I KEPT MY BELLY DOWN flat against the wash, ignoring the tinge of pain in the muscles of my lower back. It seemed wrong for the desert to be so damn cold, but I guess without the sun, and without the benefit of thick-leaved trees and brush, there was nothing to trap the heat of the previous day. Nameless mountains hovered behind us, the lighter of two deep shades of black. I kept looking over my shoulder as the hours passed, watching their jagged shapes lighten to the color of a new bruise. Aside from the yellow, dried-out clusters of low, prickly desert shrubs, there wasn’t much anything else to look for.
“What was that?” I heard Gav ask. “Is that a rattlesnake? I heard rattling.”
“That was me drinking from my canteen, dumbass,” Gonzo said. “Jesus, dude. Did you leave your balls in California?”
I shushed them, and then shushed them again when one of the girls started complaining about having to pee.
“I told you not to drink that much water on the drive,” Sarah told her. “You never listen to me.”
“Sorry I don’t have the bladder of a freaking sloth.”
“You mean camel,” Sarah corrected.
“I meant sloth,” the other girl said. “I read somewhere they only have to go once a week.”
I rolled my eyes heavenward for strength, wondering if this was what Vida felt like every moment of every day.
“Status?” Cole’s voice was clipped in my ear.
“Same as an hour ago,” I said as I pressed my earpiece. “Nothing so far, over.”
We’d taken the two SUVs down to this barren stretch of Interstate 80 and were dropped off on the side of the road; Lucy and Mike turned the cars around and drove them back to Lodi. Cole and I had mapped out the sweet spot on the highway in terms of distance from the camp. Just far enough from the camp that no one would notice the vehicles making a quick stop. But the only cover we had to hide in was the wash running along the cracked asphalt. We curved our bodies to fit its shape, and waited.
It was another ten minutes before my ears picked up on the faint hum of a distant engine. I knew I hadn’t imagined it when the others began to squirm, trying to get a better look at the lip of the wash. A few seconds later, the first pinpricks of light appeared—headlights that grew in size and intensity, slicing through the darkness.
I glanced down the wash—and there it was, three bursts of light from a flashlight. Ollie had been stationed there to check the markings on the truck. It was the right one.
Zach slapped my back, the excitement bringing a grin to his face. I felt it like a jolt of electricity to my system and flashed a smile back at him as I stood.
I walked out into the middle of the road, hands shaking only a little bit as the semi-trailer truck barreled down the road. I held up my hands as the headlights blinded me—I couldn’t see the details of the driver behind the windshield, but I saw the quick movement as his hand went to strike the horn. I let the invisible hands in my mind reach out blindly, feeling for his, stretching, stretching, stretching—and connecting.
The truck rolled to a stop three feet away from me.
There was a flurry of movement at my left as the makeshift tact team came scrambling up from the wash, moving toward the rear of the truck to open the trailer and jump inside.
I pushed the earpiece as I jogged around to open the passenger side door of the truck’s cab. “We have our ride, over.”
“Fantastic. Proceed with second phase.”
The driver was frozen behind the wheel, waiting for his instructions from me. I searched through his memories and teased one up from the week before, of him making this exact ride in. I pulled that to the forefront of his mind and said one word. “Drive.”
I crouched as low as I could in the cab, drawing the black ski mask down over my face. I pulled myself up to look over the dash periodically to make sure we were still heading in the right direction. The truck driver had been blasting some rap music that was angry and pounding enough to set me on edge, so I reached over and switched it off, missing the exact moment the gray, sun-bleached two-story structure and its ten-foot fence came into view.
“In sight,” I said. “Everyone good at the back of the bus?”
“Peachy,” was Zach’s reply. “ETA?”
“Two minutes.”
I took another steadying breath as we turned and headed off the highway onto a dirt road. The two PSFs at the gate dragged the thing open as the driver, a thick-waisted, bearded man in a short-sleeved button-down, went through the motions of turning the truck and reversing through it, his face blank. A tarp was spread out over the loading area adjacent to the main building. There were already flatbed carts out, waiting for the supplies to be unloaded. Two PSFs were sitting on them, smoking, but threw the cigarettes away and stood as the truck backed toward them. The others, having secured the gate, were hurrying back over as I took one last deep breath.
“We’re in—prepare for action,” I said. “Two PSFs positioned at your door, two more coming around the back.”
“Silent and fast,” Cole reminded us. “Ten minutes starts now.”
A fifth approached the driver’s window, calling out a, “Mornin’ Frank!”
