No Return (The Internal Defense Series) (8 page)

Becca hated paper evidence.

Words in the air were nothing, vanishing as soon as they had been spoken. Paper was tangible proof. A single incriminating note that landed in the wrong hands could bring down the resistance.

And now she was sitting in Processing 117, arguably the most dangerous building in the country, staring at a pile of them three feet thick.

She fixed the surveillance reports with a glare worthy of her mother, as if she could make them disappear through sheer force of will. The pile only seemed to grow taller.

There must have been enough reports in that stack to wallpaper the cell they would land her in a dozen times over—and she had to read every last one of them.

To be fair, she had gotten a head start. She and the others had looked over as many of the reports as they could during the meeting that had just ended. But there hadn’t been enough time for more than an overview, not with the arguments that kept breaking out. Even Kara hadn’t been able to give them any real advice, any definitive answer on whether Ryann could be trusted.

The sooner I get this done, the sooner I can go out to the clearing and burn it all.
With a sigh, she slid down off her chair to sit next to the papers.

Piece by piece, she began to dismantle the pile, laying each set of documents side by side. Little by little, pushing chairs aside as she worked, she covered the floor. Before long she had used every inch of available space… and she still had papers left.

When Meri had plunked the pile down in the center of the circle at the meeting’s start, Becca hadn’t understood why Meri insisted her informants in Surveillance hadn’t found very much information. Soon, though, she had figured it out, as they had sifted through page after page of transcribed conversations between Ryann and the dissident posing as her mother. Page after page of logs that listed the exact moment Ryann had walked from her living room to her bedroom. Page after page of nothing.

But there had to be something in here. Something Meri had missed. Something that would reveal the truth about Ryann, one way or the other.

Becca wedged herself into a corner, set the extra papers down on her lap, and began to read.

The first page listed a description of items Ryann had browsed on a trip to a clothing store. Not useful.

Second page: Photos of Ryann’s walk to school. Not useful.

Third page: Not useful.

Fourth page: Not useful.

When she finished with the papers in her lap, she set them aside and started moving down the rows she had laid out on the floor. Picking up stacks. Flipping through them. Setting them down and moving on to the next.
Not useful. Not useful. Not useful.

Halfway down the second row, she paused at a picture of Ryann staring hungrily through the window of a suburban house. Her parents’ house, the notes explained before giving a quick sketch of Ryann’s relationship with her parents. Apparently she had been close to both of them, especially her dad. She and her dad had gone hiking together almost every weekend. She had described him as her best friend once, in a conversation she had thought was private.

The look of longing in Ryann’s eyes made something tighten in Becca’s throat. It had been like that between Becca and her mom once, too. Before Becca had learned the truth about Internal. Before all these secrets had come between them.

Had it happened that way for Ryann, even before she had left home? Had her resistance involvement cost her her relationship with her dad?

Becca shoved the picture to the bottom of the stack. Not useful.

She kept going. Pile after endless pile. Photo after useless photo. Ryann had walked to school. She had walked home. She had argued with her guardian. She had curled into a ball on her bed and cried. How was this supposed to tell Becca anything? Was there some kind of hidden meaning that she wasn’t seeing, something that would come clear to her only after it was too late?

The next sheet. And the next.

And then a creak.

The sound of the door opening.

She had locked it, she was sure she had locked it… but it didn’t matter now. The door was opening slowly, but it was opening; the space between it and the wall widened even as she watched. Becca swept her arms out in a bear hug to gather as many of the papers together as possible, mashing them together without caring what order they ended up in. Knowing even as she did that it was too late.

“Becca. Stop. It’s me. It’s me.” The voice made Becca freeze. The papers tumbled out of her arms and back onto the floor, fanning out in an abstract collage of treason.

Kara stood in the doorway.

“Sorry I scared you.” Kara stepped into the room, neatly avoiding one of the few surviving piles of paper, and closed the door behind her. “You guys need a secret knock or something.”

