The Daybreak Bond

by Megan Frazer Blakemore

  She closed her eyes tightly. Beads of sweat dotted her forehead.

  “Does it hurt terribly?” I asked in a low voice.

  She nodded and winced. “But don’t get any ideas,” she said.

  I wanted to ask her what she meant, but then Ethan came back with the other wagon. We pushed Julia in through the gap and then Tommy said, “You, get in the other wagon.”

  “Me?” I asked.

  “I figure maybe you’re right and we should take precautions. I like taking precautions. So we should probably hide as many of your faces as possible. Mori, you get in the wagon, and you”—he pointed to Benji—“push from behind.”

  I climbed into the wagon. The bottom was full of old leaves, and a strange insect scurried out from under them and disappeared through a tiny hole. “Okay,” I said. “I’m good.”

  “Amnah and Mouse, you’re on that team. Take them to home base and we’ll meet you there.”

  “Wait—” I started to protest.

  “On your mark, get set, go!” Tommy yelled.

  And we were off, rolling at a terrible speed down the alleyway. Every bump we hit sent a shock to my bones and I knew it had to be a hundred times worse for Julia. “Slow down!” I yelled, but my voice was drowned out by our wheels on the pavement and Tommy’s whooping and hollering.

  When we burst out of the alleyway, both wagons veered right. I felt like I was going to tip out onto the pavement. I tried to look over my shoulder for Julia, but she was lost in the crowd of kids around her wagon. So I tilted my head back and tried to concentrate on the sky. That just made me feel sick. And then we were turning again. Away from Tommy’s whooping. Away from Julia.

  Mouse held out a water bottle to me. Her hair was reddish and spun out above her head like a cloud of tiny corkscrews. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. When she opened her eyes, she looked at the bleached-out grass to the left of my sneaker. “Drink,” she said. Her voice was so soft, I thought maybe I had imagined it. Like maybe it was the wind blowing through the trees. Another deep breath. “But slowly.”

  I glanced over at Benji. Had he noticed the way she wouldn’t look at me? He just shrugged. I took the water bottle from her and tried to peek at its contents, but the plastic was opaque. I didn’t really feel like I had a choice, though. My throat was parched like I hadn’t had water in years—had never had it. I wanted to gulp it all down, but Mouse put her hand on top of mine, telling me to slow down without words.

  Amnah looked over her shoulder. “We need to get them inside.”

  Mouse chewed on her lower lip. It was chapped and cracked at the corner.

  “It’s work hour almost,” Amnah said.

  Mouse took her hand off mine and nodded, so I took another sip.

  Benji put his hand on my shoulder. He was sweating more than I’d ever seen him. When he breathed, his skin pressed in around his cheeks and his collarbone. I tumbled myself out of the wagon. “Benji!”

  He held up one hand. “All good,” he panted.

  “Your inhaler? Do you have it?”

  He nodded and I yanked his backpack off his shoulders. The pack was full of different tools and devices, most of which I didn’t recognize. But there, at the bottom, was his inhaler and spacer.

  “Put your hands on your head,” Amnah said, and my body stiffened. Was this a holdup? All I had in my hands was the inhaler. “Put your hands on your head and breathe slowly.”

  Benji did as he was told.

  “Well, go on! Give it to him,” Amnah said to me.

  So I held the inhaler up to Benji and when he put his lips around it, I squeezed.

  “It’s gonna take time for your breath to come back, but we gotta get up,” Amnah told him. “Can you climb?”

  “No sweat,” Benji said, though he was, in fact, dripping with sweat.

  Amnah looked both ways before leading us down another alleyway alongside a giant triple-decker house whose siding was green with mold. Back beyond the building was a lawn no bigger than the entryway to our houses, and squished up against a fence was an oak tree with a rickety-looking tree house in it.

  I had always wanted a tree house in our backyard. I could read there, and sleep in it in the summertime. Of course, my parents had said it was far too dangerous, and anyway, it wasn’t allowed by the building code.

