Enemy Inside (Defectors Trilogy) (3 page)

“Godfrey tells me you have been training others in combat without authorization, and now I hear you are trying to shift the tides against me in my own camp!”

I tried to arrange my face to hide my confusion. If Godfrey had really seen me and Logan practicing in the woods, he would know she was training
me.
Something was wrong, but I could not tell them about Logan. If they knew she was trained by the PMC, they would think she was a spy.

“We were just practicing,” I said.

“Practicing?” He laughed once, cold and sharp. “For what?”

“To fight the PMC,” I said. “We want to be of use to the cause.”

“You? You and your friends from the farm?” He laughed again. “I have moles embedded in the PMC . . . former marines and snipers at my disposal. How could you possibly help our cause?”

I bit down on my tongue, the anger welling inside me. So it was true that the rebels had people on the inside.

“I don’t know why you would be teaching our comrades to fight in secret, unless you were working against us.”
 

“I’m not!”

He continued. “I have been naïve. I probably wouldn’t have believed this treachery until I saw it for myself tonight. Your friend Amory is probably lounging in the PMC barracks as we speak. This was all an act to see what we knew — learn our operations. I have been right to play my cards close. I can see that now.”

Rulon looked at the man who had dragged me here and flicked his eyes to the chair I had hit my head on.
 

In an instant, the strange man’s hands were on me, pulling me up and shoving me into the chair by the front of my coat. I struggled, kicked, and tried to hit him, but he slapped me hard across the face. My skin stung with heat, and my eyes watered.
 

While I was subdued, the man stuffed something in my mouth: a piece of fabric. I gagged, but he just shoved it in farther, and Godfrey moved to help him. It tasted like sweat and diesel fuel.
 

I heard the loud rip of duct tape and felt the sticky adhesive close over my mouth. Someone wrapped it around my face, and it clung to my hair and pulled at my skin. I was too terrified to move.

The larger man held my wrists while Godfrey taped them together and bound me to the chair. I breathed hard against the tape, trying to find air, and I felt myself begin to hyperventilate. My chest seized, and I felt tears well up in my eyes.
Where were Logan and Greyson?
Perhaps the other rebels had ganged up on them and they were in trouble, too. If they couldn’t save me, no one else would.

I was so distracted by the sudden restraint that I hadn’t noticed Rulon digging in a box on the floor. He retrieved something I recognized: a small white case no bigger than a man’s wallet. He flipped it open, and I tried to scream through the fabric inside my mouth.
 

Rulon dragged another chair directly in front of mine and sat down, a smile twitching at the corners of his mouth. He grabbed my bound arms roughly and twisted my left arm to reveal the three perfect burns.

“Hmm. Last time you got fire.” He licked his lips. “I’d like to try something new.”

You bastard,
I thought. So Rulon
had
been the one who instigated Miles’s torture.

He pulled one of the tiny strips of film out of the case. This one was black. I tried to jerk my hands away, but his grip was too strong. I thrashed around, remembering the fire licking my skin, the smoke and suffocation, and my own charring flesh.

Rulon’s guard had me in a headlock from behind, and for the first time, I saw Godfrey’s eyes flick away.

The piece of film felt cold as it suctioned to the skin parallel with my red burns.
 

A flash of cold prickled up my arm, tickling my spine as I shivered. But it was not ice as I expected; it felt as though I was being doused in frigid water. The water moved up my body in splashes, freezing and jarring, but not excruciating as before. It lapped at my ankles. I was wading in a cold pool, the water rising quickly to my knees and thighs. Suddenly, it was at chest level, splashing against my neck and chin.

As it rose up my body, the water got colder and choppier. Before I was wading in calm waters. Now I was treading in the middle of the ocean.
 

Waves splashed against my face, filling my nose and mouth. I coughed and spluttered, but I could not clear my throat. The water was rushing in too fast.
 

I beat my arms and legs, trying desperately to keep my head above water, but I just sank farther.

Thrashing desperately, I tried to come up for air, but my legs and arms were too heavy. I could not swim. The weight of my body pulled me down into the dark water, as if I had sandbags strapped to my chest.

