In The Afterlight

The back of the Mess Hall faced the forest, providing maybe ten feet of walking space between the building and the fence. The cameras never recorded what happened there, but only pointed out into the woods. It was one of the “blind spots” we’d learned to be afraid of very quickly.

She pushed the back door open with her shoulder, and I had a second to react.

I yanked the PSF around, twisting her arm behind her to the point of snapping the bone. She let out a choked noise of surprise that cut off sharply as I entered her mind.

She unfastened her uniform, ripping off her boots, the black camo shirt and pants, the belt, the dark cap, and let them fall to the ground. I kicked off my tennis shoes, trying to match the frenzied pace I’d set in her mind. She took my uniform as I passed it to her, tugging it on with a look of blank obedience. Too calm. I floated the image of her as a young child, standing at the heart of the camp, soldiers moving around her, closing in. I only eased up when she started to cry.

The flash drive fell out of my shoe into the frostbitten grass and I quickly palmed it, squeezing it tight to reassure myself it was really there.

The swap had taken no more than two minutes. Two minutes too long, maybe. I couldn’t tell—the PSFs were allowed to walk us into dark, unmonitored corners, rough us up a little bit before actually carrying out the punishment. If those missing moments had played that way to the camp controllers watching in the Control Tower, I’d be fine.

I walked the PSF toward the Garden, my breath fogging the air white with each sharp exhale. I kept my eyes on the thin chains hooked around one of the fence posts.

I wanted to say I was a good enough person not to feel some satisfaction as I sat the PSF down in the cold mud and locked her into place facing the fence, her back to the cameras on the nearby cabins and the soldiers patrolling the platform on the Tower. I wasn’t. After watching so many kids left out for hours on end, simply for talking back or looking at them sideways on a bad day, I wanted at least one of them to know what it felt like. I wanted one of them to see what they had done to Sam each time they brought her out here.

It wasn’t until I was walking back, passing the red vests posted along the path to the Control Tower and Mess Hall, that the first touch of nerves found me. Somehow, as I came closer to it, the brick tower had grown to be twice its original size; its crooked walls seemed to lean even more sharply up close.

This is an Op, I reminded myself. This is no different than any other Op. I would finish it and go home.

The PSF stationed next to the Control Tower’s door peered at me through the darkness. Searchlights from the watch platform above crisscrossed in front of me, sweeping around the camp, into the dark pockets where other lights couldn’t reach.

“Houghton—that you?”

I nodded, adjusting my cap down lower over my eyes, one hand straying to the rifle I’d slung over my shoulder.

“What’s—” His mind unfurled in spirals of green and white and red. I needed him to tap his security badge against the black pad behind him, so he did. I needed him to step aside, so he did. He did everything I asked, even holding the door open for me as I stepped inside.

I crossed the threshold into the warm heart of the camp. The heat from the vents sank through the layers of borrowed clothes, straight to my skin and bones. As I looked down the hall, toward the stairs leading up to the platform two stories overhead, I don’t know when I had ever felt so powerful in my life.

The door to my right opened, and a camp controller came out, holding a mug of coffee between his hands. The room behind him disappeared as the door slowly swung shut, but not before I saw the TV, the couches and chairs. His black button-down shirt wrinkled as he brought a hand up to yawn. The look he gave me was a friendly, what can you do? Half embarrassed, half unapologetic. Like the whole thing was one big joke.

I smiled, letting him pass by to get to the door propped open a short ways down the hall. After a beat, I followed. The left half of the building’s lower level was little more than an enormous monitoring station. Screens large and small lined the far wall, each showing a different angle of the camp. One was simply set to a satellite image of the weather; one showed a news channel on mute.

There were three rows of computers in total, though only half of the seats seemed to be occupied. It looked as though they were starting to pack this room up as well—working from left to right, slowly removing the nonessential stations.

This is why they needed the Reds, I thought. The draft was up for so many PSFs, and the ones that remained, along with the newer recruits, were tasked with moving the files and supplies in advance of the camp’s closure.

Focus.

I stepped down to the second row, sliding into the seat. The monitor flickered to life, waking up to reveal a basic desktop. Blood pounded in my ears, but my hands were surprisingly steady as I inserted the flash drive.

The folder opened and I transferred the program file over onto the desktop; I thought I’d misread it at first, my mind half-consumed with anxiety, but JUDE.EXE transferred quickly and appeared on the screen’s black background, next to the trash icon, just below a black triangular outline labeled Security.

When it finished, I erased the original file from the flash drive and dropped it to the floor, crushing the plastic shell under the heel of my left boot. The clock on the lower right-hand corner of the screen read 19:20.

I opened the COMMAND PROMPT window, typed START JUDE.EXE, and the icon disappeared from the desktop.

Nothing else happened.

Shit, I thought, glancing at the small clock again. Was that right? Why would—