Viral Nation (32 page)

Clover picked up the laptop computer from the couch cushion
between them and balanced it on her knees as she pulled up the classifieds. “He knows about us. Weird stuff that he could have only found out by talking to us. He has about a thousand pounds of dog food. Not old stuff either. Fresh dog food, for Mango. Where did he get it? How did he know we’d need it?”

“We told him. Think about it. We must have.”

“I
have
thought about it, until I feel like my brains are going to leak out of my ears.”

It made sense. Sort of. They’d say things to Waverly sometime in the future. He’d write notes about what they said. Sometime in the last two years, he read those notes. That much was clear. There was no other way for him to have information about them. He was close to the lake, and he’d discovered the portal. He was obviously still using it.

He gave himself the information about them in advance. Once he knew about them, he couldn’t unknow, so they didn’t have to tell him again. In their timeline, they would never tell him.

“I found another quote,” she said, needing to change the subject to ward off a headache that was gathering at the base of her skull. “‘Farming looks mighty easy when your plow is a pencil and you’re a thousand miles from the cornfield.’ Eisenhower.”

“He was right,” Jude said. “People can talk about how great it is that everyone has work, but they don’t know anything until they’re out there.”

Clover searched Jude’s face. “That’s why the Academy is so important to you, isn’t it? You don’t want to work at the farms.”

He studied the floor between his feet as he talked, as if imagining the soil that would be there if things were different. “My parents were migrant workers. It was only dumb luck we were in Reno when the virus hit. Farming is in my blood. But after the virus killed my father, my mother couldn’t work and take care of a five-year-old and six-month-old baby, too. She and my grandmother
managed between them, until my grandmother died when I was ten. There was no one else to take care of me while my mother worked. The social worker came and got me one day. I never saw my mother again. I don’t even know why she never came to see me. She was just gone.”

“I’m sorry, Jude.” Clover forgot, sometimes, how lucky she was. What would have happened to her if West had gone off to the Academy three years ago? Or if Mrs. Finch hadn’t helped raise them?

“It’s like Waverly knowing stuff about us. In some other timeline, I would be a farmer by now. And that would be okay. But the Bad Times came and changed everything. The Company acts like they’ve put a stop to crime, like nothing bad happens anymore. Meanwhile, they have a whole
city
of kids left completely unprotected. I have to do something to help them.”

“Are all the house parents bad?”

“Some are there for the right reasons. But the job draws people like my house father like flies. No one monitors them. There’s a theory that the Company doesn’t execute all of the future criminals. Some of them, they put in Foster City as house parents. We don’t matter.”

“You matter to me.” Clover chewed at her bottom lip before going on. “I should have been in Foster City three years ago. Maybe if I had been, I could have helped you. You wouldn’t have—”

“No,” Jude said, cutting her off. “Don’t say it. Don’t think it.”

Clover let it drop but couldn’t brush off the crumbs of guilt. “We need to ask Waverly about the quotes. Maybe he knows something.”

Jude and Clover met West and Bridget coming out of
the restaurant.

“Maybe they’re some sort of secret society,” Bridget said after
Jude explained where they were headed. “I’ve heard of those, from before. They named themselves after animals. Like Elks and Lions and Buffalo.”

“What do they do?” Clover asked.

“I don’t know.”

They found Waverly in a small but lushly green garden near the front of his house. As far as Clover knew, none of them had spoken to him since he dosed her and West.

“Can we talk to you?” Jude asked when they came close enough.

Waverly froze for a second but then brushed off his hands and stood up. He put on a bright smile for them. “Of course. Let’s go inside. I picked some blackberries this morning that will be just the thing, I think.”

Waverly had put away the mats they’d slept on the night before, and his furniture was back in place. He set a bowl of plump berries in the center of his table, and they all sat around it.

“What can I do for you?” he asked.

Clover set the paper she’d written the messages on in front of him. “We want to know what these are.”

Waverly looked at the page without touching it. “You found them already?”

“They’re right there in the classifieds,” Clover said. “We aren’t blind.”

“What are they, Dr. Waverly?” West asked.

“Meetings, of course.”

“It
is
a secret society, I knew it!” Bridget leaned in to see the paper. “Are you part of it, Dr. Waverly?”

“A secret society. Yes, I suppose that is exactly what they are. They call themselves the Freaks.”

Jude and Clover looked at each other.

“Like you, right?” Dr. Waverly said. “It’s okay. You tell me later, anyway.”

“How do you know so much about us?” West asked. “It’s pretty…”

“Weird?”

“Yes.”

“I take notes and leave them for myself. I have two years’ worth regarding you all, although I’ve been pretty careful not to tell myself too much of importance.”

So Clover was right about how Waverly knew things he shouldn’t know. Somehow knowing that she’d figured it out didn’t ease her mind much. “You still travel through the portal?”

“I have to know,” Waverly said. “I have to know. Even though it puts little holes in my memory, like Swiss cheese.”

“You must be stuck in dozens of loops,” Clover said.

Waverly gave half a nod. “At least. Hundreds is probably more like it. But I have to know.”

Clover put up her hand to stop him from talking. “Wait a minute. What do you mean, your memory is Swiss cheese?”

“We never really figured out how or why it happens. The brain is such a fragile, mysterious thing.”

“How what happens?”

“You stay on the other side of the portal more than thirty minutes, your old memories are replaced with new ones. Maybe you lose your tenth birthday party and have a memory of sitting on a stone near the lake in the future where it used to be.”

“You mean you forget things, while you’re over there?” Clover’s stomach twisted, like a fist had reached in and grabbed her insides. “Why didn’t they tell me that?”

