Article 5 (32 page)

I sat up, pulling on my boots, and ventured into the hallway. It was dimly lit and empty. The sound seemed to be centering from Wallace’s room, and I snuck toward it. From the outside I heard the man’s voice, speaking in low tones.

“You sure you won’t change your mind?” he asked.

“Not now,” said Chase. “Maybe someday.”

I stuck my head around the door. Chase was leaning back against the kitchenette counter with Billy, while Wallace and Sean stood opposite.

His eyes found mine, and for a moment everything around him wavered. I knew then that I hadn’t dreamed up what had happened between us. That it had been real and that he’d felt it too. I blushed.

Chase came over to me, ending the conversation with the others. He held out his hand, and I took it. I couldn’t hide the shy smile that blossomed at the gesture.

“Wait a minute.” Wallace grinned, and I knew what was coming before he continued. “You’d be welcome in our family, Miller.”

I saw the MM’s credo then, as it had been painted on the outside of the van that had taken my mother. Then on the wall of the house on Rudy Lane, and on the semitruck in Hinton. One Whole Country. One Whole Family. Wallace believed you could choose your family. If the country’s stepchildren all joined together, we might really be whole after all.

A crack of thunder outside. And then the rain began to beat against the covered windows. Sean lit another candle and placed it on the counter behind us.

“I told you no, Wallace,” said Chase. I could feel him tense.

He was right. I couldn’t join the resistance. Not now. But I didn’t like Chase answering for me. My brows drew together.

What had they been talking about? Chase hadn’t said a word to these people earlier, but they’d held a secret meeting when I’d been asleep? My shoulders began to rise. I tried to meet his eyes, but he was staring at Wallace.

“Why did they throw you into custody?” Wallace asked me. There was curiosity in his voice, but I knew he was asking to make a point. Exploiting the injustice of my capture would give me reason to fight.

“Not important,” Chase answered for me.

“Article 5,” said Sean. “That’s why half the girls in reform school are there.”

“Let’s go,” Chase said suddenly. Was he trying to protect me? It didn’t feel right.

“Sick, all that business. That’s why I got out. Stuff like that.” Wallace scratched his arm, and I saw the end of a black braid of wire sneaking out at the wrist beneath his long sleeve.

“You left the MM because they send girls to reform school?” I asked slowly. That seemed an odd thing to do.

The energy of the room had changed completely. It was strained now, grievous.

Chase was pulling me into the hallway.

“Wait,” I told him. The rain was coming in pattering waves.

“He left because of the executions,” Billy said helpfully. I remembered the carrier in Harrisonburg. I knew what the MM was capable of. The blood drained from my face.

“Who?” I asked.

“Shut your mouth,” Chase said harshly to Billy.

“The Article violators.” Billy looked mutinous.

My heart stopped.

“That’s enough, Billy!” snapped Wallace. He passed Chase a hard, judging stare.

“You don’t know?” Sean’s eyes darted to Chase, too. “I thought you told her.”

“Don’t say another word,” Chase threatened. Billy stuck his chin out defiantly. Sean jumped between the two of them.

“No, do.
Please
do,” I said.

“Ember, come on,” Chase had a hard grip on my arm and was pulling me away.

“Stop it!” I shouted. “Someone tell me what’s going on!”

Rain. Waves of it. Pelting the motel.

“The Article violators, the AWOL soldiers. They’re executed, like Billy said,” Sean spoke quietly. Chase took a step back. “She has a right to know,” he finished.

“They’re going to execute me?” I asked weakly.

“Not you,” said Billy. “The people charged. Your mom.”

CHAPTER

14

THE
room began to spin. I braced myself against the counter, vaguely aware that Billy and Wallace had left.

“Ember,” Chase said slowly. He did not approach me.

“Why would they do that?” I asked weakly. But even as I asked I knew it was possible. I’d been in the checkpoint on Rudy Lane when the MM had found the carrier.

“We don’t exactly fit the bill for a new,
moral
country,” said Sean grimly.

I rounded on him.

“You knew. At the reformatory. You knew when I was trying to escape and you didn’t tell me.”

