Reaping (26 page)

“My dad? Coming here?” Miah finally responds.

“Yeah,” Eli says, with a bit of a laugh. “Tomorrow morning.”

Miah and his dad didn’t always have the best relationship while we were in the Academy, but since we’ve left the Sector, I sense that Miah’s willing to re-evaluate a lot of things. And that includes his estranged father, the man who abandoned him and his mother to join some group of crazed conspiracy theorists who’d all gone off the deep end. Also known as The Resistance.

Remy stands, taking the rest of us by surprise.

“I need to head back to the Farm.”

Eli stares at her.

“Now? In broad daylight? Why?”

Remy shakes her head. “Not now. Tonight. There’s an enormous building on the campus, and no one I’ve talked to has a clue what goes on in there. I want to find out what it is. Maybe there are weapons we could use, or equipment, or seeds we can confiscate. It must be important, so we should find out what it is before the others get here.”

“Why not wait until we’ve got backup,” Eli says, his voice almost pleading. “The Dietician’s lab was risky enough.”

“The more people we’ve got milling around here, the more likely it is a drone will sight us. We need to go in tonight before backup arrives. We need to know what’s in there.” There’s an edge to Remy’s voice, a threat in her eyes, that reminds me of the tone Eli took when he held a Bolt to my head and a knife to my throat when he found me and Miah out in the Wilds. “What if it’s something they could use against us?”

“What’s the rush?” Soren ask. “Tomorrow we’ll have more manpower, additional food, and the workers will have had one more day on untainted MealPaks. Let’s give it all a rest today.”

“The rush,” she says, glaring at Soren, “is that there could be weapons in there that we could use, or they could use against us or against the Farm workers. If we know what’s going on in there, we could avoid a lot of trouble down the road. If we don’t, we could be blindsided by something they’re hiding for a reason.” Remy pauses before her next statement, and her eyes meet mine as she speaks.

“Vale, what do you think? You willing to rush into this with me?”

“Drone,” Remy whispers. “Take it out. Now.”

I turn my Bolt up to the sky and aim carefully. Now is not the time to stun them—we can’t risk them sending any photographs or evidence of our presence back to the guard stations. I press my finger to the trigger, exhale, squeeze. The flash of blue light is concealed from open view by the surrounding trees, and I’m grateful we’re not into the Farm proper yet. The drone plummets like a dropped rock, crashing into the ground about thirty meters off.

The fight that ensued when Remy told everyone she wanted me to accompany her on this adventure was spectacular, but short-lived. Eli sat quietly, looking unsurprised but a little disappointed. Sad, even, as though he’d been the last chosen for a game of football back at the Academy. Soren, by contrast, flipped into an altogether different kind of anger than I’d seen before. It took Miah slapping a hand on his mouth and telling him to shut the fuck up unless he wanted to just go ahead and broadcast our location to the whole fucking Sector for him to quiet down. When Miah finally got Soren to shut up, Remy just stared at him.

“Look, Soren, it’s only rational. If Vale comes with me, and we get caught, there’s a possibility we’ll make it out alive. If you come with me, and we get caught, they’ll shoot us on sight. And even though I don’t think we’ll get caught, I’d like to live through the night on the off-chance that we do.”

I try to leave that memory in the distance, wishfully replacing it with one where Remy wanted me along not because of my name but because I’m a good soldier, because I don’t shout at her when I disagree with her, and maybe, 
just maybe
, because she wants to be near me.

Thinking of the drone, I turn to Remy. “We should make sure it’s disabled. Don’t want it coming back to life and relaying crash data to HQ.”

“Let’s do it,” Remy agrees.

We jog a little out of our way and spot the collapsed drone caught in the bramble of two bushes. The circular, formerly hovering robot has four cameras and two low-powered Bolts attached—about what I expected for Farm security. I prise open the panel to the nanocircuitry and disable the connections with a few quick movements.

“We’re good,” I say.

“I’ve never been able to master those circuits. I usually find a rock and smash it. Not very elegant, but it works.”

