chapter 8
The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.
—WILLIAM MCKINLEY, LETTER, DECEMBER 21, 1898
West drew his hands through his hair and tried to ease his heart rate to something that didn’t make him feel like he was about to keel over. “Tell me again.”
“This kid I met at the orientation was at the pickup box.” Clover sat on a kitchen chair with her feet tucked under her, rocking and orchestrating with her hands as her words tumbled over each other on their way out. “Only, you know, he was older.”
“And?”
“And he gave me this.” She waved the booklet at him. He hadn’t built up the courage to look through it yet. “I’ve told you this already.”
“And you were there alone, because?” West could kill Bennett for letting her drive by herself. Worse, for putting her alone on that submarine full of Mariners and sending her into the future with no training.
“I told you, Leanne broke her leg in the future. Her real leg, not the fake one.” She adjusted herself, so that she was sitting with her feet on the floor and looked at the booklet. Zine, it said on the cover. “Jude knew me, West. Way more than I knew him. He acted like we were friends.”
She hesitated over the last word, and a deep flush rose up over her neck and cheeks. Friends, huh?
And who was this kid? The idiot had talked to her while she was in her Messenger uniform. While she was two years in the future. Whoever he was, he would have been arrested at best, and shot at worst, if someone had been with Clover.
Did that mean that he knew she’d be alone? He seemed to know her, she’d said. So maybe sometime in the next two years she’d tell him. “How do you know he was your friend?”
Clover reached into her pocket and pulled out a key on a silver ring. “He used this to unlock the van when I couldn’t get in. Only I hadn’t given it to him yet. I didn’t even get it until I got back through the portal.”
“Why do you have it?”
“Bennett said I can drive myself until Leanne is better. It’s the same key as Jude had at the box. I would have missed the return trip if he hadn’t been there.”
The ring was very simple, with no distinguishing features at all. Maybe it wasn’t the same one. West looked at the dispatch flyer again. He felt disconnected from the guy in the picture, even though it was himself, without a doubt. Someone was setting him up, and they weren’t doing a very good job of it. Of all the people in Reno, Bridget Kingston was on a very short list of those he’d risk himself to protect.
“Well, I’m obviously not going to kill her,” he said to the picture, then looked at his sister. She met his gaze with cool, dispassionate eyes that were the same bottle-green as their mother’s had been. West could just remember, like an eerie sense of déjà vu, his mother looking at him the same way when he drew a road for his toy cars on her kitchen floor with a permanent marker. The faint remains of his artwork were still imprinted on the tiles.
“That isn’t the point,” Clover said.
He wanted it to be the point. But she was right. If the newspaper article was genuine, then whether he would commit the crime was irrelevant. He would be punished to save Bridget’s life.
He was certain the dispatch Clover had brought back from the future was generated after his name was run through the violent crime database during his Company interview. That wasn’t scheduled to take place for two weeks.
The fact was, he would be arrested as soon as his name showed up in the database, and the next thing, he’d have a bullet in his head. But not until he’d spent a week or so in prison. He’d heard that they didn’t bother to waste food and clean water on prisoners accused of violent crimes, and that some didn’t even make it to their own executions.
“Let me see,” he finally said to Clover. She gave him the zine, and he read the article pasted into the back. It was cut from the Reno Gazette-Journal. The dispatch flyer as well. Neither was dated.
The Company, headquartered in the west, and the government, headquartered in the east, ran the justice system in all of the cities with a one-two punch that was so effective, West was unaware of any major crime that had happened since he was five or six years old.
In their city, the Reno Gazette-Journal—once a big daily newspaper, it was an eight-page weekly now—reported the murders, robberies, and rapes that the Mariners stopped before they happened. There weren’t many, but enough that the citizens never forgot what they were being protected from. The contrast between the world the newspapers suggested was constantly a near-miss, and their own safe, secure city was stark.
It had never occurred to West to question the system of prosecuting crimes that had not yet happened. He had a sudden, painful change in attitude now, and there was nothing he could do about it.
A walled city didn’t leave too many places to hide. Flyers went out a few weeks before the date the crime was to take place, and the community did the job of finding the wanted person for the guards.
Someone would turn West in and be rewarded with a Whole New Life, the same as if they’d hit the New Year’s Eve megajackpot at the Bazaar. A house with a big garden, enough to eat, a choice job, twelve hours of power a day, an electric cart to get around in. There were people who studied the dispatch flyers and searched for the criminals, like old-fashioned bounty hunters.
Did the flyer mean he would kill Bridget if he wasn’t stopped? It was supposed to mean that. Whenever West saw a dispatch, he always knew that someone would be saved.
“Maybe this is fake,” he said.
Clover pointed to the bottom of the newspaper clipping. Stuck on with a piece of masking tape was a note. Help is in the Dinosaur, fifteenth floor. “We can find out.”
West tapped the note with his index finger. “We aren’t going there.”
“What else can we do?”
