Article 5 (14 page)

We returned to the truck, where we sat on opposite ends of the seat and stared straight ahead in stubborn, tense silence. As the minutes passed I became acutely aware of his breathing
—
even, rhythmic—and soon found that my own had matched his tempo. How he could soothe me in a time like this, without even trying, how we connected on this most basic frequency made my heart ache for something impossible. Made me angle my body away so he wouldn’t see how much it hurt just to be near him again.

I missed him more now than I had when he’d been gone.

Only when the night grew so dark that I could no longer define his shape beside me did I allow myself to peek his way.

“Would you have left the MM if she hadn’t asked you?”

My voice sounded small, barely louder than a breath.

“I don’t know,” he said honestly.

I drifted to sleep, knees bound tightly to my chest, secretly wishing that his answer had been more certain. At least then I would have known how one of us felt.

*   *   *

“GOOD
morning.”

He rested his elbows on the windowsill. The same old cap was fitted over his hair; the bill was arched in a permanent half-moon. Tired as I was, when I saw that smile I knew I wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep.

I shoved the window the rest of the way up, kneeling on my rumpled comforter in my nightshirt. The sky was as black as it had been when I’d gone to bed last night.

“Why aren’t you sleeping?” I nodded toward his bedroom, directly across the space between our houses. He looked back at it, then shrugged.

“Wasn’t tired. Your mom and I had a nice walk. She told me to tell you to be good today. And not to do anything she would do.” He winked dramatically, like I knew she would have done.

I rolled my eyes, but my heart softened. I liked that Chase had walked her to the soup kitchen. Our town wasn’t as safe as it had been, especially in the dark mornings just after curfew lifted. She was never as vigilant as she should be when out alone.

“Thanks,” I said, “for looking out for her.”

He gave me a funny look, as if I should have expected no different.

*   *   *

I SNUGGLED
my cheek deeper into my pillow and … it moved.

My eyes shot open.

I was in the cab of the truck. Not at home. Not at the reformatory. I was curled across the seat, my head on Chase’s thigh. And things between us were not as they once had been.

I jolted up.

The gray, predawn light cut through the film of condensation covering the window. It was Thursday, the day we’d meet the carrier … the day I’d see my mother.

The day that Chase would be reported AWOL.

I pushed back the MM uniform jacket I’d used as a blanket, trying to remember how it had come to be spread over my body.…

Chase rubbed his hands over his stubbled face. His eyes grew wide when they landed on me. I ran a hurried hand through my short, uneven hack-job, and covered my mouth.

“Toothpaste,” I demanded. I didn’t have a toothbrush; my finger would have to do. But when I reached for the bag, he snatched it away and retrieved the item himself. I didn’t know why; I’d already seen the gun.

A blast of freezing air shocked me when I opened the truck door. Shivering, I walked far enough from the truck to shake off the dream but not so far as to lose sight of it completely.

It would be warmer farther south at the safe house. Maybe my mother was already there, head on her forearms, grumbling that there wasn’t any caffeinated coffee like in the old days. Maybe there were other mothers there, too
—
people who could support her so she wouldn’t worry so much and calm her down when she inevitably tried to launch some knee-jerk rebellion. I could see her leading the charge, a contraband magazine rolled in one raised fist, a trash can of burning Statute circulars to her side. Thinking of this made me smile, a secret smile I would never let her see for fear she’d take it as a sign of encouragement.

“Nice coat,” Chase said, breaking me from the trance. I hadn’t thought twice about slipping on his enormous jacket when I’d gone outside, but now I was suddenly embarrassed, torn between throwing it at him and nestling deeper into the bulky canvas. I ended up shuffling my weight, as if trying to negotiate a balance beam, until he spoke again.

“We need to find some other clothes,” he said, watching my struggle with some interest. “You’ll stand out wearing a combination of your uniform and mine.”

I forced myself to be still. I didn’t know what he had in mind, but I figured it was in the same vein as his procurement of the vehicle. The prospect of stealing didn’t bother me as much as I thought it might, as long as it didn’t hurt anyone or take too long.

I gathered the extra sleeve lengths in my fists and focused on the fact that by nightfall, my mother and I would be back together.

We were on the highway within a half hour.

*   *   *

JUST
after seven, we passed a sign indicating that the Maryland border was nearing. I wanted to go straight to the checkpoint, but we couldn’t take the chance of backtracking into the highway patrol. Instead we were forced into a wide arc to go south. I checked a map every few minutes, tracing Chase’s proposed path. He’d shown me the exact coordinates where we would meet the carrier: 190 Rudy Lane in Harrisonburg, Virginia.

If we didn’t run into any more soldiers, we could still arrive in time.

Though there were no cars, our momentum was stunted. The road was pockmarked by missing chunks of asphalt and man-made debris: a bed comforter, the skeleton of an umbrella. We frightened a deer that had been eating the weathered remains of a Horizons cardboard box.

I took it all in with a mixture of awe and vanquished pride. I’d been nine when the War had taken Baltimore, and the remainder of the state had been evacuated before my tenth birthday. This was the only evidence of human life left.

Chase leaned forward slightly, steering around a rusted motorcycle laid out across the middle of the street. A strange, familiar feeling stirred in my belly.

*   *   *

“COME
on. You’re not scared, are you?” His grin was fast and wicked, his challenging tone deliberate. He knew full well I hadn’t backed down from one of his dares since I’d been six years old, and I wasn’t about to now.

I threw a leg over the back of the bike, squeezing the frame with enough force to bend the metal. His dark eyes flickered with amusement as he grabbed the handlebars and released the kickstand. A tilt of his head told me to shove back, and when I did, his long leg slid between me and the front of the bike.

