Tremor (12 page)

“Come on, Faith. That's a little wild, don't you think? My dad is Dylan's dad? That doesn't even make sense.”

Faith shrugged. “Whatever. I'm leaving.”

She began to float slowly up in the air, and Wade grabbed her by the hips and pulled her down.

“Don't touch me!” she yelled. Wade backed off and held out his hands as if he were dealing with a cornered animal.

“I'm sorry, just—just don't go.”

“And don't treat me like I'm stupid. It's
true
, Wade. Deal with it. Why else would Dylan desert the drifters camp? Why would he come here, uninvited, and basically give himself up? His mom has been lying to him his entire life. He's looking for answers from his dad—
your
dad—and I'm scared for him. I'm afraid he'll never come out of that place, not alive anyway.”

“I'll make sure he does, I promise,” Wade said, a repeat of the same huge lie, because if Dylan really was his half brother, he was even more sure he had to get rid of him. The last thing in the world Wade Quinn needed was a brother to compete with. That was
not
happening, no way.

“Let me go back, check things out, see where we stand,” Wade said. “I won't tell anyone you told me. I won't say you're out here. Just don't leave, at least not yet.”

Faith half smiled and kicked the ground in front of her feet. She knew how important it was to sell this deception, but looking up once more, she felt an unexplainable attraction to the person standing before her. What insane gene in her DNA made it so hard to resist Wade's pleading? She felt the worst kind of regret—in love with Dylan but drawn against her will to a guy who had lied to her, who was on the wrong side of whatever she was involved in.
Why couldn't you have looked like a troll and lived under a bridge and had the most horrible personality ever?

She took a deep breath and gave her answer: “I did bring provisions for a few days. And I raided a sporting goods store on the edge of town, so I have a sleeping bag. I like it out here. It's peaceful.”

Wade agreed, it
was
peaceful. In four months of training they hadn't let him out for so much as a walk in the woods. It made him angry. And looking at Faith, he wanted more than anything just to leave everything at the prison behind.

“Meet me right here, tomorrow night?” Wade asked. “That should give me time to recon this thing and give you a better idea of what's going on. But no kidding, you need to stay out of this, Faith. It's dangerous. And Clara can't know you're out here following Dylan around. If she gets a second chance, she'll go straight for the kill. As far as she's concerned, you're the enemy.”

Faith's smile, which had barely existed to begin with, vanished.

“I hate her.”

Wade felt his Tablet, which he had set to silent, buzz in his pocket. The situation he'd gotten himself into was risky. Clara could come back; anyone could show up. His Tablet GPS was live, and he hadn't moved in five minutes.

“That situation at the games—” Wade said.

“You mean the hammer Clara put through my best friend's head? That situation?”

She held out her bare arm so Wade could see the hammer and the chain and the ivy. And most of all, the
C
for
Clara
.

“Yeah, I mean that. I had nothing to do with it. She did that all on her own.”

Faith ran a hand through her long hair, pulling it back behind her ear. It was a nervous habit she didn't even think about, and Wade saw the blue-and-green circle that matched her eyes.

“Cool earring.”

Faith took a step backward, wishing she'd been more careful. Had the unusual earring aroused suspicion?

But she needn't have worried. Wade loved her hair and those delicate ears and the fact that she could look him almost in the eye because she was so tall. The tattoo worried him, but for Wade the earring was just jewelry, something he could compliment her on in order to win points.

“Don't do anything crazy,” Wade said, taking a last look at the tattoo on her forearm. He'd known a lot of single pulses who thought they could take a punch. It was like a disease with them. They could move a car with their minds, but sometimes they couldn't accept the fact that the very same car was solid enough to bash in their brains.

“Don't ever forget you're a single pulse. You could get killed just flying around for the fun of it. And you wouldn't last five minutes with Clara. It's not fair, but it's true.”

Faith was becoming more controlled in the face of second-pulse bravado. It was getting easier to keep the secret. Her day was coming soon enough, and when it did, the payoff would be even better. She could imagine the looks on Wade's and Clara's faces when they finally knew:
This girl is a second. She's as powerful as we are
. Hers was a secret that was getting better with time.

“I'm careful,” Faith said. “And I don't have any interest in whatever crazy mess you're caught in. I'm worried for Dylan, so I followed him. End of story.”

“Same place, an hour after dark, tomorrow,” Wade said.

