We boarded last, behind the six volunteers who were risking their lives to give us the chance to sneak into Somerset and steal the file on Victor Mercer. As I passed them in their uniforms and winter military gear, part of me was terrified Benjy would be among them. But Knox wouldn’t do that to me. Benjy wouldn’t do that to me. Or the mission.
Thankfully, while a few of the faces were familiar, none of them were his. Still, after the plane took off, leaving the muddy gray of Elsewhere behind for the muddy gray of D.C., I joined Knox toward the front of the plane, where he sat in a jumper seat. The others lingered near the back, laughing and playing a card game as they ignored the bumps and rattles of the plane.
“We should be doing this alone,” I said to Knox, sitting down in the seat across from him.
“Who says we aren’t?” He flashed me a ghost of a smirk, but it was hard to believe it when I could see the weight of the entire war resting on his shoulders.
“So what’s the plan?” I said. “We’re using the tunnel, right?”
“Unless you know of another way inside without the Shields finding us.”
“But Celia knows about it.”
“She’s probably using it, too,” he said. “If we do run into trouble, we’ll tell them we’re there to meet with Celia.”
The plane rattled unexpectedly, and I gripped the armrests. “So we probably won’t get in and out undetected?”
He shook his head. “But we’re still Blackcoats. We’re still on the same side.”
“Didn’t seem like it from your performance this morning,” I said, and he shrugged.
“Celia brought that on herself. If she can’t play nice, then we don’t include her. Plain and simple.”
“But she runs the other half of the army.”
“I know,” he said, but he didn’t elaborate. It seemed like a dangerous proposition to me, cutting them off from our plans, but maybe he would be more lenient once we had the file in our hands.
We sat in silence for a few minutes. Knox stared out the window, and I listened to the men and women in the back. They didn’t invite us to play their game, and I realized, with somewhat of an epiphany, that I didn’t expect them to. Knox was their commander, and while I might have had little to no real power over the Blackcoat army, I was still a figurehead. We were separate from them the same way VIs were separate from IIs, and something about thatthought made me squirm.
Benjy was right. There would always be leaders, and those leaders would always be set apart somehow, even if it was only as trivial as not being invited to play a card game. I had no doubt that if I asked to be dealt in, they wouldn’t argue, but I would be unwanted. A threat, in some small way, to their fun. Different, no matter what I did or where I was raised. It was one more thing to look forward to after the war ended, I considered bitterly—a lifetime of exclusion for no other reason than who and what I was.
“Why are you doing this?”
Knox’s gaze drifted back toward me, and he raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t you just ask me that earlier?”
“You didn’t give me a straight answer,” I said. “And I don’t mean why are you doing this now. That’s obvious. I mean—” I gestured toward him. “Why did you start? What made you wake up one morning and decide to try to take downthe United States government?”
“It wasn’t that easy,” he said, but the hint of a smirk returned. “Is that how it was for you?”
“I woke up in a body that wasn’t my own, looking like the mouthpiece for the revolution,” I said. “Didn’t exactly have much of a choice.”
“Sure you did,” he said, leaning back in his seat. “You had plenty of choices, just like the rest of us.”
It hadn’t felt like it at the time, but I didn’t regret it. And truth be told, if I’d known then what I did now, I would’ve done the same thing. No—not the exact same thing. I would’ve done some things differently, like all myarguments with Knox. The recklessness that had landed me in Elsewhere. I could’ve been a better team player, and I was working on that, slowly. But I didn’t regret the risks I’d taken and would continue to take as a member of the Blackcoats.
“You’re still dodging my question,” I said, crossing my arms. They’d given me a leather bomber jacket for the mission, and it was the warmest thing I’d worn in weeks. “I agreed because I believe in the same things Lila was talking about. Because I believe in what the Blackcoats are trying to do. I’ve lived at the bottom, and I know how awful it is—I know how unfair society can be. But you were raised with a silver spoon in your mouth, and even if you weren’t, you didn’t have the Blackcoats back then to voice what was already going on in your head. So—what made you speak up? What made you risk your life and your family’s legacy for a bunch of people that, if you wanted, you’d never have to acknowledge? You could’ve been a Minister, like your father. You could’ve been living a cushy life in your own little bubble. And that’s what I don’t get—why aren’t you?”