Viral Nation (23 page)

“I don’t know, but we should figure out how to get what we need out of the house this afternoon, before it’s too late.”

“West?” Clover rocked back against her chair, but only slightly. That was her maintenance rock. The one that kept her stable when things were under control, but only just. “Be careful okay.”

“I will.”

“And if it’s your daddy that ratted you out?” Christopher
asked as West walked with him toward the house. West liked Christopher. He was seventeen, nearly old enough to collect on his own rations. He was quiet, but when he spoke he didn’t mince words.

“It’s possible,” West conceded. He didn’t want to think it. But it was possible. Something broke in James Donovan when he went to work as an executioner. Maybe something broke in him a long time before. “But I don’t think so.”

“Yeah? But maybe you’re just a daddy’s boy and can’t see straight.”

“Not hardly.”

His father was a Company man, through and through. He was on the first crews that cleaned the city after the virus and had worked his way up the ranks. He might not do anything to stop West’s execution, but West didn’t think he would go out of his way to expedite it either.

“Yeah, so you say. You sure walking around the neighborhoods is a good idea?” Christopher asked. “How you know we won’t get snatched?”

“I don’t know, but I’m pretty sure we won’t.”

“Pretty sure? I’m not about to tell your sister the guard caught you up.”

“Sure enough to risk it. The guard isn’t exactly sly. If they’re waiting for me, we’ll see them long before we reach my house. If they put out my dispatch flyer, the Bazaar will be papered with it.”

The guard was notoriously visible. The ranks wore uniforms that resembled pictures West had seen of old-school army soldiers. But more important, they showed up in vehicles with sirens blasting and lights rotating on top.

Any sign of a guard vehicle on the watch for him, and they could turn back. It might not be parked right in front of the house, but if they circled around, they’d find it. A block or two away, no more.

Isaiah had told him about the process of picking up a criminal. Bragging, West thought at the time. Rubbing in his entrance to the guard program while West had to work at a cantaloupe farm.

“Your skin,” Christopher said.

They walked the two miles to West and Clover’s neighborhood, trying to stay out of view of as many people as possible. There were some who made a career out of the dispatch flyers, determined to have a Whole New Life, and West didn’t want to run into one of them.

So they aimed for casual, but West was painfully aware that his neighbors would peg Christopher as an outsider as quickly as the Foster City kids had seen him and Clover as hoodies.

“I think it’s safe,” West finally said.

He led the way to the house he’d lived in his whole life. They came up the far side of the street, to avoid Mrs. Finch seeing them if she was at work in her garden. She must be so worried about them, but West couldn’t think about that right now. He opened the garage door. No one jumped out of a dark corner or came roaring up in a government truck.

West uncovered the trailer his father had used years ago to pull Clover behind his bicycle. He and Christopher worked quickly and quietly, filling the trailer with garden tools, seeds, extra flashlights, the rest of Clover’s meager candle stash, the three live chickens, whatever food they could carry, clothes, their laptop and a couple of books that West knew would make his sister happy. Almost as an afterthought, he took the box of their mother’s letters from Clover’s trunk, and the picture their father had looked at from the living room.

West attached the trailer to his bicycle and tipped his head toward his father’s old bike for Christopher. They were at the end of the driveway when a voice called his name.

He spun, placing the voice immediately, which didn’t stop a hard lump of fear from forming in his throat. “Mrs. Finch.”

She looked at Christopher as one hand went to worry the top button of her housedress. She had a light blue sweater over it and a pair of sensible brown leather shoes on her feet. She looked entirely out of place outside her garden. “Isaiah said—”

She stopped and looked confused. Her eyes, the left still noticeably drooping since her stroke, darted again to the boy she didn’t know.

“This is Christopher,” West finally said. “Christopher, this is Mrs. Finch.”

Christopher nodded but didn’t smile.

“Isaiah was here this morning,” Mrs. Finch said. “He said—well, I didn’t believe him of course. How could I believe something like that?”

The guard was looking for him, and he was standing in front of the place they would look first. They had probably sent Isaiah, thinking he wouldn’t run from or fight a friend. Either that, or Isaiah had come on his own, to prepare his grandmother. And maybe to warn West. “It’s okay, Mrs. Finch. Try not to worry.”

“We going or what?” Christopher asked, low, almost under his breath.

Their street was so quiet. Exactly as it had been for most of West’s life. The same neighbors, the same trees and gardens. West looked past Mrs. Finch, and it was almost like seeing a photograph. Why wasn’t the guard there already?

Didn’t take much to get to the answer. He wasn’t supposed to have advance warning. Now he’d had three pieces of it. He’d already seen the dispatch flyer. His father had shown up in his living room to warn him. And Isaiah had come as well. They weren’t here yet, because as far as they were concerned, there was no rush.

That meant that neither Kingston nor Bennett had reported Bridget missing. Looking for West for a future crime was a whole other animal than looking for the headmaster’s missing daughter. The idea that she could go missing at all was dangerous. It meant the system had failed to protect her.

West felt a little sick. “Yeah, we have to go.”

