Chapter 6 Not Dead
Not Dead
In the interest of familial stability, all female children shall remain within the proprietary care of their assigned paternal guardian until a lawful transfer through marriage is made.
After Theo debriefed me regarding my near capture at the Yorktown safe house the next morning, we stewed in a prolonged silence in his office. I picked at my cuticles while he stared frozen at his clasped hands on his desk, gripping so tight his knuckles had blanched.
“Do you think he meant it?” I asked after a time. “You know, if they waste you, they lose me.”
Theo’s dark eyes lifted. “I have no reason to believe he’s lying.”
I swallowed. “Right. I guess it just doesn’t make sense.”
“Do you feel as if I’m wasting you, Sophia?” he asked, his voice a mixture of military hardness and perverse curiosity.
You can’t waste something that’s useless, I almost replied.
“Your father wouldn’t have wanted this for you,” he said, quieter now, like the words hurt him to say.
My mind cast back to last fall when I sat in this very chair, having a very different conversation with Theo.
“It’s…your father,” Theo says, his expression anguished, his words hesitant.
Pain lances through my chest, sharp as a blade of diamond. The rest of my body goes numb.
Bang!
My chair hits the floor as I stand. “He promised he’d come back,” I say.
“I know, Sophia—”
“HE PROMISED HE’D COME BACK!”
Theo’s eyes grow suspiciously bright.
“You’re wrong,” I say and attack his desk, swiping up that abused sheet of paper lying before him, the one he’d been looking at when he hinted my father is dead.
He doesn’t stop me, so I blink down at the words, confused why I can’t read them, why everything is blurry.
Tears fall on the paper.
I sink down, down, down. My knees hit the floor first, then my hands, and then I crumple to my side, clutching the paper I can’t read through my tears, the letter that apparently confirms my father’s death.
“It’s a mistake,” I whisper. “This isn’t real. You’re lying.”
Theo rises from his chair to crouch beside me. “I’m going to bring your mother back, okay? As soon as I can.”
I try to focus on his blurry face, but instead I’m seeing my father’s smiling one, feeling his tight hugs. “Mom? She’s still alive?”
He swallows. “Yes, she’s alive and well.”
“H-how did he die?”
“I don’t know.”
Is that true? Would he lie to spare my sanity? Would I be able to handle it if my father was tortured to death?
I roll onto my back, and the fractured chandelier light dances in my vision, rainbows sparking in the crystals.
My heart is mutilated. Am I even human anymore?
“What can I do?” Theo asks.
Nothing. He can do nothing.
I wish I’d never met Theodore Harrison.
When I don’t speak, he continues, “I’m taking you out of the field, Sophia.”
Too numb to respond, I blink at the chandelier.
“Your squad will be dissolved, with the remaining members moved to another. I promised your father I’d keep you safe, and you’re too reckless for fieldwork. I will not let him down.”
“What will you do with me instead?”
He pauses to lower himself to the floor beside me. “You wanted to go to med school, didn’t you?”
I almost laugh at the absurdity of that, my silly desires from the life before. I’ve killed more people than I will ever save.
“We can train you in the hospital wing. You can be a medic.”
I say nothing.
His voice gentles. “You can save lives instead of…”
“No,” I said to Theo now, shaking myself of the memory. “You’re not wasting me.”
He scrutinized me, his mouth tight with displeasure. “I wish you hadn’t agreed to this assignment.”
“Williams clearly wanted me to do it.”
“Williams is desperate.”
I shrugged. “Aren’t we all?”
Somehow, his posture grew more rigid. “There are some things that should not be sacrificed.”
I smiled. Or I thought I smiled. Maybe I frowned. Or laughed. “Like me?”
A silence stretched before he said, “Yes.”
“I am no one,” I said. “And you know that, or you wouldn’t have even considered asking me.”
“She didn’t give me a choice,” he said, and I detected the faintest hint of defeat wafting from his very essence. He was so different now from what he’d been at the beginning. His impassioned words back then had given me hope.
“The Defiance is in its infancy,” he’d said, pacing the stage of the museum’s amphitheater, hundreds of eyes locked on him.
“But that doesn’t make us weak. We were not born to kneel.
You are here today, which means you remember a time when unity did not mean uniformity, when diversity did not divide us.
The time has come to dissolve ties to the NAO and the hate they represent, because we still hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.
