She stopped before she’d gone far and cranked up her flashlight, releasing some of her excess energy, then flicked it on.
She trusted Jude, but she still wanted to see him coming.
“Clover!” West called for her, and she saw another light illuminate the space to her right.
“Come on,” she said, slowing to wait for him and Bridget.
“I don’t want to be here,” Bridget said.
“Oh, my God. Stop whining.” Clover pushed ahead and walked toward the stairwell.
“Clover!”
She slowed a little but didn’t look back at West. “What? It’s annoying. You’d never let me get away with it.”
They made their way up, again, to the fifteenth floor. Slower this time, because West had to help Bridget. Clover kept moving at a pace that was maybe faster than she really wanted it to be. She was at least as tired as Bridget. This was the second time she’d done this climb today, plus a ten-mile round-trip bike ride that morning.
Jude didn’t surprise them on the fifteenth-floor landing this time. Instead, they walked to room 1534 on their own.
West knocked three times, like Jude had, and the door opened casually. Not thrown open in anger or cracked open so someone could peek through. A girl, one of the twins, froze and looked out at them with brown eyes that went as perfectly round as her face. Marta, Clover thought.
She held the door in one hand, as if she might slam it closed again. But she didn’t. “What’s this, then?”
“We need to talk to Jude,” West said.
Marta looked West over with a bald, obvious appreciation that made Bridget look almost as uncomfortable as West did. Clover covered her mouth to capture a snort of laughter before it came out.
Marta made a disgusted sound and shooed them away with one hand. “He made you go once, and you come back with another hoodie?”
None of them answered or moved. After what felt like an eternity, the girl sighed and said with exaggerated enunciation, “You shouldn’t be here. Especially not with her.”
“We need to talk to Jude,” West said again.
Marta shrugged and pulled a flashlight from her belt. She pushed between Bridget and Clover into the hallway. When the three of them stood there watching her, she turned back and threw up her hands. “You want the man, let’s find him.”
They walked—single file except for Bridget, who stayed next to West—down the dim hallway to a room four away from 1534. Marta knocked on the door.
Jude looked out, saw her, then them, and opened the door the rest of the way. “Are you kidding me?”
Marta gave Jude a look that said They’re all yours and went back down the hallway.
“You can’t just bring people here. Are you insane?”
“Probably,” West said. “Jude Degas, meet Bridget Kingston.”
Jude muttered a rude word under his breath. “Come in, then.”
His room had a bed pushed lengthwise against the wall across from the bathroom door. A round table and four chairs sat in front of the window. A cheap-looking brown laminate dresser and matching nightstands at the foot and head of the bed rounded things out. The space reminded her of her barrack. Except placing all the heavy furniture against the wall left a lot of open space in the center of the room.
Jude was claustrophobic, Clover remembered. The Dinosaur was big, but this room was isolated, hundreds of feet in the air. He wouldn’t like to feel closed into it.
A doorless closet held four shirts and two pairs of red pants, and two Academy uniforms, all neatly hung. A pair of boots sat on the floor next to a stack of red and blue plastic storage bins.
Jude stayed standing and didn’t offer any of them seats. Clover sat in a chair anyway. She was so tired her legs felt limp. West sat Bridget in one, too. The girl looked like she might fall over at any moment.
That left the two boys facing each other down.
“I can’t do anything for you,” Jude said. “And if you keep coming here, you’re going to get us in trouble.”
“Actually, you can do something for us.” West used his quiet, adult tone. The one he used on Clover when he thought he was right and she was wrong. He used it a lot. “We need to stay here for a while.”
“You have to leave. Now,” Jude said.
“We aren’t going anywhere.”
“You sure about that?” Jude said, his voice low. He didn’t back down an inch, even though he had to tilt his head back to look West in the face. Clover’s heart thudded and she felt the beats on her eardrums. She shook her head to clear that, and started to move closer to them, but they both put a hand out to stop her.
“I don’t want a problem,” West said to Jude.
“Then don’t cause one, hoodie.”
“We need to figure out what’s going on.”
“I agree, you do,” Jude said. “But what does that have to do with us?”
“You need to know, too.” Clover pushed West’s hand away when he held it out again. “You gave me that zine. You had the keys to the Company van.”
“Clover,” Jude said. He looked sorry for her.
“You kissed me!” Clover wrapped her arms around her body. This was so stupid. Mango was tense, sitting close to Clover and panting.
“Jesus, Clover,” West said. Jude just stared at her.
“Wait in the hall,” she said to West. “And see if you can find some water for my dog.”
Both boys said, “What?” at the same time.
“Take Bridget. And get Mango some water.”
West grunted and shook his head. “No way.”
“Jude will listen to me. Tell him you’ll listen to me, Jude. Otherwise, we’re just going to stand here all night going back and forth.”
West looked at Jude, who lifted his shoulders. “I’ll listen.”
West didn’t look happy, but he took Bridget out into the hall. Clover sat again, with Mango so close to her he was nearly in her lap. “Do you have any water in here?”