I fumbled with the back of his shirt, needing something to hold on to.

“Try this.” He grabbed my hands, sliding them around his waist until they were pressing against his chest. The warmth of his skin soaked through my thin mittens. Then he reached back to grip behind my knees, and pulled me forward until my body was flush against his.

I didn’t breathe. We were touching in so many places I couldn’t concentrate. His right foot slammed down and the bike roared to life. The seat vibrated beneath me. My heart was pounding. I could already feel the panic begin to trickle through.

“Wait!” I yelled through the helmet. “Don’t I need instructions, or directions, or a training course, or…”

For just a moment, his fingers interlaced with mine over his chest.

“Lean the way I lean. Don’t fight me.”

*   *   *

DON’T
fight me, Ember.

Absently, I rubbed my right temple with my thumb. I had to stop thinking of the person Chase had been.

“How did Mom look when she was released?” I asked, shaking off the memory.

“What?” His shoulders hunched, and he glanced out the side window.

“How did she look? After the sentencing.”

“I never said she’d been sentenced.”

My back straightened. “You implied it. You said people either get sentenced or sequestered. And you said they let her go, right? So she fulfilled her sentence?”

“Right.”

I groaned. The vague commitment to an explanation was almost worse than the earlier vow of silence.

“How long did you hold her for?”

“Just a day,” he said.

“Don’t give me too many details, okay? I don’t think I’ll be able to handle it.” I crossed my arms over my chest.

He was quiet, brooding again.
What did I do to you?
I wanted to shout at him.
Why won’t you just talk to me?
It would be so much easier to accept this person if I didn’t know him before he was guarded and wary and cold. If I couldn’t remember that once he’d been an open book and that the days had been too short to hold all our words. It was infuriating, and worse, it made me question if I’d grossly misjudged everything there had been between us.

He stretched his stiff neck from side to side.

“She looked…” he hesitated. “I don’t know, she looked like your mom. Short hair, big eyes. Little. What do you want me to say? I only saw her for a little while.”

I snorted at this summation. Leave it to a boy to be so literal.

“How did she
seem
? Was she scared?”

He considered this, and I could see a slight change in his face. A strain, pulling on the corners of his eyes. I was instantly worried.

“Yes. She was scared.” He cleared his throat, and I could tell her fear had pierced that callous shell. “But she was clearheaded, too. Not crazy, like some people get when they’re afraid. She was good under pressure, considering everything that had happened. She was absolutely determined we follow this plan.”

“Huh.” I slouched into the seat.

“What?” he asked earnestly. It crossed my mind that this was the first time he’d been interested in what I was thinking.

“I just never would have described her as clear-headed. I … I can’t believe I just said that. That’s terrible.” I cringed, feeling like I’d just betrayed her. “I don’t mean that she’s not capable of making decisions or anything. It’s just, under pressure, she’s usually … not.”

I saw a flash of our kitchen. Of her crying on the floor when I’d made Roy leave. Of all the times she’d brought home contraband, or gotten it in her head that she would tell off a soldier at the next compliance inspection. I was the safe and steady one. Not her. Now he was saying she didn’t need me, during the scariest time of our lives? That she could do this on her own? What had I been worrying about?

I pinched my eyes closed. They were burning, hot with tears I wouldn’t set loose.

“You’d have been proud of her,” he said quietly.

My heart cracked wide open. What was wrong with me? His words should have been a relief. But here I was, feeling inadequate because she could manage on her own. As if I were codependent or something.

Just as the wave rose, it receded, and left in its place was clarity.

I didn’t need her to feel strong, because she had
made
me strong. And I had made her strong, too. She was a big girl, like she’d told me countless times when I’d gotten fed up with her rabble-rousing. She’d make it to South Carolina; I just needed to get myself there.

*   *   *

“SORT
of makes you feel short, doesn’t it?” I said as the highway approached an enormous wedge cut into the mountainside. The mustard-colored walls stretched up over three hundred feet on either side, so that only a band of silver sky was visible overhead. Trees and vines, in various states of maturity, reached their crooked fingers toward us, having been long without the care of city maintenance workers. Chase was forced to reduce our speed as we jostled over a mudslide that had spewed out onto the road.

A large sign on my right that read SIDELING HILL VISITOR’S CENTER, NEXT EXIT
,
had been tampered with: Just below the words, a cross and a flag had been spray-painted with a big neon green X through it. I’d seen symbols like this on the news when we’d had a television, but never in my hometown. It made me feel like a domesticated housecat thrown out into the wild.

“You
are
short,” he commented, so late I’d forgotten I’d said anything. I tried to make myself taller in the seat, as if to say
Five four isn’t
that
short,
but the truck bounced so hard over the ground it was impossible to stay rigid.

We passed through the gap of Sideling Hill and continued on toward Hagerstown. Thirty-three more miles, the sign said. It was evacuated so quickly that most stores had been abandoned, full of merchandise. We’d see how intact that merchandise still was, eight years later, then catch the connecting highway south to Harrisonburg.

“Do you think it’s safe?” I’d heard about gangs in the empty cities. The original purpose of the MM had been to reduce crime in these places.

“Nowhere is,” he said. “It’s been cleared by the FBR though.”

“That makes me feel so much better,” I said.

He connected to Interstate 81, a vigilant eye on the road as we entered Hagerstown. The first houses we came upon were large, surrounded by rolling properties and stout trees. As we drew closer to the heart of town, little neighborhoods sprouted, then lines of track homes and condos. A supermarket. A restaurant. All covered by a gray film of ash, like dirty snow, that had grown impenetrable to weather.

No kids played in the street. No dogs barked in the yards. Not a single car on the road.