“Don’t think for a minute that this solution isn’t for the greater good just because it’s painful,” Kiely said. Her eyes were fierce. “If we don’t put an end to it, kid, there will be worse suffering for generations to come.”
I couldn’t wrap my head around how to manage it. I’d heard threats about suffering for generations from the Rogs enough times to know she was right.
“Let me ask you something,” she said. “Do you know anything about your family history, past your parents being Indentured?”
I shook my head.
“It isn’t accidental,” she said. “They keep rewriting history. I’ve tried to collect what pieces I can—that’s why I kept stealing books, even after I figured out there wasn’t going to be any one book that somehow solved everything. But they can’t change the actual past. Remember that. Your family history is part of that. When people can speak freely, they pass on stories with words.” She paused, then smiled and added, “Kel felt so strongly about it, she had this idea that if we knocked out the WiFi while we were Placing, we might be able to help.”
“You Placed with Kel?”
“For six years,” she said with a note of longing. “Did your family never take advantage of those FiDos?”
I hadn’t considered before that it was Kel who’d made it possible for our parents to speak with us freely. To learn that Kiely had been part of that, too, made my head spin. Those FiDos had allowed my parents to kiss and hug us without paying, even if those occasions were rare.
Grateful tears welled up in my eyes. “My mom told me she had some family pictures from a long time ago, but by the time we were toddlers, she had to make hard choices about what she could afford to keep in the PhotoCloud™. She and my dad chose pictures of us. Pictures of when we were little, babies—toddlers. She chose those over pictures of her own mother.”
My voice started to give way. Silence was easier than this.
“Then it stopped mattering. We couldn’t afford any subscription fees for PhotoCloud™. My parents could scarcely afford to say the company’s name. Every month they sent a notice of the tiny thumbnails of the pictures they would permanently delete if we didn’t pay. But we couldn’t pay. My parents were gone by then. Saretha, Sam and I would gather around and peer close at those little thumbnails of our family as they winked away, punishing us for our debts.”
I brushed at my eyes to clear them. Even when I was little, it had felt like pieces of us were being ripped away.
“Our guardian,” I said between gritted teeth, “Mrs. Harris. She told us we didn’t deserve what we couldn’t afford. She said even looking at those tiny pictures was immoral.”
I flashed to the moment when I had saved Mrs. Harris from the mob and wondered if I should have let things go another way. Then I remembered Sera had long ago called us thieves for looking at those thumbnails, too. When we’d argued, Sera had yelled back, I never had any pictures to get deleted! I’d thought she was lying, that she didn’t deserve to have pictures. I had been so angry about what we’d lost I couldn’t see how much worse things had been for her. Now I just felt sick and ashamed for the way I’d treated her.
Kiely kept silent, watching the road, giving me space. After a while, she said, “I’ve been kicking myself for not thinking of finding a book with the PrintLocks™ codes. I thought I could hack them. I poked through the systems. Who knew they would actually print them!”
I had to laugh at that.
“But now I have a plan for how to coordinate,” Kiely went on. “With a place like Portland, where the city is free, even if only for a while, I can recruit help. We can arm them—not with weapons, but with the PrintLocks™ codes to crack the DRM. We’ll fan them out across America®. If we can get that center in Delphi™ down, the WiFi and everything will go with it. And we won’t have to worry about people starving.”
She made it sound so easy. My head hurt as I thought about who she could recruit. “You’ll only be able to get kids like us to do that,” I said.
“I didn’t say it was fair,” Kiely answered.
A moan escaped me. “And what about the Indentureds? What will happen to them when the WiFi goes out? How will they eat?”
“The farms will be fine. They grow food. The others... Hopefully we’ll be able to reach them in time. If there was a way to do it without disabling the whole system, I’d do it, but I don’t see how.”
My mind tried to work through this, searching for another solution. My body slumped, dispirited. It all seemed so insurmountable.
“All I want is to bring my family back together,” I said more sharply than I intended. “That’s all I ever wanted.”
“It isn’t up to you to solve everything,” Kiely said gently. “It isn’t up to you to solve the problems of the world. You’re sixteen, and, trust me, you’ve more than earned the right to take your family and go.”
“Where?” I asked. “I have a friend who feels our best bet is Téjico, but...”
Kiely’s intense face broke into a small grin. “I did a little digging into your family history when Kel went to bail you out of jail,” she said, nodding her head toward her bag. “Look inside. There should be a black book with the number twenty-four on it.” She waited for me to retrieve it. “Flip to the page labeled Jiménez.”
Ancestry®: $34.99
Kiely had written about my family in ink. The idea of it was both exciting and frightening. The name Jiménez was large and heavily inked, like she’d written the word over and over again many times. I couldn’t help but think of Norflo and how happy he would be to see this.
I found the dense tiny handwritten words difficult to read as the van jostled along a road that was barely a road anymore. Still, what I saw sent a shiver through me. I’d never seen words written down on paper before. It was forbidden to us.
