The Twelve

38


In the morning, Jackie was gone.

Sara awoke to find the woman’s cot empty. Lit with panic, she tore through the lodge, cursing herself for sleeping so deeply. The old woman who bunked in the second row? Had anyone seen her? But no one had, or so they said. At morning roll, Sara detected only the smallest hitch of silence in the space where Jackie’s number should have been. Everyone was looking down. Just like that, the waters had closed over her friend. It was as if she’d never existed at all.

She moved through the day in a fog, her mind teetering on the razor-thin edge between desperate hope and outright despair. Probably there was nothing to be done. People disappeared; that was the way of things. And yet Sara could not talk herself out of the idea that if the woman was still in the hospital, if she hadn’t been taken to the feedlot yet, there might be a chance. But how could Jackie have been taken right from under Sara’s nose like that? Wouldn’t she have heard something? Wouldn’t the woman have protested? It simply didn’t add up.

That was when Sara figured it out. She hadn’t heard anything, because there had been nothing to hear. Not like this. Not for me. Jackie had left the lodge of her own accord.

She’d done it to protect Sara.

By midafternoon she knew she had to do something. Her guilt was excruciating. She never should have tried to get Jackie out of the plant, never confronted Sod the way she had. She’d all but painted a target on the woman’s back. The minutes were ticking away. The virals in the feedlot ate just after dusk; Sara had seen the trucks. Livestock carriers crammed with lowing cows, but also the windowless vans that were used to move prisoners from the detention center. One was always parked at the rear of the hospital, its meaning plain to anyone who cared to consider it.

The cols supervising the grinding teams were Vale and Whistler. Vale she thought she could have worked with, but with Whistler watching, Sara didn’t see how. There was only one solution she could think of. She topped off her bushel basket, lifted it from the ground, took three steps toward the grinder, and stopped.

“Oh,” Sara cried. She let the basket drop, clutching her stomach. “Oh. Oh.”

She melted, moaning, to her knees. For a moment it seemed that amid the noise of the grinders her demonstration had gone unnoticed. She amplified her cries, curling her legs to her chest, hugging her midriff.

“Sara, what is it?” One of the other women—Constance Chou—was crouching over her.

“It hurts! It hurts!”

“Get up or they’ll see you!”

Another voice broke through: Vale’s. “What’s going on here?”

Constance backed away. “I don’t know, sir. She just … collapsed.”

“Fisher? What’s wrong with you?”

Sara didn’t answer, just kept up with the moaning, rocking at the waist and throwing in a few spastic kicks for good measure. A circle of onlookers had formed around her. “Appendix,” she said.

“What did you say?”

She clenched her face with manufactured pain. “I think … it’s my … appendix.”

Whistler charged through the crowd, pushing onlookers aside with her baton. “What’s her problem?”

Vale was scratching his head. “She says something’s wrong with her pendix.”

“What are you people looking at?” Whistler barked. “Get back to work.” Then, to Vale: “What do you want to do with her?”

“Fisher, can you walk?”

“Please,” she gasped. “I need a doctor.”

“She says she needs a doctor,” Vale reported.

“Yeah, I heard that, Vale.” The woman huffed a sigh. “All right, let’s get her out of here.”

They helped her to a pickup parked behind the plant and laid her in the back. Sara kept up the rocking and moaning. A brief negotiation ensued: should one of them take her or should they call for a driver?

“F*ck it, I’ll take her,” Whistler said. “Knowing you, you’ll dither all day.”

The trip to the hospital took ten minutes; Sara used them to formulate a plan. All she’d been thinking about was getting to the hospital, to find Jackie before the van took her away; she hadn’t considered the next step. It seemed to her now that she held only two good cards. First, she wasn’t really sick; once she experienced a miraculous recovery, it didn’t seem likely that they’d ship a perfectly able-bodied woman off to the feedlot. Second, she was a nurse. Sara wasn’t sure how she’d put this fact to use—she’d have to improvise—but she might be able to use her medical knowledge to convince the person in charge that Jackie wasn’t as ill as she appeared.

Or maybe nothing she did would matter. Maybe once she passed through the hospital doors, she’d never come out. This prospect, as she weighed it, did not appear entirely bad, thus giving her a third card to play: the card of not caring anymore if she lived or died.

Whistler pulled up to the hospital entrance, strode back to the cargo bed, and drew down the tailgate.

