Legacy (Alliance Book 3) (11 page)

“Stan, I am not doing it with you here. I’ll just come out to the big room when I am done, okay?” and he ran off, still smiling.

She held the dress to her chest, feeling the silky fabric against her skin, weightless and soft, petals soft, butterfly-wings soft. It was so white that she was worried it wouldn’t really cover her, that all of her skin would still show through it. She peeled off her pants and shirt, and remembered that she didn’t have a white bra, and she hoped this weightless fabric would cover her nipples, or she’d have to ask Stan to find a way to make her a bra, and the thought of doing that made her giggle. She was in one of the rooms nobody ever used for anything, and it had nothing but basic office furniture in it. There were no mirrors and the window was tiny, too small to see anything in. She slipped the dress over her head, and pulled it down over her body, letting it go. She felt naked in it, the fabric warming up against her skin as soon as it touched it and clinging to her in a way nothing she’d ever worn did. She took a tentative step forward, hearing the swoosh of the folds by the floor, and she worried she’d tear it by stepping on it, only the dress moved with her; moved the way she did.

She looked down and couldn’t see anything that would embarrass her showing through. She really needed to find a mirror. There was one in the large bathroom attached to the big room but that meant everybody else would see her in this thing before she did. It meant Brody would see her in it before she did, but it couldn’t be helped. She walked slowly, still getting used to the feel of it. She was worried about Brody seeing her in this, the same dress Trina died in. She hoped he could take it.

The door to the big room was opened wide, and she heard the chatter of voices coming out of there. She stopped, listening, trying to get her face to look calm for them, for Brody, and finally walked in. The voices stopped. And then Brody was up, looking embarrassed. He walked up to her, and leaning close to her face whispered, “I don’t think I can do this, seeing you in this. I know I have to somehow, but I just can’t yet. I’m sorry,” and he was gone, and everybody looked at her with sadness in their eyes, everybody but the new guy, the soldier.

He walked over to her, smiling, a soft smile, “He’ll be all right. He’ll have to be. For what it’s worth, you look like you just stepped out of a really sweet dream, full of mist and beauty. I’ll talk to him, but you should be there for it,” and she let him take her by the hand out of the room, looking for Brody.

He was in the windowless closet room, sitting on Maxton’s old cot, head in his hands. She stood by the door, letting the soldier walk over to him alone, wanting to be able to leave quickly if she had to. She watched the soldier crouch in front of Brody and put his hand on his shoulder.

“Look at me, Brody, if you can.” He did.

“From what Loren has been able to crack, there are twenty two of them now at Crylo. I don’t know if he told you yet. Twenty two girls, Brody. I know you are stronger that this.... Everything about this is going to remind you of her. You need to bury it and keep going, you have to. You don’t get to walk away from this now. Not with everyone depending on you. Not with all those girls at Crylo.”

Brody shoved at the man’s chest and jumped up, and Maxton was up too, his face flushed, and she heard him breathing hard. Brody hurt him. She didn’t know if he meant to. She hoped he didn’t.

“You’d know about that, wouldn’t you, about walking away?” Brody screamed, angry.

Maxton didn’t move away from him, his voice gentle when he spoke. “Yes, Brody. I do know about that. If you need to lash out at me, do it. Let it out.” She couldn’t take it, Brody being like that to this man, punishing him for something he was feeling, for being right. She walked over, trying to get in between them, but Maxton stopped her, gently, still looking at Brody, “It’s all right, Laurel. He isn’t wrong. Not about this.”

Brody looked at her, and dropped his eyes. “I’m sorry, Laurel. I know there is no other way for us to do this. I just can’t not see her in that clearing.... Can’t get that picture out of my head, and you wearing this... I can’t get past it,” and he put his head down, embarrassed.

Maxton put his hand on his shoulder. “Twenty two girls, Brody. You can and will get past it,” he said softly, and it surprised her that this man truly seemed to harbor no anger for Brody after what he did to him and one of his men. He seemed sad for him, worried maybe, but not angry. She decided she liked him; the way she liked Drake. That she could trust him to do the right thing without anyone needing to ask anything of him.

