Sean gave him a sober nod and left the office.
“What about the safe house?” Billy said. “Wallace said…”
But Chase was already following Sean toward the truck. I snagged his sleeve as he barreled past.
“I have to go,” I said.
“I know. We are.” Chase’s tone was clipped.
“I have to go home.”
His eyes brightened with caution. Hands on my shoulders, he leaned down to make sure I understood his next words.
“Em, she’s gone. I know what I saw.” He stopped when he registered the determination on my face. “What if Sean’s right, and it is a trap?” He sounded frightened. Not of the MM, but of what he might find. Of hoping, just like me, that she was alive.
“I have to know,” I said.
He glanced over my shoulder, staring at nothing. Then, with a short, muttered curse, he swung back into the office.
Marco and Polo had already set out water and food for our trip, and Sean was preparing to load it in the back of the truck. I raced to help him, finding Cara’s folded Sisters of Salvation uniform on one of the dismantled crates.
I broached the silence. “We have to make a detour.”
To my relief, he only sighed and said, “I figured.”
Low voices rumbled within the office, and then I heard Billy’s cracking voice yell, “You’re doing what?”
“Oh no.” I reached the threshold just in time to see Polo place a set of car keys in Chase’s open palm.
“You’re going to get caught.” Billy’s face had gone ashy.
“Our shift is up at eight A.M.,” said Polo. “That’s when we’re reporting it stolen.”
“Unless you get caught before then, in which case we’re reporting it stolen early,” added Marco. “You’re all right, Jennings, but a lot of people count on us working this angle.”
“Thanks,” said Chase.
“Don’t thank us yet,” said Marco reluctantly.
The adrenaline was already kicking through my veins. The only vehicles that couldn’t be caught breaking curfew were the ones enforcing it. FBR cruisers. Like the one we were about to steal.
Still reeling from our whirlwind plan, I turned to Billy. “You’ll come with us, right?”
He pulled a string from the frayed hem of his shirt, frowning.
Chase put his hand on my arm, as if suspecting I might try to drag him with us.
“What’s it going to be, Billy? It’s your call,” he said.
I held my breath. Please come with us. I felt a gnawing inside of me, like I had in the days after they’d arrested my mother. I didn’t want to let Billy out of my sight.
Billy swallowed audibly, shoving his mop of dark hair out of his eyes. He transferred his weight from foot to foot. Chase was right, it was important that Billy make this choice for himself. He hadn’t gotten a say before.
“I’m waiting for the carrier,” he said at last. “Wallace is going to meet me at the safe house.”
Silence seeped across the room. No one knew how to say the words Billy would never believe, not unless he saw it for himself.
Wallace is dead.
“If Tucker brings back soldiers…” I couldn’t finish.
“We’ll take care of it,” said Polo. Beside him, Marco nodded.
Something pinched deep inside of me. If we didn’t deliver Billy all the way to South Carolina, we’d let Wallace down, but short of forcing him into the cruiser, there was nothing we could do. Decisions had to be made, and quickly. I grabbed him then, squeezing him tightly, despite his awkward, adolescent stance, and kissed him on the cheek.
“Take care of yourself, Billy. I hope I’ll see you again soon.”
He blinked rapidly and muttered a good-bye under his breath.
In less than ten minutes we were ready. Outside the loading dock was a single gas pump, meant for the delivery trucks on their distribution routes, and Marco filled three red plastic canisters with fuel so that we wouldn’t have to stop in public. The cruiser was parked in a single parking spot beside the building’s generator, just beside the high chain-link fence that surrounded the plant. When he placed the sloshing drums in the trunk I had the fleeting fear that hauling around that much gasoline was dangerous, but figured combustion was the least of our concerns.
With Chase and Sean in borrowed uniforms, and me in the Sisters of Salvation skirt and blouse that Cara had abandoned, we rolled down the ramp onto the highway and gunned it home.
