Breaking Point

  He stayed close, and the warmth from his body flowed across the inches between us. I could hear him breathing. His uniform jacket shifted, and in the moonlight I saw the raised half circle of skin where the cords of his neck met the muscles of his shoulder. Teeth marks, from where I’d bitten him when I’d been so furious at Tucker. Shame heated my cheeks. Chase hadn’t been the intended target for my rage, but all the same, he always seemed to get the brunt of it.

  Tentatively, I closed the space between us and kissed that spot. I could fix it, I thought. I could reverse all the harsh words if he gave me the chance.

  His skin was soft, but the muscles just beneath were taut and strong. My lips stayed against his neck as his breath quickened in my hair. I closed my eyes.

  “It’s time,” he said, voice heavy. “Let’s go, Em.”

  We stepped outside the stolen FBR cruiser, knowing we left all uncertainty, and the safety that came with our once-believed truths, behind. There was no going back now. Hope, and all her terrible consequences, had struck. In minutes we would learn the truth.

  Either my mother was alive, or someone was playing a very dangerous game.

  CHAPTER

  13

  WE snuck between two weathered garage units and through the yard behind Chase’s house. The dose of adrenaline coursing through my veins gave me the resolve to scramble up and over the privacy fence, but left me twitchy.

  I waited in the wild tangle of grass beside the back door while he rummaged quietly through the bushes for a large rock. Beneath it, to my surprise, was a dirty plastic bag holding a key, and though it grabbed as he slid it home, the door opened in virtual silence.

  “Stay here,” he whispered as we slipped inside.

  I remained low, leaning against the wall just inside his living room, waiting for my eyes to adjust to the dark. He carried a flashlight and a gun, holding them stacked atop each other but aimed low so that the glare wouldn’t reflect off the front windows. I breathed in, thinking the place might smell of comforting memories, but it didn’t. It smelled stale, cold, nothing like the home where I’d spent half of my childhood.

  Chase returned after a thorough check of each room. The flashlight was off, tucked into his pocket, and he’d holstered his gun as well, though I noticed he hadn’t snapped the latch closed. There was still the chance a passing patrol could come to check things out.

  “It’s empty,” he said with a mixture of relief and regret.

  I stood slowly. It was so dark I could only see degrees of shadow, but it was enough to tell that the room had been cleared of furniture. After his parents had died, his uncle had hired someone to sell most of their things at a garage sale. Some pieces remained—those that couldn’t even be given away. A wicker plant stand that leaned to one side. A couple lawn chairs against the dining room wall. I tiptoed around the corner into the kitchen and saw the wire dish rack on the counter; the last remaining evidence of a woman who used to make us cookies after school.

  “It’s still weird in here without all your things.” I hugged my elbows to my body. “It’s sad.”

  “It’s just a house,” he said, keeping his eyes fixed on the living room window. I recognized that flattened tone. It only came up when he was swallowing down his feelings.

  “We can watch your place from my room, but we’re not going over there until we’re sure they haven’t posted anyone inside,” he added.

  I didn’t like this; I wanted to see if she was there, and if not, search my house for clues. I wanted to sit on my bed, cuddle in my comforter, touch my books. I wanted to get my clothes, get a bra that actually fit and jeans that were my own. But Chase had a point. None of those things would happen if we walked into an ambush.

  I followed him down the empty hallway, and even in the dark I could see the faint glowing outlines on the wall where pictures had once hung. His room was the first on the left, and the second we entered it, my stomach clenched. There were no curtains or blinds to hide my bedroom, ten feet beyond his window.

  My house was dark.

  Disappointment scored through me. It could have been made a checkpoint and then abandoned when the MM had accused me of supporting the sniper. If that had happened, who knew where the inhabitants were. In another neighborhood. Another city. Arrested. My hands fisted tightly in my skirt.

  Chase took a low position beside the sill, angling toward the street where he could see any potential movement.

  “Let’s go look,” I whispered.

