Viral Nation (8 page)

“Part of being at the Academy is following direction.”

“You don’t understand—”

Kingston closed her folder. “I’m afraid the Reno Academy might not be the best place for you after all, Miss Donovan.”

“No. Wait, no. I already got my letter.” Why hadn’t she brought it? “You wrote me a note about my scores.”

“Sometimes someone looks like a perfect candidate on paper, but in person they just—”

Clover kept from crying by sheer force of will. “You can’t do this.”

“You’re already having problems with other students. And if you can’t function without that animal—”

“He’s a service dog.”

“Please, let’s not have a scene.”

Not have a scene? Was he expecting her to just lie back and let him…“Steal my education. That’s what you want me to let you do?”

“No one is stealing anything from you. Please, calm down.”

“I’m calm!” She was sitting, wasn’t she? She hadn’t moved.

“I really must insist that you lower your voice.”

“I’m not yelling.”

“
When
you are calm, I would like to talk to you about your options.”

She threw her hands up and the end of Mango’s lead landed in her lap. She’d been clutching it so hard that the leather left an itchy impression across her palm. “I’m calm, Mr. Kingston.”

Kingston looked over her shoulder at the door, like he thought he might need to call the old comb-over guy for backup. Clover waited to hear what he had to say. Not that it would matter. He couldn’t take back her acceptance.

“My decision is final,” he said, like he’d read her mind. He looked to her like he might have a heart attack any minute.

“Are you okay?”

He sat back in his chair and wiped his forehead again. “What? Yes, I’m fine.”

“Because you look a little sick.” Clover leaned forward and peered at him. “Do you always sweat that much?”

“Really, Miss Donovan. I’m perfectly fine.” Kingston opened a desk drawer and pulled out another folder. This one was deep blue with white piping around the edges. The Company colors. “Your exam scores were extraordinary, as I told you.”

“But you don’t want me here.”

“Getting along socially is an important part of the Academy experience. Autistics have a history of difficulty fitting in and being successful.”

“Then maybe you need to change the way things are done here. Starting with not letting in cheating—”

Kingston inhaled, slowly, through his nose. His grip on the blue and white folder bent the edges. “I would like you to go see Mr. Langston Bennett this afternoon.”

“Who is Mr. Langston Bennett?”

“You can find him at the Waverly-Stead building. He’ll make you aware of the situation when you arrive.”

“You’re sending me to the Company? Now?”

Kingston darted his shifty gaze around the room, landing on the closed door more than once. Clover looked back there, too, but didn’t see what he found so interesting. “The Company has laxer rules than the Academy, Miss Donovan. They are better equipped to handle differences.”

Differences. “But I’m not being discriminated against?”

“You’re being offered an opportunity that, I promise you, nearly every student in that ballroom would jump at.”

“So offer it to Heather Sweeney. That way I won’t have to room with her.”

“You’re making this difficult.”

He was taking away her education. Was she supposed to make it easy? “Do I have a choice?”

“If you don’t attend training, you have to work, Miss Donovan. That’s how we maintain order in our city. And people have an obligation to do the work they are best suited for.”

“Then let me come to school. I’ll do my best to get along with Heather, as long as she leaves me alone and I don’t have to share a room with her. And I can have Mango with me.”

Kingston took an envelope from the folder. The same kind of rich envelope her acceptance letter had come in. He reached across his desk to hand it to her. “This is for the best.”

“The best for who?” The envelope had
Langston Bennett
written across the front.

“The best for all concerned, Miss Donovan.”

“I don’t want to do this.”

Kingston pushed his hair back and settled his hyperactive eyes on the door for a moment before he looked at her. “Your brother is a day laborer on the cantaloupe farm, isn’t he?”

Clover nodded slowly.

“I’m sure you could go pick with him. Every job’s important.”

Clover took the letter and barely resisted the urge to crumple it into a ball and bounce it off Kingston’s sweaty forehead. “This isn’t fair.”

