Page 5 of Silver Elite

There are no windows in this room. I hate windowless rooms. I’m not claustrophobic, not really. The walls aren’t closing in on me. I can breathe perfectly fine. It’s just this stifling feeling of being trapped like cattle in a pen. No escape routes, no weapons. I can’t stand it. It itches my skin and makes me feel like I’ve got those yellow ants from the Blacklands crawling all over me.

They didn’t blindfold me when they brought me to this interrogation room, so my brain keeps running through the sequence of turns and corridors we took to get here. Right, left, right, right, left, blue door. Just have to reverse course when I find the opportunity to escape. Blue door, right, left, left, right, left. I repeat the directions like a mantra in my head while I wait for the Command to remember I exist.

It doesn’t take long. The door opens less than a minute later, and two of them walk in. A young man and woman in their early twenties. They both have dark hair, hers tied in a low ponytail, his cropped short. Her eyes are hazel. Shrewd and narrowed. His are dark brown, almost as black as the coffee Jim drinks—drank—every morning.

Without a word, they occupy the chairs across the table from me. The woman sets down a slate-gray tablet, but its screen remains black. Two pairs of eyes fix on my face. I stare back, not giving a single emotion away.

The door doesn’t close. A third person enters.

This time, it takes some effort not to react.

It’s the gorgeous jerk from the inn.

I’m not sure what I’m feeling as he shuts the door and then moves to stand in front of it. His gaze lands on mine. Like me, he doesn’t react. But I know he recognizes me. He must. It was only two nights ago when I was squished underneath his body. A body that’s now clad in navy blue. I should’ve known he was a soldier. He’d moved like one.

And he’s just as attractive as I remember, taking up all the air in the room with his broad frame and stunning face. It irritates me.

“I’m Soldier Tyler Struck,” the young woman finally says, her voice cool but polite. “This is Officer Xavier Ford.”

She gestures to the man next to her. He’s good looking, too, in a more rugged, less typical way than the guy behind them. The guy who doesn’t introduce himself. Who continues to stand in silence, his demeanor impossible to decipher. Bored? Annoyed? I can’t quite tell.

I know it’s futile considering they’re Command, but I put out the mental feelers anyway.

Telepathy and mind reading always start the same way: You open a path. The former only works with Mods, as our brains come equipped with that second frequency Jim taught me about. The positive energy waves. With the latter, whether you’re trying to infiltrate a Mod or a Prime, you’re tapping into the first frequency, where the target mind will actively resist your attempts by releasing negative energy. The brain’s built-in warning system.

If the target mind is well shielded, you don’t even get the chance to try to disarm the alarm. But if there’s any weakness in that shield, even the tiniest crack, it’s just a matter of finding your way in.

These three? Their shields are so thick, it’s like slamming into a brick wall at a hundred miles an hour. The thin ropes I throw out bounce right back at me and rattle like chains in my own head.

I’m intrigued. These people aren’t regular soldiers. They’re not like Jordan from Copper Block. They’ve clearly had extensive training in shielding.

Silver Block. That would be my guess.

“How were you able to incite eight minds?” Struck asks without preamble.

I gape at her. “What on earth makes you think I’m the one who did that?”

“You’re saying you aren’t?”

“Of course I’m not.” I put a little stammer into the words. I’m a good actress. It’s one of the reasons why Jim always trusted me to handle the soldiers in Hamlett.

“Well, we know it wasn’t the prisoner. He was cleared.”

I’m afraid to know how they “cleared” him, and once again, I worry about what Jayde Valence might have seen inside Jim’s mind.

“So, if it wasn’t him…that leaves you.” Struck tips her head toward me.

“It wasn’t me.”

“Really,” she says. It’s not a question.

“First of all, I’m not Aberrant,” I tell them. “And second, even if I was, it’s not possible to control so many minds like that.”

“It is possible because we saw it happen.” Ford adopts a disinterested voice, but there’s a hard edge to it. He flicks up a brow. “Did you not see it happen, sweetling?”

