We need each other. All of us—we need each other.
We don’t have a person to waste.
—BILL CLINTON, “A PLACE CALLED HOPE,” JULY 16, 1992
While the others worked to prepare Virginia City, Clover had a girl named Cassidy and her sister Helena to help work on the layout and printing of two hundred and fifty copies of Freaks for Freedom.
She’d gone to school with Cassidy, but they weren’t friends. Something had happened to put the sisters in Foster City.
“Is it true that your dad’s an executioner?” Helena asked while they used huge tweezers to set the letters on plates.
“Yes.” It wasn’t a secret. It kind of surprised Clover that no one else had talked to her about her dad and what he did in the city. “Why?”
“Never mind,” Cassidy said. “It doesn’t matter.”
“It does matter.” Helena didn’t look up from her plate.
“They got it right in the end.” Cassidy was separating letters out into little cups, one for each upper- and lowercase letter and one for each piece of punctuation.
“What are you talking about?” Clover asked.
Before either girl could answer, Jude came into the room and handed Clover a piece of paper with her brother’s messy handwriting on it. “West sent me with this.”
It was a new front page. She and West had gone back and forth about putting one into the zine, talking about Virginia City and what they were doing here.
On the one hand, they needed to set up a central location. A place where the rebels spread across the country could gather, if and when it came to it. On the other hand, if the zine got into the wrong hands, Bennett would be the one to show up. Clover took the paper and went with Jude into the glass-walled room that held the press itself. Cassidy watched her close the door, but didn’t say anything.
“What if we tell them, separately,” Clover said to Jude. They were sitting in the print shop, which was really just a section of a bigger room, encased in glass to keep the noise down. “Word of mouth, you know?”
“We have to be careful,” Jude said. Clover was pretty sure Jude still wasn’t totally on board with passing the zine out to Freaks in other places, but he was busy setting type anyway. “These people—we can’t forget that instigating a rebellion is dangerous.”
“I’m not an instigator,” Clover said. “They’ve been doing this longer than we have.”
Jude didn’t say anything else. His face was pale, though. She reached a hand up and touched the scar on his left cheek. He startled, then held still and let her. He’d carry the memory of his time in Foster City with him for the rest of his life, right on his face. He tipped his head a little, so that his cheek was against her palm.
“Jude?” They both looked up at Tim, who banged a fist on the glass wall. “Jude, West is looking for you. Clover, too.”
Jude stepped away from Clover, and she followed him to the hallway.
Tim looked agitated. Clover was suddenly not sure they’d be able to hear the bell from inside the glass room. Had it rung? “What’s wrong?”
He just said, “Come on!” Tim was already at the door to the classroom. “Hurry!”
Jude led the way down the wide staircase, and Clover followed with Cassidy and Helena on her heels. Where was Mango? Had someone been hurt? Maybe the lookout had seen a car. She hurried, passing Jude, and threw her weight into opening the schoolhouse’s heavy front door.
West, James, Leanne, Christopher, and Marta were all there in the street in front of the building, along with half a dozen of the new kids.
It took a minute for Clover to register what she was seeing. There were two small goats with ropes around their necks. Both were female, with their udders full.
“You caught them!” Clover went down the stairs with Jude right behind her. Mango came up to meet her and she petted his head. Just like at the ranch, she didn’t need him as much here as she did when she went to school in the city. He could be more of a regular dog. “I can’t believe it.”
“We’re still working on gathering up their babies,” Marta said. “We’re going to have milk and cheese again. We’re going to be fine.”
Before she even had her sentence out, Clover noticed two boys tearing up the road from the Carson City side on bicycles. She placed them as David, Jude’s friend from the Dinosaur, and a boy she barely knew named Eric. They stood on the pedals of their bikes, fighting to get uphill.
“West,” she said, then again, louder when he didn’t look at her. “West!”
All hell broke loose. She saw it in snips, like still frames from a movie. David yelling something. Then Jude pulling her arm, making her go back into the building. Marta yanking the goats by their ropes up the stairs. Phire tugging on the wrist-thick rope that hung from the bell tower to the front hall. The bell rang and sound came back all at once. She covered her ears with her hands. “Oh God, oh my God, what—”
Jude pushed her into the first-floor classroom museum, the one with the desks still in it. The room they used for meetings. “Stay here.”
Clover yanked away from him. “What’s going on?”
“They saw a car coming up from Carson.”
More people came into the room. Bethany was there, with the little kids, putting each one under a desk, helping them to curl into a ball, reminding them to be quiet. Marta thrust the goats’ ropes into Clover’s hand and was gone again.
