Viral Nation (21 page)

“Yeah. But he’s not just going to let his little girl go missing forever.”

“How do you live here? What about food? Water? How do you—” She glanced toward the bathroom.

Jude ran an index finger over the scar on his face. “Do you remember how I told you I got this?”

“Yes,” she said.

“We do what we have to. So far, we haven’t had to do anything that comes close to being as bad as living in Foster City.”

“But
how
can you live like this?”

“We manage.”

Clover pulled her pack to her and dug around until she found the zine, opened it to the back page, and showed him the note that told her to come here. “Tell me the truth, Jude. Would you have written this if it weren’t true?”

He took the zine from her. “I can’t imagine why I would do this at all.”

“Because we’re friends, and you know I’ll be alone at the pickup box. In two years you know, because I’m telling you now.” She pulled her van key on its silver ring from her bag as well, and swung it in front of him. “You have this with you. How do you think you got it?”

“Friends?” He tilted his head and looked at her so frankly that she shifted her gaze to over his left shoulder. “Sounds like we’re more than friends.”

She didn’t know what to say to that. Her hands flapped against her upper thighs while she tried to figure it out.

Jude sat on the edge of the mattress. “We all work. That’s how we do it. Every day, we work. You can’t just come here and take our rations and use our—”

“We have a house full of things that might be useful here.”

“Will it be hard to get back into your house?”

She couldn’t lie. Not now. He’d know it in a heartbeat, and doing this right was important. Maybe the most important thing she’d ever done. “It might be, but I think it can be done.”

Jude looked at her another minute, then stood and went to the door to let West and Bridget back in.

“You can stay, at least for now.” Jude glanced at Bridget. “At least until we get the whole story.”

“Thank you,” Clover said. She gave West a hard look, and he echoed her thanks.

“You can stay as far as I’m concerned, anyway. I can’t promise that the others will give you a pass,” Jude said. “But they’ll be happy for whatever rations you got at your house, if they get past the rest of your trash. You can’t convince them, you have to go. That’s the rule.”

West swung his gaze back to Clover. “Those rations are all we have.”

“We share here,” Jude said. “If you aren’t down with that, you can go now and save us all some trouble.”

West pinched his lips together into a thin, bloodless line. “Fine,” he finally said.

“Dinner’s in an hour. You can meet everyone then.”

Everyone
turned out to be the twins; another girl, Emmy,
who looked no older than seven or eight; her older brother, Phire, who was maybe twelve or thirteen; and Christopher, who looked old enough to be out of Foster City without having to run away.

Faced with them, Clover guessed it made sense that there were homeless children, refugees from Foster City, in Reno. Probably even more than just this half dozen. But it had never occurred to her before. She’d read books about runaways, about children living on the streets back in a time when the streets were a lot scarier than they are now. When people were allowed out at night, when the bad guys weren’t executed before their crimes could be committed.

She looked at Jude, her eyes tracing his scar. Except, it turned out, not all the bad guys were executed. And Foster City kids obviously weren’t kept track of as closely as kids from the neighborhoods, like Clover, West, and Bridget.

“How do you get your doses?” Clover pointed at Christopher. “Where do you work? How do you get your rations?”

“Clover.” West said her name under his breath. She was all too familiar with his tone.

“What? He looks old enough to work.”

West shook his head once, and she closed her mouth. But God, she wanted to know. How did Jude pass the exams with no one to teach him? How did they eat? None of them were old enough to work, except maybe Christopher, and he might or might not be old enough to get into the Bazaar to collect his own rations. Jude was sixteen like Clover—old enough to work, but he was going into the Academy instead. He was two years from being able to live, legally, without a guardian or to get into the Bazaar to pick up his own rations.

Clover and Bridget sat on either side of West at a long table in what Jude called the boiler room. Christopher sat in a chair near the open window so that he could hear and join in the conversation while keeping watch for anyone coming into the courtyard. He was a tall, broad-shouldered black boy with a lopsided smile and soft voice. He walked with a limp. Like half of his body was an inch or two shorter than the other half.

“I work, my foster father gets my rations,” Christopher said. “Would do it if the other kids got my share, but they don’t even get all of their own.”

“You don’t have to explain yourself to her.” Geena didn’t glance toward them. Her focus stayed tight on Jude. “We’re supposed to take in hoodies, right? Now we’re just hooking them in off the damn street.”

Geena and Marta both looked like they’d done everything possible to avoid looking like girls. Anything soft or pretty was hidden or destroyed. Their chopped hair and hard, black make-up around their brown eyes were the most obvious examples. They wore oversized T-shirts and baggy pants that looked like they’d never been washed.

Geena had a crude metal ring looped through the left side of her bottom lip and Marta had a similar one through her right nostril, providing an easy way to tell them apart. Clover had a hard time not staring.

“They’re here,” Jude said. “There isn’t a lot we can do about that now.”

“He got a point.” Christopher kept his eyes on the window as he talked. “We keep them here, we know they don’t go to the guard.”

West made a dismissive sound but didn’t say anything. There was a difference between wanting to stay somewhere safe and being unable to leave that place when they were ready.

“Makes no sense they’re here at all,” Geena said. “I vote no. We ain’t got enough to worry about?”

Clover pointed at Jude. “He invited us.”

“Not exactly,” Jude said when all of the Foster City kids turned their eyes to him.

“Yes, exactly.” She pulled the zine out of her back pocket and put it on the table in front of Geena, who didn’t even look down
at it. Jude took the zine and read out loud the invitation to come to the Dinosaur’s fifteenth floor.