He shifted uncomfortably. “I’d heard rumors. You have to understand, I thought you were going to tell Brock about Becca and me. I thought if you didn’t have a reason to leave, you wouldn’t have a reason to keep the secret.”

“Get away from me.”

He backed up.

“Ember.” Chase cradled my name as though it was an injured bird.

He’d known this all along. He’d hidden the truth. Why hadn’t he told me?

“We have to leave.” I shoved past him, sprinting to our room. People were out in the hallway watching me, but I barely noticed them. The fear was so thick in my body that I could hardly swallow. My knees felt very weak, but I knew I had to be strong. Yes, now I had to be especially strong.

I threw the backpack over my shoulders too quickly and had to grasp the wall to steady myself.

“Damn it, Ember. Hang on.” Chase tried to pry the pack off. His face was pallid in the candlelight.

“Don’t. We’re going. We don’t have time!” I yelled at him. “What’s wrong with you? We have to go!”

“Ember, take off the pack.”

“Chase! She’s in danger! They’re probably looking for her right now! We have to find her!” Hot tears, full of confusion and terror, ripped from my eyes. I wasn’t angry with him. I was too frightened to be angry.

“We can’t go. Not now.”

“She’s scared! I know her. No one takes care of her like I do!”

He backed away from me into the wall. His eyes were enormous, glassy, and just as terrified. I thought for a moment that he finally understood. But I was wrong.

“Ember, I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry! Let’s just go!”

“Ember!” He punched his own leg. The move was so violent it stopped me cold. “She’s dead.”

What a horrible thing to say.
That was my first coherent thought.
What a cruel, hideous thing to say.

The bag seemed very heavy now. It was pulling me backward. It slid to the floor with a thump.

“What?” That voice sounded distant to my ears.

He moved his hands over his mouth, as though to heat them with his breath.

“I’m so sorry. She’s gone, Em.”

“Don’t call me that,” I snapped. “Why are you saying that?”

“She’s dead.”

“Stop!” I screamed. The tears released in full force. I could barely breathe.

“I’m sorry.”

“You’re wrong. You’re
wrong
!”

He shook his head.

“I was there.” His voice cracked. I felt the wall support my weight.

“You … were there? What are you talking about? We have to go.” This time my voice had no volume. No conviction.

Somehow we were both on the floor. He grabbed me, pulling me hard against him. I was too shocked to struggle.

“I thought if I told you, you wouldn’t come with me. Or that you’d run away. I know it was wrong, Ember, I’m so sorry. I needed to get you safe first. I was going to tell you once we got there.”

He wasn’t deceiving me. His tortured face spoke the truth.

My mother was dead.

I became aware of a screaming pain at two points. The front of my head and the center of my gut. Icy knives of reality stabbed into those places. Stabbed at me until I bled. Until my body was turned inside out.

I could hear her. I could hear her voice.
Ember.
She called my name. How could she be dead when I heard her so clearly?

“I’m so sorry,” he repeated over and over. “I didn’t want to hurt you. I just wanted you safe. I’m so sorry.”

He was too close to me. Crowding me. I pushed him away.

“Get back,” I groaned.

“What do I do?” he asked me desperately. “I don’t know what to do.”

“What happened to my mother?” I asked him.

He hesitated. He wasn’t going to say.

“Tell me!” I insisted. “Why is everyone hiding everything from me? Tell me!”

“Ember, she died. That’s all you need to know.”

“Don’t be a coward!”

“Okay. All right.”

He kneeled in front of me, his arms now crossed over his midsection. His shoulders were shaking. A line of sweat poured down his temple.

“Fighting didn’t turn me, so my command needed something else. Tucker showed them letters. Ones I had written back to you. I thought they’d been mailed but … he’d been hoarding them. They learned who you were. That I didn’t end it with you like I was supposed to. They told me I had to buy in or …
Jesus.
Or you’d be hurt. So I cut a deal. No more fights. No more
you.
And they’d promote me to show the others that the system always wins. I did whatever they said. I thought it would work, that they’d leave you alone, but it didn’t matter.

