Enemy Inside (Defectors Trilogy) (6 page)

I grabbed my gun, and the three of us followed Godfrey to an entrance blocked by a glass door. There was no lock and no handle, but a rover above the doorway scanned each of us, and the glass slid back. I felt a prickle on the back of my neck. Someone somewhere was watching us on the cameras.

Crowding through the entryway, we emerged into a small, sterile-looking white room. It was empty except for a single station with a half-moon head scanner and a raised glass table. There was another rover and a security camera over interlocking elevator doors.

Godfrey stepped up to the station, put his head up to the scanner, and placed his palms flat on the glass surface. Three low beeps followed by a single high tone illuminated a green light over the station, and the elevator doors slid open. Godfrey shuffled into a chamber just large enough for one person, nodded at me once, and disappeared.

I glanced at Greyson, not daring to say a word. The security camera jerked in my direction, and I took that as a signal to step up to the station. Discreetly wiping my sweaty palms on the stiff polyester pants, I placed them on the glass table and waited. A ripple of white light moved through the glass, scanning my fingerprints.

Reluctantly, I leaned forward and placed my forehead against the half-moon scanner. A light flashed, scanning my retinas, and a feminine tone sounded from tiny speakers near my temples.

Please state your full name.

“Rebecca Fuller,” I said, parroting the fake name Godfrey had assigned me.

Please enter your Citizen Identification pin.

I looked down and saw a keypad illuminated in the glass. I punched in the code and heard the same sequence of beeps that had followed Godfrey’s identification.
 

The metal doors swung open again, and I hurried inside. I looked wide-eyed at Logan before the doors snapped shut again and I was thrust into darkness.

My stomach flew up to my throat as the elevator plummeted down. I had the wild fear that the PMC had identified me as an impostor and was dropping me to my death instead of taking me to Amory.

But when the doors of the elevator swung open, Godfrey was already waiting, standing against the wall in a long white hallway. With his bushy black beard, ruddy complexion, and wrinkled uniform, he definitely looked out of place.

He didn’t say anything when I emerged, and I took his silence for a confirmation that there were still security cameras watching and listening to everything we said.

A moment later, Greyson appeared, closely followed by Logan. He looked unnerved by the process, and I hoped no one was monitoring the security footage that closely. Anyone would be able to spot his pale face and darting eyes.

Godfrey led us down the empty corridor in silence. There were steel doors spaced every few feet, but none of them had locks or handles. Four-digit numbers were punched into the metal, but Godfrey did not glance at them once. Reaching the end of the hallway, we rounded the corner. This passage had no doors, but up ahead, I could see another elevator — a larger version of the one we had just taken.
 

The rover over the doors jerked from side to side, reading each of our CIDs. The doors flew open, and we all piled inside. The panel next to the door had dozens of numbered buttons, but Godfrey selected the button near the bottom labeled “A.”
 

The elevator doors closed, and we plummeted down again. As we descended, I felt weightless, unable to breathe or speak. Greyson looked pale green, as though he might be sick. Logan wore a grim expression. After a minute, the elevator slowed, finally stopping with a dull
ping
.

Atrium,
said the robotic female voice. The doors swung open.

We stood in an enormous round room. The walls were white like everything else in the building, but the ceiling was velvety black. Looking closer, I could see it was a projection of the night sky with infinite silvery stars. It could have been beautiful, but there was an unnerving rhythmic, Christmas-light quality to the twinkling stars and a weird stillness to the dank basement air.

I glanced at Godfrey, but his expression had gone empty. Logan’s wary eyes were darting around the atrium.

We passed a dark room that was empty except for a metal exam table. Leather restraints hung from the sides, and I shivered, imagining Amory bound to the table.
What were they doing to him?

I could hear voices. And strange music.
 

Heart pounding, I moved forward — toward the source of the noise — but Greyson grabbed my arm. He shook his head once almost imperceptibly, but I jerked out of his grip. Across the open atrium, I could see another room off to the side. The door was open. Every once in a while, a bright light would flash. I heard a scream, and my heart seized in my chest before I realized it was the canned sound of a recording. Someone was watching a movie.