“I carried in the hoodies,” Jude said when he was done reading.

West pushed his chair back from the table, just a little. “We’re here. I’m not willing to die, or let Bridget die, for your convenience. So we need to figure out what to do about it.”

“What you’re willing or not willing to do isn’t our concern,” Jude said.

“It is now.”

“Like hell,” Geena said.

“You should read the zine.” Clover pushed the little book closer to Geena, who still didn’t look down at it, and then it hit Clover. “You can’t read.”

“Clover,” West warned quietly when Geena’s glare turned colder.

Jude picked up the zine and flipped through it. The soft pages made a
thwap, thwap
sound as they slapped together.

“Jesus, Geena,” he muttered under his breath. “This article says the dope’s a crock.”

“Yeah,” the girl shot back. “So that proves they’re all crazy, yeah? Dope’s a crock. Whatever.”

“You wrote it.”

Her eyes went wide for a moment, and then she shrugged and closed down again. “Who says she didn’t make it up herself?”

“Your name’s on it. You meet her before this morning?”

“What does that mean, dope’s a crock? Don’t even make sense.”

“Says the suppressant doesn’t suppress anything,” Jude said. “That we were all cured and protected with the first dose.”

That silenced the room for a few heartbeats, and then everyone spoke at once. Clover covered her ears with her hands. She leaned back against her chair, then bent forward closer to the table, back and forth as the voices rose around her.

“The Dinosaur is big enough to house every kid in Reno,” West
said. “What are there, a thousand rooms in this place? More? How many can the six of you use, anyway? We won’t be a problem for you.”

“You think it’s about space?” Jude asked. “You go live in Foster City, and come back to talk about space.”

“What’s wrong with his sister?” Emmy asked, pointing at Clover, who had started to hum out loud, despite her efforts not to.

“I don’t know,” Phire said. “She’s some kind of freak.”

“That’s enough,” Jude said.

“We’re all freaks!” Clover stood up and tore the zine out of Jude’s grip. “It says
Freaks for Freedom
. Freaks! That’s us.”

West put a hand out and stopped Jude from touching her. Every inch of her skin felt pulled tight, like it might pop at any minute.

“Who you calling a freak?” Geena said.

“You.” Bridget waved Geena off when the other girl started to deny it. “Oh, yes you are. Don’t you know that no one is supposed to live like this? That’s the whole point of…well, of everything.”

“Bridget’s right.” Jude put a hand on Marta’s shoulder. “You think the hoodies know what happens to us? We’re the Company’s dirty little secret.”

Clover desperately tried not to lose the death grip she had on her behavior. Pacing would help. Rocking. Humming to drown the others out. She covered her ears again and repeated
calm, calm, calm
in her head.

It worked. Maybe not the way she wanted it to, but the room went quiet. Clover felt them stare at her but couldn’t stop herself from humming under her breath as she tried to bring herself all the way down. Mango pressed his body against her legs, lending her the pressure that helped her focus. She finally sat back in her chair and let Mango put his head in her lap.

“She calls
us
freaks?” Geena said. “Damn.”

“We go to the bar in the morning,” Jude told Clover
and West after the meeting ended with the somewhat grudging consensus that they could stay. For now. “Early, when we can get lost in the crowd. We leave the Dinosaur as a group, but we don’t go in all at once; we take it in pairs.”

“I go in the morning, too,” Bridget said. “With my dad before school.”

Clover sat on the floor in Jude’s room. Everyone else had left.

“Maybe it would be safer if we were all on the same schedule,” West said.

Jude shook his head. “You ain’t going to be here long enough to adjust.”

“I’d rather just stay on the same schedule I’ve always been on,” Clover said. She felt like someone had tossed up all the parts of her life and let them come crashing down in a chaotic mess. Why couldn’t she hold on to this one thing?

“The less often someone leaves the Dinosaur, the safer we are,” Jude said.

“How have they not caught you already?” The harder Clover thought about it, the less reasonable it seemed that there was a whole group of unaccounted-for kids running around outside their placement in Foster City.

“We aren’t watched as closely as you. We don’t count as much,” Jude said.

“You can keep your regular time for now, Clover,” West said.

“You mean
we
can.”

West looked pale. A little sick, even. “I can’t. I shouldn’t have gone tonight.”

“Well, you have to be dosed.” Bridget looked around the room for some support.

Clover was only too happy to give it. “She’s right, West. You can’t just not get dosed.”

“I’ll be okay.” West picked up the zine with his free hand and flipped to an article about the antibiotic qualities of honey that had his name on it. “This says so.”

“That girl can’t even read,” Bridget said. “How do you know that article—any of those articles—even mean anything?”

West flipped the zine to the article Geena had written and read out loud. “‘The suppressant’s only purpose is to let a few people control the rest of us.’”

“She can barely speak English. You can’t do this!”

West continued. “‘The Company is keeping us addicted.’ We have no idea if I’ll actually get sick.”

Bridget stood. “If your big plan is to make me watch you kill yourself, I want to go home. Right now.”

She went to the door, twisting away when West reached for her.

“Maybe we should let her go home,” Jude said.

West was gone then, too, without a word.

Clover hugged her knees to her chest and rocked. Not much,
just enough to keep hold of herself. Jude moved to the seat West had left, closer to Clover, and picked up the zine. “I don’t blame her for being upset. It’s hard to believe this is true. I mean, Bridget’s right. Geena can’t even read.”

It had occurred to Clover that the future Jude, knowing that she would respond to his friendship, might be setting them up. He might want her brother dead for some reason that he didn’t even know right now. “You wouldn’t make this up, would you?”