Viral Nation (16 page)

“Do you have anything to report?” He did look at her then, and she was sure he could see through her, into the truth behind her lie.

“No.”

He stood and left, locking her into her room for her quarantine, without another word.

Clover locked the door from her side as well and took off her boots and her jumpsuit. She pulled the booklet from under the hem of her T-shirt and sat on the edge of the bed. She’d be left alone until the doser came with her suppressant. Then a guard would bring food for her and Mango. She tried not to let herself draw too many similarities between being locked in her room and being in prison.

She ran her fingers over the cover of the booklet. It had been printed somehow. It almost looked like someone had carved a stamp and inked the front that way.

Freaks for Freedom
, it said. What did that mean? The inside pages were covered with print. She flipped through, reading headlines, until she got to the middle and something fell out into her lap.

Jude had stuck a folded paper into the pages of the booklet.
Clover’s fingers shook slightly as she opened it. The air seemed to leave the room when she saw her brother’s face looking up at her.

She knew what she was looking at as soon as she saw it. She closed her eyes and wished it away, but when she opened them again, she still held a dispatch flyer with West’s face on it.

Was it a joke? Some kind of elaborate, awful prank? The picture of West was current; it looked like it had been taken from above as he was leaving the Bazaar.

Murder? The absurdity of it made her wonder again if this was some kind of prank.

She stood and paced the small room in her underwear and T-shirt, her socked feet padding on the carpet. Mango hadn’t settled since they got back to the room, and now he did what he was trained to do, moving in front of her to stop her repetitive motion. She nearly tripped over him.

“Mango!” He pressed against her and she sank to the floor, wrapping her arms around him. The idea that West would kill the headmaster’s daughter was so impossible, she couldn’t imagine it.

Until it struck her that of course he wouldn’t kill her or anyone else. The report of Bridget’s death would show up in the databases before it happened. A dispatch flyer would be distributed—this dispatch flyer—and stop the crime before it was committed.

They’d stop it by putting her brother in front of a firing squad.
Not their father’s squad, of course; that would be too cruel. But West would be executed.

Clover reached for the booklet.
Freaks for Freedom
, it said on the cover. And under that,
A Zine for Truth
.

She flipped through the pages again and saw an article about the prevalence of child abuse in Foster City. Another about the need for citizens to “cry out as one against the tyranny of the suppressant.”

A little cheesy. A lot of typos. But what she read put her heart in her throat.

Jude would lose his mind sometime in the next two years. That much was clear. Everyone knew you don’t talk to Travelers. Not Mariners, not Messengers. Not ever. Even Foster City kids knew that, surely.

He must have made up these stories and the dispatch flyer. Because there was no way West would even think about killing Bridget Kingston. He wasn’t very good at hiding that he liked her. A lot.

She turned more pages of the zine until she reached the back two pages.

READ ME CLOVER
was written in big, bold letters in purple crayon across the top with arrows pointing to an article torn from the sanctioned city newspaper, neatly trimmed and pasted to the pages. “Kidnap and Murder of Headmaster’s Daughter Averted by Arrest of Local Farmer.”

Clover threw the zine away from her and went to the dresser where she’d stored her clothes. She pulled out her jeans. She couldn’t do this half naked.

West drew his hands through his hair and tried to
ease his heart rate to something that didn’t make him feel like he was about to keel over. “Tell me again.”

“This kid I met at the orientation was at the pickup box.” Clover sat on a kitchen chair with her feet tucked under her, rocking and orchestrating with her hands as her words tumbled over each other on their way out. “Only, you know, he was older.”

“And?”

“And he gave me this.” She waved the booklet at him. He hadn’t built up the courage to look through it yet. “I’ve told you this already.”

“And you were there alone, because?” West could kill Bennett for letting her drive by herself. Worse, for putting her alone on that submarine full of Mariners and sending her into the future with no training.

“I told you, Leanne broke her leg in the future. Her real leg, not the fake one.” She adjusted herself, so that she was sitting with her feet on the floor and looked at the booklet.
Zine
, it said on the
cover. “Jude knew me, West. Way more than I knew him. He acted like we were friends.”

She hesitated over the last word, and a deep flush rose up over her neck and cheeks. Friends, huh?

And who was this kid? The idiot had talked to her while she was in her Messenger uniform. While she was two years in the future. Whoever he was, he would have been arrested at best, and shot at worst, if someone
had
been with Clover.

Did that mean that he knew she’d be alone? He seemed to know her, she’d said. So maybe sometime in the next two years she’d tell him. “How do you know he was your friend?”

Clover reached into her pocket and pulled out a key on a silver ring. “He used this to unlock the van when I couldn’t get in. Only I hadn’t given it to him yet. I didn’t even get it until I got back through the portal.”

“Why do you have it?”

“Bennett said I can drive myself until Leanne is better. It’s the same key as Jude had at the box. I would have missed the return trip if he hadn’t been there.”

The ring was very simple, with no distinguishing features at all. Maybe it wasn’t the same one. West looked at the dispatch flyer again. He felt disconnected from the guy in the picture, even though it was himself, without a doubt. Someone was setting him up, and they weren’t doing a very good job of it. Of all the people in Reno, Bridget Kingston was on a very short list of those he’d risk himself to protect.

