Breaking Point

“Sniper! Sniper!”

  We were both out of the room in a shot, bolting two doors down to where the guys playing cards had gathered. Everyone shoved at one another, trying to get closer to the confiscated switchboard Wallace was manning.

  “Shut up!” Wallace roared. As the chatter died, the serious voice of Janice Barlow, a local reporter for an MM-run news station, filled the room.

  “… indicate that the four soldiers were shot several hours after curfew, from a distance of at least one hundred yards. FBR sources revealed early this morning that they are very close to finding the Virginia Sniper, whom they believe to be responsible for a running tally of seven soldiers.”

  “Yeah, right!” called one of the guys who’d returned with Cara a few hours ago. He was immediately shushed by the two brothers who’d rationed out breakfast.

  “… is the second shooting in the state of Tennessee, the first being fifty miles south, in Nashville. In response to the crisis, the Federal Bureau of Reformation has lowered the local curfew to five P.M. until the culprit can be apprehended. Citizens are reminded to observe curfew hours and report any violations of the Statutes to the crisis line or a nearby FBR officer.”

  At her pause, the hall erupted in cheers. A twitchy guy not much taller than me spun Cara around in an impromptu dance. Four, people kept saying. Four, when the sniper had only hit one at a time previously. I tried to grin, but my insides were stretched taut.

  “Quiet! Quiet, there’s more!” Billy hollered. He leaned down while Wallace adjusted the volume.

  “… determined that the bomb, made of household appliances, was a direct attempt on the Chief of Reformation’s life. Chancellor Reinhardt’s condition is stable, and he is recovering at an undisclosed location. Of the attack, the president made this statement late yesterday afternoon.”

  There was another pause, but this time no one spoke. No one dared to breathe. An attack on the president’s right-hand man made the work of the sniper seem suddenly insignificant.

  The reception grew fuzzy as a man’s voice filled the room.

  “The work of radicals does not, and will not, represent the majority. What happened yesterday to Chancellor Reinhardt is a test. Of our faith. Of our morality. And of our freedom. It is a chance for us to prove our unity and bind together as one country. To finally purge the hedonism that led to our fall, to dispel the chaos that gripped us during the War, and to remove every terrorist that stands between us and a safe, peaceful future. No one said reformation would be easy, but have faith when I say that it is possible, and it is right.”

  It had been a long time since I’d heard him speak. My mother and I had watched him on TV during the early years of the War when he’d been a state senator. I could picture him now, a tuft of silver hair atop an enormous forehead, jaw drawn tight with concern, and a gaze so piercing, it seemed to reach straight through the television into our living room. My mom used to say you could never trust someone who talked to a camera like it was a real person.

  Later, I’d learn in school that Scarboro’s movement, Restart America, had been around for years, preaching strong traditional morals, censorship, and a removal of the separation between church and state. One Faith, One Family, One Country, had been their motto, one that would later change to One Whole Country, One Whole Family when he was elected president. In his campaign, he’d cited the existing administration’s moral weakness for the attack on our nation, and the citizens, desperate for change, had believed him.

  He’d always had a cadence to his words. It was almost mesmerizing until you listened to what he was actually saying.

  Bind together. Remove every terrorist.

  Well, I knew what he meant by terrorist. He meant people like my mother. People like me. Anyone that stood between him and his perfect, compliant world. He’d reduced our country to obedient house pets and unwanted strays, and I had a bad feeling things were about to get a lot worse for us.

  Ms. Barlow signed off with the FBR motto: One Whole Country, One Whole Family.

  “Someone tried to take out Reinhardt?” Cara finally said. She looked shocked, just like everyone else. I tried to picture the man, but couldn’t. He’d come into power post-TV, during President Scarboro’s formation of the FBR, to oversee the functions of the soldiers.

  “Wonder how he got close enough.” There was a definite edge of scheming to Wallace’s tone, but he did make a point. The president and his advisors traveled in secrecy, never taking up a permanent residence, never staying anywhere too long. As far as I’d known, they’d done this since the War, when the threat of attack on any politician had been high.

