Z 2135 (17 page)

Adam was back in the arcade, with Michael at Nips.

The fried greens were still disgusting, and he was still angry with Michael. Adam had promised the Chief he would “meet with his friend” to see if there was “something worth seeing.”

But it was hard to pretend he wasn’t mad. Hard to keep Michael’s betrayal a secret. Especially since Michael acted like he hadn’t been responsible for destroying what little life Adam had left after his mom died and his father was sent to The Games.

“You should’ve seen it,” Michael said. “It was
exactly
what I’m talking about, the sort of stuff that worries me. Amos is a good guy, and wasn’t doing anything wrong. The Watchers nabbed him anyway. Who knows where he is, or how long it will be until he’s thrown to into The Darwins.”

“They had to have
some
reason, right?”

“No, Adam. That’s what’s I’m saying, that’s what’s wrong. It’s a book club; it meets every other week. City Watch says the meetings are congregations even though they’re not, the number’s small and they’re not public—like dinner with friends. But that didn’t stop City Watch.”

“So what happened?”

“They were outside the door of the book club, calling for Amos to come out, announcing to the rest of the floor that everything was fine, they were safe, and to stay aware. Know their neighbors, report what they see. They went in and turned the place inside out, but Amos wasn’t there because he’d already bolted.”

Adam got a sudden horrible and uneasy feeling. Could Amos be the guy he saw running? The guy he ratted out?

Oh no.

“Why did he run if he didn’t do anything wrong?”

“You’d learn to run too, Adam, if you were always being questioned by Watchers instead of eating with them.”

Ignoring questions meant there was something to hide.
His classes had taught him that.

Adam ignored Michael’s insult. “How did he know the Watchers were coming?”

“He didn’t. Amos was going to meet our friend Omar at the arcade, when he spotted a Watcher following him. He didn’t want to be seen with Omar, on the chance that Omar had gotten into some trouble, which he was prone to doing, so Amos took off. That’s last anyone knows. I saw on the Reels that an unnamed suspect was apprehended after running inside an abandoned storefront. That happened a block from the arcade, right around when Omar said Amos took off running.

Adam felt like he wanted to puke, but couldn’t let Michael know he knew anything. He shoved more of the crappy fried greens into his mouth.

He couldn’t tell Michael he had seen Amos running from City Watch, that he led the arresting Watchers to his hiding spot, or that it had felt amazing. He also couldn’t tell Michael he knew the truth—Chief Keller had told him everything about Amos Montgomery’s role in The Underground.

As guilt swelled inside him, Adam reminded himself that Michael was a liar, and he couldn’t allow Michael’s lies to undermine his job as a Cadet.

Michael kept talking, but now Adam watched his eyes, trying to see if he could sift truths from lies as they flowed fast from his mouth. He tried to consider both the Michael he knew—the one who was his friend, who nursed a crush on Ana forever—with the secret Michael he didn’t know very well at all.

Is he good or bad?

Michael finished chewing and looked up at Adam. “Sorry,” he said. “I know I shouldn’t be going on about all of this, and I know City Watch is a sore subject between us. I’m sorry about that, really. I’m not sure what to do, other than to keep talking until we get more comfortable with one another. This is hard, what we’re doing, living in memory and keeping on.”

Then Michael said the words Adam couldn’t believe he had the nerve to say: “Loyalty is important.”

He wanted to climb across the table and punch Michael in the face. He wanted to do to Michael what Carson had done to the pimp.

“I’m sorry for offending you the other day,” Michael was saying. “I know I did, and that it wasn’t right. I’m proud of you, Adam. For everything you’ve done since losing your mom and dad and sister. It’s not easy, but you’ve kept your head above water and stayed out of trouble. More than that, you’ve actually grown into quite the young man. Like you’ve said over and over, you could have ended up in The Dark Quarters and didn’t. I’m proud of you, and Ana would’ve been proud of you too.”

When Keller praised him, it was all he could ever want. But with Michael saying similar things, all Adam could feel was madder and madder. Michael had done an awful thing to Ana, the worst. He didn’t have any right to talk about her, or talk
for
her. Michael couldn’t say that Ana would’ve been proud of Adam, because Michael was the one responsible for making sure she could never be proud of anything, ever again.