  He considered this, but shook his head. “We’ll wait. If someone’s there, they’ll rotate through.”

  There was no use arguing with him.

  The minutes passed. While I stared out the window, he knocked down cobwebs. I remembered with a regretful pang what his room had looked like when we were kids. Clothing strewn across the floor. Empty Coke cans under his twin bed. A jar on his dresser for whatever bugs he managed to sneak past his mom. He was such a boy.

  Crack! Automatically I fell to my knees, but it was just Chase in the corner of his closet, peeling back a floorboard beneath a loose scrap of carpet.

  “What are you doing?”

  He shined the flashlight on a small wooden container, half the size of a shoebox. When he blew on it, dust sprayed across the room.

  “I left some things here before I was drafted,” he said.

  With one eye on the darkened window, I watched him pull open the squeaky lid and rummage through the contents inside with one finger. He removed a school picture of a pretty mixed girl with jet-black hair bobbed to her chin. Rachel, his sister, when she’d been in high school. Intrigued now, I sat beside him on the floor, ears still perked toward the window. The sudden sensation slid over me that we’d done this before—hunched over a flashlight and buried treasure while trying not to get caught.

  He shuffled through forty dollars cash, a dinged-up matchbox car, a couple baseball cards from teams before the War, and a wedding picture of his parents, folded in the middle. The white crease across the center of the page was so thick it nearly split in half.

  Something fluttered in my stomach. I thought of the letters I’d written that he’d carried in our backpack for so long. He didn’t have much, but his small collection of memories kept him grounded. It was touching, and somehow profound that so little could represent so much to him.

  What did I have to remind me of home? Of my mother? Of Beth, just blocks away sleeping in her bed? All I had was this stupid necklace that was supposed to have been for my protection. And it wasn’t even really mine. Suddenly Chase, with all his loss, seemed rich beyond belief.

  The box shifted, and something metallic slid across the bottom. He placed it in his hand. A tiny circle in the broad expanse of his calloused palm. Braided silver, colliding into a single black stone, as dark as Chase’s eyes.

  His mother’s wedding ring.

  “Maybe you should switch yours out for this one,” he suggested. There was a thin quality to his voice. He was trying too hard to sound casual.

  I gulped, but a solid lump had formed in my throat that I could not push down. Nervously, I twisted the ring he’d stolen for me from the Loftons’ ranch. I kept it as a disguise—there were Statutes about unmarried girls staying out alone with men. Indecent, the MM said. Scandalous. Like nail polish and hair dye and all the other contraband items deemed immoral in Article 2. But if I wore Chase’s mother’s wedding band, it wouldn’t just be for my safety. It would be for other reasons, too.

  Two memories collided simultaneously. One, just a flash of Chase’s mom and dad kissing. I’d been young enough to run away shrieking, and old enough to wonder what it was like.

  The other of me standing in line at the pawn shop, cashing in my mom’s engagement ring.

  We’d both lost our families. We could die, just like them, at any moment. We were living on borrowed time already. What if he was captured? Executed? What if he just disappeared?

  I stood, looking anywhere but at him. The heel of my hand rubb
ed forcefully at the tightness in my chest.

  “It’s not like it would mean anything. Not really.” He scratched his head, and chuckled dryly, but his eyes were dark and brooding.

  My hand fell to my side.

  “It wouldn’t?”

  He shrugged, too carelessly.

  “We’re not even valid citizens. It’s not how it was for my parents. I’m just saying it wouldn’t be real, that’s all.” He laughed again. “Forget I said anything.”

  But I didn’t want to forget. A deep ache had filled me, a longing for something more. For a future, one with him, one that shimmered in the distance like a mirage.

  I stopped him before he could shove the ring into his pocket. I didn’t care if the MM thought I was a valid citizen, or recognized our relationship. We had each other, now, and if we knew it that was all that really mattered.

