“Do you know? Or are you guessing?” Someone had to be a jerk, and more often than not that responsibility landed on me. I caught Vi’s sigh, but I didn’t apologize or back down. This was my job. Keeping people safe—running the Resistance—was more important than coming off as everyone’s friend.
“I’m guessing,” Saffediene admitted.
Raking my fingers through my hair, I exhaled slowly. “Well, a guess is better than throwing a stick at the barrier and hoping it comes down.”
“Jag—” Gunner started.
I usually listened to every word he spoke, because he didn’t talk unless absolutely necessary. But I silenced him with a glare. “We’re going over the water.”
“Jag—” Vi said.
“No questions,” I barked. “Gather as many warm clothes as you can. Charge the boards. Pace, tether two extras to yours. We fly at dusk. Vi, I’d like a word.”
I left them standing in the war room. I didn’t wait to see if Vi would follow me. She would.
When she joined me in the alcove off the main room, her glower had become a cut-through-tech glare.
I didn’t have time to soothe her. “Can you sense the barrier?”
“What?” she snapped. “Now you need my help? I thought I was to ride behind Zenn and keep my mouth shut.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You didn’t have to.”
I felt dangerously close to crying. Vi was mad at me. Zenn was uncooperative. Thane was to be drained. “I’m doing my best here, Vi. Please.” I pressed my palms to my eye sockets.
Vi touched my elbow, and that’s all it took for the tears to fall. I kept my hands up to cover my face. She yanked my arms down. “Don’t you dare break down now, Barque,” she commanded.
I looked at her through the water in my eyes. Her beauty made me ache. “I can’t do this anymore,” I choked out. “It’s too much.”
“No, it’s not. We’ll get Thane out. Raine too. Everything will work out fine. Yeah, I can sense the barrier.”
“Not that. That’ll work, or it won’t.”
She frowned. “Then what?”
I seized her in a fierce hug. Instantly the turmoil inside me began to quiet. I wished she wasn’t my drug, wished I could find solace in myself. But I couldn’t. Since the day I met Violet Schoenfeld, she’d calmed me from the inside out.
“You,” I whispered into her hair. “I just want you to be safe. If anything happened to you . . .” I closed my eyes and leaned my forehead against hers. “I just need you to sense the barrier. That’s all. Zenn will be there to protect you, okay?”
“I don’t need Ze—”
“Yes, you do. Thane took you once. Made you forget. I can’t go through that again.”
“Where were you all this time?” she asked, in a classic Vi-topic-change.
No one needed to know where I’d been, what I’d gone through. If she thought she couldn’t sleep now, Vi didn’t know the depth of nightmares she’d have if I told her.
I clung to her a moment longer. “Zenn’s flying mid-pack, but you guys will need to fly frontal with me until we make it around the barrier.”
I ignored the flare of disappointment that rippled through me when I released her. The twinge of guilt when she stepped back, those changeable eyes of hers set on super-angry.
I’d taken three steps toward the war room when she said, “Will you ever tell me?”
I half turned back. “I can’t.”
“Can’t, or won’t?”
“They’re the same,” I said.
“We shouldn’t keep secrets from each other,” she said. “You told me that.”
I bowed my head to acknowledge that she was right. Had I told her that? Yes. Should we keep secrets from one another? No.
“I love you,” I said, and walked away.
Zenn
6.
Next to me, Vi flew silently, her left hand held out to her side as if she was letting her fingers trail along a wall. In essence, she was. Vi can feel tech, and the barrier created a wall she could “see” with her hands. She’d been careful not to make contact as she guided us.
In front of her, Jag rode his hoverboard as expertly as ever. Whatever had happened to him during his eight-month disappearance hadn’t affected his flying ability.
Part of me admired that; another part wished he’d come back more broken. He remained as mysterious as ever, keeping people out and fortifying his barricades.
We’d been soaring over open water for fifteen minutes. Gunn rode in tight next to Saffediene, his face pinched with worry. I couldn’t decide if it was because of the thirty-foot drop, the mission, or the fact that Raine was in danger.
But hey, she knew the risks of running missions with the Resistance. He did too.
I switched my thoughts to the insane half plan we’d concocted. Our mission: Fly to Rise One, bust in, take Thane and Raine, and hightail it back to the ocean.
Not stellar. Especially considering the length of the flight, and the fact that just because the sky had settled into ashy evening didn’t mean there wouldn’t be EOs out in abundance.
“Here,” Vi said, her voice whipping away with the wind. “Jag! The tech is gone.”
I slowed my board to a stop, as did everyone else. All eyes rested on Vi.
Jag inhaled, exhaled, before launching the rock he’d brought with him. Gunner cringed, expecting it to hit the techtric barrier and spark into jets of light.
Instead, the rock arced through the air, landing in the water a good thirty feet away.
Jag urged his board forward, almost at a crawl. He didn’t fry to a crisp, much to my partial disappointment. The other half of me felt nothing but relief, especially when Vi glared at me with knowledge in her eyes.
“What?” I asked, though I knew exactly what.
We began the twenty-minute flight back to land, Vi still fondling the techtricity from the barrier. I watched the half smile form on her face, and it scared me. I didn’t know what Jag had said to her, but that smile—that was Vi’s way of sticking it to him.
I’d seen her direct it at her mother enough to know.
She caught me looking at her. “What?” she asked.
I shook my head even as I heard her think, You can’t put me in the middle of the pack, Mr. Leader of the Cracking Resistance.
I wanted to fly closer and hug her. Tell her I’d never force her to do anything she didn’t want to. Prove to her that everything I’d done was for her and only her. Instead I turned my face toward Freedom and quelled the roiling in my gut.
Freedom suffocated me, stealing the oxygen in the air and turning it into cement. The city lay still, as if holding its breath—as if it knew we were coming.
“Enforcement Officers,” Saffediene said, pointing toward the Rises. Sure enough, the ultrawhite light of tech haloed the Officers as they swarmed through the streets.
More than fifty, maybe more than one hundred, all heading straight for us as we lapped over the last of the waves and flew above the sandy beach below.
“This is bad,” I said to no one in particular.
“Evasive maneuvers,” Jag called. “Find a spot to hide. Reconvene on the roof of Rise Twelve, midnight.”
Then he disappeared down the coast and into the inky night, leaving the rest of us to save ourselves.
I watched him go, crazy-mad, until I remembered that he’d charged me with protecting Vi. Neither one of us could be taken again. I couldn’t withstand the brainwashing—if I survived at all.
Now that Vi didn’t have Thane’s protective buffer, she absolutely couldn’t be caught. With her powers, Director Hightower would strip her of her identity, mold her into a clone of himself.
“Vi! This way!” I flew along the barrier on the southern edge of the city. To my right the orchards were just starting to bud, and the branches would provide decent cover for a few hours.