demeter program the flight path. But going home didn’t feel right. All I could think of was whether or not I made the right choice. I left Remy and Soren’s lives in Chan-Yu’s hands, but how could I know I’d done the right thing by trusting him? He’d been my aide for all these months, and yet I didn’t know anything about him. Did he lie to my mother or did he lie to me? He could have killed Remy and Soren and then disappeared, just like my mother commanded. But then I heard the Code Red alarm, and I knew he had been true to his word. I gripped the Outsider pendant in my hand and instructed Deme to change the flight path. I needed to talk to the one person in the Sector I knew I could trust.

Jeremiah was furious when I showed up at his door, and no wonder, given that it was just after three in the morning. But he caught on to the urgency in my voice and let me in. I mixed him up a cup of the Dieticians’ brew for alertness and sat him down to tell him everything I’d just learned.

I’m the restless one now. I tap my fingers, stare anxiously around the room, and shift my weight in my chair. Finally, unhappily, Jeremiah raises his head and his chair slams down on all four legs. Then his foot starts tapping again.

“Okay.”

“What do you mean, ‘Okay’?” I exclaim. I was expecting more than that.

“I don’t know what else to say, Vale. I’m terrified, frankly, now that I know all this. I believe you, every word you’ve said. There’s no reason for you to lie to incriminate your mother, so I can only assume you’re telling the truth. But you’ve put my life in danger by telling me this. What will Corine do if she finds out I know about her crimes? She certainly won’t think twice about my well-being.”

I stare at him. I hadn’t thought of that. She was willing to have Remy and Soren secretly murdered because of something they said on camera—she would almost certainly be willing to kill Jeremiah to protect her secret.
My mother, the murderer.
I think I’m going to be sick. How many other atrocities have been committed at her behest? Does my father know about this? He can’t—he can’t know.
But does he?

The biggest question looming in my mind is: Why? Why did she want them dead? What did she hear or see them talking about on the security cameras that necessitated an act of murder? For that matter, what about that DNA was so important that Hawthorne had to die? Are Remy and Soren connected to him somehow? To the DNA?