The Dinosaur was the last casino, on the far end of downtown from the Waverly-Stead building and the Academy. The only former resort casino in Reno that wasn’t being used for some other purpose now, it hulked, dark and broken down, like the decomposing remains of the last brontosaurus.
“I’m serious, Clover. We aren’t going there.”
“They’ll kill you. You get that, don’t you?”
Clover was rocking again, hard enough that she looked like she might take flight. She ground her knuckles together in her lap until Mango pushed his head against them, and she started to pet him instead.
West knelt on her other side, but not too close. It was a balancing act with her, but one he’d been doing for a long time. Close enough to get and keep her attention, not so close that she pushed him away. She was so small that they were nearly eye to eye with him on one knee.
“Jude seemed like a friend?” he asked her. “Tell me why.”
It was a loaded question. She had to think to answer it, which redirected her energy and slowed her rocking.
“He said he forgot we were ever so young,” she said. “That sounds like he knows me now, right?”
“What else?”
“He had the key to the van.”
How would he know she’d need it, if she didn’t tell him? How would he get it, if she didn’t give it to him? “Is there more?”
She looked up at him. “He kissed me.”
Christ.
“Okay,” he said, finally. “We’ll go.”
The Dinosaur was nearly five miles from their house, so Clover and West biked there. Clover didn’t love biking, mostly because she had to leave Mango behind. Ten miles round-trip was too far for him to run beside them.
Riding her bike also gathered up all her physical awkwardness and bundled it into one neat package. It took all her attention and then some. One moment of distraction and she was careening into a light post or falling off a curb.
She didn’t like anything about this. Downtown was dead beyond the Waverly-Stead building and the Academy. Like some kind of graveyard with elephantiasis, each building a gargantua
n tombstone. Even those used for storage were devoid of life.
They traveled the service road behind the casinos instead of down the avenue. They didn’t see anyone once they left Virginia Street. This was the worst idea ever.
“What if it’s a setup?” she asked West when they pulled into the Dinosaur’s back parking lot.
Time travel made Clover feel like her brain was running on a hamster wheel, trying to figure things out, but going nowhere fast. Bennett might already know that West was supposed to kill Bridget. He could have arranged for her to be alone at the pickup box in two years. Could have engineered her bringing West here, where he could be arrested.
“Try to breathe, Clover.”
Try to breathe. Why didn’t she think of that?
They made it to the Dinosaur without any broken bones. West pushed and pulled against several doors until he found one he could force open. He reached for her hand, and for once she didn’t mind at all. He held a crank-powered flashlight in the other and flicked it on as they entered the pitch-black space.
The flashlight made a weak, yellowish circle in the perfect dark that was so thick and complete, it seemed to actually suck in the light. It felt like they were walking into the giant mouth of some hungry beast that might eat them whole.
“I’m not going in there,” she whispered, and yanked her hand back.
“This was your idea,” West answered, in a matching whisper. “It’ll be okay.”
She wasn’t so sure. But West went in, still holding her hand so that their arms stretched between them. Him inside and her out. She didn’t want to be left behind, so she went after him, tripped over a step up into the lobby of the casino, and would have landed on her face if West hadn’t caught her.
She walked closer to her brother than she would have normally, the hand he’d been holding tightened around a fistful of the back of his T-shirt, as they made their slow way out of the lobby and passed dead slot machines and moved toward the big pit of game tables in the center of the casino. Clover had only a bare-bones idea of how a casino was laid out, from old newspaper photographs and books that she’d seen in the library. West went to the Bazaar every week and seemed to know what he was doing.
As far as Clover could tell in the dim light, it was as if the Dinosaur were just waiting for someone to send it some juice and let the players stream in. The machines stood in rows, like soldiers. A few times, she nearly tripped on the high stools set at each machine, but West kept her upright and it wasn’t as bad to walk through the yawning dark as Clover feared.
Getting to the fifteenth floor was going to take some effort, though. Without energy, the elevators were dead, empty crates. West found a wall and started to follow it, looking for a door that would open to stairs.
Clover had looked at pictures of the Dinosaur in its glory days, but she couldn’t bring up any memory of seeing a diagram of stairways. She wished now that she’d come across an exit map or…and then she remembered. There was a framed map of stairways and emergency exits mounted on the wall next to the elevator in the Company building.
“Go back to the elevators,” she said.
“They aren’t going to work.”
She sighed, because how stupid did he think she was? And then she pulled him back to where they’d passed a hallway with four elevators a few minutes before.
Just like at the Waverly-Stead building, there was a framed map over the call buttons. “See,” she said as West directed their light to the map.
“Okay. I see.” He studied the map for a minute, then moved her to the side and said, “Hang on.”
He drove the butt of their flashlight into the glass. Clover jumped and covered her ears; the sharp noise echoed around her brain.
“What’s wrong with you?”
West took the map gingerly out of the frame. “We need this. The stairs are just over here.”
“You could have warned me at least.”