Becca glared. Her heartbeat still hadn’t returned to normal; her head still swam with adrenaline and fear. “A secret knock? Do you think this is some kind of game?”

“It was a joke.” Kara looked down at the scattered papers. “I wanted to talk to you, so I waited outside, but you never came out. I got worried.”

“If you thought I had been arrested, you should have left.” Becca started straightening the stacks. “You never confront Enforcers on your own, especially not in 117. You’ll only get yourself killed.”

Kara squatted down and studied the floor. “You’re looking through more of the stuff from Surveillance?”

“Somebody has to.”

Kara’s gaze flitted around the room, from Becca to the door to the dead camera in the corner. “Isn’t anyone who works here going to wonder why you didn’t leave with the others? What about the cameras—when do they turn back on?”

“I’ve done this before,” Becca assured her. “They’re used to me staying a little late sometimes. And they never turn the cameras on until I leave. I had one of Meri’s Surveillance informants check once to make sure.”

“Good.” Kara gave the camera one last suspicious look. “You want help?” Without waiting for an answer, she plucked the sheets from Becca’s hands and started laying them out again, skimming through them as she did.

Becca started to say no. But another look around the paper-carpeted room stopped her. Maybe with a second pair of eyes she would be able to leave before midnight. And wasn’t this why she had agreed to let Kara into the resistance in the first place? Because Kara could see things she couldn’t? Maybe she would find what Becca had missed.

“Thank you,” she said instead. The words came out stiff and formal.

For a few minutes they searched through the papers in silence. Kara was the first to speak. “No overly suspicious meetings,” she murmured—maybe to Becca, maybe to herself. She stabbed her finger down at a photo. “Any chance this guy she’s talking to could be with Internal?”

Becca crossed the room to look over her shoulder. “Probably not. He’s as young as she is. Surveillance sometimes recruits teenagers to work for them, but I don’t think any of the other divisions do.” She set down her own stack and picked up another. “What did you want to talk to me about?”

Kara had already moved on to the next page. “Hmm?”

“You said you were waiting outside to talk to me.”

“Oh. That.” Kara squinted down at the transcript in her hands. “You talked to Micah the other day.” She paused. “You were out there for a long time.”

“Nothing happened. You don’t need to worry about that.”

Kara shook her head. “I wasn’t worried. I just wanted…” She tapped her fingers nervously against the transcript, studiously not looking at Becca. Her voice was smaller than Becca had ever heard it before. “If something does happen, it’s okay. That’s all I wanted to say.”

“Nothing is going to happen,” Becca repeated. She thrust the page in her hand toward Kara. “What about this? Do you think it’s suspicious?”

Kara’s brow furrowed as her eyes scanned the photo, which showed Ryann deep in conversation with a store clerk. “I don’t think so. It’s too out in the open. But it’s a possibility.” Her frown deepened. She drummed her fingers against the floor. “We shouldn’t be looking for signs that she’s been meeting with Internal—we probably won’t find them. Internal will be too careful for that, and so will the spies. We need to focus on signs that she’s been in reeducation. I don’t care how careful she is, she wouldn’t be able to hide that.”

Kara had talked a little about that at the meeting, but she hadn’t had a chance to go into it too deeply. “What should we be looking for?”

“Reeducation is…” Kara swallowed. Her fingers twitched almost violently. “It changes you. Drives you to extremes. If these people were dedicated before, they’ll be twice as dedicated now—or they’ll act like they don’t care at all. They’ll hate being alone, or they’ll refuse to talk to anyone. They’ll love everyone or hate everyone. Extremes.”

Without looking up from the papers she held, she picked her way across the floor as she spoke. “Instability is another thing. You can’t put somebody through something like that and expect them to be the same after.” She reached the far wall. Turned around. Back and forth. She picked up speed, still managing to avoid the piles of paper. “And these spies are going to be under constant stress, having to pretend to believe in the same things they were tortured for believing in just a few weeks ago. They’ll be able to hold themselves together—Internal wouldn’t have risked sending them in otherwise—but they won’t be able to do it perfectly.”

