Surrender (6 page)

To calm myself, I rolled onto my side and watched Jag sleep. My pulse slowed, and the air became lighter. He was right—he wasn’t bad.

He was perfect.

Sometime later, Jag nudged me. I moaned and rolled over, right onto the cement floor. “Ow,” I groaned, wishing I could rub my shoulder, but I’d been recuffed before bed. They
didn’t want me to “try anything bad” during the night. My shoulders burned, and stabbing pains arced up my arms from the techtricity.

“We’ve got another hearing,” he said, running the water in the sink and pulling his wet fingers through his hair to reform his spikes.

My throat turned dry. I was used to getting myself in trouble. But Jag? I didn’t want to be responsible for causing more problems for him.

“Do mine,” I said. He re-wet his hands and reached up, pausing when he saw my wrists.

His cool fingers traced along the cuffs. “Tech rash.” His voice held a knowing tone, like he wasn’t surprised the tech burned me. He finished my hair and I turned around.

“Nice.” He brushed his hand across my cheek. “You have such great hair.”

“You’re a freak about hair,” I said, turning away from him to examine my spikes in the mirror. I almost expected to see a trail on my cheek where he’d touched me. “Most people don’t even notice it, because of our hats and all.” That’s how I’d kept my new short do from my mom for almost two weeks. Zenn hadn’t said anything, he’d just raked his fingers through the short locks when I told him why I cut it.

“No hats in the Badlands,” Jag said. “Hair is like status there.”

“What does that mean?”

“Everyone will love yours. It means you’re like,
the
bad guy, you know? Except you’ll be the bad girl.” He stepped close enough for me to feel his body heat through the thin prison clothes. The charge of energy pulsed through me, a feeling of familiarity so strong, so overpowering, I almost asked him if we’d met somewhere before. But that was ridiculous. I’d never met a bad boy before.

“I don’t want to be bad,” I argued.

“Too late, Vi. You’re worse than me.”

I spun around, ramming into him with my shoulder. “Take that back.”

Face flushing, he stepped away.

“I am not bad,” I said.

“Okay, fine. You’re not bad.” He studied the cement floor. “But you really are,” he added under his breath. I might have taken a swing at his pretty-boy nose if I wasn’t double-cuffed. But three Mechs and no less than twelve heavily armed guards appeared, and I thought the timing was a little off.

The Mechs swiveled around me, one in front and one on each side. They were the switchless kind, way high-class, so I couldn’t turn them off without a decoder.

Jag walked ahead of me, uncuffed, with two guards next
to him. The other guards clustered around me, their tasers activated, ready to fire if I so much as sneezed. Like a fifteen-year-old water girl could take down ten fully grown men with muscles and weapons.

We marched through the abandoned halls. We didn’t wait for the Greenies to call our names before entering the shiny courtroom, which was likewise empty.

Jag and I stood together, without Mech-reps. I’m sure this was a violation of my rights—oh wait, Goodies don’t have rights. We link to the transmissions, work the jobs we’re told, marry who They match us with. In return, we’re provided with a good life. Or so the Thinkers wanted us to believe.

The Thinkers had also brainwashed me to believe the Badlands were just that—bad. After talking with Jag, I wasn’t so sure. Again, I wondered if my dad had been banished. The Badlands couldn’t be awful if he was there.

A doctor hovered nearby, his eyes trained on my wrists. He didn’t look surprised as he typed on an e-board and left.

Moments later, the Greenies swarmed through the door like vitamins fizzing in water. They buzzed among themselves, pointing at their p-screens. The middle Greenie entered last and sat in his previous spot. Even with bloodshot eyes and a stubbly chin, he radiated coldness.

“Remove her cuffs,” he said. The guard who moved to
comply didn’t look happy about it. I sighed in relief at the release.

“Violet,” the middle Greenie said. “What are we going to do with you?’

“Do, sir?” I asked innocently.

Several Greenies exchanged looks and raised their eyebrows as if to say,
Toldja about her heinous attitude.

The middle Greenie took a deep breath. “By order of Thane Myers, you must appear before the Association of Directors.”

I didn’t blink. Didn’t move. Didn’t understand.

“Who?” I asked at the same time the middle Greenie said, “You will both be implanted with tags.”

