Three

  We took a step closer to the food.

  “And because we were in Chicago and Knoxville when they were hit,” I said.

  Chase considered this, running his knuckles absently over his jaw.

  “We have to prove we had nothing to do with it,” said Chase. “I’d rather the MM want us dead than Three.”

  “Agreed.” At least with the soldiers chasing us we could hide with the resistance. If the resistance was chasing us, nowhere was safe.

  The guard behind us appeared in my peripheral vision, closer than before. Our conversation was no longer private.

  “Where’s your uncle?” I asked. “He wasn’t here during Dr. DeWitt’s announcement.”

  Chase stood tall, shielding his eyes from the sun as he searched. He nodded to my right, where Jesse appeared as if summoned.

  “Nephew. And neighbor.” Freshly shaven and with hair still damp, Jesse threw his arm over Chase’s shoulders. I found myself mirroring Chase’s scowl. With DeWitt on the hunt for traitors to the cause, Jesse should have been more careful to wake up on time.

  “Bad news, kid,” smirked Jesse. “Looks like you couldn’t dodge the draft after all.”

  “He didn’t dodge the first time,” I said.

  Jesse looked to Chase for confirmation, the skin around his eyes tightened with regret. He would have known that if he’d stuck around.

  “What are you talking about?” Chase asked Jesse.

  “The guy in charge—Doctor something,” he began.

  “DeWitt,” I corrected quietly.

  “Right. DeWitt.” Jesse glanced away. “DeWitt’s sending all able bodies down to join his little security detail.”

  I stood on my tiptoes and looked to where a group of our people crowded around the old man with the eye patch. Billy was the first in line. For some reason this worried me. It wasn’t like he’d never done field work before—he’d left the Wayland Inn to find new recruits lots of times—but without Wallace watching over him, this seemed different.

  I wasn’t hungry anymore. Chase seemed to have lost his appetite as well, but he crammed down the meat patties and brown bread all the same.

  “What do you know about Three?” Jesse asked Chase. He didn’t look for my input, and given the way I’d reacted, I couldn’t blame him.

  “Not much.” Chase pooled the crumbs in the center of his hand, then sifted them into his mouth.

  “Nothing?” Jesse pressed, in a way that made me wonder what he had heard.

  “There was a medic when I was in the service.” Chase rubbed his thumb between his brows. “After fights he used to hold up his fingers and tell me three—”

  “—is the only number you should remember?” Jesse snorted, and shook his head.

  “Yeah.” The corner of Chase’s mouth quirked. “How’d you know?”

  “Someone said the same to me once,” he said. “Figured he was nuts.”

  They grinned at each other, as if relieved that they connected over something from their time apart.

  “What exactly does the security team do?” I interrupted.

  Jesse glanced down, as if he’d forgotten I was there. “Only one way to find out.”

  I didn’t like it, but he was right. If Chase and I were going to prove we had nothing to do with the attacks on the resistance, we needed to gain Three’s trust. I was just about to follow Chase toward the man with the eye patch when Will appeared at my side.

  “The doc wants to see you,” he told me.

  For one strange, strained moment, he met Jesse’s gaze, and then he looked down as if intimidated and hurried toward the cafeteria entrance to the lodge.

  “Weird kid,” commented Jesse. “Heard he’s one of DeWitt’s charity cases.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “Sick folks hide out in the Red Zone,” he said. “Sometimes they abduct kids from near the border to do their dirty work. We ran into them a couple of times at the safe house—the Lost Boys, people called them. Bunch of little psychopaths, more like it.”

  “We met them,” I said, thinking Jesse’s assessment was pretty accurate. “Yesterday, before Dr. DeWitt’s people showed up.” I ran a hand over my bruised side, remembering the boy who’d kicked me there.

  Jesse didn’t look surprised. “Think DeWitt tries to take some in and rehabilitate them or something. Impossible to fix what’s already broke though, if you ask me.”

  Chase shoved his hands in his pockets, and I could tell he was thinking about Harper, and the picture he’d torn off the wall in the north wing.

