Breaking Point

  But those things didn’t matter to people like Riggins. He hadn’t trusted me since Sean had brought us here for shelter. And hiding while he and the others risked their lives did nothing to prove my dedication to the cause.

  Fury stoked through me, sudden and sharp. I’d survived the MM’s unforgiving rules, escaped execution, and come here, to the resistance, where we were all supposed to be on the same side. I didn’t need Riggins making me feel weak, or anyone else doubting me.

  I shook out of Sean’s grasp and spun around—right into Chase, half a foot taller and broader even with his shoulders hunched forward. Quite a pair they were, like my own personal bodyguards. I should have been grateful for their help, but instead felt small, too in need of their protection.

  “I’ll talk to Riggins,” said Chase. “He doesn’t know when to quit.”

  “It’s fine. He’s just messing around.” My voice was too thin to be believable, though, and I could feel the terror and the emptiness pushing back from behind my thin veil of control. It had been this way since I’d learned of my mother’s murder. Sometimes the wall felt thicker, sometimes I felt stronger, but it was all an illusion. It could break through at a moment’s notice, just as it was threatening to now.

  Chase took a step forward. “Look,” he said, leaning down so that our eyes were level. “We don’t have to stay here. We can catch the next transport to the safe house. Put all this behind us.” His voice was filled with hope.

  “Not yet. You know that.” We had to find Rebecca first; if I hadn’t blackmailed her and Sean into helping me run away, they would still be together, and she wouldn’t have been hurt. I could still hear the baton coming down on her back as the soldiers dragged her away.

  “You guys go on. I’ll catch up later.” I cleared my throat. My walls were cracking. Chase sighed, and after Sean’s prompting followed him down to breakfast.

  Before the despair could take over, I fled down the corridor toward the supply room. It didn’t matter if I skipped rations; the hollowness inside had nothing to do with hunger. It wasn’t until the hallway was quiet that I remembered that Wallace had assigned Chase to clear the empty office building next door, that he was leaving the Wayland Inn without me. Even if he would be off the main streets, the thought of him out there alone made me sick.

  * * *

  BY midmorning I’d rearranged the boxes of used clothing and boots to clear space for the new shipment. I’d stacked the toilet paper into columns and consolidated ammunition into four large cardboard boxes. The small silver cartridges I’d learned belonged to our stolen 9MM’s were running low, and I made note to remind Wallace of that later.

  The uniform boxes stayed against the back wall, untouched.

  “You put the cans in alphabetical order.”

  I jumped back when Billy appeared in the doorway, brows arching beneath his shaggy hair, a Horizons bottle of bleach and a shredded sponge in each hand. I pointed him toward the metal rack where I’d moved the cleaning supplies. He’d recently switched hand-me-down jeans to a pair that was too big, and I spun away as the waistband dropped below his hips.

  When I turned back, he was attempting to tape them in place.

  “Stop,” I said, unable to hold back a laugh. “There’s a belt. Over there. By the uniforms.”

  “You put the clothes in alphabetical order, too?”

  I grinned. “Give me time.” I sobered as he made his way over to the crates, one hand holding his pants in place.

  “Um, Billy?” I stayed back a few steps. “I heard there might be rats in there.” I was pretty sure Riggins was just being a jerk, but it couldn’t hurt to see if he’d been lying.

  “There are,” said Billy. “Why? Did one bite you?”

  I cringed. “No, I just … thought I saw one, that’s all,” I lied.

  “Oh, hang on.” He backed out the door, smiling broadly. The hall was quiet—the night shift was sleeping, and most of the day shift was out on assignment. Billy’s feet slapped obnoxiously all the way down to his room.

  He returned a few minutes later holding Gypsy, the mangy stray cat he’d pulled out of the stairwell last week. She was mostly black with missing clumps of hair on her hindquarters, but less emaciated than before.

  “She’s letting you hold her.” She’d done nothing but hiss and scratch for days, and on cue she began to meow furiously until Billy dropped her on the floor.

