Fearless Read online

  When I reached the basement level, I found a massive hallway, eerily lit with an orangey glow. Down the corridor, a guard was stationed, and my anxiety spiked when I saw the size of the assault rifle hanging at his hip. He turned to scrutinize me, his blond eyebrows furrowed with suspicion—on edge perhaps because of all the previous intruders.

  Despite my nerves, I approached confidently. “Hey there, sorry to bother you. Prophet Joshua sent me.” I flashed my green card for inspection.

  “No one told me to expect you.” He remained polite, but he wasn’t stepping out of my way.

  I smiled, unfazed. “Last-minute request. I just got the call a few hours ago. I was the closest one to the area.” I still had trouble concocting lies, but at least I was getting better at repeating ones that were crafted for me by Dawn.

  The guard nodded, verifying the validity of the card, then pulled out his phone. “Let me call my supervisor.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  I watched him closely. From his reaction, it seemed that the call had gone to voice mail—the phone lines jammed by Dawn. He tried a second time, then a third. “I can’t reach her.”

  “It’s time sensitive . . .” I added, turning up the pressure.

  After a moment of indecision, he weighed his options, then reluctantly entered a code on a biometric keypad. “This way.”

  “Thanks.” I tried to conceal my excitement as he led me inside—the plan had worked! Now, I just had to face whatever new obstacles might be waiting for me up ahead.

  “What are you looking for?” he asked, casually inquisitive.

  “I need to see the storage facility,” I said, following Dawn’s script. “Joshua wants a second opinion on the count.”

  The guard nodded again, seemingly satisfied.

  I followed behind him, heart beating wildly. As he picked up the pace, I reached into my purse to steady the sharp, wiry device that was hanging heavy inside it. I took a deep breath. All I had to do now was set off this bomb.

  12

  “A bomb?” I’d asked Dawn in the ambulance, incredulous. “I don’t know how to wire a bomb.”

  She seemed unmoved. “It’s easy, I’ll show you.”

  I’d agreed to this mission without knowing all the details, and now I deeply regretted it. “I don’t know if this is a good idea . . .”

  Dawn knew me well enough to guess the root cause of my concern. “The bunker you need to infiltrate is sectioned off from the rest of the hospital. You won’t cause any casualties.”

  “How is that possible? I’m setting off a bomb.”

  “The storage facility is fireproof, and usually empty, I promise. Get in and out, and everything will be fine.”

  She’d lied to me about things like this before. I was filled with desperate fear—fear that something would go wrong, fear that I’d make a mistake. But I had to pick someone to trust, and in that moment, I chose Dawn and popped a pill—whatever guilt I might feel, I couldn’t let it show on my face.

  Now, walking through the bunker, I could feel the nervous sweat trickling down my neck; I stayed a few feet behind the guard, hoping he wouldn’t smell the stink of guilt on me. As he led me through a maze of hallways, I tried to memorize every turn, knowing I’d have to find my way back through them quickly once the bomb was set. I tried to push all my worries out of my mind . . . I couldn’t risk doubting my mission, even for a moment.

  But I couldn’t help it. The fear overcame me, nearly immobilized me. It took everything I had just to keep putting one foot in front of the other, keep moving down that hall. All I could think of was the massive fireball that was about to consume this place . . . and me, if I wasn’t careful.

  As we walked through a heavy vault door and down a second set of steps, I felt a jolt of adrenaline. This was it. The inner sanctum. Concrete walls, high ceilings, a feeling of dust and disrepair. I suspected the cobwebs in the corner had been spun by spiders dead for decades.

  As I took in my surroundings, I saw the guard eyeing me closely. “You don’t have a notepad or anything?” he asked.

  “Hmm?”

  “To write numbers on. If you’re counting boxes.”

  I pulled one out of my back pocket. Dawn had thought of everything. “Right here.”

  The guard nodded and led me past a glass wall, behind which I could see massive machinery churning. This was the manufacturing area, where right at this moment, new little bugs were being created—the mind-control nanotech. When the bomb went off, it’d have to be strong enough to destroy all this equipment.

