This Shattered World

Commander Towers doesn’t react, listening to me with what seems to be polite interest and no more. Still, there’s the faintest of twitches along her jaw, and my eyes seize on it.

“I’m sure there was nothing in it,” I say dismissively, leaning back in my chair again. “Not unlike the fairy tales they tell to keep themselves company in the evenings. Stories about how they keep moving it and it’s never in the same place twice, that sort of thing.”

Towers nods. “Anything else?”

I shake my head. “Only rumors.”

The commander straightens, running a hand over her hair and then getting to her feet. “Thank you, Captain.”

I scan her face, looking for something, anything, that will explain her sudden interest and her just as sudden dismissal. There’s little to read there—the men call me Stone-faced Chase, but I’ve got nothing on Towers when it comes to playing our cards close to our chests. But her gaze moves too quickly, lips thin, shoulders rounded more than usual. She’s on alert, edgy. And I don’t think it’s solely from the bombing.

“Of course, sir. I don’t think it’s anything to worry about, though. Just stories.”

She nods, lips curving in the barest hint of a smile. “Understood, Captain. Carry on—I’ll be in touch.”

I can’t explain why, but I have the strongest sense she’s not involved. That she’s every bit as driven as I am to find out what’s happening out there. Her movements are quick, jerky, anxious. She wants to be out of here as badly as I want her to go. I haven’t forgotten why I’m really here.

For half an instant, I want to blurt the truth. But to do so would reveal my part in all of this; that I could have captured a key player from the Fianna and didn’t, that I’d let him escape from me not once now, but twice. It would reveal that I’d betrayed my purpose here.

Most of all, it would betray Cormac.

And so I bite down hard on my lip and get to my feet, flashing a salute at Commander Towers as she turns and strides from the room. I stand there, gathering my wits, and then close the door lightly behind her.

By clearing the room of the techs, she’s unwittingly given me my opportunity.

With one foot I nudge a desk chair over so that the door, should anyone open it, will hit the chair with a clatter. A locked door would scream guilt, but the chair might distract anyone entering long enough for me to distance myself from the consoles and hide what I’m doing.

Drawing in a deep breath, I drop into another chair and start hunting for the files I need.

It takes me several long moments to navigate to the places where the surveillance footage is stored, but that’s not the hard part. Deleting those files is the work of a few seconds. The real challenge is locating the places where the various files are backed up.

My fingers know the way, my brain only half-focused on what I’m doing. One of the men I trained with taught me how to do this, and he learned it from a kid who did this for a living. My old captain, when I was a corporal, let us learn on the sly. You never pass up anything that can be used as a weapon, he said, any way of fighting that doesn’t involve bloodshed. I chafed at the instruction at the time—why would I ever need to learn how to hack into secure files?—but now, I mouth silent gratitude for my old captain and his foresight.

I try to focus. I can’t stop to think about what I’m doing, because it betrays every oath I’ve ever taken, every order I’ve ever received. It betrays everything I believe in. It’s a violation deep enough to make my soul, whatever shreds of it are left, ache. I’m helping a rebel. A criminal. A person whose friend just killed over thirty people, including someone I loved like a brother.

My eyes blur with exhaustion, and I have to pause to wipe my sleeve across my face. It leaves behind a darker patch of sweat and grime on the fabric. Now and then footsteps approach the door, but they always continue on past, striding away in time to the pounding of my heart. Still, at any moment someone might pop their head in.

There—finally. The fourth and final backup. The military always does things in fours—three being the natural number, four to be safe. The system spends a long breath-stealing instant thinking about my deletion command—and then the file vanishes. No fanfare, no sign it was ever there. No trace of the treason I’ve just committed.

I quickly close down the computer, taking care to erase any record I was ever poking around in there. The monitor closed, the chair shoved back where it belongs, I slip out into the corridor and let the room close behind me.

Mind blank, ears roaring, I float down the hallway toward the exit, limbs starting to shake. I swallow hard, fighting nausea. I need to get back to my quarters. Have a shower, lie down for a few minutes. Let myself think, breathe. Find a way to get Cormac out, now that we have some time to work with.

The corridor opens up into the main room, where the techs from the surveillance repository have joined the officers currently on duty. They’re all crowded around one of the monitors, which is no longer split to show the live feeds from the base. Instead it’s playing the same three or four seconds of footage over and over in a loop.

I take a few steps closer, peering silently past their heads—and my heart stops. It’s the footage I just painstakingly erased. One of the techs must have had it on a local drive so they could keep working while evicted from the repository.

Because not only is it the footage—they’ve finished cleaning it up and enhancing it. The clip playing over and over again shows him clearly: the handsome chin, the thick brows, the arrogant smile.