Blood Zero Sky by J. Gates Page B

I know he’s right. Take my dad away, and I’m one bad ad campaign away from being an unprofitable, just like everyone else.
    From down the corridor come the sounds of more gunshots and yelling. Ethan allows himself one glance back, but it’s enough for me to see he’s worried, and not just for us.
    “What do you want me to do?” I ask.
    He looks back at me. There’s an urgency in his voice that wasn’t there before. “Cut the cross out of your face.”
    I don’t answer. I don’t know what to say. It’s my life he’s asking. He’s asking me to take my own life. My name, my credit, my credentials, my accomplishments, all recorded in the cross, all will be wiped away.
    “That’s impossible.”
    “We’ve all done it,” he says. He points to his cheek and tilts it toward the light. Instead of the cross, there’s just a ragged scar.
    “I’d be giving up everything I have to destroy everything my father helped build,” I say.
    “Not destroy,” he says. “Commerce will still thrive. All the wealth the Company controls will still exist—many companies will remain, but we must divide and disarm the two Companies. We aren’t anarchists, May. We don’t want to destroy society. We want to reinstate the rightful, democratic government of the United States and return sovereignty to the people.”
    In other words, they want to bring back the same corrupt, inefficient government the Company managed to replace.
    But what if he’s right? What if it was because of the Company—and the people behind it—that the government became corrupt in the first place? I shake my head to clear the confusion. Even if I weren’t suffering from a concussion, the whole thing would still be too difficult to process.
    I look at the knife. Scintillations of distant gunshots play across its deadly sharp blade.
    From somewhere behind comes the sound of a muffled explosion.
    “No time, May,” Ethan says again. “Choose.”
    Yes, choose. Cut the cross out, or stab Ethan and run. Either way, I have a feeling my life will never be the same.
    Suddenly Ethan’s head snaps to the right, toward the direction from which we came. Footfalls.
    “It’s us,” yells a woman. I think the voice must be Clair’s, but it sounds more resonant, more powerful now.
    McCann is with her, and one of the other men. The fourth man does not appear.
    “The stairway’s collapsed, but they’ll get through the debris soon,” says McCann, as he runs past us.
    And now we’re all running, single file, McCann then Clair then me then Ethan.
    “Did she cut it out?” yells McCann.
    “She was about to,” says Ethan.
    “They’ll just track her right to us with that bloody cross in her face,” Clair shouts. “Let’s leave her.”
    “They can’t track the cross underground,” says Ethan. “The satellites aren’t that powerful yet.”
    “There are no tracking devices in adults’ crosses,” I wheeze. “They only put tracking devices in kids’ crosses, in case they’re abducted.”
    “They put them in everyone’s,” says Ethan.
    “That’s not true,” I huff. “I’d have heard about it.”
    “Blackie,” Clair says, “what you don’t know could fill a warehouse.”
    Shadows jump and squirm against two blinks of light as, behind me, Ethan squeezes two shots off over his shoulder.
    And we run on through the dark, through the earth, and my mind reels as I wonder where the tunnel will come out and who I’ll be on the other side.

—Chapter ØØ6—
    This is the Fourth of July. Company Day.
    I know it by the smell of grilling in the air: barbeque sauce, grease, and delicious-smelling smoke. Somewhere, a marching band plays.
    This must be a long time ago, because I still believe my father’s promises. He says he will meet me in the park and we’ll eat ice-cream sundaes together, just like old times. The fact is, we have never met in the park and eaten ice-cream sundaes. Those “old times” are completely fictional, existing only in the