* * *
WE watched the images on the television, horrified. The ground was crowded with hunks of concrete and fallen streetlamps. The dust was powdered chalk, thick as fog. People, coated in white, ran from it, screaming, coughing, like it was a living creature chasing after them, not another building crashing to the ground. Our living room crackled with static.
The camera shook. The guy taping the scene was running. And then the screen went black and returned to the newsroom.
Chicago had been bombed. Like Baltimore and San Francisco. Washington and New York. But so much closer.
“Baby, come here.” Mom reached out her hand and I slid beneath her arm, feeling how she was damp and trembling. I pinched my eyes closed. Outside, kids were playing. A car drove down the street. How could people be so unafraid?
Chase, I thought. Just his name, over and over. I didn’t know where his uncle lived. I prayed it wasn’t in the heart of the city.
“Ember, if something like this happens, you come straight home, okay?” Her voice cracked. I wrapped my arms around her waist to make her stronger. “I’ll meet you here, and we’ll figure out what to do.”
* * *
I HAD a hard time sitting back in the leather seat. Between the lingering fear of driving after curfew in a borrowed cruiser, the daunting computer panel beside the steering wheel, and the glass partition behind my back, I had a hard time calming down.
My mind wasn’t helping. The thoughts slapped one atop the next. Flashes of my mom, her hair in clips, wearing clothes from my closet. The similarities in our faces. What did she look like now? Only a couple months had passed, but I knew I looked different. Hardened. Wary. Was she the same? If she’d survived the gunshot, how badly was she injured? Was she getting enough medical treatment? Or was she being forced, like the woman with her son in the square, to scare others into compliance?
Stop, I thought. Stop. She’s dead. Stop fantasizing she’s not. Stop hoping.
My heels hammered the vacuumed rubber floor mats. Cara’s wool skirt made my legs itch.
I turned back to check on Sean. We’d opened the vent in the partition between the seats, but couldn’t hear each other without yelling. He looked out the window, content in the silence. It had been a long time since I’d seen that small, peaceful smile. That was Becca’s smile.
“Talk about something,” Chase said, startling me. His eyes stayed glued to the road.
“What about?” I asked.
“Anything. Your voice … helps.” His thumbs drummed on the steering wheel.
“Do you think we’ll ever see him again?” I asked. “Billy, I mean.” Not Tucker.
“If Tucker doesn’t get to him first.” The way he said that name—it was like he was tearing something with his teeth.
I rubbed my temples. “I keep thinking it’s my fault,” I said quickly. “That I could have stopped all of it—whatever he’s doing—that day at the base. If I’d have shot him he never would have shown up at the Wayland Inn, he wouldn’t have come with us to the checkpoint, he wouldn’t know anything about the safe house. But I couldn’t, you know? I messed up. I was a coward, and now … now something even worse is going to happen, I can feel it.”
It had burst out in one breath—things I’d been hiding from him because I’d hated to admit they were true, even to myself.
“Wait,” he said. “Not killing someone makes you a coward?”
I shrugged. I didn’t like him turning this around on me. He rubbed the back of his neck.
>
“Em, what you did that day, it makes you better,” he said. “If you’d given me the gun that day, I would have done it. I almost did at the Wayland Inn. And killing someone—even if it’s him—that changes everything. It makes all the good things wrong and all the wrong things seem okay. And it gets easier. To do again, I mean. I’ve seen it.” He took a slow breath. “Look at Wallace. He’s got nothing but Billy and the cause, and when it came down to it, he could only hold on to one.”
In the silence I remembered the Wayland Inn, purged by fire. Remembered how Wallace had forgotten what was most important.
“Be glad you didn’t kill him,” Chase said gently. “Holding back, that was brave.”
I shifted, because brave didn’t fit right against my skin. When it came to Tucker and what I hadn’t done, coward felt right, and failure felt right. At least they had. Now, I wasn’t so sure.
“I wish I knew what he and Cara were doing in Greeneville,” I said.
“You didn’t buy the cousin story either, huh?”
I glanced behind me, but Sean was still blissfully ignorant to our conversation. It wasn’t that I didn’t want his opinion, I just felt more comfortable discussing some things with Chase alone.