  “Who cares, someone did it, that’s all that matters!” yelled the guy behind me. The others agreed.

  “Next is our move,” said Cara. “Now’s the time for something big. We’ve got to hit them while they’re limping.”

  It was all too much: the nodding, the bloodthirsty grins. They were getting swept up in the momentum of a new war.

  “Hit them back, and they’ll take it out on everyone else!” I shouted above the noise. “You heard the report, they’ve already extended curfew. We know they’re withholding rations. It’s only going to get worse.”

  “Aw, that’s sweet,” said Cara. “Shouldn’t you be making dinner or something?”

  I glared at her, fuming while the others laughed.

  “Our actions send a message,” explained Wallace. He didn’t look particularly patient, as he had on the roof.

  “What message? Look, we got seven of you? They’ve got thousands of soldiers to replace each one of them!” My voice grew thin.

  “It’s not a message to the FBR. It’s a message to the people.”

  I spun toward the door and the low voice I’d recognize anywhere. My gaze swept over Chase quickly. No blood. No bruises. When I found his eyes, that part inside of me that had been clenched in his absence released. You’re back, I said to him in my mind, and as if he could hear me, he gave a barely discernible nod.

  “A message to the people,” I repeated, irritated that I was the only one who didn’t seem to understand. Sean had elbowed in through the back row to stand beside us.

  “It says there are more of us than of them,” said Wallace. “That we don’t have to take what they give us. That some of us are not afraid.”

  “You want all those people, who have nothing, to fight against men with guns? They’ll die.” The people in this room, we were different. We’d signed up for this. But what about my friends from home—Beth? Ryan? My mother? There was a time I would have found the thought of them in a place like this outrageous; now it was just sobering.

  “They’re dying now,” Cara pointed out. “If they fight back they won’t have nothing, they’ll have each other. And that, little girl, is the FBR’s biggest fear.”

  I resented her tone, but Wallace looked positively proud. I remembered what he’d said on the roof about making your own values, but sacrificing yourself for a cause didn’t make you realize who you were. It just made you dead.

  “No one’s doing anything, not yet anyway,” said Wallace, in answer to my earlier question. He breathed in through his nostrils, as if annoyed by his own proclamation.

  “Come on,” Billy whined.

  “I mean it,” said Wallace as the others settled down. “Much as I want to ride this wave, you know the drill. We hold until Three gives the go-ahead.”

  I glanced at Chase, but he was looking to me for the same answers. Subtly, I snagged Sean’s wrist and pulled him down to my height so that Cara and the others couldn’t hear.

  “Who’s Three?”

  Chase edged closer.

  “Three’s not a who, it’s a what,” Sean answered. “It’s the center of the web—the piece that ties the underground together. All known branches, like this one, report their operations to Three, and Three tells them where to go from there.”

  “How do they make reports?” Chase asked.

  “Through the carriers,” said Sean.

/>   “The carriers work for Three?” It made sense that they would be connected to some branch of the resistance, rather than risking their necks on their own.

  Sean shook his head. “It’s all top secret, hush-hush stuff. The way I heard it, the carriers don’t know who works for Three, they just collect messages when they go to the safe house and deliver them back to their local setup. The carriers, they’re more like independent contractors.”

  “So Wallace reports to someone.” I’d thought the Wayland Inn acted on its own, independent from the rest of the underground, as Sean had called it. Now that I knew differently, the whole operation seemed a little bit sturdier, like we weren’t a tiny boat floating on the ocean anymore.

  “Thanks for the vote of confidence,” Wallace whispered beside me, making me jump. “But yes, believe it or not even I report to someone. As all of you report to someone,” he called out for the rest to hear. “And in case you’ve all forgotten, we’ve still got packages to deliver, people to feed, and a recruit to keep tabs on.”

  Cara groaned. “Can we please stop being so serious? We’ve just been upgraded to terrorists! We should be celebrating!”

  And just like that it was over.