“Out with you. Let’s go.”

“I don’t think I can walk.”

“Well, you’ll have to try, because I’m not carrying you.”

Sara sat up. The sun had peeked from behind the clouds, sharpening the scene with its cold brightness. The hospital was a three-story brick building, part of a cluster of low, workaday structures at the southern edge of the flatland. At a distance of twenty yards stood one of three major HR substations. A dozen cols guarded the entrance, which was flanked by concrete barricades.

“Am I talking to myself here?”

She was; Sara was barely listening. She was focused on the car, a small sedan of the type the cols used to move among the lodges. It was headed toward them at high speed, dragging a boiling plume of dust. Sara clambered down from the bed. Simultaneously, she sensed a figure rushing at her from behind. The car was bearing down, its speed unabated. There was something odd about it, and not just the wild velocity of its approach. The windows were blacked out, obscuring the driver; something was written on the hood, the letters scrawled in streaks of white paint.

SERGIO LIVES

As the vehicle sailed toward the barricades, somebody smashed her from behind. In the next instant she was flat on the ground, her body smothered, as the truck exploded with a blast of sound and a wave of superheated pressure she didn’t believe could actually exist in the world. The air was sucked from her lungs. Things were falling. Things were sailing through the air and impacting like meteors around her, flaming, heavy things. There was a screeching sound of metal, a rain of tinkling glass. The world was noise and heat and the weight of a body on top of her, and then a sudden silence and a wash of warm breath close to her ear and a voice saying:

“Come with me now. Do exactly as I say.”

Sara was on her feet. A woman, no one she knew, was pulling her by the hand against the inertia of her wonderment. Something had happened to her hearing, bathing the scene around her in a milky unreality. The substation was a smoking crater. The pickup was gone; it lay on its side where the entrance to the hospital was, or had been. Something wet was on Sara’s hands and face. Blood. She was covered in it. And sticky things, biological things, and a fine, jeweled dust she realized was composed of tiny bits of glass. How amazing, she thought, how very amazing everything was, especially what had happened to Whistler. It was striking, what a body looked like when it wasn’t one thing anymore but had been dispersed in recognizably human pieces over a wide area. Who would have guessed that when a body blew apart, as had evidently happened, it actually did that: it blew apart.

She broke away, first her vision and then the rest of her; the woman was running and so was she, running and also being dragged, the energy of her rescuer—for Sara understood that this woman had protected her from the blast—passing into her body through their gripping hands. Behind them the silence had given way to a chorus of screams and shouts, a weirdly musical sound, and the woman skidded to a halt behind a building that somehow still stood (hadn’t all the buildings in the world just blown up?) and dropped on the ground. In her hand was a kind of hook, and with this hook she drew aside the manhole cover.

“Get in.”

Sara did. She got in. She lowered herself into the hole where a ladder waited. Something smelled bad. Something smelled like shit because it was. As Sara’s feet touched the bottom, her sneakers filling with the horrible water, the woman reached over her head and resealed the manhole with a clank, plunging Sara into an absolute darkness. Only then did it occur to her in fullest measure that she had been in an explosion of many deaths and much destruction and that in its immediate aftermath, an interval of probably less than a minute, she had given herself completely to a woman she did not know, and that this woman had whisked her into a kind of nonexistence: that Sara had, in effect, disappeared.

“Wait.”

The glow of a small bluish flame igniting: the woman was holding a lighter, touching it to the head of a torch. A blaze leapt forth, illuminating her face. Somewhere in her twenties, with a long neck and small, dark eyes, full of intensity. There was something familiar about her, but Sara couldn’t fix her mind on it.

“No more talking. Can you run?”

Sara nodded yes.

“Come on.”

The woman began to move at a trot down the sewer pipe, Sara following. This went on for some time. At each of many intersections, the woman decisively chose a direction. Sara had begun to take stock of her injuries. The explosion had not occurred without effect. There was a variety to her pains, some of them quite sharp, others more like a generally dispersed thudding. Yet none was so severe as to prevent her from keeping up with the woman. After more time had passed, Sara realized that the distance they had traveled must have surely placed them beyond the wired boundaries of the Homeland. They were escaping! They were free! A ring of light appeared before them: an exit. Beyond it lay the world—a dangerous world, a lethal world where virals roamed unchecked, but even so it loomed before her like a golden promise, and she stepped into the light.