I shake my head and laugh as we start off again. This time, we’re not going through the hole in the fence Bear showed us. We’ve been relying on it too heavily, Remy decided, worried that someone would eventually catch on. Since we’re dressed for mobility, we’re going up and over the fence at the point of shortest distance between the perimeter and the mystery building Remy wants to investigate.

Remy slaps the charge on her set of magnetic gloves, and begins climbing. The fencing material is too slick to climb any other way, and there’s nothing for a hook or line of rope to catch on at the top. The magnetic gloves work fine, although the climb is anything but easy. We’re hauling ourselves up using upper body strength alone. I’m grateful I’ve been keeping up on Aulion’s training routine, even at Normandy. The man might have been a first-rate bastard, but he sure knew how to work a strength routine.

Luckily the climb is short, as the fence is only five meters high. We’re up and over in a matter of minutes, dropping silently to the ground.

“Any guards?” she asks.

“None visible.”

“Shoot to stun, if you have to shoot at all.”

“Remy,” I say, glancing down at her, tense and alert at my side, “they won’t return the favor.”

“That doesn’t mean we should kill them,” she says. “Not all the Enforcers are bad people. They might not deserve our pity, but they don’t deserve to die.”

“Death is inevitable in war,” I respond, so quietly I almost can’t hear myself.

“You think I don’t know that?” Her voice is harsh. “But I have my list, and these men and women aren’t on it.”

I ponder these words for a second, trying not to think about the people who undoubtedly 
are
 on her list. “Okay. For tonight,” I say and follow her lead as we jog into the Farm, staying low to the ground.

As we draw closer, I blink three times to switch out of infrared into visible spectrum. The night is so dark I can’t even see the building she’s talking about until we almost run into it. Remy slows her jog and heads directly for a piping and air duct system on the exterior.

“Hand,” she says, as soon as we’ve reached it. She meets my eyes for half a second as I cup my hands in a stirrup. Then she puts her boot into my laced fingers, and clasps my shoulders. With an enormous effort, I heave her as high as I can, and with a quick motion she grabs onto the frame below two large exhaust fans.

Remy grabs at a pipe coupling and begins to pull herself up toward the roof, three stories high. She looks like a spider crawling up a web. And then she disappears.

I press my body up against the wall and wait. Not five minutes later, I hear Remy’s voice whisper in my earpiece.

“Here it comes.” I look up to see a rope tumbling down toward me, and I catch it before it can swing wide. I hated rope climbing back when Aulion stood at the bottom timing me, yelling at me no matter how fast or slow I went. Even with no Aulion, I still hate it. At least now I can use the side of the building to propel myself upward instead of swinging like a pendulum in the middle of the gymnasium. I jump and get a good handhold and start climbing. Once I’m over the edge, Remy unties the rope from around the base of a section of solar harvesters and motions me to follow her.

We crouch low and make our way through rows of panels. Except for the dim reflection of starlight, everything is shadowed and silent. At the far end there’s a door and we head toward it, careful to stay low so we cast no shadows. Remy tries the door, but it’s locked, unsurprisingly. It doesn’t take me long to fish out a lock pick and open the door.

“Simple, really,” I whisper. “Not much security up here.”

“Why would there be?” Remy responds.

Remy opens the door just a crack and we peek inside. The closeness of her body distracts me for a second, and I have to tell myself to keep my mind on the task at hand. 
Focus, Vale!

Inside, there’s nothing but darkness and a few dim red lights indicating the power to the facility is still on. She pushes the door open enough to slip through, and I follow suit, shutting it carefully. I check to make sure it’s auto-locked behind us—we want to leave everything exactly as we found it in case we don’t leave by this door—then we slink onto the inside balcony, scanning the expansive space for sensors, monitors, or cameras we need to disarm, but there’s nothing obvious.

We walk through a darkened hallway to a flight of metal stairs, which leads onto a large open platform that overlooks the ground floor. I blink back to infrared and, from this perspective, we can almost see the entire space of the building.

Remy, in her heat-cloaking gear, is now just a floating face at my side, a hovering blur of heat from her exposed skin. I look around. Stricken by the sight in front of me, I suck in a breath.