My jaw tightens at both the term of endearment and his derisive tone. “Don’t call me that. And I don’t know what I saw. All I know is that you killed my uncle.”

Struck is startled for a second, as if she didn’t expect me to bring up Jim before they did. But the best way to handle an interrogation is to pretend you have nothing to hide.

“Isn’t that why we’re here?” I say flatly. “You killed my uncle.”

Ford folds his arms against his chest and leans back slightly. “Your uncle was a deserter of the Command.”

“Bullshit. I know that’s what you charged him with, but…” I shake my head and repeat myself. “Bullshit.”

“Got it, sweetling. So you’re claiming you had no idea who your uncle was. How are you related exactly?”

“We’re not,” I answer, this time deciding to ignore the mocking endearment. “Not by blood, anyway. He adopted me.”

Struck brings the tablet to life, pressing her thumb to its scanner to gain entry. My gaze shifts toward the doorway where Mr. Silent continues to watch us. His hands rest loosely on his belt loops, face revealing no expression as he meets my gaze. He holds the eye contact for so long that my pulse speeds up, and I’m the one to break it off. Which is unlike me. I never back down.

I try to focus on the screen that Struck is now swiping her finger across. When a photograph appears, she enlarges it.

It’s Jim, and my heart clenches at the sight of him. I deliberately let the grief show on my face.

She pushes the tablet toward me. “This is Colonel Julian Ash.”

“You can call him whatever you want, but that’s not his name.”

“It’s his name. This is Julian Ash, a colonel from Silver Block who deserted fifteen years ago. He fled not long after losing his entire unit in a bombing at Sun Post.”

“No,” I counter, tapping the picture, “this is Jim Darlington. And I don’t believe a word you’re telling me, not for a second. Jim is not a deserter.”

“Yes, he is. Not only that, but he’s also Aberrant.”

I start to laugh. “Of all the lies you just said about him, that’s my favorite.”

“Let’s not play games,” Xavier Ford says, rolling his eyes. “You were at the execution. According to reports, his arms were practically glowing.”

“Your reports are wrong. I didn’t see anything of the sort.” I cross my arms and dare him to challenge me.

“We ran a background check on you, too,” Struck continues.

She swipes the screen until she’s showing me a picture of myself. It was taken last year for my ID. The Company requires citizens to update our photos annually.

“Wren Darlington,” she recites from the page. “You didn’t exist until you were eight years old.”

“That’s when Jim found me.”

“Found you,” Ford echoes doubtfully.

I shrug. “I can’t remember anything before that.”

Their skepticism grows. The gorgeous face at the door still discloses nothing.

“If you have my file, then you should have all my mentalist reports, too.”

Jim was smart. First thing he did when we left the Blacklands and resettled in Ward Z was send me for a children’s mental health assessment. I was an accomplished liar then, too.

“She concluded that whatever trauma I experienced as a kid caused memory loss,” I go on. “Nobody knows exactly what happened to my parents, but they may have died in an Aberrant attack. I guess there’d been some ambushes in the area where Jim found me wandering.”

“Right.” Ford chuckles. “This benevolent nomad who found you on the side of the road, took you under his wing, and adopted you as his own. How nice of him.”

“It’s a really fucking depressing world you live in if you think people can’t help others. Is it so hard to believe someone might just be a good person?”

“Julian Ash was not a good person.”

“Stop calling him that,” I snap, and then glimpse the hint of a shift in Struck’s expression. She’s starting to believe me.

I haven’t won Ford over yet. As for the man at the door, I have no idea where he stands on any of this.

“Jim is a good person,” I insist. “I’ve lived with him since I was eight years old. That’s twelve years. Trust me, if he was an Aberrant super soldier, I would have known about it. He would have slipped up at some point.”

“You did know about it,” Ford says. “Because you’re lying to us right now.”

“I’m not lying. I live on a ranch. Jim is a rancher. Was a rancher.”

A lump forms in my throat. I don’t even have to fake this part. The memory of his bullet-ridden body crumpling to the wooden platform is like a knife directly to the heart.

