Tether (17 page)

“Please, for the love of all that is good and decent, somebody say something!” Tim joked. “The tension is killing me.”

“We’re not going with you,” Selene said. “We’ll die before we let you take us back in.” Sasha cut her eyes at Selene so sharply that Thomas almost laughed, but Selene was serious. She was bold; he had to give her that.

“That won’t be necessary,” Adele said dryly, glancing at Thomas in exasperation. Selene was quite the topic among the KES agents; they didn’t know what to make of her. She’d done a good job of cultivating her own mystery in her time at the Labyrinth, and she was the subject of every conversation, although from what Thomas had heard, it was all more rumor than fact. “We’re here to help you.”

“Why?” Sasha asked. Thomas had asked Adele the same question as soon as he got her alone after the General gave them their assignment. Why had she covered for Selene and Sasha in the Labyrinth basement when she’d been ordered to bring them in?

“I owe you,” Adele had said. “You helped me once; now I’m returning the favor. You care about her, I can tell. If the General’s right that she thinks she loves you, then I’m pretty sure you love her back. I thought letting her go would help lessen my debt to you a little.”

“You don’t owe me anything.” He knew what she was talking about, but it had been a long time ago, and he’d never expected her to repay him. But if by doing so Adele was going to help Sasha, then he wasn’t going to complain.

“Sure I do.”

“And I’m not in love with her.” Denying his feelings felt like a betrayal, but he had to lie to protect Sasha. “She’s probably not in love with me, either. She had a crush on me, that’s all. I’m sure she’s over it. It was a long time ago.”

Adele had shrugged. “Whatever. Let’s just find her, okay?”

Back at the Warren’s Run train station, Sergei started to speak, but Adele cut him off. “We’ll explain later. We need to get off this platform right now. It’s way too exposed.”

“Who are you?” Selene stood beneath the eaves of the station house, and the slant of the sunlight threw dark shadows
across her face, hiding the look in her eyes and obscuring her expression.

“Agent Nguyen of the King’s Elite Service,” Adele said, not bothering to disguise how insulting she found the question. Lesser agents would shrink beneath Selene’s inscrutable, knowing gaze—even Thomas found it unnerving sometimes—but Adele’s belief in her own superiority was stronger than her fear of pretty much anything. “Who the hell are
you
?”

“I’m—” Selene began.

Adele cut her off. “Yeah, I know your name. Let’s move.” She and Sergei flanked the stairs while the rest of them trooped past her. Thomas felt her eyes on his back as they walked down the quiet streets of Warren’s Run, past Dutch colonial stone houses and old wooden shop fronts. Like Almond, it was one of those small, quaint Second Revolution–era river towns that had been hit hard by the last economic crash and never recovered. Locals called the train they’d been on the
Desperation Express,
because people took it only when they had no other choice.

It was a sorry state of affairs for Warren’s Run, the site of the first real battle between British forces and the colonial insurgents during the Second Revolution. In spite of the name, Warren hadn’t run; he’d advanced on the larger, better-funded imperial army with a boldness that Thomas had always admired, and eventually he’d won, giving the UCC the chance to spread its wings, like the eagle on its seal, and fly.

But Thomas was grateful the town was practically deserted; it would make it easier to slip away unseen. “I guess I should probably make some introductions,” Thomas said. As they’d made their way through town, Navin had come in over the comm to inform them that he and Cora—who’d driven to
Warren’s Run in one of the KES motos—had found an abandoned garage a few streets over from the main road. It was an old carriage house, retrofitted for a new century and then left behind. The plaque outside the door declared that this had been General Warren’s command center during the nearby battle, and everything—from the toolboxes to the oil canisters to the motos on blocks all around them—was covered with a layer of dust so thick one could almost believe the place had been sitting empty since the Second Revolution. There were historical curiosities just like this in all the towns that lined the banks of the Hudson, because this was where the war had started. And if the General was right, this was where a new war was about to begin, with Selene as its flag bearer. Or its architect, though Thomas seriously doubted that.

