I sighed at him. My shakti stirred. Was I going to have to beat the truth out of him?
He hurried on. “I was going to run ... but Cavvy, I couldn’t stop thinking about you. I know it’s stupid ... I’m putting you in such danger, but I had to see you again.”
The words heated my face and cooled my anger. I took his hand in mine and held it tight.
“But Cavvy, there’s something else I saw when I was north of I-80; south of the Wind River encampment. I think I can help you get to Nevada quickly and safely, but I’m not sure if we can swing it.”
How could he help us get to Wendover faster? His words didn’t make sense.
I touched his stubbled cheeks, like a blind person might try and read Braille. “All of this is fine, but Micaiah, I was serious when I said we can’t go on together until you let me eat from the Tree of Knowledge. It’s time for apple pie.”
“Can I get some food and water first?” he asked with a quaver in his voice.
It all might be a delay tactic, or it might give him the time to run off again, but I’d have to trust him. He didn’t make that easy. I fell into prayers.
“Fine. Don’t go anywhere.” I backed away, memorizing the dim shapes of the brush and drawing a bead on where he squatted. The slim moon gave me some light, and I was grateful, but it would also help the Regios.
Ten minutes later, I brought back my sleeping bag, a jug of water, and sealed plastic bags full of pemmican and old biscuits. I also carried one of the extra New Morality dresses we’d brought.
Micaiah stayed quiet, even when I moved past him to another dense patch of sagebrush, perfect for hiding us. I hoped it looked like I was making myself a bed next to the remuda to keep an eye on them. I had to assume the Regios or the Madelines were watching.
I found a little space in the brush. Deer or buffalo had widened it into a nest. There, I made a bed for us. Micaiah crept up. I handed him the dress.
He looked at it and I was a little afraid he’d resist, but when he talked I could hear the smile in his voice. “You want me to put on a dress?”
“It’s been done before. Just put it on.”
Staying low, he took off his T-shirt. In the silvery light of the moon, I could see his flat, muscular belly with a little sprinkle of hair going down.
I got all dry-mouthed.
Beautiful mind, beautiful body.
Come on, Cavvy, hold it together.
He put on the dress and then wiggled out of the sweats. Part of me was disappointed he hadn’t stripped first so I could get a good look before he put on the dress. It covered him completely, which was the whole purpose of the New Morality dresses.
He lifted the skirt of the dress and flashed his legs. I couldn’t help but stare. “How do I look?” he asked.
“Pretty.” I said it as a joke, but it wasn’t. Even dirty and smelly, he was striking.
He sat, legs crossed, and guzzled the water. The food, he wolfed down. I wanted to hear more about his plan to get us to Nevada, but first things first.
“Okay, Micaiah,” I said gently. “Tell me everything.”
He nodded and choked down his next swallow. “What do you want to know?”
Sure, he wasn’t going to tell me everything right away. I’d have to ask the right questions to bargain the information out of him. Such a clever mind in that boy.
Sure, he was clever, pretty, too, and completely infuriating.
Chapter Twelve
I am like most women of our age. I would love to meet a man, fall in love, get married, have children, but so far, like most women, the numbers are against me. Even when 49% of the population was male, meeting that special someone took luck, divine will, and some persistence. Now? It’s harder. Not impossible, mind you. I don’t believe in the impossible.
—Sally Browne Burke
Founder of the New Morality Movement
February 14, 2058
(i)
THE SAGEBRUSH AROUND us shivered in a warm wind.
In the Juniper, forever filled the winds. Millions of years ago, the land had been under an ocean. Now it was plains, but still the wind blew. Always and forever.
The horses on the other side of the temporary corral nickered, stepped, munched grass, slept with shut eyes, eyelashes moved by the breeze, manes and tails swished by breezes.
Micaiah and I were negotiating over the truth, and though I didn’t want to throw out the first question, I didn’t have a choice. “What about the Vixx sisters? What are they?”
“They are ...” his voice faded. Then a single word. “Engineered.”
