by Tosca Lee
I blink, trying to reconcile my sister having a relationship with a man of the world.
But I’m also thinking: We could have left. She could have gone and taken me with her.
I also know I wouldn’t have—gone. Because I believed. The entire debacle with my engagement to Shae’s dad hadn’t happened yet. Magnus was still perfect, and I lived for the day we would see our mother again in the new Earth to come after the cataclysm.
“It was easy,” Jackie says. “Forgetting who I was and that everything I wanted and felt and hoped for was wrong. Believing for a minute that it was all exactly right and as it should be. And it was exciting. Stealing moments alone. How do you think I recognized that look in Magnus’s face? I remember that feeling.”
“So . . . what happened?”
“He finished his fellowship at Iowa State. He got a job in Fort Collins at Colorado State University in an infectious disease center at the veterinary school. He asked me to go with him, live with him, marry him. I asked him to join the Enclave. But he wouldn’t. He called New Earth a cult. I didn’t know what to do—until he told me he had reported New Earth to several watchdog agencies. I felt betrayed. New Earth was all I knew. More than that, I was afraid. Three weeks later, my engagement was announced. I took it as a sign. He left. I married Magnus. I didn’t know I was pregnant.” She glances down. “I cried every night for weeks until I realized I was about to have a baby. Ashley’s baby.”
I exhale a stunned breath. It comes out like an unstable little laugh.
“Ashley will know what to do,” she says quietly. She glances at my phone. “Please call him.”
“Do you know his number?”
She shakes her head. “I haven’t talked to him since before Truly was born. So that was . . . would be . . .” Her brow wrinkles.
I watch her struggle, my heart breaking at the sight of it. “Almost six years,” I say gently. “Jackie—”
She smiles slightly. “I can’t wait to talk to him.”
My cell service is slow, stalls out twice, and finally loads on the third try with a page of information about his DVM from Kansas State, PhD in pathology, and research in emerging zoonotic and infectious diseases. Then, finally, a white page listing for an Ashley Neal on Juniper Lane. I’ve just dialed it when I stare at Jackie and say, “He doesn’t know, does he?”
She shakes her head.
It takes a while for the first ring to sound. When it does, I put the phone on speaker and set it on the table between us.
It rings and rings.
Someone picks up, and Jackie comes closer, clutching the back of her chair.
“Hello?”
“Ash?”
Silence. And then: “Jackie?”
“It’s me.” Her voice wavers, she drags her coat sleeve across her eyes.
He sounds instantly awake. “Are you all right? Where are you?”
“I’m in Chicago, with Wynter . . .”
I’ve never heard her voice like that. Never heard Magnus speak to Jackie with the same tone, such concern.
I feel like an intruder. I gesture that I’ll be back, pull on my boots, and grab my coat. Step outside onto the landing.
It’s cold, crisp, and dark, the stars brittle overhead. I can hear Jackie’s voice from inside, raised—in happiness? In dismay? I can’t tell; she’s crying.
But now so am I. And I wonder how this could happen. How Jackie and I could be reunited—here, on the outside, but without Truly, only to be separated again—seemingly by the catastrophe we’d been taught to expect all our lives.
And then I’m seething. Filled with an anger I have never felt before. What did Magnus plan to do with those samples? Trade them for a bacterial miracle meant to keep him healthy as the rest of the world dies around him, taking his detractors with it?
I tell myself I will find a way to end him. For what he did to Jackie, and Kestral before her. I will do whatever it takes.
And I will get Truly back.
Jackie’s calling me and I step back inside. Find her sitting at the table, red-eyed, and the other end of the phone is so silent that I think the call is over until I glance down and see it’s still connected.
“Hello?” I say into the silence.
“Wynter,” Ashley says. He sounds shaken. I can hear him moving, pacing on what sounds like a wood floor.
“What do we have?”
“I don’t know. I can’t know until I see it. This whole thing is crazy—”
And I know he isn’t just talking about the samples.
“Is it possible?” I ask.
“Sure, anything’s possible, theoretically,” he says. “I’m familiar with Magnus’s projects. I read up on them when I met Jackie for reasons that you obviously know now. He’s got money and knows a lot of people. Which means either it’s nothing or it’s—”
“He threatened to kill Jackie if this didn’t get to whoever was supposed to come get it,” I say. “It’s not nothing.”
He blows out a long breath. “That’s what worries me. If it’s any kind of link to the index case, it could be extremely helpful, which is why it’s too bad your friend Ken isn’t still there or in better shape. I don’t want to scare you, but it could also be very bad in the wrong hands.”
“What do we do?”
“Can you get to Fort Collins?”
I glance wildly around us. “Yes.” Never mind that the farthest I’ve ever driven is the Walgreens less than a mile away. But I figure if Jackie can make it from Ames, the two of us should be able to get to Colorado.
“Okay, it’s . . . nearly one a.m. here,” Ashley says. “I’ll head to campus this afternoon, expect you some time early evening.”
He gives me an address and building.
“Wynter, do you mind if I talk to Jackie again?” he says. “Alone?”
“Of course not.”