  “Rats, Gypsy,” he said. “Yummy rats.”

  Gypsy didn’t look so different from a rat herself, and when she curled around my calf I stifled the urge to jerk away.

  “She likes you,” he said.

  I offered a weak smile.

  Other footsteps came from the hallway, these slower and heavier, and I rushed toward the door hoping Chase and Sean had returned from clearing the building next door. Instead, I came face-to-face with Wallace, the handheld radio now tucked in his front pocket. He must have seen my face fall because he cocked his head to the side and said, “Don’t look so happy to see me.”

  “No word from next door?” I asked as Billy joined us. The new belt worked wonders.

  Wallace shook his head. “Did you want to go check?”

  Yes. The word was simple, the building was only next door, but the word stuck on my tongue. As Billy offered to escort, I shifted from foot to foot. The thought of Chase in danger, or even Sean, forced my decision, but before I could answer, Wallace had moved on.

  “Billy, if you’re done scrubbing the toilet I need you on the mainframe.” Though his mouth was set, Wallace’s eyes betrayed his pride. Billy had assembled a makeshift scanner from pieces the guys had picked up outside the base’s incinerators. A small television screen had been rigged to show the MM bulletins and lists of Statute violators in cryptic black-and-white type—it was the most use I’d seen out of a TV since the end of the War.

  “Right. I’m searching for news on the sniper,” Billy told me importantly.

  Outside on the street, a dog barked. I chewed the inside of my cheek.

  Someone had murdered two FBR soldiers last month, in March, and then disappeared without a shred of evidence. Two weeks ago the sniper had struck again in Nashville: a soldier outside a Horizons distribution warehouse. Wallace was trying to find out his identity so that we might protect him, but I didn’t like the idea of bringing such a high-profile criminal back to the Wayland Inn. Not when the MM was on a manhunt.

  “Anything new come up?” I asked.

  “Nothing.” Wallace looked past me, out the dirty window behind the uniform crates. “Local news says the FBR is close to solving the case, but they’ve been saying that for weeks.” The radio reports we monitored made it clear they were chasing their tails.

  “There’s nothing new on your friend either. I looked this morning,” Billy added, cheeks flaming. He’d been helping Sean and me search the mainframe for any rehab centers in Chicago where the MM might have sent Rebecca, but our searches kept coming up blank. Even Chase, who had trained there during his time as a soldier, could not recall such a place. I was seriously beginning to doubt that the tip I’d gotten in the Knoxville holding cells had been reliable.

  “Go,” prompted Wallace. “And it’s about time you got a belt.”

  Billy turned to leave, grumbling, but before he did he spun back and playfully swatted Wallace across the face. A second later he was sprinting down the hall, cackling.

  My mouth fell open.

  “Little bastard,” said Wallace affectionately, rubbing his stubbly jaw. I doubt he would have responded the same to Houston or Lincoln, or anyone else for that matter.

  Gypsy hopped onto the crate of uniforms below the window and curled into a ball, assessing us with her yellow eyes. In the silence, I became acutely aware that Wallace and I had not spoken alone in weeks.

  “I … I think we’re low on bullets,” I said. “I put what we had in these boxes.…”

  “Come talk with me, Miller.”

  Wallace turned without another
word and left me trailing him toward the stairway door. The moment came when I thought he was testing me, leading me outside to see if I’d really go, but he didn’t; he shoved through the exit and went up, boots clanging on the metal steps.

  Worry gnawed at me. I tried to anticipate the reason for this meeting; I didn’t know any more about the sniper, and I hadn’t been the only one to voice my doubt about Sean’s new recruit—Riggins had spoken up, too. Surely I wasn’t in trouble for that.

  My thoughts turned to the MM base. There was no way I knew to break back in; we simply didn’t have the manpower to take the entrances, and soldiers—even those in disguise—couldn’t pass through the exit by the crematorium where Chase and I had escaped. Wallace knew this. He and I had beaten the topic into the ground, until the conversation had stalled and left us both disappointed.

