Three

  I pictured the narrow woman with short, curly hair and wondered where she’d landed. I hoped she didn’t plan on using her real name in public. That kind of thing could get you killed.

  I snuck back into the room, pulling the chair close to the side of Chase’s bed. Gently, I threaded his fingers through mine. Too cold. Normally he was like a furnace, but since we’d arrived he’d been unable to warm up. I pulled the blanket higher over his bandages, careful not to put too much pressure on his chest, and kissed his shoulder.

  Tucker was chewing his thumbnail and staring at his boots.

  “I never gave my C.O. those posts,” he said quietly. “I gave them Knoxville and Chicago. I told them where to find the sniper, then told all of you she was dead. I even gave them the safe house when we were in Greeneville. But after the bombs in those tunnels, I stopped. They thought I was dead anyway.”

  He scratched his short hair down over his forehead, and I thought of how distraught he’d been after we’d survived the bombs in Chicago. He’d probably never thought the MM would take the place down with him still in it.

  “I thought I had to. I thought, I don’t know, I was doing the right thing.”

  I snorted at this.

  “The right thing,” I said, listening to the beep of Chase’s pulse on the monitor. “What’s that again?”

  Raised voices in the hall drew our attention, but lowered a few seconds later.

  “What happens for you now?” I asked Tucker.

  He dropped his hands over his knees. “Not sure.”

  I regarded him carefully. He wasn’t the same guy I’d first met at my house during my mother’s arrest, what felt like years ago. He didn’t even look the same. His green eyes weren’t as sharp as they had been, and he slouched as though he could barely hold up his shoulders. He was beaten, lost, and on his own. But despite that, he felt real, more real than I’d ever seen him.

  I didn’t know what that made us, but that didn’t scare me anymore.

  “Welcome to the other side,” I said.

  He looked up at me, over Chase’s still body, mouth twisting in a small smile. Before I could think about it, I smiled back.

  The plastic pillowcase cover beneath Chase’s head made a crinkling sound. He drew in a long, deep breath, blinking, and then turned his face to me. I waited out each torturous second as the confusion passed. There was much to tell him—about Jesse, about what I’d just heard coming from the radio—but we would talk about that later. For the first time in a long time, later felt like a real thing.

  His hand, still in mine, rose to my cheek, an IV tube trailing after it.

  “Welcome back,” I said. “We’re in a clinic. I’ll get the doctor.”

  Tucker jumped up. “I’ll go.” He rubbed his hands on his sides as if not sure what to do with them, and then turned and left the room. His gun was left on the orange chair.

  “I guess we made it.” Chase’s voice cracked, and he licked his chapped lips. “All of us.”

  Hearing him speak made my heart clench, and a small yes was all I could manage.

  His hand lowered down my neck, to the place on my collar where the shirt couldn’t cover the corner of white that stuck out from the V-neck. The heat of his palm pressed through the bandages, and I held it there, close to my heart.

  “How’d you get your scars?” he asked.

  The tears rose within me like a soft rain—quiet at first, dampening my face, making tracks down my chin to finally fall on my borrowed shirt. And then they came heavier, drenching my insides, muddying every memory into one painful pool and then finally washing me clean.

  He pulled me closer and I curled up beside him on the bed, careful to stay clear of his wounds. He stroked my hair and kissed my brow, and I promised myself that nothing could ever come between us again.

  A second later I heard the shot.

  I bolted from the bed, instinctively dropping low. Behind me, Chase was trying to push himself up. The monitor beeped faster, catching up to my own jagged pulse. As a commotion in the hall raised, I snatched Tucker’s gun and flattened myself against the wall just within the door. Ears ringing, I glanced around the corner.

  At first it looked as though Tucker was leaning against the wall, head drooped forward as if he was still nodding off, and for a split second I wondered if I’d made up the sound. But then Tucker’s hands, folded high on his chest, opened, and I saw then the dark red stains on his palms.

