God, please bless them, I pray. Protect them from enemies. Shelter them from harm.
My thoughts travel from what I don’t know to what I know too well. My father’s interview with Jez Rodriguez was so popular with Sand viewers, the media is still buzzing about it. Just two days ago, someone uploaded more videos of me singing from the night of the president’s visit to Windmill Bay. Then tonight, Jez Rodriguez aired a follow-up segment on my father, including clips from the same video, which has more than a million views.
“While citizens across the Sand want more details about Sean Stone and his brave endurance, our teenage population has become enchanted with Xoey. Young girls are rushing to their stylists, asking for hairstyles like hers and stitching ‘Free Xoey’ patches on their school uniforms.”
Jez even returned to my father’s home to get his take on the new development. “Tell me, Sean. What do you make of all the support you’ve received?”
“I’m overwhelmed.” My dad held his hand to his lips, as if words escaped him. “To see my baby singing so beautifully for the president, it makes me proud, of course. But sad too. I’m convinced she was on the brink of rehabilitation and on her way back to me. Back to us.”
The “us” he spoke of was his new family: a second wife named Portia, who joined him for the interview this time, and her two daughters, Electra and Nox, who are a few years younger than me. Nox even wore a “Free Xoey” patch on her jacket during the interview, which must have been recorded in segments. Portia looked a little too happy during the first few minutes, her bright eyes and wide smile a garish contrast to my father’s crocodile tears. She was more somber when they asked her about her daughters and their roles in the “Free Xoey” movement.
“Oh, the girls are devastated. Sometimes Sean and I hear them crying at night.” She looked at my father then, a familiar look crossing her face that reminded me of all the times my mom and I sought his approval. “We are all desperate to have Xoey home again. Desperate.”
Electra did not look desperate. She looked bored. Nox just looked bewildered, nodding her head when her mother did and occasionally biting her cuticles.
“It’s wonderful to have Xoey’s peers back at home embracing her, wishing her home safe.” My father closed his eyes. When he spoke again, his voice was thick with emotion. “I’m sorry. Can we take a break? It’s too much. Too much.”
Fake, fake, fake, I wanted to scream. Fake cause, fake tears, fake sorrow. Fake everything.
Anger floods through me even now, lighting up my nerve endings. It’s a wonder I don’t crackle with the electricity of it all, waking everyone around me. I cannot just lie here anymore. I sit up and pray for morning, but it’s no use. Dawn is still hours away.
You could sing. Oliver’s voice whispers in my ear. I can almost feel him by my side, encouraging me. Do what makes you happy. What you can control.
But I cannot be so selfish. I will not risk waking Adam again. Instead, I settle for singing inside my head, an old song we found down here with the others. I lay down and fall asleep with one line repeating in my mind:
Stay alive, please stay alive for me.
The next morning General Kelly gathers everyone in the train depot and changes the name of Windmill Bay to Fort Liberty.
“Frederick Douglass was a statesman who fought for the liberty of slaves back in the days of America’s first Civil War. Today, I invoke his fight, his memory, and his words when I ask you all to adopt the principles of freedom.” The general points to the Liberty Bell, which now sits in the corner. “Principles proclaimed by yourselves, by your revolutionary fathers, and by this old bell that once hung in Independence Hall.”
After a cold breakfast, we all get to work. Among the general’s first orders was the construction of cloaking panels—or, rather, the alteration of the school’s smart windows to become cloaking panels through specs that Sam and Gwen designed. The first priority is the Med Center and munitions plant, then Kino’s office and the adjacent server room. The train depot and the remaining parts of the library, admin building, and cafeteria are also on the list, but for now, I’m given a knife and told to salvage copper wiring from old appliances, tools, and electronics we found in the tunnels and storage rooms scattered throughout the campus. I don’t understand what’s involved or how effective the tech will be at hiding us from drones, but I trust Sam to know what he’s doing. Ozzy is tech savvy enough to be Sam’s helper. Plus, he talks a lot, spouting all kinds of conspiracy theories that get Sam laughing and distracted from his worries about Paisley. Quyen watches for drones while we work and Bess oversees the lot of us, moving here and there, filling in gaps while also managing other things I know nothing about.