“All I know is that she’s hiding something,” I said, picking at my fingernails, frustrated that I didn’t have the answers. Thinking of Cara suddenly reminded me of the copper cartridge I’d shown her in Greeneville. I’d been so distracted by the things she’d said about Sarah and the scars on her chest, I’d forgotten she’d been the last to hold it. Now who knew where it was.
I needed to change the subject.
“It’s strange going home after everything, isn’t it?” In my mind it was preserved, just as it had been when I left, but maybe it was different. I knew I was different. “I doubt anyone would even recognize me.”
“I would,” he said.
I laughed and combed my fingers through my short, dyed hair, catching a new waft of smoke. “Right. I look just like I did when I left.”
“You look beautiful,” he said. “And anyway, I’m not planning on running into anyone we used to know.” He cleared his throat, fixing his eyes on the road. “Why are you looking at me like that?”
All the hard edges within me had shimmered and gone soft.
“You said I was beautiful.”
He smirked and settled back in his seat. “I guess I did.”
I hid the smile in my shoulder.
* * *
CHASE drove fast, simply because he could. We passed no one on the highway. Not a soul. It was desolate, a half-pipe with trash and forest debris and the occasional stiffened roadkill arcing up against the side partitions. We were mostly silent, each lost in our own thoughts. My guarded hope, and his fearful dread.
Three hours in, just after we’d passed the turnoff for Frankfort on I-64, we pulled off for gas. It was dark, and the cold scent of rotten leaves filled my nostrils. Chase removed one of the canisters from the trunk and tipped the yellow nozzle into the fuel tank while Sean and I stretched our legs.
“So this is home,” he said, rolling his shoulders.
“It’s close.” I hesitated. “It’s weird coming back. Not knowing who is going to be there.”
“Yeah,” he said with a strange, strangled sigh. “Sometimes it’s better not to know.”
I frowned. Sean shook his head. “It’s good to check, though,” he added as an afterthought.
My thoughts returned to Tent City, to Sean’s confession that he had lived in such a place, and I wondered if he had family somewhere. He never talked about them. He didn’t look like he wanted to start now.
“What did you find out about Chicago?” I asked. His head bobbed gratefully.
“Marco told me we rendezvous with the resistance at an old airfield in the Wreckage.”
I shivered. During the War, the first places the Insurgents attacked were the airports. I’d seen what remained of them on the news: demolished buildings, concrete dust storms, but never a plane. Not since air travel had been banned at the beginning of the War. Chase shifted nearby. These weren’t just television scenes to him. He’d been there.
“He says it’s a rough bunch up North,” continued Sean when neither Chase nor I commented. “Says they’re crazy. Too much time in the field or something.”
“Will they help?” I asked speculatively.
“Sure. We just shouldn’t expect any hospitality.”
I frowned, wondering what this meant, but imagined that little in our line of work rivaled Marco and Polo’s generosity. They had let us steal their car, after all.
When the tank was full again we moved out.
* * *
THE lights from the old basketball arena, which had been converted to a Horizons manufacturing plant after the War, were the first signs of home. Cold and yellow, they lit the night like a warning rather than a welcome. The rest of the city was black, but for the gleam in the distance from the hospital—the first place I’d been taken during the overhaul. I returned to the edge of my seat, absently tugging at the knot in the uniform handkerchief around my neck.
The roads had been completely empty, but as we approached the Kennedy Bridge another cruiser came careening from the south, going fast enough to jump the Ohio River.
My heart clutched in my chest.
“No,” I whispered. “Don’t stop don’t stop don’t stop.”
I sank in the seat. Sean remained motionless behind us, sleeping.
It sped by without a hint at braking. Chase exhaled loudly and continued on.
“So, I guess we know what the MM does after curfew,” I said shakily. I wondered if the soldiers inside just liked to drive fast, or if they were drunk on whiskey like the kind in the back of the Horizons truck. Or if actually, there were two people inside just like us.
