But stealing one out of the parking lot, or one nearby…I hated feeling this desperate again. They might have already labeled me a criminal, but that wasn’t any justification to commit an actual crime.
“You need a car,” Priyanka began, arching a brow, “or we need a car?”
I turned toward them again, pressing a hand against my collarbone. My fingers traced the jagged edge of a new scab there. Maybe this was the reason I hadn’t let myself consider my options fully, and why I hadn’t gone straight there—from the moment everything had exploded, there hadn’t been a second I’d been without the two of them. This place was secret for a reason, even from most Psi.
“You aren’t involved,” I said. “They don’t have your faces or your names.”
“Yeah, but for how long?” Priyanka towered over me in height, and part of me envied how forceful and confident it made her seem, even when her boisterous voice gentled to something like a whisper. Even when she looked like she’d been dragged beneath a truck.
Which…
I grimaced. She basically had.
“These people—whoever did this—clearly know what they’re doing. You need our help.” Priyanka gestured toward the television, and, with a look, I overloaded its circuits, flooding the device with power. The bloodied images flashed off with a biting snap.
“Okay, yes, that was very dramatic and a waste of a perfectly good TV that we could have sold for gas money, but you do you,” Priyanka said. “The problem is, I didn’t hear any kind of counterargument.”
The fact that she thought I had to argue anything with her was the problem.
“I’ll be fine,” I insisted. “You’re free to get the hell out of here.”
Roman frowned. He raised one hand toward me. It fell away before it could touch my shoulder. “Think it through. Just from a reasoning standpoint. You don’t know us well, and you might not trust us, and that’s fine—”
“That’s not fine,” Priyanka said. “We’re awesome and we haven’t tried to kill you once. What more do you want from us?”
The truth, I thought angrily. I couldn’t keep up this charade of believing them much longer.
“—but I know you’ve realized it, too. Priya and I escaped with you. They’re going to assume we’re together no matter what, at least initially, because there’s safety in numbers.”
I’m not getting away from them, I thought, pushing back against the nausea that realization brought with it. Unless I fight them and escape. They wanted to help me, but only because they wanted something else from me. Whatever their endgame was, they’d snapped a leash on me. Every time I tried to escape it, the lead only shortened.
“Isn’t that all the more reason to scatter?” I pushed back. “To throw them off and force them to split up as well?”
“You may have a point,” Roman said. “But there are benefits to staying together, at least until we figure out what actually happened. Two more sets of eyes to keep watch. Two more sets of hands to find food.”
“Two more mouths to feed,” I continued. “Two more opportunities to be spotted.”
“As if you know the first thing about roughing it.” Priyanka rolled her eyes. “Did you read about it once in your special reports? Have a kid come up onstage during one of your fancy little speeches and tell their sob story? Did you cry a few crocodile tears in front of the cameras to sell it?”
Every muscle in my body tensed to the point of pain. I could barely get the words out. “I don’t need anyone to tell me a damn thing about it. I know what it feels like to be—”
“I wasn’t aware government robots could be programmed to have feelings,” she cut in.
I sucked in a sharp breath, a pure, unflinching anger gathering at the center of my chest. It was a fire that fed itself. It rose through me, until I was sure I could breathe it out and incinerate the motel room faster than any Red.
“Priya.” Roman’s voice was soft, but like the edge of the sharpest sort of blade, it didn’t need power or anger behind it for the words to cut deep. “Enough.”
The mocking twist of her mouth fell away. Her eyes slid to the side.
I turned to look the other way, letting that same anger and pain turn to steam. Letting it drift out of me with my next long breath.
“You don’t know the first thing about me,” I told her, fighting to keep the words even.
The girl took a deep breath of her own, pushing her long hair back over her shoulders. She struggled a bit to say, “Sorry. You’re right.”
Roman looked back and forth between us. “We need to wrap this up and head out. Preferably in the next thirty seconds.”
I blew out a loud breath through my nose, trying to quickly piece together an argument. The trouble was, they weren’t wrong. When you were being hunted, it was better to stay within the protection of a group, have extra eyes to keep watch, than to try to navigate through danger alone. I’d learned that the hard way.
Just like I’d learned that sometimes the real danger came from the people inside your car, not the world outside it.
I can’t take them there, I thought. I can’t risk it.
If I kept pushing back, they’d know I was onto them and they’d do everything in their power to prevent me from slipping away. Priyanka had the evidence I needed to prove my innocence, and she knew it. As long as she kept it out of my reach, I’d have to stay with them, or risk pitting my word against video and eyewitness evidence.
I wanted to know who was responsible for this. The need burned like a snarling charge, blistering me as it collected more and more energy to it. It was a risk taking them with me to that safe place. It meant putting more than just my life at stake. But something was happening here, something bigger than I could have ever imagined. I would have to accept the risk and control it, if I wanted answers.
Here was another thing I’d been made to learn all those years ago: the world was never as simple as it wanted you to believe it was. Hard exteriors could hide soft hearts, a chosen family could be more important than a blood one…and even the safest of places could be made into a trap.
