The Recoil Trilogy 3 Book Boxed Set: Including Recoil, Refuse and Rebel

by Joanne Macgregor

  “Quinn,” I gasp.

  “Jinxy!”

  The voice calling my name is not Quinn’s. It’s Robin’s, and he’s standing in the doorway of the living room, frowning at us. “Canoodling again? Don’t you two ever stop?”

  “Don’t you understand the meaning of privacy?” I say, scowling at him.

  “Are you blushing, Quinn?” Robin teases.

  “Ignore him, Quinn. He’s just jealous because he’s not getting any action.”

  Robin expertly dodges the pillow I throw at him and shrugs. He and Sofia didn’t work out, but neither of them were heartbroken about it.

  “Mom says that it’s time to get up and get going.” Robin holds up a thumb. “That you don’t want to be late for the opening ceremony.” He extends his forefinger and points it and his thumb at me like a gun. “And that the traffic across town is likely to be heavy, so we need to leave in good time.”

  Three fingers are in the air now. They’re the fingers of his left hand. His right arm is still thinner than the left, and the fingers don’t work properly. He can use a specially adapted mouse with his right hand, but for almost everything else, he’s now a lefty.

  “What’s that red mark on your neck?” says Robin, arching an eyebrow at me. “Is there a new plague I should be worried about?”

  The old plague is still more than enough to be worried about, but the Center for Disease Control announced just last week that “the tide is turning”, and I think I might actually believe them. Deaths are down, and the mutant rat population is being brought under control by a combination of new poisons and elimination units. The sniper squad is still operational, though none of the old team except Tae-Hyun and Mitch are still on it, and these days, only rats and infected animals are shot. There’s still no cure for rat fever, but there is a new vaccination in final trials, and results so far are promising.

  “Robin, go away — or I’ll give you something to worry about.”

  “Fine, fine, blame the messenger.”

  Robin steps into the hall, and I hear my mother calling from the kitchen, “Are they awake, Robin? It’s breakfast time.”

  “Oh yeah,” he says, with a last cocky smirk at Quinn and me, “they’re all ready for action.”

  Mom was right, the traffic is hectic. Not as bad as before — the people who still remember say — because so many people switched their business to working virtually. But it’s astonishing for someone like me who remembers deserted roads with cracked pavement and weed-overgrown sidewalks. These full lanes of bumper-to-bumper cars, trucks and buses are still a novelty to me. I love staring out of the window of our vehicle, peering into other cars alongside us, catching glimpses of other lives.

  A kid with red hair and rosy cheeks in the car adjacent to us waves at me and then sticks out his tongue just before we take the turnoff to ASTA.

  I’ve got to stop calling it that. It’s been renamed and is now called the New Horizons School of Achievement. Quinn says they should have named it after me, but he’s biased. ASTA and its various subsidiaries and holding companies have been put out of business and charged with hundreds of crimes. The list of offenses grows by the day as more of their underhanded dealings emerge in the official inquiries and hearings currently underway. Of course, they’ve got insiders giving them information, too. Leya was one of the first to do a deal in exchange for becoming a state witness.

  “Like the proverbial rat jumping the sinking ship,” according to Quinn.

  I’m off the hook for the deaths of Hawke and his bodyguard — the grand jury declined to return indictments, so I never even went to trial. But while I’ve been given awards, the entire government of the Southern Sector was forced to resign, and an early election has been called. There’s also talk of disbanding the three super sectors and returning to the federal system we had before. Things are changing faster than I would have thought possible.

  As we drive down the access road, I note how different it looks. There’s still a fence around the campus, but the guard huts and electrified tops have been removed. The gate is now a fancy wrought-iron affair with the school’s crest — a phoenix against a sun rising above the horizon — and it stands open in welcome.

  Muttering about how we were very nearly late, Mom finds one of the last spaces in the lot and backs into it. It takes her a good few tries to get it right — Mom has never been great at parking — and while she’s maneuvering, an advertisement comes on the radio, extolling the virtues of the new rat-flu vaccine which is due for release next month.