  I ran toward him, following his shocked gaze down the hall to where Wallace stood, a team of men and women crowded behind him. They stared at him, as if waiting for orders.

  Tucker fell forward, and his knuckles turned white as they gripped the metal bar against the wall behind him. I grabbed him just as he was sinking to the ground, the thin fabric of his borrowed scrubs ripping in my fists.

  Wallace walked toward us.

  “I should have listened to you from the beginning,” he said to me. “You told me he would turn us in. I didn’t listen.” There was a strange, absent quality to his voice, like all the life had been sucked out of him.

  “Tucker?” I whispered.

  I couldn’t hold his weight, and soon we were both on the ground. His head lay on my knees, his fingers scratched uselessly at his throat, as if an invisible hand were choking him.

  “Tucker,” I said again.

  He choked, sputtered, red blood brightening his lips. Then a shudder. Then a stillness, like a long sigh before falling asleep. When his eyes found mine I wasn’t sure what they saw, but he smiled, just a soft, subtle tilt of his lips.

  “Guess I was too late,” he said.

  And as the life left him, as his body went limp and his hands fell to the floor, I did what I never thought I’d do. I cried for him.

  The doctor awaited Wallace’s approval before tentatively approaching. He pressed two fingers against Tucker’s neck, just for a few seconds, then shook his head.

  I looked up at Wallace. “What have you done?”

  His brows furrowed in confusion, as if the answer should have been obvious.

  They took Tucker’s body to the back parking lot with the others who had died after reaching the clinic. Three had separated the area in two; on one side, the soldiers were thrown, their bodies discarded like sacks of garbage. On the other were the prisoners and members of Three who had fought to take down the Charlotte base. They were covered with sheets and laid side by side.

  I didn’t know what would happen to either side, but I made the freed prisoners carry Tucker’s body to the side with the rebels. I wiped his face clean and covered him with a sheet myself. It was the least I could do after all we’d been through.

  As I stood over him they brought out Dr. DeWitt, and laid him beside Tucker. One bad turned good, one good turned bad. In the end it didn’t matter. We were all the same.

  Chase and I stayed through the following night. As the hours passed, the clinic was flooded with rebels who’d survived the battle. The hall was soon overwhelmed with injured fighters, some badly burned, some with broken bones, many—too many—with gunshot wounds. The hospital staff ran from patient to patient, and for a while I helped where I could: passing out bandages, holding people still while the nurses and doctors stitched them up or made them comfortable enough to pass without pain, all the while feeling that aching pressure inside of me to move on.

  The doctor told us about an old woman who lived nearby who was friendly to the cause. Before dark on the second day, one of the orderlies helped me move Chase and three other injured rebels to her home, a nearby farm with a collection of hand-painted signs lining a privacy fence that stated: BEWARE OF DOG. For six nights we hid in her basement while Chase recovered. She brought us food and water, antibiotics the doctor could spare, and word on the resistance.

  At night we listened to Faye Brown’s reports.

  By the end of the first week, nine bases had been overrun by civilians. The soldiers that survived the riots had fled, were turned, or simply disapp
eared. And in every city where a base had fallen, hijacked Statute circulars were found, clutched in the fists of those who fought.

  The old president came down from his hiding place in the mountains and began making speeches—Faye even got a special interview with him. The FBR’s days were numbered, he said. It was time they laid down their weapons and accepted the inevitable. Democracy would return to the United States. The Statutes were history. We would rebuild again. All things that sounded good, but had yet to happen. He didn’t condone the violence, but didn’t lie about knowing Three, either. He sounded a little different on the radio than the man who’d showed me his son’s favorite books. Stronger maybe. Not like an old man.

  On the seventh day I was helping Chase into the passenger side of the MM van when a beat-up silver car pulled through the gate into the back of the farm. The man who unfolded himself from the driver’s seat looked to have aged ten years since the Charlotte base had fallen. His ratty hair was now clean, tied by a shoelace at the back of his neck, but more gray around the temples.