“Life isn’t fair, Miss Donovan. Ask your brother. West Donovan scored nearly as well as you did on his exams.”

“That isn’t true. He didn’t pass.”

Kingston looked at her another long moment, then reached under his desk with one hand. Within seconds, the office door opened and the man with the comb-over was standing there. “Ms. Donovan needs an escort to the Company building.”

“I don’t need an escort,” she said. The man who’d walked her into Kingston’s office had seemed kind of feeble. Now his eyes had gone steely and his jaw was set in a hard line. Clover shrank back from him a little bit.

“I’m glad to hear that.” Kingston reached to shake her hand. She pulled away from the visibly moist palm and walked out of his office, Mango following at her side. “You’re expected within the hour.”

Clover weighed her options.

She could walk the remaining mile or so down Virginia Street to the Waverly-Stead building in the toe-pinching torture shoes. Or she could take them off and walk barefoot, the soles of her feet touching God only knew what as the concrete scrubbed against her skin.

She left her shoes on and promised herself she was setting them on fire when she got home. Her sneakers went everywhere with her from now on.

Angry
wouldn’t cover West’s reaction when he found out she went to the Company alone. Or that she’d been sent there at all. Not voluntarily, either, even though Kingston let her walk out by herself.

She should go home and wait to talk to West, but she didn’t want to. He’d go all big brother on the situation. He’d insist on confronting Kingston, for one thing. And Clover wasn’t sure she wanted that.

Now that she’d caught her breath, she wasn’t sure being sent to
the Company was so bad. She hadn’t anticipated the Academy would be a replay of primary school. Besides, if she was expected within the hour, then she was supposed to go without her brother, who still had three more hours of work.

In the end she decided it would be best to have all the information before she talked to West. And to follow the rules. Anyway, she was annoyed with her brother and embarrassed that it never even crossed her mind to question his test scores. She needed time to figure this all out before she talked to him.

The one thing she did know was that whoever Langston Bennett was, he’d better let her keep her dog with her. Her father gave Mango to her when she was eleven. He’d been trained at the prison. It helped for the detainees to have worthwhile work, her father said. It gave them a purpose and helped them remember how to be good citizens.

She wasn’t going to do this without her dog.

Mango stopped when Clover did, at the front door to the Waverly-Stead building. Doors weren’t exactly Clover’s thing. Especially if she didn’t know what was on the other side. She closed her eyes and steeled herself against the possibility that it would be loud in there, or that it might smell bad. Or have the same flickering, garish overhead lights as the primary school building.

Thousands of people worked for the Company. If a lot of them were on the other side of this door, it was going to be bad. Very bad. Clover already felt the crush of them like a tightness in her chest that kept her lungs from fully expanding.

She pushed the door open, slowly, and inhaled when she saw a softly lit room with a very tall ceiling. Two women and a man sat together in plush chairs off to one side of the cavernous lobby, talking quietly to each other. Otherwise, the only sounds as she entered were her leather-soled shoes and Mango’s toes clicking on the marble floor as they approached the big receptionist desk.

The receptionist was maybe as old as West and had dark hair with a bleached streak in the front. White like Mrs. Finch’s. She was considerably prettier than Mrs. Finch, though. Mostly because she was so much younger and young people were usually considered prettier just by virtue of their youth. Mrs. Finch might have been as pretty as she was when she was twenty. In fact, for an old lady, before her stroke Mrs. Finch wasn’t bad-looking. After her stroke, Mrs. Finch’s eyes—

The receptionist was staring at Clover’s chest. When Clover looked down, she saw the sticky chocolate-and-cherry stain and covered it with her hand. “Heather Sweeney did that,” she said.

The receptionist raised her eyebrows delicately. “May I help you?”

“Yes, you may help me.”

There was a moment of silence, and then, “
How
may I help you?”

Clover cleared her throat and held up the envelope Kingston had given her. “I have this letter.”

