With the Enemy (3 page)

“We have to,” I say.

“Thank you,” Louisa says. “You made me feel much better.”

Which is good. It’s what I wanted to do. So why do I feel worse?

Rosie pokes her head through one of the empty doors. “The guys just whistled for help carrying some stuff. I’ll be right back. Don’t get into trouble.”

“Aye, aye, Officer Rosie,” I say, glad to be distracted.

Louisa’s stomach rumbles and she laughs. “Not a moment too soon. I just realized I’m starving. I must be feeling better.”

“Or else
Ryan
is rubbing off on you.”

She says, “Shut up!” and points furiously at Drew. I start to laugh and she starts to laugh and it feels so good, almost better than food.

We’re still laughing when we hear the heavy footsteps of the food-laden boys approaching the building.

“Finally,” Louisa says playfully as they get to the door, and one of them shines a flashlight beam in our faces.

We’ve draped ourselves over the counter, pretending to be passed out with hunger. “Food … please … help us …” Louisa squeaks piteously, and we’re both still laughing when a voice we’ve never heard before speaks.

“Stand up and put your hands over your head or your friend gets it,” the voice says.

And someone pushes Rosie, in a headlock, into the edge of the beam of light.

T
his is bad. If I’d been holding a Least Likely to Be Caught in a Headlock contest, Rosie would have been hands-down winner. So whoever did this is good.

Well trained.

Professional.

Or at least that is what I assume until the voice behind the flashlight says, “Who are you?”

Because if they don’t know who we are, that means they aren’t Alliance agents sent to bring us back to CMS. But then —

“Who are
you
?” I demand.

“I asked you first,” the voice behind the flashlight snaps. Which is true, but not something a professional grown-up would say. “And we have your friend.”

The beam moves slightly. For the first time I can see the person who’s holding Rosie. It’s a girl, and she looks unkempt and kind of wild, but not much older than we are.

I squint and try to see the person holding the light. It’s a boy, maybe a year older than us, and it looks like he has a bandage covering one eye. My arms start to come down and he barks, “Keep them up. Believe me, you don’t want to mess with us.”

Somehow, their just being kids and still managing to sneak up on Rosie is even more disturbing than if they were pros. I agree and clamp my hands over my ponytail. I say, “We’re runaways from an Alliance school.”

“Don’t look like fliers,” the one-eyed boy says. “Which school? I know them all, so don’t think of lying.”

I file that word, “fliers,” away.

Louisa answers, “Country Manor School.”

“Never heard of Country Manor School,” he says impatiently. “Where is it?”

“We don’t know. It’s — in a secret place,” she falters.

I step in. “North of here about two days.”

“Sure.” One Eye gives a snort and the flashlight dips as he bends and picks up one of our backpacks. He spills the contents on the ground and starts kicking through them. He moves to the next pack, repeats the process. Only this time something interests him. He stops, bends sideways to grab it for a closer look.

He stands up and says, “That’s it — get rid of their friend.”

What?!
?

“Troy, I’m not sure —” the girl says.

“Look what they have,” he interrupts, tossing a jacket toward her. As the light catches it, I realize it’s one of the Alliance uniforms Drew and Rosie stole when we broke into the prison camp. “I told you they were Alliance.”

This is not good.

“No, we
stole
that,” I tell them. My voice sounds a little hysterical to my ears. “To escape from a prison camp.”

“I thought you said you were at a school,” the girl says. Her tone is a lot cooler than it had been. Murderously cool.

“We were, but while we were escaping we ended up in an Alliance prison, and in order to get out —” I stop trying to explain. The more I say, the more far-fetched it sounds. I have to try something else. “Look, you just dumped our packs. We don’t have any food, do we? If we worked for the Alliance, if we weren’t really runaways, we’d have food, right?”

One Eye gives another snort. “You could have hidden it.”

The girl with her arm around Rosie hasn’t moved. Now she says, “They don’t have badges, Troy, or ID bracelets. They might be telling the truth.”

“Isn’t that what they would do? Send them without badges or IDs to make them look desperate?”

“And they stuck to back paths,” she goes on.

“That’s precisely how they would act. Undercover 101.”

“You were following us?” I breathe out with disbelief. I’d been right! Someone
was
trailing us.

“All day,” the boy called Troy answers. There’s a sneer in his voice as he adds, “And you didn’t even know it.”

“If they are working undercover, they’re really bad at it,” the girl says thoughtfully.

“That’s what they want you to believe. It could be a trick.”

I sense that, in other circumstances, Troy and I might have a lot in common.

I say, “Who are you hiding from? The people in the black trucks?”