Jude was putting her into hiding with the little kids. She pushed past him, toward the door, but the goats got stubborn and wouldn’t move. “Where’s Mango? Mango should be in here.”
Phire came in then, with Emmy by the arm, and grabbed the goats’ ropes from Clover. Mango nipped at their heels but came when she called him.
“There he is,” Jude said. “Get under a desk. Be quiet. Stay here. I’ll be right back.”
“Are you crazy?” Clover went back to the lobby and headed for the wide staircase. “Someone needs to look out. Did David and Eric light the fires? How about on the north side, just in case? We—”
“Fine.” Jude came up the stairs, grabbed her arm, and pulled her the rest of the way to the second floor, then around the corner and up to the third. He stopped at the bottom of the staircase heading to the attic. “You’re the lookout. Get up to the attic. I’ll be back in a few minutes. You stay there, do you hear me? Whatever you see, you stay there.”
“What good is a lookout that doesn’t do anything when they see something?”
Jude left without answering. Mango stayed with her, pushing against her leg, shaking almost as hard as she was.
“Goddamn it.” Clover went up the stairs. Someone had removed the shutters from one of the attic windows and moved away the boxes and chairs, leaving a space for Clover to stand, watching the street below.
Smoke billowed from the south, close, because the schoolhouse was on the south end of Virginia City. They’d moved two cars across the road, and someone had lit them on fire. Anxiety tightened in Clover’s stomach. If the flames lit the brush or the trees, if the fire got out of their control—
Clover paced away from the window and nearly tripped over Mango. Was everyone in the schoolhouse? Was someone counting heads? She couldn’t just sit there, waiting. She felt like her heart was going to explode.
She moved around the dog, who followed on her heels, and stepped toward the staircase. Before she got far, though, Leanne was there. Her steps were loud, off balance. She came all the way to Clover, took her arm, and steered her back to the window.
“Have you seen anything yet?” she asked.
“Fire,” Clover said, pointing toward the smoke. “Someone lit it. I don’t know what we’re going to do if it spreads.”
“No, I saw the way it was laid. They cleared a circle around it. . . .” Leanne went stiff next to Clover. “Oh, God, here we go.”
Clover pushed closer to the window, trying to see out of it without touching Leanne. She finally saw what Leanne had seen. A car came from the direction of the city. The wrong direction. Jude said the boys saw a car coming from the south. Why hadn’t the other fire been set?
“It came from the wrong direction,” Clover said. “Why did it come from the wrong direction?”
Leanne didn’t answer right away. She took Clover’s arm and didn’t let go when Clover stiffened, not even when she tried to pull away. The car drove up Main Street, slowly, and passed by the school without stopping.
There was nowhere for them to go. Clover had a mental image of the fire. She knew what it looked like, crossing the road, blocking the way out of Virginia City. The car would have to turn around and come back.
Clover stood there, still, some internal clock ticking the minutes. Five, ten, fifteen. Too long. They should have been turned back from the fire by now.
“Where are they?” Clover left the window. “I’m going downstairs.”
“West wants you up here,” Leanne said without looking away from the window.
“I don’t care what West wants. I can’t just sit here!”
Leanne finally looked at her. “Jesus, Clover. We have to do this. Someone has to do it.”
“You do it.” Clover turned back to the stairs, and almost tripped over Mango again. “Goddamn it!”
Untangling herself gave Leanne time to say, “Listen to me. That car is going to reach the fire and have to turn back. If they stop to look in the buildings, we need to ring the bell. Isaiah and your dad and Christopher and West need to know.”
“Where are they?”
“Out there! We have to watch.”
“Fine.” When Leanne didn’t turn back to the window, Clover walked there herself. Twenty minutes, the clock in her head said. When it reached twenty-three, which might as easily have been thirteen or thirty-three, the car came back. It drove past the schoolhouse and stopped across the street from the restaurant. Four men in Company guard uniforms got out of the car. It occurred to Clover that one or two of them might have been the people that the lookouts had seen coming from Carson City.
Clover’s stomach was in sick knots. It would be obvious, once the guards walked into the restaurant, that someone had been in there. Food was stored, tools were lined up. The dust of sixteen years had been cleaned away.
“Shit,” Leanne said under her breath.
“Should I ring the bell?”
“Not yet. Maybe it’ll be okay.”
“Where’s my brother?”
“I’m not sure.”
Clover watched another minute, glued to what she was seeing. Leanne grabbed her arm again and pulled her attention back to the attic. She yanked away, then, and moved toward the stairs. “I have to find my brother.”
