I gasped.
“What?” the man asked, looking at me as if I was the crazy one. “We always kill the men. What do we need them for?”
As the three chosen ones led Stephanie and me to our new destiny, only one thought kept me going: my father knew this was going to happen. He knew Henry, Thomas, and Daniel would be killed.
Henry.
I would make it through this.
If only for him.
Chapter 24
I leaned my head back against the wall and tried to slow my breathing. I was sucking in too much air, and I didn’t know how much longer I would be locked in the closet. It was the third time this week that I had been forced into the cramped room and bolted inside. The last time I had passed out from lack of oxygen.
I was being punished for my sins.
After the incident in the woods, our captors, Stephanie, and I had traveled by foot for a week to a safe point belonging to the council’s network of outposts and training facilities. Of course, these places were quickly becoming abandoned and obsolete. The council no longer had the manpower to run the establishments, so they moved their armies closer to the headquarters themselves. There, we were joined by other female prisoners taken from the compounds and training centers destroyed in what the chosen ones were calling the Great Reckoning.
The Great Reckoning. I didn’t ask what it meant. It remained a series of words for me. The only meaning they held was created by the council, and I had stopped caring long ago what they wanted me to believe.
Even the war that seemed to be brewing out of control felt unimportant to me. What did I know of Eastern and Western except what was told to me through the council? A distorted and dirty filter that attempted to shape my world in whatever fashion it desired. This wasn’t a war I was part of; I was merely collateral damage. This was a war between two giants who used science as their weapons. And I was just trying to survive.
Surviving meant living in the council headquarters themselves, the heart of evil. If I were going to find that beach McNair dreamed of, I’d uncover the map there.
The chosen ones were proud of the council’s headquarters and boasted of its beauty almost as if I should feel honored to be imprisoned within its walls. Built in what was once called Nevada, the headquarters, like the chosen ones who protected it, was a work of art that left one breathless. The chosen one who had killed Henry explained that it was copied from a building that once existed in England. This hardly came as a surprise, as much of the council’s prescribed buildings, clothing, and etiquette harkened back to ideas of English propriety. They had always tried to recapture the spirit of that great empire.
But they should have known that all empires fall.
Somerleyton Hall was the name of the original building the headquarters was copied from. When Stephanie and I came upon it, after a week of walking and several days in a council transport, we both gasped. We couldn’t help it.
Surrounded by formal gardens and mazes built from hedges, the vast greenery glared against the harsh tans and golds of the desert that surrounded it. Worlds that weren’t meant to live together. When I had dared to bend down and touch the grass, marveling at its ability to exist in such a place, I discovered it was fake. Learning this truth did little to diminish the splendor.
Creating something artificial wasn’t an entirely new practice for the council. Their scientists were called creators, after all. They simply had to think of what they wanted, and then it would come into existence. Or it would be forced to.
Stephanie and I were informed the building was constructed in a mixture of Tudor and Jacobean designs. Those terms meant nothing to us. All I could know was what I saw—a mixture of brick and granite. Crèmes melting into reds. Domes and spires that reached for the sky. Flowers that crawled up from the ground and danced with the brick, weaving and twisting over columns and railings.
Inside, the grandeur of Templeton was taken to the extreme. Gold and silver gleamed and sparkled like the sun and stars themselves were at war. Marble floors were covered with rugs with the most interesting designs and colors I had ever seen—blues, yellows, indigos, greens, and reds meshed and melded together in perfect, dizzying harmony.
So much color for an organization that infused our lives with darkness. Did they think they were the only ones who got to keep the richness and beauty of the world?
When we lined up that first day to receive our orders, I had convinced myself that my time at the headquarters would be spent in a similar fashion to my time served at Templeton. I would keep hidden, cleaning and tending to the needs of the great estate that kept and trained young chosen ones.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
Terribly and utterly wrong.