She reached the far wall for the second time and stopped. She turned to face Becca. “That’s what we need to look for. Anything that makes her look not quite right, or different than she was before. Anything that makes her look like she might be about to snap.” She pointed to Becca’s end of the room. “You start on that end. I’ll stay here and work my way to you.”

The room fell silent again as they got back to work.

More of the same. Transcripts, logs, photos. The minutiae of everyday life. But this time, Becca knew what she was looking for.

“She almost never leaves the house,” she murmured.

Kara raised her head. “Ryann?”

Becca nodded. “She goes to school under the identity the resistance gave her, but other than that…” She skimmed the paper in her hand. It showed the same thing all the others had. “She left home twice in the ten days that Meri’s people were watching her. Once to buy clothes because the woman she’s living with told her to. Once to meet with her resistance contact. And when she’s at school, she hardly ever talks to anyone. Her teachers have started worrying about her. Look.” She tapped the transcript, even though Kara was too far away to read it.

Kara frowned down at the sheet she was studying. “That fits.”

Becca didn’t want it to fit, she realized. She wanted Ryann to be innocent. “It might not mean anything. She could just be shy. And she had to leave everything behind—that changes people too.”

Kara didn’t say anything.

“It won’t be enough for Meri. Not when the life of one of her people is at stake.” Making excuses.
Stop defending her.
Becca would do what she had to do, whatever that was. With or without Meri’s support.

She would do what she had to do.

“It might not mean anything,” she repeated.

Kara held up the sheet in her hand, face grim. “I found something too.”

Becca started picking her way across the room toward her. “What is it?”

“Nothing worse than what you found. Like you said, it could be nothing.” She offered the paper to Becca as Becca reached her.

Becca scanned the transcript. “She started a fight at school.”

“She doesn’t talk to anyone. She doesn’t make trouble. And then suddenly she’s breaking someone’s nose. It doesn’t look like she had anything against this other girl, either—they hadn’t said a word to each other before this.”

“Not that Surveillance picked up, anyway. Meri’s people weren’t able to watch her all the time. They might have missed something.” Excuses again.
Stop.

“Or maybe she’s only a frustrated dissident,” said Kara. “I remember what that was like. I hated Internal, and I couldn’t do anything about it, so I took it out on the rest of the world instead. I bet you went through the same thing when you first started questioning Internal.”

“Mostly I was just scared.” But thinking about it, she could remember the frustration Kara was talking about. She had almost thrown her life away on more than one futile rescue attempt because of it. She had crashed a resistance meeting because of it.

Maybe Ryann’s fight didn’t mean anything more than those things had.

“Have you found anything else?” asked Kara.

Becca shook her head. “You?”

“Nothing.”

Not enough to justify killing her. Too much to justify letting her live.

Do what you have to do.

Becca took a deep breath. When she spoke, her voice was flat. “I’ll talk to Meri tomorrow. I’ll make her understand.”

“You’re going to do it.” Kara’s face didn’t reveal anything.

“We’re not likely to find anything more conclusive. And we don’t know how much time we have.” She ignored the worm of doubt in her stomach, the memory of Ryann’s face in the photograph as she stole a glimpse of her parents. The memory of her own sixteen-year-old self.
It needs to be done.

She bent down and started gathering papers into her arms. “Help me pick these up.”

Kara placed her hand on top of the stack Becca was trying to grab. “Wait.”

“You won’t convince me to compromise the safety of the resistance.”
Not any more than I already have.

“I know.” Kara didn’t move her hand. “But there’s something else we can try.”

Remember what Kara’s plans have already led to,
she told herself.
Remember Terrence.

But she asked anyway. “What is it?”

“We talk to her. Face to face.” Kara stood, eyes alight with inspiration. “I know reeducated kids. You know how to do your evaluation thing.” She gestured at the papers around them. “Put us in a room with her together, and we won’t need any of this.”

If Becca had a chance to meet Ryann in person… to sit down across from her in an evaluation…