“There are a few details left to work out,” I admit.
“What if they can help?”
“What if that’s not their goal? What if they have something else in mind, Riley? Something that makes all of this a thousand times worse?”
Riley laughs. “Like what? My sister’s locked up in a brothel and you are in more danger every time you pass in and out of Slick.”
“I’m handling it,” I say.
“Yeah, and I’m handling the fact that I’m stuck in a lawless city with a bunch of lowlife criminals who want to sell my body and soul.” Riley flexes her adorned fingers for emphasis. “But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a better way. Or that we can’t consider our options.”
“I don’t know, Riley. We’re so close. I just don’t want to mess it up.”
“I know it’s weird. I don’t trust them either, but then again, they helped me in the alley. That’s worth something, isn’t it?”
The next day I walk through the kitchen door of The Rose with a sour ball of fear building in my gut. Riley and I agreed that when—or if—Zoya and Ridhaan approach her again, we’ll set up a meeting. In the meantime, she’s going to share their names and the few details they gave her about their operation with Sam to see if he has heard anything about them—good or bad. But now I can’t shake the feeling that I’m being watched everywhere I go. Passing through the UDR checkpoint was horrible today. I’ve bitten my nails so much they’re bleeding, which I can’t let Mr. Longino see, or he’ll probably pull me from bussing duty. Picturing Riley with her pepper spray and her self-defense rings makes me feel a little better. I grab my apron, take a deep breath, and try to focus on work.
I don’t have to wait long to talk to Lexie tonight. The Thorns are on stage, running through some new songs before the doors open. I’m not paying attention at all even though I’m setting tables close to them. Then a loud clatter from behind the piano gets the attention of everyone in the room.
Gabriel throws his hand up in the air. “Oh! Oh, no! Uh…” He points to me. “A little help, please? I just spilled a whole tray of food back here.”
I grab my bin and bar mop and circle the piano to find a huge mess on the back of the stage. I immediately start grabbing dishes and putting them in my bin while Gabriel deals with Mr. Longino, who is yelling at him across the salon.
“I’m so sorry, Mr. L! Dock my pay, okay? It won’t happen again.”
I pivot, grabbing dishes that slid beneath the curtain on stage right while trying to mop up wet food that is dripping toward the edge of the stage when I realize someone is sitting behind the curtain, looking at me.
Not just someone. Lexie.
“Who are you? You look familiar.”
I blush but keep picking up bits of food. “My name is Reed. We, uh…we met in the Sand.” I pause long enough to lift my eyes to hers and confess. “I’m…one of the uh…idiots who snuck onto your balcony.”
I’ve thought of this moment for years and imagined many responses, most of them similar to Riley’s reaction when she first saw me at Windmill Bay. What I never expected is what Lexie actually does, which is to all but ignore what I said.
“So why are you here? How did you get my mom’s cat pin?”
“I’m with Riley,” I say. “We came to get you out of here.”
Fear sparks in her eyes, which quickly dart over my shoulder. “You brought Riley here? Are you insane?”
“No, no!” I hold up my hand, hoping to calm her down and lower her voice. “She’s in Slick. Not that she didn’t want to come straight here. I’ve just…well, I’ve had to talk her out of it. Several times.”
Lexie leans back, the fear leaving her eyes. Now they are hard, piercing me. “So whose idea was it to rescue me? I’m not exactly a damsel. You know that. Does she?”
I focus on the stage floor. “She would have come to find you with or without me. But I couldn’t let her. I mean, I offered to help.” I pause, looking up. “I owe her. I owe you. It’s my fault you’re here.”
“Clyde,” Seth calls to me from across the room. “You need help? Salon opens in ten minutes.”
“Nah, I got it,” I holler back. “Almost done.”
I grab my bin and scrape the last bits of food into it, then swipe my rag once more across the edge of the stage.
“I’m sorry,” I tell Lexie. “I know it’s not enough. That it doesn’t help. But I’m sorry for what I did.”
“If you’re sorry, you’ll convince Riley to go home,” Lexie says. “Make sure my baby sister never, ever comes to this place.”