You are entitled to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
You are standing when it would be easier to fall, fighting when it would be safer to stay silent.
You are our future. You will fight and sacrifice for what is right, what is just, what is yours. ”
My life had been nothing but fight and sacrifice since the moment those words left his mouth.
He’d been so passionate, and I believed him when he said this was a fight worth dying for.
But watching people die for a cause was easy.
Keeping them alive to fight for it was harder.
Theo’s zeal had faded long ago, sacrificed to the gods of war alongside his optimism, his morals, and me.
Finally, the silence between us reached a breaking point.
“Can I go?” I asked. He dipped his chin, and I excused myself in a hurry.
That night, sleep played hide-and-seek with me.
As soon as my mind drifted, my subconscious would throw out the image of Lucas Scott, swathed in Hunter black so dark he was like a void of nothing, his catlike steps carrying him closer to me in that gritty alleyway.
Half of me bathed in terror at that image. The other half sighed in relief.
I tossed to my other side, punching my pillow in hopes of comfort, trying not to think of the shrinking amount of time before I saw him again.
He’d killed people for me.
What was I supposed to do with that? How much risk had he undertaken, leaving his own soldiers dead in the street? What if he was caught, and I showed up at the Evanston house on Thursday only to find it empty?
I flopped onto my back and threw my arms over my face.
I didn’t want to return to his house, despite that he’d saved my life.
The idea of facing him now, knowing the last time he saw me I was fleeing into the night at his command, made my body break into a cold sweat.
I was alive thanks only to the mercy of a heartless killer.
Pondering why made my head hurt, and I writhed in the misery of curiosity and sleeplessness.
They hurt my sister.
Why was it so difficult for me to believe his motivation? If I had a sister, wouldn’t I be angry she’d been hurt? But would I betray the Defiance for a slight against her? Would I abandon my entire belief system for it?
No, there had to be another reason, and I would likely never learn it.
Finally, I drifted to sleep.
As Thursday drew closer, dread sank dirty claws into me. I assumed he’d lead us to the slaughter, and I’d never have to see him again, but instead, he’d saved hundreds of lives.
Including mine.
It should have made me happy, but it left no recourse to refuse my assignment, knowing the potential advantage he’d provide. What if he helped me find Tekqua? No justification existed to renege on our agreement, and I became a twisted, muddled wreck as Thursday arrived.
What did he want from us? From me? Why wouldn’t he just tell me?
Was it worse to wonder when he’d cash in, or for it to actually happen?
Hands shaking, I walked the mile to his meeting point, glancing over my shoulder every minute to find nothing but budding maple trees on abandoned neighborhood streets. When I reached the cement stairs to the front porch, I dragged my feet. The door wasn’t open, so I knocked.
No answer.
I turned the knob.
Locked.
Um…
Uncertain what to do, I tried the knob again. Funny enough, still locked.
Maybe I’d been right about his getting caught. Maybe the NAO had uncovered his duplicity and put him to death. Perhaps I’d never have to see him again. I stared at the locked door, calculating how long I needed to wait before I could consider him a no-show.
Was it utter villainy to hope another person was dead?
As I dithered, an icy presence slinked over my consciousness and hovered at my back. Fear wrapped around me like hands sliding over my waist, pulling me backward, leaning down to whisper in my ear.
“Do you routinely wait at locked doors out in the open where anyone could see you?”
I froze at his voice, as smooth and dark as it had been the night he’d saved me.
“I don’t make a habit of it, no,” I said through thickened vocal cords and the desire to vomit.
“So this display of idiocy is special for me then?”
I scowled at the door. My gaze dropped to the brass knob as his long-fingered hand entered my field of vision to insert the key into the lock. With a twist of his wrist, the door swung open. Teeth gritted, I stepped into the dark interior.
Once the door was shut, I spun to face him. He crossed the room to the coffee table and lit the single candle with a lighter he’d left lying beside it. “You have the reflexes of a sloth,” he said, all testy like this fact profoundly annoyed him. “You didn’t even hear me.”
I crossed my arms. “In my defense, you make no noise when you walk. I think you might be a ghost.”
He rolled his eyes. “You don’t flaunt yourself out in the open, looking like you do, waiting for someone to grab you.”
My attention snapped to his face. “Looking like I do?”
“You’re an attractive woman in the tightest pants I’ve ever seen. Do you have any idea what they’d do if they caught you?”