“Sorry about this.”

The woman was behind her. She had reached one hand around Sara’s waist, drawing her into stasis; the other hand, holding a cloth, rose to Sara’s face. What in the world? But before Sara could utter a single sound of protest, the cloth was covering her mouth and nose, flooding her senses with an awful choking chemical smell, and a million tiny stars went off inside her head; and that was the end of that.





39


Lila Kyle. Her name was Lila Kyle.

Though, of course, she knew that the face in the mirror had other names. The Queen of Crazy. Her Loony Majesty. Her Royally Unhinged Highness. Oh, yes, Lila had heard them all. You’d have to get up pretty early in the morning to pass one over on Lila Kyle. Sticks and stones, she always said (her father said), sticks and stones, but what galled her, really, was the whispering. People were always whispering! As if they were the adults and she the child, as if she were a bomb that might go off at any second. How strange! Strange and not a little disrespectful, because in the first instance, she wasn’t crazy, they were one hundred percent wrong about that; and in the second, even if she were, even if, for the sake of argument, she liked to strip naked in the moonlight and howl like a dog (poor Roscoe), what concern of it was theirs? How crazy she was or was not? (Though she had to confess, there were days, certain difficult days when her thoughts would not cooperate, like an armful of autumn leaves she was attempting to shove into a bag.) It wasn’t nice. It was beyond the pale. To speak behind a person’s back, to make such vile insinuations—it was outside the bounds of common decency. What had she ever done to deserve such treatment? She kept to herself, she never asked for anything, she was quiet as a mouse; she was wholly content to bide her time in her room with her lovely little things, her bottles and combs and brushes and her dressing table, where now she sat—it seemed she had been sitting there for some time—brushing out her hair.

Her hair. As she shifted her attention to the face in the mirror, a wave of warm recognition flowed through her. The sight always seemed to take her by surprise: the rosy, pore-free skin, the dewy glistening of her eyes, the humid plumpness of her cheeks, the delicate proportionality of her features. She looked … amazing! And most amazing of all was her hair. How lustrous it was, how abundant to the touch, how rich with its molassesy thickness. Not molasses: chocolate. An excellent dark chocolate from someplace wonderful and special, Switzerland, maybe, or one of those other countries, like the candies her father had always kept in his desk; and if she was good, very good, or sometimes for no reason at all, simply because he loved her and wanted her to know it, he would summon her to the sanctified quarters of his masculine-smelling study, where he wrote his important papers and read his inscrutable books and conducted his generally mysterious fatherly business, to bestow upon her the symbol of this love. Only one now, he would say to her, the oneness amplifying the specialness because it implied a future in which further visits to the study would occur. The golden box, the lifting lid, the moment of suspense: her little hand hovered over the rich bounty of its contents like a diver poised at the edge of a pool, calculating the perfect angle for her plunge. There were the chocolate ones, and the ones with nuts, and the ones with the cherry syrup (the only ones she didn’t like; she’d spit them out into a Kleenex). But best of all were the ones with nothing, the pure chocolate nuggets. That was what she craved. The singular treasure of milky melting sweetness that she was attempting to divine from among its fellows. This one? This one?

“Yolanda!”

Silence.

“Yolanda!”

In a flurry of skirts and veils and windy fabric, the woman came bustling into the room. Really now, Lila thought, what a ridiculous getup that was. How many times had Lila instructed her to dress more practically?

“Yolanda, where have you been? I’ve been calling and calling.”

The woman was looking at Lila as if she’d lost her mind. Had they gotten to her, too? “Yolanda, ma’am?”

“Who else would I call?” Lila sighed exorbitantly. The woman could be so dense. Though her English was not the best. “I would like … something. If you please. Por favor.”

“Yes, ma’am. Of course. Would you like me to read to you?”

“Read? No.” Though the thought was suddenly appealing; a little Beatrix Potter might be the very thing to soothe her nerves. Peter Rabbit in his little blue jacket. Squirrel Nutkin and his brother Twinkleberry. The two of them could get into such mischief! Then she remembered.

“Chocolate. Do we have any chocolate?”

The woman still appeared totally out of it. Maybe she’d gotten into the liquor. “Chocolate, ma’am?”

“Leftover Halloween candy, maybe? I’m sure we have some somewhere. Anything will do. Hershey’s Kisses. Almond Joy. A Kit Kat. Whatever is fine.”

