First Love, First War, First Step |√|

Daring Plan

Sliding through the sterile tiled white hallways, I hoped that the information that Meara and the cousins had given us was accurate.

Beside me, Andie scanned the passages with a critical eye. Meara and Matthew had been left behind to act as lookouts while Diane, who had turned out to be a whiz hacker, had been given the job of making sure that all electronic barriers were destroyed before we got to them.

"Could you take any longer?" Matthew whispered in my ear through a piece of equipment I had smuggled out of the Archives earlier. "You know we have a limited time frame before someone realizes something's going on."

"How would you like to be the one creeping through hallways, uncertain what you could find behind the next corner?" Andie hissed back next to me, her voice echoing through my ear as well. "I would want to sit out in your relatively safe position while you rushed through here and got us all caught."

"Must we argue?" Meara asked. "After all, there's not many people left that are helping you in any capacity. You scare away even one more, and you're down to four people. It's hard to continue a rebellion with only four people."

Matthew started to say something, but I'm pretty sure that she ripped out his earpiece before the words escaped.

"If you go down one more hallway and turn left, the door to the lab should be on your left," Diane piped up, and I heard her clicking some keys. "I'm attempting to disengage the lock right now."

Andie waltzed down the hallway, seeming confident in her cousin's skills. I waited a moment and when nothing awful happened, I followed her.

"So I'm not able to pick the lock from here, but I found the password. Are you ready for it?"

"I've been ready for years," Andie said, cracking her knuckles before letting her fingers dangle inches away from the keypad on the door. "Let me have it."

Diane blurted out a long list of numbers, and I watched her cousin's fingers fly over the keys at a rate that made it almost impossible to see what she was typing in.

I half-expected the door to remain stubbornly locked, but it did swing open on nearly silent hinges.

I blinked at Andie. "That was crazy. How did you remember all those numbers without making a mistake?"

She shrugged, and a faint blush coated her cheeks. "It's something with my memory. My aunt, Diane's mother, always said that I had to have twice the memory capacity of anyone she ever knew. I don't display it very often though."

Her words made me realize that I hadn't spent as much time as I should have getting to know my fellow Igniters. Instead, I had been more focused on first my future with Luke, then not having Luke, and last having to plan a future without him.

I didn't know that Diane was a marvel with electronics and that beneath that shy façade, she was an outgoing person. I didn't know that she had grown up on a farm with her cousin, and that she had always dreamed of escaping that life.

I didn't know that Andie had such a remarkable memory or that she really had a heart that she hid behind brash words. I didn't really know that all she ever wanted with her life was to become a marker, to make art with ink upon people's skin.

I didn't know anything about Matthew besides the fact that his parents had started the Igniters, that he was only about a year older than me, and that he had betrayed Luke. I didn't know what he had been trained in, I didn't know where he lived, and I didn't know if he had a girlfriend.

"Ilania, are you still alive?" Andie hissed, snapping her fingers in front of my face. "Diane told us that we could enter the room five minutes ago."

Shaking my head to clear the mind-numbing thoughts, I took a deep breath. "Let's get this done."

The lights didn't activate until we had stepped past the threshold, and we blinked, first at the sudden brightness and then at the treasure trove we had found.

"I hope we brought a big enough bag," the person beside me whispered, her voice filled with something akin to awe. "I can't imagine us hauling all this stuff out without one."

"All we need is the formula notes and a vial of the prototype," Matthew said. "The rest you can smash or dump down the drain or something. Just make sure they can't figure out who did it and that they can't find anything useful."

I dug through my bag and pulled out another one of the tools I had pilfered from the Archives. "Would you like a hammer, Andie? It may make it easier to destroy this place."

She flashed me a smile before wrapping her gloved fingers about the handle. "I would be honored."

While she was rifling through the papers on the table and stuffing them into her own satchel, I plucked the most promising vial from one of the many glass-fronted cabinets.

"Diane, will the sound of things breaking in here alert anyone that something's up?" I asked, weighing my own hammer in my palm after I had carefully tucked the glass vial away.

"You should be good," Diane answered. "That room you're standing in is apparently soundproofed, which should make your job much easier."

"Wonderful," Andie told her cousin before bearing the head of the hammer deep into the face of an important-looking machine.

She grinned as the glass shattered about her and knocked the rest of the remnants off of the body. "Ilania, would you happen to have something I could yank wires out with?"

I tossed her a pair of pliers before studying the long rows of vials in front of me. The contents looked no different from our normal required vaccines, but I had no idea of knowing whether merely smashing them would be enough.

Scooping up an armful, I made my way to the large sink in the corner of the room, passing by where the gleeful Andie was yanking out colorful wires with wild abandon.

Once I had reached my destination, I dropped my load with an earsplitting crash against the porcelain. My companion paused in her ventures.

"What are you doing, Ilania?"

I shrugged. "I figured if we smashed all the vials in the sink and then washed away the residue of the vaccine, they wouldn't be able to recover the formula from the liquid on that floor that would be left if we simply shattered them in their cases."

She nodded. "Carry on then."

Thus, I carried armful after armful of those tiny containers that contained what was supposed to ensnare us even more and smashed them hard into the basin of the sink.

When the glass pile grew too large, I smashed it into fragments with my hammer before continuing my pattern. My world came to consist of those little vials that promised so much to our corrupt government.

Scoop, walk, drop, repeat.

Each cacophony of breaking glass was music to my ears, and I wondered what Luke would think if he could see me now.

I had to look as maniacal as Andie as she wreaked havoc on the rest of the room. I had never thought myself a violent person, but it felt good to create such destruction, to unleash the storm of fury that had been building in me since Luke had died.

It felt good to be doing something other than sitting around and talking.

Soon the room was reduced to ruins, and I turned on the faucet to clean out the sink, shaking the glass off my gloves before making sure to scrub every trace of the concoction off the porcelain.

Andie looked tired, but there was peace and triumph in her expression as well. Instead of handing me back the pliers and hammer, she tucked them into her satchel.

"That felt better than it should have," she admitted as we closed the door and started walking out towards where the other two were waiting. "I didn't understand how much anger and fury I had stored up in myself until I started destroying that equipment."

"I know," I answered, and when a slow smile blossomed on her face, I felt that a tangible bond had formed between the two of us.

That feeling soon vanished when we walked into the early morning air to find Matthew staring blankly off into the distance and Meara with her head against the wall as tears tumbled down her pale cheeks.