Jude walked to his bathroom and came back with a little plastic bucket filled with water that he put on the floor in front of the dog. He scratched Mango’s ears once, then stood without making a huge deal about it.
“I want to help you, Clover,” Jude said. “I do. But—”
“You saved West’s life and Bridget’s, too.”
“That wasn’t me.”
Two years would change him. But this was still him. They had—would have—some kind of relationship then that she didn’t fully understand yet. But this was where it started, and she was surprised to find that she wanted it to start. Whatever it was.
“It was you. You knew Mango’s name. You had a key that you wouldn’t have, or even know you needed, unless I told you. And you warned me that my brother is going to be executed for Bridget Kingston’s murder.”
“And I kissed you?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” he said.
“What are you and those girls doing here, anyway?” Clover was genuinely curious. He’d obviously set himself up here, and those girls seemed like they had as well. “How many are there of you? How long have you been here?”
“Since I heard that I’d been accepted into the Academy. About two weeks after the kids from Foster City were given the entrance exams.” He didn’t say how many there were, and she decided not to ask again, even though she had to actually bite the question back. “All we’re trying to do is keep the guard from sending us back to Foster City. That’s all. As long as they don’t know we’re here, we’re fine. No one is looking for us. They’re looking for you.”
“No, they’re not.”
“They will be. You think Adam Kingston isn’t going to raise the alarm for his missing daughter?”
That question had buzzed around her head enough that she had an answer. “I think even if he does, they aren’t going to cause a scene about it. Not yet, anyway. People aren’t supposed to be able to be kidnapped anymore, remember?”<
br />
“Yeah. But he’s not just going to let his little girl go missing forever.”
“How do you live here? What about food? Water? How do you—” She glanced toward the bathroom.
Jude ran an index finger over the scar on his face. “Do you remember how I told you I got this?”
“Yes,” she said.
“We do what we have to. So far, we haven’t had to do anything that comes close to being as bad as living in Foster City.”
“But how can you live like this?”
“We manage.”
Clover pulled her pack to her and dug around until she found the zine, opened it to the back page, and showed him the note that told her to come here. “Tell me the truth, Jude. Would you have written this if it weren’t true?”
He took the zine from her. “I can’t imagine why I would do this at all.”
“Because we’re friends, and you know I’ll be alone at the pickup box. In two years you know, because I’m telling you now.” She pulled her van key on its silver ring from her bag as well, and swung it in front of him. “You have this with you. How do you think you got it?”
“Friends?” He tilted his head and looked at her so frankly that she shifted her gaze to over his left shoulder. “Sounds like we’re more than friends.”
She didn’t know what to say to that. Her hands flapped against her upper thighs while she tried to figure it out.
Jude sat on the edge of the mattress. “We all work. That’s how we do it. Every day, we work. You can’t just come here and take our rations and use our—”
“We have a house full of things that might be useful here.”
“Will it be hard to get back into your house?”
She couldn’t lie. Not now. He’d know it in a heartbeat, and doing this right was important. Maybe the most important thing she’d ever done. “It might be, but I think it can be done.”
Jude looked at her another minute, then stood and went to the door to let West and Bridget back in.
“You can stay, at least for now.” Jude glanced at Bridget. “At least until we get the whole story.”
“Thank you,” Clover said. She gave West a hard look, and he echoed her thanks.
“You can stay as far as I’m concerned, anyway. I can’t promise that the others will give you a pass,” Jude said. “But they’ll be happy for whatever rations you got at your house, if they get past the rest of your trash. You can’t convince them, you have to go. That’s the rule.”
West swung his gaze back to Clover. “Those rations are all we have.”
“We share here,” Jude said. “If you aren’t down with that, you can go now and save us all some trouble.”
West pinched his lips together into a thin, bloodless line. “Fine,” he finally said.
“Dinner’s in an hour. You can meet everyone then.”
Everyone turned out to be the twins; another girl, Emmy, who looked no older than seven or eight; her older brother, Phire, who was maybe twelve or thirteen; and Christopher, who looked old enough to be out of Foster City without having to run away.
Faced with them, Clover guessed it made sense that there were homeless children, refugees from Foster City, in Reno. Probably even more than just this half dozen. But it had never occurred to her before. She’d read books about runaways, about children living on the streets back in a time when the streets were a lot scarier than they are now. When people were allowed out at night, when the bad guys weren’t executed before their crimes could be committed.
She looked at Jude, her eyes tracing his scar. Except, it turned out, not all the bad guys were executed. And Foster City kids obviously weren’t kept track of as closely as kids from the neighborhoods, like Clover, West, and Bridget.
“How do you get your doses?” Clover pointed at Christopher. “Where do you work? How do you get your rations?”
“Clover.” West said her name under his breath. She was all too familiar with his tone.
“What? He looks old enough to work.”
West shook his head once, and she closed her mouth. But God, she wanted to know. How did Jude pass the exams with no one to teach him? How did they eat? None of them were old enough to work, except maybe Christopher, and he might or might not be old enough to get into the Bazaar to collect his own rations. Jude was sixteen like Clover—old enough to work, but he was going into the Academy instead. He was two years from being able to live, legally, without a guardian or to get into the Bazaar to pick up his own rations.