Tagged. Marked for life. In the Goodgrounds, that’s really, really bad. Every scanner, every reader, will pick up the tag. Alarms will wail. Everyone will know what you are. A loser. A criminal.

My future with Zenn faded into a white horizon, where I could hardly see it.

Jag stiffened next to me. “No way. You will not touch me with your Goodie tech crap.”

“You do not have a choice, Mr. Barque. You came here illegally, distributed contraband tech from the Badlands, and attempted to steal our technology.”

“I wanted to leave six weeks ago.”

“Six weeks?” I whispered. Jag ignored me, his cold blue eyes really frosty now. He and the middle Greenie seemed locked in a silent battle of wills.

“Perhaps. But you would have come back, with more of your Badlands hype. Now that you two are together, we have no other choice.”

My mind lingered on
together
, and what the middle Greenie meant by that. He’d put us together—did that mean we hadn’t done what he wanted? Or that we had?

“I’d rather die,” Jag said.

“No!” I whispered. They’d really do it. They had no qualms about killing. I should know—Ty is dead.

“The Association won’t take no for an answer this time. Sorry,” the middle Greenie said, sounding anything but apologetic. “Thane has authorized your transportation for the day after tomorrow.” He turned his attention to me. He was thinking that I wasn’t worth the trouble, and he should just get rid of me as fast as possible. Sometimes the eyes can’t hide everything. “Dismissed.”

We were herded upstairs to the cell where Jag did a most surprising thing.

He lay down on the bed and cried.

I hadn’t pegged him for a crier. His eyes were always so bright, so full of life, like he lived for trouble.

Ty had been that way too, except she lived for the water, the adventure of being herself—of
finding
herself. The day the black-hearted men came to take her, my mother tried to stop them. But a single taser blast caused her to sleep the rest of the week away. She missed my birthday and everything. Not that she would’ve done anything to celebrate, but still.

I’d hugged Ty and she’d wiped my tears, promising to visit. She whispered that she’d see me again, and hey, we’d walk around the lake and laugh at how we cried like babies
when she left. She only came home once. Then the dark-skinned government guy told us she’d died working on a new piece of tech that backfired.

After that, he’d had to use his submission tactics on me, or I might have killed him. That’s when the real trouble had started.

As I watched Jag’s shoulders heave, I felt the same mix of anger and grief as when Ty left. Finally I knelt on the bed and placed my hand on his back. I patted awkwardly, hoping that was protocol for when someone is sobbing their eyes out.

“Hey.”
Pat, pat.
“It’s okay. We’ll bust out of here before they tag us.”
Pat, pat, pat.
I felt lame.

He pushed himself up and wiped his hand across his face. He avoided looking directly at me. “Do you really think you can get us out of here?”

Of course I couldn’t. Didn’t he remember my last pathetic attempt? I hadn’t even made it out of the bathroom. But his lovely eyes, not so cold anymore, the perfectly curved arch of his mouth . . .

I’d tell him whatever it took to make him stop crying. “Sure,” I lied. “We’ll go tonight.”

He threw his arms around me and pulled me down onto the bed with him. His laugh filled my soul, and I wanted
nothing more than to feel that sound reverberating in his chest. So I laid my cheek against his breastbone as the last echo faded away. Startled by his embrace as well as my own actions, I withdrew quickly and lay on the floor, refusing to meet his eyes.

I warned you not to touch him.

I jerked at the sound of the voice, hitting my elbow on the wall behind me. Once again, I was in direct opposition of the rules. Because I craved the human touch. I always had. I shook away my traitorous thoughts.

“Sorry,” Jag said, his fingers trailing along my shoulder. “Didn’t mean to freak you out.”

“It’s okay. I—I don’t know.”

“Do I scare you?” He leaned over the side of the bed.

“Course not.”

He smiled, making my heart skip a beat. “Nice.” He said that a lot. It was like his shrugging thing.

“How come you’ve been here for six weeks?”

“Rehab,” he said. “They tried transmissions, but I wouldn’t wear the comm. So they tried counseling with one of your Goodie mind doctors. That didn’t really work either. They don’t want me to be here, but they thought it might be better than letting me go back to the Badlands. I didn’t think they’d send me to Freedom.”

“Where is Freedom?”

“Back east. Vi,” his voice dropped to a whisper, “we can’t go there. We’ll never come out. Thane . . . well, we just can’t go there.”

