“Yes.”
My eyes drift toward the window. I stare at the forest beyond my reflection, but I’m thinking about Mama and Baba, and wondering how they are for the first time in days. Focusing on Lexie has meant shuttering anxiety about my parents. Whether they are dead or alive. Whether my escape from Windmill Bay brought them further punishment.
“You can’t think that way,” Reed told me when I told him my fears over the first pathetic campfire we ever managed to light. “What would they tell you, Riley? To worry about them? Or to go find your sister?”
I didn’t argue with him, but the truth is, I don’t know what they’d say. Reed’s parents were part of the rebellion, so they would be proud of him for following in their footsteps. But my parents? Baba was arrested for speaking up to a government official—a heat of the moment decision with dire consequences. Mama’s arrest was attributed to the banned books she owned, but it was actually just an extension of Baba’s arrest. The message was simple: Don’t speak up. Your whole family will suffer the consequences.
And we have.
But it’s hard to know whether my parents would approve of my choices—especially the decision I’ve made to travel hundreds of miles to rescue my sister—oh, and with the boy I have always blamed for their arrest. Maybe they would tell me to keep my head down, pass my tests, and sign my confession. To do whatever it takes to stay out of a service ranch myself.
But at some point, I realized it doesn’t matter what they would say. When the government took my parents away, they probably thought they were making me dependent on them instead. But they only made me angry—and more independent than ever. They are the ones who turned me into an orphaned rebel. Now they’ll be the ones to pay for it.
I clear my throat and change the subject. “Your cabin is amazing. How long have you lived here?”
“Fifty-three years.”
“Wow! That means…”
Claire nods. “Yes. When I moved here with my father, I was only twenty-two years old and America was at war. Falling apart around us, yes, but still America.”
“I’ve never talked to anyone about…well, before. Did you always live in the Dirt?”
Claire gives me a hard look. “No one called it the Dirt back then. It was America—all of it, though most people disregarded those of us in the middle of the country. The press called us the ‘fly-over states.’”
“Fly over?”
“Yes. As in, the places you fly over to get from coast to coast—or Sand to Sand, as you all call it now.” She shakes her head. “That condescending mentality has only gotten worse, of course. But back then, there were plenty of great cities in the middle of the nation. My father was a successful salesman who worked in Denver.”
“Denver?” I’ve never heard of it.
“He built this cabin as a second home he could visit on weekends and holidays. Can you imagine?”
I shake my head. No one in the UDR owns their own residence, much less two. Citizens are assigned housing near their work. That’s the theory, anyway, though Mama had a forty-five minute commute by light rail each way—unless it was broken down, of course. And we all know the best residences go to the government higher-ups and famous people.
“When this cabin was built, it was state of the art, even though it was designed to look rustic,” Claire says. “Heated by natural springs, solar-powered, electrochemical toilets and water filters. Outfitted with the highest quality furniture, appliances, and gadgets—set up to store plenty of food and supplies. That was my father’s doing. He always had to have the best of everything. My mother thought it was a waste of money, but it ended up saving our lives. By the time the food ran out, I had learned to garden, hunt, and fish.”
“Reed and I tried fishing,” I say. “We didn’t have much luck.”
“It took us awhile to figure it out too. We got skinny in the meantime, but we survived. Dad bought a vast quantity of freeze-dried emergency food kits before the war began. Paid a fortune for them because, by then, people were beginning to fear the escalating violence. I got to where I hated even the smell of them.”
“But they kept you alive.”
“Yes, though I decided a long time ago we would have been better off dying in the first wave of Contagion. We moved out here to struggle day by day, year by year. And for what?”
I don’t know what to say, so I change the subject. “Neil told us fishing would be easy, but—”
“That old fool.” She shakes her head. “I’d like to ring his neck for sending you out on your own. It’s a wonder you survived at all.”
“We would have gone with or without his help. I’m looking for my sister.”
“Out here?”