  The guard led me into an underground warehouse, and I nearly gasped aloud. The space was huge, wall to wall with boxes, twenty feet deep on either side. And their contents? I knew that nanotech was microscopic. The sheer quantity of ammunition in this room . . . no wonder Dawn was worried they could strike any day. “Everything okay?” the guard asked. Clearly I hadn’t done enough to mask my horror.

  “Yeah, I, uh, didn’t think there’d be so many to count. It’s all good, thanks,” I reassured him, moving deeper inside. As I wove through boxes, stacked as high as my chest, I pulled a little spray bottle from my purse, filled with an odorless, extremely flammable liquid. I needed to hit as many of them as I could, as strategically as I could, to make the ensuing fire as massive as possible.

  Again, I had to push out of my mind the fearful image of that fireball, consuming and charring my corpse. Follow orders, I told myself. Get out of here alive.

  Moving as far as I could from the guard, I made notes on my pad every so often, trying to appear thoughtful and focused, covertly spraying as I went. By the time I’d run through the contents of my bottle, the guard lost interest in watching me work. With a breath of relief, I slipped into a gap between the rows and dug into my purse, pulling out the bomb.

  It was tiny, palm-sized, but delicate and powerful. There were two pieces: the blasting cap, which would set off the initial explosion, and a block of grayish high-explosive putty, which, once set off by the blasting cap, would make sure all that flammable liquid caught fire. I’d never imagined I’d learn how a bomb worked, but . . . well, here I was.

  My hands shook as I followed Dawn’s instructions, pushing the blasting cap into the putty, and I winced as they made contact . . . please don’t explode yet! But after a few seconds of panic, settling into echoey silence, it seemed I’d been successful.

  I’d managed not to blow myself up yet, at least.

  I took a deep breath. Was I really going to activate this thing? Was I really capable of setting off a bomb? I’d kept my cool this long, but as I fiddled with the timer, terror set in. I had five minutes before the blasting cap ignited, and then this entire shelter would be on fire, along with everything and everyone in it.

  “Grace?” My head snapped up. The guard was walking toward me. Startled, I turned to attention, and in my haste, my arm knocked against the bomb, sending it off its purchase on top of the boxes. I watched in horror as it tumbled to the ground, flipping over and over in the air. I couldn’t catch it, I could only watch it fall and brace myself, waiting for it to hit the ground and explode . . .

  It impacted on the concrete with a tinny smack, and then . . . nothing.

  I was alive. The bomb hadn’t gone off. I let out a shaky breath and glanced down.

  The device was in pieces at my feet. Two small wires had come out of the blasting cap, and the shell had cracked in two.

  The bomb was broken.

  13

  I stared at it, in shock.

  Was it going to go off any second? Never? The guard was mere feet away from me now. He couldn’t see the bomb, but I also couldn’t pick it up without drawing his attention to it.

  “Everything okay?” he asked.

  “Are there any other storage facilities in this building?” I stalled, trying to appear nonchalant despite the desperate pounding in my chest.

  “This is it,” he said. “How much longer do you think you’ll need?”

 
“Just a few more minutes,” I squeaked out. The look he returned was far from reassuring, but he accepted my answer, walking back the way he came.

  The moment his eyes were elsewhere, I quickly stooped to pick up the bomb, which felt like it could crumble further with each movement of my hands. I fumbled with the blasting cap, fingers unsteady. I didn’t know how to put it back together without setting it off.

  I wanted to abandon all pretext and book it the heck out of there, but I forced myself to stay put, stay focused. I couldn’t leave unless I knew for certain this bomb was armed.

  Ducking behind the boxes, I examined the blasting cap more closely and found what I thought was a solution. I could see where the wires used to be connected; I tried to twist them back into place, but the wires kept slipping. I listened for the guard’s footsteps, hoping desperately that he wouldn’t pick this moment to notice how absolutely freaked out I was.

