Jesse stood rigid, filling the whole room.
“Yes,” he said.
“You’re going to stop it, then. You’re going to get him out.”
“It’s too late.”
I did not believe that. I would not believe it. But the evidence was thick and heavy and filled me with dread.
“You’re bombing it tonight. For the chief’s party.” To kill one man they would risk hundreds more.
Jesse’s jaw twitched.
“We all make sacrifices,” he said.
A veil of red passed before my eyes. I thought of how he’d taken Chase away when I was twelve, how he’d left him when he was sixteen in Chicago to fend for himself. I hated Jesse then. I hated him for not even trying.
I’d wanted to believe in Three so much I’d neglected to see it for what it really was. Just another group of insurgents trying to tear apart the system. They didn’t care about the truth—that our injured had been murdered, that the prisoners were dying each day, that Chase was gone and Tucker had been used as bait—they only cared about the outcome.
Jesse had scooped Cara up in his arms and was making for the entryway. He twisted, reaching for the handle to open the door without bumping her splinted leg.
“We’re leaving,” he said, carrying her to the porch and down the steps to where the Lost Boys waited on the patchy front lawn.
I followed him outside, Sean on my heels. The standalone garage where Rebecca and I had fought off the pack of dogs was behind the parked white moving truck. The sun hid behind the thick thunderclouds, but was climbing, counting down the minutes to the Chief of Reformation’s party.
“Where?” I called.
“Tampa,” he answered bluntly. The nasty boy, Charlie, rose, and helped him lift the back gate of the moving truck. Gently, Jesse settled Cara on the flatbed.
My nerves cracked like a whip. I was not going to Tampa. I was going to Charlotte. I needed to get to Chase before the bombs hit, and the only way I knew to do that was to sneak in.
“I need this truck,” I said. I glanced at Sean. “I’m sorry,” I mouthed. He needed it, too, to get back to Rebecca.
“Don’t test me, neighbor.” Jesse didn’t turn around.
My gun was missing, and before Sean could stop me I’d snatched his from behind his back. I released the safety but kept it lowered. Jesse, hearing the noise, turned slowly.
“Don’t test me,” I said, trying to stop my hands from shaking. “I’m taking this truck.”
“Put down the gun,” said Jesse.
“Give me the keys.” It occurred to me that I didn’t know how to get to Greeneville. I didn’t even know how to drive. It didn’t matter. I’d figure it out. Fast.
I glanced to my right, to Sean, his stare shifting between me and Jesse. The eyes of the children had all turned my direction, and I couldn’t help but feel a little bad for that.
“You’re not going to shoot anyone,” said Cara from inside the truck.
I lifted the gun and fired into the air. The adrenaline kicked down my arm.
“She’s gonna shoot someone,” said Charlie.
“The keys!”
Jesse reached into his pocket, teeth bared.
“I knew you’d be a pain in the ass.” He tossed me a silver key ring.
I heard footsteps on my right, and felt Sean stand beside me.
“Get out of here,” he said quietly. “Do what you’ve got to do.”
“What’s your plan?” Jesse asked him. “How are you going to get back to your girl?”
“The Horizons truck in the garage,” said Sean. I’d forgotten about that—we’d pulled supplies out of the back the first time we’d been here.
“The tires are flat,” said Jesse.
“A lot of kids here,” he said. “I’m sure we can find a few spares.”
“You just need to make it to Endurance,” I said. “There’s one more car left in the lot.” It would be a tight fit with all the kids, but I had confidence Sean would make it work.
He nodded.
“Hey, sister,” called Cara weakly. I glanced over at her, half expecting her to have a gun pointed in my direction, too. Instead, she wore a lopsided grin. “If you’re breaking into a base, make sure you dress the part.” She winked.
Clearly she’d had too much pain medicine.
Jesse made a move toward me, but Sean blocked his way. “Uh-uh,” he said with a firm shake of his head. Jesse could have flattened Sean if he’d wanted to, but something had him falling back. He swore, and then reached into the truck to help Cara out.
