“She’s from the New York City. That’s near the ocean. She’s my friend. Is she your friend?”
Taylor raises her eyebrows over Shelly’s shoulder at me. “No.”
“Why not?” Shelly inquires, as if this is preposterous. Ah, the simplicity of youth. “She’s nice and pretty and she’s got pretty hair.”
Taylor smiles and nods in agreement. “That is good intel, soldier.” The tops of my cheeks flare. “How are your classes going?”
“Good. I did a report on zebras.” Shelly looks at me with a hilariously serious expression. “Zebras are my favorite.” Not surprising, I muse as her zebra hair ties jangle. “Did you know Eos’s favorite animal is a fox?” Taylor rolls her eyes, clearly embarrassed. “Lucy, what’s your favorite animal?”
“Siberian tigers,” Taylor says without a beat.
Shelly looks at me for confirmation, to which I nod, momentarily stunned into silence. If Taylor compiled a dossier on me, why would my favorite animal be pertinent information? Exactly how long have I been under surveillance? Unfortunately, I can’t lay into her in front of this girl, so I put that bullet of objection into the chamber to fire later.
Shelly looks exasperated. “You know her favorite animal, Eos. That means you’re friends. Friends know friends’ favorite animals. Anyway, I gotta go. Bye!” With a sly look on her face, she pounces and steals a tight hug around Taylor’s hips before cackling and taking off out the door.
“What about no hugs?”
Taylor chuckles. “She is the boss around here. Far be it for me to tell her what to do.”
“She’s cute. Clearly, she adores you. Doth a soft heart beat beneath this armored exterior of yours?”
Her expression makes it clear she finds me tiresome, though perhaps faintly amusing. “I apologize for barging in. After you left, it occurred to me you may encounter someone unfriendly in the bathroom and I did not want you to be confronted alone.”
“Ah. Well, lucky for us, there were no hostiles in the lavatory,” I report in a deep bass. Taylor escorts me back into the main room, where Shelly waves from her seat tucked between her parents as we pass. Each parent acknowledges Taylor with a nod. I wave back. “There’s not a lot of kids around here.”
“No.” She opens the door for me into the Not Special Treatment buffet room. “If people start families, they are encouraged to leave HQ.”
“People are allowed to leave?” I fill my plate and pour myself water from the pitcher, sitting down across from Taylor.
“Of course. This is our primary headquarters but it is also a training ground. People leave for many reasons. Pregnancy, incapacitation, deemed unfit for service, or sent out onassignment. Theia and I judge transfers out of HQ on a case-by-case basis, for permanent relocation, or to operate covertly.”
With its proximity to their headquarters, New York is probably crawling with these families-in-wait. I wonder how close I’ve gotten to one. “Interesting. And new members, how do they come upon your shadow organization? Not everyone gets the ‘shatter-the-skylight’ treatment, I hope.”
“Scouts trained to find and recruit agents for OrPro.” OrPro. An oddly cute portmanteau for such a menacing operation. “They scour the regions and identify pockets of resistance: local gangs, underground newspapers, independent militias, that sort of thing. Once it is determined that person is not an undercover agent for the local police, they are brought to their closest headquarters for training.”
“Everyone gets trained as a soldier?”
“Yes. Afterward, soldiers are funneled into jobs more suited to their skill sets. Some have been installed within the regions. Most remain soldiers, since ongoing war is inevitable.”
I pause. “What do you mean, ‘installed’?”
Taylor tugs on her bottom lip and glances at Mason for counsel, and he shrugs. “Order members serve as subregion leaders beneath the leaders in all five regions.”
“Oh my God.”
Subregion leaders don’t wield much actual power, but they do sit at the table with the leaders to discuss the needs of individual states. My region alone possesses twelve—men and women who have dined at our home. Papa has snakes in his garden and I can’t tell him.
“This way when you take out the leaders, fewer will step forward to take their place, except spouses or heirs. Thorne and Wolfshield don’t have any spouses or heirs that I know of.”
“That is correct.”
“But Region Leader Reed has five children. You should figure out some kind of amnesty for them,” I suggest gently. “Nobody gave a fuck about Silas, but people from both classes were pretty upset about his kids.”
“That would be Theia’s call, not mine,” Taylor replies. “I am a soldier. I kill who I am told to kill. No more, no less.”
“But they’re kids.”
“No different than the kids falling to their deaths in Reed’s timber camps, or the kids starving as they till his farms.” Taylor shrugs. “His children are not special.”