Adam remembered what Keller had said, about how sometimes you had to be around bad people if you wanted to do something good. The key wasn’t to be bad, he told Adam, because bad people never saw themselves as bad—at least not the kind of bad City Watch was most concerned with catching. The key was to be the version of good (warped as it was) that the bad guys saw in themselves.

“It’s OK,” Adam lied. “I understand. I didn’t at first, but now I do. A lot of what you’re saying about City Watch and The State makes sense. I’ve even started to wonder about some of the things you said about Jack Geralt.”

“Really?” Michael raised his eyebrows. A smile teased his mouth.

“Yeah,” Adam nodded. “Things have been a little weird lately. It’s hard to look at City Watch the same way.”

Adam fell silent, a tactic he’d learned in the Academy as a way to get guilty people to talk with confidence.

Shame doesn’t like silence.

Michael spoke, “It’s OK if you don’t want to tell me, but I’d love to hear. Maybe there’s a way I can help, even if that only means listening.”

“I went on a ride-along with two Watchers—”

“A ride-along? What’s that?”

“It’s when you go on a Watcher shift, in their car. You don’t get to
do
anything, you’re still a Cadet, but you see everything. I rode in their van when we went to The Dark Quarters.”

“The Dark Quarters?” Michael seemed both surprised and bothered. “That doesn’t seem like a smart place to take a boy,” already forgetting he had just called Adam a young man.

“I’m a
Cadet,
Michael. And almost fifteen. I won’t be a
boy
forever. If I’m City Watch, I’ll probably be in The Quarters all the time. At first, anyway.”

“
If
you’re City Watch?” Michael repeated.

Adam said
if
on purpose, and was happy Michael had noticed. He shrugged.

“Yes,
if
. I’m not sure if I want to be a Watcher after what I saw in The Quarters.”

“And what was that?” Michael seemed more interested in what Adam was about to say than in anything to come from his mouth since he once told Michael, “I think my sister likes you.”

“We went into The Quarters, which are just as scary as they’ve always been in my dreams. It’s really dark, even in the daytime. There are bad people doing bad stuff everywhere. We met this guy who gave the two Watchers I was with—an old guy who is really mean and a young guy who is nice, even though he has a temper—a tip about another bad guy, then we went to go meet that bad guy and, well,” Adam swallowed, “when that guy wouldn’t confess to what the Watchers knew he had done, they beat him. And kept on beating him. It was awful, Michael. They pounded and pounded until the bad guy—he was a pimp—was bleeding and crying and willing to say whatever the Watchers wanted.”

Adam was surprised that he felt so genuinely upset. More upset than when he’d watched it happen. It was different telling Michael the story than it had been telling the Chief. The things that bothered Adam about the story bothered him more with Michael; the things that had made it seem
acceptable
, were somehow less so at Nips.

“You can’t tell anyone, Michael, OK? Do you promise?”

Adam wanted Michael to keep his secret, and make a promise that he would—partly out of fear that Michael might actually say something to someone that could get Fogerty or Carson in trouble, or even worse, him. The last thing Adam wanted was for Chief Keller to be upset with him or think
he
was an insidious cancer. And Adam had another reason for wanting Michael to stay quiet. He wanted it to seem like he was betraying the Watchers, or at least that he was willing.

Michael asked exactly that Adam expected: “So, how did that make you feel?”

“Awful, and it made me wonder about a lot of stuff.”

“What do you mean?”

“I just mean that things seem different; I don’t really know what to think about City Watch. Stuff I saw in The Quarters, well, it’s opposite of what I always thought about Watchers. They were scary, like bad guys. When I was growing up, my dad was like a hero. His job, as a Watcher, that was the kind of thing you idolize. But now … I don’t know. To see another side of it all—”

“So what does that mean? Are you having second thoughts about Cadets? About being a Watcher?”

“I’m not sure,” Adam shrugged, “but I’m starting to wonder if I made a mistake in joining. I know it’s better than Chimney Rock, and whatever god-awful job I’d get after my aptitude tests, so maybe that makes it the best place, at least for now. But I’m not sure it’s the best after I’m a grown-up, you know?”

Michael nodded.

Of course he did.