She pulled the envelope back before it could be taken from her. The girl tilted her head and read the name on the envelope without reaching for it again. “Mr. Bennett. Is he expecting you?”

What if he wasn’t? She wouldn’t have the Academy or the Company, then. “I think he is.”

“Okay. Well, why don’t I check?”

She smiled, but her face looked frozen that way, so Clover wasn’t sure whether she would call Bennett or security.

Turned out she didn’t say anything into the phone except for “Yes, sir,” twice, before she hung up.

“Mr. Bennett will meet you at the elevator bank to the left.” She pointed at Mango with her chin. “He said to keep the leash on the dog, okay?”

Clover tightened her hold on the envelope as she turned to her left, toward a wall of brass double doors. She’d read about elevators,
and West told her that the Bazaar had some and had told her about riding them, but she’d never even seen one in person before. She looked back down the hall at the receptionist, who waggled her fingers before turning her attention back to her computer.

Clover watched a digital counter above the elevator door start at eighteen and count down to one, her hands clenching and unclenching at her sides. Finally, one of the sets of double doors opened and a tall man in navy blue pinstriped slacks and a white button-up shirt stepped out.

Langston Bennett was about the same age as Clover’s father. Maybe forty, then. His hair was dark on top, going gray on the sides, and cut very short. His most distinctive feature, though, was a series of deep virus scars on either side of his face. Much worse than West’s, or any others that Clover had seen. She couldn’t imagine the kind of sores that left scars like that.

His eyes drifted to her stained dress, but he didn’t say anything about it. “You must be Miss Donovan.”

His voice ricocheted down the cold, marble hallway. Clover took a step back from it. Mango picked up on her anxiety and pressed against her legs. The pressure helped. The man came toward her and Clover forced a breath through her nose.

“Miss Donovan?” He reached for her, and she stepped back again.

“Yes,” she said. This had to be Langston Bennett. And he was looking at her like she was crazy. “It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Bennett.”

His tight posture relaxed when she said his name. Her brain insisted that she step closer and offer to shake his hand, but her body would not obey. He closed the gap instead and put a hand on her shoulder, to turn her toward the elevator. She barely held back the instinct to yank away from him.

“Right this way,” he said, sweeping his other hand toward the open elevator door.

Clover exhaled slowly through her nose and peered through the open doors. So, an elevator was a box swinging by cables over dead air. So what? She could do this.

“How high are we going?” she asked, after Bennett was in the elevator, while she still stood outside it.

Bennett put a hand out to stop the door from closing and leaving her behind. “What’s that?”

“Which floor is your office on?”

“The eighteenth floor,” Bennett said. “You can see the whole city from my window. Even beyond the wall.”

Eighteen floors. At twelve feet a floor, that was more than two hundred feet above ground level. She stepped into the box.

The elevator wasn’t as bad as she was afraid it would be. The car was big enough to hold fifteen or twenty people. The walls were mirrored, even on the backs of the doors. Dozens of Clovers in yellow dresses with gory red stains and Langston Bennetts in pinstripes stood in infinite rows, riding more than two hundred feet up a narrow shaft, pulled by cables.

What were the chances that the virus had spared someone properly trained to maintain the intricate system of pulleys and brakes that kept them from plummeting to their deaths?

The red digital numbers above the panel of buttons registered each floor. It took less than a minute to reach eighteen. And then the door opened again and it was over. Mango walked beside her as she followed Bennett into a long, silent hallway.

She’d never been higher up than the third floor of the primary school building. Until she stood on solid ground, Clover didn’t realize that she expected to feel a swaying or some kind of instability at this elevation.

On either side of the hallway, large windows looked into offices that in another lifetime had been hotel rooms. The hallway was lit
from above and nearly all the offices had lamps and overhead lights blazing.

“You use a lot of energy in this place,” she said. She and West got only two hours a day. And even that was just enough to run the water heater and a couple of lamps.