He glanced at her, nodded, and passed the binoculars over, pantomiming what each of the knobs on top did to sharpen her view and vary the amount of light, although the amplification was almost unnecessary now in the strengthening light.
As she put them to her eyes, he leaned in and spoke into her ear. “The best, closest angle to get a look at the collars they use to keep them from Sparking is along the edge of the butte, right before they cross out of view behind it.”
She nodded without commenting. She did focus down at the base of the butte as he suggested. He noted her heavy swallow and the thinning of her lips. She had not been collared in the room back at Azcon. Her experience had been traumatic but brief. They had to live with the current every hour of every day. After a moment, she slowly scanned to the side and up, returning her view to the prison. She was silent, but the anger radiated off of her in physical heat that Alex, sitting so close, could feel.
Lena stiffened. She sucked her breath in and her hands clutched around the glasses. She leaned in, as if getting those few inches closer to the scene far below would make what she watched clearer. Alex turned back to the prison. He didn’t see anything amiss—or not any more amiss than so many men like them being tortured, criminals or not. A smaller group of eight, not the usual twelve, caught his attention. They were smaller than the others, as well, and more rag-tag. Had the Council brought in boys?
“There are girls down there.” She kept her words low, but furious. She lowered the binoculars and passed them to him. Her face was pinched and mottled with rage. “In the yard. There are girls. Wearing those collars. I highly doubt they’re criminals.”
Alex looked at the rag-tag little group he’d marked as different. It had to be them. The view through the glasses arrowed him down the hillside as if he were standing right outside the yard.
The girls stood still, some of them shivering in waves in the peculiar way Lena had when she’d had the current flowing through her on the table. They weren’t cold. They were fighting a constant flow of electricity.
One of them, the tallest, seemed Lena’s age. Her long, dark blond hair hung lank around her shoulders. Her pale eyes burned with the same fury Lena’s did. The bright uniform was too snug across her full chest and hips and too short at the wrists and ankles. The collar snugged against her neck had a small chain of lights flowing one to the next in a constant stream of light, like a macabre red slash across her throat. He shifted his view to look at the others.
The rest were girls: two teenagers, thin and awkward; a couple of pre-teens; and three smaller girls. The youngest was no more than five or six. Beyond a doubt, if she’d been a boy, she’d have been sent to the Ward School. They all would have. But they were girls. When their parents had taken them for testing, they’d have been powerful, unpredictable, and marked as capable of producing dangerous and uncontrollable children and sent here. How long had this been going on? How had Fort Nevada’s spies missed this?
The littlest girl had enormous brown eyes, almond-shaped, with dark smudges of exhaustion and fear hollowed out beneath them. Her black hair was unkempt. Her collar, clearly improvised and too big for her thin neck, held her small chin up in an unnatural position. The lights running across her throat moved through their pattern slower than on the woman, but her body shivered constantly nonetheless. Alex swallowed bile.
“We’re not leaving them here.” Lena’s voice brooked no arguments.
He lowered the binoculars and returned her gaze. Her face was serene and terrible.
“No,” he agreed, “we’re not.” The words came before he’d even thought them through, but they were true. It didn’t matter how much they complicated things. He rubbed the back of his hand across his mouth and passed the binoculars to Jackson. His soft exclamation told them when he’d found the girls.
Jackson leaned over, careful not to jar the lip of the hole they hid inside. He started to speak, hesitated as he looked at Lena, and then plunged ahead, voice no less emphatic for being barely audible. “Sir. We’re supposed to—”
“I know what our objective was, Ward. It’s changed.”
“We were to keep her safe at all costs, sir. Has that changed?” Though his voice never rose above a whisper, Jackson challenged Alex.
Lena made a noise of disgust.
“No. You’ll be leading Lena back to Herrons and then returning here—”
“The hell he will!” Her exclamation was a strangled hiss.
“Lena, listen.”
“No. You listen.” She remembered to breathe the words in spite of her fury. “Those girls are me. If I hadn’t blown up that building, I’d be down there with them. This is my fight. Tell me different!”
Alex sighed.
It was all the answer she needed. Determination set her face. “I’m not leaving them. I’m not going back. I can remove the collars. And I’m more dangerous than either of you.” The last she whispered with absolute certainty.
He stared at her.
She stared back, refusing to give way.