Rebellion (23 page)

Ding.

“Restricted Division,” a cool female voice says as the elevator doors slide open. He could be taking me to a cell. Or he could be taking me straight to Charlie. I have a bad feeling it’s the latter.

As my guard leads me forward, I remember: Beechy is here. I don’t know where Charlie’s keeping him, or if I’ll even get to see him, but knowing he’s already gone through something similar to what I’m about to go through makes me less nervous. It reminds me there are still people who believe I am strong, and need me to be strong for them.

If any opportunity arises for me to put an end to Charlie, I have to be ready to do it. I can’t hesitate as I did with Joe.

Charlie has never been my friend; I owe him nothing. The only thing he deserves is a bullet through his chest.

My guard makes me stop walking again. There’s a soft tapping, like he’s tapping buttons, followed by a snap.

“Who is it?” a muffled voice says. It sounds like it’s coming through a speaker.

“Lieutenant Dean,” my guard says. “I’m accompanying the prisoner, Clementine.”

There’s a click and the whoosh of a door sliding open. We walk forward again, into a corridor with a dull hum in the air. There are ridges in the floor, and the air feels cooler.

The last time I was here, Charlie spilled the truth about his plan to destroy half the world, and gave me a shot to make me sick, and threw me in Karum. I don’t know what he’ll do this time to make things worse, but I’m sure he’ll find a way. I only hope he won’t involve Logan.

But why else would he have had Sam keep him alive?

I count thirty steps and two corners we have to turn until we stop again. Another door slides open.

Lieutenant Dean lets go of my arm and gives my lower back a light push forward. I take careful steps down a short ramp to a flatter floor, but I’m afraid to go farther. He’s not guiding me anymore, and I can’t see a thing. I’m not sure I want to see.

“Welcome,” a hoarse voice says. I know it too well.

Two hands brush my back from behind—Dean’s, I hope—and loosen the sack around my head, and pull it off. I squint at the harsh light.

“Take off her shackles,” the hoarse voice says again. “She won’t need them.”

That makes me open my eyes. Commander Charlie’s standing on the other side of the room, but I don’t look at him yet. First I take in my surroundings as Dean unlocks my shackles and slips them off my wrists. The source of light comes from blue lamps in the floor, which give the whole place an eerie glow. There are several desks with blank monitor screens built into the walls on either side of me, along with a wall panel covered with buttons of various shapes and sizes. Ahead of me, a short set of steps lead to a wide, rectangular table with holograms of ships and our planet spinning above its surface, like the table I saw in the Crust security hub’s control room.

Charlie stands on the other side of the table, and beyond him is another screen covering the wall and part of the ceiling. The screen is speckled with a night sky full of endless stars, like this is a spaceship and I’m looking out a window. But there are no real windows in the Core; this screen is either transmitting an image of the sky captured from somewhere else, or it’s a fake moving image.

A memory comes to mind of what a scientist said once in the Core, during Charlie’s big announcement, and I realize what this place must be: the control room that turns the Core into a battleship once the outer sectors have been blasted away.

“Do you like my ship?” Charlie asks, gesturing to the room. He moves around the table, stepping into full view. He’s wearing his standard navy uniform and white gloves, and his face has as many wrinkles as I remember. His hair seems a darker shade of gray in the light.

With my wrists free, I flex them and rub the tender skin. “It’s not a ship yet.”

“Ah,
yet
is the key word.”

“It won’t ever be.”

Charlie walks down the steps with a subtle limp in his left leg, where Beechy shot him with a laser before we hijacked his ship. He’s trying to hide it, but it’s still noticeable. The damage must’ve been deep enough that his surgeons couldn’t fix it completely.

Good. He deserves to have a scar, too.

“I missed your delightful retorts, Clementine,” Charlie says when he reaches the bottom of the steps. “It’s good to see you again.”

I don’t reply. I can’t tell if this cool exterior of his is a ploy or not. I expected him to be furious with me after how badly I ruined his plans.

He keeps walking forward, closer and closer. I step back, but Lieutenant Dean takes hold of my shoulders to keep me where I am.