“Yeah,” Navin said, peering at Sasha and Selene. “Which one of you is which, and how do I tell the difference?”

Thomas had no trouble telling them apart; he was certain that even in a room full of a thousand copies, he could pick Sasha out every time. There was something about the way she looked at him, even casually, that set his insides humming like a tuning fork. It had nothing to do with her appearance, which made it easier not to be fooled by imposters.

“We’re identical.” Selene sniffed. “Like twins. I suppose you’ll just have to guess.”

“Selene’s the one who always looks like she thinks she’s smarter than you,” Adele remarked. Selene’s face darkened, and Cora and Sergei reached for their sidearms, as if they thought she might attack Adele. But Thomas had a feeling Selene was above petty violence—and besides, how much damage could she possibly do?

Sasha put her hand on Selene’s shoulder and shook her head. “I’m Sasha,” she said. “This is Selene.” She slipped her
necklace out from underneath the collar of her T-shirt. It was a small charm, a crescent moon and a star, hanging from a thin silver chain. “If you need to tell us apart, I’m the one wearing this.
Or
you could just ask,” she added.

Thomas ran through the roster—Tim McComber, Sergei Azarov, Navin Patel, Cora Gunner, and Hector Rockaway. He forced himself to say Rocko’s name without betraying how he really felt about him.

“And you’ve already met Adele,” he finished. “They’re all KES agents, like me.”

“Yes, we can see that,” Selene replied. The proprietary way she said
we,
as if she and Sasha were a team, when everything inside him shouted that
he
and Sasha were a team, bothered him. He wondered what Sasha thought.

“Why are they here? You can’t possibly expect us to trust them. We might not be as smart as you,” she said, with a glance in Adele’s direction, “but we aren’t stupid.”

“Thomas,” Sasha said, looking squarely at him. He’d told her once that it wasn’t in his nature to lie, and she deserved the truth from him, but there was no way to give it to her. He didn’t turn away—it would’ve been too obvious—but he could feel the blood rushing to his face, and when she lowered her gaze, he knew she had at least an inkling that he was keeping something from her. “What’s going on?”

“We were all recruits at the Academy together,” Thomas said. This was treacherous territory; it was like crossing a canyon on a tightrope. “We’re going to help you find Juliana.”

“And why would you do that?” Selene demanded. Thomas looked to Sasha to back him up, but she was just as unconvinced as her analog.

“This is ridiculous,” Navin griped with a roll of his eyes. “If we were going to drag you back to the General, we would’ve done it already.”

“And if we wanted to kill you, we would’ve shot you when you tried to run,” Rocko said. Cora punched him hard in the shoulder, and he glared at her.

“Don’t scare them,” she said. Cora had the big blue eyes of a cartoon character, made even brighter by the deep auburn of her thick, wavy hair. They were hypnotic, those eyes, and when you looked into them, you believed what she was saying. Thomas didn’t know Cora as well as he did the others—she’d trialed out of the Academy within his first month—but he’d been on the receiving end of a few of those penetrating gazes, and he would do anything to avoid one, especially now. “We’re on your side. Not everyone in the KES believes in what the General’s doing, and at the end of the day, we don’t serve
him;
we serve the royal family. It’s our job to protect the princess.”

“You don’t want to protect her,” Selene said. “You want to cage her, and she knows that. She won’t let us get anywhere near her while we’re with you!”

Sasha glanced at Selene, surprised at the outburst. After days of interrogation, a daring escape, and a night on the run, the girl was reaching her breaking point. Thomas sort of admired her for not having broken yet. Selene was stronger than he would ever have expected her to be—stronger than most people, in his experience—and in some ways it made her even more terrifying.

“What makes you so sure?” Tim asked, reclining against a seemingly stable stack of paint cans and sending them crashing to the ground. Tim fell right along with them, toppling head over feet onto the garage’s oil-stained concrete floor.

“Graceful,” Navin said as Sergei helped Tim to his feet. Tim shrugged and grinned.

