The Defectors (Defectors Trilogy) (12 page)

“So you’re publishing your own newspaper,” I breathed in awe.

“Not me alone, but yes. According to my information, no government body tied to the PMC is monitoring the U.S. mail right now. They’ve got bigger fish to fry. I have lots of old contacts in the press — journalists who have retired or gone into hiding. I still receive reliable correspondence from all over the country.”
 

My heart thudded in my chest. I couldn’t believe there was an entire
movement
of people defying the PMC. “How are you distributing it?”

“I have some connections with other patriots who offer their homes to travelers. They help get word to those on the run.” She leaned forward and made intense eye contact. “When people so desperately want the truth, they will seek it out.”

“So what is ‘the Exchange’?” I asked Logan.

“It’s a cross between the farmer’s market and the black market,” she said with a grin. “It’s held every Saturday at a location that changes constantly. You can get anything there: food, clothes, weapons, ammo, jail-broken smartlenses — anything. You can pay in cash or trade.”

I opened my mouth to ask something else, but I was cut off by a high-pitched, blaring wail. Although it seemed to echo through the night, the sound was coming from within the house. Everyone froze, their forks clattering to their plates.

“PMC,” Logan whispered.

“Okay, everyone, you know what to do,” said Ida. “Evacuate as planned.”

Everyone moved silently at once, methodically carrying out duties they had clearly rehearsed. Max snuffed out the overhead lantern and lit a smaller one, going from room to room, putting out lamps and the fire. Logan and Roman left the room and returned with several rifles slung over their shoulders and a box of ammo.
 

I followed Amory to the kitchen, unsure what to do. He flipped over the rag rug near the hearth and felt around until his fingers found a crevice in the wood. He gripped the edges and pulled up the planks to reveal a two-by-two-foot opening.

“This house was used in the underground railroad.” He looked up at me. “Go ahead. I’ll be right down.”

I hesitated, perched over the opening. It was pitch black.
 

I swung my legs over the side, feeling for a foothold.

“You have to jump,” said Amory, retrieving a lumpy sack from the pantry.

I took a deep breath and pushed myself off the ledge.

It wasn’t as far of a drop as I thought, but since I couldn’t judge the distance, I wasn’t prepared to catch myself. I fell forward onto my hands, the side of my face making contact with something soft and lumpy. It was a canvas bag.
 

“Haven,” Logan whispered. “Take these.”

She was hovered over the hole, holding a rifle.

I got to my feet and reached up to take the gun. The metal felt cold and heavy in my hand, and I shivered as she passed them down to me one by one.

She jumped in after them, followed by Ida in her billowing carpet skirt.

I heard Amory’s voice from overhead. “Here, take this.”

“What? Where are you going?” Max hissed.

“I forgot something.”

“No, Amory. Don’t be stupid!”

 
Max appeared above the opening, clutching the bag Amory had grabbed from the pantry. He passed it down first, followed by the lantern. He jumped down, and Roman followed.

“Where’s Amory?” I asked.

Logan and Max exchanged a look.

“He’s coming,” Max said.

My heart pounded in my chest, guilt and fear constricting it in a viselike grip. If I had brought the PMC there . . .

“Let’s go,” said Roman.

“We have to wait,” Logan snapped. In the flickering light of the single lantern, I could see the terror in her eyes. “Amory —”

“Amory knows the protocol,” Ida interjected.

Logan looked close to tears.

“He can catch up to us.”

Reluctantly, Max pulled a crate under the opening and reached up to pull the floorboards back into place.
 

My eyes took a while to adjust, but when they did, I saw that we were not in a cellar, but the mouth of a narrow tunnel. The floor was packed dirt and gravel, but it was supported by huge wooden beams that made it look like an old mine.

Everyone grabbed one of the canvas sacks I had landed on and slung it over their shoulders. Since I did not have an emergency evacuation bag, I took a rifle and Amory’s bag from the kitchen. It was heavy and clanked a lot, probably filled with food from the pantry.

I followed the others through the tunnel, worrying about Amory. What had he gone back for? Was he showing himself to the PMC to give us more time to escape? The thought was too terrible.
 