  “Such good news!” Mom says, wrestling the wheel to one side and reversing in jerky bursts.

  “Better health for a better future,” the voice on the radio says sunnily, “brought to you by Type Atlas.”

  Robin, Quinn and I exchange glances.

  “That name, though?” Quinn says.

  “Yeah, I caught it.” Robin frowns. “Do you think —?”

  “I don’t want to know.” I hold up a silencing hand.

  “Wouldn’t surprise me,” Robin mutters as we get out of Mom’s car. “Money always finds a way to survive.”

  “A luta continua,” Quinn says. Or that’s what it sounds like.

  “Look, there’s Cameron!” I wave and run to the steps at the entrance, where my big friend stands, smiling.

  It’s a warm May day, and I’m wearing a light-blue sundress. Much to Mom’s chagrin, I’m wearing it with sneakers. As a concession, they’re covered in lacy detail, so they don’t look too strange with the sundress, but I won’t wear heels. For one thing, they make the muscles in my right thigh ache and twitch, and for another, I’m not so over the past that I’m comfortable with being hamstrung by heels. I want to be able to run if I need to.

  “Hey, Cameron! How’re you doing?”

  I give him a tight hug, pull back to check his face. He’s smiling.

  “Good. You?”

  “Great!”

  Quinn and Robin catch up with us and shake hands with Cameron, while Mom hustles us up the stairs. They’ve retained the decon unit for folks like my mother who still want it — old fears and habits die hard, I guess — but the boys and I simply walk through the open door into the marble-floored lobby of the old ASTA building.

  I’m struck by a moment of déjà vu. This is where I stood that first day as a nervous, green recruit, eagerly listening to Roth and Hawke spew their deceit-filled speeches, excited to be out of the house, and already interested in the tall, handsome boy standing beside me. It was just over a year ago, and although I’m only seventeen, I feel years older than that girl.

  There are a lot of familiar faces, and some that are noticeably absent, but Mom hurries us into the auditorium, saying, “You can catch up afterwards, Jinx, and we’ll meet up with your family then, too, Quinn. The ceremony is about to begin.”

  There’s some music from a string quartet and a few speeches about how the school will serve gifted children from across the state by exposing them to a wide variety of academic, cultural, artistic and sporting subjects in hope of “fostering well-rounded, broadly educated future leaders”. I have to stifle a giggle when I think what Sarge would say if he knew that the old shooting range is now the site of a new school theatre. Because one thing they will certainly no longer be teaching at this school is sniping.

  We get a mention in the speechifying, the names of our little team — “the liberators” as the press called us — who brought down The Game and revealed the truth about the government and ASTA, are read out one by one, and we stand briefly to acknowledge the applause.

  “A medal would have been nice, or a reward,” Robin says, not bothering to keep his voice down.

  Mom shushes him so we can hear the end of the new principal’s address. He holds up a large brass plaque with our names engraved on it — “Yours had better be at the top,” Quinn tells me — and informs the audience it will be mounted in the entrance hall of New Horizons “as a reminder, because those who forget the past are doomed to
repeat it.”

  Afterwards, we shuffle out of the auditorium and are guided through the school to admire the new music center, the converted classrooms and the fully equipped art room. When we pass the high-tech computer lab, I have to hook a finger through a loop on Robin’s trousers to prevent him sneaking inside.

  They’ve laid on a champagne breakfast in the gardens at the back of the school, and there’s a moment of awkwardness when Robin and Sofia bump into each other in the crowd thronging out through the doors.

  “How are you doing?” Sofia asks.

  “Good, you know, okay. I’m starting college in the fall.”

  “Me too, at Emory. Pre-law.”

  Robin nods like that fits what he knows of her.

  “I’ll be doing biomedical engineering at Georgia Tech. They’ve got a research program underway using virtual reality to help people regain use of paralyzed limbs by reactivating the nerve connections.”

  “Cool. It would be great if that game technology could be put to better use,” Sofia says. “Good luck, Robin.”

