WHILE THEY WAIT, THEY work for food—grooming horses in exchange for a loaf of bread, chopping wood for a bowl of soup—but one of the three always remains at the stables. Just in case someone from the president’s office should pop by for a visit.
No one does.
Which means either no one read the letter, or they did but didn’t believe it, or the president is too busy planning the Conclave to focus on anything else. And each day that passes is another day closer to Chancellor Maddox’s inauguration.
On the third afternoon after delivering the letter, as Hope is returning to the stables, she notices the townspeople are nearly ecstatic as they prepare for the upcoming inauguration. Shops seem to be doing record business, people stop and talk and laugh, and in the distance, music plays: some combination of banjos and fiddles. Celebrations both planned and spontaneous pop up everywhere.
Their joy only increases Hope’s frustration. She and Cat and Book know what Chancellor Maddox is capable of, and yet no one wants to listen to what they have to say.
She veers away from the main avenue and loses herself in the backstreets of New Washington, walking with her head lowered, her hoodie pulled tight, her thoughts swirling. She passes a massive tent that is so large, it’s less a tent and more a warehouse. She is nearly beyond it when something draws her back. She retraces her steps until she can read the simple, unadorned sign out front.
RTA Dept. of Records
She stands there a moment, thinking.
Instead of returning to the stables, she finds a spot between two tents just across the road and studies the warehouse-like tent, taking note of people entering and exiting through a security check.
Darkness can’t come soon enough.
Stars pop from a velvet sky. After timing the guards all afternoon, Hope knows just the right moment to make her move. She tiptoes across the road and down a muddy alley. Taking out her knife, she slices through the thick canvas, creating a small flap in the side of the tent. She slips inside.
Not so difficult, but then again, who would want to break into here? It’s just files and records. Dusty archives.
She fumbles for a match, strikes it, and then spies a hurricane lantern. When she lights it, she can make out her surroundings. The place is huge—a vast cavern of metal shelving stacked floor to ceiling with cardboard boxes. Needles in haystacks are more easily found than what she’s looking for.
The milky light from the lantern leads her forward. The floor is a series of wobbly boards placed atop the mud. She glides down the length of the building, noting the markers at the ends of aisles. Things like Historical Archives and Congressional Records and Presidential Papers. And one that reads Government Employees. That’s the row she chooses to explore.
She works her way down the long aisle, trailing through the alphabet until she reaches Sa–Sc. She pulls out a damp cardboard box and rifles through its contents. Buried in the very middle is a file with a label that makes her heart leap.
Samadi, Uzair.
She removes the thick folder and places it in her lap. Her fingers tremble as they peel away the top sheets. She begins to read.
Biography. Terms of Employment. RTA Contract. Past Employment Record. All of it.
Hope reads quickly, greedily, hungrily. Some of this she knows; some she has never heard before. Like the fact that her father grew up in Chicago and went to a school called Yale and was employed by an organization called the Mayo Clinic. That’s all new to her. After Omega happened, things get vague.
She flips quickly through the pages, looking for something else, anything.
One page grabs her attention most—a Letter of Agreement between Dr. Uzair Samadi and Dr. Joseph Gallingham, signed by Chancellor Cynthia Maddox. Hope is both eager and afraid to read it. She forces herself to go through it, slowly, carefully.
Among other things, it lists her father’s title—research scientist—but at the bottom of the document there’s a space marked Duties, and it’s been left blank. There’s nothing there that tells her what he actually did. She is about to turn the page when something catches her eye. Hope brings the lantern closer . . . and she sees the space wasn’t always blank. There used to be text there. Someone, for some reason, marked over it with a kind of white glop. All that’s left is a faint indication of typed letters—a gauzy dream of alphabet.
But what was it that it said? And who covered it up?
She places the document in front of the lantern to study it further when the sound of a scraping foot stops her cold. She hastily stuffs the paper in a pocket and extinguishes the lantern’s flame. Her fingers wrap themselves around the handle of her knife, and her breath goes short, even as the footsteps grow closer and closer.