“Think about this,” Jesse said. “The first bomb hits Charlotte at midnight. The rest follow every fifteen minutes. Chicago, Atlanta, Knoxville, and Lexington.”
Every major base between here and the middle of the country.
The breath trembled in my lungs. After the bombing, Three would attack Charlotte. If the Statutes I’d put my name on worked, the same thing would happen across the country.
“You’re sure?” whispered Sean over his shoulder.
“I’m sure,” I said.
“Then get going.” He nudged me toward the door. I saw in his face he wasn’t coming. Better that way. He needed to find Rebecca.
I looked into his bright blue eyes, flooded with memories of him helping me escape from the reformatory. Here he was, doing it again. Being the friend I needed him to be.
I gave him a quick hug, our only good-bye.
“Tampa,” he said. “I’ll see you there.”
I nodded, throat hot. I jumped in the front seat, slammed the door shut, and pushed the key into the ignition. Driving couldn’t be so hard; I’d seen Chase do it tons of times.
I pressed the gas and the engine revved, dust spraying out behind the car. I dropped the gun and white-knuckled the wheel. Normally this was the part where we were supposed to go forward. Gently, I tapped the gas again, to the same effect.
“Come on,” I coaxed the car, bouncing in the seat.
Sean jerked open my door. He reached down to the floor, grabbed my ankle, and shoved my foot on the pedal to the right.
“Brake,” he said. He pointed to the other. “Gas.” Then he leaned across my body, grabbed the shifter emerging from the wheel and adjusted it down a notch. A light on the console beside the speedometer switched from P to D.
I couldn’t believe I hadn’t remembered that part.
“Drive,” he said. He stepped back and shut the door.
I pressed down hard on the gas. Something slammed behind me—probably the back gate closing. The last view I had in the mirror as I tore down the street was Sean surrounded by the boys, watching me go.
* * *
I JERKED to a stop in the middle of an empty road. The freeway onramp was to my right, but there was another road that wound around the left. North was the direction I needed to go to get to Charlotte, but I didn’t have time to backtrack if I was wrong.
Eighteen hours. I had less than a day to find where the MM had taken Chase and to figure out a way to get him out. Dark thoughts shimmered on the edge of my focus. A voice that said he was already dead, that he’d died in pain, alone, while I’d been miles away, unconscious. And that if he was dead, every soldier that died when the bases fell would not be enough to fill the hole left inside of me.
I pulled out the map from the sun visor and spread it across my lap, but my hands were shaking so hard I ripped it down the center.
“No!” My throat was tied in knots.
I wouldn’t cry. I would not.
A knock at the passenger window made me scream. I leaped out of the seat and scrambled for the gun, but instead knocked it to the floor.
Jesse stood outside, arms crossed over his chest, mouth pulled into a thin, tight line.
“What’s the plan, neighbor?”
I couldn’t believe it. A stowaway.
“What are you doing here?” I asked, venom on my tongue.
Slowly, he lifted his hands, and then opened the passeng
er door and sat down. He stared straight ahead through the window.
“My nephew—he told me to look out for you if something happened to him.”
I closed my eyes.
“I guess I don’t have to tell you I owe him one.”
I flexed my legs. “I guess not.”
“And if he got caught, I had to stop you from going after him.”
I imagined Chase asking Jesse to make this promise and my heart cracked open.
“You can’t stop me,” I said. “I’m going to find him.”
“I know.” He smiled, and his eyes were glistening. “I had to try.”
A silent moment passed.
“You’re sort of like her, you know,” he said. “My sister. She was hard-headed, too. You should have seen our dad when she told him who she was marrying.” He whistled, shaking his head.
I’d never given much thought to Chase’s mixed heritage. His parents were always so warm and nonjudgmental, and I resented that they would have to fight that battle. Either way, talking about Chase’s mother made me uncomfortable, like Jesse and I had too much in common.