  I reached for his fist, curled around his mother’s ring, and brought it to my lips. Gently, I kissed the inside of his wrist. I heard his breath change tempo, quicken.

  “Does that feel real?”

  He nodded.

  “Then who cares what they say?”

  A warm, relieved smile spread across his face.

  “Someday,” I promised.

  But instead of saying something more, his expression flattened, and he shoved the ring in his pocket. For a moment I was humiliated, until I realized his gaze had narrowed on a point behind me.

  “We’ve got incoming,” he said quietly.

  I spun toward the window, ducking when I saw a shadowed shape. Had someone just come in? Or had they been inside the whole time?

  “Sean?” I whispered.

  “Too small.”

  “Too small for a man?” I clarified. He didn’t answer.

  My heart pounded out of my chest. In that moment I knew that she was here. I could feel her, just feet away. I would have her back in seconds.

  “We’re going.”

  He couldn’t tell me no, because now he had to find out, too.

  “I can break through the lock in the back,” he said.

  “I don’t care if you throw a rock through the damn window,” I said even as he shushed me. “I’m getting in that house right now.”

  He placed a steadying hand on my arm and I forced myself to take a deep breath.

  We snuck out his back door, onto his patio. He locked the door while I bounced from heel to heel. He didn’t waste any time with good-byes. It was a house. Just a house, like he’d said.

  We exited the side gate, sneaking as quietly as we could across the grass divide between our two houses, then edged along the building, careful to stay out of the moonlight, and to roll our feet from heel to toe to make as little noise as possible as we crossed into my small backyard and stood on the single step that led into the kitchen.

  My home. We were home. Everything, everything was going to be okay. The tears were already filling my eyes. My whole body was trembling and ready to hold her and squeeze her until her ribs cracked. We would take her to the cruiser. She couldn’t stay here and do this. We’d take her to Chicago. And then, after we figured out how to free Rebecca, we’d all go to the safe house.

  Chase jimmied the back lock using a knife from his belt, and after a few painfully slow moments, it clicked open. He raised his weapon. I wanted to tell him to put the gun down; he didn’t want to accidently shoot her after everything she’d been through.

  He pushed inside.

  Despite my bubbling excitement, the scurrying of feet across the carpet spiked my awareness, and my body, trained to react with caution these last weeks, braced.

  “Soldiers!” I heard a male voice whisper fearfully.

  A scuffle sounded across the carpet beyond the kitchen.

  I ran toward them, petrified that they would try to escape out of the front and run right into a passing cruiser on curfew patrol. I jerked around where the kitchen table should have been and slid, rounding the corner too fast.

  Chase was right on my heels. He grabbed my shoulder and shoved me bodily into the wall, pinning me against it. A moment later my heart rebounded, its cadence slamming through my eardrums.

  “No soldiers here,” Chase called loudly enough for someone in the next room to hear. We waited behind the wall that separated the kitchen from the living room and the front of the house.

  Hurried footsteps, and then silence.

  “We won’t hurt you!” I said against Chase’s tightening grip. “Don’t go out the front! There was a patrol car passing through earlier.”

  Silence.

  “I’m not a soldier,” Chase said again. “It’s just a disguise.”

  “Yeah, right!” returned a male’s voice. “How’m I s’pposed to believe you?”

  “I’m putting down my gun,” said Chase. He cast me a warning look before releasing me, and then, to my shock, knelt and leaned the weapon against my foot. I scooped it up, but kept it lowered.

  “I’m not putting down mine!” the man responded.

  “We both know you don’t have one,” said Chase calmly.

  “We’re looking for a woman—Lori Whittman,” I said. “That’s all. We don’t want any trouble, we just want to talk to her.”

  “She’s here,” said a female voice. “I’m Lori Whittman.”

  My stomach turned. No, no, no, no, no. That was not my mother’s voice.

  “I’m coming out,” I said.

