Ruthless by Sarah Tarkoff

Author:Sarah Tarkoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2020-03-30T00:00:00+00:00

5

“You went to see her? Alone?” Dawn was beside herself, as Irene gripped her hand, trying to calm her. When I’d arrived home in the early morning, I found my friends already assembled in our meeting room, a larger crowd this time, including Layla and a few other rescued members of the resistance. They’d heard about my late-night jaunt to the prison, and they were not happy about it. I was certainly not going to get any sympathy for my mommy issues from this group.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?” Zack asked, pacing the room. His tone was colder and more condescending than ever.

Feeling everyone’s eyes on me, judging, I got defensive. “Because I knew you’d react this way. I knew I’d get more out of her if I saw her one-on-one, if she felt like I was coming to her as a daughter, not an interrogator.”

“And what did you get from her?” Layla challenged.

I struggled to think of something that would seem worthwhile. “She won’t turn. We all knew that. But I think she’d believe me if we fed her false information. If we allowed her to communicate with the outside, maybe we could mislead the prophets.”

Dawn shook her head. “She knows too much about our position in Redenção. We can’t risk her being in contact with her home base.”

“We should just kill her,” Layla muttered.

“Kill my mother?” I asked her, pointedly.

Layla stared daggers at me, not backing down. The unspoken: You killed my father.

Irene stepped in, playing moderator, “No one wants to kill anyone. But I think we can all agree, Esther is the enemy. We shouldn’t trust her.”

I stepped in, defensive. “I never said we should trust her. I’m saying she’s valuable, there must be some way we can use her.”

“Torture her for information?” Zack suggested in a casual way that made me want to strangle him.

“My mother?” I asked again, incredulous.

“You’re the one who said she was valuable,” he reminded me.

Before I could answer, Dr. Marko entered, face grim. “Dr. Smith is dead.”

The room fell into a devastated silence. Dawn put a comforting arm around him, as tears ran down his face.

He stammered out, “Someone knew we were sending the serum and spiked it with cyanide. She tried to fake her death and . . . well, she never left the morgue.”

Dr. Marko’s oldest friend, and our one chance at fixing that machine, was gone. My mind reeled. I wondered, was there some way I could have saved her? I knew Dawn was right, that one life wasn’t worth compromising our position, but still, after the fact . . .

“How did they know we were sending the serum?” Irene asked. “If they’d just wanted her dead, they could have killed her a million other ways, but to intercept a package and contaminate it . . .”

“We have a mole,” Dawn said, definitively. Instinctively, eyes shot around the room, inspecting the faces it contained.

“It’s not anyone here,” Zack insisted.

“Who else knew?” Dawn asked.

Dr. Marko shook his head.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.