“Well, I’m obviously not going to kill her,” he said to the picture, then looked at his sister. She met his gaze with cool, dispassionate eyes that were the same bottle-green as their mother’s had been. West could just remember, like an eerie sense of déjà vu, his mother looking at him the same way when he drew a road for his toy cars on her kitchen floor with a permanent marker. The faint remains of his artwork were still imprinted on the tiles.

“That isn’t the point,” Clover said.

He wanted it to be the point. But she was right. If the newspaper article was genuine, then whether he would commit the crime was irrelevant. He would be punished to save Bridget’s life.

He was certain the dispatch Clover had brought back from the future was generated after his name was run through the violent crime database during his Company interview. That wasn’t scheduled to take place for two weeks.

The fact was, he would be arrested as soon as his name showed up in the database, and the next thing, he’d have a bullet in his head. But not until he’d spent a week or so in prison. He’d heard that they didn’t bother to waste food and clean water on prisoners accused of violent crimes, and that some didn’t even make it to their own executions.

“Let me see,” he finally said to Clover. She gave him the zine, and he read the article pasted into the back. It was cut from the
Reno Gazette-Journal
. The dispatch flyer as well. Neither was dated.

The Company, headquartered in the west, and the government, headquartered in the east, ran the justice system in all of the cities with a one-two punch that was so effective, West was unaware of any major crime that had happened since he was five or six years old.

In their city, the
Reno Gazette-Journal
—once a big daily newspaper, it was an eight-page weekly now—reported the murders, robberies, and rapes that the Mariners stopped before they happened. There weren’t many, but enough that the citizens never forgot what they were being protected from. The contrast between the world the newspapers suggested was constantly a near-miss, and their own safe, secure city was stark.

It had never occurred to West to question the system of prosecuting crimes that had not yet happened. He had a sudden, painful change in attitude now, and there was nothing he could do about it.

A walled city didn’t leave too many places to hide. Flyers went out a few weeks before the date the crime was to take place, and the community did the job of finding the wanted person for the guards.

Someone would turn West in and be rewarded with a Whole New Life, the same as if they’d hit the New Year’s Eve megajackpot at the Bazaar. A house with a big garden, enough to eat, a choice job, twelve hours of power a day, an electric cart to get around in. There were people who studied the dispatch flyers and searched for the criminals, like old-fashioned bounty hunters.

Did the flyer mean he would kill Bridget if he wasn’t stopped? It was supposed to mean that. Whenever West saw a dispatch, he always knew that someone would be saved.

“Maybe this is fake,” he said.

Clover pointed to the bottom of the newspaper clipping. Stuck on with a piece of masking tape was a note.
Help is in the Dinosaur, fifteenth floor.
“We can find out.”

West tapped the note with his index finger. “We aren’t going there.”

“What else can we do?”

The Dinosaur was the last casino, on the far end of downtown from the Waverly-Stead building and the Academy. The only former resort casino in Reno that wasn’t being used for some other purpose now, it hulked, dark and broken down, like the decomposing remains of the last brontosaurus.

“I’m serious, Clover. We aren’t going there.”

“They’ll kill you. You get that, don’t you?”

Clover was rocking again, hard enough that she looked like she might take flight. She ground her knuckles together in her lap until Mango pushed his head against them, and she started to pet him instead.

West knelt on her other side, but not too close. It was a balancing act with her, but one he’d been doing for a long time. Close enough
to get and keep her attention, not so close that she pushed him away. She was so small that they were nearly eye to eye with him on one knee.

“Jude seemed like a friend?” he asked her. “Tell me why.”

It was a loaded question. She had to think to answer it, which redirected her energy and slowed her rocking.

“He said he forgot we were ever so young,” she said. “That sounds like he knows me now, right?”

“What else?”

“He had the key to the van.”

How would he know she’d need it, if she didn’t tell him? How would he get it, if she didn’t give it to him? “Is there more?”

She looked up at him. “He kissed me.”

Christ.

“Okay,” he said, finally. “We’ll go.”

The Dinosaur was nearly five miles from their house,
so Clover and West biked there. Clover didn’t love biking, mostly because she had to leave Mango behind. Ten miles round-trip was too far for him to run beside them.

Riding her bike also gathered up all her physical awkwardness and bundled it into one neat package. It took all her attention and then some. One moment of distraction and she was careening into a light post or falling off a curb.

She didn’t like anything about this. Downtown was dead beyond the Waverly-Stead building and the Academy. Like some kind of graveyard with elephantiasis, each building a gargantuan tombstone. Even those used for storage were devoid of life.

They traveled the service road behind the casinos instead of down the avenue. They didn’t see anyone once they left Virginia Street. This was the worst idea ever.

“What if it’s a setup?” she asked West when they pulled into the Dinosaur’s back parking lot.

Time travel made Clover feel like her brain was running on a hamster wheel, trying to figure things out, but going nowhere fast. Bennett might already know that West was supposed to kill Bridget. He could have arranged for her to be alone at the pickup box in two years. Could have engineered her bringing West here, where he could be arrested.

“Try to breathe, Clover.”

Try to breathe. Why didn’t she think of that?