She had no idea where West was, but she thought starting in the classroom museum, where Bethany had the younger kids under the desks, seemed like a good bet. If he was in the schoolhouse at all. She kept her head down and took the stairs quickly, suddenly wanting to see that West was safe.
“Clover!”
She came up short and missed her next step. Her hand was already on the railing, which made her fall backward, sitting hard on the step behind her, rather than forward. “God, Jude.”
He was at her side, pulling her up. “Are you okay? What did you see?”
“The car went through town, then it must have turned around at the fire. They came back. They went into the restaurant. Where’s West?”
“I don’t know.”
“What do you mean, you don’t know?” Clover started down the stairs again. “He’s probably with Bethany in the classroom.”
“No.” Jude got ahead of her, stopped her without touching her. “He’s not here. He went with Isaiah. They—”
Clover’s knees were weak. “Oh. Oh my God, Jude. Are they in the restaurant?”
“I think West and Isaiah are probably at the Bucket of Blood.”
West and Isaiah. “Where’s my dad?”
Jude put his arm around her. “Come on. Clover, let’s go back upstairs. I’ll—”
She pushed past him, down the stairs. She thought about ringing the bell, to pull the men from the city away from the restaurant before they walked into it. Jude must have seen her look toward the rope because he threw himself between her and it. “Clover, slow down. Think! If you ring that bell, you’re going to bring those men into this building. Right here, with all of these little kids.”
“How could we be so stupid?” She passed in front of the door, trying to figure out what to do. “What if my dad is in that restaurant? Where’s Christopher? And Marta, where’s Marta?”
Jude started to say something, but Clover couldn’t hear. She couldn’t see. “I can stop them. They won’t hurt me,” she said. “They’re looking for me.”
“Clover, don’t even think about it.”She opened the door and went outside, onto the wide front porch. A gunshot rang out. Just one, but it froze her in place, long enough for Jude to come stand beside her and whisper, “Jesus.”
“Oh, God. My dad.”
Jude grabbed her arm before she could even make it down one step. His grip was hard enough to bruise, and the abrupt stop made her cry out. Mango barked from inside the building.
“No.” Jude yanked her, dragging her toward the door. She struggled, then went limp. He sat with her. “Clover, don’t do this. Don’t—please, please, we need to get inside.”
Her brain wouldn’t cooperate. It focused on the wrong things. On Mango barking, on Jude’s iron grip on her arm, on the cold concrete under her, on the way the wind felt wrong, blowing directly into her face.
She looked toward the restaurant, where the shot came from. Just one. She rocked, her hip banging into him over and over. Bang, one, two, bang, one, two. The rhythm helped. The door opened and uniformed men came out. Jude made a desperate noise next to her, but she couldn’t move. Bang, one, two, bang, one, two.
She counted them as they came out. “Three.”
“Clover,” Jude whispered in her ear. “Jesus, Clover, get up.”
“There are three. That’s not enough—”
More gunshots, from the north side of town, and screaming. Clover threw her hands over her ears and fought hard to stay aware, to not let herself dive down into the place where the noise would go away. Jude stood up and put his arms under hers, his weight into pulling her back into the building. He couldn’t lift her, not from his position. And then she knew what to do.
“No, wait. Jude, let go!” He did, and she stood up. “We need to make some noise. Something that sounds like gunshots—”
Once she was standing, he had leverage to get her inside the building, and he used it. When she tried to resist, he put his shoulder against her and hoisted her onto it. It was only six or seven steps to the door, and she didn’t have time to react enough to keep him from bringing her in.
“Put me down!” She kicked, finally, but it was too late. He dumped her back to the ground. “You—you don’t do that. Ever!”
“I’m going to carry you into the museum if you don’t go on your own. And I’ll tie you under a—”
“Listen to me!”
The door to the museum opened, and Marta was there, wide-eyed, panicked. She ran to the door, then stopped and turned back to them. “We heard shots.”
“We need to make some noise,” Clover said. Having a plan centered her enough to remember that West wasn’t in the restaurant. West was shooting from the north. Making noise. She was sure of it. “Come on, help me.”
They didn’t have time to go searching for something to make noise with. It had to be something here. Something fast.
“The pots and pans,” Marta said.
They’d gathered things from the basement kitchen to take to the restaurant, but they were still in boxes in the schoolhouse lobby. Jude and Marta dragged them into the classroom and passed them out.
“Hurry!” Clover threw open the windows, yelling over her shoulder, “Over here!”
