We hurried back to the tracks and kept walking along.
“I forget sometimes that the whole world isn’t part of Krita,” Benji said.
The fence got straighter as we kept walking, and instead of metal, there was a second fence. This one was made of wood, thick, with green plants in boxes up top, alongside the ribbons.
A sudden squeal stopped our feet. It was followed by laughter.
“Kids!” Benji exclaimed. He hurried up the embankment.
“Benji, wait!” I reached out to try to grab him, but barely touched the flapping tail of his shirt.
“I’m just taking a peek. There’s a gap up here.”
“We don’t have time for this,” Theo said. But he followed Benji up the steep hill to the fence. I hesitated. My heart felt like it was closing off my throat, thump-thump-thump.
“I’m open! I’m open!” someone yelled on the other side.
It did sound like a kid. I forced my feet to carry me up the hill to my friends. We crowded around the gap. On the other side of the fence was a neighborhood not too different from our own. Their houses all looked alike, though nothing like ours: three stories and long from front to back. Some had porches hanging off them, and some of the porches had potted plants or faded flags. And ribbons. There were ribbons tied on the bars around the porches and on the railings of the stairs and even around some of the streetlights. The town looked a little run-down, with curbs missing and the colors fading on the houses. But most of the buildings had window boxes with bright flowers, and the lawns were clipped neatly.
In the middle of the street some kids used hockey sticks to pass around a bright green tennis ball. One boy wore a black T-shirt with a yellow B on it. “McPhee has the puck! He’s racing up the ice! No one can stop him now!” The boy lifted his stick and slapped the ball so it lifted off the ground and flew straight for us. It came in slow motion and horribly fast all at once.
Benji dropped flat on the ground. “Uh-oh!”
They pulled me away from the fence while Julia spun around and pressed her back to the chain link. Ilana slid down the embankment, then lay on her stomach looking up at us. Her eyes were wide and her mouth open a little bit, puffing out panicked air.
“McPhee!” someone yelled from the other side of the fence. “Get the ball! Back in play, back in play!”
“Hold up a second, why don’t ya? I thought I heard somethin’!”
Closer. Closer. His feet clomped over sandy pavement.
I bit my lip hard. Theo held a finger to his lips.
“You heard your ego poppin’, that’s what ya heard.”
“You heard your pants droppin’!”
More steps. It sounded like he was dragging his stick on the ground behind him, a cool shrift-scratch sound that went right up my spine.
A kid could do a lot of damage with a hockey stick.
“You heard your mama callin’ her sweet baby home for din-din!”
What I could hear was the boy’s breathing, heavy and uneven. “I heard somethin’!” he yelled again. His weight pressed against the fence as he leaned up against it. I closed my eyes. I had never been this close to an outsider before. I could feel his breath. I could smell his sweat.
On the other side of the gap, Julia had her eyes squeezed shut. Her mouth, too, as if she were afraid to breathe out. I tried to hold my own breath.
“Maybe it’s the Maynard strays, Tommy!”
“Yeah, Tommy, better step back before they bite your brains out.”
Theo kept his gaze on the gap. His hands were in the dirt, ready to pull himself to his feet and what? Run away? Fight?
And then the kids on the other side of the fence started yapping and barking. Tommy, the boy, kicked the ground and muttered something under his breath before he spun around. “Quit your yappin’, that’s one more goal for McPhee’s Boys and we’re up three to two!”
Julia tapped my arm and nodded her head. We started to slide down the embankment with Theo and Benji behind us. It seemed impossible to move any slower or more carefully than we were, but still pebbles cascaded down the slope as loud as boulders in an avalanche.
Ilana helped me to my feet at the bottom and we walked back onto the tracks. We didn’t have to say it. That had been a mistake—too close, way too close. Benji looked sick and even held his hand to his stomach as we walked on and on and on.
We were a hundred yards down the tracks before we spoke.
“That was intense,” Benji said.
“Why do you always have to be such a numb nuts?” Theo asked him. “What were you even thinking?”
Benji didn’t try to defend himself.
I was still holding on to Julia’s hand. Ilana was on the other side of me. She reached out and gave me a pat on the back. “Deep breaths, Mori,” she told me.
I tried to do as she said. I took a deep breath in and let the air out through my dry lips.
“They were so close,” Benji said. “You could’ve reached out and touched him, Mori.”
I shook my head. Never in a million years would I have stuck my hand through the fence to touch that strange boy.
“They’re just kids,” Theo said. “What exactly do you think they would’ve done to us?”
“Oh, like you weren’t scared,” Julia shot back. “I saw your face.”
“With your eyes closed? Impressive.”
“We were all scared,” I said.
Theo gave half a nod.
“I know I was,” Ilana said.
“Really?” I asked.
“Yes! They find us, and this whole plan is kaput.” She reached up and pushed some of her hair away from her forehead. The sun was really brutal; it felt like my skin was cracking in the heat. Then the dirt that puffed up around us stuck to our skin. We looked like gray-and-brown ghosts walking down the tracks.
“Do you think they go to school?” Julia looked over her shoulder, though the group was long out of sight.
“Of course they do,” Theo told her.