It helped to think that.
The clock on the dashboard flashed 2:27 A.M. as we crossed the dark waters of the Ohio on the high metal bridge. There were only four hours until curfew was up, until any nosy civilian could recognize our faces and make a report. The pressure made my muscles tense. We hadn’t said it out loud, but it would be better all around if we were out of here before dawn.
The cruiser rolled over the cracked pavement, headlights shining on landmarks like we were historians excavating some ancient tomb. There was the stop sign halfway between Beth’s house and mine. We used to meet there before we walked to school. Back when I used to go to school. Trees I recognized, dogwoods, already turning pink with blossoms. Tall, overgrown grass and weeds in front of every home. I remembered before the War when people had used lawnmowers. What a waste those things were. That much gas could power a generator for hours.
I’d tripped there and skinned my knee on the sidewalk. On that corner, a girl once set up a lemonade stand for a quarter a glass. And right beneath that tall brick wall was where I’d been standing when I’d fallen in love with Chase. I was nine, and he’d just won a race against Matt Epstein. He was the fastest boy in the whole world.
So many Statute circulars glued to so many doors. How many people had been taken since my overhaul?
We reached Ewing Avenue—my street—and a small whimper came from my throat.
I looked up a steep embankment on the right, but the old, abandoned house where I’d met Chase for the first time was now hidden by shadow. Hidden, like the children we used to be.
My house had come into view. Small and boxy, white. A sister to its next-door neighbor, the Jennings’s home.
“No fast moves,” Chase hissed. Two headlights came over the swell at the top of the street and caused my heart to stutter. The FBR cruiser eased by Mrs. Crowley’s house, right across the way from mine.
“They’re already here!” Bands of tension ratcheted around my lungs. I bit my lip so I wouldn’t scream, so hard it bled.
“It’s just a curfew patrol,” he muttered as we rolled past. “Just like us.”
The tinted windows were too dark to see i
nside. As Sean continued to snore, the patrol car continued to the intersection and disappeared around the block.
We approached my house. The familiar L-shaped walkway led to the front door where a Statute circular, the same that had been placed there during my arrest, still hung. A single tear slid down my cheek and I hurriedly wiped it away.
“Look.” I pointed. Below the living room window someone had tagged my house with black spray paint. One Whole Country, One Whole Family.
Someone was here after all. Someone fighting back. My pulse ran a mile a minute.
Chase buttoned the top of his collar, which he’d left slack in the car, with one hand. “We’ll park off the street and go through my backyard. Check your house from mine.”
I had to get in there as soon as possible, but was petrified of what we’d find.
We parked two streets down, in a cul-de-sac overrun by trash the city workers had missed and storm debris from the surrounding trees. I recognized this place, though barely. Chase and I had played here as children. Hide-and-seek. It was close enough we could still hear our parents calling us home to dinner.
It was disheartening how much the place had changed. Now it was dark and silent. Those who hadn’t moved away were hidden inside for curfew. Those who caught a glimpse through their closed curtains of our stolen FBR cruiser were afraid.
Chase killed the engine. Behind us, Sean woke and took in our surroundings.
Time to go, I told myself. But my legs wouldn’t move.
Sean got out. Chase followed, and I heard them conversing in low voices. Sean took off around the block, moving stealthily through the shadows. He was going to keep watch from up the street.
Get up. Still nothing.
Chase returned to the car. He rubbed his forehead with the heel of his hand and we sat in the dark. One minute. Two. We didn’t have time to waste; sunrise was coming, we had to move on to Chicago, but even though I told myself this, I could not summon the courage to open that door.
Slowly, he leaned over the center console and unbuckled my seat belt. I still felt where his hand had touched my stomach even after it drew away.
I could tell there were things he wanted to say. Chase things. Things like, we don’t have to do this, or why don’t I look and you can stay here. He didn’t say any of them though. Maybe he knew what my response would be. Likely he knew just as deeply as I did that this was something we had to do. This mystery, left unsolved, would haunt us the rest of our likely short lives.
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