“Come,” Miss Mia commanded me, and I quickly caught up with her as she went through automatic glass doors.
I don’t care about clothes on a good day so the next hour was torture, but an amazing torture. I didn’t know that clothes like this existed. Mrs. Allen, the Provost’s wife, had been the fanciest-dressed woman in our cell, and I’d assumed her matching skirt suits and impractical shoes were about as good as clothes got. But the things that Mia was picking out made Mrs. Allen look just regular.
Finally, finally Mia, with me trailing her like a hunting dog, went to the counter to pay. Behind the counter was a hall leading who knew where, and I tried to keep my eyes properly looking at my feet while the clerk boxed up all the new clothes and tied the boxes with wide satin ribbon.
With a flick of her hand Mia gestured to me to pick them up, and as I did so I glanced down the hallway. There was movement and I looked more sharply. Was that a flash of fair hair? It was gone in a second.
Back at the palace, Mia told me to unpack the boxes and put everything away.
“Remember that things are arranged by color and type,” she said, sounding nothing like the angry girl who had used her riding crop on her brother. I nodded silently. Here I was, sorting clothes by color and type when the President might already be here, in this building, where I could kill him!
Burning with impatience, I flicked the lids off the boxes and unpacked ridiculous shoes that I had to line up on shelves next to hundreds of other shoes, more freaking underwear that could not be described as sturdy or practical, skirts made of wool and leather that got hung up next to similar ones (kill me now), soft, beautiful sweaters that were folded just so and arranged in paper-lined drawers, a long, gorgeous dress o
f amber satin that was kept in its white paper bag and hung up like that, and… a gun.
96
HELEN
HELEN STREPP HAD BEEN SITTING on this metal chair for what felt like twelve hours. She knew it had probably been about four. Four hours was the prime length of time to keep a prisoner waiting—not so long that they got angry and defiant, not so short that they retained hope.
Her hands were chained to a metal link welded to the metal table. They’d gone numb about forty-five minutes into this. She was still considering escape possibilities but the best scenario she came up with only had a seven percent chance of working.
Ms. Strepp considered herself unsurprisable, yet when the interrogator walked in, she was surprised. More than surprised. Stunned. It took everything she had to keep the shock off her face.
“Hello, Helen,” said Ajana Nielson.
Helen realized she was staring at her and quickly looked away, striving for casualness. “Ajana,” she said evenly.
Ajana laughed. “That’s Vice President Nielson to you,” she said, further shocking Ms. Strepp.
“Vice President!” Helen said. “What happened to becoming a minister, having your own church?”
The Vice President laughed again. The harsh white light in this room no doubt made Helen look older than she was, and unhealthy to boot. But it bleached Ajana’s face to a sickly greenish mud, made her smooth brown arms look rubbery.
“I had a higher calling,” she said with a smile, the smile that Helen remembered heartbreakingly well. There was a thick file in front of her and now she opened it, skimming the first pages. “You’ve been busy,” she murmured. “Whew—an actual training camp! Looks like you had a higher calling, too.”
An unusual feeling began churning in Helen’s stomach. They’d known about the training camp? Did they know about the Knowledge Stash there? Her mind spun rapidly. She couldn’t remember how she was captured—head trauma, or maybe she was drugged. Did they breach the camp?
“I’m afraid everyone in the training camp is dead,” the Vice President said, making a tsking sound. Looking up at Helen, she shook her head. “It wasn’t us that killed all those kids. It was the plague. The plague that’s been emptying cell after cell.” She turned a few pages while Helen struggled not to cough, not to choke. Then sanity washed over her and she calmed down. Her camp wasn’t dead. They were fine. Ajana was making this up to break her. She would have done the same herself. She relaxed and breathed again.
Finally Ajana closed the file, gave Helen such a familiar look that Helen wanted to cry for the first time in—
“Helen, Helen, Helen. I thought we’d seen the last of you. This is all just so silly, your little ‘uprising.’ Why don’t you come back home and forget all this?”
“The palace isn’t my home,” Ms. Strepp said thinly. “Maybe it was once. But never again.”
“How many years has it been? Ten, twelve?”
Ms. Strepp’s lips were thin. “Seventeen.”
“And what have you accomplished?” Ajana asked, looking as if she really cared. “What is all this about? Are you saying you don’t want to live well, eat good food, have all comforts and conveniences available to you?” Her eyes were round, such a dark brown that Helen couldn’t see the pupil, and so caring. So deceptively caring.
Helen made her voice strong. “Not at the price of my soul.”
Ajana laughed again. “This is me, Helen. Your best friend. The girl you grew up with, played with, made plans with. Then you… betrayed us. Betrayed everything. And you never told me why.”
“You know why.”