Engineered. Biogenetic engineering. Not robots, but clones.
Still, I couldn’t quite believe it. But I’d seen Renee Vixx survive at least two mortal wounds. Seen it with my own eyes. The Juniper really did have mutants.
I sat there until I could whisper, “So the ARK created super soldiers.”
Another nod from Micaiah.
“Why do they want you so bad?” I asked, breathlessly.
He picked up the sweats, dug into the pocket, and pulled out a chalkdrive with the ByteBuild logo on the side. It was top-of-the-line, prolly a hundred ultrabytes on that stick. “This is the Oracle research database for the ARK. I stole it from a secret research facility.”
The American Reproduction Knowledge Initiative. The most powerful corporation on earth. Government subsidized to research the Sterility Epidemic and selling Male Product along the way. And apparently brewing up an army as well.
“But the electromagnetic field made it worthless,” I said. “That chalkdrive was wiped clean the first second you entered the Juniper.”
He shook his head. “No, the ARK developed limited shielding for solid-state memory. It’s not perfected, not yet, but it’s enough to protect the integrity of the data.”
My mouth went slack. “Jesus, help me. You could sell that chalkdrive for a billion dollars. If not for the drive itself, then for the technology of the shielding. You could bring electricity back to the Juniper.”
Just like Mama thought. She hadn’t been stupid, Shar. She’d only died too soon to see her prophecies come true.
I blinked and connected a few more dots in a half-second. “That chalkdrive has the base formula for the Vixx sisters. The science to create an army of them.”
“Yeah, I think so.” Micaiah sighed. “Not an army of Vixx sisters. There are only four of them, well, three now. Renee is dead, thanks to Wren, but Reb, Ronnie, and Rachel Vixx are still alive. They are better than humans, faster, stronger, bio-engineered to heal almost any wound. The Regios are less perfect, but still strong, fast, modified to follow orders without question.”
“Are the Vixxes really your aunts?” I asked.
He winced. “Kind of.”
I should’ve pressed him, but then I realized what could be on the chalkdrive. A chilly sweat broke out across my whole body. “You have it, don’t you?”
He didn’t respond. He knew what I was asking.
“Tell me.” I grabbed his arm. “Do you have the cure for the Sterility Epidemic?”
Blackpoole Biomedical had been a little research company before the Sino, but Hoyt joined it early ’cause he was already in bed with the politicians in Washington, DC. In the early 2030s, when birth rates for boys dropped off, they went to Blackpoole. Hoyt changed the name to the ARK, to market to the Christian element, and made a fortune charging families for Male Product on every continent, in every country, worldwide.
“The cure? Maybe,” Micaiah said quickly. “I don’t know for sure. And you can’t just sell the chalkdrive to the highest bidder. The technology it would take to unencrypt the data is only the first mystery to solve. You’d need a special Oracle plug-in to read it. Only one exists. At the ARK. You’d have to hack Oracle to get another plug-in. And if you could do all of that, you’d need the scientific knowledge to understand the data. Literally, there’s only about three people in the world who could unravel the tech and the data. All of whom are on
the ARK payroll and closely watched.” He pried my hand off his arm and smiled. “Ouch. You’re really strong.”
I didn’t apologize. “You have it. It’s crapjack for you to deny it. You have the cure to the Sterility Epidemic. And that’s why your daddy is spending millions to find you.” Suddenly, his promise of a six-million-dollar reward didn’t mean so much.
He dropped his head. And started to cry.
He was raw, emotional, far different than he’d been the last time I’d seen him in the crawlspace above Jenny Bell’s attic. Back then he’d been kind and strong, yet distant. Now he seemed fragile.
I took him back into my arms. He’d been on the run, hardly sleeping, then held captive by women who wanted him dead. I couldn’t imagine what he’d been through, and he was already such a sensitive soul. I held him like he held me in the crawlspace. I didn’t whisper it would be okay, though, ’cause okay was a long way off.
I brushed a hand over his hair to soothe him. “Now, tell me how you can get us to Nevada.”