  “Yeah, see you.”

  I walk around inspecting the revamped gardens. The bench that I liked to sit on at sunset is still there, but the cameras are gone. There are new flowerbeds filled with blue hydrangea bushes and white anemones, same as Mom has planted at home.

  “It’s an improvement, I’d say,” Quinn says, handing me a tall flute of orange juice when we get to the long tables laden with a variety of drinks and platters of snacks.

  “You bet.” I take a sip. “Is this spiked?”

  He winks.

  “How’s the leg?” Cameron asks, noticing me rubbing it.

  “It’s okay.”

  A dent, a scar and a limp aren’t too much to live with. Others weren’t so lucky. Like Bruce.

  “Hey, you,” someone says next to me, and I turn to find Evyan there.

  She’s almost unrecognizable. She’s let the shaven side of her hair grow out and has cut the long side, so that now she’s sporting the kind of cute pixie cut I was aiming for when I hacked off my long hair last year. She’s wearing only six studs in her ear and none in her nose, and although she’s still dressed entirely in black, she’s eased up on the eyeliner and looks — there’s no other word for it — pretty.

  “You look …” If I say, “pretty,” she’ll probably deck me. I’m still thinking of a good word when a familiar voice supplies the right word.

  “Hot! She looks hawt!”

  Bruce has arrived, and he’s holding a flute of champagne in each hand.

  He gets a long hug from me and a bro-hug from Cameron, and then he shakes hands with Robin (“How’s it hanging, Thing Two?”), and Quinn (“Wassup, Leprechaun?”). Evyan gives him a cool lift of the chin.

  “I’d offer you a glass, but I think you might prefer water, Evyan,” Bruce says, nodding toward the rows of bottled water with their pink and blue labels.

  Evyan catches my eye, and we both smile, remembering the days when I called her by the brand names of bottled water.

  “You clean up nicely, Goth-Girl,” Bruce says.

  Evyan ignores him and tells me, “You did okay, Jinx.”

  Wow. Coming from her, that’s high praise.

  “Yeah, we did okay,” I say.

  “I don’t guess I can call you Goth-Girl anymore, huh?” Bruce says, taking a large gulp from first one glass and then the other.

  “What are you up to these days?” I ask Evyan.

  “Traveling, mostly. Tomorrow I’m off to Thailand, I’ve got a three-month gig teaching English there.”

  “Teaching!” Bruce says.

  “And you guys?” Evyan asks.

  “I’ve still got to complete my high school diploma, but I’ll be finished by July.”

  I’ve spent the last six months recuperating, learning how to drive, and fulfilling the requirements to finish high school. Even though schools are reopening, I decided to finish high school the way I’d started it — online.

  “Are you sure?” Quinn had asked when I told him my decision. “Don’t you want some of the real thing? You know, friends and teachers and prom?”

  I knew I’d be missing out on some stuff. I would have liked to play guitar in orchestra. And it might have been fun to try cheerleading.

  Quinn had grinned when I’d mentioned that. And when he saw I wasn’t being sarcastic, he’d laughed so hard, he actually fell off the bed.

  “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he’d said when he reappeared, wiping his eyes. “It’s just the thought of you as a cheerleader — would you shoot the opposition?”

  “In September, Quinn and I are going to Duke together,” I tell the crowd now.

  “Architecture,” Quinn says when Evyan wants to know what he’ll be studying.

  “You?” Cameron asks me.

  “I don’t know yet.”

  I’m considering half a dozen subjects — European history, game theory, anthropology, classical guitar, biology — none of which seems to fit with the others, and none of which I’m certain I’ll be able to hack. Plus I keep changing my mind about what to do. It’s part terrifying, part exhilarating — this freedom to choose, this not knowing.

  “Do whatever interests you now. You’ve got the rest of your life to change your mind,” is Mom’s view. Unlike her guidance on shoes, I think I’ll follow this advice.

  Mom has loosened up a lot over the last few months, and she seems to have a new zest for life. She’s even taking ballroom-dancing lessons and has extracted promises from Robin and me to attend her studio’s show in July.