“The human mind wasn’t designed for time travel, Clover. Some things are only in my notebooks now.”

“If you know that’s a problem, why would you stay more than thirty minutes?” Jude asked.

“I try not to. Sometimes I lose track of time.”

The air went out of Clover’s lungs, and taking another breath was painful. “So if a Messenger missed a return trip?”

“The memory loss isn’t minute-for-minute. The replacement is exponential. Twenty-four hours would be devastating.”

“How did you figure that out?” Clover asked.

Waverly rocked in the chair. “We had to know. You have to understand. We had to.”

“What did you have to know?” West asked when Waverly petered off, like he’d lost track of what he meant to say.

“They were volunteers, all of them. We tested their memories and sent them through. The first half hour doesn’t affect much for those with the strongest memories.”

West looked at Clover, and she shook her head. “I don’t think I’ve forgotten anything.”

“Not in the first half hour. But after twenty-four hours, a person would return with no memories except for what they’d done on the other side. They’d remember to breathe. How to walk. Whatever they did during those twenty-four hours, they’d keep, but when they came back through the portal everything else would be gone.”

“The fortune cookie,” Clover said. The idea of forgetting how to read made her feel sick. “That’s it isn’t it? I had to read a fortune cookie so I wouldn’t forget how to read.”

“Yes,” Waverly said. He looked like he might want to go on, but he didn’t say any more.

“But they can relearn things they forget, right?” Jude asked.

“Sure, but it’s the difference between knowing something happened and remembering it happening to you.” Waverly looked at each of them, as if trying to judge their understanding. “Some things take years to learn. Like speaking or reading. Some people have strong memories that can handle traveling.”

“What do you mean by
strong memories
?” West asked.

“Some people are special.” Waverly smiled at Clover. “They can afford to lose more, because they remember more.”

“Like me.” Clover clenched her hands together on the table in front of her.

“Like you.”

“You still go,” Jude said. “Even though it’s stealing your memories?”

Waverly pulled at a lock of his hair and didn’t comment on that.

“So, what about the quotes?” Bridget didn’t even bother to disguise the gigantic subject change. “What do they have to do with us?”

“They can’t have anything to do with us,” West said.

“They know about you. Oh, yes they do.” Waverly drummed his fingers against his thighs. “And they know that a revolution is coming.”

“How do they know?” Clover asked. “
We
don’t even know. I’ve been through the portal three times. Things are just the same in two years.”

“Are you sure?” Waverly said. “Jon would work hard to keep the present time line from finding out about problems in the future.”

Clover tried to think. All she really saw was the lake and the road to and from the pickup box. The last time she went, even though she was acting strangely, all the Mariners were preoccupied enough not to notice. And somehow, Jude was able to approach her with the zine. And leave the suppressant syringes. And then there was Leanne.

“My trainer broke her leg. That’s why I was alone when I met Jude at the box.”

“Leanne Wood didn’t break her leg,” Waverly said. “In two years, she’ll be dead.”

Clover covered her face with her hands and forced herself to breathe until she could speak. “Dead how?”

“I don’t know for sure, but the rumor is she was killed to stop her efforts in the rebellion.”

“Leanne is a rebel?”

“Most definitely.”

“If that’s true, why would Bennett let me travel at all? He must know what’s happening in the future.”

“Having information from the future is like a drug. It’s…” Waverly looked around the table at each of them, his face contorted with discomfort. “It’s addictive. He used you to bring him what he needed.”

“Why me? He could have used anyone.”

“That may be.”

“You must know what’s going on two years from now,” Jude said when Waverly didn’t answer right away. “You leave yourself notes about everything else.”

Waverly shook his head. “I have almost no notes about the revolution. Just enough for me to know that it picks up speed when you get here. I’m not sure why I haven’t told myself more, but there must be a reason.”

“Why would people revolt at all?” Bridget asked. “Things are good inside the walls.”

Jude snorted, and Bridget’s face flushed. Things were good for her. And they were okay for people like Clover and West. They were scary bad for Jude and the other kids from Foster City.

“It’s been brewing a long time, Bridget. It started with a baby who was allergic to the suppressant. I heard about it, and helped him.”

“You can be allergic to it?” Bridget said. “How is that possible?”

“It’s not really a miracle, despite what you were raised to believe. That baby survived because I told his parents that he didn’t need daily dosing.”

“Why haven’t I heard about people having trouble with the doses before?” Clover asked.

“We knew there could be allergies, but one person, for any reason, not on the suppressant and not contracting the virus…you can see what that would have done, can’t you?”

“Kept us from having to take your fake dope for our whole lives,” Jude said, his voice devoid of emotion. “What made you take a stand finally?”

“So many were already dead. Hundreds of millions of people just in the U.S. So many that we can never name them all. I couldn’t stand to let that baby be another one lost. Not from the virus, and certainly not from the cure.”

“You saved him,” Clover said.

“His parents were the first. It’s taken nearly fifteen years, but they built a network that communicates with each other, across the country, through the classifieds.”

“The messages,” Clover said. “I can’t figure them out.”

Waverly touched his finger to his nose. “That’s the whole point.”

“She figured out they were messages,” Jude said. “And she figured out that they were probably only markers, leading people to the real messages.”

“Impressive,” Waverly said. “Much more than I expected.”

“Are you going to tell us what they mean?” Clover asked.

“Tell me one.”

“‘Genius is sorrow’s child.’”

“Ah. John Adams. It’s easy, really. The first three words give you the time of a meeting. In this case, six twenty-seven.”