Resistance

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Despite Dante’s suspicions, Agnes was in the car, huddling in Nate’s jacket, when they burst through the woods and into the grocery store parking lot.

No one had spoken throughout the course of the hike, aside from a couple requests from Nadia to be put down, which Dante ignored. They were probably about as quiet and subtle as a herd of elephants crashing through the underbrush, but it didn’t seem like there was anyone around to hear.

Agnes leaned over and opened the car door before Nate could reach it, and Dante laid Nadia carefully on the seat as if she might break if he put her down too hard. He closed the door behind her, and he and Nate both climbed in the front. Nate didn’t know about the others, but he didn’t feel remotely safe, even though they seemed to have gotten away cleanly.

Dante pulled out of the driveway and hung a right, pushing the car up to the speed limit fast enough to look suspicious to anyone who was watching.

“So, where are we going?” Nadia asked from the backseat after having exchanged a brief greeting with Agnes.

Nate looked at Dante, hoping he had some suggestion of what to do and where to go now, but he looked as clueless as Nate felt.

“We’re still working on that part,” Nate said. “We figured we needed to concentrate on getting you out first.” Which was certainly true, but he wondered if any of them had really thought they were going to succeed. Until Nadia had called them, their rescue plans had been vague at best.

He doubted his answer was what you’d call satisfying, but Nadia took it in stride, as she seemed capable of doing in even the worst situations. “Why don’t you start by telling me the whole story,” she prompted. “Including why you and Agnes dressed up so much to break me out of the retreat.”

As Dante drove resolutely away from the Sanctuary but not toward anywhere in particular, Nate filled Nadia in on everything that had happened from the moment he’d received Dante’s call at the theater.

Nadia was still shaking with cold and residual nerves as she listened to Nate’s recounting of the night’s events. She raised her eyebrows at Agnes a couple of times, surprised and touched that the timid girl had put herself at risk as she had. Though it would have been better for all if Agnes weren’t with them. She knew too many of their secrets already, and the more time she spent with them, the more she would learn—and the deeper a hole she would dig for herself. Nadia wondered if the girl had any clue how catastrophic her decisions tonight were going to turn out to be. Had she figured out yet that she couldn’t go back?

“There’s something I don’t understand,” Agnes said after Nate had finished explaining everything.

Nadia was looking at Agnes, but out of the corner of her eye, she saw the face that Nate made. There was actually a lot Agnes didn’t understand, but she didn’t seem to know that.

“What’s that?” Nate asked.

“You said your father can afford to kill you now because he has Dorothy.”

“Yes.”

“What does Dorothy have to do with it? I thought once he found the recordings, your father was free to eliminate anyone who knew too much.”

Nate looked puzzled. “Well, yeah. But he couldn’t kill me because he needed an heir, and now he has Dorothy for that.”

Agnes looked just as puzzled as Nate did. “But he still has a backup of the original Nathaniel Hayes, and that backup scan was done before you learned any of his secrets. Why couldn’t he just create a new Replica and start from scratch? I mean, it would be really expensive and all, but…”

Nate squirmed a little in his seat. “I know you’ve heard that the hiatus in the Replica program is temporary, but that’s a lie. There won’t be any more backups or Replicas. Ever.”

Agnes’s eyes went wide, and her mouth dropped open in shock. Nadia could only imagine the girl’s dismay at discovering how she and her father had been played. With Paxco’s chief source of revenue gone, Nate as its Chairman Heir became a considerably less appealing marriage prospect. Would Chairman Belinski really have wanted his daughter tied to a state on the verge of economic collapse? Nadia was quite certain Chairman Hayes had never mentioned that little issue during the marriage negotiations.

Agnes opened and closed her mouth a few times with false starts before she took a deep breath and shook her head. “There’s obviously been a lot of lying going on. More than you know about, apparently. Remember I said there was something fishy going on?”

She was talking to Nate—she’d had no such conversation with Nadia—but a lump of dread was steadily rising in Nadia’s throat.

Nate nodded cautiously.

“Well, the first fishy thing that happened was the announcement about the Replica program.”

Nate grinned wryly. “You mean you don’t believe my father when he says the press was exaggerating and it’s just a temporary glitch?”

Agnes shook her head. “It’s not that. At least not exactly. My father and I were sworn to secrecy—for obvious reasons—but part of the appeal of the marriage agreement was that my father and I would both have backup scans. We freaked out when we heard the news, but your father assured us the Replica program is still up and running. It’s just that he’s running low on storage space for all the backups so he’s picking and choosing who he’ll use it for.”

Nate shook his head. “That’s not true. It can’t be true.”

Nadia found she was gripping the seat in front of her so hard her fingers were going numb. She hadn’t even realized she’d reached out to grab it. “He’s just stringing you along,” she said with more hope than conviction. “After you sign the agreement, he’ll regretfully tell you—”

“My father and I had our scans done on Friday.”

“No,” Nate said again, as if denying what he didn’t want to hear could make it not true.

“Maybe it’s all a scam,” Nadia said. “Maybe he just pretended to make backups.” But she didn’t believe her own theory.

“That has to be it!” Nate said.

Somehow, without meaning for it to happen, Nadia’s hand had found Nate’s, and their fingers twined together. Whatever else kept them apart, in this they were together.

“What is it?” Agnes asked. “Why is this … upsetting you so much?”

Still holding on to Nate’s hand, Nadia let herself think back to that dreadful day when she had been arrested. Thought back to the deal she’d made with the Chairman. She remembered Thea somehow messing with the electronic lock so that they couldn’t get into her vault. Remembered the Chairman going back to the other room to retrieve a key from Dirk Mosely’s dead body. Remembered him walking back to the vault with blood on his hands.

And remembered the moment before he’d finally gotten the vault door open, when all the lights had suddenly dimmed.

Just like they did when a Replica was created.

“Thea’s not dead,” Nadia murmured in horror. “She made a Replica of herself before the Chairman destroyed her.”

And if Thea was still alive, that meant that everything Nate and Nadia had gone through had been for nothing.