“Um …”

“Sí? A little choc-o-LAH-tay? Check the cabinet over the sink.”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know what you’re asking for.”

Now, this was annoying. The woman was pretending not to know what chocolate was!

“I fail to see what the problem is, Yolanda. I have to say, your attitude has begun to trouble me. A great deal, in fact.”

“Please don’t be angry. If I knew what it was, I’d be glad to get it for you. Maybe Jenny knows.”

“That’s my point, you see. That is precisely what I’m saying.” Lila sighed heavily. A pity, but there was really nothing left to be done. Better to rip the band-aid off than drag things out.

“I’m afraid, Yolanda, I’m going to have to let you go.”

“Go?”

“Go, yes. No más. We no longer require your services, I’m afraid.”

The woman’s eyes seemed practically to pop from her head. “You can’t!”

“I’m truly sorry. I wish things had worked out. But under the circumstances, you really leave me with no alternative.”

The woman hurled herself at Lila’s knees. “Please! I’ll do anything!”

“Yolanda, get ahold of yourself.”

“I’m begging you,” the woman blubbered into her skirt. “You know what they’ll do. I’ll work harder, I swear!”

Lila had expected her to take it badly, but this undignified display was wholly unexpected. It was positively embarrassing. The urge to offer some consoling touch was strong, but Lila resisted it, lest this draw things out, leaving her hands hovering awkwardly in the air. Maybe she should have waited until David got home. He was always better at this sort of thing.

“We’ll provide you with a reference, of course. And two weeks’ pay. You really shouldn’t take it so hard.”

“It’s a death sentence!” She hugged Lila’s knees as if she were clinging to a life raft. “They’ll send me to the basement!”

“I hardly think this qualifies as a death sentence. You’re completely overreacting.”

But the woman was beyond appeals to reason. Unable to form words through the storm of her uncontrollable sobs, she had given up her pleading, soaking Lila’s skirt with mucusy tears. The only thing on Lila’s mind was extricating herself from the situation as quickly as possible. She hated things like this, she hated them.

“What’s going on in here?”

Lila lifted her gaze toward the figure standing in the door, at once breathing a sigh of relief. “David. Thank God. We seem to have a bit of a situation here. Yolanda, well, she’s a little bit upset. I’ve decided to let her go.”

“Christ, another one? What’s the matter with you?”

Now, wasn’t this typical. Wasn’t this typical David. “That’s fine for you to say, gone all day, leaving me stuck in the house. I’d think you’d back me up.”

“Please, don’t do this!” Yolanda wailed.

Lila made a get-this-woman-off-me gesture with her hands. “A little help here?”

Which did not prove quite as easy as it might have. As David (not David) bent to extricate the sobbing Yolanda (not Yolanda) from Lila’s knees, the woman redoubled her hold and commenced, unbelievably, to scream. What a scene she was making! For goodness sake, you’d think being fired from a housekeeping job really was a death sentence from the way she was acting. With a hard yank at the waist, David pulled her free and hoisted her bodily into the air. She kicked and screamed in his arms, flailing like a crazy person. It was only through his superior strength that he managed to contain her. One thing about David: he’d kept himself in shape.

“I’m sorry, Yolanda!” Lila called as he whisked her away. “I’ll mail you a check!”

The door slammed behind them. Lila released a breath she realized she’d been holding in her chest. Well, wasn’t that something. Wasn’t that just about the most uncomfortable business she’d ever had to endure. She felt completely rattled, and not a little guilty besides. Yolanda had been with them for years, and for everything to end so badly. It left a sour taste in Lila’s mouth. Though admittedly, Yolanda had never been the best housekeeper, and recently she’d really let things go. Probably some personal difficulties. Lila had never even been to the woman’s house, though; she knew nothing of her life. How curious was that? All these years, Yolanda coming and going, and it was as if Lila didn’t know the woman at all.

“Well, she’s gone. Congratulations.”

Lila, who had resumed brushing her hair, examined David coolly through the mirror as he paused in the doorway to straighten his tie.

“And how is this my fault, exactly? You saw her. She was completely out of control.”

“That’s the third one this year. Good attendants don’t grow on trees.”

She took another long, luxurious stroke with the brush. “So call the service. It’s really not such a big deal, you know.”

David said nothing more, evidently content to let the matter drop. He moved to the divan, drawing up the knees of his suit pants to sit down.

