Cheating Time (3 page)

Jayden was an orphan, and my family had been
the only one he had.
The only one he'd ever
have.
It had been my responsibility to remind him there
were people who cared for him. I'd watched him stand by and stare
on as we drove away. The words had been on the tip of my tongue.
I'd just not been able to make myself roll down my window and say
them.

I just
couldn't.

Dragging me back to the here and now was the
reality that there was something urgent, nervous, and frightened
all at the same time behind the way Mom was stroking my forehead.
Everything felt disconcerting. My eyes popped open, and I realized
it was still pitch black inside and outside my room. The crickets
chirped, the toads croaked, and the owls hooted in a way that told
me the hour was more midnight than dawn, and it was nowhere near
time to get up.

"What's going on, Mom?" I asked, jerking up
and looking around.

It was too dark for me to make out anything
more than a shadow pluming over the exact spot beside me where I
knew my mother was sitting. Before she could answer my question,
fight-or-flight chemicals surged through me and made my hands
shake. My instincts whispered,
It is
time
. My logic overwhelmed the whispers and screamed,
It can't be. I'm not yet seventeen. I still
have a few weeks.

My mother took my trembling hands in hers
and squeezed them as if she could osmotically force what little
strength she possessed into me.

"Give it a second, sweetie. The medicine'll
kick in. It'll slow your heart and calm your nerves. Just like it's
supposed to," she assured me tenderly while waiting with me for my
tremors to quiet.

There was no reason to doubt what Mom was
saying. Every Aspect's citizen knew she topped the list of
worldwide entrepreneurs and inventors—beating out Steve Jobs and
Bill Gates for top spot—after she started MicroCorporation, a
company geared toward developing and designing the future. Among
MicroCorp's most important successes were the MicroTracker and
MicroPharm chips, which Mom intellectually combined into one device
and distributed, effectively changing Aspect Nation and its
landscape forever.

After years of running the company and more
stressed than I'd ever seen her, Mom had an all-out nervous
breakdown on the first day of our vacation, ending our
once-in-a-lifetime family road trip and preventing us from
traveling back to our home in the nation's capital. Still, no
matter how feeble she now sometimes seemed and how immobilized she
became with even the tiniest amount of strain, there wasn't a soul
in the world who'd ever be able to take her accomplishments away
from her.

"Mom, I don't want the MicroPharm to sedate
me. I don't want to be so robotic that I can't show the first
emotion," I moaned, rolling my head around on my shoulders and
trying to shake off the medicine.

For us, this was an old argument. I knew
before I uttered the words they were useless.

"You know it doesn't work like that. It
stabilizes. It doesn't sedate," she defended.

The MicroTracker may have been an advanced
version of the tracking chips that had been around for decades, but
the MicroPharm was unlike anything ever invented, created, or
contemplated. The simplest way to describe the MicroPharm was to
say it was a micropharmaceutical device implanted within the hearts
of every one of our nation's newborns within hours of their
birth.

According to Mom, she'd begun envisioning it
and conceptualizing it as a way to spend time with Peter Panzali,
her grandfather, a man who—
like my
mother
—lived eighteen hours a day in his lab, searching
for ways to improve people's health, their life, and our world.

Mom idolized Gran. Elevating the pedestal
she held him up on was the fact that he'd still been a teenager
when he discovered by analyzing a tiny drop of a newborn's cord
blood, the baby's life expectancy could promptly be calculated down
to the date of death.

According to Gran's
Theory of
Longevity
, there were just a few minutes after the
delivery within which a complicated genetic algorithm could be
applied to the baby's blood. If done timely and accurately, Gran
could tell any parent or doctor how long the baby would live.

How many days.

How many
months.

How many years.

More incredible was the accuracy of his
predictions. According to Mom, Gran was as much actuary as he was
scientist; therefore, he was able to calculate the impact of future
medical advances as well as environmental stresses on the babies'
lifespans. From there, he was able to assign the exact date of the
infant's
natural
death, and that
date could be calculated years before anyone considered the
newborn's fate.

With my great-grandfather's discovery, he'd
unlocked the future in a way that could be scientifically proven.
The last thing he wanted was for his information to be used to
decide who lived and who died, who was born and who was aborted,
who received healthcare and who got kicked to the curb.

To prevent that, he kept his findings a
secret. At least he had until Mom followed his footsteps, joined
his research team, and convinced him that good could come from the
knowledge as long as the date of every baby's death was embedded
within the baby's MicroPharm's data chip, used only by scientists
for their research, and kept secret from the person and his or her
family.

"Better?" Mom asked a few minutes later,
sensing I'd calmed.

Just like she'd said,
just like she'd known
, the tremors subsided and a
sense of tranquility washed over me. She was the inventor of the
MicroPharm so she understood exactly how it worked and how long it
would take to see a change.

"Yeah," I whispered begrudgingly. My words
may have been serene, but deep down, I wanted to scream for her to
stop pretending as if my world wasn't about to end or that I wasn't
about to be taken from her and forced to go to the preparatory
academy, the secondary institution where every Procreate kid ended
up as soon as they turned seventeen.

Even if their mothers
still need them
, I thought sarcastically.

"Are they here for me?" I asked when it
dawned on me that Mom was going out of her way to avoid telling me
why she had me up in the middle of the night.

