Reborn (Alpha's Claim 3)

“You needed help carrying supplies. I needed to do something useful, for once. The months of my seclusion have shown us one truth, over and over. My uncle was wrong... I was wrong. My access to Shepherd’s communications did nothing to further the resistance’s cause.” Leslie let the Beta see her need for vengeance. “The proof is on the wall before you.”

Corday’s response was automatic. “You have interpreted messages that have saved the lives of many of our brothers and sisters.”

“How did they find him? How did no one know he was missing until this morning?” Face pinched, she whispered, “What if Shepherd... what if he only let us think we operated out of his influence?”

An ironic, painful chuckle escaped the Beta.

Rubbing her skull as if it ached, Leslie sighed. “Your visitor, that Maryanne woman, may have been right. If they found Senator Kantor, they know where the resistance gathers. Shepherd knows where you live. He knows about me and my access to this commutations network.”

Exactly Corday’s unspoken point; the resistance was in ruins.

Leslie had more to say. “What if your Omega Claire had made a deal with her mate? He may have been watching us this whole time.” A question wracked with doubt trailed off, “How else could this...?”

He didn’t want to hear it; Corday didn’t even want to think it. “We must get back to headquarters. Brigadier Dane needs to be told what was done here.”

Leslie Kantor grew vehement. “This has to end.”

The word left him in a breath, he was at a loss. “How?”

“I have been to your meetings. I’ve spoken with my uncle! Brigadier Dane, Senator Kantor, refused to engage Shepherd’s army. All they did, all she will do, is police the population and bribe potential recruits with food and false hope, while our enemy grows more powerful.”

Everything Leslie was saying was true. Corday agreed with her, but the resistance was too undermanned. Weaponry was scarce, bullet stores diminishing by the day. Had they attacked months ago as Claire had suggested, a rebellion might have stood a chance. Now... the only prayer they had was to find the contagion and wait for the city to implode.

Senator Kantor had been trying to prevent such an outcome. He’d been trying to save as many lives as possible. He had tried to outthink a man far smarter than him.

Corday repeated himself, robotic and unable to even hint at what was going through his mind. “We need to take this body to headquarters.”

Leslie softened her eyes and offered a sad smile. “No, darling Corday. There is no more time to hide away. I will not hand our city over to the inept hands of Brigadier Dane’s failing leadership. There is another place we can go, a place my uncle refused to consider. Inside there might be food, supplies, guns, ammunition... everything we need to take a stand and end this.”

Eyes bone dry in their sockets, feeling as if all life had been sucked from him, Corday made himself engage. He knew the very place she suggested and understood why it was off-limits. “During the breach, while my fellow Enforcers were trapped in the Judicial Sector, dying from plague, Callas’s home went into lockdown. For all we know, the contagion was let loose behind that steel barricade. To force the gate could expose the population and kill us all.”

She turned her back on the blood in the room, moving to the dwelling’s small window and its slice of sunlight marking the ground. “There is another way inside, Corday, a small, secret entrance. Like my uncle, I know where it is.”

The information did not surprise him. In fact, he, others in the resistance, had suspected there must be secondary access—an escape hatch in case of emergency. It had been Senator Kantor who fervently refused to risk the lives of millions to find out what might lie within the Premier’s home.

Leslie answered his silence, turning her head to see him motionless, the corpse of her uncle wrapped in plastic and cradled in his arms. “If nothing is done we are going to die. The proof is in this room. Salvation might wait beyond Callas’s door, and Shepherd would never suspect the resistance would gather there. Let him think he’s won, that we’ve disbanded while we rally behind walls he cannot penetrate. This is our only chance, Corday.”

There was another roadblock, the woman the resistance would look to for leadership. “Brigadier Dane will stand against you on this.”

“That’s why we are going to open it, you and I, before we go to her. When we come to the resistance, we come bearing hope, or we die as we should for our ineptness.” She sounded so much like her uncle in that moment: imperious, confident. “Now, put him down. Leave my uncle here. He would not want us to waste time or endanger ourselves simply to cart his body to be gawked at by the people he loved.”