“They don’t sound like they go to school,” I said.
We were approaching a train platform. There was a small brick building, not much bigger than a KritaBus, with an overhang that shaded where people had once stood to wait for the train. We had learned about it in school. Commuters used to drive in their own cars from all the surrounding towns to the stations, park their cars, and then take the train into the city. When the diseases became more virulent, public transportation was a real problem, and there were times it was even shut down all together. This platform had a large, lateral crack; stubborn grass sprouted out of it.
“Their school is probably different, though,” Julia said. “I mean, like it’s probably the way it is in history books with big classes and rows of chairs and all that.”
“I bet some things are the same, though. Like I bet some teachers are awesome and some are boring,” Benji said. “Didn’t Mr. Nussbaum used to teach out here?”
“Maybe they have all virtual school,” I said.
“Like, they go into a classroom with a million kids and then they have a remote teacher that they see on a screen,” Julia said. “That would make sense.”
“They probably still have to do the stupid fitness tests, though.” Benji jumped up onto the platform and walked along its edge like a tightrope walker.
“Where?” Julia asked. “I didn’t see any central buildings. No town hall, no library, no gymnasium. No school.”
“We only saw the tiniest sliver. It’s like if someone peered through the fence at Firefly Lane.” Theo’s voice cracked when he said the name of our street, and I think we all thought of home, so far away.
“I wonder if they have all the vaccines we do.” Without thinking about it, I rubbed my hands on my shorts. Those kids were vectors, too, carrying disease from one person to another just like the flies we’d been swatting away.
“They must have some, right?” Julia said. “We send them out, so they must have them.”
“Mayb
e we test ours on them,” Theo mumbled.
“Very funny,” Julia said. She turned back over her shoulder again. “It’s not the way I thought it was.”
“What do you mean?” Benji asked.
“I guess I thought it would be drabber. And sadder.”
“Uh-huh,” I agreed. “I thought everyone would be sicker.”
“Why?” Ilana asked. “You said they get medicine out here. And of course they probably have even better natural immunity than we do—the people who survive pass on those genes.”
“But they could still get sick,” Julia said. “They don’t have the precautions we do.”
Ilana bent over and scooped up a rock. “Aren’t there rules out here, too?”
“We can’t force them,” Julia said. “We encourage them, maybe, but no one is forced.”
“It’s not like they’re stupid or ignorant,” Ilana said. She said it slowly, like she was thinking out loud, but I got the sense she was just trying not to make Julia angry. That she knew exactly what she was saying. “I mean, it’s not like Krita took all the knowledge and locked it up, right?”
The train tracks skirted around a black-topped wasteland—the old parking lot, I figured—and the sun blazed down even hotter. I never realized I could sweat behind my knees, on my ankles, between my toes. It even felt like my brain was sweating, squeezing out the moisture and giving me a headache. I took a small sip of water.
The sound of barking traveled over to us and I wondered if it was the coyotes we’d heard the night before or if they had gone to sleep.
“What do you think?” I asked Theo.
“About what?” Theo replied.
“About the kids. About how it is out here and back home?”
Ilana tossed the rock to Theo and he caught it easily. “I think we need to pick up the pace if we are going to make it to MIT by nightfall.”
The chain-link fence continued past the platform. The other side of it was barren—no trees, no houses, nothing.
“It’s kind of like Harmonie,” I said. “I bet that fence went all around. I bet they quarantine sick people. They just don’t have, you know, all the smart people we do.”
Theo scoffed.
“What?”
“We don’t know a thing about them. They could all be geniuses.”
I thought of Tommy with the dirt smeared on his face and that strange accent that didn’t seem to have any r’s in it. “I don’t know about that.”
“Don’t be a snob, Mori.”
“I’m not being a snob,” I told him.
“You are being a snob,” he said. “Because of how they looked. The way they talked. That’s why you don’t think they’re smart, right?”
A tree root stuck straight out of the torn-up dirt. I didn’t think I was a snob. I just knew that Krita brought together the smartest people they could, and the people left outside, well, sure, some of them might have talents and intelligence, but it wasn’t the same.
Julia fell into step with me and hooked her arm through mine. “Don’t listen to him. You’re no snob.”
“It’s not your fault,” he said. His voice almost disappeared into the sound of our feet on the stones around the tracks, the insects whizzing around the air, and even the distant barking. But I still heard him: loud and clear.
“Gee, thanks.” I wished I hadn’t said anything. Why had he even come?
“You only know what you’ve been told. You think it’s so much better up in Old Harmonie, but you don’t know what it’s like to live out here. Not really.”
“Leave her be,” Ilana said.
“And you know what it’s like?” I asked him.
“No,” he said. “That’s the problem.”
“You don’t make any sense.” I ran my hand through my hair. Even my scalp was sweating. I knew we should just stop talking, that the heat was making us feel and say things that we wouldn’t under normal circumstances. Our anger was a heat mirage, like the oasis, but if we acted on it, we wouldn’t be able to undo it.
Theo seemed to feel the same way. His face was drawn together and he continued to speak in a low voice, looking more at the ground than at us or where we were headed. “None of this makes any sense,” he said. “But here we are.”