  As the line reached its end, people began filtering to their assigned duties. I watched Sean help Rebecca toward the south wing, where we’d passed the classrooms, and felt the pull toward the opposite side, where Three’s leader had summoned me.

  Chase looked torn, and I tried to offer a reassuring smile. “I guess I’ll see you later.”

  He nodded slowly, but his feet stuck to the ground. I didn’t want to go either. Bad things happened when we split up. A memory of the last night before he’d been drafted into the FBR over a year ago came to the forefront of my mind. I shouldn’t have let him go then, and I shouldn’t be letting him go now.

  “Find me if anything comes up.” He glanced over my shoulder toward the lodge, reluctance in his eyes.

  “I’ll find you.”

  “Good god,” said Jesse. “I just remembered why I never got married.”

  Chase smirked, then leaned down and planted a quick kiss on my cheek. “Be careful,” he whispered. I willed him to do the same as he turned and followed Jesse away.

  * * *

  “I WANT the location and status of your team.” DeWitt loomed over my shoulder as I sat in my plastic bucket seat before the radio. The tech beside me was turning dials and pressing buttons on the black console. A crackle of static filled the small room.

  On the opposite wall two other members were crammed side by side at a small table stacked with assorted papers, and I eavesdropped curiously as they muttered numbers aloud and recorded them on clipboards.

  “Not a word about who you’re with or where you are.” DeWitt drew my attention back to the task at hand. “Obviously this Morris trusts you, but you may not be able to trust him anymore.”

  Anymore. As if I ever really did. “You think he’s the one selling out the bases?”

  DeWitt tilted his head. “Should I?”

  I frowned, both at his suspicion and my doubt. A month ago I wouldn’t have questioned it—Tucker was bad, end of story. But since then Tucker had proven he was on our side, making me question everything I knew about him.

  I turned back toward the microphone. “He’s with us.”

  I felt DeWitt’s eyes on me, and when I looked up I saw that his expression had grown hard. Beside me, the tech shifted in his chair.

  “Anything else I should know about him?”

  He might as well have asked if Tucker had killed my mother, but maybe I was just being paranoid.

  Be careful, Chase had said.

  I reminded myself that DeWitt hadn’t come into this position by chance. When he spoke, the entire compound had stopped to listen. That was a power I didn’t want to fight against.

  “No,” I said.

  I planted my feet on the floor, and scooted the chair to the microphone.

  “I’m ready.”

  * * *

  TUCKER didn’t answer.

  We attempted to make contact on the same frequency he’d used yesterday, but to no avail. Wherever he was headed, whatever danger he might have been in, he was unable to respond. As the hours passed, I became more and more convinced the something else had gone wrong.

  By lunchtime it was clear we weren’t going to make contact unless Tucker called first. DeWitt had disappeared late in the morning without explanation, and in his absence, I rose and wandered to the opposite side of the room where the operators were still recording numbers on a stack of paper.

  A woman with a pencil between her tee
th shoved back the dark bangs that stuck to her forehead with sweat. The heat coming off the radios in the room was tremendous, and it was beginning to make me drowsy.

  I looked down at the notes she’d scribbled across the paper. There were two columns. On the left was a list of regions: 129, 257, 313, and so on. On the right, a census count—90, 568, and even in one region, 925.

  Instantly, I was alert.

  “Is that how many people are on our side, or theirs?” I asked.

  The woman’s head snapped up, her cap of greasy hair swinging and sticking momentarily to her cheek.

  “I wish we had that many on our side,” she said. “Rebels don’t waste a lot of time counting their numbers.”

  I didn’t need to ask why.

  “You got the soldier counts from hacking into the mainframe?” I lowered my voice. “Can you check if someone’s been captured? A carrier. He’s missing.”

  “Does it look like we have mainframe access?” she said briskly.

  “My friend Billy hacked into the mainframe in Knoxville.”