“All right,” I told them. “We need a car. But I’m driving.”
Besides, where we were headed there was someone who could take care of any unwanted memories they might make—and guarantee they’d never remember the way back.
Three Days Ago
THE WHEELS DIDN’T STOP TURNING on the road. Not for gas, not at signs or signals.
A glare of sunlight burst through the window beside me, washing out the words I was pretending to read on my cell phone’s screen. A deep grumble from the engine and the renewed stench of gasoline signaled we were slowly picking up speed. The grind of the highway beneath us still wasn’t loud enough to drown out the police escorts’ sirens or the chanting from the sign-wavers lined up along the highway.
I refused to turn and look at them. The tinted windows cast them all in shadow, one dark blur of hatred in my peripheral vision: the older men with their guns, the women clutching hateful messages between their hands, the clusters of families with bullhorns, and their cleverly awful slogans.
The police cars’ lights flashed in time with their chants.
“God!”
Red.
“Hates!”
Blue.
“Freaks!”
“Well,” Mel said. “No one could ever accuse them of being original.”
“Sorry, ladies,” Agent Cooper called back from the driver’s seat. “It’ll just be another ten minutes. I can turn up the music if you want?”
“That’s okay,” I said, setting my phone down on my lap and folding my hands on top of it. “Really. It’s fine.”
The machine-gun-fire typing coming from the seat beside me suddenly stopped. Mel looked up from the laptop balanced on her knees, a deep frown on her face. “Don’t these people have anything better to do with their lives? Actually, on second thought, maybe I should send a job recruiter down here and see if we can’t get them on
our side—that would be quite the narrative, wouldn’t it? From hater to…humbled. No, that’s not right. It’ll come to me eventually.” She reached for where she had left her phone on the seat between us and spoke into it. “Make a note: protestor reform program.”
As I’d learned—and apparently Agents Cooper and Martinez had, too—it was best just to let Mel talk herself through to a solution rather than try to offer suggestions.
The car snarled and shuddered as it hit a bad patch of highway. The chanting grew louder, and I fought its tug at my attention.
Don’t be a coward, I told myself. There was nothing any of them could do to me now, not while I was surrounded on all sides by bulletproof glass, FBI agents, and police. If we kept looking away, they would never think we were strong enough to meet them head-on.
With a hard swallow, I turned to gaze out my window again. The day’s breeze tugged at the construction flags across the divide between the northbound and southbound lanes. They were the same shade of orange as the barriers protecting the workers as they went about the business of pouring new asphalt.
A few of the men and women stopped mid-task and leaned against the concrete median to watch our motorcade pass; some gave big, cheerful waves. Instinctively, my hand rose to return the gesture, a small smile on my lips. A heartbeat later, just long enough to be embarrassed by it, I remembered they couldn’t see me.
Behind the thin barrier of dark glass, I was invisible.
The window was warm as I pressed the tips of my fingers to it, hoping the workers could see them through the tint like five small stars. Eventually, though, just like everyone else, the workers disappeared with distance.
Setting America Back on the Right Route! had been one of Mel’s first publicity projects for the interim government established and monitored by the United Nations, back when she was still fairly junior in the White House communications office. It was a way to advertise new infrastructure jobs while also promising that roads would stop buckling under people’s wheels, that the gas ration would, eventually, be coming to an end, and that deadly bridge collapses like the one in Wisconsin wouldn’t happen anymore—not with reinforcements from new American steel. The proof of its success ran on newscasts every night: the unemployment rate was falling as steadily as the birth rate was beginning to rise.
Numbers were simple, real symbols that people could latch onto, holding them up like trophies. But there was no way they could capture the feeling of the last few years, that all-encompassing sensation that life was rolling out in front of us again, swelling to fill those empty spaces the lost children had left behind.
The same populations that had shifted to the big cities in desperate search of work were now slowly making their way back to the small towns and suburbs they had abandoned. Restaurants opened. Cars pulled in and out of gas stations on their assigned days. Trucks cruised down the highways that had been patched and knitted together again. People walked through newly landscaped parks. Movie theaters began to shift away from showing old films to showing new ones.
They arrived tentatively, slowly—like the first few people on an otherwise empty dance floor, waiting to see if anyone else would rejoin them in search of fun.
Almost five years ago, when we’d driven these same highways, the towns and cities we’d slipped in and out of had practically ached with their emptiness. Parks, homes, businesses, schools: everything had been hollowed out and recast in miserable, dirt-stained gray. Neglected or abandoned like memories left to fade into nothing.
Somehow, the government had managed to shock a pulse back into the country. It fluttered and raced in moments of darkness and frustration, but mostly held steady. Mostly.
The truth was, it had less to do with me than it did the others working day in and day out. I hadn’t been allowed to do much of anything until I finished the new mandatory school requirements. President Cruz had said it was important for other Psi to see me do it, to demonstrate there were no exceptions. But it had been agonizing to wait and wait and wait, doing the homework of simple math problems Chubs had taught me years ago in the back of a beat-up minivan, studying history that felt like it had happened to a completely different country, and memorizing the new Psi laws.
