Insurgence [h.s]

seventeen

"There you are."

Alouette spins around, diverting her gaze from Evie's retreating figure. Jackson is coming towards her with Jayden in tow. Brooks and Gray are nowhere to be seen.

"I'm gonna need a full report of everything you did since you left," he continues—his voice is eerily cool once more, now. Even though there's no evidence of that burning anger from before, though, Alouette shudders. She doesn't think she'll forget it anytime soon. "You'll certainly understand a very curious thing happened tonight. It could be our strongest lead, so I'm afraid your privacy will not be accounted for on this one. If you'll follow me."

Alouette doesn't dare defy him. She follows him to his office, walking next to Jayden. When she sends him a glance, she finds him already looking at her. She glances away. She has no idea what he might want from her still. There's nothing left to say now.

They enter the office, and she sits down on the chair in front of the desk while Jackson takes the one behind it. Jayden closes the door and leans against the wall on the side, silently listening.

Jackson pulls out a piece of paper and a pen, and looks up at her. "Let's start from when you left the Palace," he announces. There's no question, but there doesn't need to be.

Alouette starts talking. She tells him of her first stop, when she went to buy hairpins to remove the tracker from the car, and then of her drive to Dacran. She tells him of the apartment, of being attacked, of fleeing to the headquarters of the Revolution. There, she hesitates.

"What next?" Jackson pushes her. "I seem to understand you received an address there? Is that correct?"

"They left it on my windshield," she forces herself to say. Suddenly, speaking of this feels weird. Wrong. She cannot tell why; it's simply a sensation—a very strong sensation that she should not be talking about this with a man so closely tied to the Palace and its President.

"Who left it?" he presses on, but she shakes her head.

"I don't know."

"Can I see it?"

"I don't have it anymore." The lie surprises her in the instant she lets it out. There was no planning, no intention of lying until a moment ago, and she doesn't know what made her do it. In her pocket, the paper with the address burns. "I discarded it before we left," she adds for good measure. From the side of the room, Jayden's gaze is heavy on her, but she doesn't look at him. She doesn't dare.

Jackson doesn't seem moved. "If you tell us where you threw it, we'll retrieve it."

"I burned it. With a lighter." She clears her throat, forcing herself to act normal—not to look at him too straight in the eyes, not to glance away too quickly. Truth is in behaviour—a good lie often sets in the middle. "We thought it'd be safer that way."

"We?" Jackson looks at Jayden, and Alouette's hands clench around the fabric of her shirt in her lap. She shouldn't have said that—it was a bad lapse in judgement. She should've been more careful—but she's so on edge, so exhausted. In the past twenty-four hours she's escaped a shooting, faced the ghosts of her past, planned an attack in the middle of the night, retrieved a friend gone missing and defended herself from ridiculous accusations. Maybe she could attribute it to all that—say that she didn't mean we, that she made that decision alone, that she's just tired, that the others didn't know she destroyed the paper because she kept it a secret.

She opens her mouth, but Jayden precedes her.

"It was sensitive material. It didn't seem wise to bring it out and about, nor to leave it there unguarded. We've all seen it anyway, and the address we got from it was correct. There was no reason to keep it around."