  She snorted. “That was Knoxville. This is No Man’s Land. We haven’t had Internet since the president shut down our satellites during the War—said it was too easy to organize terrorists that way, in case you’re too young to remember. Now you need a hardline to crack into and we’re too far out for that. Bureau’s got bombs that run by body heat sensors, and we’re still deciphering radio messages.” She groaned and covered her face with her hands.

  “Where’d you get those numbers then?”

  “They’re the last reports to come in from the safe house,” she said.

  “The carriers delivered messages from the posts to Three there,” I said to myself. Sean had told me this once.

  She nodded. “Hard to believe all these regions report to one base. Guess that’s what happens when a war wipes out two-thirds of the country. Leaves everyone else a little thin.”

  Contemplating why Three was monitoring the soldiers present in each region filled me with a dark doubt. They couldn’t possibly attack a base. There were only two hundred, maybe two hundred and fifty people in the army we’d seen this morning. Even if they recruited the help of the existing resistance posts, they wouldn’t have the numbers to stand a chance. In Knoxville we’d had less than thirty people total. To attack the base would have been suicide.

  A strong urge to find Chase shook through me. I was getting a very bad feeling about the purpose of Three’s “security” team.

  “I don’t know how we’re supposed to pull this off when we don’t even have current numbers,” she muttered.

  “Pull what off?”

  She lowered her hands slowly. “Who are you again?” She reached suddenly for my shirt sleeve and gave it a tug. The collar untied, and my shoulder was exposed. I yanked it back up, retying the straps.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  Her brows lifted, and her mouth pursed. She flipped over the paper she’d been recording the census counts on, and I was surprised to see the bold, familiar type of a Statute circular staring back at me. There were at least a dozen sheets spread across the table.

  “My mistake,” she said.

  It didn’t seem like a mistake, but she clearly wasn’t saying any more about it.

  “That’s the best use of the Statutes I’ve seen yet,” I said cautiously. I’d seen them everywhere—stuck to the front doors of houses, old telephone poles, windows. Anywhere anyone might see them. But never used as scratch paper. The very idea seemed so defiant it brought a smile to my lips.

  “We hijacked some trucks on their way from the printing plant awhile back.” She jutted a thumb out the door without looking up. “They’re down the hall.”

  Two soldiers, two halves of the same person really, came to mind. Marco and Polo, the night crew at the printing plant in Greeneville, where we’d taken refuge on our flight from Knoxville. I could still hear the deafening drone of the printing machines in the back room.

  I wondered if those two had anything to do with some trucks being hijacked.

  She held her hand over the stack of papers, clearly waiting for me to leave so she could continue.

  I removed myself from the room and wandered down the hall until I found an open door. Inside the closet was a rack of office supplies, and boxes stacked upon boxes of Statute circulars.

  I pulled one off the top open box, reading down the list I’d memorized long ago, feeling a familiar pang in my heart when I reached Article 5.

  Children are considered valid citizens when conceived by a married man and wife. All other children are to be removed from the home and subjected to rehabilitative procedures.

  “Looking for something?”

  I spun to see the guard who’d been following us—the one who looked like Rat but older—standing in the doorway, and cringed, both inside and out. “Don’t you have anything better to do than follow me around?”

  The corner of his mouth quirked. “It appears not.”

  Resistance posts were being destroyed, our people—Tucker included—were possibly missing, and yet I was his assignment.

  “I need to see my friends.” I hoped this made it clear that I would be heading down through the tree line to find Chase.

  “I’ll take you.” He turned, and I jogged after him to catch up, wondering how that had been so easy.

  We passed the heavily guarded weapons depository and exited the north wing by way of an open foyer, but where I thought we would exit through the cafeteria the guard kept walking. He cut straight through to the south wing of the lodge, past the infant room with its colorful tattered squares of old carpet and handmade wooden toys. Inside I caught a glimpse of Sarah changing a diaper. Good practice for the months to come, although her hair was pulled loose on one side, and she didn’t look particularly happy. I waved, and she called out a brief distracted hello.

