She gasps and drops her head, sucking in gulps. “I was just starting to like it,” she groans, defiant as ever. She lifts her head and gives the Interrogator a glittering smile.
“Where is the Resistance hiding?” he asks. Sketch does not answer, does not move an inch.
He slaps her face. She laughs.
He turns to me, black eyes dark as coal. I wish I had my father’s dagger. I don’t know what they did with it, but I feel naked without the solidity of steel against my thigh.
“Where is the Resistance hiding?”
“There is no Resistance,” I say.
He throws his head back and laughs. “You have your mother’s humor, I see. Where is she hiding?”
“My mother is not my concern anymore,” I say, and it is the same answer I will always give him, no matter what he does. Because in my heart, she died years ago. If she were still the mother I used to know, she would have come to save me by now.
She would never have left this building until she watched me escape first, until she knew that I was safe. She would have given herself up before anyone touched me.
But she didn’t.
She ran, like a coward. And she’s not coming back.
“You’ll get nothing from us,” I say. “Never.”
“We’ll die before we tell you anything,” Sketch adds.
The Interrogator shrugs. “You’ll probably die,” he says to Sketch. Then he leans up against the bars so he can look right into my eyes. “But you, Meadow Woodson, will never get the luxury of death.”
He leaves, slamming the door behind him as he goes.
He thinks he can win. He thinks that, battle after battle, he is peeling away the tough layers that surround me, forcing my answers out of hiding.
But there is something the Interrogator did not account for.
In this war, I am the strongest soldier.
I am my father’s daughter, and I refuse to break.
CHAPTER 11
ZEPHYR
I can’t look at the woman.
Sparrow.
Lark’s sister. Because a memory hits me as Rhone and I drag her back to our camp. It was something Meadow said, a long time ago. About her aunt being the one who put Meadow’s name into the system.
Sparrow is the one who sent me after Meadow.
Sparrow is the one who tried, time and time again, to get me to kill the girl I love. She passes out by the time we’ve made it back to our camp. Rhone and Dex force me to leave her, say I can come back later, when she’s awake.
And I will.
I’m going to get my answers from this woman.
CHAPTER 12
MEADOW
I know how to deal with pain.
My father taught me how to take it and twist it to my advantage, to fuel off of it the way a soft wind can stoke a fire.
They took Sketch away, and now, I am the only prisoner here, hanging upside down by my ankles, on some sort of table. The Interrogator asks me a question, and when I do not answer, he touches a scalding hot knife to my bare skin. The room is still freezing, and when he puts the blade to my neck, I see a trail of smoke, hear the sizzle and pop of my cold skin touching hot steel.
“Where is Patient Zero?” he asks me.
The same questions, the same answers.
It takes too much effort to speak. My heart is in my throat, and every swallow is fire.
“Patient Zero,” he says. “Zephyr James. We know you have information on his whereabouts. Cooperate, tell us, and you’ll live like a queen.”
Zephyr. He knows their secrets, all of the inner workings of the Murder Complex. As long as he’s out there, the Initiative will search. With what he knows, he could incite a full-scale rebellion.
I wish he would.
I imagine him saving me, dropping from the sky in the same way that I did for my mother. Shooting everyone down, pulling me to his chest. The two of us, finding freedom together outside of the Perimeter.
I push the dream away.
Sometimes dreams are impossible lies.
“TELL US!” the Interrogator screams. He whips me across the face with the back of his hand. The sting is so strong that I almost don’t feel it.
“No,” I groan. “No.” Hanging upside down, I feel small. The Interrogator’s hideous face towers above me. My vision grows spotty and dim.
“Very well,” he says. “I can do this all day, Miss Woodson.”
He presses the blade of the knife flat against my forearm, right above my fearless tattoo. The pain is so intense that I start to see the world in green. I pretend the pain is only Koi’s knife. He is scratching the tattoo into my arm, back on the houseboat. We are together and safe. I don’t want to scream. My father would tell me not to. But still, I cry out.
“Had enough?” the Interrogator asks. “Where is the Resistance?”
“You’ll never find them!” I say. He presses the knife to my other arm.
“Where is your mother?”
“I . . . don’t . . . KNOW!” I scream. “I don’t know anything about anyone!”
He pulls the knife away. My skin peels back with it, and I want to sob, scream, curl into a ball. Instead, I focus on the wideness of his shoulders, the way that he favors standing with his weight on his heels, how he uses his right hand more than his left.
The Interrogator stoops to one knee, his face even with mine. I see the dark lines under his eyes, smell his rancid breath. He makes me want to puke.
He doesn’t see that I’ve gotten one wrist loose, that I’ve twisted and turned and done the tricks my father once showed me. I have to keep him distracted, so I can free my other arm. “Go to hell,” I whisper. I spit in his face.