These were easy words to say to myself. Not so easy to put into practice.
Since it was a long flight, the hunters preoccupied themselves with watching movies, though they continuously kept an eye on me by glancing in my direction. I lowered my own personal screen and put on headphones. I chose the first movie that was on the list, and though I stared at the screen and turned the volume up, I wasn’t actually listening. But the noise was good. The noise was distracting.
I practically forgot about the fact that I was due to turn back into myself until it actually started happening toward the end of the last hour of the journey. An overwhelming tingling sensation spread all over my body. The three guards stood up and stared at me as I transformed back into a girl. Jude’s clothes felt loose around me, especially the pants. I had to tighten the belt to stop them from slipping. I shook away the spectacles.
“Well, well, well,” the tallest guard said. “Now we finally see you… How old are you?”
I scowled, unwilling to answer any of their questions unless my life was at stake.
Soon the helicopter started descending. I gazed out of the window but couldn’t see anything. The sky was thick with cloud coverage, and rain splattered against the glass. The chopper rocked a little from a harsh wind. I shuddered just looking at how miserable the weather was outside. I didn’t spot the ground until we were about thirty feet away. And then we landed.
Once the doors had opened and the ramp extended, I was removed from my seat. The hunters replaced my handcuffs and then dragged me out of the aircraft. Rain, wind and cold engulfed us as we hurried across the large concrete landing strip. We were heading toward a familiar, brown building. One of the many signature oblong constructions that lined the landing strip.
The hunters led me along a myriad of corridors, through rooms and up elevators, until we arrived in yet another familiar-looking place. It was another interrogation room, with the same tinted glass wall and stark furnishings. Except this one, in addition to the glass, had one of its walls occupied by a wide flat screen. Something told me that it was not a television.
I couldn’t help but wonder for the hundredth time, Why have they brought me here? If they wanted to punish me, they could have just done it back in Hawaii. Why go to the trouble of bringing me all the way here?
I was placed in a chair at one end of the bare table and told to wait. The three familiar guards left the room, leaving me with four, wholly unfamiliar ones. The nearest man to me, a guy who was on the shorter side, though with an equally stocky build as the others, smelled unpleasantly of cigarette smoke.
I was half tempted to strike up a conversation with them, but what would be the point? I didn’t have enough hope left in me by now to think that they were going to give me any answers.
Then another hunter entered the room—a woman, this time. She had auburn hair cropped in a pixie cut, and she wore a stiff black suit. She had no badge.
She eyed me coldly before taking a seat at the opposite end of the table. She locked her fingers together, pressing her thumbs against each other. She didn’t even bother to introduce herself. Instead she launched right into business. “So you discovered a thumb drive containing a few dozen files,” she said. Her accent was American, but with a hint of Russian. “Files which you believe are related to FOEBA.”
News of that thumb drive sure had spread fast through the IBSI’s organization. I guessed that Jude had managed to make a copy of the folder and all its files after all, even if most of the files were broken. This woman, and probably also Mr. Munston, had read that cryptic note by Georgina. Only they should not know it was written by her. Not unless they had known her and were intimately acquainted with the details of her death—then possibly the date would ring a bell, along with the other events she alluded to.
My brain ramblings were interrupted as she went on, “Since you have arrived earlier than expected, I’m going to start by asking you some questions in advance of your meeting with the chairman.”
I stared at her, blinking. “The IBSI Chicago’s chairman?”
“There is only one chairman,” she replied. “The chairman for the entire IBSI.”
The IBSI has a chairman. Throughout the time I’d spent learning about the IBSI, which was part of preparation for new recruits joining the League, I’d never once learned that a chairman or organization head existed—or even a founder, for that matter. I just thought of the organization as run by a board of people, without any particular person at the top. This was certainly how they portrayed themselves to the outside world—I must have read hundreds of newspaper clippings relating to the IBSI over the years, and not a single one had mentioned a boss. Nobody in The Shade could have known this, either.
I guessed that I should not have been so surprised though. The IBSI was hardly known for transparent practices. They were a highly secretive organization, and any information they released to the press was always a refined, watered-down version of the actual truth—always twisted in some way to make them seem like heroes.
“I do recommend that you give me some answers. It might make the meeting run faster,” the woman went on. “Which is in your best interest,” she added. “The chairman has little tolerance for people like you, for reasons I’m sure you can understand.”
People like me. I smiled sourly at her. I was feeling so worn down by now after the long flight, and all the trauma that I had endured in the past twelve hours, that I felt a surge of recklessness. I was tired of feeling afraid. Of wondering what these people had in store for me next. But I realized that more than anything, I was curious to meet the chairman. Probably out of morbid curiosity. What kind of bastard was in charge of this horror of an organization? I wondered whether it was a man or a woman. Young or old. What was this person’s background?
More curiously, what had I done to warrant a meeting with such an important person? It only brought me back to the same conclusion: whatever on earth FOEBA stood for, it really was a raw nerve for them.
As the redhead in front of me asked her first question—“Where did you find that thumb drive?”—I kept my lips firmly sealed.
She repeated her question several times before moving on to another. “Do you have any idea where the other drive, or drives, are?”
