“Tell me a little something, Lily, and I’ll give you a break for a while. Just tell me why you went to Conley Terminal the other night.”
Lily felt her consciousness beginning to waver. Her vision had blurred again. There could be no harm in answering the accountant’s question … after all, he already knew, didn’t he?
Focus!
Lily’s mind sharpened for a moment. Those words were not Dorian’s, not Maddy’s. And now she realized that she was actually hearing the other woman, her thoughts inside Lily’s mind, so tightly wrapped that Lily might have mistaken them for her own.
The other night.
It definitely wasn’t August 30 anymore. Had William Tear and his people gotten away? Lily would have given her life for the correct date, but she couldn’t ask.
The assistant left the room, the door booming closed, and for no reason at all, Lily suddenly thought of her father, who had died years ago. Dad had hated President Frewell, hated the proliferation of Security offices in each city and town. But there was no organized resistance then. Dad had been a fighter with nothing to fight for, no one to fight with.
Dad would have liked William Tear, Lily realized now, her eyes stinging with tears. Dad would have fought for him.
“Last chance, my girl.” There would be no respite; the accountant had moved over to the man to console himself. Lily clenched her toes in preparation, grabbing the arms of the chair. The accountant sat down and smiled pleasantly at her, a predator’s smile in a bureaucrat’s face, then clucked in mock concern.
“Tell me, Lily … whatever turned a nice woman like you into a cunt like this?”
He reached for the console, and the lights went out.
For a long moment, Lily could only hear her harsh, frightened breathing in the darkness. Then she heard shouts and cries in the hallway outside, muffled by the metal door. Beneath her feet, the ground trembled, and Lily was seized with joy, a fierce joy that bordered on ecstasy in the dark.
September first! her mind exulted. She knew, suddenly, that it had come, the end of the old, diseased world. September first!
Somewhere, far away, an alarm began to squawk. More muffled screams echoed from the hallway. The accountant’s chair scraped back, and Lily drew up into a ball, expecting him to find her at any moment. She could hear the grating crunch of his feet on the concrete floor, but whether he was near or across the room, Lily couldn’t tell. She began to feel her way around the arms of her chair, looking for a sharp edge, a nail, anything, tugging as hard as she could against the short reach of the handcuffs. This was her only chance, and if she didn’t take it, if they managed to get the lights back on, the pain might go on forever.
The door thrummed, a deep metal gonging sound, and Lily jumped, banging her head against the back of the chair. Several sharp beeps punctuated the darkness: a gun being loaded. Lily could find no sharp edges on the arms of the chair—of course not, she thought, of course there wouldn’t be—and so she began to work on one of the handcuffs that bound her to the chair’s arms. She was fine-boned, with thin wrists, but no matter what she did, the cuff wouldn’t slip off the protrusion below her thumb. She continued to pull at it, not stopping even when she felt the first trickle of blood. Sometime in the last forty-eight hours, Lily had discovered the great secret of pain: it thrived on the unknown, on the knowledge that there was a greater pain out there, something more excruciating that might yet be reached. The body was constantly waiting. When you took away the uncertainty, when you controlled the pain yourself, it was infinitely easier to bear, and Lily yanked at the handcuff, gritting her teeth, hissing the pain away through pursed lips.
The door boomed again, a much deeper sound, metal hitting metal, and a moment later the hinges burst apart, emitting a silver rectangle of light from some sort of halo device. When Lily was little, they used to take such lights camping, but this one was infinitely brighter, turning the door into a rectangular sun in the darkness. Lily threw up a hand to cover her eyes, but it was too late; she was already blind, her eyes burning, leaking salt. The room was full of gunfire, quick sharp clicks and the metallic ping of bullets bouncing from metal walls. A thin slice of pain tore across Lily’s bicep. The backs of her eyelids seemed to be on fire.
“Mrs. M.!”
A hand clasped her shoulder, shook her hard, but even when Lily opened her eyes, all she could see was white fire.
“Jonathan?”
“Hold still for a minute.”
Lily held still. There was one sharp crack of metal, then another, impacts that reverberated all the way up her arms.
“There, you’re out. Come on.”
“I can’t see.”
“I can. But I can’t hold you up. You need to walk.”
Lily let him pull her to her feet, though pins and needles awoke roaring in her feet and calves. She stumbled along, Jonathan’s arm tucked behind her shoulders. To her left, she heard a gagging rattle, the sound of someone choking. She could see shadows now, bright beams of flashlights in the darkness. The choking intensified, becoming a loud gargling sound that made Lily wince, and then it ceased.
“We have to go!” a voice squealed, so high and panicky that Lily couldn’t tell whether it was a man or a woman. “They’re bringing the secondary backups online! The power’s already on in Building C!”
“Keep your pants on,” a woman drawled, and Lily swung toward the voice, though all she could see was another bright blue shadow.
“Dorian?”
“Come on, Mrs. M.” Jonathan took her arm, pulling her along. “Gotta move, time is short.”
Is it September first? But there was no time for her to ask. They hustled her out the door—Lily skinned her elbow on the busted frame on the way out, but said nothing—and down the hallway, which was still dark. Lily blinked continuously, trying to force her sight back. Scattered light arced across the hall—flashlights—and Jonathan’s hand urged her to go faster. Lily heard pounding on the doors as they passed; people were still trapped in there, behind magnetic locks, and now Lily understood Jonathan’s urgency. All Security facilities were supposed to have several sources of emergency power in case of a failure; Dorian and Jonathan must have sabotaged more than one, but they had not killed them all. Beneath her feet, buried deep in the stone, Lily felt intermittent thumps as someone tried to bring the building back online.
A figure stepped into the flashlight beams, some ten feet in front of them, and Lily halted, recognizing a Security uniform. The man was big and rangy-looking, and he held up a huge black machine rifle, one that could fire either bullets or darts; Greg used something very similar whenever he went deer hunting with his cronies in Vermont.
“Where are you going with her?”
Behind Lily, someone snarled, a soft sound that made the hairs stand up on the back of her neck.
“She’s being transferred to Washington.”
Lily knew that voice: it was the accountant’s assistant, the bald man who had spent most of the night with his hand on the console. He was on Jonathan’s other side, still in his uniform, but when Lily screwed up her eyes to focus, she saw that his face was a grotesque white mask of panic. She was beyond surprise now, beyond reaction; the presence of the assistant merely registered, poking the bubble of her mind with a soft finger, then retreating.
“On whose orders?”
“Special orders from Major Langer.” But the assistant’s voice was unsteady, and the guard wasn’t buying it, even Lily could tell. Dimly, outside the glow of their flashlights, she spotted someone moving down the hallway wall, a sliding shadow in the darkness.