We sat in silence for a moment.
“Chase taught me how to shoot,” I said. “Not to drive.”
He laughed, and slapped a hand on his chest.
“Where we headed?”
“Charlotte,” I told him. “Unless you have a better idea.”
“You want to join Three outside the base, or just drive in through the front gates?”
I turned away, staring out the window. “I need to get into the prison.” There wasn’t time to gather with the other fighters, and anyway, they wouldn’t let me get close to the base before it blew. “Once Chase got himself arrested to find me in the Knoxville holding cells.”
“Well, that was stupid,” he said.
My hands began to shake again. I needed to get in and out of the base before midnight. I wished Billy was here—he would have at least been able to hack into the mainframe and tell me for sure if Charlotte had taken a new prisoner.
But Billy had jumped aboard an MM delivery truck, bound for Charlotte.
“Greeneville,” I said, the idea lighting inside of me. “Marco and Polo have an FBR delivery truck.”
A slow, dangerous smile spread over Jesse’s face. He got out of the front seat and stepped outside. I scooted over as he rounded the front of the car, folding the map as he opened the door and climbed into the front seat.
Jesse was a lot faster driver than I was.
* * *
THE thick clouds patched together as we neared the line where the Red Zone gave way to occupied area. In the early afternoon Jesse left the highway, because the MM had set up checkpoints at all major crossings to block civilians from heading into the restricted areas. Because of this, we ended up in a small suburban community, weaving through abandoned cars and debris blown by the weather, at a pace slow enough to make my skin crawl.
I kept my eyes pinned on the road highlighted in the headlights. A rickety wooden bridge was coming up, and beyond it the trees grew thick, a wall of green and gray shale.
“Why didn’t you tell us you were with Three?”
He slowed as he steered around an overturned trash can in the road. “Never came up.”
I shifted to face him fully. “Oh, I can think of a few times you could have said something.”
He chuckled. “You never asked.”
I groaned. “You couldn’t answer a straight question if your life depended on it.”
“My life, neighbor, often depends on not answering straight questions.”
He pointed ahead, to a thick cropping of pine trees, the slender gray trunks of which were skirted by emerald holly shrubs. “We’ll turn off the road past the bridge and park back a ways. The outer fence of the printing plant backs up against those woods.”
Though I didn’t say so, I was secretly glad he’d come. Last time we’d come here, I’d arrived in the back of a delivery truck. Sneaking in the back was a whole different game.
I kicked at the floor mat, and glanced back automatically to assure we weren’t being followed. It was clear I’d have to try a different tactic. “The Lost Boys call you the hunter, you know.”
He squinted, watching the road.
“How many have you brought to Endurance besides Will?”
“Not as many as I should have. I thought…” He sighed. “I thought that guy in the trailer was looking out for them. I should have paid more attention.”
Jesse scratched at the stubble on his chin, silent for some time.
“I wasn’t meant to be a dad,” he said finally. “What happened with my nephew—with Chase.” He hesitated. “It wasn’t supposed to happen. I never wanted him.”
I didn’t know how to respond; the raw confession had surprised me.
“Maybe before,” he said quietly, almost as if he wasn’t talking to me at all. “I was a soldier once—not in the Bureau. Before the War. Before the insurgents. U.S. Army, Sergeant Major Waite.” He sat a little straighter in his seat. “We fought enemies from the outside, not the inside. But no one noticed. They just went on like life was normal, like men and women weren’t dying so they could watch TV and go to bed without a gun under their pillow. No one here even knew there was a threat—not until the insurgents brought the fight home, and Reinhardt and his tool Scarboro made their move.”
The president’s platform—one whole country, one whole family—had been just what the country was looking for after the chaos began. It didn’t matter that the government they proposed would sink its teeth into our everyday freedoms, just as long as the bombs stopped falling.