I look up to respond, but Lexie has already disappeared behind the curtain.
Riley is quiet tonight when I tell her what Lexie said. I give her some space afterward, taking longer than usual in the bathroom. When I come back and unlock the door, I expect to find her at the window like usual, watching the street below. Instead, she is asleep on the bed with tears drying on her cheeks.
39
Oliver
I wake up hearing Jonah’s voice.
Huh. Forgot I fell asleep next to the vent.
I roll over and wipe the sleep out of my eyes with a trembling hand. If I’m counting right, we haven’t been fed in three days.
“Jonah?” I clear my throat. “Are you reading? It sounds like you’re reading.”
Jonah laughs. It turns into a cough. He spent a week in the infirmary before the last UN inspection, but hasn’t sounded any better since he got back.
“Nah, I’m not reading. I’m trying to remember something I read a long time ago.”
“Scripture?”
“Yeah.” He coughs again. “When I was a kid, my grandmother was mighty fervent about religion—always trying to get me to memorize scripture. I wasn’t so keen, of course, so she tried all kinds of ways to motivate me. She’d bribe me with treats, but that only worked for so long. Finally she asked me to memorize scripture as a gift to her. Guilt, it turns out, worked best of all. So, once a year, for her birthday, I’d memorize something new and recite it to her as a gift.”
“That’s weird, Jonah.”
Jonah laughs again. “Yeah I guess so. But she was convinced the new government was going to destroy all the Bibles, so she wanted to save some of it, you know. Inside my head.”
“How much do you remember?”
“On the whole? Not much. But some bits stick. Like the part I’m trying to remember today. My friend Mike and I used to talk about it, back in the caves when we worried over the people we couldn’t get out. It’s a scripture about freeing prisoners, spreading the Good News. I’m just not sure I remember it in the right order.”
“Let’s hear it,” I say. “It’s got to be better than counting these bricks again.”
Jonah clears his throat. “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, he’s anointed me to help the heartbroken, bring Good News to the poor, and proclaim liberty to prisoners. To open prison doors for those in chains and proclaim the year of our Lord and the vengeance of our God.”
“Proclaim liberty,” I say. “Is that from Leviticus, Jonah?”
“Oliver!” Jonah sounds incredulous. “How’d you know about Leviticus? I thought you weren’t a believer, son?”
I laugh. “I told you I know someone…”
“Someone who’s been quoting Leviticus to you? She’s hardcore, your Christian girl.”
I shake my head. “You have no idea.”
“Anyway, it’s not from Leviticus, Mr. Smarty Pants. It’s Isaiah.”
“So when Isaiah wrote about that ‘year of our Lord’ stuff,” I ask, “was he talking about the Year of Jubilee?”
“Now you’re just showing off,” Jonah says.
I laugh. “Nah, Jonah. Just connecting dots. But is it the same thing? A time for freedom? Letting prisoners out, unbinding chains, comforting the poor?”
“I guess so, but I’m no scholar. I mean, it’s all in the past, right? Or maybe it’s talking about Heaven? I’m not sure. But Mike and I used to h
ope it could be a rally cry, you know? Something to comfort people who had lost all hope.”
“I hear that.” I lay back and close my eyes. “Never thought I would want to call down the vengeance of God, but if that’s what it takes, bring it on.”
The click clack of Kino’s shoes echoing down the hallway wakes me with a jolt.
“That woman is persistent as a virus,” Jonah mutters.
I don’t answer. The door is clicking unlocked and my muscles are rebelling, twitching in anticipation of her beating. I push myself to the center of the floor. Kino steps into my cell, sees me shaking, and begins to laugh.
“How wonderful, Oliver. To see how much you miss me when I’m gone—how the sight of me makes you tremble with anticipation.”
I’m too weak to come up with a snappy comeback. It doesn’t matter, though. Today, Kino is too impatient to goad me for long.
“Get him up,” she says to the guards.
They pull me to my feet, where I totter, blinking against dizziness that threatens to topple me. “If he can’t walk, drag him,” she says. Then she turns on her heels and marches back down the hallway.