  Chase blocked my path. He flipped on the flashlight and stepped out into the hall with me right behind him. I tucked the gun in the back of the skirt’s waistband and pushed, trying to get him out of my way, but he was as solid as a brick wall.

  “Who gave you my name?” the girl inquired.

  “A friend…” Chase trailed off. He stiffened before me.

  “It’s … you,” she responded. “You!” she screeched. She knew him. And he knew her.

  I finally succeeded in shoving Chase aside.

  There before me, highlighted in the beam of the flashlight, was a girl with a wild thicket of red hair, pale cheeks, and dark freckles. Her thin mouth was pulled back into a sneer, and the green eyes I’d known since my childhood hardened with fury, and then blinked, confused.

  “Beth?”

  “Ember?”

  My knees began to knock. This wasn’t right: Beth, here in this condemned house, using my mother’s name. She couldn’t be running a checkpoint, she was just … Beth. Just Beth, my best friend. She didn’t know this world. She knew high school and who was dating who and what assignment was coming up in English class. She knew what size pants I wore and that I hated tomatoes. This was all wrong.

  But I didn’t think any more about it, because the next second her arms were around my neck and she was hugging me, and I was hugging her back, and she was blubbering and bawling like I’d only seen her do when we were thirteen and her cat Mars had died.

  She smelled like Beth, and she felt like Beth, all hard joints and long skinny limbs. She was wearing a turtleneck sweater and jeans and cute slip-on flats and all I could think was how impossible those would be to run in.

  “Ohmygoodness I thought you were dead! What are you doing here? What are you wearing? Are you a Sister now? And your hair.… Are you going back to school? Wait, that’s silly, I don’t know what I’m talking about I’m just glad you’re alive!”

  She said it all so quickly I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. It was better that way. If I had opened my mouth, the disappointment would have come flooding out, and I couldn’t do that because this was Beth, my best friend, and I was supposed to be as overjoyed as she was.

  A second later she pulled back, and I caught a glimpse of a short guy in his late twenties with a goatee and circular glasses. Before I could ask who he was, or what Beth was even doing here, she released me, and pounced on Chase, claws out like a redheaded wildcat.

  “Beth!” I grabbed her around the waist and heaved her off of him. He stumbled back into the kitchen, arms raised in surrender, and stalled against
the stove. It clanged loudly, the metal scratching metal. He stilled it with lightning fast reflexes.

  “What are you doing here?” she sneered at him. Beth always had a mean temper, even when we were kids.

  “We heard my mom was here,” I said. I didn’t let go of her skinny waist.

  “You have some nerve coming back here after what you did to them!”

  “He’s okay,” I told her. “He helped me escape from rehab! He’s not a soldier.”

  “He sure looks like one.”

  “He’s not.”

  “He can’t talk for himself?”

  “Beth, please.”

  “I’m not a soldier,” said Chase in a low voice. Beth had her own flashlight and shined it accusingly on his face.

  “Then where’d you get that uniform, huh? And why were you with the soldiers when they took my best friend?” I could practically see the steam coming off of her.

  “Keep it down!” said the guy behind Beth.

  “Beth, stop it,” I said, instantly exhausted. Where were the kitchen chairs? I had to sit down. Where was the table for that matter?

  “She waited forever for you, you know that?” Beth rolled on, a year of pent-up best-friend aggression letting loose. “When you left it killed her. I’ve never seen her that sad in my whole life.”

  A wave of guilt crashed over me, followed closely by embarrassment. I didn’t want her making Chase feel bad with that stuff. He already felt bad enough.

  “I mean seriously, what kind of boyfriend doesn’t even write a letter to say he’s okay?”

  “Not a very good one,” said Chase.

  “And then you come back and arrest them?”

  I backed into the wall.

  “Beth, please.”

  “Well, he should know,” she said haughtily.

  “Where are the chairs?” I asked.

  She shined the flashlight in my face. “Oh God, you look like you’re going to throw up. You’re not going to throw up, are you? Stephen, get a trash can!”