  “I heard you’re leaving without saying good-bye,” said Wallace, leaning against the side of the blue van. His fingers tapped a rhythm against the metal beside his hip.

  I wasn’t sure how he’d found us. In the past week I’d been careful not to use either of our names, nor give any information that might indicate who we were.

  “We’re leaving,” I confirmed.

  “Don’t suppose I can convince you to stay. There’s still a lot of work to be done.” He looked up to the sky, like someone might after feeling a raindrop.

  “We can’t stay,” I said. Chase’s hand slid into mine, a move Wallace noticed.

  “Yeah,” said Wallace. “Well, if you change your mind, you’ll always be welcome in my camp.”

  I almost asked where that would be, but guessed that he probably didn’t even know yet. He was the last remaining leader of Three, a soldier of the cause, something I now realized I might never truly understand. I did know this, though: the blood on his hands—Tucker’s blood, and Billy’s, too—would never wash away. He would carry it the rest of his days, and maybe for that reason alone he could never stop fighting. It was the only thing left that could make his actions make sense.

  I stepped toward him and shook his hand. He pulled me into a hug and I patted him awkwardly on the back.

  “Take my car,” he said gruffly, placing a tarnished silver key in the palm of my hand. He scratched the back of his neck, refusing to meet my gaze. “There’s two full cans of fuel in the back. Not much food, but enough water to get you through a couple of days at least. And there’s a map in the glove box. The border patrol in South Carolina has all been pulled in to support the existing bases. You should be able to get into the Red Zone without too much trouble, though I’d still stick to low-traffic routes.” He hesitated. “Consider it payback for kicking you out of the Wayland Inn. Not one of my brighter moves, I guess.”

  I blinked, unsure how to respond as he reached out his hand to take Chase’s.

  “Your uncle was a good man,” he said.

  Chase tilted his head. “You knew him?”

  “I knew him,” Wallace said with a smile. “I knew him a long time ago, before the War.” He looked like he might say more, but didn’t.

  There was still a lot I had to tell Chase about Jesse. We had a long drive ahead of us, miles and miles to talk.

  “What was he like back then?” he asked.

  “Young and stupid.” Wallace laughed. “The most reckless of the three of us. He’d start a fight, and I’d go in after him, and then Aiden had to bail us all out.”

  Chase glanced at me. “Aiden DeWitt?”

  I squeezed his hand.

  “If Jesse didn’t like something, he’d fix it. Fix the whole world if he could have. In the end, I guess he did. You should be proud of that, son.”

  I closed my eyes, thinking of the way he’d risen, broken and bloody, to stab the knife I’d passed him into the heart of the Chief of Reformation.

  “I am,” said Chase.

  Wallace scuffed his heel on the ground. “You remind me of him. Once you get your mind set on something, you take it to the very end.”

  My lips turned up in a smile for the first time in a week.

  “Good luck to you both,” said Wallace. “Maybe we’ll see each other again sometime.”

  But as he walked away, I knew we wouldn’t.

  EPILOGUE

  SUMMER in the south wasn’t as hot as I thought it would be. Each morning, the breeze came in off the ocean, and each afternoon the thunderclouds built overhead and cracked open for a short time before stretching thin and melting into the evening sky. Just before dark, the world seemed to bound back: the air smelled like fresh soil and the birds broke their silence—a last reminder before the dark of the life that surrounded us.

  But early morning was my favorite time. The quiet before the day, just after the rise of the sun. In worn-out sneakers, cutoff shorts, and one of Chase’s T-shirts, I walked down the beach, keeping to the crunchy sand left over from the high tide.

  The docks would be quiet today. Most people stayed at the compound—an old Air Force base that had steadily grown over the past months. The runways had been bombed during the War, but the rows of housing were still intact, and now served as an evacuation center for those still fleeing from the interior. Sanctuary, it was called. An entirely self-sufficient community, complete with its own hydraulic power station, water desalination plant, and school. More than a few Lost Boys went there.