He sniffed at his tears as he got himself together. “There’s a train, Cavvy, just a little north of here. And not just any train, a cattle train.”
Without meaning to, I grabbed him too hard again. Got another ouch out of him.
(ii)
The moon climbed higher into the sky, and the smell of sleeping sage perfumed the air.
Micaiah told me about finding the train. He’d driven the Dodge with the AIS steam engine up north, looking for I-80. Somehow, he overshot it, which wasn’t that big of a surprise. Salvage monkeys would’ve melted down the six-lanes of super highway asphalt into road coal for the steam engines of their Cargadors.
By a miracle, he didn’t drive right into the Wind River people, but he knew he’d gone too far, so he turned around. Then on the outskirts of what we thought might be Laramie, Wyoming, he saw the train come rumbling into a station not twenty kilometers north of where we were.
He left the truck to creep around, overhearing snips and snatches of conversation to figure out what was going on.
The ARK had purchased a train in Buzzkill, Nebraska to bring reinforcements into the Juniper. More troops to search for Micaiah and the chalkdrive. They hired engineers to fix the tracks all the way to Nevada ’cause the Union Pacific gave up running trains through Wyoming years ago. The Wind River were ruthless when it came to the railroad. The iron horse had stolen their land once, and they weren’t going to let that happen again, so they’d attack the Union Pacific trains and sabotage what they could.
He described the train to me: two engines, one in the front, one in the back; and over fifty cattle cars carrying troops, water, food, weapons, and ammunition. Near the back were five flat cars loaded with assault vehicles, jeeps, and extra diesel.
He said the only train they could find was a cattle train, which made sense since a passenger train wouldn’t be able to hold as much gear and the big coal trains had stopped running in the West decades ago. Not a lot of coal left in the world.
While he talked, a plan swirled up into my mind to steal the train, but it was desperate. It involved bringing down the wrath of God on those soldiers—wrath we would have to summon without getting murdered ourselves, ’cause a rain of fire will fall on the just and the unjust alike.
Took me a bit ’cause I was thinking so hard, but I realized he’d gone silent. He touched my face, traced my lips. It was a prelude to kissing. He’d told me the truth. We could be together.
My chest tightened.
“Have you told anyone about who I really am? Sharlotte? Wren?”
“No,” I whispered. “I never even told them you were in the attic.”
“Please, Cavvy, please, try to treat me like any other boy you’d come across in the Juniper, come across, saved, saved again.”
I didn’t respond. Instead I kissed him, which devolved into a full-on make-out session. Took some effort, but I kept his straying hands from straying too far. Russian hands and Roman fingers, or that’s what Mama called it back when there were more boys around.
Eventually, I had to stop completely. I was afraid of what we might do in the sagebrush, within earshot of the horses and the tents. I wasn’t ready for that, not a chance, though I knew most every girl in the world would’ve told me I was crazy for stopping. Boys were rare. Boys you clicked with? Even more so. Impossibly rich, famous, viable boys? The rarest of treasures.
Still, it felt like enough right then. Not for him, I knew that, but enough for me. And I had so much on my mind already. We ended up in the perfect sleeping position. He was on his back, and I was half on the sleeping bag covering the ground, half on him. My head rested on his chest.
I was soothed by the rise and fall of his breathing and the drum of his heart, going from a snappy snare in his excitement to a slow, steady beat once sleep claimed him. I’d grown accustomed to his strong boy smell, mellowed by the sage and the scent of the night.
He slept while my mind roared. Sleep and cute boys don’t go together, so I didn’t get a lick of rest, and that was a shame ’cause I needed some. In a few short hours I was going to have to convince my people I wasn’t crazy, when in truth, I was.
Completely insane.
My last plan had nearly gotten us all killed. Why would this plan be any different?
(iii)
At first light, I risked escorting Micaiah into the cab of the Chevy Workhorse II. I hoped the New Morality dress would hide him from the spying eyes undoubtedly watching us.
