Page 50 of Red

“Gretch, good to see you moving. Heard you got sent to medical.”

“No ankle is going to stop me.”

I smile at her. She is determined—for the wrong cause.

The three men eye me, but Gretch starts up the stairs before they say anything else.

Inside, we find to a few tables lined together in the center of the room, a similar length to Stark’s dinner table. My heart rips a little, as this is not the place to be unfocused. There are large drawings on whiteboards and maps along all the walls.

“Gretch, good to see you. And you brought . . . ?” The bald man sitting in one of the chairs stands and stretches his hand toward me. He’s not much taller than Gretch.

“Aly.”

He over-grips and shakes my hand firmly. Gretch beams at him. “She’s the one they brought to the med unit.”

“Ah, of course. Welcome to the Uprising.”

Interesting name for a group of murderers. If they wanted to be correct, they should consider calling it a genocide.

I quirk my eyebrows. “Um, thanks.” For once, I have to master hiding my emotions. I practiced on the drive in the rearview mirror. I keep my lips straight, showing no indifference, trying to mimic someone I need to not think about while I’m here.

“She doesn’t know about the beasts yet.”

“Aly, our mission here is imperative and we could use all the bodies it takes.”

“Could you, um, tell me more?” I cringe inside at my voice.

He smiles and gestures to the chair across the table from him. I take it, and Gretch sits next to me.

“Now, I won’t go too into detail, but I’ll try to tell you why we’re here.” He pulls on his sleeve and wipes the board with his arm, then plucks the lid from a marker, snapping it onto the back of it. “Here is a beast.” He draws out a giant-toothed wolf in black. “And here is what they look like if they want to.” He draws a stick figure. “See, they hide in plain sight. Usually they’re taller than us, yet you see they can transform to a beast and kill us in an instant. We can’t have them in our schools or walking the streets with our families and children. So, we’ve come to eliminate them.”

When he turns toward me, I barely remember to breathe. My legs vibrate under the table, the layers giving me no release.

“How do you intend to do that?”

“If you stick around, you’ll see.”

“Of course. It seems like meaningful work. I guess my parents kept me isolated growing up. They told me not to go too far north, but never why.” The backstory I created for Aly should work to my advantage.

“Many don’t know—or don’t want to to know. It’s easier to live in denial of safety. There’s a border we are not to cross, but they cross it often. Humans go missing and it’s always them.”

Flames flare in my hands, and I tuck them under the table, digging my nails through the fabric on my legs. “Wow, that’s . . .” So wrong and lacks any facts.

“Terrifying, and why we’re going to win,” says Gretch, filled with triumph.

“Without a doubt.” I can tell he means it. They’re here to win. “Now Gretch, tell me what happened tonight.”

She goes on to repeat the same story from the med unit, but with a bit more detail, including the size and approximate height of the beast she saw. It’s still not enough detail for me to figure out who it was. He writes the numbers down and adds a tick along a list of colors at the end of one whiteboard — some kind of tracking system. They ask me to step out at the end, and I do so without an argument. I could use a cold plunge into a frozen lake at this point.

Two of the three men are still standing at the bottom of the stairs when I come down.

“You got a nice body under all those layers?” one asks with a drawl, before tossing a cigarette into the snow and stepping on it.

“Excuse me?”

Be cool. Stay cool.

“Small thing like you must be smoking. I can always tell.”