Judging by the silence in the group, the others were wondering the same thing. I could no longer hear the blaring wail of the alarm from the house, but it seemed to be burned in the back of my mind, making my ears ring.

The tunnel narrowed the farther we went, the ceiling dropped lower, and the floor seemed to slope upward. It was as if the tunnel were closing in on us.
 

At first, I thought maybe I was imagining it, but after a while, I noticed the others were moving much more slowly, heads bent.
 

Max, who was leading the way, stopped and set down his lantern. The light illuminated the passageway, and I could see we had reached the end of the tunnel. He reached his hands up and pushed. I couldn’t see any light coming through the opening, but it appeared to be another false floor.

There was another crate off to the side, which Max used to climb up through the opening. He helped Ida up next and then Logan. Roman turned to me, looking unfriendly, but he let me pass through first. I stepped onto the crate and poked my head up through the floor, which came up to my chest. Once I put down the things I was carrying, it wasn’t difficult to pull myself up and out of the tunnel. We were inside a tiny shed. Roman followed behind me and slid the false floor back into place.

The shed was crowded with old farm equipment, so the five of us stood hunched shoulder to shoulder in the small space. Ida was peering out of a crack in the wood, her long silvery hair catching the bright, artificial light. The searchlight moved, throwing us back into total darkness.

Nobody moved or spoke. Then the false floor over the opening rattled, making everyone jump. I looked at Logan, who raised a rifle and pointed it at the opening. Everyone watched, holding their breath.

The boards slid over, and I leaned forward to stare into the tunnel. Magnus the cat flew out, propelled by an unknown force, hissing with his orange fur standing on end. Nobody moved.

Then Amory stuck his head out, and I felt my body relax. He was alive.

“Are you crazy?” Logan hissed, putting down her gun. “The PMC is flying over as we speak.”

“What? Were you just going to leave him?” Amory asked, looking aghast.
 

Logan rolled her eyes and sank down onto an upturned wheelbarrow. We waited for what felt like hours, although it couldn’t have been more than a few minutes.

Finally, the search light disappeared completely, and the sound of the chopper faded into the darkness.

“What the hell was
that
about?” Max asked. His face looked especially white in the bluish glow of the night sky trickling in through the cracks in the walls.

“Were they looking for me?” My voice shook a little, but I had to ask. I knew everyone was already wondering the same thing.

“No,” said Amory. “They wouldn’t send out a chopper for something as minor as aiding and abetting a defector. You’re off their radar by now.”

“I agree,” said Ida. “They must be searching for rebel cells in the area.”

“Do you think they’ll be back?” Logan asked.

Ida shook her head. “I don’t know, but it seems they didn’t find what they were looking for tonight. Our greatest advantage is that we don’t operate the way they think we do, so they don’t really know what to look for.”

As we trudged back through the tunnel, I felt the exhaustion wash over my body. Nobody spoke much. I expected that the gravity of the situation was still sinking in, and I understood what Logan had meant when she said the safe house didn’t always feel very safe. Was this what it was like being undocumented? The constant threat of the PMC and the fear of discovery looming over you?

When we reached the other side of the tunnel, Max muttered something about reheating the food, but his heart wasn’t really in it. We all helped clear the table and climbed upstairs to bed.

The next morning, I awoke to the feeling of my legs being crushed by something . . . or someone. Sitting up in alarm, I realized it was just Logan perched on my shins, looking far more awake than I felt and somehow managing to look glamorous wearing a baggy flannel shirt, ripped jeans, scuffed boots, and her hair piled into a golden bun near the top of her head.
 

“Get up! It’s your first day on the farm!” she squealed, slapping my kneecap. “We’ve got a lot to do today.”

I groaned, unable to behave like a polite guest so early in the morning.

“Let’s grab a bite to eat and bring it along. We’re first watch.”

Logan tossed me a pair of her jeans, a sweater, and a lumpy jacket. Thinking privacy wasn’t really an option, I changed quickly while she bounced on the balls of her feet.
 

As soon as I had buttoned the jeans, she flew through the door and thundered down the stairs to the kitchen. I followed her, groggily pulling my hair into a low ponytail. She grabbed us each a napkin full of coffee cake, shoved one in each of her pockets, and bounded out the front door. She led me across the yard out toward the barn.

