Defiant: Quantic Dreams Book 2 by Elizabeth McLaughlin (reading list txt) 📗

as she pressed the cold disk of the stethoscope against my ribcage and my back. “Deep breaths.” When she was satisfied that my heart was strong and my breaths clear, she uncapped the disposable thermometer and stuck it underneath my tongue. It was an odd moment of calm. Shannon waited until the thermometer beeped and took it out of my mouth. “98.6. You’re fine. Get out of here.”

“What’ll I tell everyone?”

She sighed and closed her eyes. It was obvious that she hadn’t gotten much sleep over the past few days, if any at all. Black bruises underlined her eyes and her hair was disheveled. I could not fathom what hell she was going through. “I don’t know Jacob, tell them whatever the hell you want. I’m too busy trying to keep that woman alive.”

“Fair enough. Thank you, Shannon.”

The moment I left the infirmary, the mob set themselves on me anew. They demanded an explanation. They wanted to know why they hadn’t been told earlier that something serious had happened to Allison. They accused me of covering up Athena’s death. Every time I opened my mouth to speak, the very next words were overshadowed by someone trying to fill it for me. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I stuck my fingers in my mouth and whistled loudly enough to make the group jump.

“I understand that you have a lot of questions.” I motioned the crowd to stand away from me and finally felt like I had some room to breathe again. “I’m just finding out the facts of what’s going on myself, so I beg your patience as the situation may change. Yes, Allison Garvey has fallen quite ill, as is obvious to you. She is suffering from an illness, the nature of which we know very little about.” The crowd burst into chatter again, and I yelled for quiet. “We ask that anyone who exhibits symptoms of a respiratory illness to present themselves to Shannon and the fine physicians we have here as soon as possible. Symptoms we are looking for include fever, cough, any difficulty breathing, and exhaustion. I will work closely with several others to establish a quarantine for anyone exhibiting these symptoms. As for the second mouse…”

The crowd had gone completely silent, their eyes boring into me as I spoke. I felt the impulse to turn tail and run back into the infirmary, but stayed put. “As for Athena, I can confirm that her current camera transmissions suggest that she passed in the night. We are carefully reviewing the camera footage as I speak to determine her cause of death. There is no evidence as of now to suggest that it was due to an environmental problem.” More shouts and yelling from the crowd. See, you shouldn’t have opened your mouth, Jacob. I thought to myself.

“We want to go back, Jacob!” someone yelled. “We’ve had enough! Bring Gabriel back online. He took better care of us than you ever did!” I squinted my eyes and through the throng of people I saw one of the young men that had joined me at breakfast uninvited. How stupid I was to think that he was anything other than a plant. Some flunky of George’s whose sole mission was to get me to slip up and now he had everything he needed. Shit.

“Yeah!” A woman next to him joined in. The blonde that had confronted me in the mess hall. “Come on, Jacob! We know that you promised George an election. Why hasn’t anything been done about it yet? You can’t leave us out here to get sick and die!”

I realized just how blind I had been to Gabriel’s plans. This whole time he had been staying just far enough out of the way to let me set myself up for failure. The only way I could think to proceed was to buy myself time. “Okay. I’ll meet with George this hour and we’ll have an election plan for you tonight.”

The woman stood with her hands on her hips. “You had better. Otherwise we may just have to take matters into our own hands.”

Before I met with Gabriel, I set out to find my family. I found Eliza and Marcus working on some engineering problems the shelter faced. Many systems that hadn’t fallen apart during my solo reign were badly in need of repair. When I arrived, Marcus had his stuck inside a hatch as Eliza guided him through repairing a pipe. I knocked on the doorframe and they both jumped. Marcus swore as his head knocked into the metal hatch with a bang and I chuckled. It was an indispensable moment of humor. I wanted to cling to it forever.

“We need to talk.”

Eliza didn’t say a word. She set down her instruction manual and yanked Marcus’s head around. He motioned me to shut the door, his hand rubbing the rising goose egg on his skull.

“Gabriel’s alive.”

“What?” Eliza furrowed her brow. “What are you talking about?”

“Gabriel’s alive. He took over George’s mind somehow. He’s been working behind our backs this entire time. Last night he kidnapped me and trapped me in the incinerator room. He’s the reason Athena is dead. He injected her with a poison. He says he has more.” The words spilled out of my mouth faster and faster, like a confessional. It was such a relief to rid myself of the terror that had slowly creeped through me over the past hours. “He plans to force an election to make him the leader of the shelter and when he does, he says he’ll put everyone back in the pods.”

Marcus said nothing. His gaze was fixed on a point somewhere beyond me, his eyes unblinking. I knew what he was thinking. Now that he had his freedom, a return to slavery was unthinkable. No matter how comfortable that captivity was. After a long pause, he spoke. “We’ve got to do something.”

“There’s nothing we can do. Even if I wanted to bank on Gabriel’s claim that he has