Viral Nation (36 page)

Clover sat on her bed with Mango lying across her
feet and tried to wrap her head around everything that had happened that night. Geena and Waverly were both gone. Thinking about them felt like a fist closing around her heart, and she forced herself to think about the notebooks instead.

The time lines were like a giant case of déjà vu. Something almost remembered, but for the wrong reasons. Things she’d never do had changed her whole life. Changed everyone’s life.

Nothing in Waverly’s life happened organically. He lived in the present and also in about a thousand time loops that he used the notebooks to keep straight.

The only way for them to get their hands on the most recent notebooks was to figure out where Waverly kept them. Then wait two years to catch up with them. Or for her to dive for them. She
had the air bladder, but the idea of learning how to swim and then diving into the lake deep enough to reach the portal terrified her.

There was something else. Something Waverly seemed to think they would need. The information about Stead was hidden.
Where all the information is.

Where was all the information? She nudged Mango off her feet and they both went to go look for Jude and his computer.

“Do you have any idea where to start?” he asked when they were sitting at the table in the house he shared with Christopher.

“Maybe he’s got it written down somewhere.” Clover leaned over to the box on the floor and pulled out Waverly’s very first notebook.

“Any idea where that is?” Jude asked. “There’s nothing about it in the notebooks.”

“There’s this.” She turned the notebook toward him. It was the first one, dated fourteen years ago. On the inside of the cover, in thick black ink, was a quote.
Oppressed accumulate a sense of humor that few can fully appreciate. Thomas Jefferson.
“Maybe that’s a clue. He doesn’t have any quotes written on any of the other covers. In fact, I didn’t see any presidential quotes anywhere in any of the books. Did you?”

Jude typed the quote into the computer, then shook his head. “It’s not Jefferson.”

Clover looked at the quote until the words swam in front of her eyes. The other presidential quote codes were so easy, they’d gone right over her head while she was trying to make it complicated. “Type this in,” she said. “Nine, one, zero, one, five, two, five, four, three, three, five, one, zero.”

“Jesus, Clover. It’s an ISBN number.
A Child’s View of the American Revolution
, by William Matthews.”

It took most of the afternoon for them to search every book they could find on the ranch.
A Child’s View of the American Revolution
wasn’t there. Anywhere. When they couldn’t find another stash of books to check, they returned to Jude’s house. “This isn’t a library,” Clover finally conceded. “Even if he has a lot of books.”

“Do you think he hid it in a library around here? Maybe in Truckee?”

She picked up the notebook again.
Oppressed accumulate a sense of humor that few can fully appreciate. Thomas Jefferson.

“Wait. Thomas Jefferson? That’s it. It has to be.” It was the name of the Reno city library.

“Mr. Donovan?”

James held the door to his barrack open a little wider. “Yes, sir?”

“James Donovan?”

“Yes.”

The man came into the room. “Do you know who I am?”

James tilted his head, looking more closely at the other man. “Of course, I do, Mr. Bennett.”

Langston Bennett nodded. “And you know what I do, then.”

“You’re the head of the Mariner program. How can I help you, sir?”

Bennett sat in the chair behind James’s desk. “Can you imagine why I might be here?”

James exhaled and then couldn’t draw another breath fast enough and the room started to spin. He fought hard to keep his moment of off-balance to himself. “Is it Clover? Has she been hurt?”

Bennett flipped through the file folders lying in a neat pile on
the desk. “You mean to tell me you don’t know your children have left the city?”

James did step back then, and put a hand on the side of his bookshelf to steady himself. “That can’t be true.”

“Your daughter missed a mission yesterday, and your son hasn’t been at work for a week.”

“Mr. Bennett, you have to find her. You have to…”

“Her. Not him? Do you think your son might have hurt his sister?”

James shook his head. He couldn’t think that. Not if he wanted to keep his sanity. “No.”

Bennett stood up and came around the desk to James. He brushed his hands over James’s shoulders, then gave him a two-handed pat. He stood too close, but James didn’t step back. “We will find your children, Mr. Donovan. Both of them. You can be certain of that.”

“I hope so,” James said.

Bennett slipped a card into James’s shirt pocket. “If you hear from either of them, you’ll call me.”

And then he was gone, leaving James to hyperventilate all on his own. He sat hard on the edge of his bed. His hands shook as he leaned over and pulled a file folder from its hiding spot between his mattress and box spring. He opened it and read West’s dispatch. He’d done it. West had left town, just as James had told him to.

And he’d taken Clover with him. They were both out there, somewhere, without their suppressant. Without anyone to help them. He took the folder into the bathroom, pulled out his lighter, and lit a corner of it on fire. He held it while it burned, then dropped it into the bathtub and watched it smolder until he could rinse the ashes down the drain.

