The Ones (19 page)

Arthur's car was right outside. He helped her in, and then they were driving, through a security gate and onto a featureless road. Cody had no idea where she was, having only experienced these surroundings with a bag over her head on the floor of a van. After relishing the mundane beauty of everything she saw—sunlight, grass, clouds, a bird—she finally turned her attention to Arthur.

“Can you tell me what's going on?”

Arthur sighed. “Cody, it's very complicated. I'm sorry you were stuck there for so long. The only thing that's important now is that you're going home.”

“Mr. Livingston … please,” she said. “How is this possible? What did you do to get me out?”

“I really can't talk about it.”

Then it occurred to Cody that maybe she wasn't going home. Maybe this was just the next step in her process of being dismantled. She had proved that the water and the bags wouldn't work, so they had devised this. Suddenly distraught, she saw that this new strategy was already working. It had only been ten minutes, but she had begun to feel hope again. Cody had given up in her cell, and that had made things much easier. Now, in an instant, she had something to lose. They were brilliant that way.

But why use James's father? Cody knew him well enough to know that he wasn't some elite government agent. And she truly believed that he wasn't a secret Equality Movement fanatic. So how was he connected to Norton and the people detaining her? Cody realized that regardless of whether he was friend or foe, she still couldn't answer the question.

Cody shrank back in her seat. Arthur saw this and reached out to touch her shoulder. She flinched instinctively and shut her eyes. Arthur pulled back as calmly as possible.

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to scare you. But I promise you, Cody, I came here to help you. I promise to take you home.”

Cody opened her eyes and looked at him suspiciously. She wanted to believe him, but none of it made sense.

“But … how?”

Arthur shook his head. He wasn't going to say any more.

“Just tell me one thing. Was it James? Is that why you came here?”

Arthur stared off down the road for a moment, then finally nodded. And Cody remembered what love was again.

*   *   *

Hours later, several states later, and two incredible hamburger stops later, Cody finally believed it was real when Arthur pulled to a stop in front of her house. She got out of the car, walked gingerly to the front door, and pushed it open. Her mother obviously wasn't expecting her.

“Cody!” she screamed. “Oh my God, Cody, come here, baby!”

Joanne rushed over from the kitchen and embraced Cody so tightly that she could barely breathe. This was the good kind of not breathing, though—Cody had never before felt someone so soft and warm and welcoming. She held on tight, eyes closed, letting her mother try to squeeze their bodies into one. When her mother was done sobbing, she helped Cody to her bed, and Cody collapsed involuntarily before she could utter a word.

When Cody woke up, she felt the familiar panic of not knowing how much time had passed. She forgot that she could simply glance outside or check a clock to orient herself now. And even though it was her old bedroom, something seemed off. Cody shut her eyes to ward off the uncomfortable feeling, but her mom was at her bedside, and she reached out to take Cody's hand.

As Cody tried to calm herself down, her mom forced a steaming bowl of chicken soup on her. Cody took the soup and gave her mom's hand a squeeze. She knew her mom must have been absolutely shattered by the past few weeks, and she wanted to convey that they could both bounce back. Cody had caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror of Arthur's car, so she knew it didn't appear that way. There were bruises on her neck and blotches on her face. Her eyes were bloodshot and the hollows around them deeper. She barely recognized herself.

“It looks worse than it is, I promise,” Cody said. She also took in her mother for the first time and noticed that she looked almost as bad. “Jeez, Mom, were they starving you, too?”

Joanne tried to smile but was still teary-eyed. “I was worried sick—can you blame me? They took my baby away and wouldn't tell me anything.”

Cody nodded and pushed the soup back. She began to explain what had happened since the school takeover but left out the worst details. She didn't need to put her mother through any more pain. And more than that, she wasn't ready to relive them. Joanne explained to Cody everything that she had done to try to find her: the endless phone calls and days at the police station, meetings with lawyers, screaming in a federal courthouse. Nothing had worked to bring her daughter home. The Equality Act prevented that.