Charlie steps to the left of me, heading toward one of the desks. “Would you like something to drink?” he asks. He reaches the desk and taps a button on the wall beside it. A large piece of the wall slides away, revealing a hole with three pitchers and a stack of empty cups inside. “We have yazo juice, arebara, and water. Have you tried arebara? It’s my personal favorite, though some people find it a bit strong.”

Maybe this is a trick and all the pitchers are poisoned, but I’m so thirsty, I don’t even care.

“Water. Please.”

Charlie pulls out the middle pitcher and lifts the cup from the top of the stack. He pours the water, taking his time, and sets the pitcher down back in the hole. He taps the button again, and the wall closes back up. Turning back to me, he smiles as he walks over and hands it to me.

The last time I had water, I downed it all at once, but this time I know I might not get more, so I take one sip at a time and savor the coolness on my tongue.

No one speaks until I’m finished. I wipe my mouth with the back of my hand. As I move to return the cup to Charlie, I pause. It’s a plastic cup, and the rim is a bit sharp—almost sharp enough to be useful as a weapon.

Charlie’s lip twitches in amusement. He wraps his fingers around the cup. “I give you water after your guards have kept you thirsty for two days, and now you want to kill me?” He makes a
tsk
ing noise.

I loosen my grip with only a tinge of annoyance, and let him take the cup away. It would’ve made a shoddy weapon anyway.

Moving to the opposite wall, Charlie dumps the cup into a trash chute. “Now, come over here. I’d like to show you something.”

He heads back up the steps to the table with the holograms. I don’t want Dean to force me to move again, so I follow Charlie without argument. Though I’m not stupid. I know Charlie didn’t bring me here for small talk and a glass of water.

At the top of the steps, he moves around to the other side of the table, but I stay on this side, staring at the slow-spinning blue hologram of a planet that must be Kiel. Up close, it’s bigger than I realized, nearly half my size. It shows the Surface in detail: miniature mountains and forests; a vast expanse of ocean; the buildings that form the city and work camp. And those are only the places I’ve seen in real life—there’s a whole back side of our world that I’ve never seen before, with plains and rivers and jungles. There’s a whole other half to the ocean.

“Beautiful, isn’t it?” Charlie says. “Our world is rich and full of life. It’s easy to understand why our ancestors chose to leave their old home and settle here to build a civilization.”

My mind plays back the conversation I had with Fred in Karum, when he first told me about our ancestors’ original home, Marden.

“We came here because of a war,” I say. “We didn’t get along with the people in our old home.”

“Don’t call them ‘people.’ The Mardenites are savages, not humans. We should never have let them run us out of our old home. We should’ve slaughtered them all and ended this whole mess before it began.”

“The acid shield is destroyed, so the mess with them is over. You’re the one who wants to prolong it.”

“You’re wrong,” Charlie says calmly. “I want to end it, so we can put it all behind us and start over.”

“Then end it! Marden’s savages don’t care about us anymore. Stop caring about them.”

Charlie’s cheeks pinch, letting me glimpse the annoyance behind his calm exterior. He turns his back and moves to the desk below the massive screen of stars. He fiddles with something, and the stars speed by as if this room is really a ship and he’s speeding us across the sky, or scrolling back in time.

My eyes drop to the table in front of me, to something I noticed without really seeing it. There are three thin, pointy pieces of metal, similar to nails but without a flat end, lying below the spinning hologram of Kiel. They blend into the screen, but I’m sure they’re real. I shift my body an inch to the right so I’m blocking them from the view of Dean, who’s still waiting back by the ramp. Charlie freezes the star screen on an image, and pulls a laser pointer out of his pocket. He directs the laser at a small cluster of objects in the sky, which look like several stars clumped together.

“Keep your eyes on those,” he says and rolls the image again, this time much slower.

I set my palm on the table as I step around it to see the screen better. My fingers close over one of the pieces of metal. It fits perfectly inside my palm.

My eyes remain on the clump of stars on the screen. These stars look like they’re moving faster than the rest. Almost like a clump of satellites, but if we have any in the sky right now, there aren’t that many. And they wouldn’t be moving together.