  After the bases had fallen, the MM had destroyed all existing long-distance explosive devices. Uncertain who to trust within their ranks, they erred on the side of safety, assuring that their people, and ours, were no longer at threat of an aerial assault. In the last three months President Scarboro had received countless death threats and more than one attempt on his life. This, along with the death of his Chief of Reformation, had apparently been enough to force a treaty with Matthew Stark’s camp—at least that was what we heard on Faye Brown’s news report broadcasted nightly at Sanctuary.

  I would believe it when I saw it.

  It wasn’t long before I came to the docks. Along the bank opposite the clear blue water, a grove of Cyprus trees appeared beneath the high overarching palms. I walked beneath the heavy boughs, the sound of the ocean growing faint behind me. The air grew rich with a sweet, heady scent, and the thin branches that had fallen crackled beneath my feet.

  I made my way to the center tree, glancing beyond it, just for a minute, to where an old road broke off before bridging across the bay. Turning my attention back to the tree, I slid my hands around the smooth gray bark until I reached the indentations.

  LORI WHITMAN, it said. Already the wood had puckered and accepted its new tattoos. Looking up, I saw a new ribbon had been tied around the lowest branch, a token from the last visitor.

  “Hi, Mom,” I said quietly, letting the breeze blow through my hair. I didn’t feel her loss as sharply as I did before. The pain was still there, though more of a dull ache, a sadness.

  My fingers traced the letters, then came to rest on the silver ring with the small black stone hanging around my neck. My someday promise. Laying beside it, the Saint Michael’s medallion—for luck.

  I traveled to the next tree, tracing another name: Jesse Waite, and below it, three hash marks that Chase had carved there.

  I moved from tree to tree. Billy. Marco and Polo, back together on one stout branch. Lincoln and Riggins from Knoxville. A soldier named Harper in Chicago.

  Tucker Morris.

  I stopped there, as I always did, unsure what to feel. Maybe someday I would come to peace with the role he had played in my life. I might accept what he’d done and his twisted logic behind it. The anger and the pity and the questions would all die down, and I would know him as a boy who’d been hurt by his family, who’d found a new family in the FBR, and who’d done what he thought he had to do in order to survive.

>   Perhaps he’d been right when he’d said we weren’t that different.

  From behind came the low groan of a motor, and with one final good-bye, I turned and made my way toward the water. The sand gave way to a cracked concrete walkway, which rose above the lowering beach and stretched twenty feet out into the waves. In the distance, a boat approached, its silver hull gleaming in the sun. A smile tugged at my lips, and soon I was jogging toward it.

  He was standing at the front of the boat, his hair shaggy past his ears, his skin darker than I’d ever seen it. As the boat slowed and drew closer, he moved to the side and grabbed a pile of rope from the deck, flinging it across the divide to where I waited.

  “Take your time, why don’t you,” I said. It had only been four days since Chase had left, but might as well have been weeks.

  “You miss me?” A grin turned up the right side of his mouth, and as the engine went dead, he tied off his side of the rope using only his right hand.

  It had only been three months since the gunshot that had almost taken his life, and though the medic at Sanctuary had given him a clean bill of health, I still worried at the way he favored his left arm.

  I finished knotting the first rope to its anchor on the dock the way Sal, the carrier to Mexico, had taught me. From the back of the boat, a short, shirtless man hopped over the siding and finished the task in half the time it had taken us.

  “I missed Sal,” I said. The carrier grinned, dimples deep in his cheeks, and whistled my way.

  “Te amo,” he called, gripping his heart dramatically.

  “I see how it is,” said Chase, tying off another rope. My stomach did a small flip as the breeze flattened his damp shirt against his chest, revealing the ripples of muscle beneath.