There were a bunch of names written on the pages, all connected with little lines. I was descended from these people—all these people. They spread like branches or roots, to me and from me. A few generations back, Carlos and Eleanor Hernandez, my great-great-grandparents, had come from Mexico to live here back when Téjico was still called Mexico. What had they expected to find? The Jiménez side of my family had apparently lived in America® for hundreds of years before their name was shortened to Jime by something Kiely called the “One People’s Act.” I wanted to shake Kiely’s book for more answers, but all I could do was stare and try to understand everything she’d written.
Toward the bottom of the page, Kiely had written a note that sent chills down my spine.
“‘The algorithms appear manipulated to ensure early Indenture date for both sisters before independent families can be created.’” I read aloud. “What does that mean?”
“They like your genes,” Kiely said grimly. “They wanted to take you all into Indenture before you could have children. It’s likely the reason they kept your parents together when they were assigned. They probably thought you all would make nice workers for generations to come.”
I stared at her in horror. Many kids didn’t know what became of their parents once they were taken. They weren’t allowed any contact. We were restricted to a few nervous, awkward, aching calls each year. Many of my friends—Penepoli, Mandett, Nancee, Sera—were only allowed to talk to one parent. The other parent was simply gone. But when your parents couldn’t really afford to say anything, how much did it matter? What could any of our parents afford to say? I’d never realized that we were lucky our parents had gone together—I’d just thought it was unlucky they had been taken in the first place.
My head kept shaking in disbelief. Kiely pulled us down a wooded dirt road and began to slow the van.
“I lived most of my life never really thinking any of this was odd or wrong,” I whispered. “How could I have been so stupid?”
“Not stupid,” Kiely said. “Ignorant and unprepared. That’s by desi
gn. They didn’t want anyone to know what they were doing.”
She stopped the van and looked around. There were a few plastic shelters out in the dark, each shaped like half an egg and printed roughly around a tree. One was only half-constructed, with a small, drone-like printer circling and building the shelter up slowly in the dark. Kiely frowned after a moment.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“This is the blind where we were supposed to meet,” she said, rubbing a hand through her short blond hair. “Site’s been abandoned.”
“Why?” I asked, panic creeping into my voice. The little printer kept moving.
“It’s okay,” she reassured me, putting a calming hand out. “Could be lots of reasons. If they’d been caught, they wouldn’t have left the hacked printer going.”
I squinted out into the shadowy forest, hoping to spot Saretha or one of my friends. Despite what Kiely had said, the abandoned printer didn’t make me feel any better.
“There’s a second site not far from here,” she added, putting the van in Reverse and backing down the dirt road. “Don’t panic. We’ll find them. There’s just no WiFi to communicate. We mapped out a plan.”
Kiely reached into her bag and pulled out a Pad. She tapped the screen to update something, then handed it to me.
There was a line of WiFi blinds dotting the map from OiO™ down toward the outskirts of DC. Some were green, some were red. Beyond, all the way into the Archipelago of Disney™, more dots spread out, like an infection. A corruption of the system.
“How did you get this map?” I asked, centering in on Carolina.
“I stole it, obviously,” she said. She turned us around and started to speed up.
My heart started to pound. The words Crab Creek appeared between the Agropollination™ domes. Small red dots spattered the area around it.
“Crab Creek!” I cried. “That’s where my parents are!”
“I know,” she said, smiling. “Saretha told us.”
“Can we get them out?” I asked. If anyone would know how, it was Kiely. “Can we free my parents?”
She took a deep breath. “I don’t know much about how those farms are guarded.” She paused and looked at me. “There are overseers, and the Cuffs keep them tethered to the area. The chaos you and I’ve created... Well, it can’t hurt.”
“You didn’t answer my question. Is it possible? Is there a way to break my parents out of there?” I stared at the spot and burned its location into my brain.
“I know you have to try. You’re lucky they’re both in the same location.”
I thought on this a moment. She wasn’t going to give me a yes. Kiely wouldn’t make an empty promise.
“Why do you think they kept my parents together?” I asked.
Kiely looked at me sidewise. “I imagine in the hopes they would—” she paused, and the next word stuck in her throat “—breed.”
I felt sick to my stomach at first, then felt a small surge of relief. “Well, that certainly didn’t work out the way they planned.”
“That’s fortunate,” Kiely said, turning the wheel toward another densely wooded path. “The companies take direct ownership of any children born to parents in Indenture.”
I recoiled in horror. “What?”
“It’s slavery,” she explained. “They are born into slavery. You probably don’t know that word. They priced it too high for anyone to speak. When the government wants to destroy freedom and limit thought, they control speech. They don’t want you to understand the concept. If they could, they’d have erased it from the Word$ Market™ entirely, but that isn’t allowed. Slaves are people whose lives, freedoms and fortune are under the absolute power of others.”
“But that’s everyone,” I cried.
“No. The Law is clear on how it works.” She recited: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States™, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.”
“Except a ton of people are in involuntary servitude.”
We came into a clearing. “Like your parents, most have been ‘duly convicted’ of a debt crime,” Kiely reminded me.
“Duly,” I muttered.
