Breaking Point (3 page)

I tried to swallow, but my throat had tied in knots.

Wallace shoved through the heavy metal door on the tenth floor, flooding the shadowed interior with light. It wasn’t a bright day, but on the fourth floor we kept the curtains drawn, and my eyes took several moments to adjust. When they did I scanned the familiar cement patio, empty but for the cave-like entrance to the stairs and the park bench behind it, and the resistance guard overlooking the streets to the west.

The air wasn’t fresh, but it wasn’t stagnant like inside. Breathing it raised my awareness, made me feel exposed. Being here with Wallace didn’t feel as safe as when I came up here alone.

He strode toward the edge at the front of the building, to the elevated lip of red brick that stood like a battlement from an old-time castle. I followed him into the shadows, glancing up at the towering empty office building adjacent to the Wayland Inn. Though the structures didn’t touch, they were close, and I wondered if Chase could see me now from one of those high, dark windows.

“Look, out there on the freeway,” Wallace said, pointing around the neighboring building past the slums that had once been a college to the raised highway by the river. A few scattered cars traveled there, but the haze made it impossible to tell if they were cruisers.

“There are people in those cars who can go anywhere they’d like. People who aren’t starving and freezing like the folks in the Square. Men that still have jobs. Girls that still go to school.” He leaned down to rest his elbows on the ledge and glanced my way.

I felt a sudden trembling in my chest, cracked with a blow of all those things I’d been trying to shut out. Home. Beth with her wild red hair. I’d be a senior this year, graduating in June.

“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.

“Hey!” I jumped forward to right them.

Beneath those she’d overturned was another box that I had yet to sort. She peeled back the cardboard and lifted a pleated navy skirt.

A punch of memories: the reformatory, the last time I’d seen Ms. Brock, the headmistress, preparing to punish me after she’d ordered soldiers to beat Rebecca. The sound of the baton striking my roommate’s back as she demanded to know what had become of Sean.

I fixed the fallen boxes, lining up the corners perfectly.

Like everywhere else, the Sisters of Salvation had gradually infiltrated the city’s charity scene. They were what another Article violator had once called the
MM’s answer to women’s liberation,
and ran the soup kitchens here, the orphanages, even the school system.

An unexpected tremor of excitement passed through me. Cara could wear this out into the community on assignment.
I
could wear it out. Sisters could go places civilians couldn’t, just like the guys in the resistance who wore stolen soldier and Horizons uniforms. It was the first time I’d seriously considered leaving the Wayland Inn, and it felt liberating. Empowering.

But mostly impossible. I couldn’t do the kinds of missions Cara did. I’d already been caught. The next time I wouldn’t get the luxury of a needle full of strychnine like the condemned soldiers in the holding cells at the base. I’d get a bullet in the head.

“See, now you can play dress up with your boy toy,” Cara said with a plastic smile.

Her words brought on a sudden surge of humiliation. I was about to say something I’d probably regret later when Billy’s shouts from the radio room intervened.

“Sniper!
Sniper!
”

We were both out of the room in a shot, bolting two doors down to where the guys playing cards had gathered. Everyone shoved at one another, trying to get closer to the confiscated switchboard Wallace was manning.

“Shut up!” Wallace roared. As the chatter died, the serious voice of Janice Barlow, a local reporter for an MM-run news station, filled the room.

“… indicate that the four soldiers were shot several hours after curfew, from a distance of at least one hundred yards. FBR sources revealed early this morning that they are very close to finding the Virginia Sniper, whom they believe to be responsible for a running tally of seven soldiers.”

“Yeah, right!” called one of the guys who’d returned with Cara a few hours ago. He was immediately shushed by the two brothers who’d rationed out breakfast.

“… is the second shooting in the state of Tennessee, the first being fifty miles south, in Nashville. In response to the crisis, the Federal Bureau of Reformation has lowered the local curfew to five
P.M.
until the culprit can be apprehended. Citizens are reminded to observe curfew hours and report any violations of the Statutes to the crisis line or a nearby FBR officer.”

At her pause, the hall erupted in cheers. A twitchy guy not much taller than me spun Cara around in an impromptu dance.
Four,
people kept saying. Four, when the sniper had only hit one at a time previously. I tried to grin, but my insides were stretched taut.

“Quiet! Quiet, there’s more!” Billy hollered. He leaned down while Wallace adjusted the volume.

“… determined that the bomb, made of household appliances, was a direct attempt on the Chief of Reformation’s life. Chancellor Reinhardt’s condition is stable, and he is recovering at an undisclosed location. Of the attack, the president made this statement late yesterday afternoon.”

There was another pause, but this time no one spoke. No one dared to breathe. An attack on the president’s right-hand man made the work of the sniper seem suddenly insignificant.

The reception grew fuzzy as a man’s voice filled the room.

“The work of radicals does not, and will not, represent the majority. What happened yesterday to Chancellor Reinhardt is a test. Of our
faith
. Of our
morality
. And of our
freedom
. It is a chance for us to prove our unity and bind together as one country. To finally purge the
hedonism
that led to our fall, to dispel the
chaos
that gripped us during the War, and to remove every terrorist that stands between us and a safe, peaceful future. No one said reformation would be easy, but have faith when I say that it is possible, and it is right.”

It had been a long time since I’d heard him speak. My mother and I had watched him on TV during the early years of the War when he’d been a state senator. I could picture him now, a tuft of silver hair atop an enormous forehead, jaw drawn tight with concern, and a gaze so piercing, it seemed to reach straight through the television into our living room. My mom used to say you could never trust someone who talked to a camera like it was a real person.

Later, I’d learn in school that Scarboro’s movement, Restart America, had been around for years, preaching strong traditional morals, censorship, and a removal of the separation between church and state. One Faith, One Family, One Country, had been their motto, one that would later change to One Whole Country, One Whole Family when he was elected president. In his campaign, he’d cited the existing administration’s moral weakness for the attack on our nation, and the citizens, desperate for change, had believed him.

He’d always had a cadence to his words. It was almost mesmerizing until you listened to what he was actually saying.

Bind together. Remove every terrorist.

Well, I knew what he meant by terrorist. He meant people like my mother. People like me. Anyone that stood between him and his perfect, compliant world. He’d reduced our country to obedient house pets and unwanted strays, and I had a bad feeling things were about to get a lot worse for us.

Ms. Barlow signed off with the FBR motto: One Whole Country, One Whole Family.

“Someone tried to take out Reinhardt?” Cara finally said. She looked shocked, just like everyone else. I tried to picture the man, but couldn’t. He’d come into power post-TV, during President Scarboro’s formation of the FBR, to oversee the functions of the soldiers.

“Wonder how he got close enough.” There was a definite edge of scheming to Wallace’s tone, but he did make a point. The president and his advisors traveled in secrecy, never taking up a permanent residence, never staying anywhere too long. As far as I’d known, they’d done this since the War, when the threat of attack on any politician had been high.

“Who cares, someone did it, that’s all that matters!” yelled the guy behind me. The others agreed.

“Next is our move,” said Cara. “Now’s the time for something big. We’ve got to hit them while they’re limping.”

It was all too much: the nodding, the bloodthirsty grins. They were getting swept up in the momentum of a new war.