  There were boards nailed into the trunk of the tree for a makeshift ladder. Mouse went first. Then Benji. I waited until he was all the way up, but again, what would I have done if he fell? I certainly couldn’t catch him. Amnah came behind us, closing the trapdoor.

  “I just don’t normally run that much is all,” Benji said. He had his hands back up on top of his head.

  “Keep you behind closed doors up there, I suppose,” Amnah said. The red bumps on her skin were shiny and angry.

  “It’s not like that at all,” I said.

  “What Mori is trying to tell you,” Benji began, then stopped to take a few deep breaths. “Is that you happen to be sitting with the dopest skateboarder in four counties.”

  “Dopest? Like stupidest?” Amnah asked.

  “No, like cool.” Benji picked up his inhaler and took another puff. I watched his skin. He didn’t seem to be sucking it in so hard, but I still wished we had all gone to see the EMT. Why had they separated us, anyway?

  The walls of the tree house were covered with posters. Some were for movies I had seen, but others were totally unfamiliar, like one with a giant, feathered monster peering down at a city that was held beneath a birdcage. I turned away from that one. On the far wall was a big map. I crossed over for a closer look. There was a big red circle around South Concord. Then lots of little x’s marking other spots. I didn’t pay attention to those. I concentrated on the big green area marked “Old Harmonie, KritaCorp.” Between there and the tree house was a blue rectangle—the reservoir.

  “You’ve come a long way,” Mouse said from a seat by the window, her voice like a puff of air. She looked at a stack of sketches on the table, paging through them while picking at her fingers again. The ends were all red and raw.

  “Yes,” I said. And then the air went still and heavy between us all. We had nothing to say to one another. Even Benji, who could fill just about any silence, looked uncomfortable.

  There was a bookshelf tucked in one corner, but it didn’t hold any books. One shelf had what looked like a bunch of circuit boards, another had battery packs, and the top had motors and lights of various sizes.

  “Whoa!” Benji exclaimed. “Is this what I think it is?” He held up a small black box.

  “I guess that depends on what you think it is,” Amnah said.

  “A Nyetalift?” He spun it around in his hands.

  “Doesn’t work,” Mouse said, still looking at her drawings.

  “You should send it back, then,” Benji said. “’Cause these things are way cool. We have one in our tech lab at school and Theo and I programmed it so that when someone got close to it, it would levitate their hair.”

  “That was you?” I asked. My own hair had gone straight up and one of the boys from over on Serenity Drive had said I looked like the world’s saddest peacock. A few days later he had come up to me all full of apologies, and I realized now that maybe his parents had dampened his cruelty so he wouldn’t tease anymore. He’d been overly sweet ever since.

  Mouse shook her head. She raised her eyes to peek at Benji. “I didn’t buy it.”

  “You stole it?” I exclaimed.

  Amnah exhaled slowly. “Really?”

  “What? If she didn’t buy it, then she must have—”

  “Made it,” Amnah interrupted. “She made it herself. Duh. Though I’m not surprised that theft was the first thing an Old Harmonie kid would think.”

  “I just—” I began. The truth was, I had never heard of anyone making their own Nyetalift. It was a device that created a field that allowed things to levitate. Mostly kids just fooled around with theirs, but they had some cool innovative possibilities. Juli
a had used one in a project to show how you could redesign the run-up to a high-jump bar so that people would get greater vertical lift, and then how the athlete could use that to better execute the jump. The idea was that athletes could use it while they were training to really perfect their technique. The school had bought a new one just for that project. No one had even suggested that she try to make one herself.

  “What’s not working about it?” Benji asked.

  “It doesn’t hold the field. Things go up, but they fall right down.” Mouse held out one of her sketches to Benji. It was covered in numbers and notes.

  “Huh,” he said. “It should work.”

  Mouse agreed by nodding.

  Amnah picked up a knot of loose wires. She began untangling the wires, coiling each one up so it wouldn’t get re-tangled. “You should know that Tommy McPhee has a history of doing incredibly stupid things, and I think this is just about the stupidest.”

  My breath came quicker as I felt my chest tighten. What exactly was Tommy doing? Had this all been a plan? “What do you mean?”

