Convictions of the Ascent: Book 2 of the Fallen Series Page 2

  They purchased the farm, and Momma and Daddy were at odds as Georgie and I grew up. Daddy wanted to foster our abilities, thinking that we were the territory’s only hope. He believed that we were meant for greatness and that we could end the suffering. She wanted to take us away from all of it and convince us that we were normal. She believed that, given enough time, the Authority would fall on its own. If I hadn’t taken all of this from her mind, then we never would have known. She would not have told us any of it. I do not feel guilty for taking it.

  2

  …

  Plan C

  WE STAND AT THE base of the steps of the Authority office now, looking up at the sinister brick building with its sharp edges and neat hedges. It holds our fate inside. I am reminded of the time that Georgie and I meandered sociably past it on the day that I sensed T’s mind for the first time. Then suddenly, it hits me—I can sense him now. My brow furrows as my eyes slide to the Authority truck parked in front of the building.

  ‘He’s here?!’ Georgie exclaims into my mind, and the hope that wells inside of her twists my stomach. Hope is dangerous right now. But I allow her to fill me with it. The uncertainty feels good. Maybe she was red-lighted for something else, her brain reasons. Perhaps they just want to talk to her about something involving T, and that’s why he’s here too. ‘He did go off the reservation a bit when you guys were together a few years ago,’ she says into my mind.

  ‘We weren’t together,’ I snap back, ‘and Dak said that he was only hanging around because the Authority had him spying on me.’ She raises an eyebrow at me. She knows as well as I do that I loved him. The Authority has used the red lights to summon people for such things, her mind reasons, but I shake my head at her thoughts. There is only one case in which I have ever heard of the implants being used to summon someone for anything other than a death sentence or a draft summons, and it was when the man that Dak thought was his father used the Authority’s red light system to find him as a wayward, wandering teenager.

  ‘Maybe T is here to help,’ Georgie suggests. ‘He did say that when Daddy was red-lighted, he somehow knew.’

  ‘Wait,’ my mind snaps as it locks on to the situation—T is alive?! I have been so absorbed in Georgie’s thoughts that this hits me later than it would have in my own mind. Dak told me that T was dead. The relief of this revelation is like a cool breeze on my skin that vanishes after a few seconds, as the muggy, stammering heat of Georgie’s red light returns. It doesn’t make me want to go into the building any sooner than we have to, but the thought of seeing him again flutters my stomach. I scan the minds of the people inside, and she peeks nonchalantly at what I sense. This is not an unordinary circumstance in which the Authority is using the red light system for something other than the draft or a death sentence. Georgie is expected because she has been drafted. This fact is confirmed in their thoughts. They have already sent out the Authority truck to pick up today’s crop of draftees, but Georgie’s name is not on that list because they know that she has come to town and will not be needing a ride. They are tracking her. They already know that she is here, outside, lingering on the front steps as many do. I don’t need to relay any of this to her. She reads it out of my mind as I process it. Her abrupt shift to disparity chokes me as I glance over at her. Her downcast eyes break something inside of me. If she has been drafted, then I cannot use my mental abilities to trick them into believing that they see her surrendering when she is not—because there is a paper trail. They will be expecting her at training and on the field afterward. This was the fanaticized strategy that her mind had been entertaining, and it is sinking swiftly into the thick, suffocating waters of hopelessness. I have to do something to offer her relief—to show her that it will be okay. I release my carefully hidden strategies to her—Plan A, which is the best-case scenario, Plan B, which will take some finagling but may work, and Plan C, which is the last stitch contingency. Georgie meets my eyes soberly.

  ‘I don’t like plan C,’ her mental voice conveys. I nod with grim determination.

  ‘I don’t think it will come to that,’ I lie. Georgie sets her jaw and straightens her spine as she glares at the red light on her wrist. I feel her helplessness and guilt, but this is not her fault. I read her intentions before she moves and turn to her as she embraces me. The sun is blaring down on us, and her skin is wet and sticky, but I could stand here and hold her all day. This could be the last time. ‘It won’t be,’ I say into her mind with burning, fortified conviction, like the sun that blares down on our shoulders. She releases me and begins to climb the stairs to the entry. T’s presence here is a game-changer. I shift the plans that I have made around in my head. The layers of strategy that I have in place are the only thing that allows me to uproot my feet and trail her.

  A blast of cold air wafts out of the building and covers my body as she holds the door open to me. I cannot allow myself to feel relief despite the immediate sigh that my body seems to make at escaping from the heat of the day. I have never been inside this building before, and I don’t want to be here now. Inside the entry is a small room, with a long, high, desk at the far end that is illuminated with false light. There is a door behind the receptionist that sits, perched at the center, peering down at us. The desk is attached to the floor as if it were built into the structure and wraps around in a long rectangle with sharp, lethal edges. There is a break in the desk on the far end where a portion of it is split and hinged to allow entry and exit. I stare at the burgundy carpeted floor and wonder briefly if the color of the carpet was chosen to conceal the blood and tears that fall in this room.

