Rebel Nation Read online

  Sure, the girl might have some kind of asshole of a father. One who made home brew in his bathroom and drank too much of it, maybe. Or one who couldn’t control his temper and slapped her around some.

  Maybe her father was totally absent, leaving his girl to be raised by her brother. Leaving his boy to grow resentful of the extra responsibility and end up with more anger than he could contain inside himself.

  James straightened his shoulders and pushed that thought back down. The bell rang again and startled him. Realizing that his mind had wandered so far was upsetting. He lifted his rifle without comment when he caught Cole looking at him.

  The door opened, but the guards were slower coming in this time. When they came into view, they were nearly carrying Cassidy Golightly.

  “Walk.” The guard on her left gave her a hard shake. “For God’s sake, girl, walk!”

  “Please, don’t do this,” she said loudly enough for her voice to filter up to the Gun Room.

  James breathed in slowly through his nose. The girl’s hair was hacked short, like someone had grabbed up hunks and ripped through them with scissors.

  That, he was sure, was just what had happened. Her hair had been long in the picture. Long enough to cover the target on her chest if it came loose. Clover did the same thing to her own hair, and had ever since she’d cut it from waist length to chin length when she was ten. His daughter chopped off chunks when they got in her way, so she sometimes looked like a surprised porcupine. None of it made her look any less like her mother.

  “That’s enough.” The other guard shook her once, hard enough to cause her head to snap back. “Shut your mouth.”

  She obeyed him. James wasn’t often surprised by a convict, and now he had been twice in the past hour. The guards manhandled Cassidy Golightly to the post. She was considerably smaller than either of them, even if she wasn’t small for a girl. The Company assigned Kill Room guards for their ability to handle full-grown men.

  In weeks, this girl would bludgeon her father to death. She was young, but far from innocent. James forced himself to imagine her crime in clear enough detail that gooseflesh peppered his arms.

  She looked up at the gun room windows and straightened, visibly pulling herself together.

  “He should be here, not me.” She lifted her chin high, exposing a long, pale neck ringed with dark bruises around her collarbone. “I haven’t done anything wrong.”

  The Gun Room was already silent, but the quiet took on a different quality. What makes a girl kill her own father? James could almost hear the question in each man’s head.

  “Jesus,” Ross whispered.

  Where was the bell?

  “You don’t know what you’re doing.” Her voice was stronger, less scared. “I wouldn’t have to kill him, if you did your job!”

  Still no bell. How long had it been?

  James kept his eyes on the girl’s red X. It was the same color as Jane’s old high-top sneakers, the pair Clover wore nearly every day, as if by doing so she could hold on to part of the mother she never knew.

  No. This convict was a killer, no matter what she said her father deserved. She was not Clover. She was a monster, and it was his job to slay monsters when they ended up in his Kill Room. If the door didn’t open, and the warden didn’t give her pardon, then she was guilty. Beyond even the shadow of a doubt.

  That was the system, and he believed in it even if he’d been temporarily blinded when it came to his son.

  Christian shifted in his seat. “What do you think he did to her?”

  “Shut up!” Mason said.

  “But what if he—”

  “No.”

  The bell finally rang and all five of them set their guns, responding like Pavlov’s dogs.

  “I don’t like this,” Christian said, even though his gun was at the ready.

  “I swear to God, you’re next if you don’t stop,” Mason said.

  “She’s a kid,” Ross said. “Maybe Christian is right.”

  “Do your damn job.”

  “But don’t you ever wonder?”

  “Will you both just shut it!” James had never heard any of his crew bicker like this. Not about the morality of their work, anyway, and certainly not seconds before firing their weapons.

  The girl still looked at his window. Her breaths came fast, her chest heaving now that only one bell stood between her and her death. “Please,” she said. Cole made a soft noise next to James.

  James didn’t realize that he was holding his breath and waiting for the Kill Room door to open again until he was forced to exhale. The door didn’t budge.

  A girl ran with me today.

  Clover loved to run. Running was her only real peace. And suddenly, James remembered her coming home from school when she was no more than eight or nine, excited to tell him that a girl had run with her that day.

  No. James steadied his gun and tried to will the damned bell to ring. Absolutely not.

  His beautiful, odd girl. They said she had autism. Not that their label mattered. She was brilliant and different, and attracted bullies like ants to honey. She needed her mother, but Jane had died with seeping open sores all over her body less than two weeks after Clover was born. Died the day a doctor knocked on their door with a syringe filled with salvation in the form of the suppressant.

  The cure came too late. James had already eased her pain, when being brave enough to endure it would have saved her life. No time-traveling justice system sixteen years ago, though, so he made amends the only way he knew how.

  The bell rang and James squeezed the trigger before he could think anymore.

  “You can’t leave my sister alone with him!”

  The girl’s words, screamed as though she thought volume might save her, echoed around the Gun Room after the noise of James’s lone shot died away. No blood bloomed over the red X on her chest.

  “Christ, James,” Cole said. “Christ.”

  “Fire!” James looked at Cole, and then at the other men. “What’s the matter with you? Fire!”

  “Hold your fire!” A rough, deep voice boomed from the floor of the Kill Room up to the Gun Room. “I said, hold your fire!”