The water engulfed my head, beating down on me. Like a whirlpool, the water was churning — forcing itself into my airways. I choked, and my chest tightened as I fought for air. I moved my arms, trying to surface. It was no use.
 

More water rushed into my lungs. They were on fire. I couldn’t breathe.

Black spots appeared at the edges of my vision.

I was drowning. I was going to die.

Then my body started to feel weak and heavy, as though it were made of lead.

I floated down, down, down, until I finally settled against the bottom of a pool of brackish water.

The rough concrete scraped my skin, but it felt nice resting there. My legs and torso were too heavy to stay buoyant. Everything was so heavy. It was easier down here.

I thought about Amory kissing me up on the cliff. It was strange — like watching someone who wasn’t me being kissed. That seemed so long ago. Amory was so far away. I just wanted the agony to stop.

Something flickered in the back of my mind. I could not sleep at the bottom of the pool.

As my head went light and fuzzy, I felt an urgency stirring in my chest. Raising my head, I tried to remember which way was up. I squinted through the blackness to the bright light refracting off the water’s surface. I pushed off toward the light, feeling the water flowing through my fingers. My head broke the surface, and I felt the cold sting of air against my face. I gasped.
 

Coming up was awful.

I choked, and the pain in my throat matched other pains I had not felt in the water. I retched, but no water came up. People were moving around me, talking in low voices. I ignored them.

Someone kicked me in the gut. I whimpered and withdrew into a ball but did not move. I just wanted to be left alone.
 

I couldn’t remember why someone tried to drown me, and I found I did not care. I closed my eyes, willing them to go away. They did.

Then I felt something brush against my cheek like the wing of a bird.
 

Someone tugged on my ponytail gently. It was such a soft gesture that called back to another time: me, ten years old, being awoken in the middle of the night at summer camp. We were sneaking out to the lake to look for frogs. Only one other person could remember that.

Slowly, I opened my eyes. Greyson was staring down at me, looking horrified. I was lying on my side against the tarp on the ground, still taped to the chair with my right arm wedged painfully underneath me. I must have thrashed hard enough to knock myself over. Someone had removed the tape and fabric from my mouth, and my scalp prickled where bits of my hair had ripped out with it.

“Come on,” he whispered. “We have to get you out of here before they come back.”

He withdrew his knife from a back pocket — the knife I had carried in my bag over a thousand miles for him — and cut the tape binding my wrists. He ripped it off quickly like a Band-Aid and began cutting me out of the chair. As I struggled to roll over into a sitting position, my limbs felt strangely weak, and my head was still spinning.
 

I looked down at my arm. There were four clear strips of film stuck to the skin there; the color had leeched into my bloodstream with the poison. I tried to peel them off, but my hands shook. Greyson saw me struggling and did it for me. There were new marks there now, these ones shiny and raised as if the flesh had bubbled as it burned. They looked like tally marks ticked off in a row.

Looking down expectantly, Greyson held out a hand to help me to my feet. My gut ached painfully where one of them had kicked me, and I felt other bruises beginning to form along my side where I had crashed to the ground. There was a tender skid mark on my cheek from falling over onto the tarp.

Greyson held on to me as he poked his head outside through the flap. Seeing no one, he pulled me out into the snow and around the side of the tent. We made our way along behind the row, careful to stay out of sight as we moved down the block to the tent I shared with Logan.

We entered through the back flap, and Logan jumped as she heard the rustle of canvas.

“Oh! It’s you,” she sighed. Even in the dark, I saw her expression change immediately when she saw me. “What the hell did they do to you?”

I shook my head, shivering as I sank onto my sleeping bag. My clothes were soaked with cold sweat.
 

“They tortured her,” Greyson spat. He was shaking with anger. “They used four this time!”

“You got through four?” Logan looked at me in disbelief. “I’ve never heard of that.”

“What are those things?”

“HALLO tags,” she said. “They were developed by the PMC to be a more ‘humane’ form of torture.”

