Resistance

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

The constant flow of adrenaline through her veins made Nadia want to run as fast as she could, but her best chance of escape was to move slowly and cautiously. She tiptoed down the dormitory hall and used Lily’s key card to unlock the hall door. The door made a soft beep when it approved the key card, and Nadia winced. But though this place felt like a prison to her, it wasn’t one. There were no guards posted to keep the inmates locked in, no one to come running to investigate the unexpected sound.

Nadia cast a wary eye on the security cameras as she slipped out the door. She had to assume that Lily had disabled them so as not to catch the planned murder on them, but how many of the cameras had she disabled? All of them? Or just the ones that might have caught her doing something incriminating? If any of the cameras were active, Nadia’s escape attempt would end before it truly began.

Closing the door behind her as softly as possible, Nadia cautiously stepped out of the dormitory hall and went for the main staircase. She had to pass through another security door to get there, but Lily’s key card once again did the trick.

The main staircase and the lobby it led to were both dark, only a few dim night-lights offering any illumination at all. That was a good sign, Nadia decided. It meant the staff of the night shift didn’t frequent this area. Nadia suspected they used a service stairway to gain access to the second floor, where the dormitory was located.

Creeping forward, listening for any sign that she was not alone, she headed toward the office, where she could use the phone to call for help. She hated to put anyone else in danger, but escaping the Sanctuary penniless, on foot, and in uniform wouldn’t do her a whole lot of good. She held her breath as she passed a door with a discreet placard declaring it to be the security center, but, though she heard voices, no one leapt out at her.

Like just about everything else in this damn place, the office was locked, with entry allowed by key card only. Nadia put her ear to the door, trying to guess whether anyone was inside. She didn’t hear anything, and the longer she lurked in the lighted hallway, the more likely someone was going to happen along, so she quickly ran her key card through the reader and pushed the door open, canister held out in front of her like a gun.

She needn’t have bothered. The room was dark and empty. She let out a sigh of relief as she closed the door behind her. She leaned her back against it and closed her eyes, trying to calm the frantic beating of her heart and take a deep breath. She still had a long, long way to go before she was out of here. There was no time to indulge in relief or search for calm.

Nadia plucked the nearest phone from its cradle, glad that she’d had the foresight to memorize the number for Dante’s secure phone instead of depending on the address book in the phone he’d given her. A quick check of the time showed her that it was past 2:30 A.M., and she hoped and prayed that Dante was a light sleeper and would hear his phone ringing.

Her knees went a little weak when he answered on the second ring, and she had to sit down on the edge of the desk to stay upright.

“Nadia?” he asked, sounding not at all like someone who’d just been woken up at 2:30 in the morning. “Is that you?”

“Yeah,” she said. There was a quaver in her voice, and the hand that held the phone was shaking slightly in delayed reaction. But she was still in dire trouble, so she ordered herself to delay the reaction even longer. It didn’t stop her hands from shaking.

“I’m in trouble,” she said. “I need help.”

“What’s happened?”

“Someone just tried to kill me.” Her voice was shaking more now instead of less. She had to get ahold of herself. “I’m fine, but I have to get out of here before they try again. I didn’t know who else to call.” And she didn’t know what she was hoping Dante could do for her. He was at least a four-hour drive away. It wasn’t like she could afford to wait for him before making her move.

And that was when her mind finally processed the fact that there was noise in the background on Dante’s end of the line, noise that didn’t sound like it belonged in a bedroom.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“About fifteen minutes out from the Sanctuary. Hold on and I’m going to put you on speaker. I’ve got Nate and Ag— Miss Belinski with me.”

Nadia was glad she’d already sat down or she might have collapsed in shock. “What?”

The background noise became louder and tinnier. “We’re coming for you, Nadia,” Nate’s voice said.

It should have been good news. They were only fifteen minutes away instead of four hours, and that greatly increased her chances of escaping. But they wouldn’t be coming for her in the middle of the night unless something gave them reason to fear for her life. The dreadful suspicion she’d been trying to hold off crashed through her mental barriers.

“Has something happened to Gerri?” she asked, willing them to tell her no.

There was a silence in the car, and she imagined them looking at each other, each waiting for someone else to answer. It was Dante who finally did.

“Her car went off the bridge into the East River.”