  Finally, despite my hands quaking violently, I managed to secure the wires to the blasting cap. This was the best I could do. Maybe by dropping it I’d broken it completely, but if not, I only had a very short time to get out of there.

  I left the blasting cap inside its broken shell and hid the bomb deep within the stack of boxes, next to the remains of that bottle of flammable liquid, walking quickly back to the guard. “All done!” I said brightly. “I’m ready to go.”

  He frowned, noting my sudden shift in demeanor. “You in some kind of hurry?”

  “I’m running a little late for something. Do you mind taking me back?” I asked, attempting breezy.

  I could tell he was definitely suspicious now, but I couldn’t worry about that. I’d gone into this planning to blow my cover—I just needed to get out alive.

  We retraced our path, me walking a frantic step or two ahead of him. “Why did the prophet want a count?” he asked, trying to keep up with me.

  “I don’t know. I just do what they tell me to do,” I said, smiling over my shoulder.

  The guard seemed confused. “He didn’t give you any reason?”

  I struggled to think of an acceptable answer. “I assume it has to do with time of deployment?”

  “Deployment?”

  I improvised, “You know, when it’s time to use the tech.”

  I glanced behind me and saw his startled expression. “Tech?”

  I immediately realized that I’d said too much; the contents of the boxes must be a more closely guarded secret than I’d anticipated. But I kept walking ahead, eyes fixed on the exit. “Just what I was told.”

  He didn’t respond. When I looked back; he was gone, his feet pounding toward the storage room.

  I only hesitated a moment before sprinting after him, kicking myself the whole time. My carelessness had tipped him off, put his life in danger, and bungled the mission to boot.

  I hurtled into the storage room and saw the guard digging through boxes. How could I stop him, how could I save him? “What are you doing?” I called to him.

  “Trying to figure out why you’re really here,” he snapped.

  I wasn’t going to convince him of my innocence, no matter what I did. Whatever horrors Joshua might inflict once this guard detained me—that was a foregone conclusion. Now I just had to save both our lives.

  “Look, I’m sorry, you’re right, I lied to you.” The guard looked up at me, listening. My voice trembled, knowing what a risky play this was, but I pushed forward. “I came here to sabotage this facility. This technology is dangerous.”

  The guard pointed his gun at me. I felt a surge of terror, realizing for the first time that he might be willing to shoot, to kill, in the name of his prophet. “Don’t you dare move,” he barked.

  “There’s a bomb that’s going to go off any second,” I told him as calmly as I could, afraid of alarming him further. “You can’t stop it. We have to go, now, or we’ll both die.” The guilt was coursing through me—this was the outcome I’d most feared, that I was about to directly endanger the life of another human being.

  He was unmoved. “You’re not going anywhere.”

  I added a little more urgency to my tone. “You can shoot me if you want, but if you don’t get out of here right now, you’re going to die. Do you understand me?”

  He hesitated. Would he really be willing to do it, commit murder? He was angry, he wanted to stop me in my tracks . . . but he couldn’t. The Universal Theology, his fear of Punishments, were too powerfully ingrained. Still, he aimed the gun at my chest, shaking as he asked, “Who are you working for?”

  “Please,” I begged, “we don’t have time for this.”

  Frustrated, he accepted his inability to take a human life and holstered his gun so he could resume tearing through the boxes.

  “You’re not going to find it in time,” I tried to convince him. “Please, just come with me, save yourself.”

  “It’s my job to protect this area,” he said, growing more desperate. I saw in his face something familiar—a willingness to die for his cause. The same willingness I had to die for mine. He might not be able to kill, but there was one life that was his own to give, and he’d clearly given it to the prophet long ago. He was as staunch a believer in the prophet’s message as my father was . . .

  I couldn’t convince him.

  With a pang of deep guilt, I realized that if I couldn’t save this guard, I had to try to save myself. I took one last look at him, then bolted back toward the vault door. It occurred to me that I hadn’t looked at my watch after setting the bomb’s timer. Had it been five minutes yet? It seemed like it must have been.