  “Helping a bunch of Krita kids. I bet he thinks the president of the company is going to thank us. Invite us up there for a big parade, maybe even let us stay. Ha! We all know that’s not going to happen.”

  I looked over at Mouse and Benji. Neither of us told them how far up Theo’s mom was in the Krita corporate ladder.

  Mouse said, “Tommy wants to be a hero.”

  “Some hero. He gets us into more scrapes than I can count.”

  Maybe that’s what I was doing. Trying to be a hero. And look what had happened. Julia had been bitten by a dog. “Is there a hospital nearby?” I asked.

  Amnah shook her head, disgust smeared across her face. Mouse nodded. That cool silence descended again. It was almost like Amnah could summon it. “How long do you think it will take?” I asked.

  “Hopefully not too much longer,” Amnah said. “I mean, it’s not like I’ve got all day to sit around babysitting you two.”

  I went and sat next to Benji, who put his arm around me. “It’s okay, Mori,” he said. I could feel that his breath was still coming all ragged. Mine, too.

  The wind blew through the tree house, rustling some papers on the floor—comics, it looked like—and bringing with it a foul, smoky smell. I wrinkled my nose and Benji coughed.

  Amnah started wrapping the wires again, tugging them around her fingers, then sliding them off.

  “What are you hoping to do with the Nyetalift, anyway?” Benji asked Mouse. “Little science fair experiment or something? I’ve got a pretty dope plan for one, if I can ever convince my parents to get me one. Of course, if you figure out how to fix yours and send me the plans, then I can make my own. Totally rad.”

  “What would you make with it?” Mouse prompted. “And don’t say hoverboard.”

  “Totally a hoverboard!” Benji said. “The last frontier of science. The one problem that no one has ever really solved, right up there with the cure for the common cold.”

  Mouse laughed at this. “Well, I’m working on an assistive walking device for senior citizens.”

  “Holy cow! Really?”

  “Why is that so shocking?” Amnah asked.

  “It’s just really ambitious,” Benji said.

  “We have ambitions out here, too. You didn’t get a lock on that.”

  “That wasn’t what I meant. It’s just—”

  “Save it,” Amnah said. “Not interested.”

  “Amnah,” Mouse said in a soft voice.

  Amnah scowled and looked out the window.

  Benji turned back to Mouse. “It’s a much better use of the technology, I’ll give you that. Although I do think senior citizens might enjoy hoverboards, too.”

  Mouse smiled and Benji picked the plans back up.

  “Hey, have you tried connecting this port to the one over here?”

  She nodded. “Yep. No go.”

  She rustled through the papers and showed him something else.

  “Got it,” Benji said. “Did you ever think about—”

  Before he could finish his question, she showed him another diagram.

  Benji nodded. “Right, of course, because of the weight.”

  She smiled and nodded.

  “Oh! So then that means, if you could shift the center of gravity forward—”

  “Nope.”

  He took the sheet of paper from her. “Huh,” Benji said.

  “Huh,” Mouse agreed.

  And Amnah just kept looking out the window.

  11

  There were three quick knocks on the trapdoor, followed by two slower ones. Mouse leaned over and pulled the lock out of the door, then lifted it up. Tommy’s face appeared. “It’s bad,” he said.

  “Where is she?” I asked.

  “She’s at Naya’s. She’s still bleeding and she’s not real coherent all the time. Trudy gave her some painkillers and those seem to be helping a little. Anyway, she needs to go to the hospital, but she won’t go. Said you all were on a mission and she wasn’t going to be the one to mess it up.”

  “I’ll talk to her,” I said.

  “Go for it,” Tommy said. He climbed back down the ladder, and I followed him. Benji and Mouse came and then, after a moment’s hesitation, and with a great deal of grumbling, Amnah came, too.

  We walked back down the alleyway. There were dandelions growing out of the cracks in the pavement, bright yellow ones that reached for the sun.

  “So, are you?” Tommy asked. “On a mission, I mean. Or is that just the fever dreams talking.”

  “She has a fever?”