Clover put a hand back and felt the port at the base
of her neck. This whole thing suddenly seemed just too
big
. “What about the suppressant? Does anyone know where it is?”

“It’s in the restaurant. I don’t know where he got it, but there are hundreds of bottles. Enough to keep us going for a long time, but not forever,” Jude said. “Do we trust that if we wean off, we won’t get the virus?”

“What choice do we have?” Clover asked.

Jude waited until they’d all nodded or voiced their agreement, then said, “Then we’ll start weaning off tomorrow. That will leave us with plenty to help others.”

“Others?” Marta asked. “Where are others going to come from?”

“This is a revolution, Marta, not an isolation camp.”

“A revolution?” Emmy asked. “What’s that?”

“It means change, Emmy,” Clover said.

“We tackle the Company?” Marta said. “No way it’ll work.”

West laughed a little. “That’s what we’re doing, though, isn’t it? What’s the choice? Go back to the Dinosaur and pretend we don’t know the Company has everyone in the country strung out?”

“I like it,” Christopher said. “A revolution.”

Jude stood up. “First things first. We have to think about how to wean off the dope. Anyone have any ideas?”

There was some discussion about weaning, but they were all emotionally and physically exhausted, and it wasn’t long before they went to bed on the pallets. Clover lay on her back on her mat with Mango asleep near her feet, listening to the sleeping sounds of her brother and her friends.

The only way to stop what was happening—to other kids like
her, to kids like them, to the whole country doped up on the Waverly-Stead suppressant—was from the inside.

It turned out that Phire was good with fire. In the
morning, after everyone had slept as well as they could on the floor of the main house, he lit up the grill and Christopher and Marta made breakfast of roasted sweet potatoes, scrambled eggs, and green beans.

“We can eat some of the chickens,” West said. “There are more than we need for eggs.”

Clover pushed her plate away. “I have something to say.”

“Me, too,” Bridget said.

Clover felt a kick of irritation. She’d spent all night thinking about how she’d put her news, coming up with just the right words. She didn’t want to wait. But she figured it would be better to have all the information she could, so she nodded for Bridget to go first.

“I need to go home,” she said.

Everyone looked at West.

“Bennett will kill you, Bridget. Do you understand that? He will kill you,” West said.

“Not if I wait until after my death date.” Bridget took a breath and wet her bottom lip before going on. “Jude can come with me.”

“What?” Clover looked at Jude and then back at Bridget. She was ruining everything. Everything.

“Someone has to be on the inside,” Jude said. “It has to be me. Me and Bridget.”

“You can’t just walk back in,” West said. “Even if you slip in, what about the dope? They’ll know you’ve missed doses.”

“They don’t pay as close attention to Foster City kids as they do to the hoodies,” Jude said.

“You seem pretty sure of that.”

“We’re listed by house number, not by our names. We don’t even get ID like you do, until we get our own rations.”

West shook his head, like he was trying to shake that idea into some kind of order. Clover couldn’t wrap her own head around it.

“Never mind that right now. Bridget, are you sure you want to go back?”

“Yes.”

“You don’t even know what your death date is now. We’ve changed the future.”

“It’s not right for me to stay just because I’m scared.”

“I know you miss your father,” West said. “But he wouldn’t want you dead.”

“It’s not that.”

“Then what?”

“If I go back and tell them that you’re dead, Bennett won’t try whatever it was he was going to do to me again.” Everyone else stayed silent, like they were holding their collective breath. “And if he’s looking for you, he’ll stop.”

“I don’t want you to go,” West said, his voice barely above a whisper.

“It’s the only way. This place is too important. The Freaks are too important. And Jude is right. We have to have some people on the inside.”

“It doesn’t have to be you,” West said.

“Who else?”

West just grunted, turned to Clover, and lifted his eyebrows. “And what about you? What’s your big announcement?”

Clover wished she’d gone first. “I want to go back, too.”

West left the restaurant. Bridget reached for him, but he brushed past her.

The awkward silence West left behind was thick, and Clover
escaped it by following her brother, Mango padding alongside her. She had to run to catch up to him. “Wait. West, wait for me.”

“This isn’t fair,” he said, turning to look at her. “You can’t do this to me.”

“Do what?”

“You really want to go back and work for the Company? After all this?”

“No.”

“Then what? Move back to the Dinosaur? They won’t let you live in our house alone, or with Mrs. Finch. She’s still too frail.”

“I know that. All of that. The safest place for me is the Academy.”

“How do you plan to swing that?”

“I wasn’t sure until now.” Clover remembered what Jude had said to her earlier. “Kingston will let me in if I bring his daughter to him.”

“Why? Why is this so important to you?”

“We need what he left us at the library in the city. And on the other side of the portal.”

“You can’t travel through the portal if you’re in the city.”