  As I ran up the steps, a new, sickening thought occurred to me. What if I’d simply disarmed the bomb when I dropped it? Then I’d fail my objective, lose my cover, get arrested—and it all would have been for nothing. As the moments ticked by, my dread increased. Why had I thought I could repair the blasting cap?

  But as I raced around the final corner, exit in sight, there it was—the explosive boom, as I felt my feet lose touch with the concrete beneath me. The force of the explosion knocked me forward, whacking my ribs hard into the ground. I gulped in deep breaths of thick smoke, clinging to the ground for any wisp of fresh air as my ears were overcome by a cacophonous clanging, and a raging heat lapped at the soles of my feet. I’d succeeded after all. If I could survive this.

  I just had to get to the doors. I could crawl there, I could make it.

  The smoke surged around me, and my whole body ached from the impact of hitting the floor. Inch by painful inch I edged toward the door, calling on every last reserve of strength . . .

  You’re not going to make it, a voice in my head told me. My muscles were drained, I was too weak, I was overcome by the lack of oxygen. My fear subsided into a kind of acceptance . . . this is the end.

  As I lay there, dazed, a pair of high heels stepped into my line of vision, cutting off my path to freedom. A woman in a sharp blazer was coming toward me in a haze of dust, her legs ashen with smoke. Her face was covered by a gas mask, so I couldn’t make out who it was. Could it be Dawn? Had she come back to save me?

  “Come on.” I heard the woman’s voice as if from under water as she pulled me to my feet, supporting me as I lurched to the exit.

  “There’s a guard back there, too,” I rasped. “He needs help.”

  She didn’t reply. Propping me against the wall, she managed to pry open the vault doors, and I felt the cool breeze of the outside air wash over me. The oxygen fanned the flames behind us as she pulled me back to my feet. “Go, quickly,” the woman said, and I stumbled out into the hallway, collapsing onto the cement floor.

  As she pulled off her gas mask, she released a thick mane of dark, wild curls. Through the wafting smoky haze, familiar brown eyes pierced mine. This was a face I’d memorized, a face I’d idolized.

  The woman who’d just saved my life was my mother.

  Book Two

  1

  It’s funny how memories work. Immediately after my mother died, I could recall
every intimate detail about her. Her smell, her laugh. I could predict how she might have responded; imagine the way she would’ve jumped to my defense against a bully, the soothing words she might say when I was feeling down. As I grew older, it wasn’t that my memories of her were lost—I simply began to remember the stories about my memories better than the memories themselves. My experiences of my mother were condensed into anecdotes, and she became more of a legend than a person. Over the years, as my father filled in more details about her life and history, things I’d never known when she was alive, those new details shaded the pieces of her still lodged in my brain. Eventually, it was hard to know what was memory and what was myth. Given all that, at the age of eighteen, this is what I knew about the late Valerie Luther.

  She’d graduated top in her class from her inner-city D.C. high school, gotten a degree in social work from Yale, and she’d met my father while running a battered women’s shelter in Washington, D.C.—before the Revelations, mind you, when volunteer work was solely done for idealistic reasons, rather than as a calculated attempt to improve one’s appearance. Everything I remembered about her, everyone I’d talked to, painted her as the kindest, most thoughtful woman there could be. So when she was struck down in the American Revelation, I’d never figured out why. I’d never understood what she’d done that Great Spirit would have Punished her so drastically for.

  Of course, later I’d realized her murderer hadn’t been Great Spirit after all—it was her own guilt. She must have done something that weighed on her so heavily it ultimately killed her. If my father knew what it was, he’d never told me.

  I’d been to her funeral, that was true. But it had been closed casket—common practice in cases of lethal Punishment.

  Now I wondered; could she have survived somehow, escaped? In the bomb shelter, her voice sounded different—stronger, clearer. But maybe that was how she sounded in person: all I remembered at this point was her voice on our home movies.