Article 5 by Kristen Simmons

Author:Kristen Simmons
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Speculative Fiction
ISBN: 9780765329585
Publisher: Tor
Published: 2012-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER

9

“WHAT? Who?” Was it Randolph? Had he suspected something?

My thoughts backtracked to the overhaul, to the blond soldier with the green eyes. And the three marks down his neck from my nails.

“Morris.” I guessed. It had seemed like they were friends. You said you’d be cool, Morris had said when Chase protected me. He’d obviously known Chase and I had had some sort of connection in the past.

“You know him?”

“How could I forget? He arrested me.”

“Tucker Morris is…” Chase grimaced, as if unable to find the right word. “He was in my unit. He came back with me after he … delivered you to transport.” He glanced quickly over and then looked away, his face tightly drawn.

“Why would Tucker have called the reformatory?” I asked, glad that Chase seemed to dislike him as much as I did.

An odd expression crossed his face. He was beyond angry now. Tortured almost. Clearly Tucker had done something really bad to Chase.

Or Chase had done something really bad to Tucker. Which would explain why Tucker would have turned him in.

“There’s … sort of a history there.”

“What ‘sort of a history’?” I asked dubiously.

I could hear Chase’s heel tapping the floor. He hesitated so long I thought he wasn’t actually going to answer me. Then he sighed heavily, resigned to sharing.

“Tucker enlisted in the Bureau about the time I was drafted. We were in the same training cohort.” He was rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands.

“And you two hit it off?” I prompted dryly. Getting Chase to explain anything was like pulling teeth.

“No,” he said. “We had some things in common. Important things for training. We’re about the same size, so they put us together for hand-to-hand, and—”

“Hand-to-hand fighting?”

“Yeah. Combat maneuvers. He seemed all right at first, quiet, but decent anyway. We had classes together, just like in school. On the Statutes and all their caveats. Negotiations. And then policies and procedures for management of disruptive civilians.”

I snorted, thinking of my mom telling the soldiers to get off our property.

“He got in some trouble.…” Chase waved his hand, indicating that this part of the story was inconsequential. “After that he was a real pain. Arguing with everything the instructor said. Refusing to follow orders. Kid couldn’t even fill out the correct paperwork for an SV-one.”

I frowned. I didn’t want Tucker to have rebelled against the MM, because that’s what I had done, and I didn’t want to have anything in common with that blond-haired, green-eyed coward. I motioned impatiently for Chase to continue.

“It wasn’t that he couldn’t get anything right. It was that he purposefully tried to get things wrong. He kept sneaking off base, then getting caught and thrown in the brig. Getting his pay docked, his rank stripped. He was sort of used to calling his own shots, and he had … uh … ties he couldn’t cut at home,” he added.

“Have to dedicate your life to the cause, right?” I feigned indifference but remembered with a pang what Rebecca had told me in the reformatory.

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