They both fell silent when they were forced to consider how James's father had managed to free her. It was still scary to think about, and neither of them wanted to unpack exactly what it meant. Joanne left her daughter to rest, and again Cody descended into a series of fever dreams. As she drifted in and out of sleep, she could hear voices coming from the rest of the house. James, definitely, pleading with her mother. Erica, some friends from the cross-country team, Mr. Oberlee … Kai? She didn't know what was real and what was imagined.

As the days passed, she simply stayed home with her mother, trying to recover some sense of normality. And every night, in the darkest hour, she'd jump awake in terror, imagining footsteps coming down the hallway. Joanne would come in with breakfast in the morning and find Cody on the floor, curled up in the far corner.

Of course it was a relief to be home, but soon the joy of luxuriating in creature comforts was overpowered by a different emotion: anger. Cody began to leave the house with her mom, if only for a quick trip to the store or a walk in the park. The outings were brief, but Cody saw that things had only gotten worse since she'd been taken away. More Equality graffiti was showing up around town. Someone had hit the diner with a giant equal sign, sprayed in red paint. There were crazy headlines on the news racks. Harsher elements of the Equality Act were being enforced on the Ones. And in an odd twist, the person who accelerated all these events, Edith Vale, had apparently disappeared.

Prodded by these reminders, Cody began to fixate on how badly she wanted to hurt the people who had hurt her. But she was better than them, and she wasn't interested in simply inflicting physical pain. Instead, she wanted to hurt them where it counted, by dismantling the entire apparatus that allowed her to be detained. She wanted to destroy the Equality Act. She wanted to destroy the entire Equality Movement. Before her capture, Cody's motives had been idealistic: She had believed in protecting the rights of the Ones and demonstrating to that end. But the torture had changed her. It had radicalized her, filled her with hatred, and created a more fearsome enemy. Now she wanted revenge.

Cody tossed and turned in her bed, fantasizing about getting back at Norton and the rest of the agents. She didn't know how she was going to do it, but she vowed to try. They were the ones who still kept her awake at night. They were the ones who had turned her into a hopeless, empty body. They were the ones who would have to pay.

After a few days of recovery, including a strict cell-phone blackout, Joanne let James in to see her. When Cody finally saw him in the flesh after countless hours of imagining his face, she felt a bit of a shock. He was almost too real: His curls were curlier, his nose even more of a button, his eyes a richer hazel brown. Cody wanted to leap into his arms, but she was still sore and moving slowly. And James clearly felt tentative, too. He inched forward into her room and stopped when he saw what she looked like.

“I'm not contagious,” Cody said, smiling.

“I know,” James said, embarrassed. “It's just hard to see you like this.”

Cody waved him closer to her bed, sensitive to the fact that James was processing this reality for the first time. He knelt down next to her and reached out a hand to softly touch her face.

“My God, it's so good to see you,” he said, eyes tearing up. Then he tried to laugh. “I think security is tighter here than wherever the hell you've been hiding.”

Before he could say any more stupid things, Cody yanked his face down to hers, and they shared a kiss that she hadn't dared to let herself imagine when she was gone. It was pure bliss, a concept she had forgotten still existed in the world. Then Cody pulled James down onto the bed and snuggled under his arm. She lay there silently with him, gaining strength from the warmth of his body.

After what felt like an hour, she was at last ready to speak. “Can you explain what happened to me?”

“My dad says Margie had a heart attack when the SWAT team rushed in. When they found her dead, they framed you for murder and held you under the Equality Act for being a member of a terrorist group. After that … well, I guess you know the rest.”

“Then how did I get out? How did your dad do that?”

James tried to smile at her. “Is that really important now? You're home. You're safe.”

Cody pulled back from him. She wondered why he seemed hesitant to tell her. “James. It
is
important. To me. So tell me what happened.”