  It shocked me, the elation over the sniper and the assassination attempt on the Chief of Reformation, but more the way everyone returned to business as usual, as if someone had pressed the off button. That they weren’t thinking, as I was, of reinforcing our security, or avoiding the Square or anywhere crowded with soldiers.

  They moved on. Maybe that was how they survived this life.

  Wallace announced dinner and the others dispersed, leaving the radio room empty but for Chase and me. He leaned against the outer wall, looking distracted, and as I settled beside him I became aware that we hadn’t been alone together for some time. As the new guy, he was often assigned the late shift securing the perimeter. Technically, we shared a room, but that didn’t mean we saw much of each other.

  Now that the others were gone, his guard lowered, and he rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands, the exhaustion from his double shift breaking through. But something else was bothering him, I could tell.

  “What is it?” I asked.

  His eyes rested for a moment on my collarbone, and I realized the men’s shirt I wore had slouched down to reveal the top of my shoulder. I righted it slowly, and he blinked and glanced away.

  “Probably nothing, it’s just…” He shrugged. “When I was fighting at the base in Chicago, there was this medic. An old guy, officer age. They’d send me to see him if I got knocked around too much, and he’d always hold up three fingers and say, ‘How many fingers do you see?’ I told him once it didn’t work if he always held up the same number, and he said, ‘Three’s the only number you need to remember, sergeant.’ I figured he was crazier than me.”

  Chase had only once spoken to me about when the officers had made him fight at the base, and even then he’d told the story from another’s perspective. I knew his time in the FBR was something he wanted to forget, especially his stretch at the Chicago base, so I’d never pushed him. I’d always figured if he wanted to tell me, he would.

  Now my curiosity was piqued. Could the resistance have infiltrated the MM? If so, we’d have access to FBR plans, strategies, supply shipments.… It seemed too much to hope for.

  “What happened to the medic?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. They stopped the fights after I”—he stretched his shoulders back, as though his chest had suddenly constricted—“after I agreed to stop writing you. I didn’t have much need for a medic after that.”

  He glanced over to me, and for a moment, our gazes locked. It made me remember things I didn’t want to remember. All the letters I’d written that had gone unanswered. The pressure he’d gotten for fraternizing with any girl, much less one with a noncompliant mother. How they’d made him arrest her anyway.

  How he’d witnessed her murder.

  I believed him, that he couldn’t have saved her. But even though it was useless, sometimes I wondered if he’d really done everything he possibly could—everything I would have done. Thoughts like this led me nowhere, of course, and only made it harder to be close to him. He was both the cause of my pain and the cure.

  “So how are you?” He cleared his throat. “Really,” he added.

  I felt my skin stretch tight at his words, like all the anger and fear was expanding. It was pressing at my lungs, making it hard to breathe. And he must have felt it, too, because he pushed off the wall and stared a hole through his boots.

  “Hungry,” I said. “What do you think it’ll be tonight?”

  A beat passed. Then another.

  “Pizza,” he said finally, and I breathed out a sigh of relief that he’d changed the subject. “Maybe spaghetti. And ice cream for dessert.” The corner of his mouth quirked up.

  “Sounds delicious,” I said. Canned ham and beans were more likely, but sometimes it was easier to pretend.

  * * *

  “WHO wants ice cream sundaes?”

  I buried my head under the pillow. Was she seriously going to pretend that we had ice cream, when we didn’t even have a freezer?

  “Too bad. I guess I’ll have to eat it all myself.”

  I groaned. The blank tablet of paper lay beside me, untouched. How many letters had I written to Chase in the last six months? Twenty? Thirty? And not one response. Not to say he’d arrived in Chicago and started training. Not to say he missed me.

  He’d promised he’d write, and I’d believed him.

  I shouldn’t have.

  I ignored my grumbling stomach as long as I could, but facing her was inevitable. I pushed off my bed and dragged myself into the kitchen.