Kiely slowed the van. The lights washed across another plastic printed structure. This one stood alone, but it wasn’t abandoned. Saretha was sitting there, her back to it. When she spotted our van, she rose, unsteady on her freshly healed legs, and began to run toward us.
My heart broke. Seeing Saretha stand made me want to cry with joy, but seeing how unsteady she was filled me with tears of a different kind. Before Kiely had the van at a full stop, I pulled at my handle and jumped out of the van, tossing Kiely’s book and Pad back inside.
“Speth!” Saretha cried. I ran to her and pulled her into a fierce embrace. She squeezed me back, shaking, more desperate than even the hugs our mother had stolen during FiDos. I felt her heart beating through her chest and my own matching it, fast and hard. I didn’t care what happened next. I would never leave her again.
The van’s engine cut away, and I pulled back so I could look at her.
“I’m sorry!” I sobbed. “I’m so sorry I left without you.”
“I’ll give you a minute,” Kiely said in a low voice, wandering away from us and the structure.
“Are you okay?” I asked, looking down at Saretha’s legs.
She shrugged and hiked up her skirt to show me. I felt myself take a sharp breath. Her legs were bruised and blotchy, puckered at the shin where the worst break had been. She fingered that indentation. “It still hurts,” she said.
I pulled her back into my arms. “I’m sorry,” I said again, aching for her. I waited and hoped for her to say it was okay, but the words didn’t come.
This time, she broke off the hug. Her eyes were clearer than the last time I’d seen her. The pain had overwhelmed her then, and before that, for a long time, Zockroft™ had dulled her. But she wasn’t back to what I thought of as normal. Her eyes looked different—not misty, but farther away. When she spoke her next words, I understood why.
“I want to forgive you,” she said.
“You...” I couldn’t find a word to say after that. It felt like she’d kicked me in the stomach.
“I wish there was a BoneKnitter® for our hearts,” Saretha said, touching her legs again. She looked so sad. It was the kind of sappy comment Sam would have made fun of, and I felt his absence deeply in the space now between us. I wondered if she did, too.
“If I’d spoken,” I choked out, thinking of that day on the bridge, “they still wouldn’t have... They might not have—”
“We’ll never know,” Saretha said. Unsaid was, You could have tried.
I felt dizzy from the ache in my heart. Blinking back tears, I stared beyond her at the hastily printed structure. Two printers zipped back and forth, building it up, thickening the walls. They hadn’t been here that long. Mira’s head poked out through the door, curious, then slipped back inside. One piece of dread fell away. Mira was okay. She was safe, but a pang of jealousy hit me. Sam was still gone.
“I need you to believe it wasn’t my fault,” I begged Saretha. “Please?”
Saretha’s forehead wrinkled. The last time she’d looked at me with any real pride had been on my Last Day. She had been so excited for me. She put a hand to my chin and lifted my head just a little to look at my scar.
“What happened that night?” she asked. She hadn’t bothered to back then—the night I was attacked—because she knew she’d be met with silence. That silence sat between us like a wedge.
“I had to keep quiet,” I told her. “I couldn’t let some random lunatic make me speak. I was attacked in Section 14. This drunk Affluent...” I swallowed. “He knew I wouldn’t scream. He wanted to do...things to me. If Henri hadn’
t broken from the Placers to help me...” I looked at the door where Mira had been, desperate to know whether he and the others were safe.
“Henri rescued me and got the Placers to take me in,” I said. “I had found a way to help the family—to keep us out of servitude. I wanted to tell you so badly.”
Saretha’s face softened a little. She took my hand and squeezed. I squeezed back, wanting this to be forgiveness, but I could feel it was less.
“I did everything I could,” I said to her. “I tried to find every way I could to keep us together. I wanted you and Sam to know I was a Placer, I really did.”
“Sam would have really liked that,” she said. It wasn’t meant to be cruel, but the reminder hurt. Sam would have been thrilled to know I’d made it onto a crew. But he’d died before he could truly feel happy.
“If I’d spoken, Keene would have taken us all,” I tried to explain, but the words came out sounding weak, like they didn’t have enough substance.
“Not if you’d read just your speech,” Saretha said. She tried to make the comment sound light, but for her, it wasn’t. “I could have pulled it up for you. Arkansas Holt said you could read it anytime.”
“Maybe,” I admitted. “But there was more to it than that. They’d stolen your image long before my Last Day. I...I wanted to do something about it.”
“I know,” she said. Her eyes flashed with a momentary thrill. “I was Carol Amanda Harving the whole time.”
That wasn’t exactly how it worked, but it was easier for me to agree. I looked at the light coming from the shelter. Someone paced inside.
“Did you meet them?” I asked her. “My Placers?”
Saretha swallowed hard and reached out to hug me again. “I’m sorry, Speth,” she whispered.
She had something awful to tell me. I knew it from her voice. My body started trembling. I wanted to push her away—to run from the news she was about to deliver—but I held on more tightly. We hadn’t even been able to mourn Sam properly. I wasn’t ready for more appalling news.
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