The stairwell, when they finally found it, was narrow and painted white. The light reflected and bounced around it, making the flashlight far more effective here. West folded the map and put it in his pocket, then started up.
“Wait, West,” she said as she looked into the darkness above. “What if guards are waiting for us?”
West hesitated, too. “Do you think he’d work with the guard?”
A thousand scenarios had rushed through her head since Jude had handed her the zine. In two years, he would be only halfway through his Academy training. It was possible, she thought, that just like she was snapped out of the Academy and put into the Mariner program, he was put early into the guard. Maybe that was what they did with Foster City kids and she just didn’t know it.
But then she remembered that he’d kissed her. Like it wasn’t the first time. He knew how to get around her instinct to pull away from being touched. He knew her. And he knew her well.
“No,” she finally said. “Let’s go.”
The first few floors, Clover’s heart jerked at each landing, sure the door would open and guards would be there ready to arrest them both. By the tenth floor, she didn’t care. It took all of her energy to take one stair after the other. There were two dozen to each floor, twelve and then a ninety-degree turn with a small landing before twelve more and a big door to the next floor.
“You okay?” West asked her at the landing on the fourteenth floor.
“Yeah, you?”
He grunted and they climbed the last flight.
They stopped in front of the door marked with the number 15 painted in red. It was hard for Clover to imagine a time when there were enough people to fill hotels like this. She thought all the residents of Reno could probably fit inside the Dinosaur with room to spare.
She reached for the door and West grabbed her forearm. “What do you think you’re doing? You can’t just rush in there. We need a plan.”
“We can’t just stand here.”
West put his back against the door.
“Just give me a second. I need to think.”
“If we’re doing this, let’s just do it,” she answered. “What is there to think about?”
“I don’t know. What if—”
The door opened and West fell backward into the hall, pushing Clover away from him at the same time. She cried out and stumbled back until the edge of the metal step behind her bit her calves and forced her to sit down hard on the third stair.
“West!”
He steadied himself and stepped back through the doorway to her. As soon as he was out of the doorway, she saw Jude standing there, looking as scared as she felt.
“What are you doing here?” Jude asked. “You shouldn’t be here.”
“Neither should you,” she said.
“What are you doing here?” he asked again.
“You invited us.” West pulled Clover up by the arm and pushed her ahead of him out of the stairwell.
“Wait, where are you going?” Jude held the door open. “Just leave before you get us all in trouble.”
“Jude,” Clover said. “I have to show you something.”
“Just leave. Please.”
“We can’t leave,” West said.
Jude was afraid of someone. No. For someone. He stood between them and the hallway, keeping them from moving away from the door, in the same protective way West stood between her and Jude.
He would change a lot in the next two years. More, even, than she had realized when she saw him at the pickup box. Physically, of course. But there was also a confidence about him then that hadn’t fully developed yet in this time line.
“We’re friends,” she said. “Well, we will be friends.”
His jaw relaxed as his eyes moved from West to Clover. “Where’s your dog?”
“He’s at home.”
“What do you have to show me?”
She pulled the flyer with West’s picture on it out of her pack and handed it to Jude.
He held his flashlight on it so he could see, and then looked b
ack at them. “Is this supposed to make me feel better?”
“You gave it to me.”
“What? I didn’t—”
“Two years from now.”
It took another minute. Clover stayed where she was and watched him think it out.
“Okay,” he finally said, and let them into the hallway.
West followed Jude as he led them down the long dark hallway. He had Clover by one hand and his flashlight in the other, adding to Jude’s to illuminate the crayon blue carpet and dirty yellow walls. He stopped at a door marked 1534 and knocked on it three times in quick succession.
A girl opened the door. She was about Clover’s size, but West thought she was no older than fourteen. She looked from Jude to West.
“Jude? What’re you bringing in here?”
Jude got her to let them in. Sunlight filled the room through an open window. Inside another girl, identical to the first, sat on one of two huge beds.
“Clover and…” Jude looked to West.
“West.”
Jude pointed to one girl and then the other. “Geena, Marta.”
“Are you crazy, bringing these hoodies in here?” Marta asked. She shot a look at West and Clover that dripped hostility.
“I might be,” Jude said. “They’re friends. I think.”
Marta shrugged her narrow shoulders and went to stand by the window. The twins were not as young as West first thought. Once he’d heard the one girl speak and gotten a good look at them, he adjusted his assessment of their age closer to Clover’s. While his sister inherited her small stature from their mother, West got the impression that Geena and Marta were stunted somehow. Their too-large heads were perfectly round and both covered in a fine fuzz of brown hair, like the crew cuts his dad used to give him. It was as if their heads had kept on growing, expecting their bodies to catch up.
“They really friends of yours, Jude?” Geena asked.
“I think so,” Jude answered. “Gather everyone in my room. I’ll be right there.”
“You live here?” Clover asked. Marta gave her a narrow-eyed glance before following her sister out into the hallway. “How can you live here? How do you eat? What about water? Power? I thought you were from Foster City.”
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