“Not exactly.” I hate telling my story. Still, ever since I found out we were walking in circles in the forest, I’ve wondered how off track we wandered. There’s only one way to find out. “She was taken to a service ranch not far from Slick City. It’s called The Rose.”
Claire stills for a minute, then nods, shifting from one foot to another. “You’ve got a fair way to go to reach Slick.”
“And The Rose? You’ve heard of it?”
Claire nods almost imperceptibly.
“So? How long do you think it will take us to get there?”
“Another week.” Her eyes wander up the stairs. “But your young man is in no shape for that.”
“He’ll recover quickly. We’ll be out of your hair as soon as we can.”
“Hmpf.” She stands up with a grunt. “It might take longer than you think. And there are dangers to consider. Anyway, I need to feed the chickens and milk the goats. Will you help?”
Claire keeps me busy with chores all morning. When I check on Reed at lunchtime, he jumps at the touch of my hand and bolts from his pillow.
“Riley!”
“It’s okay. We’re safe.”
He squints into the dimness of the room. “Where?”
“A cabin in the woods. Don’t you remember anything?”
He rubs his eyes and shakes his head. “Voices. I’m not sure what was real.”
“Yeah. You were really out of it.”
“I woke up under a huge tree, but you were still asleep. Then we walked…and you yelled at me.” He closes his eyes and leans back against his pillow.
“Yeah, well you deserved it.”
He keeps his eyes closed. “Hmm. I always do.”
I smooth his covers. “We were walking in a big circle, Reed. An old lady brought us here.”
He opens his eyes. “Who? Whasshee like?”
I don’t bother answering. His eyes are drooping again. I tug the covers up and tuck them under his chin.
“You’ve been sick, Reed. Truly sick. Just rest. We’ll talk later.”
He shakes his head and opens his mouth—no doubt to argue like always—but he either decides to give up or he’s too tired. I watch him sleep for a while. An hour later, he wakes up and lets me feed him some broth. Then he’s out for the rest of the afternoon.
Claire was a lot less chatty after lunch, so I don’t seek her out again. Instead I choose a book called Animal Farm from the bookshelf and curl up in one of the chairs across from Reed’s bunk. I must be tired too because I fall asleep sometime after the animals have gathered in the barn, but before the big pig has a chance to explain his dream.
For the next week, little changes. Reed sleeps most of the time. He wakes up long enough to meet Claire one morning. Every day after that, he sits on the deck for a little while, wrapped in a blanket, but even going up and down the stairs wears him out.
Claire keeps me busy, teaching me how to milk the goats, gather eggs, hang laundry out to dry, and harvest vegetables from her garden. She hasn’t let me near her beehives yet, but I keep asking, trying to be as helpful as I can to repay her hospitality.
There’s not always something to do, though. I find strange comfort in that. Comfort and guilt. I know I should be itching to get back on the road to Lexie. A big pa
rt of me is. But another part of me craves the simplicity of Claire’s life out here in the middle of nowhere. Some days I take walks into the forest. I even found the huge tree where Reed and I hid during the rainstorm. Claire has taken me to the river a couple of times too, where I’ve been learning to fish. I even caught two yesterday, which Claire helped me prepare and cook over an open fire.
I finished reading Animal Farm, then moved on to one called Emma. Today I’m tired after clearing weeds around the chicken coup and a long walk down to the river and back, so I settle down in my chair to find out if Emma is going to finally give up matchmaking after that disaster with Mr. Elton. Before long, my eyes grow heavy and I fall asleep.
Sometime later, Claire shakes me awake.
“Get up! Now!”
She is clearly furious, but I have no idea why. Before I can even respond, she crosses the room and drags the covers off Reed, shaking him fiercely.
I jump to my feet. “What’s going on?”
She turns to me and I realize it’s not rage I see in her expression, but fear.
“A UDR patrol,” she hisses. “They’ll be at the door any second. Come on!”