  “Where are we going?” I asked. Not out of the building to where the soldiers had emerged this morning, I was certain of that much.

  “To see your people,” he said.

  We came to the end of the hallway, where two rooms split off in a T. From one side came the sharp smell of sage and other herbs I didn’t recognize. From the other, a girl’s high giggle.

  I stuck my head in the doorway, surprised at the clean floor and sterile countertops. Clay jars filled the shelves, labeled with unfamiliar words like BETONY, AVENS, MILKWEED, and VALERIAN. A dozen cots were placed at even intervals, and on one of them sat Rebecca. Opposite her, on a round stool, DeWitt chuckled, a tool in his hand that looked like a petite hammer.

  A strange mix of comfort and suspicion had me hurrying to Rebecca’s side.

  “Ember!” Rebecca beamed. I’d forgotten how beautiful she was when she smiled.

  “What’s going on?” My gaze raced over her, finding the sores on her arms bandaged with pale yellow cloth. A gray mud oozed down into the crook of her elbow. Her pants were pulled up above the knee; there were so many bruises you’d think her natural skin color was purple. I winced.

  “Dr. DeWitt gave me some tea. It’s good. You should have some, too.” She lifted a cup of what looked and smelled like dirty water, and when she giggled at my scrunched nose it occurred to me the concoction might be spiked.

  “What did you give her?”

  “Something for the pain,” answered DeWitt. “Maypop root, to relax her muscles. Hopefully help her body heal naturally.” He gave her a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder.

  In my time with him, I’d yet to see DeWitt in this role, but watching him with Rebecca, it was clear he enjoyed taking care of people.

  “He thinks I’m going to walk again!” Rebecca squeezed my hand and pulled me down beside her. “I mean, walk better. Without the crutches.” She spilled some of the tea on the cot.

  “Really?” I offered her a weak smile, reluctant to believe what I’d secretly closed off as an option. Was the doctor right? He didn’t have any proper medical equipment that I could see.
>
  “Slow down,” said DeWitt with a kind smile. “I said there’s a good chance you’ll recover. But only if you take care of yourself. Relax. Eat right. Do the exercises we talked about.”

  “And rub moldy plants all over me every day,” Rebecca added solemnly, then grinned at me. “Sean’s going to flip his lid.”

  I was going to flip my lid. I didn’t want to believe the impossible, but her joy was contagious. If this place could make her better, if DeWitt could help her, every ounce of pain we’d put her through for freedom had been worth it.

  “I can’t wait for you to tell him,” I said. “Where is he?”

  “He’s a farmer now.” She giggled. “Can you imagine? They’ve got him picking carrots I bet.”

  “How’d he pull that off?” All able-bodied fighters were being recruited to the army. I was sure they would have wanted him given that he was an actual soldier.

  “He dislocated his shoulder,” she said with a pouty frown. “It must have happened when those boys ambushed us. He’s so the suffer-in-silence type—I didn’t even know about it until this morning when he had Dr. DeWitt reset it.”

  I’d seen Sean since the boys had attacked us. He hadn’t been injured. I was almost positive this was a ploy to stay close to Rebecca. He’d promised he would never leave her again.

  DeWitt was watching me out of the corner of my eye.

  “He didn’t want you to worry,” I quickly told Rebecca. “I’m glad he finally got it looked at.”

  Some, but not all of the suspicion faded from the doctor’s face. “Picking carrots is a noble job,” he said. “It makes the horses very happy.”

  “Sir?” A radio tech appeared in the doorway, adjusting his glasses. His cheeks were stained red, and his hair, sweaty like mine, stuck straight out on the sides.

  “Excuse me.” DeWitt rose, and shook Rebecca’s hand. “It was a pleasure, dear. We’ll talk soon, all right?”

  “Thanks, Dr. DeWitt.”

  My eyes tracked him to the door, where the calm, reassuring presence was stripped away as he listened to what the tech had to share. A moment later, they sped down the hallway, footsteps clicking.