  The intensified proximity of T’s presence enhances the feeling of hopefulness that I have allowed to simmer in the corner of my mind. I can’t see him, but he is close, and I can feel him, and it quenches something inside of me. Other than the receptionist, the room is empty, but I can feel multiple minds buzzing behind the wall at her back. Georgie lifts her red-lighted wrist expressionlessly at the receptionist, who nods at her wordlessly. The somber silence in the room makes it feel like a funeral hall, with the echoes and sobs of mourners permeating the clean, white walls. The woman scans Georgie’s implant and begins to clack on the keyboard attached to the screen in front of her wordlessly. She is not a bad person. She is not indifferent toward Georgie, but the years of working here and watching children pass through that break in her desk have worn the jagged edges of sympathy that she feels for them down like a piece of glass rolled in the waves. Maybe she is a bad person.

  I turn my attention to the minds behind the door, digging for what I need. I need a person that has the ability to green-light Georgie’s implant without taking her, preferably a greedy one with loose morals. I dig through mind after mind, slashing through them mentally as if I am crossing items off of a list in red pen. They are all the same. Vile, self-interested, sadistic minds that make me feel slimy for touching them. The knowledge that I gain is damning, and the foundation of my plans begin to shift. The only way to green-light Georgie is to take her to the training command in the south-central territory. Her light will remain red until her training is complete. She exhales and glares at the light on her wrist as she reads the others’ thoughts through my senses. She wants to rip it out with her bare hands. Some people have actually attempted that. None of them have lived to tell about it. The implants are tamperproof. The only way to remove it is to forfeit your life, and then what’s the point? ‘Implant Health’ was a pretty discouraging chapter of my preventative medicine book. It was far more terrifying than the chapters that detailed the various disease processes of the heart, lungs, and digestive tract. Implants do not send warning symptoms as the body’s organs do. Maybe that’s because they aren’t supposed to be there. The human body was not made to be enslaved. A book at MEDOC mentioned that a common mode of suicide is a good hard slam on the implant. The battery inside releases its acid into the bloodstream, and you suffer excruciating pain for about ten minutes before you die cleanly. This has also
become a common means of murder in bigger cities. Weapons aren’t necessary anymore. Not now that everyone walks around with blinking death under their skin.

  I exhale and glance at her. None of the officials in the building have the power to do what we need. Not here. They are all sick with their own perceptions of the power that they hold, but their power is useless to us. They are saturated with hatred. They are boastful with their beliefs in their own superiority. They are afraid of the gen soldier—they are afraid of T. He is here to transport this crop of draftees to the south-central territory for training. He will transport Georgie. I have an unnerving suspicion that he was sent specifically for her. The officials in this office don’t know why there is a gen here for transport this week. I slam through their minds with more vigor. ‘Why?’ I ask their memories. No one knows. A sick feeling slides into Georgie’s gut, and she glances at me as she watches my progress.

  ‘They know,’ she says into my mind, ‘the Authority knows about us.’ If they know, then plan A is a bust. Regardless, no one has the power to green-light her here anyway. I cannot bribe someone with the money that I just got from selling Dak’s car. I shift the bag of cash on my shoulder and try not to feel defeated as I move to plan B. I skim through the minds in the building for the one that belongs to T. He only knows that he has orders to transport the draftees to the south-central territory for training. He thinks that this is a menial task and that he is being punished. He is suspicious of the reasoning for sending him here to do this. I narrow my eyes. His mind feels different—it is unfeeling. Is this because I am reading him more clearly now or because he has changed? His memory shows no spark of recognition or feeling toward Georgie’s name. He does not know who she is. There is something strange and unfamiliar about him. He is moving toward the door. I can feel his consciousness approaching. He has been alerted that one of the draftees is here. He is coming to take her. This is his assignment. In the desperation of my own perplexity, I reach my consciousness toward him.

  ‘T—can you hear me?’ I stammer into his mind. My voice in his head sends a blast of shock through his consciousness like a wave, just as it had with Momma’s when I spoke into her mind. Fear, curiosity, denial. He does not know me. I look at Georgie with wide eyes as the door opens. The gen that emerges is not T. His face is T’s face. His body is T’s body. His uniform is the same, but with different rank insignia on the collar. Gray peppers the hair at his temples and lines crisscross the skin at the edges of his eyes. There is no minute scar that splits his right eyebrow. There is no scar that runs from his jaw, down his neck. He looks like he could be T’s father. But T had no father because he is a gen. The woman at the desk looks up at him as he enters her space, and a squeak escapes her as she rolls her chair away from him. He ignores her. I ignore her. His dark, penetrating eyes fix on mine, and I stare back at him with the familiarity of an old opponent. Even aged, and undoubtedly not him, the shock of seeing this face after all of these years threatens to completely undo me. His glare intensifies as I raise my chin. I’ve done this before, and I am not afraid of him. I am holding his brain in my fist, and he doesn’t even know it. I set my jaw as his reaction to my dispassionate glare washes over me. Confusion, irritated indignation, belief that I am simple, amusement at how easy it would be to snap my neck. My pride flares, and I want to show him how wrong he is, but I hear Georgie’s voice in my mind.