  Was that what he wanted to talk to me about now, my lack of contribution? My failure to save the others in the detention center? Because I knew I’d let them down. Wallace, the resistance, those prisoners I’d left behind. They haunted me, and maybe I deserved it. I’d saved Chase and myself, knowing others in the neighboring cells would die.

  I tried to swallow, but my throat had tied in knots.

  Wallace shoved through the heavy metal door on the tenth floor, flooding the shadowed interior with light. It wasn’t a bright day, but on the fourth floor we kept the curtains drawn, and my eyes took several moments to adjust. When they did I scanned the familiar cement patio, empty but for the cave-like entrance to the stairs and the park bench behind it, and the resistance guard overlooking the streets to the west.

  The air wasn’t fresh, but it wasn’t stagnant like inside. Breathing it raised my awareness, made me feel exposed. Being here with Wallace didn’t feel as safe as when I came up here alone.

  He strode toward the edge at the front of the building, to the elevated lip of red brick that stood like a battlement from an old-time castle. I followed him into the shadows, glancing up at the towering empty office building adjacent to the Wayland Inn. Though the structures didn’t touch, they were close, and I wondered if Chase could see me now from one of those high, dark windows.

  “Look, out there on the freeway,” Wallace said, pointing around the neighboring building past the slums that had once been a college to the raised highway by the river. A few scattered cars traveled there, but the haze made it impossible to tell if they were cruisers.

  “There are people in those cars who can go anywhere they’d like. People who aren’t starving and freezing like the folks in the Square. Men that still have jobs. Girls that still go to school.” He leaned down to rest his elbows on the ledge and glanced my way.

  I felt a sudden trembling in my chest, cracked with a blow of all those things I’d been trying to shut out. Home. Beth with her wild red hair. I’d be a senior this year, graduating in June.

  “Sometimes I come up here and watch them. I don’t know, I guess I come up here to feel sorry for myself.” He sighed. “I never knew how good I had it, back before all this. How easy it was to walk down the street without worrying someone might turn you in.”

  “Yeah.” I kept my eyes on the cars.

  “You know what I always realize?” he asked.

  I shook my head.

  “I feel sorrier for them.”

  A siren cut through the air, drawing my attention to the alabaster fortress, crouching within its high stone walls twenty miles to the east. The FBR base.

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “My house may not look like much, but it keeps my family safe. I’ve got food in my gut and a roof over my head.” He lifted his arms out before him, like he was holding something precious. “But more importantly, I’m free, Miller. All those poor folks who follow the rules are trapped in a prison of fear.”

  “You’re not free,” I said, frustrated. “You’re trapped, just like they are. I don’t like it, but it’s the truth. The only way you’re really safe is if you’re compliant.”

  But the words suddenly sounded hollow. How many hours had my mother and I spent applying for meal passes, doing paperwork to apply for the mortgage freeze? Bending over backward because every job in the city discriminated against my mother’s tarnished record? And what good did it do? They took her, they killed her, anyway.

  “Safe,” Wallace repeated. “That’s the same thing Scarboro said when he became president.” When he sensed my concern he smiled. “Don’t worry, more than half the country believed him. It’s what people do when they’ve been through war.”

  A memory filtered through from another time. My mother, balking at the television while the man on the screen promised safety through unity. Freedom through conformity. That traditional family values and a streamlined faith would restore our country to greatness.

  I rubbed the heels of my hands into my forehead, feeling like I had so many times over the past month: too full of something, too empty to name it. Whatever small part of me believed that I still belonged in the same world I’d grown up in, the world with Beth and school and home, had been cut loose. I could never go back.

  “What do I do now?” I asked feebly, twisting the gold ring—the fake wedding ring Chase had stolen for me—around my ring finger. I didn’t need to wear it if I never left, but I did anyway.

  Wallace sighed. “You figure out what matters. And you do something about it.”