Deep down, I assumed the midnight secrecy
had something to do with the Scholastic Law, a decree written to
force every child to college and away from the family who loved
them, but I wanted to hear it from her.

Needed to hear it from
her.

It was nothing short of a miracle that I
could be pacified knowing I was about to have to leave my mother
when she was still so terribly fragile. The fact that I wasn't
wrapped around her and refusing to go was one more reminder of just
how effective the MicroPharm was and how good Mom was at her
job.

The MicroPharm was her device, and it was
meticulously precise when it came to sensing my body's chemicals.
If for any reason the chemicals and hormones maintaining my body
became unbalanced, the MicroPharm went to work compounding drugs
and normalizing my physiological makeup.

In much the same way, the MicroPharm
proactively prevented childhood diseases (measles, mumps, rubella,
etc.) and treated benign illnesses (allergies, colds, flu, etc.)
long before I experienced even the first symptom. The device's
ability to stabilize and cure was one of the many reasons Mom's
invention had made her rock star famous and Rockefeller rich.

Finally, I took a deep, relaxing breath. I
couldn't see Mom, but I could feel the anxiety and tension rolling
off her lessen in correlation with my mood change.

"Not yet," she finally answered me. I sank
into her as she leaned over, kissed my hair, and shoved a small
stack of what felt like clothes into my arms. "Now get dressed,"
she whispered.

I might not have been able to see anything,
but I felt the bed move as she got up, and I made out her footsteps
as she left my bedside. The unspoken truth between
us—
they may not be here, but they're
coming
—was as thick, heavy, and suffocating as a room
filled with deadly smoke.

I heard the creaking of the door hinge right
before Mom quietly said, "Carlie, everyone's in the barn waiting
for you. Even Jayden. Don't take too long."

Jayden! Holy heck!
Jayden's here!

Carlie

"What?" I asked.

Other than shushing me, Mom ignored my
question and shut the door, leaving me to do as I was told, a
million thoughts pinging through my head.

The earlier surge of adrenaline was back
with a vengeance.
Jayden's here.
For all practical purposes, it had just been Mom, Dad, Gran, and my
cousin, Tawney, for the last six months. I'd met lots of people
since we'd left on our failed attempt at a vacation. Almost every
one of them had thought they knew who my family was—
who I was
—but none of them really knew me.

No one would ever know me
like Jayden.

My mind raced as I jumped from the bed. Even
without Mom's express order against it, I knew she didn't want me
to turn on any lights. She wanted everything we were doing to be
kept from the Coxes, the couple who'd been hosting us since we'd
left the capital.

If I had to describe the Coxes' farm, the
place we now generously called home, and its
efforts—
besides growing fresh vegetables and
raising farm animals as a front
—I'd describe a situation
similar to the Underground Railroad. The Safe Passage Network, SNP,
members—
led by the Coxes
—designed
and developed ingenious escape routes, recruited thousands of
secret members, and had at their disposal hundreds of undisclosed
safe houses.

Based on the secrets I'd learned through
eavesdropping, everyone within the SNP network had a single purpose
and a common goal for what they did. The single purpose being that
of providing a safe passage for MicroPharm separatists as they
traveled toward the nation's border with every intention of
defecting. The common goal was that of saving the lives of the
MicroPharm separatists' families as they made their way toward a
different kind of life.

The Coxes' farmhouse was old, and its walls
were thin. Since my room was right above the house's main room and
there was a vent that acted as a microphone connecting the two,
there were few living room conversations I missed if I listened
hard enough. I wasn't proud of myself for eavesdropping, but my
family's safety was in jeopardy. Because of that, I made it my
business to know as much as possible about the Coxes, their farm,
and anything that happened there.

Listening in was merely a means to an end
because I'd known as soon as we arrived there was something
significant going on… something that made listening to private
conversations more important than the rules of etiquette that said
I should respect the owners' and my parents' privacy.

"Every last SNP resource is used to provide
the food, shelter, and passages that keep the separatists and their
families under the DOA's radar," Mac Cox had told Mom and Dad one
night after they thought everyone else was asleep.

If I'd not been up wondering what Jayden was
doing without me, I'd have never overheard anything about Safe
Passage Network, and I'd still be as clueless as Gran and Tawney
still were about the farmhouse, its owners (Mac and Elle Cox), and
their roles in the network. Since I was morbidly fascinated by the
DOA, I'd been all ears the minute Mac mentioned the
organization.

I'd heard of the DOA before that night. The
first time had been at school, and as soon as the teachers who'd
been talking about it noticed me and my interest, their gossiping
had stopped and they scattered like the cockroaches I'd always been
sure they'd been spawned from. That night, I asked Dad about them.
The way he'd very noticeably blew me off and claimed he had a call
to make had only made me more curious.

A few minutes after that, I stalked Jayden,
found him in his room, and asked him the same thing.

"What makes you ask about the DOA,
princess?" he'd asked, clearly hedging and obviously looking around
for his own escape route.

"That doesn't matter. I want to know," I'd
insisted, blocking the way to his door.

He'd run his hands through his hair and
sighed heavily. He knew as well as me that I'd never stop asking.
After a final deep breath, he'd said, "The DOA, Department of
Aberrant, is the enforcement agency charged with hunting down and
killing MicroPharm separatists."