Our work on the panels goes slowly. The whole school has to go dark for two hours every morning, then for three hours every afternoon, based on UDR satellite orbits, provided by intelligence from an imbedded spy in the Western Sand. Bess calls him Harvey, but I don’t think that’s his real name.
“I’ll finish doing that.”
I turn around. Adam is holding out his hand for my utility knife. “Xu’s asking for you again.”
I turn back to the dented stove, from which I have salvaged several feet of copper wiring. Soon we all have to disappear like gophers again, going underground while the government we hide from takes pictures from the sky.
“No. I want to get the rest of this out before the satellite is overhead.”
“Xoey. He’s persistent.”
I sigh but keep cutting insulation away from the copper. I like the solitude of where I’m working in a storage room off the kitchen. As if my father’s interview with Jez Rodriguez wasn’t bad enough, now he and his new family are going to be in a reality show, which has a lot of people here talking, and pretty much everyone eyeing me with interest. Meanwhile, videos of me singing have more than two million views online and the “Free Xoey” campaign is catching steam in both the Western and Eastern Sand. It feels like the only people who treat me the same as they ever have are Sam, Adam, Jasmine, Ozzy, and Bess, so I avoid everyone else and try to keep busy.
“Come on, Xoey. It might be important.”
I pull the last bit of copper from the stove and coil it before handing it to Adam with a sigh. I guess I’m not going to avoid this any longer, but still, I resist. “It’s not about Oliver or Paisley. Xu said that, right? So what’s the point?”
Adam looks unhappy. “Still. I think you should go.”
“Fine.” I point at the corroded dishwasher behind the stove and hand over my knife. “But Sam is waiting on more of this. You better hope you are as fast as me.”
I cross the courtyard to the Med Center and stomp up the stairs. There are now only forty-five minutes until we all need to be hiding in the tunnels while the satellite orbits overhead. For now, a flurry of activity surrounds me. A lot of the books we found in the tunnels are being brought to rooms above, creating more space for people below. I understand the logic, but it makes me nervous, watching them carry box after box of precious books and media up to the light of day for the first time in more than fifty years.
“Those books were hidden down there to protect them,” I told Adam and Bess last night. “Bringing them upstairs feels like…”
“Like we’re putting them within Kino’s reach,” said Adam.
I nodded.
“She won’t be back,” Bess said. “Those poor souls she left behind tell me that much.”
I am not convinced. Kino permeates this place like a smell hanging in the air. I breathe her in and my pores clog, my lungs constrict. No matter where I turn, or how things have changed, I still expect her to show up at any minute. Now the memory of her name being spoken with such respect by my father during his interview makes me sick with anger.
I have struggled with anger all my life. It grew like a tumor when I was little, swelling into a well-fed parasite every time my father struck me, or punished Mom for not anticipating his every need. After her arrest, I let it
control me. Fighting back felt both wonderful and terrible. My father’s response was always swift. No matter what he tearfully tells the camera, he never shed a tear over locking me in a closet or sending me to the state home where I lived for only days before being dragged out of bed in the middle of the night and brought to Windmill Bay. My anger and I, we fought every step of the way, which was why I was so bruised and battered when I first met Reed.
When I open the Med Center door, my anger flairs, fresh and raw. Seeing Xu in the bed where Riley was treated for lash wounds on her back makes me furious. I clench my hands and walk toward him. He looks like he is asleep, but there’s nothing gentle about the way I wake him, grabbing his blanket and giving it a shake.
“You asked to see me.”
Xu flinches and opens his eyes. If they looked violent, like they used to, or even scared, I might have been able to keep a tighter hold on my anger. Instead his black pupils bleed into dark brown irises, flat and fathomless, staring back at me with something so devoid of hope, my anger dissipates.