I stumble behind her, a guard on my left and another on my right. We don’t go far. Just past the infirmary there is an unmarked door I’ve never noticed. Kino ushers us inside and begins tapping on her tablet while the guards chain me to a table in the center of the room. The far wall lights up with a pixel test pattern, the guards leave, and Kino leans against the door, smiling.
“Do you know what day it is, Oliver?”
“No.”
“Today is the one hundredth day you’ve been my guest here. So let’s celebrate with a little show and tell. I’ll show you some entertaining videos, and you’ll tell me how you feel about them.”
“Starvation has put a damper on my speaking skills,” I say.
Kino’s smile widens. “That is quite alright. I’m sure your face will tell me all I need to know.”
She taps her tablet and the pixel wall streams a recorded news broadcast about some type of rescue operation. The vid has obviously broken into the middle of a report because the most important details are missing, like who is being rescued. Since it’s recorded at nighttime, there’s also not much to see through the shaking chopper cam. I make out a derelict house surrounded by dozens of police and Secret Service transports, their blue and red lights pulsing against the dark sky. After a few seconds, several black-clad figures exit the house with someone smaller in between them. The ticker crossing the bottom of the screen offers little help either, reporting on traffic, weather, and rolling blackout schedules in the Western Sand.
“What—”
“Shh, you’ll miss it,” Kino says.
The vid switches back to Chase Holder in the studio. “If you’re just tuning in to our late breaking report, Xoey Stone, kidnapped some seventy-six days ago from a UDR reeducation facility, has been found. Repeat, Xoey Stone has been rescued tonight in the desert.”
My breath catches in my throat. Xoey? The broadcast continues with history and context, but nothing I absorb. I just fidget while my mind jumps from speculation to speculation. Kino interrupts my scattered thoughts.
“I told you your face would tell me everything, Oliver. You don’t disappoint.”
I ignore her, because the vid switches to a scene outside a housing complex where reporters and citizens are crushed together on narrow sidewalks, holding up tablets that read, “Save Xoey” and “Welcome Home.” Within minutes, a black transport pulls up to the curb and the crowd moves back, making room for two figures. The woman I recognize as Yvonne Middlebrooks, President Amaron’s press secretary, but the man is unfamiliar.
“What will you say to Xoey, Sean?” one of the reporters shouts. The man starts to speak, but Middlebrooks puts a hand on his arm and shakes her head. Two Secret Service agents circle the transport and create a human barrier as the door glides open. I’m holding my breath again and probably straining forward in my seat, but I don’t care what Kino thinks right now. It’s Xoey, stepping out of the transport, wearing a familiar brown uniform from Windmill Bay. She looks dirty and shaken, all except for her hair, which is long and somehow off center. A wig? The crowd erupts in applause and the man begins to weep. Running forward, he wraps her in his arms.
“Xoey! My Xoey, you’ve come home!”
For the next hour, Kino says little, just keeps showing me vids of Xoey. Her interview with Jez Rodriguez in which her father does most of the talking, her visit to President Amaron’s residence, where she’s given some kind of award, then a People magazine feature set to music—Xoey singing that Trinidad Ray song, unless I’m wrong—which is just a bunch of pictures of Xoey dressed in fancy clothes and posing for the camera. Finally, there’s a video of Xoey with a new haircut, singing in a studio and hugging Trinidad Ray while a voice-over reporter breathlessly tells us about the album she’s recording.
I sit back in my chair, blinking at the pixel wall.
It’s Xoey, but she’s in the Sand. And it doesn’t seem like Xoey, not the real Xoey.
My Xoey.
“I can see you’re confused, Oliver,” Kino says, pausing the video feed. “So let me help. Do you remember several weeks ago, when I was wishing that, somehow, I could see what would happen if I got you and Xoey together again?”
I look up sharply. “Xoey’s in the Sand, not here.”
“Here, there.” Kino shrugs. “Mere minutes away.”
“She has no reason to come here. No reason to visit this place.”
“No?” Kino smiles. “I think I can persuade her to come.”
“For me?” I laugh and hope it’s the best performance of my life. “She won’t come here for me. I told you—I’m nothing to her. Besides, look at the life she’s living now. She doesn’t want to look backward. Why would she?”