I grab Reed by the sleeve and follow her down the stairs. Claire beats us to the kitchen and is already pulling up planks of wood flooring.
“Go!” She points down into the darkness. All I can see is the top of a ladder under the floor.
I start climbing, but Reed stalls, looking back and forth between us.
“Reed, come on!”
“But what—”
Claire all but pushes him through the floor. He trips down the ladder and lands on top of me while she replaces the floorboards and covers them with a rug.
“Not a sound, do you hear me?” she whispers from above. “Or you’ll get us all killed.”
7
Xoey
We take the laundry-room stairs two at a time and run toward the old gym. It’s not far but it feels like an eternity passes as my boots pound the pavement and my heart pounds in my ears. I pray as I run—a strangled and wordless knot of anguish, hope, and dread.
The last time I was in the gym, we were learning to dance for President Amaron’s visit. It was a derelict, leaning structure then, and our fear, that it would finally give way to gravity and crush us while we danced, now seems legitimate. It has caved in, tilting toward the east in a crumpled mess of rusty metal. I am surprised anyone on our team was curious enough to find a way inside it. It feels like the providence of God.
Joey, our medic, reaches the gym at the same time as us, carrying supplies from the Med Center. We stand back and let him enter first, following his lead as he ducks his head and maneuvers around awkward angles and sharp edges. I am the last one to go through, my heart pounding at both the confined space and the fear of what I will see inside.
As soon as I turn the last corner and stand upright, Bess puts her hand out as if to hold me up. “Keep a head, Xoey.”
Her concern is justified. My heart contracts as I take in the scene and I falter, putting my hand against the closest bit of crumpled steel to keep my head from spinning.
We are in the northwest corner of the gym, in a hollow space less than ten meters in diameter that seems to have been preserved only because the metal bleachers interrupted the complete collapse of the roof. I absorb these details, but my eyes are fixed on one place, where the blue light of several Readybeams illuminates three people chained by their wrists to the bleachers. Their thin arms dangle above their heads, which loll at sick angles to their shoulders. It’s hard to believe any of them might be alive, but Joey is checking them in turn, moving swiftly from one to the other while quietly giving Quyen instructions.
Adam and I lock eyes for a moment. His face is gray—probably a reflection of mine—shock at what dehydration can do to familiar features.
“These two are still alive,” Joey says. “But barely.”
“What can we do?” Bess asks.
“Get those blankets wrapped around them while I administer fluids. Ozzy?”
“Yeah?”
“Go back to the Med Center. Get the backboard on the wall behind the door and bring it to me.”
Quyen begins cutting away their shackles while Adam and Bess carefully wrap them in blankets. I stay where I am, staring. Thoroughly shaken.
It’s not them.
“Hand me that saline bag.”
“Ease him to the floor.”
“Watch his head!”
Commands overlap, and still I stare at the rise and fall of their chests, barely discernible evidence of life. My eyes shift briefly to the other figure: a body detained long after his soul took flight. A hiccup of hysteria bursts through my lips. I cover my mouth with shaking fingers and back away.
This could have been Oliver and Paisley. “It’s not them,” I whisper.
“But who are they?” Bess asks.
Adam shoots me a look of concern. “This is Xu, and that one was our social studies teacher, Mr. Patrick.”
He only names the survivors, I notice. Something about hearing Mr. Patrick’s name startles me out of my paralysis. He was the best of our teachers at Windmill Bay—the only one kind enough to help during the flu epidemic last winter. He also helped Reed escape and was probably the last person to see Oliver the night we stole the Liberty Bell.
I find my feet, then my voice, rushing forward to kneel at his side. “Mr. Patrick?”
He blinks at me, but I see no recognition in his eyes. He is nothing like I remember, just a living skeleton wrapped in flesh. Still, I take his trembling hand and pray he will live.
“I’ve got the backboard.” Ozzy pushes his way through the twisted metal with a long plastic board. I move to let him through.