“They can communicate telepathically,” Adele said. Selene stiffened, and Sasha drew in a sharp breath. “What? You
think it’s some big secret? I’ve seen the surveillance footage from your cell, Selene. There’s no way you plotted an escape from the Labyrinth without saying a word about it. Not so smart now, are you?”

Selene’s expression hardened; she seemed more determined than ever—but determined to do
what
?

“Look,” Adele said. “I had the chance to expose you in the Labyrinth, but I let you go. Why would I do that if I wanted to screw up your plans?” The girls didn’t reply, but Thomas could see that Sasha was softening, and even Selene seemed stymied by Adele’s question.

“Okay, that’s enough,” Thomas said. “We need to get out of this ghost town. Do you know where we’re headed?”

Sasha and Selene shook their heads.

“We can feel her there, on the tether, lurking,” Selene explained. “But we can’t hear her, and we don’t think she’s listening to us.”

“Can’t you scream at her or something?” Navin suggested.

“That’s not how it works,” Selene sniffed.

“It is sort of how it works,” Sasha said. “You forced your thoughts and memories through to me, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but your mind is open, and Juliana’s is closed. I have a better command of the tether than you do, but Juliana … her force of will is so strong. She’s well practiced at shutting people out. The only reason we saw what we did was because her emotions were running so high, she didn’t think to hide from us.”

“I’m sorry—you saw something?” Thomas asked. Selene shot Sasha a conspiratorial glance, which wasn’t at all reassuring.

“She was with Callum,” Sasha volunteered. “Libertas was holding them both, and they escaped. But the vision cut out
before we could see where they were being held or where they ended up.”

“Okay,” Thomas said. He was still a little rusty at leading missions, but his instincts had kicked in, the ones that told him to focus and strategize. “If we don’t know where she is, we’ll head to Farnham. That’s the last place any of us saw her, and if Callum is with her, it makes sense she’d be there.”

“What part?” Sergei asked. “It’s kind of big.”

“Adastra City,” Thomas said. He glanced at Selene and Sasha. “You two keep working on her. Maybe she’ll slip up and show you something, or maybe she’ll stop being so stubborn and just tell you where she is. Come on, we’ve got to move. Navin, where’d you hide the moto?”

“Uh, so, about that,” Navin said, wincing. “The moto died out on us a couple blocks away. We thought we might be able to find something here to jump it with, but none of these rust buckets have any juice.”

“Way to go, Patel,” Rocko said sarcastically. “A massive disappointment, as always.”

“Hey, there’s nothing I could’ve done—” Navin protested, but Thomas stopped him.

“Shut up, both of you,” he commanded. “Use your brains instead of your mouths, and let’s come up with a strategy.”

“This town’s not completely empty,” Sergei said. “I bet we could find someone with a working moto we could use to jump the engine.”

“It could come to that,” Thomas said, although he wasn’t too keen on walking the streets of Warren’s Run flashing badges and asking for help. The people in these river towns had small lives, long memories, and a hunger for conspiracy theories that came from growing up not too far from a top-secret military complex. He didn’t want anyone finding out
there was a group of stranded KES agents in their midst and wondering what the hell they were doing there. “Let’s call that Plan Z.”

“We might be able to help,” Sasha said, exchanging a cautious glance with Selene.

“How?” Cora asked.

“Oh,” Selene said, smiling. “You’ll see.”

“So this thing moves? On its own? Like the train?” Selene asked. She just couldn’t get over the fact that something so heavy could glide forward without being pushed. It wasn’t as if they were living in the Stone Age back there on Taiga—from the way she described it, Home seemed equipped with all sorts of technological marvels—but they didn’t have moving vehicles and never had had them, not even before the asteroid hit. When I’d explained to her about fossil fuels on the train, she’d gotten angry.
But that would be so bad for the environment,
she’d said in bewilderment. I wasn’t looking forward to dragging her into Adastra; she was reasonably at home in the wilderness surrounding the Labyrinth, but a city, with its pollution and its noise, would break her heart.