Jacob stalked the hallways of the recruit quarters until he caught sight of one of his targets.
"Hey." The girl looked up at the sound of his voice and for a second he thought she would try and bolt. "Got a minute?" She nodded and motioned him to follow her into her room. The second girl from this morning was inside, sitting on the one of the two twin beds. She jumped to her feet when she saw him enter. Both recruits gazed at him warily.
"Hello, again. You want to tell me what the hell was going back there? And before you follow your natural impulse to lie, try to remember I overheard your little conversation by the water cooler. You had prior knowledge of your instructor's premeditated murder and you didn't report it. That makes you both complicit. As of this moment the only three people who know that are in this room. You answer my questions, honestly, and that's the way it stays." The girls exchanged a glance and the smaller of the two nodded. The blonde turned to address Jacob.
"All we did was help her gather the plastic for the shiv." So Scott had recruited these two to help her assemble the murder weapon. That made sense. Having multiple people stealing the material reduced the chances of getting caught, provided she could trust they wouldn't turn her in.
"Why do the three of you want Morris dead?" The darker girl spoke this time, her expression grim.
"Morris is a perv. He tells female recruits that if they sleep with him he'll boost their ranking, and keep them from being cut. If they say no suddenly their grades start dropping in his class." Jacob blinked. There wasn't much that unsettled him, but this struck closer to home than he'd like.
A year before McCready had found him he'd been living in a group home. There'd been a older girl, Angela, who'd looked out for him. On the days he'd been sent to school without food, she'd given him half her lunch. On the nights when their foster father had come home drunk and angry, she'd hidden him in her room. On one of those nights he'd been in her closet, and their foster father had come in and he'd...hurt her. Jacob hadn't moved. He hadn't done anything. The next morning the girl told him she was fine, that it had been happening for a while and she could handle it. About a month later Angela killed herself. Jacob had run away about a week after that.
"So he's done this to the three of you?" There was an unspoken understanding that recruits deal with their own problems at St. Regis. There were penalties, of course, but unofficially Bud rewarded students who demonstrated they had the initiative and intelligence to defend themselves. If Scott had been assaulted, Jacob doubted Bud would penalize her too harshly. He was surprised when the blonde shook her head.
"No, not Scott. She's top bitch around here. Morris only targets mid-rankers like us."
"Then why did Scott go after him?" The girls both shrugged.
"I don't know. The girl's nuts. We figured if she wanted to go all kamikaze on Morris, fine by us." Jacob nodded. Their lack of interest in Scott's motives made sense. If Scott was top of the class, then it was likely they considered her as much of a threat as Morris. If she was put down, then their ranking would automatically rise. If there was one thing that was universal at St. Regis, it was a strong sense of self-preservation. All the students were survivors. Or they were supposed to be.
Jacob made his way across campus, his mind turning over and over the puzzle that was Scott. Why would a top ranking student sign her own death warrant by killing someone who was in no way a threat to her? More importantly, why did he care? He was a full agent now, and had been for years. Whatever this little academy drama was, it had nothing to do with him. In a week or two he'd be back in the field, wearing a new name, fulfilling a new contract. He should just drop it, go work a heavy bag and leave Bud to deal with the situation. The trouble was, he didn't want to. Maybe it was the weeks of boredom, maybe it was his disgust for Morris, or maybe it was just that he found Scott so damn unusual. Whatever the reason, something was compelling him to see this through to its conclusion, propelling his feet to the building containing the holding cells.
A fingerprint scan and elevator ride later Jacob was facing two black-shirted guards.
"I want to talk to her." The guards turned and smirked at one another before turning back to Jacob.
"Is that right? Well, Golden boy, protocol says we hold her until McCready gets back." Jacob resisted the break the guards nose. He hated dealing with the campus security. They were the absolute bottom tier of academy students who had survived their training and as a result they were invariably difficult. The used whatever limited power they had to screw with high-ranking recruits. Jacob had experienced back in the day, and now it seemed it was deja vu all over again.
"I'm not asking you to let her out, I'm asking you to let me in. McCready will want a full briefing when he gets back. He's not going to be in the mood to conduct the interviews himself. You want to be the one to tell him this bullshit hasn't been taken care of?" Invoking Bud's name did the trick. The perception that he had the boss' ear could be pretty useful at times. The metal door swung open, revealing Scott sitting cross legged on the cell's cement floor. Her eyes, which had been closed, popped open when he entered the room.