And the whole time, Chubs and Vida had been allowed to do real, meaningful work. They’d moved from one closed door to the next, disappearing into meetings and missions, until I was sure I’d lose track of them completely, or be locked out forever.
But it was only a matter of time before I caught up to them. As long as I kept pulling my weight and proving myself useful, going wherever the government sent me, saying the words they wanted me to say, I’d keep moving forward, too. And someone had clearly seen my potential, because Mel had been reassigned to me, and we’d been traveling together ever since.
“How did I know they’d be back out in full force now that the reparations package has been announced?” Agent Martinez said. “I swear, people are never happy.”
After four years of trying, Chubs and the Psi Council finally got a plan for reparations and Psi memorials through the interim Congress. All families affected by IAAN could apply to reclaim their homes and receive debt forgiveness. Banks had foreclosed upon most of them during the financial crisis sparked by a bombing at the old Capitol in DC, which had only worsened with the deaths of millions of children and the loss of jobs as businesses closed.
Watching the final deal go up for vote, seeing it pass, had filled me with a renewed sense of purpose and hope. I’d cried at the final yea vote. There’d been this pressure locked around my chest for years, so long that I’d gotten used to its ache. In that moment, though, it had finally released. It felt like taking my first deep breath in years.
Justice demanded time, and, in some cases, sacrifice, but with hard work and persistence, it was achievable. The kids who’d died, those of us who’d been made to live in the cruel camp system, none of us would be forgotten or brushed aside. Even the old camp controllers were finally being brought to court, with the hope of criminal prosecutions later.
They’d finally know what it meant to be imprisoned. It was what they deserved.
We still had so much work to do, but this was a start. A springboard to asking for—and getting—more. With this victory under his belt, Chubs was already at work trying to shift government research funding away from Leda Corp, which Psi and their families all agreed hadn’t deserved to survive the purge of the Gray administration, given their starring role in developing the chemical agent that had caused the mutation.
“The real problem is that we have to announce road closures days ahead of time,” Agent Cooper said. “They want us to alert the cities to secure the routes, but it’s like a signal fire to these folks. It doesn’t matter if it’s you or someone else from the government.”
There was a gap in the unbroken line of protestors as we moved along the highway. Farther from the rowdier ones, clustered in a small, tight group, were a few men and women, all holding signs of their own. They were silent, their faces grim. The SUV flew past them, forcing me to turn back in my seat to read them.
WHO HAS OUR CHILDREN? A chill curled down my spine as another one of the men angled his sign more fully toward me. It read, GONE—AND FORGOTTEN BY UN. Beneath the angry words were old school photos of children.
I sat forward again. “What was that about?”
The government had worked hard to identify unclaimed Psi and find new homes for them—as far as the reports I saw were concerned, all of them were now accounted for. I knew that after the camps had been closed a handful of Psi had run away, choosing that life over returning to the families who had abandoned them. But it seemed a little hard to believe that the kind of parents who were abusive or fearful of their children would stand out on a highway with homemade signs begging for answers.
“It’s those damn conspiracy theorists,” Agent Martinez said, shaking his head.
Of course. I should have put that together. A number of recent news c
lips had centered on the latest fearmongering line the Liberty Watch people were testing out—that vast numbers of Psi had been taken by our enemies to use against America.
Unfortunately, the rumors didn’t seem likely to die off anytime soon. Joseph Moore, the businessman running against Interim President Cruz in the election, had recklessly parroted one of Liberty Watch’s well-loved demands for mandatory military service for Psi and had watched his popularity numbers spike overnight. Now he repeated whatever script Liberty Watch gave him. If I had to guess, his people were floating the stories as a kind of trial balloon, to test future messaging for his next speech.
“But those pictures…” I began.
Mel shook her head in disgust. “This is a new thing that Liberty Watch is doing. They’re taking photos like that off the internet and hiring people to stir up doubt and fear that the government isn’t doing their job. But we, at least, know that they are.”
Frowning, I nodded. “Sorry. They just caught me off guard.”
I leaned my temple back against the window just as we approached another huddle of protestors.
“Oh God,” Agent Cooper said, leaning forward to look up through the windshield. “What now?”
The banner dropped over the pedestrian bridge ahead of us, unfurling like an old flag. The two grown men holding it, both wearing an all-too-familiar stripe of white stars on a blue bandana tied to their upper arms, sent a chill curling down my spine.
LIFE, LIBERTY, AND THE PURSUIT OF FREAKS FOREVER IT’S ONLY MURDER IF THEY’RE HUMAN
“Charming,” Mel said, rolling her dark eyes as we passed under the bridge.
I rubbed a finger over my top lip, then picked up my phone, tapping through to the most recent text thread. ARE YOU STILL COMING TODAY? I typed.
I didn’t take my gaze away from my phone’s screen, waiting for the chat bubble to appear with a response. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the reflection of Agent Cooper’s mirrored sunglasses as he looked up into the rearview mirror, watching me. His already white skin looked a little bloodless as the sign’s message sank in.