Being Amber (27 page)

“Let me go,” he barked at the three men restraining him.

When she turned her back to a soldier so that he could cuff her, she lifted her gaze to meet Xander’s. “Love you,” she mouthed, as a loop was slipped over her head and tightened around her neck, before she was roughly turned and led into the corridor by the pole attached to it.

“Jaci!”

She heard Xander call her. Then, she heard the fading sounds of a scuffle. She looked at her feet as she walked down the hallway. She was a spectacle, an example for all those who cared to look.

Chapter 18

When the half-dozen Guardsmen finally cleared out of the apartment, leaving Xander alone, he sprung into action. He tapped the com in his ear to contact Rock. Instead, he found a com waiting from Rock.

“Play.”

“Xan, sorry I missed you. The Gov showed up to transfer me to Emerald. So, I guess this is it. Take care of Journey for me. She’s going to be scared. Jaci will probably have to help you at first.” He cleared his throat. “When she gets back. So, yeah…later, brother.

Xander tried to reply but got a message reporting that the com he was trying to reach was disconnected.

“Fuck!” Xander picked up the pan of fried potatoes he’d been making for their breakfast and threw it across the room, leaving a greasy mess over the wall and floor.

Then he commed his captain.

“Rush here.”

“Cap, the National Guard took Jaci.” There was silence on the other end. “Cap?”

“I’ll get someone to get the team together and I’ll send a cruiser to pick you up in…half hour?”

“Yeah, okay. Oh, Cap?”

“What?”

“Rock’s gone to Emerald.”

“Yeah, I know. Half hour. Be ready.”

Xander sat on the edge of the bed. His mood was black. He felt desperate and lethal. The room was consumed by utter silence with only the sound of his own blood rushing through his veins, filling his ears. He’d never known of a person being returned to the Amber Zone after the National Guard picked them up. His blood boiled with the need to find and save her. Every second that passed was a second too long to be away from her.

He didn’t know what a team meeting would do to help Jaci, but at least he would be able to find out where she was taken. He was going to get to her, and he was going to kill anyone that stood in his way.

The decision made, Xander stood focused and determined. He wiped up the mess on the floor and then slowly, deliberately dressed in uniform. He checked and holstered his gun.

He was calm. Like a man who’d decided to commit suicide and knew the pain would be over in a moment or two. He would save Jaci or die trying. Either way, his anguish would be over soon.

He sat stoic in the passenger seat of the cruiser that picked him up and did the same as he waited in the briefing room of Amber Police Headquarters. It had been less than twenty-four hours since the team met to wrap up the case. It hadn’t occurred to him at the time that Rock would be transferred before they saw each other again. Already, it seemed like a lifetime ago.

When Captain Rush, Brady and two other Amber officers entered the room and headed straight for Xander, he had no idea what was going down until they were done. The two officers overpowered him and cuffed his right hand to the stainless steel cuff bar attached to the wall.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he shouted.

Captain Rush thanked the two officers and dismissed them. Then the cap and Brady sat at the table. Jordan entered a few seconds later.

“I’m saving your life.” Captain Rush said as he sat back in his chair. “You are still under my command and you will follow my orders. I know you well enough by now to know you’re planning on going rogue.” The Captain leaned forward in his chair and leveled a glare at Xander. “You’d be dead before you even found her. We do this my way.” He leaned back in his chair.

Xander seethed. “Let me the fuck go!”

Captain Rush ignored him. “Okay, I’ve made some calls and finally made contact with General Morgan the acting commander of the New Atlanta peacekeeping force. He was already aware of Jaci’s detainment. She’s currently being interrogated. He said that she may be charged with Caroline’s murder, pending any disclosures she may make during the interrogation. I advised him that we were aware of the Gov’s involvement in the termination of Amber fallows and the attempted murder of Jaci. I reminded him that the Gov’s actions were a violation of the Amber Accord and that he risked an Amber uprising if should this information to get out to the public.

“The general wanted to see what proof I had of their Accord violations. Brady is putting together audio and will e-mail it for the general’s inspection. That’s where we are now.”

Xander took a deep breath and blew it out slowly, eyes closed. A slight wash of relief and gratitude flashed over him. They weren’t going to lay down and pretend none of this happened. They were actually going to try to do something to help her, to get her back. “Do you know where they have her?”

“She’s being held on the peacekeeper’s compound in the Emerald Zone. I don’t know exactly where.”

Over the next few hours, they waited for Brady to gather all the evidence and then they waited to hear back from the general together. Eventually, after Xander surrendered his gun and promised not to do anything stupid, Jordan released him from the cuff bar.

A nagging impulse to go to Jaci, to save her, persisted, but he knew the captain was right. He’d never even make it to the Emerald Zone, let alone onto the peacekeeper’s compound.

It was almost a complete day before they heard back from the general’s office. He would discipline the people responsible for the Accord violations. Jaci would be released to Amber upon completion of her interrogation.

It was a long wait, and Xander had more than enough time for his mind to reason and rage. Finally he’d come to a surprisingly easy decision. Never again would he or someone he loved be a helpless victim to the Gov. He left police headquarters without a word to anybody.

An hour later, Xander walked toward the rear of the wellness center’s garden, closing in on the wall that separated the Amber Zone from the ungoverned Onyx Zone. The pillowcase he carried was laden with canned food from the commissary.