Pain stabbed through Nadia’s heart. “No,” she moaned, pressing her free hand against her sternum as if that would somehow ease the pain. It didn’t.

“I’m so sorry,” Dante said softly.

Nadia wished he were here with her, wished she could throw herself into his arms and sob until her eyes could produce no more tears. But she didn’t have time to lose herself in grief. Not here, not now.

There was a mother lode of anger beneath the grief. Anger at her parents for not letting her talk to Gerri. Anger at the retreat staff for taking her phone away. Anger at herself for not having told Gerri the truth in the first place. But most of all, anger at the Chairman, who had ordered both her death and Gerri’s. Nadia tapped into that well of fury to hold the grief at bay.

“Are you all right?” Nate asked, though he had to know the answer was no. “It’s not a coincidence that you’re calling right now, is it?”

Nadia remembered she hadn’t been on the speaker yet when she’d told Dante what had happened. She hoped Nate would take the news as calmly as Dante had.

“Don’t get hysterical,” she answered. “I promise you I’m fine, not a scratch on me. But someone just tried to kill me.”

“We don’t have time for you to freak out,” Dante said, and Nadia presumed he was talking to Nate based on the sharpness of his voice.

“I’m not freaking out, and I’m not getting hysterical!” Nate snapped. “I’m just so pissed off I want to punch someone. Maybe it doesn’t bother you that someone just tried to kill Nadia, but it definitely bothers me.”

“Don’t start, guys,” Nadia said, wondering how the two of them had managed to survive a four-hour car ride together. And what had Dante said about Agnes being with them? She’d have asked about it, except she didn’t think they had the time to waste. She’d get them to fill in the many details she was missing when she got out of here.

“We, uh, still haven’t exactly figured out how we’re going to get you out,” Dante said. Nadia was glad he wasn’t rising to Nate’s bait and was keeping focused on the problem at hand.

Nadia chewed on her lip. There was no way she was getting out the front entrance, not with the little guard station they had there. She doubted even the Chairman Heir had the authority to order them to let her go—only her parents or the Chairman himself could do that. The fence was electrified, so there would be no fence-climbing as there had been at Tranquility—even if Nadia thought she had the upper body strength required to get over a fence.

“The watchtowers,” she murmured under her breath, visualizing the retreat’s grounds with the towers set into the fence. The towers themselves wouldn’t be electrified, and Nadia doubted there was more than one guard manning each one.

“Huh?” Dante asked.

“They’re the weak spot,” she explained. “I can get over the fence by jumping from a watchtower.”

“Umm, aren’t there people in those watchtowers?” Nate asked.

“My guess is that there’s a single guard in each,” Nadia said, reaching into her pocket and fingering the canister of knockout gas. “I’ve got some handy supplies thanks to the people who tried to kill me, so I ought to be able to get into one of the towers and subdue the guard. Then I’ll just have to jump down and hope I don’t break my legs.” She hadn’t ever gotten an up-close view of the towers and wasn’t sure how high they were, but out with broken legs would be better than inside in one piece.

“Meet me at the second tower from the right of the entrance, and make sure no one sees the car driving up.”

There was a silence on the other end of the line. Despite everything, Nadia couldn’t help smiling just a little, imagining the looks on their faces when they heard her, a sixteen-year-old gently bred Executive girl, claiming she was going to take out an armed guard all on her own.

“It won’t be as hard as you think,” she assured them. “I’ve got a key card and some knockout gas. And these aren’t prison guards braced for trouble. I doubt any of them has seen any action ever, so they won’t be prepared to deal with me.”

Still silence.

“Unless you have a better idea…?”

Someone—or maybe multiple someones—let out a heavy, frustrated sigh that she took for a no.

“All right, then. I’ll see you in a few minutes.” She crossed the fingers of her free hand, knowing there were about a thousand things that could go wrong, no matter how easy she had made her escape plan sound.

“Be careful,” Dante said, as if there were any doubt that she would.

“You too. And thanks for coming for me.” Her throat tightened with grateful tears, but as with everything else, she didn’t have time for them right now.

Bracing herself for another plunge into danger, she hung up the phone.

Nadia exited the building onto the back porch where people had gathered for the funeral. Unlike at Tranquility, there were no discreet little lights marking the edges of the walking paths here. During the day, there was a clear view from the porch straight to the fence, though it was at least a quarter mile away. At this time of night, however, there was nothing but an intimidating pool of darkness out there. The fence itself and the watchtowers were well lighted, but getting there would require a nerve-jangling run in the dark.