She picked up a pot and banged it against the windowsill and screamed. The scream came from somewhere deep inside her and the end of it was like a sob.
“Are you out of your mind?” That was Bethany. Clover screamed again, and banged.
She heard Jude behind her, urging the kids to pick up pots and pans, to help her.
“We need them to think we’re prepared. We need them to get the hell out of our city,” she said, then screamed again, this time with other voices joining hers.
She counted, three. Definitely three, hunkered near their cars, talking to each other, looking alternately toward the gunshots still coming from the north and toward the building where she was screaming at the top of her lungs. She wished she could hear them. Number four could have been the first gunshot. Clover’s heart clenched. Who had fired it?
The whole group of children were screaming and banging now, and Clover’s breath caught. She put her own pot down and covered her ears. Mango was there, tight against her, urging her to back up, to get away. She slid to the floor, which was the best she could do, her back against the wall under the window, hugging her knees.
“They’re leaving,” Jude said, loudly, over the noise. “Clover, it’s working!”
“How many?”
“What?”
She rocked back, banging the back of her head against the wall. “How many left?”
Bethany and Jude started to try to quiet and calm the children. They’d gone over into full banshee mode, and it wasn’t easy. It took everything Clover had in her not to crawl out of the room. It felt like days, but was only minutes, before the noise finally stopped.
“How many left?” she asked again.
“I don’t know,” Jude said.
Clover stood up, kept one hand on Mango’s head to keep him calm, and looked out the window. The car was gone, completely out of sight, and West and Isaiah were running toward the schoolhouse. She pushed her way out of the crush of kids and Jude followed her to the front door.
She came up short when the door opened and her brother was there, a rifle in one hand, his face dead white. The relief was almost as painful as the noise had been. More than her brain could process.
“We heard a gunshot,” West said.
“From the restaurant.” Jude stood close but didn’t touch her. If he touched her, she would come apart.
Isaiah was behind West. As soon as he heard that, he turned and went back down the stairs. West followed. Jude hesitated, staying close to her for another second.
“We have to go,” she said. Her voice shook and she felt a fine tremor all through her, like her nerves were humming. “I’m okay.”
They went together down the stairs and across the street. She heard a contingent behind them, but didn’t turn to look. Marta ran past them.
Christopher was outside, bent at the waist near the side of the building. He’d vomited and he looked like he’d aged twenty years in the last twenty minutes. He was alive. James stood near the road, looking toward where the car had disappeared. He was also alive. Neither of them looked like they’d been shot.
“I only saw three,” Clover said.
Jude left her and went to Christopher, with Marta. Christopher stood up, shook his head, but let Marta wrap her arms around his waist. Her head fit against his chest, and as soon as she was there, Christopher sagged, wrapping her tightly against him.
“Jude,” Clover said, louder. “I only saw three guards. Where’s the fourth?”
“I shot him,” Christopher said, quietly. Clover barely heard him. “I—I think I killed him.”
“They came in, and he shot,” James said without looking away from the road. “They’ll be back. The whole fucking guard is going to be here. We shouldn’t have let the others leave.”
“Okay,” West said. “Jesus. Okay, we need to go look—”
“I’ll do it.” James walked past West, into the restaurant. Everyone else seemed to freeze where they were. Even the small kids, who’d worked themselves into a frenzy in the schoolhouse, were quiet.
When he came back outside, the truth was on his face, clear enough for even Clover to read. “He’s dead.”
Christopher sank to the ground, taking Marta with him. She held his head in her lap while he cried.
—
“I’m sorry,” Bennett said. “Are you telling me that your men left Virginia City, because of some noise?”
“There were gunshots.” Bennett turned to look at the man who spoke. He didn’t know his name, and didn’t care. He was young, and defensive. “We lost a man.”
How in the hell was this even happening? “Tell me exactly what you saw.”
“There was a miscommunication. Two teams ended up in Virginia City, one from each end. We came from the north and saw smoke from the south.”
“Fire? Why am I just hearing of this now?”
The guard stayed quiet until Bennett exhaled and waved him on.
“There were two cars across the road. They were burning. Two guards were able to get past the fire but could not bring their vehicle past it. We took them with us in ours and we went back to the town.”
“Did it look like there were people there?”
“Honestly, no. We stopped at a restaurant, because it looked—”
Bennett waited, and then fisted his hands to keep from throttling the other man. “It looked?”
“It looked too clean. And we smelled food. It was hard to tell, because of the fire, but we thought we smelled food.”