“Ranchers, huh?” Ford leans back in his chair again. “How many head of cattle?”

“Two hundred.” I frown, pretending not to understand why he’s asking.

“What kind?”

“Cows. Some heifers. You should know,” I can’t help but jeer. “Our cattle feed you and your army.”

Struck speaks again. “You know, I’ve never been on a ranch. Why don’t you tell us about the ranching life?”

Ford nods, looking amused. “Yes, sweetling. Enlighten us. Describe a day in the life of a rancher.”

I stare at them. “Seriously? You guys think I’ve been pretend-ranching my entire life? Why don’t you come talk to me after you’ve had your entire arm up a cow during calving season, keen?”

“Describe your day.” Ford is unfazed by my sarcasm.

With feigned annoyance, I go along with their request. For the next hour, it’s a barrage of questions from the relentless duo, and not a single word from the dark-haired man. My eyes flit toward him more than once. Assessing. Sometimes admiring. His short-sleeved version of the Command uniform means I can see tattoos swirling out of his sleeves, winding around his biceps and forearms. I can’t make out what they are.

When Struck brings up the incitement incident again, I force myself to focus.

“Do you see what I’m wearing?” I gesture to myself. I’m in a tank top. “If I was standing in the crowd, somehow inside the heads of eight people and forcing them to do whatever the hell they were doing, someone would have seen me doing it. The Aberrant glow when they do their psychic stuff.” I play as dumb as I can, choosing words a lowly Prime villager would use.

“Why did you run then?” Struck asks, slanting her head. “Why were you spotted trying to flee the scene of—”

“Because you just killed my uncle!”

I take a breath and pretend to calm myself down.

Really, I’m steady as can be. Not rattled in the slightest. I feel grief, yes. Concern, perhaps, about how long they’ll hold me here. But I know eventually they’ll release me back to my ward. I’ve done nothing wrong. Not to them, anyway.

The only crime I committed is not being able to save Jim’s life.

That’ll be something I punish myself for until my dying breath.

“I’m sorry.” I exhale again. “I didn’t mean to yell at you. But I didn’t do anything. All I know is that I was enjoying myself at my village’s Liberty Day celebration a couple of nights ago”—I spare a glance at the silent soldier—“and the next morning, the Command came and took my uncle away. Do you honestly think I was just going to stay in Z? Of course not. You took my uncle. Of course I came here to get him back.”

“So you admit you were trying to interfere with Command business?” Ford lifts an eyebrow again.

“No, I was trying to save my uncle because he didn’t do anything wrong. You guys are wrong. About all of it.” I shove the tablet toward them. “Jim is not a ’fect. We can go through your file, page by page, line by line, and it wouldn’t change a damn thing in my eyes.”

“No. This man, your uncle, the corpse with all those bullets in his chest”—I flinch at Ford’s gruesome description—“is Colonel Julian Ash. His fingerprints confirmed it.”

“You’re lying.”

“The fingerprints confirmed it,” Struck reiterates. “We don’t know how Ash managed to switch out his prints in the Company’s system—”

I do. We have people everywhere.

“—but they were compared with the ones from his Command file and it’s a perfect match.”

“I don’t believe you,” I say stubbornly, while inside I’m beyond grateful they can’t find fault in my own file. Children aren’t printed and logged in the Continental ID system until the age of twelve, which means these people will never know who I was before I entered the database. As far as they’re concerned, I’ve always been Wren Darlington.

“You don’t believe us, huh? What a coincidence. We don’t believe you, either.” Ford smirks as he pushes his chair back.

They both rise. Struck tucks the tablet under her arm.

“What? That’s it?” I wrinkle my forehead. “We’re done?”

“Oh no, sweetling,” Ford says. “We’ve just begun.”

They approach the door, waiting for the stranger from the inn to step aside.

“What about you?” I demand, glowering at his back. “Mr. Silent over here. Got nothing to say? Who are you?”

He stops, turning to spare me a glance over his shoulder. His lips curve slightly as he finally speaks.

“I’m the one who decides whether you walk out of here alive.”