  CHAPTER

  2

  THE field team returned to the Wayland Inn late in the afternoon. From the back stairway window I watched three men who’d left early yesterday in ragged street clothes emerge from the cab of a Horizons distribution truck in taupe, one-piece uniforms, complete with the Horizons logo spanning the widths of their shoulders, and efficiently unload boxes from the back. The engine never stopped running, and they drove away the instant the task was completed.

  Cara, having stowed away in the back of the truck with the boxes, was the first to return to the fourth floor. She carried nothing, breezing in with a satisfied smirk, tugging the kinks out of her dyed black hair. I knew she kept it braided in town as an attempt to appear more conservative, but I doubted it worked; Cara could never, even in jeans and a men’s sweatshirt, be accused of looking plain. It didn’t take listening to the running commentary of thirty males to pick up on that.

  She didn’t say hello, even though she’d clearly seen my wave. Instead, I was acknowledged with no more than an arched brow as she ducked into a room and left me standing, with my hand still awkwardly half-raised, in the hallway.

  Several of the others had surfaced by that time and were making their way toward the stairs to help unload. I approached the surveillance room, noting the familiar stack of handheld radios and batteries strewn across the center table. Against the back wall were Billy’s patchwork computer and a black receiver board, yanked from the incinerator pile outside the base. Cara and Wallace stood beside them, speaking in hushed tones.

  As her cool gaze found mine, I was reminded of our first moments within the resistance headquarters, when she’d recognized Chase and me by name. I knew it was because she listened to hacked MM radio signals religiously—at that point the MM had been tracking us for days already—but I couldn’t shake the feeling that she, and maybe Wallace, too, had somehow been waiting for us.

  I hustled toward the supply room to inventory the new provisions.

  * * *

  SIXTEEN boxes of canned food. Two boxes of liquid soap. Washrags. Clean Towels. Flats of bottled water. Matches. All in all, it was a jackpot. Of course, Wallace would review what I’d inventoried, and determine what we would siphon back into the community, but for now the mood was celebratory.

  I worked alone, comforted by the sounds of the others playing poker in the hall. It distracted me from the fact that Chase and Sean had yet to return.

  “Did you see the present I brought you?” Cara swung into the room, an enormous bleached sweater hanging carelessly off one shoulder. Somehow, she even looked pretty in tha
t.

  “Not unless it was soap.” I smiled, trying not to sound as guarded as I felt. For weeks I’d been playing nice, attempting to make an ally of the only other girl here, but her mood swings didn’t make it easy. She rolled her eyes and tipped a stack of smaller boxes so that they spilled out over the floor.

  “Hey!” I jumped forward to right them.

  Beneath those she’d overturned was another box that I had yet to sort. She peeled back the cardboard and lifted a pleated navy skirt.

  A punch of memories: the reformatory, the last time I’d seen Ms. Brock, the headmistress, preparing to punish me after she’d ordered soldiers to beat Rebecca. The sound of the baton striking my roommate’s back as she demanded to know what had become of Sean.

  I fixed the fallen boxes, lining up the corners perfectly.

  Like everywhere else, the Sisters of Salvation had gradually infiltrated the city’s charity scene. They were what another Article violator had once called the MM’s answer to women’s liberation, and ran the soup kitchens here, the orphanages, even the school system.

  An unexpected tremor of excitement passed through me. Cara could wear this out into the community on assignment. I could wear it out. Sisters could go places civilians couldn’t, just like the guys in the resistance who wore stolen soldier and Horizons uniforms. It was the first time I’d seriously considered leaving the Wayland Inn, and it felt liberating. Empowering.

  But mostly impossible. I couldn’t do the kinds of missions Cara did. I’d already been caught. The next time I wouldn’t get the luxury of a needle full of strychnine like the condemned soldiers in the holding cells at the base. I’d get a bullet in the head.

  “See, now you can play dress up with your boy toy,” Cara said with a plastic smile.

  Her words brought on a sudden surge of humiliation. I was about to say something I’d probably regret later when Billy’s shouts from the radio room intervened.