Outside, I key in the code to the side door of the garage. There’s an entire storage unit filled full of the things we camped with at Indiana Dunes. I grab a couple sleeping bags, ski gloves, a stupid snowboard hat with a pom-pom on top, and the emergency kit. Pry open a plastic tote and find a cache of old gas station and AAA maps. Grab Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, and Kansas as an afterthought before dumping out the tote and filling it with all the stuff. I carry the tote to the house garage and load it into the back of Julie’s car, which I know for a fact has a full tank of gas.
Gas.
I search around the riding lawn mower for the red plastic gas can, find it half full, add it to the trunk.
Inside the house, I snatch up a spare set of batteries, the blanket from the couch, a couple masks and sets of gloves from Ken’s office, a bag of things from the fridge and pantry, a case of water, one of the five canisters of Lysol wipes Julie picked up from her last trip to Costco, and the pepper spray she jogs with.
Pausing by the desk in the kitchen, I tear a piece of notepaper from the cube by the house phone.
Julie,
I love you.
W.
I leave the note on the counter and quietly carry everything out, pile it all into the SUV.
Back up in the carriage house, I find Jackie staring off into the darkness.
“The car’s loaded,” I say. When she doesn’t answer, I move toward her. “Jackie. Let’s go.”
“I’m not going with you.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
She shakes her head. “I’d take these to Ashley myself, but I don’t trust myself ten hours from now not to lose them or do something horrible. I’ve already seen her . . .”
“Seen who?” I say, not understanding.
“Mom.”
A chill runs up my spine.
“You have to come with me,” I say. “Especially if this is a cure—”
She shakes her head. “I asked him. There’s no cure. Only the possibility of a vaccine. By the time there’s any kind of treatment, I’ll be long dead.”
“You don’t know that!”
“What I do know is that I can’t risk getting you sick.” She looks at me, something feverish in her eyes. “You have to get Truly.”
“Please, Jackie—”
“Promise me!”
“I will. I promise!”
“Besides.” She shakes her head. “I don’t want him to see me, remember me, like this.”
She gets to her feet, and I realize she’s about to leave.
“What are you doing? There’s food here—water in the fridge and more in the tub. If you won’t come with me, you have to stay!”
“No. If they’ve followed me I need to be seen—going the opposite direction.”
“Where?”
I move toward her, and she backs toward the door.
“I love you, Wynter,” Jackie says.
The next instant, she’s yanked open the door and is hurrying down the stairs. I run to the landing, lean out over the rail as she darts down the driveway.
“I love you,” I whisper as her heels pound down the frozen street.
• • •
THE GOD OF my childhood was angry. A God to be obeyed and taken offerings of beer, who loved you if you parroted a joke you weren’t old enough to understand—preferably with dirty language.
The God of my adolescence never cared about cuteness—only perfection. He was the fiery God of rolled-up sleeves concerned with the minutiae of sin with all-seeing eyes. The God you looked to, if only to make certain he still saw you, and whose punishments you accepted because negative attention is better than none. A God who could turn both the tables and the rules on you at a moment’s notice. So that all you thought you had done to be right could be wrong. And all that was wrong was presumed right—no matter how wrong it still felt.
The day I was turned over to Satan for the destruction of my flesh, I knew Jackie had saved me in the only way she could. I knew, too, that I would save her in return. That there was a God waiting for me beyond those walls, ready to show me how.
But now, staring down at the empty street after Jaclyn disappeared, I wonder which God has taken her from me, here in the outside world. The God who requires childlike devotion or blood sacrifice for the sin of notice? Or the capricious God who cannot be followed for his equally changing ways?
Grief immobilizes. Stuns and turns you numb, like venom creeping toward your heart. It seized me up when Mom died and now threatens to paralyze me again. I don’t know how to move, how to function in a world without Jackie.
It’s the thought of Truly that makes me move, looking blindly around me in the gust of cold air from the open door. Grabbing the flashlight, I toss the contents of the fridge into the bag with the rest of the food. Pull the flash drive from my phone and drop both into my bag before slinging it over my shoulder and closing the carrier.
Back out in the house garage, I slide the carrier into the front seat of the Lexus, plug my phone into the charger, and get in, tossing the flashlight onto the floor.
Thirty seconds later, I’m accelerating toward the highway, glancing into my rearview mirror.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
* * *
Magnus showed up at the children’s school while I was teaching, his sidelong smile for me alone. He appeared at the kitchen when I went to serve, his gaze loitering on me when backs were turned.
The only place he wouldn’t deign to visit was the laundry.
But now, when I needed the work, no one would give it to me. Women who used to see through me rushed to relieve me, their attention cloying as syrup. The oblivion I had enjoyed for five years was gone; I was noticed everywhere, treated with a deference I did not want.
Yet, there was one person who made no effort to hide her displeasure at my sudden rise in favor.
Ara.
We had never been friendly except those first days when we were both seven, a thought that used to make me sad until she systematically turned all my friends against me—including Shae. Ara had mostly ignored me after that, and I had stayed out of her way. She had effectively replaced Kestral in her duties especially as they pertained to novices; Jaclyn had no real interest in dealing with the guests and, in all honesty, was probably not the most welcoming member of the Enclave. Whereas Ara had the same charm, when she chose to, that she had once shown me.