“Remy,” I whisper, awed. “Are you on infrared?”

There’s a pause as she activates her infrared contacts and then she gasps, and together we stand there for a moment, taking in the size and scale and weirdness of what we’re seeing. There are enormous, two-story high towers of heat, pulsing gently, probably twenty of them, spaced evenly throughout the facility. As I look more closely, I realize they are slatted, sheets stacked upon sheets inside round containers. The tall vats are surrounded on our level by a wraparound balcony. Right in front of us, a walkway leads to a small elevator spanning this level and the ground level. Although what moonlight there is filters through the domed glass ceiling, the place is still shrouded in deep shadow.

“What 
is
 this?” Remy says, hushed.

“No idea,” I respond.

We continue along the platform, which leads right up alongside the blocks of heat. There’s a powerful scent of antiseptic, and something else I don’t quite recognize, something fresh and heavy but off-putting somehow, not a little revolting. Remy leans closer, but I keep my head up, trying not to get too close.

“Should we risk a light?” she asks, peering down into the containers.

“We should confirm there’s no additional security, first,” I whisper. “Nothing that might trigger as we start poking around.”

Remy nods in assent.

“Let’s do a quick sweep, then. Disable anything you see.”

I follow her down the stairs at the end of the suspended walkway. We split up and scan the area. I keep my eye out for cameras or internal security, but there is none. No guards. Doesn’t even look like there’s a guard station. The strangeness of this place has set me completely on edge.

“Looks like the puppet masters never imagined the puppets would cut their strings and go exploring,” she says, her eyes gleaming, her thoughts echoing my own. “No security at all.”

“I don’t like it,” I respond. “This is the largest building at the Farm, with minimal exterior security and none on the inside. They obviously don’t think anyone would ever come in here. But why?”

“Rose mentioned once that she thought this was a greenhouse, but that made no sense since there are no windows. But if that’s what the workers are told, and they believe it, no questions, why would they try to break in?”

“Wouldn’t some of the workers work here? Unless the place is automated. Maybe whatever’s going on in here doesn’t require a lot of manpower.”

“Let’s flip on a light and see what they’re keeping so quiet,” she responds, her voice conspiratorial, almost eager. I wish I shared her enthusiasm. The whiff I got earlier unsettled me and almost turned my stomach.

Remy pulls a biolight out of her pocket and flips it on. We both blink back into visible spectrum. She turns to the nearest vat and moves right up to the edge. She presses her gloved fingertips against the glass, staring into the large container.

It’s one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen.

There are thin slats of some sort of bioplastic film layered horizontally all the way up the glass container. At the top, the slats are mostly empty, but as the slats go down, they are fuller, loaded with gelatinous material, some almost honeycombed, some more liquified than anything. At ground level—waist heigh for us—the material is fully solidified and, from my perspective, utterly revolting.

We stand and stare at it, stunned at the weirdness, and then it hits me. I remember back to one of my history classes at the Academy: As the population spiraled out of control in the Old world, raising animals naturally became not only an insufficient method of production, but impractical because of clear-cutting of forests for grazing and subsequent soil degradation and mineral depletion. When scientists discovered it was possible to grow protein tissue in petri, a new industry arose, one that replaced the unethical and unhygienic industrial animal processing facilities. But these protein companies, too, succumbed to the profit motive as they expanded too rapidly, competing for market share in the race to displace conventional industrial animal farms. To undercut competitors, businesses grew meat products with little to no nutritional value leading to rampant vitamin deficiency. Lax regulation coupled with poor oversight resulted in routine outbreaks of illness from Salmonella, E. coli, and listeria monocytogene poisoning.

I pull back from the glass and fight the temptation to retch. Remy, however, doesn’t seem to have quite caught on.

“Remy,” I say, my voice louder than it should be, “it’s a protein lab. They’re growing meat.”

She turns to stare at me, and then quickly turns back to the vats.

“Oh my god,” she whispers. “I thought this was illegal?”

“It 
is
 illegal. The third tenet of the OAC’s incorporation doctrine was that they would never grow meat laboratory style, like the protein industries of the Old World.”