it my way.”
He scowled. “Fine.”
“Fine.”
He punched a nine-digit code into a small metal box, and a moment later, the door to the bunker opened. We stepped inside. A long concrete hallway stretched out in front of us, and the darkness obscured the high ceiling. I swallowed hard and tried not to think about what was up there, just out of sight: two dozen guards, each with a rifle pointed directly at us.
Guilty until proven innocent. That was how it was for the government, and that was how it was for the Blackcoats. Knox could talk about a rebellion and change until he was blue in the face, but as I followed him through the corridor, my head down and Benjy’s jacket clutched around my shoulders, I began to wonder whether or not anything would really change if the Blackcoats succeeded. I believed in freedom and democracy with everything I was, but if Celia and Knox won the rebellion, the people would still be under the rule of the Hart family. In the end, how many lives would really change for the better?
I pressed my lips together. The Blackcoats weren’t perfect, but they were fighting for the rights of the people—the same rights Daxton Hart and the twelve Ministers of the Union took pleasure in denying them. As I watched Knox punch in another code at the end of the dark corridor, the day of my testing flashed through my mind, and cold fear prickled down my spine, a ghost of a life that was slowly slipping away from me with each day that passed. I knew what it was like to be one of them. I knew what it was like to wake up every morning wondering if today would be the day I ran across a Shield in a bad mood, and he would drag me into the street and shoot me in the head just because he had a gun and I didn’t. I knew what it was like to watch it happen to others and worry I was next. And I knew what it was like to consider the possibility that maybe it wouldn’t be the worst thing in the world after all.
It was preferable to the alternative: being sent Elsewhere, a place that, until two months ago, I had deluded myself into thinking was some kind of summer camp for criminals, the elderly, and those deemed unfit for society. Daxton had cleared that up for me my first day as Lila, when he’d taken me hunting in a lush forest. We hadn’t been hunting deer or quail, though. We’d been hunting humans.
That was why I was doing this. Not for the people who wanted to keep their heads down and live as happily as their ranks allowed, but for the people whose lives didn’t belong to them anymore. For the people who saw what this world was really like and had no way of escaping it.
Knox led me through a twisting hallway full of armories and colorless bunks, where refugees and members of the Blackcoats stayed. The heart of the bunker was set in the center, where roughly a dozen people had gathered on ratty and worn chairs and couches, each poring over papers I knew would be burned once the meeting ended. Several heads raised when Knox and I joined them, and a few of them even waved. Knox didn’t wave back.
I watched them closely. Most were decades older than me, their faces lined by age and stress. A handful looked to be in their twenties, but even they seemed weighed down. My heart sank. Whatever was going on, it wasn’t good.
In the center of the ragtag group sat an officer wearing a black-and-silver uniform. Sampson, a high-ranking member of the Shields, and one of the leaders of the Blackcoats. I’d only met him a few times, but as I found a place at the edge of the group, he offered me a warm smile. I smiled back.
“Well?” said Knox impatiently. “What happened?”
Sampson’s smile faded. “The raid failed.”
Knox swore loudly. “How? We had everything planned down to the last detail—”
“Celia found out right before it happened,” said Sampson. “She changed the plan.”
Silence. Slowly Knox’s face went from pink to red to purple. Not once in the past few months, not even when I’d been at my worst, had I ever seen him turn those colors.
It was then that I noticed Celia and Lila were missing, despite Knox’s assumptions that they’d be there tonight. Was this why? Was Celia avoiding him? Or had she been uninvited from her own rebellion?
“You know not to listen to Celia without going through me first,” said Knox in a low, dangerous voice. “No matter what she says—”
“Her ideas weren’t bad,” said Sampson. Even he seemed to shrink under Knox’s glare. “And what was I supposed to do? Say you’d taken over her own army?”
“You should have protected our people.” Knox slammed his fist into a worn wooden coffee table, and half the group jumped. I dug my nails into my palms. “Days—that’s how long we have. Days, Sampson. We needed those supplies. Celia doesn’t have the military knowledge or experience—”
“And you do?” snapped Sampson.
“I’m not some spoiled VII who’s never had to work for anything a day in her entire life,” said Knox.
Before I could stop myself, I snorted.
All eyes turned toward me. My face grew warm, but it was Knox’s stare that made me feel as if I were about to spontaneously combust.
“Did you have something to say, Kitty?” he said. His voice slithered through me, turning my blood to ice.
I should have kept my mouth shut. After everything that had happened that evening, the last thing I should’ve done was add fuel to the fire that was Knox’s temper, but something inside me broke. “If you’re going to rag on Celia for inheriting her VII, then at least acknowledge you had your VI handed to you, too. We all know your father’s title will pass to you one day, and it wouldn’t do to have the next Minister of Ranking with a IV or a V, would it?”
As I repeated the very words he’d said to me when he’d first told me he’d never taken the test, Knox’s face drained of all color, and the silence around us turned deafening. “If you have a problem with any of this, then there’s the door,” he said in a deceptively even voice. But the dark look in his eyes offered me a single promise: if I walked out of there, I would never be allowed back.
“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—” I sucked in a deep breath. I didn’t owe him an apology for defending Celia, not when he was acting like this. “I’m just saying, we’re here because none of us believes in the rank system in the first place. You have every right to be upset with her, but don’t drag Celia down based on her rank. It only makes you look like a hypocrite when your VI is as good as my VII.”
“Perhaps so,” said Knox coldly, “but between us, I’m the one who could earn my VI if I had to, while you’re the one who earned a III.”
My mouth dropped open, and his words twisted in my chest like a knife. No matter how bad a mood he was in, no matter how rebellious I was feeling, he had never used my III against me before.
Guilt flashed across his face. He knew what he’d said, but he made no move to apologize. We stared at one another as the seconds passed. My hands tightened into fists, and the edges of my vision went dark as I tried to figure out what to say. He was right, of course—I’d earned my lowly III, but not because I wasn’t smart. I couldn’t read anything more than my name, and I’d had to take the test orally, which had resulted in me never getting the chance to finish it. If I had—maybe I’d be a VI, like Benjy. Maybe Daxton would have never hunted me down, and maybe my life would be completely different.
But I couldn’t live off of maybes,