A while back, he’d learned of the black market that enterprising Ambers developed between their Zone and people in Onyx. Reportedly, they threw bundles of goods, with notes included inside, back and forth over the walls, creating a cooperative food for goods that could only be found in Onyx trade.

When he arrived at the twelve-foot cement block wall topped with loops of razor wire, he called to anybody who may have been on the other side. He got no response. Turning to put about ten feet of distance between himself and the wall, he held the pillowcase with two hands and spun in circle after circle, giving the bag more and more momentum, before he released it. The bag skimmed the gnarl of wire at the top. He heard the
thunk
of the bundle hitting the ground on the other side. He waited for a minute, and then he heard a reply to his enclosed note.

“Tomorrow at sunset.”

Xander smiled. He’d made a connection and if it turned out to be a reliable connection, life as he currently knew it would change drastically. Not only for Jaci and him, but maybe for all of Amber.

* * * *

Jaci had been in the dark, literally, for what seemed like days. Her stomach growled its displeasure at being empty for so long. It was a low, angry complaint. But being hungry was the least of her worries. She’d die of dehydration long before her hunger became unbearable. The inside of her throat was parched and had been void of any saliva for at least a day. When she opened her eyes, her lids felt like sandpaper scraping over her eyeballs.

The shade of the blackness she stared into changed only slightly with her eyes open. She had to be underground. It was the only way to achieve the dank air and complete darkness that surrounded her. She no longer knew if it was day or night as she lay on the cold, hard cement, shivering and wishing for more of the blissful escape sleep provided.

She thought about a lot of things in the complete absence of any sensory input. But, mostly it was Xander that lingered in her mind. She knew by now he would be out his mind with worry. She prayed he would realize quickly that she wasn’t coming back so he could start the healing process and move on.

Jaci knew she was going to die, if not directly at the hands of the Gov, then from dehydration. She had another day, maybe two, and she would be dead. Thank God.

She was so happy to end it with the love that she and Xander shared. For a moment, she’d seen what it could have been like with him. She replayed their last day together in her head over and over. It was amazing. She smiled. It would have been so good with him. It would have been a new chapter in her life. It would have been her fairy tale.

That last night had been too good to be true. Some part of her knew it all along, because she’d easily accepted the fact that the life she wanted with him would never happen. It hadn’t taken much to remove all expectations of happiness, and totally break her of her will to live. Jaci told herself she wasn’t giving up, she was being realistic. If she expected to ever go back to Amber again, she was kidding herself. If the time since she’d been designated Amber taught her anything it was that she had no control over her life anymore, and her existence was meaningless to most everybody.

Her throat tightened as she tried to hold back an avalanche of grief. She prayed that Xander didn’t feel as much pain and sorrow as she felt. She shouldn’t have mouthed
I love you
to him before she was taken away. It was selfish, and if she were thinking at all, she would have realized it would be harder for him to get over her after that. She shook her head and berated herself for so many things she’d done and not done, said and left unsaid. In the end, though, she guessed it was better that they’d just started their relationship. They hadn’t, technically, even made love yet. She didn’t want to be a source of pain for him. This way, given time, she’d be easily forgotten.

Jaci jumped, startled by a light flicked on somewhere away from where she was being kept. The dim illumination carried to her, faintly cutting through the thick blackness. Footsteps approached. Her heart sped up. She’d waited to be questioned when she first got there, but nobody ever came. So, she assumed that they were going to leave her down there until she died. She was almost there.

“Get up.” A soldier ordered as he came up to her cell.

Jaci staggered to her feet, using her hands to walk up the cement block wall for support.

“Put your wrists together through the bars.”

She was cuffed and then walked down a long corridor toward the light source. The soldier shoved her into the center of a room. He grabbed the few links of chain between her handcuffs and dropped them onto a metal hook dangling over her head. Jaci was strung up on a hook like an animal carcass. She was forced to stand on wobbly legs or bear the entire weight of her body dangling from her wrists. The soldier stood back and leered at her, raking his gaze over her body. His terrible smile flooded her with feelings of dread. She looked down at the floor to escape it.

The light switched off again and the soldier’s footsteps faded away. With a snicker, Jaci recognized the irony of wishing for the cold, dark place she’d been kept in before.

She stood for as long as she could before her legs gave out. The excruciating pain of being hung by her wrists made her cry out. The air seemed dead around her. The air–or the room–she wasn’t sure, seemed to gobble up every sound she made. Somewhere in the far reaches of her mind, it occurred to her that she may be hallucinating. Before long, she gave up her screaming, and eventually, she passed out.

Jaci woke to the sound of the door opening. She found her feet again and supported her own weight. It was a lame show of strength, but it was the best she could do.

The uniformed man who entered pinned her down with a piercing, blue-eyed, savage glare. She would have considered him handsome if it weren’t for the air of evil that followed him in.

“Good morning, Jaci. I’m General Morgan.”

She didn’t reply. She only followed his movements with her gaze.

“You’ve caused me a fuckload of trouble over the last two days.”

“By not dying when you wanted me to?” she rasped through her arid throat.

Out of nowhere, he slapped her face with a powerful swing. She hadn’t seen it coming and the impact swiveled her head around.