Brody turned to face Maxton, looking up at his face. “I spent the last few days trying to find a way of asking you to forgive me, and I still can’t. I think I would have killed that kid if Riley didn’t stop me. I need both of you to know that. I lost control. I saw that woman in him, couldn’t help it. If you feel I can’t be trusted to lead this, I’d rather it was you than my boys. They are too young and inexperienced, though as well trained as I could make them,” and he turned away from them, walking to the door, head down, Maxton watching him.

“Brody.” He stopped, right at the door, not turning around, his head still down. “I trust you just fine. But you and I need to come to an understanding. I won’t try to apologize to any of you for what I did any more, and you need to learn that I don’t hold grudges against people who consider me their enemy at the time. We all do what we have to under those circumstances, you know that. The way I see it, what happened then wasn’t between you and me, but different people, and those people are gone now. Gone for good. Ellis is gone. Alliance Maxton is gone. There is just Brody and Lancer. Can you live with that?”

“I don’t know, but I am going to try,” and he was gone.

Maxton turned to her, gray eyes serious, worried, “I think he might try to use you to punish himself somehow. Don’t let him. The way he was with Brandon, it’ll take him a long time to get over that. It’s the hardest thing to live with.”

She thought as much already, but hearing Brody say it so flatly, that he almost killed that kid, it surprised and scared her. “Is it true? What he said about almost killing that kid?”

Maxton looked at her, “It is, Laurel. But it’s also true that he didn’t see that kid when he did it. I could see it in his face. In his own mind, he wasn’t swinging the knife at a young kid, but the woman who savagely beat Riley, the woman who killed the girl he loved the way she did, and I can’t say I blame him for it.”

Everyone was back in the room when she walked in, Maxton following. Brody was up and pacing in front of the window. Nobody was saying anything. Ams was sitting by Riley, wearing the same dress she had on and she couldn’t stop staring at her. She looked entirely unlike Ams that she knew; nothing of a girl in her, all woman.

Brody turned to her, finally noticing them. “Loren was going through all the chatter earlier, and... the Selection was a week ago, Laurel. They know you are missing, everybody knows you and Ams and Hassinger are missing now. So far they just sent out the names, but I am sure they’ll send out the images in short order. I don’t know why the hell I didn’t think about that before. Don’t know what to do about it,” and he went back to his pacing.

He was right, of course. They kept track of the Selection Day from the beginning, but then with everything else that’s happened nobody remembered it anymore. Stupid of them not to. They couldn’t go to Crylo like that now, not if everyone was looking for them. Stan was doodling something on Ella’s pad next to her. Everybody else just had their eyes on Brody, faces serious, and then Stan was up whispering something to Brody, and Brody nodding his head at him, and Stan was gone after that. Brody telling them that there might be a way to change the images of the girls before they go out, they would just need to find replenishers nobody would recognize, girls from a few years ago at least, and replace the faces on them, and the vitals. This way they would be safe, until someone saw their tattoos or ran a DNA scan on them.

It made sense, what he was saying. They would need to come up with different names for this too, just in case. She looked at Ams, and it hit her. They could just get rid of the damn tattoos. There had to be a way to do it. “Ella, can you get the tattoos off of us somehow? It’s just two letters, so it shouldn’t be too bad. And we’ll have to put in the letters for whatever new names we come up with.”

Ella shook her head. “I can, but it won’t help. You got these tattoos years ago, all of you. I can’t age the new ones like that or hide the scars from getting rid of what you have.”

Maxton was softly tapping his fingers on the table next to her, lost in thought. Everybody watching him now, but he didn’t seem to notice, and then he was up. “Can Stan make uniforms with whatever he used to make these dresses? I think we can still do this, even with them knowing that the girls are missing, but we’ll need the right uniforms to pull it off.” And he laid out his plan, quickly, rushing through it, not having thought through all the details yet, and Brody and Riley seemed to like it enough, only Drake was shaking his head, worry all over his face. Maxton looked at him and nodded for him to just say whatever was bothering him.

“I don’t know if I am comfortable with this kind of risk for the girls, Lancer, is all. If something goes wrong and they are taken from us, I don’t know how we would ever get them back from that place....” and he sat back down.

