Subject Zero, page 20
“In exchange for sparing my life, we made a deal,” he explains, picking up where my mother left off, as if the silence is pressing him for his side of the story. “Per our agreement, Bilken would help me seek asylum with PHOENIX, and he coached me on what to do to gain Nolan’s trust. It wasn’t particularly hard. AWOL Enforcers make good little soldiers the Heads can shape to be cannon fodder for the cause. Once they’re sure we hold no loyalty to the State anymore, that is.”
Although his words should surprise me, they don’t. My most recent encounter with PHOENIX had all too clearly demonstrated how its priorities have shifted over the last few years. Instead of helpless, terrified refugees, the only members in that bunker were armed muscle for Nolan.
“I was with Nolan for nearly two months prior to your extraction, and in that time, I did everything I could to make myself invaluable to him,” Quinn says. “I ran his errands like a good little minion and force-fed him a story about how much I hated and feared you.” When I cock an eyebrow, he adds, “I needed to give him a good reason to let me be on the firing squad.”
“Oh, so, that’s why you were such an asshole to us,” Jenner scoffs.
Quinn’s responding glare is icy. “I couldn’t do anything that would make Nolan suspect my allegiance or put my mission at risk. I’m sorry if I hurt your feelings,” he spits, “but your opinion of me meant absolute shit.”
Snorting, Jenner stretches his arms out along the back of the sofa.
“What did you get out of this bargain, other than your life?” Ezra asks. “Surely, there was something more in it for you since you had to have known you couldn’t stay with PHOENIX.”
The ex-Enforcer crinkles his nose. “Nor did I want to. The plan was to ‘execute’ Wynter and then reconvene with Dr. Adler and Bilken at a safe place a mile southeast of the bunker’s location where we would all then escape the State together. You two”—he wags a finger, pointing between Ezra and Jenner—“were just excess baggage.”
“Excess baggage?” Jenner squawks at the same time I say, “Escape?”
Quinn ignores Jenner, locking eyes with me. “That’s what I was promised. The chance to begin again somewhere else. Somewhere far away from the State’s ideologies.”
“And this fresh start included you two?” I ask, once again peering at my mother and Bilken, who traces the shape of his well-manicured, close-cropped beard with his fingers.
“This country has gone to hell, and we were tired of playing both sides,” he admits. “Sometimes, power isn’t worth the struggle it takes to hold onto.”
His words take me aback, and a long moment passes as I once again try to align this version of Bilken—the man behind the mask—with the cold-hearted coward I assumed him to be.
He and my mother sit silent, waiting for me to speak. In the seconds that follow, I note the traces of exhaustion lining each of their faces. Faint purple smudges ring my mother’s eyes, and Bilken’s salt and pepper hair is beginning to look more gray than black. All that scheming must be catching up with them.
With a strangled breath, I sink back into the cushion. “Let’s say everything you’ve told us is true, and that everything you’ve done really has been to help me. Why goad me into attacking you? Why not just tell me the truth?”
Why make me hate you?
“Just another part of the plan, Miss Reeves. You and I were never going to be able to speak freely with Rodrick always watching you. There were cameras everywhere in that bunker. He and his soldiers were aware of every move you made, even when you thought they weren’t.” He cocks an eyebrow at Ezra and Jenner, and I know he means when they broke me out of my cell. “There was no opening to expose my plan to you, and frankly, the less you were aware of, the better. The way it played out was far more believable than if you or your friends had been in the know.” He pauses for a moment, and his lips part again on a sigh. “As for why I provoked you? Simple. It gave me the opportunity to plant a tracker on your person. That way, had you refused Mr. Stohler’s offer of refuge, which you did,” he grumbles, his eyes swinging to Quinn before returning to me, “your mother and I could have traced your location. Which ended up being a necessity given your…detour.”
Inside me, sparks of outrage threaten to burst into flame, and I glower at Bilken, once again repressing the urge to strangle him. He’s just like Richter, treating me like some possession that needs keeping track of.