There was no sign of the moon or the stars, which Nadia took to mean it was overcast. The air had a wintry bite to it, and she could see her breath steaming. Spring took its own sweet time to visit upstate, and Nadia shivered with a combination of cold and nerves as she took off across the lawns. The overcast sky would work to her advantage, she told herself even as she stumbled over the decorative rock edging of one of the paths. It might make for a stubbed toe here and there, but it was far less likely anyone would see her as she ran toward the tower.

Nadia forced herself to slow down when she approached the band of light that stretched out from the watchtower. She stood still under the protection of the darkness and took stock of the situation.

The tower was narrow and circular, a utilitarian concrete cylinder with a glass-enclosed control room at the top. As she’d expected, there was a single guard stationed in the control room, sitting on a tall stool and facing out over the fence. But he wasn’t actually looking out, or even looking at the feed from the security cameras on the various screens built into the console; his attention focused instead on something he held in his lap. From his jerky, urgent movements and the occasional flashes of colored light, Nadia guessed he was playing some kind of game on his handheld.

He was exactly as alert as Nadia had hoped he would be. She watched for a minute or two and saw that he spared the console a brief glance every once in a while. Nadia couldn’t see the images on the console, but she was pretty sure the cameras were pointing outward, designed to find people trying to sneak close enough to get forbidden photographs of the Executive residents.

Getting her key card and the canister of knockout gas ready, Nadia sprinted toward the tower, her whole body tense with nerves when she stepped into the light. She half expected lights to start flashing and sirens to start blaring, but nothing happened, and the only thing she could hear over the pounding of her heart was the thump of her feet hitting the turf.

She made it to the base of the tower without being seen. Sure enough, there was a card reader at the base of the tower by the door. Nadia cursed in a way that would make her mother cringe when she tried Lily’s card and it didn’t work. Apparently, the security crew had their own access cards.

So much for that plan.

But Nadia had to get into the tower. It was her only hope of escape, and she was painfully aware of every agonizingly slow second that passed by. Surely Lily and Athena were awake by now, probably had been for a while, and were making noise in an effort to attract attention. Though come to think of it, they’d be pretty hard-pressed to come up with an explanation for what had happened, so maybe they weren’t in such a great hurry to raise the alarm after all.

Reminding herself for the millionth time that the man in the tower was a night watchman, not a trained, paranoid prison guard, Nadia took a gamble and pounded on the door with her fist.

“Help!” she cried. “Open up! Help!” She let out a muffled sob that sounded forced to her own ears, but that she hoped sounded real to the guard.

An elongated man-shaped shadow formed on the grass behind her as the guard stood up and stepped to the window to investigate, but he couldn’t see her where she stood in the protection of the doorway.

“Help!” she cried again, and gave the door another pound for good measure.

“Who’s there?” the guard called out. “What’s wrong?”

Nadia just sobbed and gasped, making as if she were so panicked she couldn’t even talk. If the guard called for backup, she was in big trouble, but she was gambling it wouldn’t even occur to him.

He called out again, but she kept making incoherent sobbing sounds. Sure enough, she soon heard the clank of shoes hitting metal stairs as the guard came down to investigate. She readied the canister of knockout gas.

The moment the door opened, she stuck her foot in the gap to stop it from closing and discharged the knockout gas straight into the guard’s face.

He had about two seconds to register surprise before his eyes rolled into the back of his head and he collapsed. He was too heavy for Nadia to move, so she merely stepped over him to get inside. Because another weapon couldn’t hurt, she relieved the unconscious man of his sidearm before she sprang for the stairs. She held her breath to avoid accidentally breathing in any gas until she made it to the top.

The windows around the control center allowed the room to be climate controlled, which Nadia supposed was only reasonable, considering how fierce the winters could be. But it didn’t make sense to station an armed guard behind windows if he couldn’t open them to shoot, so she fiddled around with the center panel until she found a catch and popped it open. She swung her legs out and sat on the ledge, looking down. She was definitely up higher than she’d like to jump from, maybe ten feet or so, but she didn’t have a choice.

Ahead of her, just outside the reach of the lights, shadows moved in the darkness. Thinking that she was quite literally making a leap of faith, Nadia jumped.