“Humane?”
Greyson rounded on her. “There’s nothing ‘humane’ about it! Did you learn how to use those?”

Logan glared at him. “I did what I had to do. I’m not proud of it. It’s not like I enjoyed torturing people.”

He looked taken aback.

“And anyway,” said Logan. “They should never have used that many on you. They could have
killed
you.” She sat down next to me. “Did they use the fire ones again?”

I shook my head. “It was like I was drowning.”
 

“Waterboarding.”

“Why did he do it? I don’t understand.”

“You challenged him openly,” said Logan in a quiet voice. “He’s weak. Everybody says so behind his back. It’s just that no one’s ever stood up to him.”

“He tortured me because I
talked back
to him?”

“He has to keep order somehow.”

I turned to look at her. “We can’t stay here.”

“One step ahead of you. Our bags are already packed.”

I glanced over to the corner of the tent, where our rucksacks stood ready to go.

“I grabbed some extra clothes and stuff for you, too,” she said to Greyson. “Plus everything from your tent.”
 

I felt a pang of sorrow when I remembered what few items Greyson had left in this world to call his own. Just the picture of his family and the knife I had brought with me from his apartment after his arrest.

“Where should we go?” I asked.

Logan threw a shifty glance over to her sleeping bag. Looking closer, I could see a map smoothed out over it.

“I stole those while Rulon was busy torturing you,” she confessed. “It’s the only way we’re going to get into Sector X. All their routes are marked. I haven’t quite figured it out yet, but it’s better than nothing.”

Amory.
I let out a long breath I’d been holding since Rulon’s tent. “Let’s go.”

Bundled up in all the warm clothes we had, the three of us slipped out the back of the tent. We hugged the line of trees and moved in the shadows to avoid attracting attention. After the commotion at dinner, the last stragglers were returning to their tents, talking in low whispers.

“. . . never thought she was PMC, but I guess it just goes to show . . .”

“You can’t trust a defector. I know it sounds bad, but they’re just not like us.”

I felt my face grow hot with anger and embarrassment. I hated that Rulon had made such a scene.

“Hey!” Greyson hissed, swatting behind him. “Wha —”

Logan clapped a hand to his mouth, and I saw the glint of his knife in her hand. For a minute, I thought she had gone off the deep end, but then she crunched through the snow toward the weapons tent and slipped in through the back flap.

I exchanged a look with Greyson, who had gone bright red.
 

“What? She just frisked that off me!”

We waited in the shadows, my heart pounding in my throat. Any second now, Rulon could return to the tent to find me gone. It would be impossible to get out of here once the camp was on alert. I was just about to go after Logan when she emerged carrying a serious-looking gun. Two more were strapped to her shoulders, and she also had a bag full of ammunition dangling from her arm.

“They had HK416s
and
FN SCARs,” she whispered. “I haven’t seen one of these since my dad’s.” Logan ran her hand down the side. “He’s ex-military.”

Greyson eyed her warily. “You’re a little scary, you know.”

She rolled her eyes and shoved one of the rifles into his hands. “Just for that, you don’t get the other SCAR.”

I took the rifle she handed me with numb hands. I never really knew what to do with a firearm.

“We need to get out of here
now,
” she said.
 

“So why did you take my knife?”
 

Logan looked guilty. “I may have used it to threaten the poor kid who was guarding the tent.”

Greyson snorted. “A tent full of assault rifles, and you hold up a guy with a dull knife.”

Making our way down the hill toward the edge of camp, Logan led us deeper into the trees. We still had to get past the lookout who was stationed at the foot of the hill. Peering through the trees, Greyson stopped and pointed.

If I hadn’t been looking for him, he would have been impossible to see. The lookout was perched in a tree, dressed in dark camouflage. With no fire and no protection from the wind, he must have been freezing.

Suddenly, I heard the crunch of heavy boots through the snow and a low whistle. I squinted through the darkness back toward camp. There was a figure ambling down the hill with a gun slung over his shoulder. The scraggly beard and slight limp told me it was Godfrey.