I walked through the open doorway into the dark room and instantly wished I hadn’t.
 

On screen, a man had a woman by her hair. He was pummeling her skull with a hammer, spewing blood everywhere. Her piercing screams filled the room, and I realized it wasn’t a movie; the film had a shaky amateur quality. The screaming woman disappeared. She was replaced by a man with a black canvas bag over his head. He was sitting in a dark room with his hands bound behind his back. The camera shook. Another man appeared to the side with a gun and shot three times, four times —
 

I tore my eyes away from the screen, willing my ears to shut out the sound of gunshots. Then a crisp voice began to narrate over the violent picture.

Such a dangerous world requires a new generation of soldiers . . . a force for good to keep ordinary citizens safe from evildoers . . . safe from the violence of rebellion and the abominations created by the modern age.

An artificially grainy image of a carrier appeared, doctored to look extra frightening and menacing.

The Private Military Company of the United States is always working to protect and serve . . . Order. Compliance. Progress. This is our credo. Go forth and do your duty, citizen. Your country needs you.

Without warning, the screen flickered to silver, and the same voice from the elevators rang out.

End of simulation.

Then the screen went black.
 

I looked around the room. There were ten rows of white chairs lined up facing the screen, but only one of them was occupied.
 

Sitting there staring up at the screen was Amory. I could only see half of his face, which looked blank — emotionless. He was wearing a white T-shirt and cotton pants that looked like scrubs. He sat up in his chair straighter than I remembered, but otherwise he looked exactly the same.
 

“I don’t need an adjustment, so you can come back later,” said Amory. His voice was clipped, cold.

I stood there frozen, unsure what to do.

Amory sighed, twisting in the chair. “Why don’t you —” He stopped short, staring at me as if he had seen a ghost.

He stood up abruptly, and my body tensed, preparing to run or fight if he was so far gone that he did not remember who I was. But then he did something I had not expected.
 

Navigating around the chairs, Amory crossed the room and threw his arms around me.
 

“Haven,” he whispered into my neck, crushing me against him.
 

Everything about Amory came crashing back: his wonderful woodsy smell, the feel of his warm muscles through his shirt. Somehow, he was exactly as he had been. I tightened my arms around him.

“Wait —” Amory pulled away slightly, a look of confusion knitting his brows together. “Why are you here?”
 

He seemed to be working to piece something together, as though it had been years — not weeks — since we’d last seen each other.

“I —”
 

“Break it up, you two,” Godfrey grumbled behind me. “Could be cameras.”

We broke apart, and I looked up into his face. His gray eyes looked tired, but that fierceness was still there. His chiseled cheekbones looked a little more gaunt, but it was nothing a few days of good food couldn’t fix. He was alive.
 

Then his arm fell into my peripheral vision, and I stifled a gasp. All up his forearm, crossing over the jagged scar from his CID, were twenty HALLO tag burns lined up in a row like tally marks. The tender raised flesh looked painful, irritated. He had to have been tortured at least five separate times.
 

“What have they been
doing
to you?” I whispered in disgust.

Darkness flickered in his eyes. “They didn’t break me right away.” He swallowed, a muscle in his jaw flexing. “I fought it. Haven, I tried, but —”

Godfrey’s voice cut him off. “We need to get the hell out of here.”

I turned around. Greyson was watching Amory with apprehension, but Logan’s eyes were swimming with tears. She looked as though she wanted to throw her arms around him, but she restrained herself in case we were being watched.

Amory and I followed them out of the room into the main atrium. Looking up again at the artificial sky, I felt the hairs stand up on the back of my neck. Something about the perfect constellations was unnerving. Like everything else the PMC created, it was just an illusion.
 