“We have to talk.”

“Can’t you see I’m busy? Don’t they need you back at the hospital or something?”

“I don’t work at a hospital. We’ve been over this a million times.”

Had they? Sometimes her thoughts were autumn leaves, sometimes they were bees in a jar, little buzzing things going round and round.

“What happened in Texas, Lila?”

“Texas?”

He sighed grumpily. “The convoy. The Oil Road. I thought my instructions were clear.”

“I haven’t the foggiest idea what you’re talking about. I’ve never been to Texas in my life.” She paused her brushing, meeting David’s eyes through the mirror. “Brad always hated Texas. Probably you don’t want to hear anything about that, though.”

Her words, she saw, had hit their mark. Bringing up Brad was her secret weapon. Though she knew she shouldn’t, she took a perverse delight in the expression on David’s face whenever she spoke the name—the deflated blankness of a man who knew he could never measure up.

“I don’t ask much of you. What I’m beginning to wonder is if you can control these things anymore.”

“Yes, well.” Buzz, buzz.

“Are you listening to me? We can’t have any more disasters like this. Not when we’re this close.”

“I don’t see what you’re so upset about. And to be perfectly honest, I don’t care for the way you’re speaking to me.”

“Goddamnit, put that f*cking brush down!”

But before she could do this, he snatched it from her hand and sent it pinwheeling across the room. He seized her by the hair, yanking her head back, and jammed his face so close to hers it wasn’t even a face but a thing, a monstrous distorted sluglike thing, bathing her with its rotten bacterial breath.

“I’ve had it with your bullshit.” Spittle splashed her cheeks, her eyes; it launched revoltingly from his mouth into hers. The edges of his teeth were etched with a dark substance, giving them a terrifying vividness. Blood. His teeth were lined in blood. “This act of yours. This stupid game.”

“Please,” she gasped, “you’re hurting me!”

“Am I?” He twisted her hair, hard. A thousand pinpoint agonies screamed from her scalp.

“David,” she pleaded, tears drowning her vision, “I’m begging you. Think about what you’re doing.”

The slug face roared in anger: “I’m not David! I’m Horace! My name is Horace Guilder!” Another twisting yank. “Say it!”

“I don’t know, I don’t know! You’re confusing me!”

“Say it! Say my name!”

It was the pain that did it. In a cyclonic rush, her consciousness collapsed upon itself.

“You’re Horace! Please, just stop!”

“Again! All of it!”

“Horace Guilder! You’re Horace Guilder, Director of the Homeland!”

Guilder released her, stepping away. She was lying backward over her dressing table, shaking with sobs. If only she could go back. Go back, she thought, clamping her eyes tight to hide this horror of a man, this Horace Guilder, from her sight. Lila, go back. Send yourself away again. She shook with a nausea that rose from a place so deep it had no name, a sickness not of the body but of the soul, the metaphysical core of her fractured self, and then she was on her knees, vomiting, gasping and choking and spewing the vile blood that she herself had drunk that very morning.

“Okay, then,” said Guilder, wiping his hands on his suit coat. “Just so that’s clear.”

Lila said nothing. So powerful was her longing to will herself away, she couldn’t have formed words if she’d tried.

“Big days ahead, Lila. I need to know that you’re on board. No more of your nonsense. And please, try not to fire any more attendants. These girls don’t grow on trees.”

With the back of her wrist, she wiped the rancid spittle from her chin. “You said that already.”

“I’m sorry?”

“I said, you said that already.” Her voice didn’t even sound like her own. “About attendants not growing on trees.”

“Did I?” He gave a little laugh. “So I did. Funny when you think about it. Something along those lines would sure come in handy, given the exigencies of the food chain and all. I’m sure your pal Lawrence would agree. I tell you, that man can eat.” He paused a moment, enjoying this thought, before his eyes hardened on her again. “Now clean yourself up. No offense, Lila, but you’ve got vomit in your hair.”





40


“Sara? Can you hear me?”

A voice was floating toward her. A voice and also a face, one she knew but couldn’t place. A face in a dream, which was what she was certain she was having: an unsettling dream in which she was running and all around her were bodies and parts of bodies, and everything on fire.

“She’s still completely out of it,” the voice said. It seemed to reach her across an impossible distance. A continent. An ocean. It seemed to come from the stars. “How much did you use?”