  “Can I call you Teach?” Bruce asks Evyan now. “Will you give me extra lessons? Spank me if I’m a naughty boy?”

  I’ve got to laugh. Same old Bruce — on the outside, at least.

  “Should you be drinking with only one kidney and no spleen?” I ask him.

  “Blue, Blue, Blue,” he tuts, shaking his head at me. “You don’t drink with your kidney or your spleen. You’re hooked up with an Irishman — I would have thought he’d have taught you how to drink by now.”

  I laugh, but I give him another hug, too. “I’m glad you’re here, Bruce,” I say.

  I don’t just mean at the function, and he knows it. The slug ripped through his back and abdomen, and between the blood loss and the massive infection which set in afterwards, it was touch and go for weeks.

  “Likewise, princess,” he whispers at my ear and then sets me free, complaining about the wet patches I’ve left on the shoulders of his snazzy silk shirt.

  “Control your woman, Paddy, there are some babes around here I still want to impress.”

  Bruce is now a shooting instructor at a military academy in Texas. “Spoiled little punks from rich families mostly, but I’ll turn those little piggies into soldiers, yet!”

  Cameron and I exchange glances and smile into our drinks. I’m sure he’s imagining, like I am, Bruce channeling the spirit of Sarge — making his charges do push-ups in the rain when they miss their targets and yelling at them, “Pain is …? What is pain, my little piggies? Pain is good!”

  Cameron tells us he’s going to spend the summer on a ranch out in Wyoming, herding cattle and training horses.

  “I need some time away. To be quiet, figure things out,” he says.

  “You’re going to be a cowboy,” I say, giving him a punch on the arm. “That suits you.”

  “Hey, look who it is! Come say hi,” Quinn calls over my head, waving someone over.

  It’s Neil, looking pretty much exactly the same as when last I saw him. He tells us he’s working on new software to detect and protect against surveillance intrusions, and another program to analyze computer games.

  “The government may look all different,” he says, in a low, suspicious tone, “but I don’t trust them. Or big business. That technology is out there, man. It would be a fool who doesn’t think some crowd or another’s going to try using it again.”

  “How’s Beth?” I ask him.

  “Happ
ier than I ever remember her being,” he says, looking surprised at this turn of events. “She says you’re never too old to be a mother.”

  “Still managing the shelter?”

  “Yeah, she lives there now. Volunteers at the local clinic twice a week, too. She sends her love and told me to tell you that they’ve officially renamed the shelter Tallulah’s.”

  We’re all quiet for a moment, feeling our sadness, remembering the kind, loving woman who was our soft place to fall. We drove all the way to Tuscaloosa, Quinn and I, after I got out of the hospital. We spent an afternoon visiting Miss Edna, handing over the envelope of memories, and sharing stories of the grand woman. I told her about Carlos, who wants to be a chef when he grows up, and the teens staying off the streets, and about how Tallulah’s legacy was continuing with Beth giving them love and a shot at a future.

  “To leave the world a better place,” Miss Edna had said, dabbing her eyes with a small handkerchief. “That’s all any of us can ask for.”

  My mother and the O’Rileys come up to join our group. Mr. O’Riley gives me a huge smile and a friendly greeting. He’s a fan for life, crediting me with saving his sons, toppling the government and saving the world, too, I think. Mrs. O’Riley is a little more reserved, but Quinn always said she was the tougher nut to crack.

  “She’s coming around, though,” he’d said after my last visit to their house. “She’s not blind, she can see you love me and that you make me happy. And that’s what she wants most for her children — to be loved and happy.”

  Connor, standing beside his mother, greets me politely, but not warmly. He still doesn’t look very happy — not to see me, and not with things in general. According to Quinn, he’s finding it difficult to adjust to life after the rebellion and isn’t sure what to do with his future.

  “He’s at a loose end,” Quinn said when we last spoke about his brother.

  Kerry had other words for it. “Dad says he wanders about the house like a lost fart in a perfume factory.”