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Coming down a narrow hallway, Sebastian heard the drone of many voices, overlapping and mixing and talking over one another. No one was immediately visible, so he took a deep breath and rolled his shoulders. Hiding in plain sight—this was why he was invaluable to Hess.
By Hess, of course, he meant the Resistance.
Sebastian got to the end of the narrow hallway, and without warning, it opened into a huge room crammed with stalls and people and even a few little tents. It would have looked like an open-air market if not for the stiflingly low ceiling held up by a smattering of irregular pillars, all tagged with graffiti and posters.
Sebastian peered at one of the pillars as he passed it. Some of the paint-scrawled messages were typical youth nonsense—gang-like names, dirty words, the like—but many of them were also informative: times and dates for meetings or sales, the names of guards to look out for, some that looked like nonsense but that Sebastian detected a thread of subversion in that he wasn’t in-the-know enough to understand.
The market, such as it was, wasn’t exactly busy or bustling. Crowded definitely wouldn’t have been the word. The drone of sound came more from a dozen quieter conversations rather than a hundred people struggling to be heard over a tumult.
Sebastian tried to make as straight a line through it as he could, heading for the larger opening he could see on the factory side of the room. He slid his gaze over the faces of everyone he passed, assessing threat, intent, recognition. As his eyes passed over the slightly horsey face of a brown-haired woman with striking green eyes a few stalls away, he felt a stab of panic that wasn’t his own.
“Who is that?” Sebastian demanded. The woman saw him and started heading over, her pretty green eyes tight.
“No one.” But that stab of panic hadn’t been Sebastian, and only one other person was in this head.
“Don’t lie. She’s going to be on us any second.” Sebastian put as much threat and steel into his voice as he could. He hated threatening people—at least, threatening not-bad people—and hated pretending to be the kind of person who didn’t hate it.
“My wife.”
“What would you say to her?”
“What…what do you mean?” Confusion from Noah and exasperation that was all Sebastian.
“She can’t know I’m in here. It’s better for everyone, so when she gets here, you need to tell me what—”
“Noah.” The woman was on them, speaking softly and reaching out, so Sebastian took her hand.
“How was your shift?” Sebastian let the words flow from Noah’s consciousness and out of his mouth without a pause to filter them. The pause, no matter how slight, always tipped off something instinctual in people. He just had to hope Noah didn’t blow his cover. That Sebastian’s claws were hooked into his brain stem was clearly not incentivizing him as much as Sebastian was used to.
The woman shrugged a little distantly. “Fine.” She tightened her grip on Sebastian’s hand. “Do you have them?”
Hesitation from Noah, but it felt natural. “I…had them, but…”
“But Neumann,” the woman finished with a heavy sigh that seemed to bring her small frame even closer to the floor. She closed her eyes, grimaced, then squeezed his hand again. “I’m glad you’re alright.”
Another hesitation, and this one Sebastian didn’t like. “You are okay. And you’ll be better when you get me out of your brain, so let’s get this over with.”
“I’ll get more.” Sebastian swayed forward and put a comforting hand on the woman’s upper arm, hoping that was right. “I’m going now.”
The woman frowned. “We can’t—”
“Don’t worry,” Sebastian let Noah cut her off. “I’ll be back soon.”
“Kiss her forehead,” Noah ordered, and Sebastian hurried to comply, pulling Noah’s wife in close and planting a soft kiss on her forehead. The tenderness leaking out of Noah’s consciousness made him ache, and he pulled back quickly. With a last, forced smile, he passed her and picked up his pace toward his goal.
“What did they take from you?”
“Ration pills.” Noah had apparently finally decided that there was no point in insisting on secrets from Sebastian. “For my daughters.”
“Oh.”
“They’re twins, and so they’re both at that age when they should be growing a lot, but…” But they weren’t because they couldn’t get the nutrition they needed out here in the middle of nowhere. Sebastian felt Noah’s heavy, ashamed sigh. “I don’t want them to end up like me.”
“I’m sorry.” Sebastian grimaced. Ration pills didn’t work miracles. They didn’t replace actual vegetables and proteins, but they’d at least help the kids make it into functional adulthood.
“Neumann and his nasty little crony don’t even have families.” Noah seemed to be relishing the chance to rage now that he’d given in. “They’re just taking them to sell to some other desperate family at an even greater markup than I bought them at.”
“The worst and most common type of bastard.” Sebastian seethed on Noah’s behalf, but it was a familiar enough feeling that he knew it was his own and not a bleeding out of Noah. “I’ve seen a lot of their kind. Every species has them.”
