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 teeth 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.