  “Probably.” He shrugged. “Her body’s going into fight mode. She’s bound to get hot. But are you on a mission? What kind of a mission? You happen to have stumbled upon one of the a-number-one mission planners, so you’re pretty lucky.”

  “Who?” I asked. I concentrated on my feet, putting one in front of the other. It felt like the alleyway had stretched and no matter how many steps we took, we didn’t get any closer to Julia and my friends.

  “Me,” Tommy said.

  But Amnah said, “Mouse.”

  “She’s just saying that to rile me up. And because they’re sisters. But there’s no hiding the truth. I know what’s what. You tell me what you all are up to and—”

  “Are we almost there?” I asked.

  “Just up here,” Tommy said.

  It was another one of the triple-decker houses. There were three mailboxes on the outside wall, and when Tommy pushed open the front door, there was another heavy door to our left, and stairs going up.

  “Trudy and Naya live on the first floor, thankfully,” Tommy said. He knocked three times on the door and while we waited I tried to figure out what he meant about Naya and Trudy living on the first floor. Did they live without their parents?

  Naya opened the door and, after hustling us inside, bolted the lock on the door. We had a lock like that on our front door, but never used it. We had even forgotten to lock it during the outbreak.

  “Wait, does more than one family live in this house?” I asked.

  Amnah just shook her head as she walked by.

  “This is actually a really sustainable use of space,” Benji said. “Building up instead of spreading out. I’m surprised we don’t do more of this.”

  I didn’t like the idea of another family living above or below me. Would I hear them stomping around? Would they hear me?

  “She’s in here,” Naya said.

  As Naya pushed open the door, I braced myself. Julia was lying in bed, on top of a coverlet with tiny pink flowers. The pillows were pink, too. My sweatshirt was gone from her leg, and instead her leg was wrapped in white gauze. Her face was gray as stone dust. Ilana paced beside her, tugging at one of her curls. Sitting on the windowsill was an older girl, maybe sixteen or seventeen. Trudy, I supposed.

  The room was silent as a coffin.

  I dropped to my knees next to Julia. “I’m so sorry, Jules!”
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  Julia shook her head. “I’m fine. It’s nothing. I’ll be back balling in no time.”

  “We need to go back,” I said.

  “No way,” she replied.

  “Julia.”

  “No. You don’t know—you don’t know how far we’ve come. You can’t go back.”

  “You need to go to the hospital. They have one here.”

  “I agree,” said the girl in the window. “I’ve taken an oath, you know.”

  “The Hippocratic oath is for doctors,” Tommy said. “You’re a junior EMT.”

  “I thought you said she was an EMT. No junior about it,” Ilana said.

  I was still looking right at Julia. She wrinkled her nose, then shook her head. “No way,” she mouthed.

  Theo said, “Mori’s right. You need to go, Julia. If you don’t get that treated, it might not ever heal properly.” We all knew what that meant. After all, who was Julia if she couldn’t run the fastest and jump the highest?

  “And when I do, they’ll know we’re out and where we are and we’ll have to go back. All of us.”

  Ilana stopped pacing.

  The sun poking through the window blinds stabbed at us.

  “You have to go, Julia,” Ilana said. “You can’t stay—not because of me.”

  “Maybe now would be a good time for you to tell us what’s going on?” Tommy said. “So we can actually help you all.”

  I considered the kids from this strange little city. Amnah didn’t look ready to help us one bit. Tommy seemed caught up in the adventure of it all. The mission. But Mouse looked like someone I could trust. “It’s complicated,” I said. “I’m not sure if you could even understand. If out here—”

  “Ilana got in some trouble,” Theo said.

  “It’s nothing dangerous,” Benji said. “I mean, what she did wasn’t that kind of trouble.”

  “She just broke a few rules is all,” Theo said. “And she has, um, some family in Cambridge, and we all thought it would be better if she got out of Old Harmonie for a while and—”

  “That sounds like a load of bull,” Amnah said. “Stinks like it, too.”

  Julia pushed herself up so she was sitting with her back straight. “All I have to do is make it a few hours to give you guys a head start. Then I’ll go to the hospital. I’ll tell them you went in a different direction.”