“All right. I am kind of confused myself, but I'll explain what I know,” James said. “When we couldn't find you or do anything for you, everyone started freaking out, trying to figure out ways to help you. My dad had an old friend from growing up—he's a lawyer in the Justice Department. He's not, like, the attorney general or anything, but he put my dad in contact with the people holding you. I don't know what he said, but I guess he convinced them to let you go. I'm sure they knew you didn't murder anyone, so I assume they probably would have given up eventually and done that anyway. You know, with or without my dad pestering them.”

Cody couldn't help but laugh to herself.

You are a terrorist.

We can do whatever we want to you.

You will die in here.

They weren't just going to give up.

Cody didn't know if James actually believed this flimsy story or if he was the one hiding something.

“Wow,” she said. “Good thing he had that friend.”

“Yeah, really lucky.”

“When we were driving home, though, your dad made it sound like you made it happen.”

“Well, yeah. I mean, I was begging him to help. You know, to think of something, figure out a way to find you. But it's not like I put a gun to his head or anything. He was happy to do it. I know you'll never believe it, but my parents actually do like you.”

Cody decided to let James's explanation rest. “So what else did I miss? Any celebrities fall down naked or anything?”

“Yeah, like you care,” James said. “I don't know if you saw yet, but schools all over the country had copycat takeovers. They weren't all successful, but it's obvious that young people are siding with the Ones. Of course, that's just making the jerks in the Equality Movement even more enraged.”

“What are they doing now?”

James grabbed her computer. “You sure you're allowed to see this? Or is your mom going to kill me?” James opened the laptop, brought up a website, and tilted the screen toward Cody.

“Have you heard of an Equality Team?” he asked. She shook her head. “They are ‘peacekeepers' with guns who are sent to hot spots around the country to enforce the Equality Act. They're everywhere now. They come in, intimidate the Ones into following all these new restrictions, and arrest anyone who doesn't comply.”

“Have they been to Shasta?” Cody asked.

“Not yet. I guess we're not big enough.”

James kept clicking through some news stories showing the recent interventions of Equality Teams, and Cody scanned the headlines:
ONES SUBJECT TO NEW TRAVEL RESTRICTIONS … AGENTS CLASH WITH ONES DEFYING COLLEGE ENROLLMENT BAN … EQUALITY TEAM HONORED BY DIRECTOR NORTON IN D.C.

“Wait! Go back,” Cody shouted.

James returned to the previous photo, and Cody confirmed what had caught her eye. It was a picture of a medal ceremony in Washington, D.C., where an Equality Team was being honored for bashing the most heads or something. And standing front and center, giving away the medals, was none other than Agent Norton.

Cody almost felt flattered. Her captor and interrogator was clearly someone important. She had sensed as much while she was detained, from the way Norton carried herself and the scope of her questioning. Norton didn't care at all about Margie's death. She was after something much bigger.

What is the Ark?

What is the Ark?

What is the Ark?

Now that Cody knew this for sure, her liberation at the hands of James's father made even less sense. What could Arthur have possibly offered to make Norton release her? Cody got the feeling that she might not want to know.

“What is it?” James asked, snapping her back to reality.

“Oh, nothing. I just can't believe some of these photos. They are really confronting people in the street like this?”

“Yeah. Gennycide. The whole country is cool with it.”

Cody tried to wrap her mind around this new state of affairs. She wasn't surprised, but she was still saddened by it. And she realized she had played a part, however small, in creating this moment. She remembered that James had warned her against it.

“Just like you predicted,” Cody said.

“Huh?”

“You said it a while ago. If we stay calm, this will blow over. If we act out, things will get worse. You were right.”

“Well, doing nothing wasn't the answer. I came to terms with that when I was scraping gum off the floor. When we were segregated in our own school. When kids started getting killed because they were Ones.”

“But I talked you into the school takeover, and look what happened.”