“Three drops. Well, maybe four.”

“Four? Were you trying to kill her?”

“It was rushed, okay? You told me you wanted her out. So, she’s out.”

A heavy sigh. “Get me a bucket.”

A bucket, thought Sara, what did the voices want with a bucket? What did a bucket have to do with anything? But no sooner had she thought this than a force of cold wetness crashed into her face, blasting her into consciousness. She was choking, drowning, waving her arms in panic, her nose and throat filling with the icy water.

“Easy now, Sara.”

She sat upright, too fast; her brain sloshed in its casing, swirling her vision.

“Ooo,” she moaned. “Ooo.”

“The headache’s bad, but it won’t last. Just breathe.”

She blinked the water from her eyes. Eustace?

It was. His top front teeth were gone, shorn at the root; his right eye was clouded with blindness. With a gnarled hand, he was holding out a metal cup.

“It’s good to see you again, Sara. You’ve already met Nina, here. Say hello, Nina.”

Standing behind him was the woman from the pipe. A rifle was slung across her chest, her arms folded casually over it. “Hello, Sara.”

“Don’t worry,” Eustace said. “I know you have a lot of questions, and we’ll get to them. Just drink.”

Sara took the cup and gulped the water down. It was astonishingly cold and tasted vaguely metallic, as if she were licking a bar of iron.

“I thought you were—”

“Dead?” Eustace grinned, showing his ruined mouth. “In point of fact, everybody here is dead. Nina, remind me, how exactly did you die?”

“I believe it was pneumonia, sir. That or something very heavy fell on me. I can never remember how we did the paperwork.”

The explosion, the dash through the pipe; it was all coming back now. Sara drained the cup and took a moment to inspect her surroundings. She appeared to be in some kind of bunker, although there were no windows; she sensed they were someplace underground. The room’s only illumination came from a stand of flickering torches.

“Where are we?”

“Someplace the redeyes can’t find us.” He had a way of looking at her, angling his face to aim his good eye, that somehow added to the penetrating seriousness of his gaze. “Beyond that, I can’t tell you. The important thing is you’re safe here.”

“Are you … Sergio?”

Another broken-toothed smile. “I’m flattered you would think so. But no. There is no Sergio. Not in the way you mean.”

“But I thought—”

“And you’re supposed to. The name is short for ‘insurgency.’ Nina, if I’m not mistaken, that was your idea, wasn’t it?”

“I believe it was.”

“People need a name. Something to focus on, a face to attach to the idea. That’s our face. Sergio.”

She looked at the woman, who was regarding her coolly, then back to Eustace.

“The explosion. That was you, wasn’t it?”

Eustace nodded. “Our early reports indicate seventeen cols dead, including your friend Whistler, and two members of the staff who were visiting for an inspection. Not a bad day’s work, I’d say. But that’s not the real prize.”

“It’s not?”

“No. The real prize is you, Sara.”

Eustace was looking at her intently now. Both of them were. Sara shivered in the cold. A shift had occurred, an inversion of the conversation’s energies; he was trying to draw her out. Could they trust her? More to the point, could she trust them?

“This is the part where you ask me why.”

Not wanting to concede too much, Sara nodded.

“As of this morning, there is no Sara Fisher. Sara Fisher, flatlander number 94801, was killed in a suicide bombing that took the lives of nineteen loyal security officers of the Beloved Homeland. The only recognizable part of Sara Fisher that remains intact is, conveniently, an arm with your tag on it. This was procured from a female col who, not twenty-four hours ago, was employing it to beat women and children in the dairy barns. We thought that under the circumstances it had better uses, though she seemed not to agree. Put up rather a struggle, Nina, did she not?”

“The woman was a fighter. I’ll give her that.”

He regarded Sara again. “I see in your expression that our methods come as a shock. They shouldn’t.”

It was all going by her too fast. “You kill people. Not just the cols. Innocent bystanders.”

Eustace nodded evenly. His face was unreadable, almost emotionless. “That’s true. Fewer than our glorious director would have you believe, but these things never come without cost.”

She was appalled by his casual tone. “That doesn’t justify it.”

“Oh, I think it does. Let me ask you something. What do you think the redeyes will do after today’s attack?”

Sara said nothing.

“All right, I’ll tell you. Reprisals. They’ll crack down hard. It won’t be pretty.”