At this I couldn’t help but ask, “What do you mean?”
“I’m sure that you read the note contained within the only readable file,” she replied. “It stated ‘backups were left safely’. Backups, in the plural,” she emphasized.
Oh, my God. I had barely paid any thought to that until now. I guessed I’d just assumed by “backups”, Georgina had meant “backups” of the multiple files themselves, not whole other drives… but this hunter’s interpretation of her wording was extremely interesting. And it made total sense. The files were obviously very important to Georgina. Where else might she have hidden copies? I realized I was now asking myself the exact same question the hunter had just asked me.
I re-zipped my lips.
Apparently understanding that she would be wasting her time by asking me again, she breathed in through her nose and blew out slowly.
“Well, if this is how you want to play it…” She stood up and nodded to the guards. I expected them to approach me, grab my arms, and lead me out of the interrogation chamber to whatever room the chairman was situated in. But they didn’t. Instead, they moved to the wall behind me and switched off the lights before exiting.
The woman remained. She reached for a remote that lay on a thin ledge beneath the large flatscreen. She pressed one of the buttons, and the screen flickered on.
As a face materialized on the screen, amidst the backdrop of a dim office filled with rosewood furniture, a gasp escaped my lips.
It was the face of a man, and although it was half cast in shadow, it took me less than a second to recognize him.
Triangular jawline. Dusty blond hair. Icy blue irises.
Atticus.
Atticus Conway.
They
didn’t bring me to Chicago to see Lawrence.
They brought me to see his father.
Grace
“You!” I breathed. “You liar!”
Atticus gazed back at me through the screen, unamused.
I felt bowled over by the sheer deceit of this man. All the implications that came with it began crashing down on me.
He’d sworn to us that he wasn’t a hunter. He’d lied, just like he had lied about his wife.
As the chairman, he would have known full well about the experiments that were being carried out on his son. Yet he had let it go on. Had Lawrence been forced into it after all?
Why had Georgina been so afraid of Atticus?
The female hunter standing next to me cleared her throat. “Sir, in the spare time we had before our appointment, I did start by attempting to ask some questions, hoping that you would have some answers to work from… but she refused to cooperate. I doubt she will answer any of your questions either. So it’s your call what you want to do with her now.”
Atticus leaned back in his dark brown, high-backed chair and folded his hands together, resting them over his desk.
“So she refused to clarify where she found the thumb drive?” he asked in a deep, disconcertingly quiet voice.
“That’s correct,” the woman said.
“And she also refused to answer whether or not she is aware of other drives?” he went on.
“Yes, sir,” the huntress replied.
He reached for a pen and twirled it thoughtfully between his fingers. Then he leaned forward, casually, in his own time, and looked at me directly. The screen was large and crisp, causing his shadowed face to look frightening and intimidating as it filled an entire wall.
“Since you are unwilling to answer my questions,” Atticus said, “perhaps you have a question of your own to ask me.”
Huh? I was taken aback by his words. Why would he say that?
Surprise even registered in the huntress’ eyes.
One would have thought that, after everything I’d just been through, the first question that would have flown from my lips would be, What the hell is FOEBA?
But it wasn’t. “Where is Lawrence?” spilled out before I could even think.
“Ah, Lawrence,” Atticus said, smiling slightly. “He is with us here, in Chicago. Now that we have full access to him again, he is back on course with his treatment and has fully recovered. He is doing well. Very well.”
I narrowed my eyes on him disbelievingly before firing my next question. “What is FOEBA?”
Atticus shook his head. “I granted you the courtesy of answering a single question. Now I’ve done that, I think the least you can do is respond to one of mine.”
I saw where this game was going. An answer for an answer… even if his answers were nothing but a pack of lies.
“Okay,” I said, swallowing. I could lie, too.
Almost as soon as I’d had the thought, his eyes turned to the huntress. “Hook her up,” he ordered.
Oh, crap.
I’d already guessed what he meant by that long before the huntress exited the room and returned with a familiar rectangular-shaped machine. Another lie detector.
But this wasn’t fair play. He could detect when I was lying about something, but he had no lie detector strapped to himself. He could feed me a cartload of lies, and I would have no way of knowing… other than the fact that his lips were moving.
No. This was a game I quickly realized I could not enter. That I would not enter. Given that the guards had left the room and I was alone with this woman, I felt a sudden surge of confidence, however misguided it was.
All I knew was that I could not let her strap me in to be interrogated. If I started going down that road and refused to answer, I was sure that it was simply a matter of time before they resorted to brute force to extract answers out of me. I knew exactly the kind of man Atticus was, based on the monster of an organization he was maintaining. I wouldn’t be able to get away with not answering to the chief like I had been able to with the more lowly hunters. He wouldn’t hesitate to sear holes through my bones if that was what it took.
As the woman set the machine down on the table and moved to begin wiring me up, I shot up from my seat and sent my right leg hurtling in the direction of her groin. As my knee met its mark, she groaned and went staggering back.
“Security!” Atticus roared through the screen.
It looked like he had pressed some sort of button, and the next thing I knew, the door to the interrogation room burst open. The four guards piled inside.
