Jenna Black - Replica

“Okay, fine,” she said as she settled on question number one. “If you’ve been in contact with Bishop, then why haven’t you told your boss?”

Dante reached up and rubbed at his eyes. “I can’t believe I opened my mouth.”

“Well, you did.” Nadia couldn’t make sense of the emotions roiling through her any more than she could make sense of the puzzle Dante presented. She was excited at the prospect of finally getting some answers, and yet there was also a good deal of dread about what those answers might be. And then there was the frightened, cautious, maybe even paranoid part of her that whispered this all had to be some kind of an elaborate trap, set by Mosely to trick her into revealing every scrap of information she’d kept secret.

Dante huffed out a deep breath and straightened his shoulders. “Right. But I need you to promise me something first.”

She understood his caution, but it was far too late for it. “We both know I’d promise you my firstborn child if that’s what it took to get you talking right now. We also both know I’d never make good on it. You’ve opened the barn door, and you look pretty silly chasing after the galloping horse.”

Even in the midst of his obvious turmoil, Dante managed a half smile. “You have a way with words.”

“I’m glad I amuse you. Now, tell me what’s going on!”

The hint of humor vanished from Dante’s face. “You’re right and I can’t hold you to any promises, but I’m begging you not to repeat anything I’m about to tell you. Lives are at stake, my own and other people’s.”

Lives had been at stake from the moment someone had stabbed the Chairman Heir to death, and Nadia had been shouldering the responsibility to protect them so long it felt almost natural now. “I understand. Now, who are you, really?”

With the grim resolve of a soldier marching into battle, Dante sat up straight in his chair and met her eyes. “My real name is Dante Sandoval. My parents are both sanitation workers.” He made a face of disgust. “One step removed from Basement-dwellers. We’re technically Employees, but we’re so low Mosely didn’t want anyone to be able to look into my background. I’m not respectable enough to be a servant, you see, so he insisted I make up a new name for this assignment.”

Nadia had no trouble hearing the bitterness in his voice, and now she understood a little better why he’d seemed so touchy about her status as an Executive.

“I’m sorry if I’m being insensitive,” she said, “but I’m not that interested in your background right now. I want to know—”

“I know what you want to know,” he interrupted, and she saw a renewed flash of anger in his eyes. Anger that he visibly tamed, reeling himself back in as she suspected he’d done a thousand times in his life. Kind of like how she’d held in all her anger with Nate for so long. The problem with holding it in so fiercely was that it tended to get out at the most inconvenient times.

“I guess my background isn’t that important,” he conceded. “I was just trying to explain that people like me, people like my family, have shitty, miserable lives working shitty, miserable jobs without ever being able to hope for better, and people like you have everything handed to you on a silver platter just because you happened to be born an Executive.”

No doubt about it, Dante was harboring one hell of a lot of class anger. Nadia would have liked to point out to him that her life wasn’t as much of a picnic as he might think, but entering into a debate about the class system wouldn’t get her the information she wanted, so she bit her tongue.

“Eventually,” Dante continued, “it gets to a point where the downtrodden have had enough, and they band together. It’s happened a million times over the course of history, and it’s happening now.”

“What does that mean, exactly?”

“It means there’s a resistance movement forming in Paxco.”

Nadia frowned at him. “Am I supposed to be shocked? Someone’s protesting something practically every day.” Nadia had the uneasy suspicion that if it weren’t for Mosely and his security goons, there would be a lot more protests, and they’d be a lot bigger and louder. The government wouldn’t be so gauche as to publicly quash protests, but they would make sure such protests were a controlled burn, not something that could catch on and spread.

“I don’t mean the kind of resistance movement that involves marching around carrying signs. I mean the kind that’s actually going to do something about the injustice.”

“What does this have to do with anything?” Nadia asked. She wanted to know more, but she had to keep the conversation focused. She and Dante had had the schoolroom to themselves for quite some time now, but there was no guarantee someone wouldn’t come looking for one or both of them at any moment.

“I’m part of it. I’m here because I’m working a mission, trying to infiltrate Mosely’s spy network. It’ll probably take years before he’ll trust me with anything sensitive enough to be useful, but when he does, I’ll have the ammunition to help the resistance take down the entire Paxco security division.”

Nadia might have stood up and cheered the vision, if she didn’t think that Dante’s resistance meant to take down more than just Paxco’s security division. She didn’t for a moment think that the class system was fair, nor was she blind to the massive corruption within the government of Paxco. The Chairman himself was about as corrupt an individual as she could imagine. But it sounded like the resistance movement had ambitions to start a revolution, and that wasn’t a pleasant prospect, either.

“Bishop’s part of the resistance,” she said, the lightbulb suddenly going on above her head. “That’s why he didn’t flee Paxco when he had a chance. And that’s why you’re carrying messages for him.”

Dante nodded. “The resistance is mostly Employees, but there’s a fair number of Basement-dwellers. I’ve heard we even have a few low-level Executives, though I don’t know who they are.”

Now that she had more puzzle pieces, Nadia found it easier to put them together, though she didn’t much like the picture that was forming. Dante had been sent on a mission to infiltrate Mosely’s spy network. What were the odds that another member of the resistance would have found his way into the Chairman Heir’s household on the basis of pure chance?

She tried to drive the thought from her head. She would worry about the twists and turns of Bishop’s motivations later. Right now, she had to concentrate on the fact that she was sitting face-to-face with someone who was capable of contacting him.

Of course, Bishop had reached out to contact both her and Nate within the last twenty-four hours, and that contact had been far from friendly. He’d delivered the message that he didn’t want to be found with vicious conviction, and she wondered what she was doing, still trying to find him after all that he’d done. After all, he’d had Nate beaten last night, had hurt him body and soul.

But in the end, none of that mattered. What mattered was that neither she nor Nate would be able to rest until they found out what had happened on the night of his murder, and there was only one person who could tell them.

“I need you to take a message to Bishop,” she said.

Dante looked at her as if she were insane. “You’re joking, right?”

She continued as if he hadn’t spoken. “He underestimated me, and he underestimated Nate. I told Nate the truth about the tracker this morning.” Her throat and chest tightened at the memory of the look in Nate’s eyes, but she tried to keep the pain from showing on her face. “I even showed him the note Bishop wrote me. He now knows for sure that Bishop is still in town, and he’s not going to stop looking for him.”