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“What’s your role?”

“Wh . . . what?” Voice cracking.

“Your job. What is it?”

“I’m a counselor.”

“What’s your name?”

“Gary.”

“How many children are here, Gary?”

“Umm.” It was the first time the man had consciously hesitated.

Decker pulled a long bowie knife from a leg sheath, twisted the blade to catch the light, then slid it across the man’s throat, painting a thin line of blood. The counselor jumped, started to yelp, but Luke had his hand down before he could make a sound.

“We got one warning before Epstein tried to kill us. You get the same. Hold back again, or try to lie, and we’ll gut you.” Luke took his hand away. “Now—”

“Six hundred and four!”

For a moment, Luke almost ordered Decker to kill him, but the fear in the counselor’s eyes was pure and uncalculated. “That doesn’t make sense.”

“I swear—”

“Lower your voice.”

“I swear, it’s true, I swear.”

“This is where Epstein brought the kids who escaped from Davis Academy two weeks ago. There were only about three hundred students in the whole school.”

“We p-p-paired them. With other children.”

“Why?”

“The academies—these kids were taken from their parents, brainwashed. Taught to hate each other. For years. They need care, help. That’s why we’re all the way out here, the middle of nowhere. Please, don’t cut me again.”

“What other children?”

“Huh?”

“You said you paired them with other children.”

“Oh. Holdfast kids. V-v-volunteers.”

Luke weighed that. It made sense; it wasn’t that different from the kind of counseling veterans with PTSD had access to. It’s a gift. It’ll make Miller’s plan twice as effective. “You an abnorm?”

“Yes. I’m a tier-four reader, with a master’s from—”

“I’m going to ask you a question, and I want you to read me and think very carefully before you answer.” He leaned forward. “How badly do you want to live?”

The man stared at him. For a long moment, Luke could see him wrestling to hold on to notions of honor and duty. But abstract concepts were slippery, especially in the middle of the night with a bowie knife resting on your throat.

“What do you want me to do?”

“How many therapists are on staff?”

“Uhhh . . . about ten professionals, plus administrators.”

“If you could pick two others to survive the night, who would they be—and where do they sleep?”

Twenty minutes later, Luke and Decker had recruited a couple more therapists.

It would have been quicker, but two of them didn’t want to live as badly as Gary.

Considering how packed it was, the big dome of the gymnasium was eerily calm. The children sat on the floor, some in pairs, most alone. The ones from Davis Academy had simply lined up and held out their arms to be zip-tied, one at a time. Gary and the other two counselors had been useful; when the children saw adult faces they recognized, they’d just mutely done what they were told.

The only ones who had argued or offered resistance were the Holdfast kids. But the sight of commandos with automatic rifles had kept them in line.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” Gary said, his voice trembling. “These men have promised that no one will be hurt.” He stood in the center of the gym, spinning slowly as he talked, trying not to look directly at the armed men surrounding them.

Luke walked the perimeter, taking a headcount and wondering what the academies must be like to have so cowed these kids. He remembered assemblies from his grade school days as noisy affairs, no matter how loudly the staff yelled. And those had been regular kids; these were gifted, mostly tier ones. It wasn’t just that they could do things straights couldn’t, it was that they would have known that. He’d expected them to be cocky, sure that their abilities allowed them special privilege. And even though they were young, there were more than six hundred of them against a dozen soldiers.

Of course, they didn’t know that he had no intention of hurting a child. Whatever the academies were like, the people who ran them must not have operated under the same principle. Ugly, but useful. As he’d told General Miller, they were accustomed to taking orders.

500, 502, 504.

Decker and two of the others came in from the outside in a wash of loud, cold wind. The biker nodded to Luke. Good. It was done, then. The rest of the staff had been neutralized, leaving just Gary and his fellow therapists.

The facility belonged to the New Sons of Liberty.

A wave of exhaustion rolled across Luke. No doubt the rest of the team was in the same boat; it was nearing dawn after a long day. They’d left in the middle of the night following the drone attack, and marched hard to get here, covering almost fifty miles in twenty-four hours, breaking only briefly for meals, lying in thorny scrub as they waited for traffic to clear on the roads they’d crossed, nervously eyeing gliders soaring high above them. Add to it the adrenaline of action, even action without resistance, and what he wanted more than anything was to snatch a couple of hours of rack time.