I waited for more of an explanation, but he clammed up.

“Because we’re Free Thinkers,” I said, as if stating a fact. Baldie had called me that at the first trial. That’s why Jag and I were in the same cell and why I felt such a strong connection to him. “Why won’t we survive in Freedom?”

In the dim artificial light, his eyes reflected fear. “That’s where the Association is.”

“Yeah, so?”

“They’re the good guys,” he said.

“Like—”

“Like, really good guys,” Jag repeated. Which meant they’d be pretty bad for me.

“Who’s Thane Myers?” I asked.

“Nobody,” Jag answered, the lie written in all three syllables.

“He’s controlling everything,” I whispered. The guards. The Greenies, maybe even Jag. I’d heard his name enough to know.

“Forget about Thane,” Jag said, his voice oddly powerful. “Let’s figure out how to get out of here.”

I rolled away, trying to think of how a Goodie could get out of prison.

Then it hit me.

Be bad.

We didn’t go that night. I promised Jag we’d try after showers in the morning, buying myself some time by telling him I had something to check in the bathroom. Really, I just needed to think of something a Baddie would do.

Instead, he told me stories about the Badlands and how he hadn’t been to school in three years. He said everyone got to choose their clothes. Long sleeves or short. Blue or red or purple. Didn’t matter. No hats, unless you wanted to wear one for “fashion purposes.” (I didn’t even know what that meant.) I couldn’t fathom that kind of freedom. Every morning my closet spat out a pair of blue jeans and a drab long-sleeved shirt.

Jag told me that most people are happy being bad because they don’t know any different. He only knew because he came to the Goodgrounds on a regular basis. He knew the tech we had—saw how the Badlands could benefit from our purification systems and comforts of life.

I couldn’t argue. It felt totally unfair—except for the brainwashing part. I could leave the links and transmissions behind pretty easily.

I wondered if I’d ever been happy being good. I mean, I didn’t know any different either—at least not until I stopped plugging in. When I mentioned it to Jag, he said, “It’s just a control tactic, Vi, to make you believe one thing over another.”

I knew that, I did. But a lifetime of labels is hard to overcome. Maybe I just needed a new label, one that was neither good nor bad. Because Jag seemed good enough to me, no matter where he’d been born. In fact, he was the complete opposite of everything I’d been raised to believe about Baddies. Disease-ridden, losers, undeserving of help—just plain bad people.

Nothing about Jag meshed with what I’d believed about the Baddies. I harbored such negative feelings for them. Because I blamed them for Dad’s long absence.

But now . . . yeah, now nothing made sense.

Finally Jag slid the pencil into the spiral binding of his notebook and shoved it under his pillow. I sat next to him, staring through the bars into the corridor. How could I get us out of here? I swallowed my doubt, determined not to give in yet. I would think of something.

Jag threaded his fingers through mine and leaned toward me. The tension drained from my body as I enjoyed the same comfortable silence I’d only experienced with Zenn. I
forced the thought of Zenn away. Tagged and sentenced to the Association, my past life was just that—in the past. I only wished it didn’t make me feel so empty.

“You do smell like a guy,” Jag whispered, his voice soft in my ear. His breath trickled down my spine. His fingers filled the spaces between mine perfectly.

“Shut up,” I managed to say, but my voice sounded breathless. Surely he noticed the effect he had on me. I wasn’t that good at hiding it. We’d only been living in the microscopic cell together for two days, but I felt a connection with Jag somewhere inside—somewhere I hadn’t known existed until I met him.

I slid off the bed and settled onto the floor, my hip bone grinding painfully into the unyielding cement. Jag leaned over the side of the bed. “Vi?”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll help you.” His hand rested on my shoulder as I fell asleep.

For the first time in, like, forever, I might have been able to sleep all night, but the whirring Mechs roused me before it was light. Jag didn’t stir, even amidst the creepy Mech-chatter—unusual for his light sleeping habits.

The Mechs (three of them) escorted me to an elevator
(totally old tech) and we rode to level one (at least I’d fallen asleep with my shoes on). I couldn’t have managed a descender right then, so I was thankful. The doors opened into a room flooded with the whitest of lights. I squinted as the advanced tech-buzz assaulted my senses. Way more than cloudy vision, this was like going blind because someone was hacking with a sharp object from inside my head.