I wince as a sharp pain stabs behind my eyes, the agony chipping away at my brain. This is all too much. I’m drained just trying to unweave this complicated web of endless lies and deception.
Shaking off my growing fatigue, I cut my gaze back to Quinn. “And the RF transmitter? If they were already tracking me, and if you had the means to contact them,”—I nod toward the communicator on his belt—“then what was the point of having that?”
“Because the DSD is the one place the trackers and communicators don’t work,” my mother says, answering for him. “That place is…was,” she corrects herself, “a fortress. It was constructed with materials designed to prevent anyone on the outside from accessing the sensitive intel and equipment stored inside, or from anyone already inside from transmitting to an exterior location. That included access to personnel movements.” Frustration leaches into her tone as she glances between Ezra and Jenner. “Why do you think PHOENIX never managed to hack the DSD’s systems? Because it can only be done from within the building. Sure, we were able to track you to the DSD’s doors, but beyond that, we were blind to your location. The RF transmitter Quinn used had a short range and only targeted alarms—and, in turn, the locking mechanisms—in the immediate area.” Her gaze flicks back to mine, and her expression softens. “That’s how I was able to find you so quickly. I was already there, I just needed to know where to look.”
I blink, stupefied into silence. They really did think of everything—covered every possible angle and outcome.
And yet, there’s still one thing I don’t understand.
“If the plan was to escape the State, then why help us get back into the Heart?” I ask Quinn.
He cocks a dark brow at me and snorts. “That ticket out was entirely dependent on delivering you to Dr. Adler. You insisted on going back into the Heart. Would I have been able to stop you?”
He’s right. We would’ve just gone on without him if he hadn’t agreed to come with us, and he couldn’t exactly tell us the truth. I had just tried to kill Bilken with my bare hands and I never would’ve believed my mother was working for the DSD, let alone serving as the acting Head of Termination. Not that it would have mattered if he had. Rai was still our priority.
To uphold his end of the bargain he made with my mother, Quinn had no choice but to return to the one place he was so desperate to leave, to accompany me for as long as it took to fulfill his mission, all in the vain hope that the path to escape would still be there at the end of it.
“What’s done is done,” my mother says brusquely. “The decision was made and now, we have to work with the hand we’ve been dealt if we are to get out of this city alive.”
“And your plan is…what?” Jenner prompts. “Because I’m assuming you have one.”
Sitting forward, Bilken props his elbows on his knees and steeples his hands, touching his fingertips to his lips in contemplation. “You forget, Evelyn and I are not from here, and my position has allowed me a certain degree of, shall we say, freedom and accessibility not afforded to others? All that to say, I have made valuable friends and connections abroad over the years. Connections, who would be willing to harbor fugitives and aid their escape from”—he shrugs, gesturing vaguely with one hand—”an oppressive regime that’s currently under attack?”
Surprise ripples through me. “You have a way to contact people outside the Heart?”
He might’ve provided PHOENIX with the instructions to set up a secure contact channel between them that night at the magistrates building—even if it wasn’t entirely necessary, based on what he’s since revealed about stoking the flames of Nolan’s delusions—but that communication line was still within the boundaries of the State. Whereas, what he’s talking about now… He’s implying that he’s had access to the outside world this whole time—that he’s always had the option of freedom, while those of us trapped inside the Heart’s borders didn’t.
Just how far can one man’s reach extend?
“My dear, when you work at the center of something, you familiarize yourself with its loopholes and flaws. You learn to play those weaknesses to your advantage. Take the DSD, for example. These connections of mine wanted to eliminate the threat before it came to them, so I gave them what they wanted—the beating heart at the foundation of the State’s war.”
As Bilken’s eyes hold mine, it sinks in what he’s saying. He doesn’t just mean the DSD. He means Richter’s research and the weapon it created that allowed the State to pursue such ruthless endeavors. And now, with this attack, his connections think they’ve destroyed the threat.