There’s a subtle shift in the air, nothing I can name, but suddenly Troy and the girl both seem tenser. Troy says something that sounds like “Felix” and at the same time the girl snaps, “What do you know about those?”

“Some people in a black truck took our friend Maddie,” Louisa tells them. “Madeleine Frye. Have you seen her?”

“Where?” the boy demands, and at the same time the girl says, “When?”

I look at the shadowy forms behind the light. “Earlier today. About ten miles from here. Who are they?”

The boy and girl exchange a glance. The girl says, “We don’t know your friend.”

“But you know the people in the black truck,” I confirm. I’m convinced they have intel that could help us. But not while the girl is holding Rosie by the neck.

“Keep your hands up,” Troy shouts at me.

That’s what gives me my idea. “Where did you run away from?” I ask.

The girl hesitates.

I try another tactic. “Did you come out of Chicago by the lake or along the highway?”

“Don’t tell them anything,” Troy yells at the girl. He seems even more wary than before.

“But, Troy, I think they’re telling the tr —”

“And stop using my name. Don’t you see what they’re doing? They’re trying to turn us against each other.”

Louisa shoots me a glance that says,
What are you doing behind your back
? and I lean forward slightly so she can see. She frowns but then gets it and her face softens.

Luckily our captors don’t seem to notice. “They just want to win your trust,” Troy goes on. “Once they do, they’ll throw you in a Rover and take you back.”

“You’re being irrational,” the girl says.

Troy makes a sound like a growl. “Irrational? I’m not going back to Phoenix. I won’t be a slave. I’ll do whatever it takes to keep from going back.”

I’ve been trying to draw as little attention to myself as possible but I have to ask, “Who is Phoenix? Is that who the people in the black trucks work for?”

The light, which had shifted slightly while they argued, swings back to me. “Who’s Phoenix?” Troy repeats with a high-pitched laugh. “Look at that, sis. See how well trained they are? Who’s Phoenix, she asks.”

“Stop it, Troy,” the girl says. And then to me, “Ignore my brother; he’s under a lot of stress.”

“I won’t go!” he says, swinging the light off of me just enough so I can pass the rubber band I freed from my hair to Louisa. “I won’t let them take me back!” he repeats, staring at us with a mad glitter in his one eye.

“Now,” I whisper, and Louisa, with her expert aim, shoots the rubber band at it.

“They stabbed me!” he yells, covering his eye with his hand. The flashlight falls to the ground and the building goes completely dark.

The girl shrieks, “What have you done?” and Rosie’s voice from somewhere in front of us says, “Don’t even think about it,” and there’s a grunt and a scuffle and another grunt. I can’t believe I left my night-vision goggles at CMS. In the six and a half seconds it takes me to reach for my flashlight and get it on, Rosie has gotten her arm around the guy’s neck and Louisa has her hands around the girl’s ankle and she’s lying on the ground where she fell when she tried to run away.

“Now
you
answer questions,” Rosie says to them, pushing the boy onto the floor and clamping a hand on his shoulder.

Louisa lets the girl turn around so the brother and sister are sitting next to each other, and we get a good look at them for the first time. Their faces are red, like they have been sunburned, but that could just be from the fighting. The boy’s hair is matted down and the girl’s looks like she hasn’t washed it in a few days and they both have oddly short, uneven bangs. They are both wearing what appear to be inside-out hoodies and cargo pants.

“I know you’re Troy,” I say to the boy. “What’s your name?” I ask the girl.

“Don’t answer,” Troy tells her. “Don’t answer any questions under duress.”

“You’re not under duress,” I say. “You can leave anytime.” Rosie frowns at me but it’s true. We’re not jailors.

“My name is Helen,” the girl says. And she starts to cry. “This is all a stupid miscalibration.” As Helen pulls the sleeve of her hoodie over her hand and uses it to dry her eyes, I resist the urge to ask if she means “miscalculation.” “My brother and I — you’re right.” She looks at me. “We’re on the run from a place in Chicago. We grew up in Wisconsin but our parents, well, they’re not around. We’ve been on our own for a while. But it’s tough, you know. We got arrested for shoplifting a few times. The last time, Troy … He … hit the police officer. Beat him up pretty good. Or bad, depending on which side you’re on. We ran away, but they found us.”

“Rovers,” Troy says, but it seems like his mind is partially somewhere else.

“That’s what those black trucks are called. Rovers,” Helen supplies. “That’s what we were picked up in. Then they loaded us into a bus with the windows blacked out and drove us for hours. There were three of us, me and Troy and one other guy.” She pauses and licks her lips. “We thought for sure we were going to a prison camp somewhere far away. But instead they took us to a school. Like a reform school but kind of
nice
.”