“Hmm.” Kino taps her chin with a blood-red fingertip. “Why would she indeed?”
She taps a command into her tablet, starting the vid feed again. It switches to a scene that I quickly decide must be the father’s reality show he kept talking about during their interview. The entire family is sitting around the table. Xoey puts down her fork. “I need to see Mom,” she says. Kino pauses the vid again.
“Xoey wants her mommy.” She forces her pretty mouth into a pout. “And do you know where her mother is?”
“No.” Denial courses through my veins. It’s a lie, though. I already know the truth.
“Sure you do,” Kino continues. “You got a good, long look at her the other day while you were pacing in the courtyard.”
I lunge out of my seat, tugging against my wrist restraints so violently, the table shakes. “If you lay one finger on her, I swear I’ll—”
Kino’s cackle crowds out my useless threats and she claps her hands. “There it is. The response I was hoping for. But you can rest easy, Oliver. I have no intention of hurting dear, sweet, Xoey. No, she’s serving my purposes quite well where she is.”
“Then leave her alone!”
“I can’t do that either.” Kino leans over me, her hands splayed across the table. “Because, Oliver, your execution date has been set, which means our fun times together will soon come to an end. And I can’t think of a more fitting finale than bringing Xoey here to watch you die.”
40
Xoey
“Leave me alone!”
I reach the apartment door, pause while it unlocks, then burst through. My father is hot on my heels.
“We are not finished talking, young lady!”
“Oh, yes we are!” My voice is not just raised. I am screaming at him.
Portia, Electra, and Nox stand in the living room, watching us, their eyes and mouths forming perfect O’s. I know the cameras are also catching every humiliating second, but I don’t care.
I don’t care.
“I thought things were going to be different,” my father continues. I notice he tilts his head as he follows me to the kitchen, making sure the ca
mera catches his best side. I shake my head and pour a glass of water. “I thought your reeducation had taught you—”
I wheel around, sloshing water on the front of my dress. “Taught me what, exactly? To behave like a citizen? Like any other normal teenager in the Sand? In case you didn’t know, there were all kinds of citizens at that party.” I sweep a hand over my outfit. “Take it all in, Dad. This is how citizens dress. This is how they cut their hair and wear their makeup. How they talk and behave! You are getting exactly what you wanted!”
“I didn’t want you…caught up with drugs!”
I put my glass in the sink with such force, I am surprised it does not break.
“But you did not want me going to church, either, did you, Dad? You did not want me living the private, quiet life Mom always advocated. No. Because that was brainwashing. That was dangerous, deviant behavior, right? A kind of…evil that cannot be paralleled!”
For once, my father is speechless. I take advantage of his silence, turning on my heels and stomping down the hall. I slam my bedroom door.
For several seconds, I stand in the middle of the room, letting the silence wash over me. Then I collapse on the edge of the bed and cover my face with my hands. Tonight was a nightmare. And now?
Now I do not know what to do.
Trinidad sent a transport for me again, just like she did the night we went to Club Nuño. This time it took me to her home—a posh residence in a gated hillside community all but concealed by lush vegetation. Kelan sat on the other side of the transport with his eyes closed the whole time. There was only one other passenger, a girl named Sadie who barely took a breath, mostly telling me about her modeling career and her boyfriend with powerful connections in the industry and government.
“Basically, he’s taking my career from here”—she sliced her hand through the air at waist level—“to here.” She reached above her head, wiggled her ring-covered fingers, and giggled.
When we got to Trinidad’s place, Sadie headed straight for the bar in the corner. I thanked Kelan for the ride, then walked out large glass doors leading to a veranda that covered two sides of the house. Candles dotting the banister provided plenty of light, but the relative darkness felt more comfortable than the well-lit interior of the house. The views of the city were impressive too, and something growing nearby smelled so good, every time a breeze would pass, the fragrance would envelope the veranda. Hiding in the shadows also made me feel better about what I was wearing—another dress that started too low and ended too high, because Middlebrooks says everything I wear should be eye-catching, even when I’m going to a private party.
Weeping Justice Page 28