“It was the final test. Your extraction. They used
you
to break me.

“We took your mom to a base in Lexington, with all the other Article 5s in the state. She was put in a detention cell. My unit leader, Bateman—he was pissed off by what happened at your house. That I didn’t follow orders and stay in the car. He said I was out of line. I was a failure as a soldier. He reported me to command.”

He stopped there and leaned over his knees like he might vomit.

“Finish,” I demanded. I could barely hear him over the screaming in my brain.

“They brought me in front of the board for discipline. My CO was there. He told me that it was time to put my training into effect. That I could still make captain someday. He told me I could
redeem
myself by … by executing the detainees, starting with your mother. I told him no. I’m just a driver. I just transport. I told him to kick me out. Give me a dishonorable discharge.”

Chase punched his thigh again. I wept softly.

“He told me to follow orders. That if I didn’t do what he said, someone else would. That they’d pull you from school and do the same. I didn’t know what to do. The next thing I knew, Tucker was escorting me to her detention cell, and I had a gun in my hand.”

I wanted to scream at Chase to stop. But I had to hear. I had to know. The tears ran from his eyes freely now.

“Your mom. God. She had been crying. Her shirt was all wet. She saw me and she smiled, and she ran over to me and grabbed my jacket in her hands and said, ‘Thank God you’re here, Chase.’ And I was there to kill her.

“I held the gun up, and she backed into a chair and sat there, watching me. Just watching me. I thought for a second I was going to do it. That I had to. But nothing happened. My CO was behind us. He told me to pull the damn trigger or I’d watch them murder you. Your mom heard him. She grabbed the gun in my hand, and she leaned in close and told me to find you, wherever you were, and take care of you. ‘My baby,’ she called you. She told me not to be scared.
She
told
me
not to be scared.

“And then he shot her. And … she died. A foot away from me. I don’t even know what happened afterward. I ended up in a holding cell for a week.”

Silence. Long, suffocating silence.

I felt my brain twisting, trying to understand, even as it was trying to erase the last thirty minutes.

“Maybe if you would have talked to your officer. Maybe if you had tried to tell him that she didn’t deserve this.…” My voice sounded small.

“It wouldn’t have made a difference.”

“You don’t know that! You didn’t even try! You could have talked to them and … and … you could have never come home.… In training you could have not been so …
you
! You could have told us to run!”

I felt as crazy as I sounded.

“I know.” He had no conclusion to this statement.

A frozen hammer against my skull. I knew the truth, even if I didn’t want to.

“She’s dead,” I realized.

He nodded. “Yes.”

“You lied to me. You let me believe she was alive. In some safe house!” I screamed suddenly. Now there was anger. Hot and vicious and poisonous within me.

“I know.”

“Were you ever going to tell me?”

“I would have, once you were away from all this. Maybe not all of it. I didn’t want you to know all of it. No one should have to hear all that.”

“So you can take it but I can’t? She’s
my
mother, Chase!”

“I didn’t mean you can’t handle it. I just mean … I don’t know. I didn’t want to hurt you.”

“You’d rather me believe a lie than be hurt? Who the
hell
gave you that authority?”

“I don’t know.” He was honest. He didn’t know what he was doing. His hands lay open on his knees before him, begging for some shred of direction to which he could cling.

I was rolling now. A snowball plunging down a hill. Knowing that at the bottom there was a brick wall that would smash me. That would break me into a million pieces.

“You knew all this from the very beginning. From the day you got me at school. You knew she was dead. You’d seen her dead. And you kept that from me.”

“Yes.”

Faster, I rolled on.

“How could you do that?”

He shook his head.

Twisting inside of me.
Nothing is real.

“You said … you said all those things … and … I believed you.”

“Wait. Please. That was the truth,” he was pleading now.

I shook my head. There was no truth.

“Ember, I love you.”

His words hacked a bright new pain into me. I stared at him for a full second, horrified, recognizing that this was the first time he’d said these words. Thinking maybe the opposite was true. That Chase might actually
hate
me. That was why he lied about everything. That was why he kept hurting me. How could someone be so cruel?