Sara looked at Eustace, then Nina, then Eustace again. “But why would you want that?”

Eustace took a long breath. “I’ll put it as simply as I know how. This is a war, Sara. Nothing more or less. And in this war, we’re badly outnumbered. We’ve managed to infiltrate nearly every level of their operation, but the numbers are still on their side. We could never defeat them if we engaged them directly. Our theater of operations is psychological. Rattle the leadership. Draw them out. Every person who’s hauled into detention is somebody’s father, somebody’s wife, somebody’s son or daughter. For each one the redeyes send to the feedlot, two more will join us. It may seem brutal. But there it is.” He paused, allowing his words to sink in. “Maybe this doesn’t make sense to you. Soon enough it will, if my hunch about you is correct. In any event, the upshot of the afternoon’s attack is that you no longer exist. And that makes you extremely valuable to us.”

“Are you telling me you planned this?”

He shrugged in a manner that suggested the question was more complex than she’d intended. “There’s planning and there’s planning. A lot of what we do is a matter of timing and luck. But in your case, a great deal of thought went into your extraction. We’ve been watching you for some time, waiting for the right moment. It was Jackie who put the pieces together and gave the go-ahead. The episode at the biodiesel plant was staged, as was her sudden disappearance from the lodge last night. She knew you would come looking for her at the hospital. Frankly, I found the whole thing a little elaborate, and I had my doubts, but her confidence in you won the day. And I’m pleased to say she was right.”

Sara’s mind was swimming with disbelief. No, drowning. “Jackie is … one of you?”

Eustace nodded. “The woman was with us from the beginning, a senior operative. I can’t tell you how many attacks she engineered. Her final mission was to bring you in.”

Sara groped for words but found none. She simply couldn’t square the woman Eustace was describing with the one she knew. Jackie? A member of the insurgency? For more than a year, the woman had barely been out of Sara’s sight. They’d slept three feet from each other, worked side by side, eaten every meal in each other’s company. They’d told each other everything. It made no sense; it wasn’t possible. Then:

“What do you mean by ‘final’?”

Something changed in the air. “I’m sorry,” he said. “Jackie’s dead.”

His words were like a slap. “She can’t be!”

“I’m afraid it’s true. I know she meant a lot to you.”

“They don’t move people from the hospital until dark! I’ve seen the van! We have to get her!”

“Listen to me—”

“There’s still time! We have to do something!” She darted her eyes to Nina, still standing impassively with her arms folded over her rifle, then back at Eustace. “Why aren’t you doing anything?”

“Because it’s too late, Sara.” His expression softened. “Jackie was never in the hospital. That’s what I’m telling you. Jackie was the driver of the car.”

The sensation was of something breaking. That was how it felt. Something broke inside her. A final severing, the last thread binding her to the life she knew cut away. She was floating, floating away.

“She knew how sick she was. At most she would have lasted a few more months before they sent her to the feedlot.” Eustace leaned closer. “It was how she wanted it. The crowning moment of a glorious career. She wouldn’t have had it any other way.”

“She’s dead,” Sara said, to no one.

“She did what she had to do. Jackie was a hero of the insurgency. And here you are, ready to pick up where she left off.”

She couldn’t seem to make herself cry. She wondered why this was, and then she knew: the last tears of her life had fallen; there were no more left inside her. How strange, not to be able to cry. To love someone the way she’d loved Jackie and find no mourning in her heart.

“Why me?”

“Because you hate them, Sara. You hate them and you’re not afraid of them. I saw it in you that day in the truck. Do you remember?”

Sara nodded.

“There are two kinds of hatred. One gives you strength, the other takes it away. Yours is the first kind. I’ve always known that about you. Jackie knew it, too.”

It was true; she hated them. She hated them for their leering eyes, their easy, laughing cruelty. She hated them for their watery gruel and icy showers; she hated the lies they made her shout; she hated their battering batons and the smiles on their smug faces. She hated them with her bones and blood, each cell of her body; her nerves fired with hatred, her lungs breathed hatred in and out, her heart pumped an elixir of pure hatred through her veins. She was alive because she hated them, and she hated them, most of all, for taking her daughter away.

She became aware that Eustace and Nina were waiting for her to speak. She understood that all they’d done and said had been arranged for this one purpose. Step by careful step, they had led her to the edge of an abyss. Once she stepped off, she’d be herself no more.

“What do you want me to do?”