I didn’t manage to even make it near the exit before I found myself cornered by the men. Trapped.
They closed in on me. Being handcuffed, there was an extremely limited number of things that I could do to defend myself. I had only my legs, which I used to the best of my ability. But then one of the hunters—the shortest one, who carried the unpleasant odor of cigarette smoke—launched right at my knees and floored me. His muscular physique made him heavy, and as he crawled over me, pressing my head against the floor and keeping his entire weight on top of me, it was a struggle to breathe.
My hands still tied, I felt the belt of his pants scrape painfully against my knuckles. I struggled to move them out of the way—further to the right, to avoid direct contact with the harsh metal. As I slid them aside, they brushed against a small object beneath the fabric of the hunter’s right pocket. It felt hard, like plastic…
The man’s face was situated just by my left ear, and when he opened his mouth to instruct his colleagues to fetch a sedative, his smoky odor intensified.
Smoke.
There’s no smoke without fire…
The small object in his pocket was a lighter. I was sure of it. It felt like just the right size.
The door opened and footsteps rushed out. From the angle I was being pinned down at, I couldn’t make out who exactly had just left the room. But my focus was fixed on the object. I inched my hands further to the edge of his hips as discreetly as I could, while I made grunting sounds in hopes of distracting him. Once I sensed the opening of his pocket, I wrapped my fingers around its entrance and coaxed out the lighter. In the struggle, the lighter had moved quite close to the exit of the pocket. It came out with little effort.
By the time the hunter had realized what I was doing, I had already pressed down on the flint wheel. The smallest spark was all that I needed. As soon as I felt the heat against my fingers, I brewed it up into a blaze. The hunters yelped and jolted off me, even as I continued to stoke the flames. Having my hands handcuffed was a most unfortunate position, but I just had to work with what I had. I made the fire billow in front of me and form a barrier as tall and thick as me. This interrogation room was only small. When I directed the flames toward the hunters, they darted for the exit. I hurried after them in a panic. I couldn’t let them lock me in.
The room was quickly clogging with smoke, but I could see them running in front of me. They slipped out of the door, but before the last guard could disappear, I threw myself against him. We both went tumbling to the floor a couple of feet before the doorway. I managed to scramble up in front of the door before him, having fallen closer to it. I slammed it shut before he could push me aside and leap out, turning my hands so that my palms faced him.
Still manipulating the fire, I made it die down just a little as I spoke to him with as harsh a voice as I could manage. “Remove my handcuffs!”
When he didn’t reply but only backed further into a corner, I unleashed more fire. I didn’t mean to burn him—at least not yet. I needed him to get desperate enough to obey my command.
“Remove them!” I urged again.
A deafening siren filled the room. Water sprinklers burst into life in the ceiling. I swore beneath my breath. Damn fire alarm. I couldn’t let the fire die out. I didn’t know what had happened to the lighter now. I must have dropped it somewhere.
I had to concentrate harder to keep the fire going, aggravati
ng it, even against the gushing of water. I had to keep the fire thick and overwhelming. I couldn’t have him shooting at me… though I was sure that he could have already done so. Perhaps he had a reason for holding back.
Watching me make the flames surge in spite of the water seemed to strike more fear in the hunter’s heart, for he finally replied, “I don’t have any key!”
Footsteps pounded outside. More hunters were arriving. Then the door burst open. It slammed into the backs of my heels, practically knocking me from my feet.
I dropped to the floor, keeping my head down low. If I was going to escape this room, I had only a second to do it—just before they started piling in. I threw myself into the first pair of legs venturing forward. The unexpected force of my skull crashing into the person’s knees caused them to trip, allowing me a narrow gap through which to push out and escape the room. There was no water falling from the ceiling in this corridor, and the fire I was wielding quickly grew again. I forced my way through a sea of legs—which wasn’t too difficult considering they hurried to leap away from the flames—and broke free from the crowd. Footsteps thundered after me as I launched toward the nearest set of elevators. I managed to keep them at a far enough distance to reach the elevators and hurry inside of one. I spurted fire until the doors snapped shut before relinquishing it to just a small ball within my palms. Having left the lighter behind, I had to maintain the spark. I pressed the button for the ground floor with the tip of my nose and held my breath as I descended.
Come on. Come on. Level seven, six, five, four, three, two… and just as I sensed that I was about half a floor away from the ground level, the elevator shuddered to a stop.
My heart palpitating, I swore beneath my breath. Crap! They’d disabled the elevators. I hurriedly traced the gap between the elevator doors with the fingers on one hand. I curved my fingers into the gap and managed to get a small grip. I pulled roughly to the left. The doors budged only slightly, but at least this gave me hope that they were moveable. I pulled again and again, each time causing the crack to get a little larger, until finally I’d managed to dislodge the left door and force it open. One door was more than enough for me to slide through. I poked my head out to find myself just slightly below the ceiling of the ground floor, where there was a second pair of doors. I slid my legs out until they dangled over the edge. Wedging the ridge of my shoe’s heel into the crack, I managed to coax them open too—enough for me to slide through. Jumping from such a height with my hands handcuffed and juggling fire made me feel petrified. But the fear of the hunters catching me was far greater.