I pushed the image of Frank rolling down the window into his mind, leaned over him, and, before the PSF’s eyes could so much as widen, had my gun pointed directly at his face. He was young, around Cate’s age, maybe. At the sight of me, he lost the easy smile on his face. His whole body pulled back in alarm, and he reached for his rifle.
“What the fu—”
“Hands where I can see them.” I couldn’t control Frank and the PSF at the same time, and Gonzo and Ollie eliminated my need to. One of them cracked him on the back of his skull with the butt of his own rifle, and the other had him facedown in the dirt, gagged and secured with zip ties. He was hauled behind the truck, where four other limp forms were already propped up.
I knew some of the kids hadn’t understood why we’d run through this so many times, but I think, now that we were here, they saw the answer in how smoothly we assembled into formation. The real benefit of simulations was to train your nerves to behave, to make something like this feel as normal as waking up and walking to the showers each morning. It seemed to have worked—even as we approached the door the PSFs had left open and quietly stepped inside of the building, the group felt as steady as stone to me. We certainly looked menacing enough, dressed in all black and wearing ski masks.
The hall was dark, but a stream of light spilled out of one of the rooms—the third one down on the right. I felt myself pause. The smell of bleach tinged with lemon, shoe polish, and human odor gripped me in a stranglehold. Some part of me recognized that it made sense for this camp to smell almost exactly like the Infirmary in Thurmond. Why wouldn’t they use the same military-ordered cleaning supplies? But more than anything, it rubbed up against my nerves.
Gav stepped into place, kneeling down and aiming as the others crept forward. Voices trickled down the tile from the open door I’d spotted before. I waved the kids forward and crept along the wall with them until Zach grabbed my arm and pointed to the door marked CR. Control Room. That was our cue.
As we ducked out of formation, I cast one look back into the open room—four PSFs were sitting around the table, uniform jackets slung onto a nearby couch and the backs of their chairs as they laughed and smoked, dealing cards around a cramped table. As Gav and Gonzo filled the doorway I saw one look up and then look again, diving for a weapon he never reached. The Blues upended their table, threw the PSFs against the wall, and silenced them before they could gasp out a warning over their radios.
That made nine. Nico had reviewed the footage from Pat and Tommy repeatedly, counting the different faces in uniform he saw. Two camp controllers, thirteen PSFs. Fifteen targets total.
Zach and I pressed ourselves against the wall, and I reached out and knocked against the Control Room door.
“Enter,” a voice called. It was a good thing we hadn’t tried to charge it—the thing was locked from the inside. I heard a buzz and then a click, and Zach didn’t waste a moment before pushing it open with his shoulder.
Inside there were two young women, both in black button-down shirts and slacks. The room was a wall of monitors that kissed up against a row of computers. Most of the screens were set on a series of bunks and the children sleeping in them, but they switched over to the hall, to the outside area, the recreational room across the way as we stepped inside. The one who was monitoring the screens dropped her mug of coffee down her front when she spotted what was happening across the wall. The other, standing in front of some kind of panel of switches and dials, turned and let out a small scream when she saw us. Zach had her pressed up against the ceiling with his abilities a full second after I was already in the other camp controller’s mind.
An avalanche of faces, sounds, colors, landscapes streamed through my mind, thundering down over me. I searched for the relevant ones, information about how they reported in statuses, the timing of it, as Zach brought the other screaming woman down, gagged her with cloth, and zip-tied her safely away from the controls to one of the pipes running along the far-right wall.
“Done!” he called. “We have eight minutes. Erasing camera footage.” Nico had shown him how to set the footage back, to loop through already recorded images, making an educated guess about the programs they used. It must have been close to reality, because Zach punched a fist in the air when he was done.
“Get the rooms unlocked upstairs,” I told him, pointing to the nearest computer. “Password is capital P, capital S, capital F, one, three, nine, three, eight, exclamation mark, asterisk. Did you get that?”
“Affirmative.” He relayed the next part to the rest of the team who were, hopefully, already heading up the stairs. “Unlocking doors.”
I brought up the memory of the woman sitting at one of the computers, the message she’d relayed to the PSF system—exactly how I wanted her to do it now, and then again in another two hours. When I pulled back, I took away her memories of Zach and I entering. She simply nodded and went about her business, standing in front of the monitors, her eyes unseeing, her face a blank slate.
“Control is out of play, over,” I said.
“Roger that,” came Cole’s relieved reply. “Proceed upstairs with the others.”
Zach hit the button beside the door, unlocking it, and stepped out. I was right behind him when he jumped back, raised his gun and aimed—
“It’s me,” came a familiar voice. “It’s me, don’t shoot—”
Disbelief, dumb and mute disbelief, stole over me as I confirmed who was standing at the other end of Zach’s rifle.
Liam.