  She sat at the table, hands folded neatly behind a heaping bowl of instant mashed potatoes, the powdered kind that came out of a blue box. There were two spoons, one directly before her, the other in front of my seat. She’d fashioned some kind of triangle-shaped sailor hat from a brown paper bag and placed it regally on her head.

  “You have got to be kidding me,” I said.

  “Oh, did you want some ice cream? I’m not sure there’s enough to share,” she taunted.

  Just to humor her, I sat. I couldn’t look her in the face though; the hat was too ridiculous.

  She lifted her spoon, filling it with a huge dollop of mashed potatoes, and stuck it in her mouth, making all sorts of satisfied noises.

  I smiled.

  After a moment I picked up my spoon. Took a bite.

  “Tell me that’s not the best ice cream you’ve ever had,” she said.

  “It’s not the best ice cream I’ve ever had,” I said, trying hard to swallow without giggling.

  A look of disbelief spread across her face. Then she slung a spoonful of mashed potatoes across the table, and splattered them all across my shirt.

  * * *

  “HEY.”

  I jolted up straight in my chair as Sean snapped his fingers in my face. My chest still ached with the memory. If I had known my mother would be dead three months later, I never would have fought with her over something stupid, or yelled at her when she’d gotten a citation. I would have packed our stuff and we would have run, and we’d both be at the safe house now.

  I tried to hold on to the sound of her laughter, but it blended with the others down the hall. Cara’s soprano rose above the rest. They were probably playing poker again, competing for something someone had picked up in town. Candy maybe, or cigarettes. I cringed. They might as well invite the whole base over with all the noise they were making.

  Billy pushed away from the computer, shoving back his hair absently. I’d zoned out while we were scanning the mainframe for more information on girls’ reformatories in Chicago. There wasn’t much for me to do while Billy hacked into the server and Sean scanned the lists.

  “Go to bed,” Sean told me, squinting at the screen.

  “I’m fine,” I said, yawning. “And anyway, you’re not the boss
of me anymore.”

  He tossed me a pointed look over his shoulder. “Was I ever the boss of you?” When I grinned, he said, “That’s what I thought. Go away, you’re making me tired.”

  I did what he said, but only because I wasn’t helping any. I took one of the candles; its wavering yellow light made the walls look that much more decrepit. When I got to my room, I paused outside, listening through the door for the sound of Chase’s breathing. The noise in the hall seemed amplified; the guys that had left before curfew returned. Houston and Lincoln were arguing about a cute girl they’d seen in the Square. Someone was singing in the shower. The walls were way too thin.

  I tried to imagine Chase lying on the bed, but the thought made me nervous. I wondered if I should go inside at all. He didn’t sleep well—I knew the nightmares still plagued him, though he never talked about them. I could crash in the supply room and let him catch up on some much needed rest.

  Before I could change my mind, I inched the door open and slipped inside, careful to cover the flame with my hand. It didn’t take long for my eyes to adjust, to find him stretched out over the moth-eaten velvet chair, placed strategically in front of the window—the same window I’d escaped from when he’d told me about my mother. He’d left our blanket folded at the foot of the sagging mattress, empty in the center of our tiny space.

  Empty, just like me. Lost without my mom, without any lead on Rebecca, without any sense of purpose here.

  The yellow light was small and didn’t grant much visibility, but even so I could tell he wasn’t moving. Barely even breathing. He was too still to be anything but awake, and I matched his stillness, feeling his eyes graze over me, conscious of my breathing, too shallow, and the hot wax that dripped on my thumb.

  I blew out the candle.

  Crossing the room, I placed it on the window ledge, and before I knew what I was doing, I’d climbed into his lap. My palms searched through the dark to grasp his face, and my thumbs raced over his cheekbones, rough from not shaving, to his lips, parted and soft. There was no time to question how he’d respond, or think of how we’d barely touched these last few weeks. I needed this, needed him, and he needed me as well. His arms surrounded me and pulled me close, and then I was kissing him and he was kissing me back, his lips pressed hard into mine. He was alive and warm, smelling vaguely of sweat and mint toothpaste, and I told myself his touch would make me warm, too.