“If you didn’t want to come, you should’ve said so back on the tennis court,” Julia told him.
Theo chucked a rock over the fence. “I’m not saying I didn’t want to come.”
I ignored what he had said. “You were the one who asked me what was wrong. And you were the one that came up with the plan with me. So you had all sorts of time to say you thought it was a bad idea.”
“You’re not listening.” Theo put both hands on the top of his head, his fingers laced together. It was like he was trying to hold his rage in.
And me, it was like I couldn’t help but press and press to make him explode. “You’ve never really liked any of us, have you?”
“Mori.” Ilana put a hand on my shoulder.
“You’ve never been kind to anyone but me, and I guess now that’s over, too. Which is fine.”
Theo’s cheeks flared red. I remember what he had told me, that sometimes it felt like words were just spurting out of him and he didn’t mean what he said. But somehow I knew that he meant these words, that he wouldn’t erase them even if he could.
“In fact,” I said, my voice rising in pitch and volume, “why don’t you just turn around and go back? We don’t need you.”
Theo stopped walking. He hung his head and his fists fell down by his side. He might just turn around and start running back, and I realized that would be awful. Because we did need him.
“Come on,” Benji finally said. “We have to keep going.”
It was another moment before we started walking again. Ilana took the lead, and Theo dropped back behind us. Julia still had her arm looped through mine. “Theo’s just being Theo. He doesn’t really mean it.”
“Maybe,” I replied, and wiped sweat off my forehead. “I was afraid he really would leave. I don’t think we can get there without him.”
“He won’t,” she said. Then she nodded toward Ilana. “And she’ll be okay. We’ll get her there. I promise.”
“And then what?” I asked. “It’s all hinging on hope. This whole plan isn’t really a plan at all. It’s a wish.”
“No. We’ll get there and we’ll get her help and then once she’s safe, we’ll come home.” She held up her hand as if she knew what I was going to say. “She won’t be gone forever. We’ll know where she is, and maybe we can even send messages somehow.”
“I don’t want anyone to know where she is.”
“Maybe we can do it somehow without them knowing. If one of the people there will let me use their computer, I could send a—”
“We don’t know if anyone there will have a computer. We don’t even know if it’s there anymore. I shouldn’t have gotten you all involved in this.”
“You didn’t. And I would’ve been mad if you’d gone—” Her voice was drowned out by the sound of dogs barking. It was like they had appeared out of thin air, a whole pack of them, pushing against the fence just up the tracks from us.
“Get!” Theo yelled, which only made them bark louder. A Rottweiler jumped its paws up against the fence and the whole thing groaned under its weight. Theo came up behind us. “Go. Not too fast. Not too slow. Don’t make eye contact.”
“There’s a fence,” I told him, still angry.
“If they all decide to jump, it won’t hold them.”
We stayed close together, moving past the dogs. I held my breath as we did, as if that would keep them from noticing us.
They ran along the fence back and forth, yipping and growling.
“Keep steady,” Ilana said.
And then we heard the sickening creak as the fence gave way.
8
We all started running, tumbling down the tracks, bumping our elbows against one another. I could hear Theo’s warm breath rig
ht behind me. “Go, go, go!”
The dogs thrashed toward us at an ever-faster pace. Their claws clicked against the rails. They breathed hard and snorted.
Ilana was strides ahead of the rest of us in minutes. She yelled: “Come on, doggie! Come on!”
“What’s she doing?” I panted.
But by then the dogs nipped around our feet.
“Come on, dogs! Come and get me!”
“Ilana!” I yelled. “Stop it!”
A dog snapped just as my heel came up and caught it in the chin.
Whimper. Snarl.
Theo grabbed my arm and yanked me up the far side embankment, where there was another fence, this one low and dented. “Go over,” he yelled.
“We don’t—”
“Go over!”
The sound of the dogs was deafening.
I looked over my shoulder but didn’t see any of our friends.
“Go!”
I shoved my toe into a link of the fence and heaved myself up. When I threw my leg over, my sneaker got stuck. Three of the dogs had followed us up the hill and one bared its teeth at me as it let out a low growl. It cackled at me like a villain in a movie. Just as it lunged at me, my foot broke free and I tumbled over to the other side.
Theo kicked at a second dog, then leaped over the fence and landed in a crouch by my side. The dogs threw themselves against the fence, but this one held. Theo’s breaths came in heavy puffs.
I drew myself up to my full size, which wasn’t very much, but it was enough. “Go away,” I growled back at them.
And they did. Whimpering.
Next to me, Theo burst out laughing.
“What?” I demanded.
“Go away!” He mimicked my growl.
“Honestly, Theo.” I pivoted.
He held up both his hands, which were stained red from the rust on the fence. In the first moment, it looked like they were dusted with blood. “Come on, Mori.” He laughed, and dug his water bottle out of his pack. “That was wild. I never thought I’d see you do something like that. Not in a million years.” He held his water bottle out to me and I could see his hand was shaking.
“Right,” I said. “It’s about as likely as me breaking out of Old Harmonie.”
The Daybreak Bond Page 4