“Hi, Xoey.” His voice sounds like chalk dust.
I cross my arms over my chest. “Can you tell me anything about the night of the president’s visit? What happened to everyone? Did Kino burn down the school?”
He shakes his head but keeps his eyes on me. I would not have thought he could shrink further inside himself, but that’s what it looks like. Like he wishes the bed would swallow him whole. “I don’t know. Kino was raging. Then she shot Haak.”
“Mr. Haak?” I repeat stupidly. “Why?”
“You got away and someone needed to be punished. They were going to kill the rest of us, I think. Me, Brock, Mr. Patrick, and Oliver. We were all zip-tied, sitting there while Kino and Amaron figured stuff out.”
“What do you mean?”
“They argued. I don’t know, I couldn’t hear what they were saying and Haak was just lying there, bleeding and cursing.” He looks at his hands. “I think Amaron won the argument, though. The SS officers dragged Haak away and locked us up. Me and Brock with Mr. Patrick in the gym. Oliver somewhere else.”
“You told Lieutenant Marx about all this, right?”
“Yes.” He starts coughing. I look at our medic, who comes over and checks his fluids.
“You need to wrap this up.”
“Why did you ask for me, Xu?”
He stares at his blanket a moment, then raises his eyes to mine. “To say sorry. To ask for your forgiveness.”
“Forgiveness?”
My throat feels tight. It’s the last thing I expected. I wish Xu would look away, but his dark eyes lock onto mine, searching for something he cannot find. Something I cannot give.
Finally, he looks away. Confusion settles on the hard angles of his face and his hand trembles as he plucks at a loose thread on his blanket. “I thought if anyone―”
“I can’t do this.” I back toward the door.
“Wait. Xoey―”
“No. The satellite is almost overhead. I have to go.”
I change bunks tonight, switching with Bess, who complained about sleeping near Sam.
“Sam’s a treasure, don’t get me wrong. But the way he stays up all night, mutterin’, it’s a bit of a trial, if I’m being honest.”
“Let me take your bunk,” I said. “I never sleep well down here anyway. Sam won’t bother me.”
It turns out to be truer than I thought. Something about Sam’s quiet voice, communicating with his electronics, distracts me from the tunnel closing in around me. I sleep soundly for the first time since we got here, only waking with a start when Sam lets out a strange chirp of excitement early in the morning. I sit up and rub the sleep from my eyes.
“Sam?”
“Shh! Listen.”
I sit next to him. His tablet is pulled apart and attached to another gadget with old-fashioned cables. There’s a meter on it that keeps twitching. Meanwhile, the speakers emit noise I cannot identify. Not voices or music but beeps almost too quiet to hear.
“What am I‒”
“Shh!”
“Sorry!”
Jasmine is awake now too, but she seems to know better than to ask questions. Leaning sideways, Sam digs through his box of electronic junk and digs out a pair of headphones. “Noise cancelling,” he mumbles. Then he plugs them into a port and puts them on.
I pull up my feet and watch him frown while adjusting switches, tapping and swiping on his tablet screen. Then he stills and his eyes widen. He leans toward the radio, dropping his tablet as he clutches the headphones.
Sam rarely smiles, but when he does, it transforms his handsome face, whisking away familiar shades of worry and sadness. Tonight, his smile is even brighter than that, like a ray of sunshine pushing into all the dark corners of the tunnel. He raises his eyes and pulls off his headphones, flapping his hands wildly at his side.
“It’s Paisley! Xoey, Mom! It’s Paisley! I found her!”
17
Reed
Claire stands on the porch and watches us leave tonight. For a minute, I think she might hug Riley.
“I’ll never forget your kindness,” Riley says.
Claire crosses her arms and tells us to hurry up before a patrol returns. Riley squeezes her hand and heads down the stairs.
“Thank you,” I say.
“You take care of each other.”
I turn back once when we are just about to the tree line and see her still standing there.