What made me the most nervous was that no one was guarding Amory. There was a rover mounted above the entryway to the atrium, but there was no sign of PMC officers anywhere. In fact, there was no sign of any other test subjects, either. There were more dark rooms branching off the atrium, but I was too terrified to investigate further. Even if we found other people, it would be too risky to take anyone else out with us.

As we exited the atrium and started down the long corridor to the elevator, I turned around to ask Amory about the guards. He wasn’t behind me.

Amory was standing just inside the atrium, looking out at us with mournful eyes.

“Come on,” I hissed. “We have to go.”

He shook his head slowly, looking confused again. “I don’t think I can.”

Logan rolled her eyes. “What do you mean? Of course you can.”

“No,” he said, shaking his head slowly. “I’ve tried to come through here before. It’s like there’s an electric fence.”

I backtracked until we were only a few inches apart and placed a hand on his chest. “Just run through really fast. Don’t focus on the pain. Focus on me.” I locked my eyes on his. “We’re getting you out of here.”

He nodded and took several paces back. I stood and waited as he let out a long burst of air and gritted his teeth, bracing himself.
 

Amory lurched forward like a sprinter exploding off his blocks, running toward the threshold. His face instantly contorted in pain, and he staggered off to the side as though he’d run into an invisible wall. He looked wounded but undeterred.

Keeping his eyes on me, Amory took a step forward but pulled back instantly as if he had been burned. He tried again, this time more slowly, his face turning ashen as he tried to walk out.

He stopped, panting. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I can’t explain it. Every time I try to —”

Again, he moved forward, face screwed up in pain. He stopped, clutching his head as though he were physically hurting.

Godfrey sighed. “They’ve implanted a new CID. That’s why he’s a test subject here. They’re experimenting with controlling people’s behavior. Whenever he’s in range of a rover, his CID emits a signal to keep him in bounds. When he tries to leave, it causes him pain.”

“What?” Greyson looked aghast. “But how can they —”

“The behavior modification with the old CIDs never worked, but for a long time I suspected the PMC was trying to get it right.”

“How do we get him out?” I asked.

Godfrey sighed. “He has to walk out. Only way. If we try to remove him by force, he could turn on us. We don’t know what they’ve conditioned him to do in response to pain.”

Amory shook his head. “I can’t.”

My heart was starting to beat more frantically. “Amory, just turn it off. The pain is all in your head. They’re just trying to control you.”

He looked scared. “They do control me,” he said in barely a whisper.

“Just try.” I was trying to keep my voice calm, but I could feel the panic welling up inside.

“You don’t understand. I physically
can’t.
”

“Yes, you can,” I said fiercely, fighting to keep my voice steady.

 
Logan shook her head but didn’t speak.

“I’m sorry,” said Godfrey in a low voice. “If he won’t go, we can’t take him with us.”

It took several beats for his words to sink in.
They wanted to leave Amory behind.
He was healthy and beautiful and alive, but they wanted to walk away and leave him in this horrible place to be controlled by the PMC.

“No!” I snapped. “We can’t . . . I won’t leave him here.”

Tears were streaming freely down Logan’s face now. “Haven, we said —”

“I said I could do what needed to be done. We
need
to get him out of here!”

I stared at Amory, who looked utterly helpless. That familiar resolve was gone from his eyes. They looked dark and far away.

“Why is he like this?”

“They’ve been conditioning him,” said Godfrey with distaste. “Pain, the simulations, probably drugs to distort reality. They’ve been breaking him down. He’s been here a long time.”

I turned away, trying to keep a hold on the runaway panic filling me up. “I’m getting him out of here. You three can leave, but I won’t unless he’s coming with us.”

I could see Greyson watching me closely. Perhaps he was remembering what it was like to be the PMC’s prisoner — to be on the inside not knowing what would become of you or if anyone was trying to get you out.
 

“I’ll help you,” Greyson said. I met his gaze, and I wanted to hug him. Greyson was back, and it was us against everything else once again.

“Haven.” Amory was looking at me as though he was trying to break bad news. “I can’t walk out. You need to leave.”