“You’ll meet him eventually,” Ellis says with a dismissive wave of her hand. “His health isn’t the best, so he doesn’t get out much. But the main office is also where all the people I just mentioned stay. We have an infirmary and several multipurpose rooms—storage, smaller meeting rooms, stuff like that.”
A few people poke their heads out of the makeshift homes as we pass. Whispers follow. I catch Ellis’s name, obviously, but I hear mine a lot, too. It makes the hair on the back of my neck rise—and I always thought that was just some dumb expression.
Some of them smile with recognition, and a bunch say hi, but no one tries to actually talk to us. They’re all young, most of them around fourteen, I’d guess. Of course. Everyone here is a Nyte, so obviously everyone is younger than twenty—but it still throws me off to see kids who can’t be older than six or seven running around tossing balls back and forth.
I wonder if I knew any of these people in the past. I wonder if everyone already knows I lost my memories and if that’s why they’re not saying more than hello even though they look like they want to talk. Which is another surprising thing. When they see Ellis, they don’t act like they’ve seen some terrifying leader who rules with an iron fist but like they’ve seen their guardian. Their eyes light up. They call out greetings to her like they would to any other person on the street. A few little kids run up to her and wrap their arms around her legs until she laughs and gently pries them off.
The feeling of camaraderie is so thick I almost choke on it. Whenever I thought of the rebels before, I always imagined them as desperate—clinging to anything that might let them live and attack the sector. But the people I see are different from that. The farther we go into the underground city, the busier it gets. Kids run around screaming obnoxiously but happily. Some of the older Nytes keep an eye on them, protective older siblings, while others stroll down the streets running errands as if all this was totally normal. Picking up food at the distribution center Ellis points out to me? All right. Chatting with anyone you happen to run into on the way? Cool. Living in the dark underground? Sure, why not.
They don’t seem like bloodthirsty killers. They’re just going about their lives. Yeah, sure, without most luxuries that living in the sector gets you, but there’s no sense of danger here. They’re all in this together, and you can tell from the feeling in the air. Everyone here is just … normal.
When we reach the end of what I’d guess is the main street, Ellis stops and spins around to face me. She’s been dropping so many names and so much info on places we pass that it’s all spinning in my head. “So?” She holds her hands clasped behind her back, arms extended straight behind her. It’s the same exact thing Lai does when she’s messing around. “What do you think? Not bad for only having two years behind us, right?”
“Not bad is an understatement,” I say, and I mean it. “This place is incredible. I still can’t believe you managed to find such a perfect place for all this.”
“Well, we couldn’t have done it without the help of our fellow gifted,” Ellis says. “This place isn’t the only one of its kind, either. The other underground caverns are much smaller, but they make the perfect locations for bases.”
“Why even bother having bases aboveground, then?” I ask, thinking of my first mission with the team, when we took out a rebel base. The memory unexpectedly hurts. It’s only been a few hours, but I’m surprised by how much I miss them. Or maybe I just miss the feeling that I could trust them with my back. Now, I’m surrounded by people I have to watch my every word around. “Wouldn’t it be safer to just do everything below? How do you even have the supplies to build bases aboveground, anyway?”
“Not everything can be done belowground,” Ellis says. “Besides, if we always have our people coming up and down for everything, it’d only be a matter of time before the military caught on. We do everything of import down below, and the aboveground bases act as transition points for less critical matters. That way, even if they’re taken down, it won’t be a huge loss to us. And we don’t build the bases up above—they already existed, just like these caverns. We just fix them up a bit and take them for ourselves.”
Great to know how much effect our mission had. “How do you just find abandoned bases? And wouldn’t one of the sectors have claimed them?”
“It’s the same with these caverns and the broken sector we set up our ambush in,” Ellis says. “Sorry about that, by the way. But they’re places that used to be occupied before people up and abandoned them for whatever reason. Probably from before the nuclear war. And sure, the military could try to occupy them—but they’re so far out of the way of the sectors themselves, it would be too much trouble to keep them. What Etiole wants to wear that stupid protective suit and go all the way to the middle of nowhere to guard a base that has no strategic value to the sector? It’s not worth it for them.”
It makes sense as she says it, but I’d never thought too deeply about all that before. Who cared how the rebels set up their bases? Where the buildings came from? My only job was to empty them out, and I only did that because the military told me to and I had nowhere to stay other than with them. Maybe it’s time I started asking more questions.
“I’ve been wondering this for a while,” I say, thinking back to the team, “but what were you guys doing at those old warehouses in Sector Eight? Why attack them? It doesn’t seem like a strategic place to strike. There’re rumors you stole something, maybe a weapon, but…”
Ellis looks at me evenly. The expression reminds me so much of Lai my skin crawls. “I think it’d be best,” she says slowly, “if we don’t discuss that just yet. But what we took wasn’t a weapon. It was information.”
“Information?”
She shakes her head. “It’s not important for now. When it becomes relevant, I’ll let you know.”
Her tone doesn’t really leave room for argument. Even though my curiosity is only stronger now, I need to switch topics before I make her suspicious. “Well, anyway, you guys really do have a great system set up here.”
“We have to if we’re going to take down the sectors.” Ellis’s nose wrinkles like she just smelled a pile of crap. “Nytes are stronger, but the sectors have more people, more resources, and more firmly established structural organization. We need to use everything we have in the most efficient way possible if we’re going to win.” Her eyes suddenly harden. For the first time since I came here, she looks like the rebel leader I met in that broken sector. Ruthless. Proud. Wild. “And we will win.”
I’m saved from having to reply when someone says, “I see the rumors are true.”
Ellis and I both turn to see a tall black guy with short, curly dark brown hair walking toward us. He looks like he could be nineteen or twenty, probably one of the oldest people here. He walks with a cane, his back slightly hunched, his mouth turned down at the corners in a mildly concerned frown.
The crazed fervor disappears from Ellis’s eyes as she smiles and waves to the new guy. “Gabriel! Glad to see you up and about again. How are you feeling?”