“What are those?” I ask, moving my hand off the table. I clutch the nail with my fist.

Charlie switches the laser pointer off. “Those are ships from Marden. A whole fleet of them, headed toward our planet.”

“Excuse me?”

“Marden is sending an army to wipe us out.”

I wait for him to laugh, to give away that this is a joke. An army can’t be coming.

But those dots moving fast on the screen do look an awful lot like a fleet of ships. And there’s a flicker of real fear behind Charlie’s stony eyes; he believes the fleet is a true threat.

“You can’t be serious,” I say.

“I assure you I am.” He steps back to the table and sets his hand on the lit surface. It’s a touch screen. He flips quickly through some images and pulls up a new hologram, this time of a small fleet—the one among the stars. “My astronomers spotted the fleet five days ago.”

Five days ago. That was the day before he began transferring people off the Surface, and the day before the Crust coal mines shut down.

“We’ve been tracking its position,” he says, “and we’ve created a model of what we believe their ships look like, based on sketches we recovered from old records.”

“Why would they be sending an army, after all this time?”

Charlie’s nostrils flare slightly. “Well, you did destroy the weapon the Mardenites placed on our moon. It could’ve been sending a signal to them, one they lost as soon as the generator was destroyed. That would’ve made them realize we’re still very much alive, and possibly still a threat.”

No, that makes no sense. “We destroyed their weapon eleven days ago. Fred told me it would take a few
months
to reach Marden by ship. Unless their technology is far, far superior to ours, they couldn’t get here in eleven days. Which means they were already on their way.”

Charlie draws his gaze away from mine. But something tells me he already knew.

The pointy ends of the nail in my fist dig into my skin.
Not yet.
“If you want me to trust you, don’t lie to me. Tell me everything you know.”

Charlie rubs the spot above his nose with two fingers and gives me a wry smile. “Sorry, there is something I failed to mention. The last time we sent an army to Marden, we captured a few of the savages and brought them back with us. One in particular is a rather important figure to the Mardenites. A savior, they call him. He is the god and leader of their people. He’s the reason they put that generator on the moon, and the reason they’re bringing a whole fleet.”

I pause to process this new information. An alien god? “What, so they know we killed him?”

“It’s possible they think we did, yes, and that’s why they’re coming to wipe us out,” Charlie says stiffly. “It’s also possible they know he’s still alive, and they’re coming to rescue him. Your guess is as good as mine. All I have to rely on for information about the Mardenites comes from the military records we have from the time of the last war, and what information we’ve extracted from the savage in our custody.”

Either way, it doesn’t make sense to me. All of this—us flying to Marden, capturing their god and bringing him here—happened hundreds of years ago. Why would they retaliate now? They already put a generator on the moon and tried to wipe us out. Did it take them three hundred years to realize they failed?

In fact—“They put the generator on the moon to wipe us out,” I say. “The acid could’ve killed their god too. I doubt they wanted that.”

“The savages are immune to the acid, so he wouldn’t have died,” Charlie says.

“How do you know?”

“I am privy to more information about Marden’s inhabitants than you would care to know, since the war records have been passed down to all the Developers. But we performed a test recently to confirm it.”

“On the Mardenite prisoner, you mean?”

“Indeed.”

Memories of the tests Charlie had the Karum doctors perform on me flash through my head, and I feel sick to my stomach. “How is he still alive, if we captured him three centuries ago?”

“The Mardenites have life spans far superior to our own.”

If they’re really coming for us in warships, I need to know more about them. I’d like to meet the one we captured and talk to him myself. “Where are you keeping him?”

Charlie swipes his hand across the table screen, and the hologram of the fleet disappears. “That’s classified information. If you agree to aid me in the war against the fleet, I may choose to disclose his location. But you haven’t yet.”

He looks at me expectantly.

It almost doesn’t even matter if he’s wrong about this and the Mardenite army isn’t coming to wage war against us. He believes it is, and he is in control of everything.

“You want my help,” I repeat, in case I misunderstood.