He smiled that confident smile of his, a smile that had the unexpected power to confuse Faith's emotions, and then he was gone.

“Well, that was weird,” Faith said. She wished she had Dylan's jacket, because there was a chill in the air and it was a long walk back to the HumGee, where she'd left it. Then again, the jacket would have only set Wade off.

She started walking, pressed the sound ring.

“Sorry about that, guys. Coast is clear now. We're fine.”

“No one saw you?”

Faith hated to lie, but things were complicated enough without Clooger freaking out.

“All clear, no worries.”

“Don't leave us hanging like that!” Clooger yelled. “I call, you answer. You can't go AWOL, Faith. Not even for five minutes.”

“Sorry, I just . . .”
What to say, what to say?
“I thought there was someone out here, but I was wrong. I didn't think a lot of chatter was a great idea while I was figuring it out.”

Silence, then a slightly chastened Clooger. “Fair enough. Get back here as quick as you can and we'll regroup.”

“At least you're efficient,” Hawk said. “Took you all of one day to nearly blow our cover. Impressive.”

“I'll be there in fifteen if I keep moving; fix me some lunch?”

“Unwrapping you a protein bar now. Chocolate peanut butter. Yum.”

Faith made a sour face. She hated protein bars, but she was starting to love the walks in the woods. Wolves and skunks and Wade Quinns aside, it really was peaceful. Maybe someday she and Dylan would live on a mountain, have nine kids, and throw boulders at each other for fun. For some reason she thought of Wade, too. It had been more confusing seeing him than she'd expected, as if he were a magnet and she were steel and it would take some effort not to get pulled in, not to get hurt.

She belonged with Dylan, and as long as he stayed alive, that hadn't changed just because Wade Quinn was back in the picture.

At least that's what she told herself as she made her way back to the shelter of the HumGee, feeling the weight of all the lies that had piled up in such a short span of time.

Chapter 9
Trust Me, Grandma

Andre's private office had previously belonged to the warden of the supermax prison. There were rows of old books, which Andre had taken to reading in the evenings. It was an interesting collection that skewed toward wars, criminal justice, and true crime. There was also a smattering of poetry, most of it obtuse and depressing. The warden's taste in such things had run in the direction of Emily Dickinson and T. S. Eliot. The room had a long, wooden desk and file cabinets that had never been unlocked. A dim beam of light pushed through thick yellow glass high on one wall.

“Since the power grid went down we use generators for heat and light, but we try not to overdo it,” Andre said, rubbing his hands against the light chill in the room. “Plenty of gas, but only three generators and no one mechanically inclined enough to fix them if they go down. If we'd been born a hundred years ago, we'd be practically useless. The modern dilemma, no?”

“Why did Meredith leave?” Dylan asked. Their time together could be cut short for any number of reasons, and he needed to move things forward fast.

“Right, down to business. Just give me one moment, if you would.”

Andre knew he had only minutes before Gretchen or Clara or a host of single pulses showed up at his office door. The warden's office was one of the most secure locations in the entire facility. He tapped a few buttons on the wall next to the entryway, and Dylan heard metal bars sliding and locks locking.

“They'd need a bomb to get in here, and I'm not even sure that would work.”

He tapped out a system-wide message on his Tablet and hit
SEND
:

I've got him in my office. We're discussing his situation. Leave us alone.

It didn't really matter how they chose to respond. If they didn't believe him, they'd assume Dylan had him imprisoned against his will. Either way, they weren't going to attempt any kind of rescue mission. Gretchen was too smart for that.

“I wish I knew why your mother chose to leave,” Andre said, sitting down where the warden used to sit, in a worn leather chair Andre had come to love. The desk seemed more like an aircraft carrier when Dylan sat down on the other side, a vast wooden expanse between the two of them.

“You'll have to do better than that,” Dylan said. “Where were you? Let's start there.”

“A lonely outpost in the desert with very few souls. But we had our work with Hotspur Chance. It was all that mattered.”

“Must have been something else, working with the smartest guy in the world.”

“It was,” Andre said, looking wistfully at the notepad on his desk, a relic from a time when such things were considered useful. “Your mother was one of the last to join us. I picked her up at the airport; can you imagine? She
flew
in—on an airplane. Seems like a million years ago.”

A paperweight made of clear glass sat on the desk. Andre touched the smooth surface, imagined the chaos building outside as he sat in a locked room with a second pulse who had the power to end him with a single thought.