“You’re late,” grumbled Amory, who was carrying a large bucket of what looked like livestock feed. His hair stuck up a little in the back, and he looked as though he’d been up all night.

Logan stuck up her middle finger at him. “I’m teaching,” she said, smiling and pirouetting into the barn.

“Yeah, well every hour you ‘teach’ is an hour one of us has to pick up an extra carrier shift.”

She rolled her eyes, donned an old Carhartt jacket hanging on a hook inside the door, and turned her back to me to fiddle with the padlock on an old cabinet. Finally, I heard the metallic click that freed the door, and she turned to face me, holding a shotgun in each hand.

I took an automatic step back, an icy wave of apprehension shooting down my spine.

She put one on her shoulder and, as if thinking better of it, turned back to retrieve a smaller one. “Here,” she said, holding it out to me.

I shook my head. “I don’t know how to shoot.”

Logan rolled her eyes. “It’s just a BB gun. You’ll get some target practice, and then we’ll let you try later with the real thing. No sense wasting ammo.”

I took the toy gun, eyeing the two real ones with apprehension. Logan moved about with ease, gathering a box of BBs and some empty coffee cans sitting near the door. She looked like a bizarrely beautiful Annie Oakley with her blond hair pulled up and two guns slung over her shoulder.

We walked down to a tree on the edge of the field with a clear view of the patch of woods I had run from the day before. There was the small shed we had been holed up in during the raid, not far from where Amory originally tackled me.
 

Logan set down everything she was carrying except the guns, which she hung on my shoulder. I stood frozen as she dragged a sawhorse out of the shed and sat the coffee cans in a line. She stood back, squinting as though she were an artist scrutinizing her work, and then pulled me by the shoulders into position where she’d been standing.

“Perfect,” she said, sounding immensely proud of herself.

I exhaled audibly as she relieved me of the real shotguns. She kicked off her shoes and started to scrabble up the tree trunk like a squirrel. She climbed with staggering grace and ease, swinging her leg over one of the lower branches and turning to look down at me.

I knew I would eventually need to learn how to defend myself living off the grid, but I hadn’t really thought about what it would be like to shoot a gun.

Logan fished a piece of coffee cake out of her pocket and shoved it in her mouth. “Okay, go for it,” she said.

I turned the BB gun in my hands, feeling the cold metal.
Why is this a child’s toy?
I thought. It seemed so strange. I raised it and moved my hand down the barrel, trying to find a comfortable grip.
 

My hand found the trigger and I fired — looking but not really seeing my target. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t hear it make contact with any of the coffee cans.
 

I tried again, this time really staring down one can in particular. It didn’t hit the one I’d wanted, but I heard the tinny sound of the BB hitting the can next to it.

“You’re awful at this!” Logan heckled from the tree.

“Some teacher,” I shot back. I felt like laughing, but I didn’t want her to think I wasn’t taking the lesson seriously.

It took several more tries, but I finally hit the can I was aiming for. Two hours later, I could consistently hit each can, one after another.

“All right, hot shot,” Logan called. “Let’s see how you do with the real thing.”

She shimmied gracefully down the tree and unloaded the guns she had slung over her shoulder. “Hold these.” Even propped on the ground, the barrels felt heavy and cold against my fingers.
 

Logan dashed back to the shed and emerged a moment later dragging a huge canvas sandbag behind her. It had a crude stickman painted on one side with Xs for eyes. I realized it was a makeshift shooting target. Huffing and puffing, she got it right side up against the sawhorse. The painted dummy was looking at me with its dead eyes — very appropriate for carrier target practice. As Logan turned to face me, I saw that her golden hair was falling out of her bun, and she was beaming with excitement.
 

“Let’s see what you got!” She relieved me of one of the guns I was babysitting and backed away to stand under the tree.

Holding the shotgun up to shoulder level, I realized how heavy it felt compared to the toy gun. It wasn’t the weight of the metal warming beneath my fingers; the gun was pregnant with terrible possibility and undeniable blame for things that hadn’t even happened.