"You again."
"Me again." Jacob's eyes swept the empty cement room. He'd been here once before, after he'd broken into a fellow student's room and busted both his knee caps. He'd ended up doing a month in the hole, but when he'd emerged no other student had dared fuck with him again. There were still no cameras, nothing that could be destroyed or used by the cell's occupant. He could speak to Scott with no fear of being recorded.
"I heard some interesting things about you from the guards." So the idiots outside were prone to gossip were they? Not surprising. "Apparently you're some kind of living legend. Youngest recruit to graduate in three decades. McCready's favorite." Jacob got the distinct impression that despite Scott's words, she wasn't remotely impressed. In fact, her tone was almost contemptuous.
"McCready doesn't have favorites." A lie and one that Scott wasn't fooled by. She rolled her expressive blue eyes at him, something that no one who knew his real identity had done in a long time.
"I know. Daddy loves his recruits all equally. Which is to say, not at all." The contempt that had been a mere undercurrent in her voice was now unmistakable. This girl definitely had some issues with Bud.
"You know I heard some interesting things about you too." Scott actually chuckled and shot Jacob a playful grin.
"Let me guess: I'm a crazy bitch?" Apparently the girl was well-acquainted with her reputation.
"More or less. I heard you went after Morris because he was pressuring other recruits into sleeping with him. Other recruits, but not you." Scott's smile fell from her face.
"Was there a question in there?"
"Why were you willing to die for those girls? They knew you'd be killed if you succeeded. They didn't care." Was Scott acting out of some kind of misplaced sense of loyalty? It was hard to imagine that a top ranking student would be that stupid.
"When I first here I had a roommate, Elena. I came back to the room one day and I found her with Morris. She told me not to say anything because she wasn't doing well and cuts were coming up. She was convinced Morris would save her. He didn't. She's dead and he just moved on to the next girl down the list. He wasn't going to stop. Someone had to do something." Jacob's mind flashed back to the night in Angela's room. He hadn't done anything, not then, and not after either. He forced his mind back to the present. What happened wasn't on him. It wasn't his job to do something.
"Why you?"
"My father used to say, 'If not now, then when? If not you, then who?' He believed if you had the power to help and you didn't it, then what happened to him was on you. I didn't help Elena. That was on me." Jacob looked into Scott's eyes and read completely sincerity. It was moral claptrap that "normal" people spouted, but Jacob had never in his life come across someone who actually put it into practice. Before today he would have sworn such people didn't exist outside fairytales, and if they did he'd have said St. Regis was the last place on earth he'd ever find one. Yet here Scott was.
"Why are you telling me this?" She was smart, she had to know what Bud would do to her if he suspected she had this kind of internal weakness.
"Maybe I'm just a sucker for a pretty face." Scott leaned back against the concrete wall and closed her eyes. She was apparently done talking to him. Well, that was unfortunate because he was not yet done with her.
"You want me to tell McCready. You're still hoping he kills you." What was this girl's deal? She was the top of her class, and that didn't happen without effort. If she really was suicidal the easiest path would have been to simply fail out.
"You asked me before if I wanted to die. I don't, but I'm not sure I can live with who'd I need to become to survive this." Jacob suddenly understood. Scott had said she'd been at St. Regis for over a year, which meant she was year 2. Her class was three months away from graduation. The final exam was always a kill mission. That's what she was hoping to avoid.
Scott was complicated. Clearly she had natural ability in abundance. Her plan to take out Morris showed intelligence, courage, and a willingness to do whatever it took to achieve her objective. On the other hand she was flawed, infected with some morality bullshit. She feared becoming "bad". It was as though two halves of herself were making war on one another. So what was Jacob going to do about it?
"If I was you, I'd get real sure, real fast." Jacob removed the small shiv from his pocket and tossed it to the floor in front of Scott. Her eyes opened at the sound of plastic hitting cement. She looked at the weapon and back at him. "McCready will be back tonight for your hearing. I strongly suspect Morris will attempt to get to you before then. Decide if you want to live or if you want to die. Either way the choice is yours."
Jacob turned and walked out of the cell without a backward glance. He given her a chance to survive. The rest would be up to her.