Breaking Point (Article 5 #2)(6)
“Sometimes I come up here and watch them. I don’t know, I guess I come up here to feel sorry for myself.” He sighed. “I never knew how good I had it, back before all this. How easy it was to walk down the street without worrying someone might turn you in.”
“Yeah.” I kept my eyes on the cars.
“You know what I always realize?” he asked.
I shook my head.
“I feel sorrier for them.”
A siren cut through the air, drawing my attention to the alabaster fortress, crouching within its high stone walls twenty miles to the east. The FBR base.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“My house may not look like much, but it keeps my family safe. I’ve got food in my gut and a roof over my head.” He lifted his arms out before him, like he was holding something precious. “But more importantly, I’m free, Miller. All those poor folks who follow the rules are trapped in a prison of fear.”
“You’re not free,” I said, frustrated. “You’re trapped, just like they are. I don’t like it, but it’s the truth. The only way you’re really safe is if you’re compliant.”
But the words suddenly sounded hollow. How many hours had my mother and I spent applying for meal passes, doing paperwork to apply for the mortgage freeze? Bending over backward because every job in the city discriminated against my mother’s tarnished record? And what good did it do? They took her, they killed her, anyway.
“Safe,” Wallace repeated. “That’s the same thing Scarboro said when he became president.” When he sensed my concern he smiled. “Don’t worry, more than half the country believed him. It’s what people do when they’ve been through war.”
A memory filtered through from another time. My mother, balking at the television while the man on the screen promised safety through unity. Freedom through conformity. That traditional family values and a streamlined faith would restore our country to greatness.
I rubbed the heels of my hands into my forehead, feeling like I had so many times over the past month: too full of something, too empty to name it. Whatever small part of me believed that I still belonged in the same world I’d grown up in, the world with Beth and school and home, had been cut loose. I could never go back.
“What do I do now?” I asked feebly, twisting the gold ring—the fake wedding ring Chase had stolen for me—around my ring finger. I didn’t need to wear it if I never left, but I did anyway.
Wallace sighed. “You figure out what matters. And you do something about it.”
CHAPTER
2
THE field team returned to the Wayland Inn late in the afternoon. From the back stairway window I watched three men who’d left early yesterday in ragged street clothes emerge from the cab of a Horizons distribution truck in taupe, one-piece uniforms, complete with the Horizons logo spanning the widths of their shoulders, and efficiently unload boxes from the back. The engine never stopped running, and they drove away the instant the task was completed.
Cara, having stowed away in the back of the truck with the boxes, was the first to return to the fourth floor. She carried nothing, breezing in with a satisfied smirk, tugging the kinks out of her dyed black hair. I knew she kept it braided in town as an attempt to appear more conservative, but I doubted it worked; Cara could never, even in jeans and a men’s sweatshirt, be accused of looking plain. It didn’t take listening to the running commentary of thirty males to pick up on that.
She didn’t say hello, even though she’d clearly seen my wave. Instead, I was acknowledged with no more than an arched brow as she ducked into a room and left me standing, with my hand still awkwardly half-raised, in the hallway.
Several of the others had surfaced by that time and were making their way toward the stairs to help unload. I approached the surveillance room, noting the familiar stack of handheld radios and batteries strewn across the center table. Against the back wall were Billy’s patchwork computer and a black receiver board, yanked from the incinerator pile outside the base. Cara and Wallace stood beside them, speaking in hushed tones.
As her cool gaze found mine, I was reminded of our first moments within the resistance headquarters, when she’d recognized Chase and me by name. I knew it was because she listened to hacked MM radio signals religiously—at that point the MM had been tracking us for days already—but I couldn’t shake the feeling that she, and maybe Wallace, too, had somehow been waiting for us.
I hustled toward the supply room to inventory the new provisions.
*
SIXTEEN boxes of canned food. Two boxes of liquid soap. Washrags. Clean Towels. Flats of bottled water. Matches. All in all, it was a jackpot. Of course, Wallace would review what I’d inventoried, and determine what we would siphon back into the community, but for now the mood was celebratory.
I worked alone, comforted by the sounds of the others playing poker in the hall. It distracted me from the fact that Chase and Sean had yet to return.
“Did you see the present I brought you?” Cara swung into the room, an enormous bleached sweater hanging carelessly off one shoulder. Somehow, she even looked pretty in that.
“Not unless it was soap.” I smiled, trying not to sound as guarded as I felt. For weeks I’d been playing nice, attempting to make an ally of the only other girl here, but her mood swings didn’t make it easy. She rolled her eyes and tipped a stack of smaller boxes so that they spilled out over the floor.