Page 81

“ D o you understand your orders?” Bynes asked as the nurse injected the back of my neck with my tracker.

“Yes,” I muttered. After sitting in the debriefing that morning, hearing the plan of how we were going to infiltrate the REG while hundreds of Northern and Dissenter soldiers attacked the wall as a decoy, Bynes called Jacob and me to follow her.

And now here we were, being implanted with the tracker Charles had mentioned the night before.

“Come again?” Bynes asked, clearly relishing her power and control in this moment.

“I said yes ,” I repeated through gritted teeth. Jacob sat next to me, quiet as the nurse moved on to inject him. I glared at Bynes. “What’s it like to be Charles’s puppet? Do you like it? Or does it do something else for you?”

SMACK!

Bynes backhanded me, splitting open my lip. “I’ve been wanting to do that for a long time. Keep talking, girl. I’d be happy to do it again.”

I opened my mouth, but Jacob nudged my shoulder, giving me a warning. I snapped my mouth closed, biting my tongue.

“Who’s on the team?” he asked.

Bynes snickered. “All the favorites, of course. It seems President De’vor is doing everything in her power to control this mission as much as possible, but it doesn’t matter.

We’ll have a soldier with you to make sure you get the job done right .

You have one objective, and that’s installing the virus. We’ll take care of the rest.”

“Yeah, I bet you will,” I muttered under my breath.

“Careful, Telvian, or I’ll slap the other side to make it match.” I chewed on the inside of my cheek, my blood boiling. “Now, remember the plan. The team will assemble at 1200 hours. And if you mention any of this to anyone—”

“We got it,” Jacob interjected. “Hell to pay, people suffer, so on and so forth. You’ve made it clear, General.” She sneered at him before turning and leaving the room. The nurse lingered for just a minute, and then she left too, leaving us alone for the moment.

“This is bad, Mara.”

I ran my finger over the sore spot on the back of my neck. “I know, I know.”

Jacob stood up and started pacing in front of me while I remained seated on the exam table. “This tech can’t exist. It’s got to be destroyed, and I don’t trust this Calvernon guy one bit.”

I snorted. “If only you knew the half of it.”

“I’m serious, Mara. No one can have this tech.”

I furrowed my brows. He was right. This kind of technology couldn’t exist, and especially not in the hands of someone like Charles Calvernon.

Because that’s what Charles wanted. He wanted NIT-V2 for himself—that’s what he expected Jacob and me to do.

We were going to betray everyone—the East, the Dissenters, our team—betray them all by installing a virus into Telvia’s mainframe when we were supposed to be destroying it.

The virus would corrupt the system and change the coding, so when the tech went live, Charles would be the one in control, not Raúl. And that was going to be just as bad.

Jacob shook his head, still pacing. “This is bad. This is really, really bad.” He stopped pacing, running his hands through his hair before turning to face me.

“We’ve got to destroy it, Mara. The North can’t have control of the tech.

Not them, not the Dissenters… nobody . It’s got to stop here.

No matter what happens tomorrow, we have to get to the lab, and we have to destroy all of it! ”

“What are you thinking?”

“I’m thinking we bomb it.”

“What?”

He walked up to me, taking my hands in his. “Hear me out. Everything that has to do with the nanochips is at the lab. I can access the mainframe from there, destroy the files, and then we can bomb the entire thing. We need to destroy everything. Every prototype, all the models—all of it!”

“What about the team? They’re gonna figure out that we’re up to something. And even if they don’t, there’s no way they’re going to let us bomb the lab. Not when the point of the mission is to take over control of the tech,” I reasoned.

“Then we ditch them. We separate ourselves from them, and we get to the lab.” He squeezed my hands. “Mara, please . I have to fix this. I have to fix what I’ve done. And I don’t trust anyone to destroy the tech except for you and me. Help me do this. Help me fix what I’ve done.”

I sighed, feeling the heavy weight he was placing on me.

He wasn’t wrong. I knew he was absolutely right.

No one should have the nanochip technology.

No one should have the power to control people this way.

Nobody . Not Sasha, not the East, and definitely not Charles.

“Okay. We’ll separate from everyone, and we’ll destroy it all. ”

Jacob’s eyes glistened, tears in his eyes as he cupped my face in his hands and kissed my forehead. “Thank you.”

“Don’t mention it,” I muttered, giving him a weak smile. He stepped away from me. “Hey, Jacob?”

“Yeah?”

I had a lingering question, one that weighed heavy on my heart. I was afraid to ask him, but I had to know. “What are the chances we make it out of the REG building alive?”

His brows furrowed as he rubbed his lips, looking away from me. It didn’t take a genius to know what that meant. It meant our odds were pretty low, and I didn’t really like those odds.

“That high, huh?” I joked half-heartedly, looking at the bruising on my knuckles.

“Hey,” he whispered, taking my chin in his hand and lifting my eyes to meet his blue ones. “No matter what happens, we can do it. We can handle anything as long as we stick together. You got that? And nothing will keep me from you again. I’m with you, Mara. And I’ll always be with you.”

Moisture filled my eyes. I wasn’t stupid. I knew that this very well might be the end of the road for us both. And the thought filled me with sorrow. I had made such a mess of my life. A mess that hurt the ones I loved most, and there was little time to make any of it right again.

“Hey,” he whispered, drawing my attention back to him.

“It ends with us, okay? No matter what happens, we finish it.” He smiled, taking me into his arms and hugging me as though he hadn’t seen me in a thousand years.

And it felt so good to feel his strength again, to feel the security that my brother always represented for me.

I wrapped my arms around him, burying my face in his chest, and allowed myself this moment because Jacob was right.

Whatever happened tomorrow, it was going to end. I was going to make sure of it.