The Renegade

Chapter 22

Jayse started my rebellion against the Civilization. His departure showed me the Civilization's ugliest side--when he left and took something with him, he exposed me to torture and truth at once. I've always wondered what he stole from the Civilization, but now that I'm faced with potentially uncovering the truth that Ryke has held for years, I'm as terrified as I am curious.

My voice shakes as I ask, "What does Jayse have to do with anything?"
Ryke narrows his golden eyes at me. "I think you already know the answer to that."

"So now you're going to tell me what happened?" I growl. "After all those times I asked you and you wouldn't tell me?"

"Hey, I don't have to tell you now, so just shut up and listen," Ryke retorts. I squeeze my lips together even though I want to wring the truth out of him.

"Ryke--"
"This weapon, this gas, it's the Civilization's," he blurts, and the truth comes to light. As soon as he said Jayse's name, I knew he had to be connected to this. When Jayse left the Civilization, the Civilizers were furious at him, and they weren't just mad because he disappeared. They're mad because he stole something: the gas. But how did he steal it? And how did he and the weapon end up in Domus? He must have arrived while Luk was still Father Paul's prize son. Then my heart drops to the bottom of my stomach. When I asked Luk all those months ago if he knew Jayse, did he lie to me?
"Jayse stole it," I say, tripping over my words. "The gas."

Ryke nods, running a hand through his long hair. "Yep. I...I don't exactly know how. I didn't work in weapons like Jayse, and honestly I don't think I would have cared if I'd seen it."

"But he told you what he found?" I ask, leaning towards Ryke to keep our voices low.

Ryke tilts his head to study me, thick eyebrows furrowed. "Ren, he didn't just tell me that he found the strafing gas. He created it."

My world shatters again--Jayse didn't discover the weapon and save the Civilization's enemies. He invented this horror, this weapon of mass destruction. How could he have come up with something so incredibly evil? And why didn't he just turn it over to the Civilization if he was capable of creating kind of atrocity? Did his conscience

"He--he made it? How? Why?" I stutter.

"You know he was a genius, Ren. Probably smarter than even you." Ryke shrugs again. "I don't know why he made it--probably just to see if he could. We were both hungry for something, but I wanted power and he wanted knowledge, and he ended up creating, well, this."

"So why'd he leave?" I ask, trying to put together the pieces of the man I apparently didn't even know. "Why didn't he just give it to the Civilization?"

"He realized what he created was too dangerous to leave in the Civilization, and he wanted out anyways. He always felt...I don't know, squandered there. He wanted freedom and he was curious, always too strafing curious."

"So he left and took the weapon with him."

I can't forget the day the Civilization discovered his disappearance when Mizpah interrupted my Advanced Training test to take me in for questioning. How they strapped me to a chair and shot electricity through me, waterboarding me in between shots of electric. All because Jayse was too curious, too smart, too creative and cruel for his own good.

"Why didn't you tell them the truth in the interrogation?"

This is the question I've always wanted to ask Ryke. For all his loyalty to the Civilization and the brazen things he did in its name, he never betrayed Jayse, not even to me. I don't understand his blind loyalty to a friend who deserted him.

"Jayse told me he was leaving," Ryke explains. "He even asked me if I wanted to come with him, but I couldn't. I had it made in the Civilization and I wasn't sure there was anywhere in the Outside I'd actually want to go." Ryke glances around the room. "Now I'm positive there isn't. So he said he was leaving and taking a canister of the gas with him."