Maxton paced behind her quietly for a few minutes, and said very softly after a while, “We’ll just have to make sure nothing goes wrong, Drake. We’ll run through everything as many times as we need to before we get on that flier. We’ll plan for all the what ifs that we can, and we’ll have Loren and Stan plug into their comms before we go, so we know what they are planning in real time. Nobody will be looking for these girls in the midst of that city. They have the best chance of any of us of blending in.” He sat back down, looking at Laurel apologetically for some reason, but she just smiled at him. She liked his plan. It seemed solid enough. Even if they got caught, she couldn’t imagine anyone in the Alliance would want to harm them, given what they were, at least not unless she and Ams had to shoot at them, and by then, they’d be in danger no matter who anybody thought they were.

Stan came back in, out of breath, a defeated look on his face. He couldn’t do it then, change the images. “They loaded them to the nets already, Brody. I am sorry....”

It looked like Maxton’s plan would have to be it then. She looked over at Ams, and she smiled at her. A small smile, but she knew she was okay with it. They’ll make it work, and maybe Brody would stop beating himself up, and this new man she liked could sleep again, and Drake and Ella would find a place they liked enough to call home. Maybe all of them just needed for all of this to be over, so they could stop running, stop putting holes in trees, and mostly, so they could all laugh again, like they did at that waterfall.

She watched as everyone started to file out of the room, and suddenly Brody was standing right next to her, pulling her up by her hand and wrapping his arms around her, face worried. She smiled up at him, and put her arms around his neck, not caring that whoever was still in the room was likely watching them, not caring about anything but making this boy smile again. She kissed him softly, pulling him towards her by his neck, and whispered just for him, “Ams and I both think we can do it. That means we can. And I like you too much to not want to come back from this in one piece.”

He smiled back at her, she saw it in his eyes, all the sparkles in them, looking at her as if she were something magical, the way she looked at those glowing birches in their old clearing, making her blush from that look, making her wish she never had to let go.

PART II

SUICIDE SQUAD

Maxton, May 6, 2218, Camp Copley Military Academy

He knew he had to pass these last few tests if he had any hope of staying here. He knew he could, too, easily enough. The trouble was simply that he didn’t belong here anymore, not with these kids who got off on hurting each other, bloodying each other’s faces the way they did. He wanted out, so doing badly on everything was deliberate, only of course he had no place else to go to now. They would put him into one of those orphanages if he flunked out, they would have to.

Stranton told him what they did, quietly, just laying it out as if he wasn’t talking to a kid. In a way, he wasn’t. None of them here were really kids anymore. But he could have at least kept some of the things from him, could have tried to protect him. He remembered sitting in his office, staring at these images of unrecognizable burnt bodies of what he was told was left of his parents. They scanned them. They were sure. The bloody animals downed their flier and torched it with everyone on board, women and all. He asked to be taken to wherever that place with the bodies was. He wanted to say goodbye to something other than these frames of mangled bodies shoved at him on a screen. He needed to know for sure, and somehow, he felt that he would, if he could see them, but of course they wouldn’t take him. He knew they wouldn’t, but he couldn’t help asking anyway.

That was 43 days ago. He was put on suicide watch, though he told them, Stranton and the medic, that he didn’t need it, didn’t need any of it. He was fine, truly. He didn’t even cry. He couldn’t cry, and that was the strangest thing of all, the not crying about it. Everyone in his dorm left him well enough alone, the only bloody good thing to come out of it. He hated most of these kids, all but Soren, but even he was letting him be.

He must have closed his eyes, as he felt Soren standing over him, but didn’t see him approach. He was hiding from everybody in the little stretch of woods in the back of the camp, leaning against a tree he liked, running his hands through the grass and just breathing. That’s where he spent all of his free time now; alone. It was the only place he felt free enough to think, and maybe, one day, to cry.

“Hey, Lan. Can I sit?” He nodded to his only friend, not looking at him.

“I need to ask you something, Lan. Look up. It’s important.” He did, Soren crouching in front of him, face serious.