I then swallowed as much of my fear as I could and woke everyone up. I sent Dolly Day and Crete out to secure a perimeter and to get them out of the way ’cause I knew they’d argue against me and I couldn’t have that.
Around the morning cookfire, I whispered that Micaiah was back, but told them we had to keep him hidden. We had to assume we were still being watched.
With all eyes on me, I told them about the train.
“Solves everything,” I said. “If we can steal that train, we can escape the Vixxes, the Madelines, the Wind River people, even the Mormons. We can get across the deserts and the Great Salt Flats and arrive in Nevada way ahead of schedule.”
No one said anything for a long time. I could see they were afraid, tired of fighting, and I was asking them to fight some more.
Pilate laughed abruptly, then coughed. He glanced over at Wren, who smirked and shook her head. “Well, Pilate, her last plan got your pinkie finger blowed off.”
He raised the bandage. “Not the whole thing, just the distal phalanx, according to Petal. I never liked that fingernail anyway.”
I sighed. “Please, can you be serious? I feel bad about my killdeer plan, okay? Can we drop it?”
“Dropped.” Pilate suppressed a cough. “Tell us more.”
I kept my voice low for the next part. “Micaiah and I talked a long time last night. I know who he is. I know what he has. That’s all I’ll say. You’ll have to trust him and me, but you’ll get the full story once we get to Nevada. Suffice to say, we were right in protecting him. We were doing God’s work. Still are.”
Wren gruffed some, but no one else did. She wanted the full story, but I couldn’t trust her, not with Micaiah’s secrets. She’d wanted to sell him into slavery when she thought he was only a viable. What would she do if she caught wind of what he had in his pocket? Or if she found out who he really was?
Pilate took a different tact. “Did he tell you what his aunties are?”
“Engineered super soldiers,” I said. “And yeah, there’s only one company rich enough, with enough genetic research to pull that off, and that’s the ARK. That’s who’s gunning for Micaiah. We’re prolly the only people in the world who know that the ARK has an actual army and enough weapons for another Sino.”
We all fell quiet. I knew it would take a minute for everything I’d said to sink in. It wasn’t every day you stumble into what felt like both a supernatural comic book story and an international spy thriller all rolled into one.
Af
ter a while, Wren squinted at me. “Why not just leave our headcount and run off with the boy if he’s so important.”
“Why not take both?” I asked. “Bottom line, if we did suddenly run off, the Vixx sisters would come at us. This way, if we can take their train, we leave half of their assets stranded. And yeah, maybe their Johnny Boy blimps will find the reinforcements, but then they’d have to chase us down. The Juniper is a big place. We go quick, we all get away. Get the reward Micaiah promised as well as the money for the cattle. Set us all up for life.”
“What makes you think we’ll be safe in Nevada?” Kasey asked. “If the ARK can harass us in the Juniper, they can hunt us down there.”
I shrugged. Never really thought about what we’d do once we dropped off the cattle, past paying off the ranch. However, an answer came to me. “I’ve lived in the World, in Cleveland, for the past four years. Like ’em or not, the Yankees have laws. The ARK won’t just be able to gun us down in the streets.”
“Oh, Cavatica, that is so naïve,” Pilate said, but not unkindly, “but I’ll let the world show you that laws and reality rarely go out dancing together. I do want to add a few things to your argument, if I may. Once we sell the headcount, we won’t be sneaking around with several thousand cows under our coats. That would help. And I would expect Micaiah would take off. If he’s a good sort, he’ll make it abundantly clear to the ARK where he is and where he’s going. Which would take the heat off us.”
“He is a good sort,” I said. “I would imagine, with who he is and what he has, he’ll make a big stink in the media as well. He just needs to make it out of the Juniper alive.” And with the chalkdrive safely in his pocket.
Wren chewed on her cheek, gazing at me, trying to guess at what I knew.
“What about Sharlotte?” Aunt Bea asked. She looked pale and aged.
I closed my eyes in a wince. “I don’t know about her. Maybe she’ll come back. I hope she does. Or maybe the Moby can find her.”
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