Clover and Bridget sat on either side of West at a long table in what Jude called the boiler room. Christopher sat in a chair near the open window so that he could hear and join in the conversation while keeping watch for anyone coming into the courtyard. He was a tall, broad-shouldered black boy with a lopsided smile and soft voice. He walked with a limp. Like half of his body was an inch or two shorter than the other half.
“I work, my foster father gets my rations,” Christopher said. “Would do it if the other kids got my share, but they don’t even get all of their own.”
“You don’t have to explain yourself to her.” Geena didn’t glance toward them. Her focus stayed tight on Jude. “We’re supposed to take in hoodies, right? Now we’re just hooking them in off the damn street.”
Geena and Marta both looked like they’d done everything possible to avoid looking like girls. Anything soft or pretty was hidden or destroyed. Their chopped hair and hard, black make-up around their brown eyes were the most obvious examples. They wore oversized T-shirts and baggy pants that looked like they’d never been washed.
Geena had a crude metal ring looped through the left side of her bottom lip and Marta had a similar one through her right nostril, providing an easy way to tell them apart. Clover had a hard time not staring.
“They’re here,” Jude said. “There isn’t a lot we can do about that now.”
“He got a point.” Christopher kept his eyes on the window as he talked. “We keep them here, we know they don’t go to the guard.”
West made a dismissive sound but didn’t say anything. There was a difference between wanting to stay somewhere safe and being unable to leave that place when they were ready.
“Makes no sense they’re here at all,” Geena said. “I vote no. We ain’t got enough to worry about?”
Clover pointed at Jude. “He invited us.”
“Not exactly,” Jude said when all of the Foster City kids turned their eyes to him.
“Yes, exactly.” She pulled the zine out of her back pocket and put it on the table in front of Geena, who didn’t even look down at it. Jude took the zine and read out loud the invitation to come to the Dinosaur’s fifteenth floor.
“I carried in the hoodies,” Jude said when he was done reading.
West pushed his chair back from the table, just a little. “We’re here. I’m not willing to die, or let Bridget die, for your convenience. So we need to figure out what to do about it.”
“What you’re willing or not willing to do isn’t our concern,” Jude said.
“It is now.”
“Like hell,” Geena said.
“You should read the zine.” Clover pushed the little book closer to Geena, who still didn’t look down at it, and then it hit Clover. “You can’t read.”
“Clover,” West warned quietly when Geena’s glare turned colder.
Jude picked up the zine and flipped through it. The soft pages made a thwap, thwap sound as they slapped together.
“Jesus, Geena,” he muttered under his breath. “This article says the dope’s a crock.”
“Yeah,” the girl shot back. “So that proves they’re all crazy, yeah? Dope’s a crock. Whatever.”
“You wrote it.”
Her eyes went wide for a moment, and then she shrugged and closed down again. “Who says she didn’t make it up herself?”
“Your name’s on it. You meet her before this morning?”
“What does that mean, dope’s a crock? Don’t even mak
e sense.”
“Says the suppressant doesn’t suppress anything,” Jude said. “That we were all cured and protected with the first dose.”
That silenced the room for a few heartbeats, and then everyone spoke at once. Clover covered her ears with her hands. She leaned back against her chair, then bent forward closer to the table, back and forth as the voices rose around her.
“The Dinosaur is big enough to house every kid in Reno,” West said. “What are there, a thousand rooms in this place? More? How many can the six of you use, anyway? We won’t be a problem for you.”
“You think it’s about space?” Jude asked. “You go live in Foster City, and come back to talk about space.”
“What’s wrong with his sister?” Emmy asked, pointing at Clover, who had started to hum out loud, despite her efforts not to.
“I don’t know,” Phire said. “She’s some kind of freak.”
“That’s enough,” Jude said.
“We’re all freaks!” Clover stood up and tore the zine out of Jude’s grip. “It says Freaks for Freedom. Freaks! That’s us.”
West put a hand out and stopped Jude from touching her. Every inch of her skin felt pulled tight, like it might pop at any minute.
“Who you calling a freak?” Geena said.
“You.” Bridget waved Geena off when the other girl started to deny it. “Oh, yes you are. Don’t you know that no one is supposed to live like this? That’s the whole point of…well, of everything.”
“Bridget’s right.” Jude put a hand on Marta’s shoulder. “You think the hoodies know what happens to us? We’re the Company’s dirty little secret.”
Clover desperately tried not to lose the death grip she had on her behavior. Pacing would help. Rocking. Humming to drown the others out. She covered her ears again and repeated calm, calm, calm in her head.
It worked. Maybe not the way she wanted it to, but the room went quiet. Clover felt them stare at her but couldn’t stop herself from humming under her breath as she tried to bring herself all the way down. Mango pressed his body against her legs, lending her the pressure that helped her focus. She finally sat back in her chair and let Mango put his head in her lap.
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