“But we’re friends,” Howard says. “If friends don’t help each other, who will?”
Howard’s code of friendship. It’s so simple. No games, no testing, like The Program. Just friends helping each other.
“If Mike said he was alive, that means you thought he was dead?” Howard says.
“I saw him die. Or I thought I did.”
“How?”
“Mike killed him. On orders from The Program,” I say.
“Orders,” Howard says. “That’s how we’re going to find your father.”
“I’m not following you.”
“The Program lives on the Web, right?”
The Program exists online, that’s what Howard discovered on my last mission. He found a network of young hackers, some as young as twelve years old, gathering data, uncovering the bytes of information that lead to the targets to which I am assigned.
“Once something is online, it can be found,” Howard says. “Even after it’s erased, removed, eradicated. If they gave the order, we can find that order. Or some evidence of it.”
“Ghosts in the machine,” I say.
“And I am a ghost hunter,” Howard says.
“What do you need to know?”
“We can start with his name.”
My father’s name is buried inside with the rest of my past, kept out of my consciousness, where it cannot harm me. If I tell Howard, I set him on a course of investigating The Program. That is tantamount to treason.
But what is a chip inserted into me against my will? What is sending me on a mission then withdrawing support, protecting The Program’s interests at the expense of its own soldier?
I take a breath, and I pull my father’s name up from the depths of my memory.
“Dr. Joseph Abram,” I say.
I haven’t said his name aloud in a long time. It feels strange in my mouth, like a foreign language.
“A medical doctor?” Howard says.
“No. He was a professor of psychology at the University of Rochester six years ago.”
“I’ll find out everything I can,” Howard says.
“Thank you.”
“That’s assuming I get out of these woods tonight without being eaten by something.”
“You’re too skinny to be eaten,” I say. “That’s a lot of chewing with very little reward.”
“You’re not making me feel better.”
“Be careful, buddy.”
“You, too,” he says. “See you soon.”
He gets out of the truck and scurries into the woods clutching his blanket. I hate to leave him alone out here, but I have no choice.
CHAPTER SIXTY-NINE
A DOWNED TREE BLOCKS THE ROAD, HALF A DOZEN ARMED BOYS ON GUARD BEHIND IT.
This is not the roadblock from the other day. This is a hastily erected barricade, more substantial, more dangerous. What’s worse, I don’t recognize any of the boys guarding it.
There’s no way to drive around the roadblock. There is a cliff on one side, dense forest on the other, and the tree covers the space in between.
I sort through options:
I could back up, abandon the truck, and set out on foot.
I could try to talk my way through.
I could abandon the mission.
Three options. Two are bad; the third is unthinkable.
I make my choice.
I slip the knife from my pocket and push it up the sleeve of my right arm, using the elastic of the stretch fabric of the hoodie’s wrist to hold it in place.
Then I pull slowly forward. I’ll start by talking, and I’ll do what I have to do after.
Guns rise as the truck comes near. The faces behind them are grave. A taller boy steps forward, looking through the windshield. I keep both hands on the steering wheel where he can see them.
Something changes in the tall boy’s expression, and he calls out to one of the boys behind him. I see a walkie-talkie pop up. A message sent, a message received.
“Turn off the truck,” the tall boy says. He has a tactical model pump-action shotgun, modified with a stock and pistol grip. He points it at me.
I look down the black shotgun barrel. Then I look at the boy behind it, staring at me, searching for a reason to pull the trigger.
I turn off the truck.
I feel the weight of the knife inside my right wrist. If I turn and snap my arm, the inertia will drop the knife into my hand. One and half seconds to turn, a second for the knife to drop and settle, another half second for me to depress the switch that releases the blade, and two seconds to travel the distance from the window to the boy’s throat.
Five seconds.
But it only takes two seconds for his mind to register the threat and depress the trigger of the shotgun.
I don’t move.
I register the tightness in my chest, my dry mouth, a sick feeling in my stomach.
This feeling. I remember it from a long time ago, a distant echo of my childhood.
It is fear.
Howard is right. The chip works.
Or rather, it doesn’t work, because it’s taped to the outside of my chest right now, where it can’t affect me.
I will myself to look only at the steering wheel in front of me, but I’ve lost impulse control. My eyes shift left to once again look down the shotgun barrel. I imagine the round chambered down below, and my mouth goes dry.
A moment later the boy with the walkie signals.
The shotgun is lowered.
“Move over,” the tall boy says. “I’m driving us in.”
CHAPTER SEVENTY
WE DRIVE INTO LIBERTY.
I see the panel vans from the night of The Hunt, their sides modified with NORTHEAST ELECTRIC stencils.
Why are they making them look like power company trucks?
A boy and a girl with guns stand guard by the vans. They nod to my driver as he passes.
As we come closer to the encampment, I see more teens with guns. Heads snap around when they hear the truck coming.
Everyone is armed, everyone tense.
We pass the first set of buildings, and then the main square comes into view.
I see a backhoe parked in the center of the square, its shovel raised to maximum height as if it’s in the process of digging something.
There is no operator in it. The backhoe is still, parked in the upright position. As we drive closer, I see something else. A rope tied haphazardly around the shovel with a life-sized doll hanging from it like a party favor.
It takes a second for my mind to register what I’m really seeing.
It’s not a doll. It’s a body. Sergeant Burch’s body.
His head is canted at an unnatural angle, the rope tight around his neck.
He’s been hanged.
Teens walk under the body, their pace quickening slightly, eyes cast toward the ground.
I last saw Sergeant Burch sneaking out of the woods before I left the parking lot. Now I’m sure he’s the one who was passing messages to the FBI. Someone else was sure of it, too, and ordered him executed.
Miranda steps out the door of a building. She stands there in jeans and a loosely buttoned blouse, her red hair flowing free down her shoulders.
The driver stops the truck and motions for me to get out. Miranda approaches. She looks at me without speaking. I note that she doesn’t have a gun.
“We thought we lost you,” she says.
“Lost and found,” I say. “I’m back.”
“Why did you run away?”
“I got scared after your father—”
I look at the ground, wanting her to think I’m experiencing a painful memory.
I’ve done this a thousand times, emulating emotions I’ve seen in others, feigning emotional states to make people believe what I want them to believe.
I’ve done this a thousand times, but now is different.
Because now I feel real pain, not for Moore or what he was trying to do before he lost his way, but for Francisco, my brother in The Program.