“Maybe what you were working on made her uncomfortable,” Dylan said. “Is that possible?”

Andre felt cornered by the question and didn't want to answer it. He'd thought this might be coming though—it was unavoidable.

“For a long time I thought she left because she'd lost interest in me, and I do think that was part of it. I'm no fool when it comes to love, but I never really knew how she felt. Your mother was difficult to draw out. Not unlike Gretchen, come to think of it. I have a way of choosing the difficult ones.”

Dylan used his mind to pull the paperweight out from under Andre's hand, slide it across the expanse of the desk, and land in his hand. It was heavy. Heavy enough to kill with, for sure.

“What were you working on out there in the middle of nowhere? Meredith told me Hotspur Chance got interested in human biology and genetics. That true?”

“Of course it's true. Without him there would be no pulse at all, not the one I have, not the
two
you have.”

“Why'd he do it?”

“Why indeed,” Andre said, standing and going to the wall of books. He pulled out a well-read journal, fanned the pages, stopped. “
No problem can be solved by the same consciousness that caused it in the first place.
Strange how this warden fellow had the same interest in Einstein as Hotspur Chance himself, don't you think?”

He turned to Dylan, like a professor engaging a student. If Andre had all his faculties about him, which was not exactly the case, he would have remembered that it was he himself, not some long-forgotten warden, who had placed the journal there.

“Hotspur Chance loved Einstein, and do you know why? Because, like Einstein, Hotspur didn't see anything the same way we did. He was not of the same mind. He understood what was required for our survival in ways we can never fully know.”

“The States,” Dylan said. “But what's that got to do with developing or discovering the pulse?”

“It's a fine line—developing or discovering—isn't it? Hotspur did both. He unlocked parts of us that no one else could, because he had to.”

“Why?”

Andre wouldn't answer the question directly. “The first second pulse was Gretchen. Did you know that?”

Dylan could sense that he was right on the edge of discovering what Andre's intent was. Meredith had always known the plan was violent, but she'd never been able to uncover any specifics.

“Gretchen was the one who changed everything,” Andre said. “She gave us something the States alone could not. She gave us power.”

Andre put back the book, continuing to talk as he did so. “We come to it now, don't we? If you're not happy with my answers, you'll kill me and go back from where you came. Isn't that right? Like taking an important chess piece off the table, then falling back to plan your next move. I'm very much aware of the simple fact that fathers and sons are enemies as often as not.”

“Don't go all Shakespearean on me. I think you want to do something different than what you're planning. I think you want this all to end peacefully. Maybe together we can make that happen. That's all I want.”

Andre flashed the same toothy smile he'd once used on Dylan's mother when they'd first met. He'd smiled that way at Faith Daniels the day she showed up for her first day at Old Park Hill. It was a smile he hadn't had much use for in quite a while, and he was glad to break it out for a little practice.

“And what if my plans don't align with your plans? What then?”

“Then we're at an impasse,” Dylan said. “And I'll do what I have to do.”

Andre sat back down behind the giant desk. “I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but should you choose to kill me, you'll never leave this room alive. It's secure.
Very
secure. You can throw things all you want, but nothing is getting out of this room unless I say so. It's locked from the inside, and only I know the combination to open it again. There's no water. You'd be dead in a few days. My side wins in that equation—the only second-pulse threat, neutralized. They can go on without me.

“It's not complicated, not really. You and I don't know each other, so we don't trust each other. We'd both like to stay alive. I don't want your mother dead any more than you do—well, maybe you do want her dead, but I don't. I just don't want her getting in our way, and she's done far too much of it lately. So we are at a bit of a stalemate, but one I think can be overcome.”

“I don't want to kill you. I just want to know what's going on. I've been lied to my whole life. I have trust issues.”

“Understood, and very helpful. So I'm going to tell you something now, and it will be up to you after that. Gretchen would not approve, but I'm telling you anyway. Consider it my olive branch.”

Dylan nodded. It was a tight situation, and Andre was difficult to read. And he was right. If this were a game of chess, Dylan was a more valuable piece than Andre.

“Hotspur Chance developed an entire plan for the States,” Andre said. “It was very specific. There was no ambiguity whatsoever about what was to be done. In the making of the States his plans were followed, but then the politicians got involved. Not just here, but worldwide. They took control, pushed Chance aside, and started making very big mistakes. These States, specifically the two American States, are not what you think they are.”