Now when I passed her, lasers shot from her eyes. She’d already given birth to one beautiful dark-haired little girl and was pregnant now with a second child. But somehow I’d always known she considered herself too good for any of the Elders.
Though Magnus’s choice was a foregone conclusion to the Enclave, he hadn’t announced our engagement. Which meant I still had time to bore him. I just didn’t know how. I’d been careful to stay busy, make sure we were never alone—a thing he treated as a game that only fueled the fever in his eyes.
But now his patience was waning.
Five days after his revelation, he sent Magnolia out of the office on errands.
“Ask me to do something for you,” he whispered, leaning over my desk. “Something secret that only you and I will know.”
“What I’d really like you to do?”
He smiled slightly. “Yes?”
“Is ask Jaclyn that.”
He pulled back, a dark look in his eyes. “No. I’m asking you.”
“I’m sorry. I can’t think of anything.”
“I’m getting tired of this, Wynter.”
When I didn’t answer, he walked to the file cabinet that I now knew contained every sin of the Select. He pulled out the drawer marked M–Z. Traced a finger over the tops of the tabs and slowly pulled one of them out.
Mine.
“I read this, as you asked,” he said quietly. “So many confessions. Such unbidden thoughts. I think you have many secrets.” He lifted his gaze to me. “I want to hear them. The ones you don’t dare confess, even in your prayers. That you think about at night. The ones you try not to think about at all.”
“All I have is there, and now you know them,” I said evenly.
He considered the file, flipped through the pages. Seemed to weigh them in his hand.
“So . . . many . . . . troubling thoughts.”
“Acts committed in thought are not the same as those in deed. You told me yourself.”
“Why would I contradict the Testament?” he asked, tilting his head.
“That’s what you said!”
“Did I?” But his expression said he was clearly concerned about the state of my mind. “Meanwhile, it would be worrisome if someone drew attention to the sheer volume of these. It reminds me a little of a girl named Lyssa. Remember her?”
I stared. What was he saying?
His face turned to flint. “I thought you were different from the others. I still think you are. But it’s your choice. You have three days,” he said, sliding the file back into the cabinet as Magnolia returned.
• • •
I FOUGHT FOR breath behind the Factory.
My choice? What choice did I have? I could survive Magnus as long as I was willing to debase myself, alienate my sister, and deceive the Enclave alongside him.
Or I could lose everything—along with Jaclyn and Truly—in three days’ time.
I spent all day trying to sort through my too-few options. All night wondering what escape might mean for my soul. Knowing I would never leave Truly.
Which meant I had to convince Jaclyn to come with me.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
* * *
Just after 2 a.m., the streets are eerily dark, traffic lights like unseeing eyes in a city far too quiet. Twice on my way out of the neighborhood, I pass groups of people standing outside, staring at the heavens. A few cars drift along the street, silent as ghosts. No headlights behind me; they’re all in the parking lot of Target, pointed at the shattered front doors, people coming and going with carts.
Three police cars whiz past, lights flashing. Silent. They don’t stop.
At least the car’s GPS still works. I follow the prompts to Highway
88. Nine hundred forty miles to go. Fourteen hours. Barring any delays, I will be there by early afternoon.
Assuming the world doesn’t end.
The scratch in the back of my mind is back. Whispering that Julie and Ken and Dr. Reiker might be far more misguided than I. That in some twist of logic, someone as crooked as Magnus has heard a voice of God too faint for any other human ear.
In which case the samples beside me mean nothing and retrieving Truly will only push her to the front step of Hell.
Stop.
I tell myself God cannot be so petty, capricious, or cruel.
And then I think of Jackie.
I can’t get my last image of her from my mind. Can’t not hear her running down the street. Or stop wondering where she’s gone.
She said Magnus threatened to kill her and thought she was being followed even as she admitted she was losing her grip on reality. It’s possible the only thing following her was a pair of headlights headed in the same direction. But if they thought she was coming to warn me . . .
I dial Julie from the car’s Bluetooth.
“Wynter.” Her voice is soft but not yet groggy—the way people sound when they’re trying to sleep and can’t. “Everything okay?”
“Julie, listen to me,” I say, craning to look back as I pass two vehicles in the ditch, headlights still on. “Don’t wait till morning. Get up. Now. Go.”
“What do you mean? You sound like you’re in the car.” I hear her sit up, instantly alert. “Wynter, where are you?”
“I’m sorry. I have to leave. It’s an emergency.” If I tell her where I’m going and why, I’ll have to tell her about Ken. And I don’t know what she’d do then.
“What? What are you talking about? Where are you going?” I can hear her, practically see her, getting out of bed. Flipping the duvet off of her, swinging her feet to the carpet before remembering the lights don’t work and fumbling for the flashlight on her nightstand. I hear her click it on in the background.
“Julie, it isn’t safe. You can’t wait till morning to leave.”
“We’re not going without you!”
“I’m not coming.”
