is a bad guy. There’s a processing center for everyone they bring in,” Ben says.
“The slaves?” I ask, because I don’t want to get confused about who we’re talking about, and I don’t want to mince words or pussyfoot around something because it makes us uncomfortable. We need to call it what it is. These people who are being trafficked, they’re slaves.
Ben nods. “We called them the Unwilling.”
02:18:24:44
I can feel the hair on the back of my neck standing on end, and a shiver moves through me. “They have Cecily,” I say. I explain everything I know. How my world fell apart—the shortages of food, water, electricity, medicine, everything. I recount the first missing-persons case, the high count of people who vanished from Qualcomm, and the last abduction, when Cecily was taken too.
In the end, I add, “We need to get her back.”
Ben swears. “I . . .”
“We’ll get her back,” Elijah says. “We’ll get them all back, and we’ll take these fuckers down.” He reaches out, grabs Ben’s shoulder, and gives it a shake. “What do we need to do?”
“We need to know everything about the operation,” Barclay says. “We need to know how it worked. How did you know who to grab and where and all that?”
Ben takes a deep breath and repositions himself on his chair. It’s like I can see him pulling a hardened shell around himself. He’s overcome—I know the feeling—but he’s with us. He isn’t about to let these guys get away with this. “It was different depending on the assignment. I guess Meridian had people who were doing scout work, I’m not sure. In the beginning, I had to work with a partner. We’d get a location and a type of person they wanted. It could be vague, like gender and age range, or sometimes it would be more specific, like hair or eye color or something.”
Like shopping. If my stomach wasn’t so empty, I’d be fighting to keep from throwing up.
“The last couple of jobs I did were different,” Ben continues. “I was on my own, and I had a specific person they wanted me to grab: name, age, height, weight, appearance, sometimes even a picture or files, like someone had been keeping tabs on them.”
“So they sometimes were targeting specific people?” Barclay asks, and I know from his tone he wasn’t expecting that.
Ben nods. “When I brought them in, they didn’t stay at the processing center. Someone else portaled them out that night. Usually one of Meridian’s main guys.”
I take a deep breath and blow it out slowly. I’m not sure why these targeted people are different, but they are and I know that’s important. It’s another piece of the puzzle. Whenever I think I’ve gotten a handle on this situation and what we’re up against, I’m surprised by the horror of it. How can this be real?
Barclay is still calm. “So you lived at the processing center in this world. Could you take us there if you needed to?”
Ben nods.
“And you’d get a job, portal out, grab whoever the job was, and portal them back to the processing center. Then what?”
Ben shifts on his feet and blows out a steady breath. I wonder if he lay awake at night, unable to sleep because of the guilt, how he justified to himself that saving me was worth so many other lives, and if he’s started to think about what he did—for me—and how it wasn’t actually for me at all.
His eyes find mine, and I know what I’m seeing in them. Because what Ben is feeling, I am too. I don’t know how things got so messed up, how we went from belonging to two different worlds—something that already seemed impossible—to wherever we are now, with my double in another room, human traffickers and IA agents looking for us, and countless people whose lives we’re both responsible for tearing apart.
“Come on, we need to focus,” Barclay says.
Ben nods. “There was a guy in charge of the processing center, and I’d report to him.”
“What’s his name?”
“Basil something. A lot of the guys there called him Razor or Raze.”
“You’re fucking kidding me,” Barclay says with a snort. He pushes back into his chair and runs his hands through his hair. The gesture looks so much like something Ben would do.
Trying to concentrate, I lean forward. “What? What does that mean?”
“Basil ‘Razor’ Lehrman is a smuggler and a rapist. He got his nickname when he was fifteen and killed his parents by cutting them