“We’ll take them up in turn,” Joey says. “This one seems the most critical. Come on. Help me.”
Ozzy and Joey lift Mr. Patrick onto the backboard, strap him in place, and hurry out. I move to follow but Bess holds me back.
“Stay with this one, Xoey. Xu, is it?”
I nod and turn back. Like Mr. Patrick, the boy in front of me is almost unrecognizable. Almost, which is to say he’s still familiar enough to make anger rise in my throat. I try and choke it down, but I am flooded with memories.
Xu tripping Sam. Beating him, terrorizing him, and letting his bruises heal before doing it all over again. Xu attacking Paisley, then nearly pushing me down a flight of stairs when I rushed to help her. This is Xu, I remind myself. Who never expressed an original thought but was content to be a second-in-command bully. A lackey enforcer, doing the bidding of his sadistic friend, Brock.
Brock. Who is now dead and shackled to the bleachers behind me.
I shift to kneel by Xu, adjusting the blanket around him while watching Quyen out of the corner of my eye. He removes Brock’s shackles and lowers his body to the floor before respectfully folding his arms over his shrunken chest.
I look away, confused to find my face wet with tears, and even more by the odd mixture of pity, sadness and…a sense of justice that tangles inside me. It is easy to conjure my last strong memory of Brock. It was the night he killed one of Sam’s kittens, just for the pleasure of watching Sam suffer—a cruel action that almost got Sam killed.
And if it had? Would Brock have shed any tears if Sam had died that night?
No, of course not. So why am I crying now?
A Proverb my mom used to quote comes to mind: Their feet run to evil, but they lie in wait for their own blood, ambushing their own lives. My tears dry up and hopelessness takes over. One way or another, was this always going to be Brock’s end?
“How long do you think they’ve been here?”
I almost jump out of my skin. I forgot Quyen was still with me.
“Probably since we left. About two months?”
He nods. “You were all skinny and malnourished when you got to Fort Unity, but this…”
“Yes. This is something different.”
Quyen looks around.
“No water in sight. No food. It would help to know when the rest bugged out of here.”
“How long can someone survive like this?”
“I don’t know, but you can see they’ve been chained up a lot longer than they’ve been without food or water. Someone must have tortured them this way for weeks, barely keeping them alive before abandoning them altogether.”
I picture Kino. All those times I saw her painted mouth curve into a smile because someone else was in pain. “The school director enjoyed that sort of thing.” I look down at Xu. “But then again, so did he.”
“Really?” He looks at Xu with new interest. “So, what made her turn on him?”
“He failed her.” I glance toward Brock’s body. “They both failed her.”
Quyen looks like he wants to ask me more about it, but Adam and Joey come back through the doorway, and I step out of the way so they can lift Xu onto the backboard and strap him in place. As they carry him up to the Med Center, Bess’s voice comes through my implant.
“Xoey, do a sweep of the northern perimeter, would’ye? I’m sending Ozzy south. Give a holler if you find anyone else in shackles.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I’m glad to leave the gym, taking a deep breath, as I step out into the fresh air, and hoping I never have to set foot inside it again. If it was up to me, we would tear the whole thing down, but I imagine Bess would say it should stay as it is. Somewhere beneath it are tunnels, and perhaps buried under a crumpled pile of rusting steel, there is another trapdoor like the one we found in the shed last year. Another way out. Another way in.
I don’t like the thought of using it for either.
I head toward the fields, switching on my pocket-sized tablet, which is loaded with a mapping app that uses the camera to record the terrain, the landscape, and the buildings in great detail. We have already searched all the buildings and known tunnel entrances, but I follow orders anyway, passing the shed where Brock killed Sam’s kitten, and continuing through several acres of fallow fields before I reach the north fence where an empty Sentribot tower looms over me. On impulse, I climb the ladder and step onto the small platform. Kicking loose cables out of my way, I turn around to look down at the campus stretched out below.
Weeping Justice Page 5
