But then he paused.
The image was still etched in my memory. He stood beside the first prisoner and cracked his neck, a spark of silver flashing at the tip of his finger. I’d squinted at the screen, my stomach falling when Adam whispered, “Is that ascalpel?”
In the next several seconds, I discovered that the method a man chose to deliver a death sentence told me everything I needed to know about him.
Catlike movements brought Lucas Scott before the first prisoner in line. He gripped the man’s shoulder and punctured his neck. A quick crank of Scott’s wrist, and he moved to the next one while the dying man dropped to his knees.
My head spun at his indifferent efficiency, less messy than his fellow Blood Colonels, but more cold-blooded.
Ninety seconds. Twenty breaths. Fewer than two hundred heartbeats.
He’d killed them all. Like a robot. Wholly inhuman.
I’d never seen anything like it.
On the screen, bodies littered the ground, pools of blood spreading through the dust. Pale as death, Lucas Scott twirled his scalpel around his fingers like a pencil and tossed it over his shoulder. He’d disappeared offscreen, leaving us to stare at the carnage he’d left behind.
Now, that same man had me beguiled. Who was this person who killed like a machine but took time out of his life to train me to survive? I wanted to understand every word he said and action he took. Why was he doing this? Why take this risk when he didn’t seem to hold the Defiance in any esteem, when he had no problem murdering us in broad daylight?
They hurt my sister.
Where was his sister? Did she live in this city with him?
I brought my concerns to Theo, and he confirmed he still didn’t know the whereabouts of this mystery girl despite several attempts to locate her.
Still, regardless of his motives, Lucas Scott’s information was on point. Over the next several weeks, while I struggled beneath his deadly hands, he passed along guarded NAO secrets. Upcoming plans, battle tactics, locations of interest—all in Theo’s grasp. We learned their food and supply routes, the many locales of the Stability bloc, how they rotated women through the House.
Week by week, the infrastructure of the NAO made its way to Theodore Harrison, and a notorious NSF Blood Colonel, the man who’d greeted us with the coldest execution in the NAO’s history, became the greatest asset we’d had since the start of the war.
10
Crippled
The greatest enemies in a combat survival and evasion situation are fear and panic.
—U.S. ARMY FIELD MANUAL
The guilt over ignoring Zara boiled over the next day, and I met her at the quarantine house. Given that the local hospitals were either abandoned or only treated loyalists of the NAO, we’d been forced to commandeer a roadside hotel to provide more privacy for the patients who needed long-term healing. All medics took weekly shifts at the facility. They were like a breath of clean air compared to the suffocation of the hospital wing at headquarters, where the injuries proved endless. The patients at the quarantine house needed little more than TLC.
It gave Zara and me plenty of time to chat.
That used to be something I looked forward to. Now, I couldn’t stifle the fear that gnawed at me as we settled into our usual chairs in the old check-in lobby.
What would the next loss do to me? Who would it be? Would it be Zara?
Which of my friends would I hug goodbye, only never to see again?
I first met Zara Akbari when she’d cared for me during a flu outbreak more than a year ago, but the woman had taken me under her wing when Theo assigned me as a medic. Twenty years my senior, she’d been a practicing physician for at least a decade before The Fracture. She’d taught me pathophysiology and pharmacology while Dr. Grayson schooled me on the nitty-gritty of field medicine.
While Dr. Grayson was quick and dirty, Dr. Akbari was all nuance and gentility.
“Why do we still call it the quarantine house?” I asked as I sank deep into my chair.
She laughed. “I suppose it’s a misnomer, given it isn’t used for quarantine any longer.”
“Nor is it a house,” I said with a forced chuckle.
“Old habits, I suppose.”