They think they’ve destroyed me.
Fear is a hand tightening around my windpipe. What will happen when they realize they didn’t?
“And my reward for orchestrating an end to the State was a one-way ticket for us out of the Heart,” Bilken says, but I barely hear his words past the terror soaking into my thoughts.
“The inside man… It wasn’t Adler, it was you,” Jenner accuses, sitting upright, his arms slipping down onto the cushions beside him. His tone holds neither question nor surprise. He’s simply voicing what I think we all suspected from the moment we arrived at this safe house.
I glance at Quinn, who—given his part in this conspiracy—must have been aware of Bilken’s role in the attack despite claiming otherwise. Our conversation outside the DSD replays in my thoughts and, again, I hear Ezra and Jenner theorizing that someone might be working with the enemy from within the State as a double agent. At the time, although he was the one who brought it up, Quinn had shrugged the notion off as a mere possibility rather than a fact.
Can’t say for sure, huh?
Bilken lets loose a rough laugh. “Did you not wonder how I would continue to make myself useful to PHOENIX after fleeing the State? I know you did,” he adds, nodding at me. “I’m not a fool. I know Rodrick would have disposed of me the moment I was no longer working for him from the inside. That was the only worth I held for him. So, I gave him his tool to take on the State and then outlaid what he had to do to use it. It wasn’t enough having the DSD’s weapon at his disposal. He knew as well as I did you weren’t going to attack your own home—”
“But that didn’t mean someone else wouldn’t,” Ezra mutters behind me.
Bilken nods. “The plan, at least as far as Rodrick was concerned, was for me to tip off the ‘enemy.’ To give them a reason to strike the Heart, offering a potential end to our global conflict by means of an attack, which would provide PHOENIX with the opportunity to broker peace and establish themselves as the new governing power. Once peace was publicly made, military support from outside would sweep through the Heart, allowing the rebellion to supplant the State. I simply made the introduction between him and these friends, at which point, they stated their terms and Rodrick agreed.”
“PHOENIX planned this?” Disgust roils in my gut. Now, I know why Nolan was so willing to let millions of people in the Heart suffer. He isn’t just some power-hungry opportunist seizing an opening. He created the opening with Bilken’s help.
He brought this chaos to our doorstep.
Bilken frowns. “Believe it or not, this conflict was inevitable. Had you remained Richter’s puppet and continued forging a path of death across the globe, someone would’ve retaliated—”
“They wouldn’t have succeeded,” I cut in, but Bilken is already shaking his head.
“They would have found a way,” he insists, “just like I found a way to take down your transport helicopter. As for PHOENIX… Well, like Rodrick, many were tired of withering away in the shadows. They would’ve come to a head with the State at some point.”
“Not like this,” Jenner whispers, his head jerking side to side in disbelief like the sway of a pendulum.
The weight of Ezra’s hand disappears from my shoulder, and he steps around the sofa until he’s standing beside me. “All this, a war with millions of lives sacrificed, just to get Wynter back for her mother?” Shock distorts his voice, and his face is unnervingly white, painted pale with the same revulsion I feel ripping a hole in my chest.
As he meets my gaze, I know I made the right choice in acting on his mother’s words and asking him to kill me. Ezra would never risk so many lives to save mine. He would choose right. He will choose right.
And the right choice isn’t me.
“And to secure our escape from the State, although that wasn’t the only reason,” my mother protests. “You saw for yourselves what Richter was hiding in the DSD. He was attempting to create an army, and I think we all know he would have succeeded eventually. Then, it wouldn’t have mattered where we went. We wouldn’t have been safe anywhere. That was all the incentive we needed to intervene, casualties be damned.”
The mention of the bodies in the sublevel of the DSD churns the minimal contents of my stomach. I wish I could bleach my eyes and scrub the memory of that room from my brain.