Bennett had already heard the rest, so as this idiot guard told him about walking into the restaurant and being fired on, he stood in front of his window and looked out over Reno. His city was falling apart, and he didn’t know how it had happened.
“What stopped you from firing back?” Bennett asked without turning.
“We weren’t armed.”
Bennett laughed. The noise wasn’t joyful. It was slightly hysterical, which matched perfectly how he felt inside. He turned to face the guard. “You went looking for fugitives, unarmed.”
The guard didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to. Bennett knew, with a sick surety, that this was not the nameless guard’s fault. It couldn’t be placed on the shoulders of any of the guards.
This was Jon’s fault.
Bennett had told him, in the beginning, that the wall wouldn’t keep people in or out without a strong military presence. Jon insisted that fear and love would keep people in their cities. The fight and flight have been scared out of them, Jon said. They need us. They won’t go against us, as long as we keep them feeling that way.
“How many people do you think there were in Virginia City?” Bennett asked.
“Two in the restaurant. We didn’t see the others, but they made a lot of noise. A dozen, I’d say. At least.”
“A dozen.” Bennett rubbed a hand over his chest and wondered if he could be having a heart attack. “How did they get out of the city?”
“Honestly?” the guard asked.
Bennett turned to look at him. “Yes, honestly.”
“They could have just walked out. We got two guards at the gate. Nothing ever happens there, especially at night, so—”
Clover Donovan was gone. West Donovan was probably still alive. The boy who was guarding Bridget Kingston had gone AWOL. Leanne Wood had disappeared, somehow, right out of the city lockup. James Donovan had gone missing with her, which made Bennett’s skin crawl.
The Kingston girl was buried in Bennett’s backyard, and her father was desperate to leave the city to look for her himself. It wouldn’t be long before Bennett would have to do something about him, for his own sanity.
And he was going to have to talk to his brother soon.
Jon would expect him to just come up with an answer. To make all these problems disappear. He wouldn’t even want to talk about how. He’d offer no solutions of his own. He came to the city once a year, for the spring celebration of the end of the virus. He waved from a car during the parade, gave a speech that was recorded and broadcast to all of the cities, and then went back to his hidey-hole.
“Screw that,” Bennett said, louder than he meant to.
“Pardon?”
“Leave.”The guard looked genuinely confused. Like one word was too much for him to understand. No wonder everything had gone to shit.
“I said ‘leave.’ Get the hell out of my office.” The guard hesitated one more moment, like he still wasn’t sure what he was supposed to do. When his hand was on the doorknob, Bennett added, “Send Adam Kingston in.”
“I don’t know—”
Bennett shot the guard a hard, scathing look and he finally got the message. If he didn’t know where Adam Kingston was, he could damn well find out. The guard left, fast, closing the door behind him.
Jon wanted him to take care of things here? If he was going to put all the weight of every problem on Bennett’s shoulders, then Bennett was damn sure going to do what needed to be done. He stared at his phone, defiantly not picking it up to dial Jon, until his door opened again and the headmaster came in. He must have been in the hallway.
“Langston, I’m driving up to Virginia City myself. If Bridget is there—if that boy has—”
Bennett waved a hand to stop Kingston, who had somehow gone from being a nervous little yes man to a full-blown father on a mission. Not what Bennett needed right now. Not at all. Bridget Kingston was rotting in a hole, and if he heard one more word about her, he was going to do something regrettable.
“We need to beef up security around here,” Bennett said.
Kingston looked at him a long moment, and then said slowly, “I don’t have anything to do with security.”
“You do now.”
“I’ve got all I can do, worrying about my daughter and running the Academy.”
“I can hire a new headmaster, if that would help you.”
Kingston opened his mouth, then closed it again, two or three times. Like a fish. His forehead broke out in sweat. “That’s not necessary. It’s—”
“We need to beef up security.”
“What exactly do you expect me to do?” Kingston finally said. “I don’t know anything about security.”
A burst of anger shot through Bennett and a spark of pain erupted behind his right eye. He rubbed it with his fingertips and said slowly, evenly, “I don’t have time for this, Adam.”
Kingston’s whole posture changed. He straightened and some of the milquetoast aura went out of him. “I need to find my daughter.”
“Don’t you think I’m sending people—trained guards—to Virginia City? If your daughter is there, they’ll bring her home.” Bennett forced himself to breathe, to calm down, to ignore the pain in his head.
Kingston stared at him, his body tight and stiff. Bennett was prepared to kill him. In fact, he longed to do it. Anything to release some of the pressure building inside him. But Adam turned on his heel and left.