“Don’t let her fool you,” I tell Riley. “She’ll miss you.”
“No, she’ll miss you,” Riley says. “I think you remind her of her long-lost love.”
I shrug in the twilight. “Claire? Sentimental? I don’t buy it.”
Riley just shakes her head and we keep walking. Darkness settles around us and before long I feel almost as if our detour at Claire’s house was nothing but a dream. It’s just Riley and me again, in a dark forest with the moon lighting our path as we work our way toward Lexie.
It takes three hours to reach the abandoned ski lodge. I start to doubt we will get there at all as we pick our way across a damp meadow that turns into a wide, marshy river. We are halfway across, ankle deep in muddy water, when I see a bombed-out bridge some sixty meters south of us.
“That was probably the only road leading in and out of the lodge,” I say.
“Then there’s a good chance it’s still abandoned,” Riley says. We finish crossing the river and climb the opposite bank.
“Over here.” Riley picks up an ancient sign that was knocked over and buried by new growth. It’s rusted now but was once all yellow with a black figure on skis. We continue on, following a crumbling asphalt road that has long since been overtaken by nature. It is steep, switching back and forth between rock walls until it opens up to curve around a small lake. The beach is littered with rusty boats and uprooted trees, but the moon shining on the water makes me think it was once beautiful. We circle the lake, then climb around another bend. Half an hour later we see a sign that reads White Mountain Resort.
Riley keeps eyeing me sideways and slowing down, no doubt because I’m breathing hard and trying not to cough. When we finally crest the last hill, we both stop and gasp at the sight ahead of us.
“I didn’t expect this,” Riley says.
Me either.
A ghost town of lodge buildings is spread out before us. Wide verandas and vaulted porticoes supported by hefty logs rise overhead, some as many as six stories high. While most of the windows are still paned in glass, there is an entire section that is unfinished, with tattered plastic blowing across gaping black holes and warped plywood covering unfinished construction.
“Was this place abandoned before it opened?” I ask.
Riley nods. “Kind of. Claire said her dad was an investor. The ski slopes were opened, along with part of the lodge and a handful of private cabins, but all of this”—she waves her hand—“was being built when the second civil war broke out.”
“The Americ
a those people knew disintegrated,” I say, “which made skiing…”
“Superfluous?”
“Nice word. You’re going to miss Claire’s books, aren’t you?”
Riley smiles, tapping her backpack. “She let me bring some with me.”
We walk silently through the ruins, circle the towers, and follow another overgrown road that winds farther up the mountain.
“I can’t believe this place has been abandoned for all these years.”
“With steep ski slopes behind it and a bombed bridge leading up here…”
“Yeah, but we walked right across that river.”
Riley shrugs. “It might be unusually low right now. Besides, this whole place is overgrown with trees, so it’s probably not even visible on satellite feeds. Who would want it?”
I have ideas about that but say nothing. We’ve reached the main lodge, which is a beautiful building with an impressive entrance made of logs and stone. We pass through a wide lobby with lofty ceilings, dusty furniture, and a huge stone fireplace right in the middle. We circle the fireplace to another seating area with a bar and a full bank of glass doors. Several of the doors are broken, with trees growing through them. The room, along with the wide deck beyond the doors, is littered with decades’ worth of debris and encroaching nature.
“Be careful,” I say. “There are probably hundreds of critters living in this place.”
“We’ve slept with critters surrounding us before,” Riley says. “That’s not going to keep me awake.”
We step through the glass doors and onto a wide deck. Dense treetops all but obliterate views of the lake we passed in the valley below, but if we stand just right, we can see it, lit by the soft edges of dawn creeping over the horizon.
“Wow,” Riley says.
She watches the sunrise while I watch her. With the light of dawn kissing her skin and her eyes focused on the beauty below, she looks peaceful. My heart twists, wishing this was her everyday world. Wishing she didn’t have to leave it tomorrow.
Weeping Justice Page 12