The memory of what I am indirectly responsible for.
The memory of what Richter was trying to create with my blood.
A dour laugh presses at the wall of my lips, breaking through. “Let me guess, that was the price for their help. That all the weapons of the State be destroyed.”
“The price,” my mother clarifies, “was that PHOENIX provide the coordinates to the source of the weapons, where they were being created and stored. But when the blast didn’t wipe out the full scope of the DSD as intended, I knew I had to finish the job myself or else risk them reneging on their side of the arrangement where our escape was concerned. And…” She hesitates, wringing her hands in her lap again. “So no one else would ever have to go through what you have. So no one else could continue what Richter had started.”
I brush off her forced attempt at reconciliation as a blanket of calm settles over my senses, extinguishing my simmering rage. I’ve heard enough. I understand why my mother and Bilken did what they did, but their actions change nothing. They offer no way to put an end to this war—only the offer to run away from it like a coward.
But there can be no running away, not for me. Not for any of us.
Not if the future plays out as I know all too well it will.
Slowly, I rise from the sofa, taking a few calculated steps back toward the bedroom before pausing, glancing over my shoulder.
“Everything you did was in vain. The collar is broken—there’s no way to control this disease. And you do realize these ‘friends’ will never let me go once they realize what I am, right? They’ll want me dead, just like everyone else with Ultraxenopia.”
“We won’t let that happen,” my mother assures me. “Wren already drafted a new identity for you just in case they learned your name. No one needs to know who you really are or that you’re sick. We have options.” As if to prove her point, she pulls the remains of my busted collar from her coat pocket, setting it on the marble table before her. Hand shaking, she gestures to it and says, “Once we’re out, I’ll find a way to fix it. To cure you myself. We have time—”
Even if I believed her—which I don’t since there can be no hiding the severity of my illness or fixing a device none of us knows the first thing about, not in the time I actually have—it doesn’t change the fact that she would willingly leave everyone else in this city to a fate they don’t deserve. What’s to stop her from doing the same to Ezra or Jenner if it came down to protecting them or me?
I won’t risk it.
“Except, we don’t. Because I’m not leaving the Heart. My time is almost up. I’ll die in this city.” Turning fully, I fix a cold glare on my mother. “And if you keep trying to ‘help’ me, you’ll die, too.”
You all will.
Cold water strikes my face, an icy deluge that brings relief for all of five seconds before the nausea rolls through me again. My tongue darts out across my chapped lower lip, and I swallow, pushing down the bile burning the inside of my throat as I raise my gaze to the mirror. Gripping the sides of the polished stone basin, I grimace at the gaunt face staring back at me. Whatever healthy color I had to my skin has faded, resulting in my chalky complexion, and shadows mark the edges of my now protruding cheekbones, the skin around my eye sockets mottled with blistering shades of purple and black. Even my eyes seem to have lost some of their vigor and hue, the irises dull, taking on tones of gray.
I splash water on my face again before peering down into the sink.
“It really is trying to make up for lost time,” I mutter, biting back an unhinged chuckle, which quickly fades into a sob. I clamp a hand over my mouth to keep quiet.
This disease really is determined to kill me.
Pain slashes through my skull as if in response to that thought, and I cry out as a searing flash of light explodes behind my eyes, blinding me. The room spins, my surroundings blurring, and my knees buckle, dragging me down to the floor.
As my fingertips graze the tile, searching for a way through the sudden fog obscuring my vision, a voice calls out from the distance, calm and collected.
And, above all, familiar.
I glance in the direction it’s coming from, unsurprised when the light fades and I find I’m no longer on the floor in the washroom in Bilken’s safe house but in the magistrates building in Zone 1. Standing, as if this disease isn’t killing me.
I recognize the office I’m in, and my chest tightens as I peer down at the carpet, the fibers bleached white, erasing the evidence that it was once soaked with the blood of at least a dozen Enforcers. Erasing that Rai was shot in this room.