Again, I considered what it might be like if the old president resumed his post. If the people had a vote again. But a system backed by Three, who was preparing to bomb the bases—kill their own just to take out more soldiers—seemed just as corrupt as a system backed by Restart.
“Some of us saw what they were doing,” continued Jesse. “Me and Frank and Aiden—he was an army doc back then.”
Doctor Aiden DeWitt. I felt myself leaning toward him, drawn in by the story. Fat droplets of rain began to splatter against the windshield.
“Frank?” I asked, and then shook my head, piecing together what Jesse had said in Greeneville to Billy. “Frank Wallace. From Knoxville.”
Jesse nodded. “Frank and Aiden took the high road—tried to fight from within the system. I told them that wouldn’t do anything. Frank ended up shooting his partner and Aiden lost his girls.” He shook his head. “When Restart formed the Bureau, I joined the protests. They stripped me of my rank and threw me in jail.”
I’d always assumed Jesse had been in jail for robbery or assault, something bad. Not this. Not the same thing I was doing now with the Statutes.
“They never took their eye off me. The Bureau, they were always watching. I kept quiet after my sister died and I got Chase. I tried to do what Aiden did—play the family man. I did all right for a while. But they kept watching. Once the bombs started falling, Restart needed names—people to blame. Who better than a guy they already had on record?” He laughed bitterly. “I tried to get the kid out once the fighting came to Chicago. I swear. I tried to keep him safe like his mother would have wanted. But they found me. The only way Chase had a chance was on his own.”
“How come you never told him?” I asked. “He thinks you cut him loose because you couldn’t take care of him.”
Jesse started, as though he hadn’t expected me to be listening.
“I couldn’t,” he said. “That’s the truth.”
“It’s part of the truth,” I stressed, unsure what to think of this man now that I’d heard his story.
“I didn’t want this life for him. I wanted him out of the way.”
“So you found him in Chicago and told him about the safe house.”
“I thought I was too late,” he said, regret hanging heavy over his shoulders. “The Bureau had already gotten him.”
“You
weren’t too late,” I said. “You helped save him. Just like you helped save those Lost Boys.” I wondered if they were penance for the nephew Jesse had left behind.
Jesse slammed on the brakes then, and I braced against the dash a moment before I hit it. We’d reached the bridge. I hadn’t noticed we’d gotten so close. Twenty feet below rushed the muddy water of an overflowed creek.
Across the bridge were three Bureau cars, blocking the way. My heart slowed, but began to pound twice as hard. With damp hands I reached for the gun I’d placed between us on the center console.
“I believe it’s time we split up, neighbor.”
The rain pounded against the windshield, too hard and fast for the truck’s shredded wipers to keep up.
Our options were limited: we couldn’t outrun them, not in an old beat-up moving truck while they were in cruisers, and not on streets marred by potholes and debris. If we ran, they’d hunt us, and we’d never make it to the printing plant. As I watched, one soldier got out of the driver’s side door, talking into a handheld radio.
“The warehouse is five miles northwest—through the trees. Look for the lights.” Jesse reached across my lap and opened the door. “Get out.”
“They’ve seen us!”
“I’ll cover you.”
I stared at him in horror.
“My nephew did good when he chose you.”
With that he pushed me out of the seat. I scrambled to stay upright, crouching in the shrubs beside the road. Now my pulse was flying, and the rain that fell sizzled against my hot skin.
A second later Jesse gunned the engine, aiming straight toward the cruisers.
CHAPTER
22
THE truck hit the bridge with a squeal, and even through the rain I could hear the shouts of surprise from the other side. Thirty feet below roared the swollen creek, brown and frothy, like the chocolate milk I used to drink as a child. The fastest path was straight down the hill, but the way was steep and treacherous.
Without looking back, I aimed for the water, legs churning to keep up with the barreling pace of my body. The loose gravel gave way beneath my boots and soon I was rolling, crashing through the prickly shrubs and sharp rocks that tore at my clothes and my skin. The gun was torn from my grasp.