“What's that supposed to mean?” Dylan asked. Andre had his attention.

“You don't know a prison when you see one,” Andre answered. “The States are nothing more than that—comfortable prisons. And these are not prisons that will solve the climate problem. They've long since gone away from those plans, because politicians care about only one thing: reelection.”

Andre leaned back in his chair and let this information sink in.

“All we want to do is get things back on plan, nothing more. We're the good guys, Dylan. Unfortunately, getting things back on track will require some persuading. Gretchen, Clara, Wade—they are an elegant solution. You must see that. They are very powerful. They are indestructible. They are, shall we say, persuasive. Hotspur developed the second pulse for this purpose: to
persuade
. It's my job to see that it's carried out.”

“What about me? I'm a second pulse.”

Andre shook his head, a cloud of frustration masking his face.

“I advised him not to teach Meredith how to draw out a second pulse, but he did it anyway. You wouldn't even
know
you were a second if Meredith hadn't meddled where she shouldn't have. For that matter, there would be no drifters, no first pulses at all outside the ones I control. Her resistance movement should never have come to pass, don't you see? It's an abomination, a theft. It's a betrayal.”

Dylan knew this part already, but Meredith had a very different view of her actions. For her, she was the only hope of resisting something that could overpower the rest of the world. Once she knew how to find and develop a pulse in certain people, she knew she had to flee. She would have to strike a balance or die trying.

Andre smiled that big smile of his.

“That's going to need to be enough for now. If you're willing to stay on, do some training, I'll make sure the rest of the team invites you in. You found us at a very opportune time, really you did. We're very near a decisive move, and I would love for you to be a part of it.”

Dylan didn't trust Andre, not even close, and yet it was complicated. How much did Dylan really know about the resistance he'd been involved in his whole life? There had never been any real information, only Meredith's insistence that
they
were on the good side. From Dylan's vantage point, he couldn't be sure who was right and who was wrong.

“Wade and Clara aren't going to like this,” Dylan said. He needed more information, so he wanted to keep Andre talking.

“Clara likes you; I think you know that.”

“It was weird before; it's weirder now.”

Andre's dark brows, which were not quite as thick as Dylan's but close, furrowed.

“Good point.”

Andre had already thought of this, Dylan and Clara having the same father, but it bloomed in his mind once more like a poisonous flower.

“We can't tell her, can't tell anyone. She does well when she can't have something she wants; it's a useful distraction. Humor her. So long as Wade doesn't know you're my son, he'll go along. Not happily, but he'll do as he's told.”

“They're not going to like it either way.”

“Just do the training; I'll deal with them. We've got something new I think you'll find interesting. And if you don't like where this is going, I won't stop you from leaving.”

“You're serious?”

Andre's heart appeared to soften, his eyes going a little wider and less authoritative.

“You're my son. It's highly unexpected, but the test doesn't lie. We'll talk more. I'll tell you more. And if at any point you want to leave, fly away and don't come back. I won't let anyone follow you.”

Andre looked at his Tablet, checking the time, and saw that he had a string of messages.

“They're scheduled to train in an hour. Let's keep up appearances, have you stay in the cell as before. I'll make sure you're safe and well fed.”

Andre was harder to read than Dylan had expected. Maybe this was all a front for keeping Dylan off balance and under control. But if he could hang on for a couple of days, hopefully he'd have the information they needed. They could stop the Quinns from whatever they were plotting.

Dylan would have been wise to consider more carefully the man with whom he was dealing. Andre Quinn was a master of manipulation. Much of what Andre had just said was designed to keep Dylan in line. When the time came, Andre would do the same with Gretchen and the twins: he would twist and turn the facts and events in order to advance the plan. And why not? He'd been thinking like a dictator for as long as he could remember. Dylan was another piece to be played in just the right way, an important piece because he was a second pulse. He would use Dylan carefully and productively. He would play both sides of the situation—his family and his estranged son—to advance the plan.

It was good to be the king of information, the minister of truth. It was the kind of power Andre liked most of all.

 

Andre opened the door to the warden's chamber and found Wade, Clara, and Gretchen waiting for him. If he hadn't been standing there as the only single pulse, it might have erupted into World War III the second the door opened. He could see that possibility in Wade's and Clara's eyes. But he was vulnerable—they knew this—and it gave him the time he needed to force the issue.