He pulled his ration tickets from his pocket and pressed them into Mrs. Finch’s hand. She grabbed his wrist with her other hand, her grip surprisingly strong, and held it long enough that Christopher started fidgeting beside him. Then she let him go and West rode away.

“Clover’s a weird name.”

“Said the sister of a boy named Phire,” Clover said.

One of the twins had braided Emmy’s pumpkin-orange hair into a thick rope that hung halfway down her back. She had a rash of freckles all over her face, neck, and shoulders and down her bare arms. At seven, she was nearly as big as her twelve-year-old runt of a brother. “Our mama said we was bright like jewels when we popped out. Got a big brother named Diamond. We call him Mondo. Phire’s real name is Sapphire, and I’m Emerald.”

“Where’s Mondo now?” Clover asked.

“A ghost. Same with our daddy and mama.”

“You mean dead?”

“Dead or just gone.” Emmy didn’t look particularly sad. Maybe she wasn’t. Everyone had lost someone. Seven was pretty young to be jaded, but Clover thought maybe that was what let the little girl get through.

“What happened to your parents?”

Emmy sat at the table in the boiler room, drawing on some
recycled paper with the broken and well-used nubs of crayons. “The squads got my daddy before he got my mama, then she got herself.”

She was so matter-of-fact. Didn’t even look up from drawing oblong fish swimming in a green sea.

“You still have Phire,” Clover said. “Same as I have West.”

Emmy added a long strand of yellow seaweed to her drawing. “Phire takes care of me.”

Phire still needed someone to take care of him. “How long has he taken care of you?”

“Since we went to Foster City, when I was almost six.”

A year or so then. “Why did you leave Foster City?”

Emmy frowned and pressed harder on the tiny piece of golden crayon in her left hand. If it had been longer, it would have broken. “Daddy Martin liked Phire too much.”

“He made you call him Daddy?”

“He said he loved Phire, but he made my brother cry. A lot. Jude snatched us up from there and now we live here.”

Clover’s stomach knotted, and she breathed through a wave of nausea. “Do you like it here?”

She smiled up at Clover, showing a gap where one front tooth had fallen out and the other had grown in crooked. “Yes, a lot.”

“See why we can’t go back?” Jude asked from the doorway.

She did. She didn’t want to, but it was obvious. “I wasn’t trying to pry. I’m just curious.”

“I know. Don’t ask Emmy questions around Phire, though. He’s very protective.”

Clover had a brother like that. “Is Bridget still sleeping?”

“I think she’s in shock or something. Sleeping to keep from thinking about it. Can I talk to you for a minute?”

Clover studied Jude’s face. He had smudges like bruises under his eyes, and he looked like he hadn’t slept well the night before. Or any night. Ever. “Is everything okay?”

“Come with me? I have to get back to watch.”

Clover followed Jude to his room with Mango at her heels. “But aren’t you worried that someone will come in another way? Someone else, I mean.”

“If someone came in, they wouldn’t come all the way up here. We have a protocol if someone shows up.”

Clover didn’t say that their protocol had failed both times she and West came into the Dinosaur. Instead, she sat in one of the chairs. Jude stayed standing, inspecting the bean plants growing in cans in front of the window. He plucked off some ripe pods and handed a couple to her. Mango lay between them. Without his vest on, he was off duty and could laze around like a regular dog.

“I found something,” Jude said. “On the nets.”

“What is it?”

“Something about Waverly.”

Clover took a bite of one the beans. “What did you find?”

Jude looked back out the window. “Waverly left the Company two years after the suppressant was developed.”

“Everyone knows that.” She’d learned it in primary school. Waverly was a recluse when he found the Lake Tahoe portal and pulled away from the Company when the publicity became too much for him.

“But did you know that Waverly spoke out against the Company privatizing everything?”

The Company took over most aspects of society after the virus. Clover had been taught that this privatization was necessary to keep peace and safety in the cities. It had never crossed her mind to question the Company’s dominance over her country, her city, even her family.

The number of things she’d never thought to question was becoming alarming.

“How come I’ve never heard that?”

“You ever been on the open nets?”

She hadn’t. Her access was limited to what the Company and the government wanted her to know. If what Jude said was true, that meant the Company had sanitized the story. Sanitizing helped keep order. It hurt Clover’s brain to think otherwise.

“What happened?” she asked, pushing aside the disturbing idea that she’d been brainwashed. For now, anyway.

“I found an article someone wrote and posted just before the nets were closed. Listen to this. ‘Even Waverly knew the truth, that the cities gave up too much freedom, and now who knows what they’ve done with him.’ And then, ‘
Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud
is the only maxim that can ever preserve the liberties of any people.’ I haven’t had time to find out what they meant about him knowing the truth. But it’s here, somewhere.”

Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud?
“Can I use your computer?”

She barely heard him answer before she was sitting in front of it, the wide open entirety of the nets at her fingertips.

“Nip the shoots of arbitrary power in the bud,” she murmured as she typed the words.

“What is it?” Jude asked, behind her.

She looked over her shoulder at him. “John Quincy Adams.”

“You guys need some security at these back doors,”
West said to Christopher when they rolled up to the back of the Dinosaur. Christopher held the door open wide so that West could park the trailer inside.