“‘You’ve been chosen,’” Troy says in a deep voice different from his own, and I realize he’s quoting someone. Probably Phoenix. “‘You are being given a second chance. Your record will be wiped clean and you will become part of an elite group. You are the lucky few, the proud.’” He shakes himself and repeats, “Chosen.”

“At the beginning we did feel lucky,” Helen says. “The classes were cool, not boring like regular school. And there were clean beds and clothes and lots of food.”

“All courtesy of your friends in the Alliance,” Troy says.

“Wait.” I sit forward. “It was an Alliance school? In Chicago?”

“That’s what we figured out.” Helen nods vigorously. “That’s why we escaped.”

One thing about being suspicious of everything everyone says is when you hear the truth, it sounds — strange. Unfamiliar. But distinct. That’s how Helen sounds now.

I of all people shouldn’t be surprised that there’s an Alliance facility in the middle of Chicago, but it’s still kind of staggering. Which is why it takes me a second to see what this means: this could be where Maddie is. If we find the school, we could find her. “Where exactly is this place?” I ask.

“They have showers, too,” Troy says, completely ignoring me. I want to break in but it’s like he’s somewhere else. His head is tilted and his one eye is squarely focused on his hands. “But they don’t work. You can’t get clean. It’s in your hair and your clothes and your eyes. No matter what you do, you always smell like
it
. Even now I smell it.” He gazes around at us, and his eye has a kind of strange sheen.

“That’s enough, Troy,” Helen says, wrapping her fingers around his forearm to calm him.

His hands clutch his ears. “And the noise. They shriek when you do it, like you’re stealing their souls,” he says as though he hasn’t heard her.

“Snap out of it, Troy!” she says sharply.

This time he does. His hands drop and his eye focuses on me and he looks dead serious. “Look for the big lie —”

“Silence!” Helen barks, and his mouth shuts. She kneels in front of him and takes him by the shoulders. “Look at me. You need to stop talking. Stop scaring these people. You don’t want to scare them with your
made-up
stories, do you?”

“What?” I ask, trying to get his attention back. “What big lie?”

He looks at me, and I could swear I read disappointment in his expression. “No,
I told you
, not lie —” I see Helen’s knuckles whiten as she tightens her grip on his shoulders and he falls silent. His eye is glued to her face as though he’s mesmerized. When he talks next his voice is flat, affectless. “Nothing. I was making it up. Sometimes I — my mind gets mixed up.” Helen nods and lets go of his shoulders.

She sits back down and faces us. “You shouldn’t take what Troy says seriously. My brother isn’t well. He gets started on a train of thought and then he has these hallucinations and they seem so real to him he believes they’re true.”

“But the school is real,” I argue. “You said so. Can you describe where it is? The street, anything?”

“Not really,” Helen says. She’s not meeting my eyes and the strange sound of truth is gone. “The bus pulled into, like, a garage or something and we went inside and we didn’t get a chance to see anything outside. It was always dark or we were in class.”

“How about when you escaped? How did you get out?”

“Shoot,” Troy says with a little laugh. “It was the only way. They never even thought of it.”

Helen goes completely still for one full second; then she laughs but not for real, like she’s forcing herself to do it. “Shoot, it was hard, the way we did it,” she says, and it sounds completely fake.

She takes a deep breath and says, “What we did was, we waited until dark and then climbed down the side of
the building with ropes, and then there was a wall and a fence. And after that we were just running as hard as we could.”

I’m almost positive that she is lying but I want to be sure. “What was the building made of?”

Her eyes go left, then come back to me. “Cinderblocks,” she says. Which is what the snack bar we’re sitting in is made of. “Look, I’m sorry we can’t help you find your friend but I really don’t know where the building is or what it looked like or anything.”

“Do you know in what direction you ran when you left?”

“Sure.” Helen stares at me hard. “The direction that didn’t have any cops in it.”

“She’s asking too many questions,” Troy says to Helen. “I don’t like all the questions. I want to go.”

“Trust me,” she tells him.

He’s in the middle of nodding when he sits up straighter, a hunting dog on a scent. His head whips around toward the door and he says, “Who’s coming? Someone’s coming!” as Alonso and Ryan walk through it.

For a moment everyone is frozen, caught like those birds you used to see in trees after flash ice storms.

Then Ryan slides his hands from the pockets of his parka to the straps of his backpack and says, “How come you didn’t tell us you’d invited company for dinner?”