“I just wanted somewhere to belong,” Adam continued, warming to the subject. “I figured I’d follow in Dad’s footsteps. But the more I think about it, the more I wonder
why
I would want to. I mean, he murdered my mom and broke up our family.
He’s
the one who got Ana killed.” He shook his head. “I just don’t know.” Adam started to cry, surprising himself with very real tears.

“Do you
really
think your dad killed your mom?”

“Yeah,” Adam nodded, surprised that Michael would ask something so stupid. “That’s what I keep coming back to: if you have to do bad stuff as part of your job, and you have to do those things over and over, maybe it changes you after a while. Makes you crazy murderer bad.”

“That’s what I used to think,” Michael said. His voice had softened, his compassion seemed real. Something in his whisper seemed to Adam less like him hating City Watch, and more like he wanted to help Adam feel better.

Michael dropped his whisper so low that Adam strained to hear him. Michael leaned forward. “I don’t know anymore, though. I’m not so sure. Now I think maybe he was set up, just like your sister.”

That made Adam so angry that he balled both fists beneath the table.

Not yet
, he thought. Instead he asked, “Why do you think my father is innocent?”

Michael’s eyes were suddenly bothered. He leaned even lower, glanced around every corner of Nips, swept fried greens from the table’s center and hissed.

“Can you keep a secret?”

“Yes, of course,” Adam said. He leaned toward Michael, his heart beating fast, certain Michael was seconds from confirming his growing suspicion that he was part of The Underground.

Jonah left Clinic 17 feeling … uncertain. Liza was amazing, and seeing her was electric. It wasn’t physical, at least not mostly. It was that looking into Liza’s eyes gave Jonah part of his soul back. Sutherland had filled him with an odd sort of hope, but Liza reminded him of who he was, back when Jonah was willing to stare into the eyes of his hunger.

He had no idea how he would engage Adam, or if he would even be able to find him at all, but he had hours until Liza was free, and figured he would know the right plan as he found it. He was about to head off on foot, rather than his mobile, which might stand out more near the Academy, when Jonah spotted Ballard—or Balrog as Watchers preferred to called him—on foot patrol.

Like everyone, Jonah hated Balrog because he was a miserable pile of shit, not to mention a marginal Watcher. A run-in with Balrog was certain to end poorly, so Jonah kept walking straight instead of turning, figuring he’d walk a mile then double back and get the mobile after all.

Despite his anxiety, Jonah smiled while passing a fortune-teller working the street, amused as always that people were willing to surrender credits so a woman in rags could tell them obvious nothings. No fortune-teller could have ever predicted the things that had happened to Jonah.

He walked two more blocks when Jonah heard the whir behind him. He couldn’t afford to freeze; the orb would know because they were programmed for such behavior. If his gait made a hiccup, he would be scanned. The only thing that had kept it from happening so far was Jonah’s intimate understanding of what data orbs gathered before alerting the nearest Watcher.

He must have had a twitch in his movement, though, something that held the orb at his back for a full block before it hovered in a wide circle around him.

“Citizen, please extend your wrist.”

Jonah held his wrist up like he wasn’t terrified.

The orb scanned his wrist, then turned silent. After four painful seconds it said, “Thank you,” then drifted away.

Jonah kept walking. He wanted to hurry but was forced into strolling. He had no idea where the orb was. It could be behind him, high up in a place he couldn’t see without looking. And looking, Jonah knew, would certainly broadcast his guilt.

He couldn’t be sure, but Jonah would bet his disguise that Balrog had kept walking when he did, and was now a block behind him. Jonah saw the man out of the corner of his eye as he cut across the street and stepped inside Bakery 4. Jonah waited in line for five minutes, subtracted two credits from his wrist for a baguette (Marquis had loaded it with a hundred) and stepped back into the street.

Sure enough he saw Balrog one block up, but Balrog’s eyes weren’t on the bakery, or anywhere near Jonah.

He looked both ways and crossed. Balrog’s face was still turned away from him, and Jonah no longer felt the orb. Maybe everything would be OK, but he had to run.

He set the baguette on the ground, then ran toward the alley and ducked into the dark. As soon as he did Jonah felt the man behind him.

“Don’t move,” the Watcher said. “Hands on your head.”