  ‘Be careful, Roe, that is not T,’ she says into me. She’s right. We can see it in his memory. He has never been to this town, and he has never laid eyes on me. He is the only living gen from the B-company. The gens are identical—just like Georgie and I. They are so identical that I mistook this gen’s mind for T’s. They are genetic reconstructions of the same person. Quiet shock splashes over my mind as I process this. Of course they are identical. How could I not have deduced that before? I have never stood face-to-face with any gen other than T, so how could I have known? Still, I have been sloppy. I should have read this fact from the minds of the officials. The knowledge from his mind slams into me, and I set my jaw and carefully control my expression. I push the shock of this revelation aside for the sake of seconds as I attempt to rally plan B, which is shriveling, but I hastily reconstruct it. Standing here and staring at him, I can’t help but feel nostalgic despite the circumstances. ‘Did you think that the Authority was going to release me to come live here and pick peaches with you for the rest of my life?’ T had asked me on the night of our last goodbye, and I hear the echo of his words in my head. It was an unrealistic notion, but if they had, then this is what he would have looked like years from now when my hair is graying, and my skin is wrinkled too. He’s a handsome old fella, I muse, as Georgie splashes my mind with irritation at my train of thought. He brakes our stare and turns to Georgie.

  “You have been summoned by the Authority to defend the Requital Republic and fight for vengeance and prosperity,” he says evenly to her. His voice is the same as T’s voice, and I suppress a shudder, but Georgie glares at him. He is unsettled as he begins to consider that this may not be a menial task after all. He can smell us, and his senses are communicating to him that we are not normal—that we are like him. This excites him, but denial is preventing this thought from taking root in his consciousness. There are two of us, which confirms his developing suspicions. He feels a strange connection to me as if something in the pit of his instincts is telling him to submit. He does not feel the same toward Georgie. But, years of experience have taught him that avoiding conflict eases the difficulty of a task. He just wants to apprehend her, load her with the others, and be on his way. I feel him bite down on his urge to leap across the desk, snatch her and show her how helpless she is as she glares at him defiantly. Fury boils in my core. Try it, I want to say to him, but I bite down on my own impulse toward violence as I pop my knuckles at my sides. It is the only sound in the room, and it slices through the silence. He hears the sound and ignores it, moving to the split in the desk and pushing the hinged portion open to her. If he touches her, then I am going to kill him. He is sensing danger. He is judging the distance between all of us and scanning me for weapons with the corner of his eye, formatting a blueprint of easy apprehension with minimal expenditure of energy if I strike. Little does he know, if I decide to strike, there will be no warning, and he will fail.

  I have completed my reconstruction of plan B—and now, it is even shakier than before. Initially, I was going to use my mental abilities to project absence as I had on the day that I deleted the MEDOC’s merit contracts. I was going to use the computer system at this Authority office to manually turn Georgie’s light green and destroy the paperwork pertaining to her draft summons under an absence projection. But, the thoughts of the officials here have indicated that there are no means to do either of those things at this office. They can only turn implant lights red here, and the draft summons lists are stored in a database in Rapid Falls, which cannot be altered from this location. But, the gen’s presence here has changed plan B. I know that I had the ability to control T, and the gen before me is a replica of T—or rather, T was a replica of him. If I can get this gen out of here before anyone else sees us, maybe I can convince him to destroy the paper trail about Georgie’s status in Rapid Falls. We could travel to the training camp and do the same with another gen there, to have her green-lighted. I have read from his mind that they do have the ability to turn implant lights green at that location.

  First step: I need to somehow test my abilities against the gen before me. I need to know inconclusively how much control I have. I need to do it carefully and discretely. If it works, then I don’t want him to know. Not yet. Georgie reads the plan reconstruction from my mind and turns to assist me. She pulls me into a hug as if we are saying goodbye, and I peer over her shoulder at his hand, which rests at his side. I tighten my grip on his brain and softly flick the nerve that controls his pinky. Twitch. I have him. Smug relief spreads across Georgie’s face in a grin as she releases me. Confusion seeps into the
gen’s continence at the sudden shift in her mood, but I don’t give him time to try to interpret it or draw conclusions.

  “I’d like to speak with you,” I say in a commanding voice to the gen, “alone.” His immediate response is disbelief at my defiance, but the command in my voice sparks that instinct inside of him again. Submit, it says. He struggles against it.