  “The bell rang.” The guards came back into the Kill Room, this time to release the girl. The warden already stood beside her. James turned to Christian. “You heard the bell!”

  Christian looked like he might faint. He didn’t acknowledge James at all. None of the other men said anything. Only James still held his rifle.

  The girl’s red X gleamed in the saunalike heat of the Kill Room. Sweat and tears plastered ragged strands of strawberry blond hair to her round cheeks.

  “I have a little sister,” she said.

  “She’s here,” the head guard said as her arms were freed. “We have her in custody.”

  “What? No!” She turned back before the guards could stop her and looked up at the gun holes. She pounded the red X with one fist. “I did it. I will do it. Shoot me. Leave Helena alone. You shoot me!”

  The warden brushed the guards away and put a heavy arm around the girl’s shoulders. She stiffened and then relaxed almost to the point of a swoon when he said something to her that James couldn’t hear.

  His bullet had been blank. It was the first time he knew for sure.

  We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles.

  —JIMMY CARTER,

  INAUGURAL ADDRESS, JANUARY 20, 1977

  NOVEMBER

  WALLED CITY OF RENO, NEVADA

  “How in the hell did this happen?” Langston Bennett stood at the window behind his desk and looked out toward the twenty-foot-high concrete wall surrounding his city. The execution center was just out of his line of sight.

  “You know how it happened.”

  He turned and glared at Adam Kingston. The W
averly-Stead Academy headmaster met his gaze, which was almost as unnerving as learning that three people had taken two prisoners from a train headed for the Reno Kill Room. Kingston was a weak little worm of a man who never made eye contact.

  Bennett picked up the small stack of file folders from the edge of his desk and opened the first one. “Michael Evans is going to rape a woman in six months.”

  Kingston took a step closer. “Do you really think he still will? I mean, he’s been arrested. He’s—”

  The folder thudded against Kingston’s chest and fluttered to the floor in a shower of paperwork. “Shut up.”

  Kingston knelt and collected the papers, carefully placing them back into their folder. His hands shook, which gave Bennett some small measure of satisfaction.

  Kingston stood and looked directly at Bennett again. “All I’m saying—”

  “I know what you’re saying.” Kingston was saying that Michael Evans might not rape Sherry Ritter after drinking too much one night next spring, even if his sentence wasn’t carried out this week.

  Hell. After coming so close to execution, Michael Evans might never touch a drink or a woman again.

  Kingston was saying that all the peace and order Bennett and his brother, Jon Stead, had worked so hard to achieve since the virus came and changed everything, was an illusion.

  “Maybe it isn’t the end of the world, Langston. What does it really matter if it’s the executions themselves that made things better or the threat of them that did it?”

  Bennett bounced his fists against his thighs and took a slow breath. He could actually feel them slamming into Kingston’s sweaty face, wrapping around his throat, and choking the life out of him. Would that turn up in the goddamned discs? “Get out.”

  “Langston.”

  “Get out of my office.”

  The headmaster looked like he might say something else, and Bennett felt the tension in his arms. He would hit him. If Kingston said one more word, he would put his fist through the little worm’s face. The headmaster must have seen it, because he quietly put the file back on Bennett’s desk, turned, and left.

  Bennett sat in his chair, his back to the window, to the city that his Time Mariners had kept safe for the last sixteen years. How in the hell had three people from Kansas—Kansas, for God’s sake—managed to do so much damage?

  Everything was fine until James Donovan’s children turned it all sideways this summer. It galled him that the girl had slipped out of his grasp. She had the highest test scores he’d seen. He’d had hope that she could stay on the other side of the portal longer than the others, long enough to do something more interesting than picking up a disc of information.

  She might be the key to figuring out how he could travel through the portal himself. And now she was sitting in a classroom, learning something utterly useless from someone who was probably struggling to keep up with her intellectually. He wouldn’t be surprised if she’d already committed her textbooks to memory, front to back.

  God, her memory. It was a national treasure, an international treasure, and it was being wasted.

  He picked up his telephone and dialed. The phone rang on the other end, precisely three times, just as it always did. The most powerful man in the world never answered before the third ring. Langston would have hung up before the fourth ring if his brother hadn’t picked up the receiver.

  His goddamned brother. Everyone died and left Jon Stead the ruler of the free world. Ruler of the whole world. Some days it was like being little brother to Jesus Christ himself. Frustrating and awe-inspiring in crushingly equal parts.

  “I’ve already heard.” Not even a hello. “What I want to hear now is what you’re going to do to get this thing back under control.”

  Bennett turned his chair and looked out the big window again. “I’m open to suggestions.”

  The phone went dead silent in his ear. Even the static quieted. Bennett forced himself to breathe. Jon might be the most powerful man in the world—he controlled the viral suppressant that kept everyone on earth alive—but he was also Bennett’s brother.

  Half brother, Bennett corrected himself. They had different fathers. Jon had reminded him of that his whole life. Jon was their mother’s first son. And then Bennett’s father, and Bennett himself, came along and divided her attention.

  “Here’s a place to start.” Jon’s voice was slow and dangerous. “Get the Donovan girl back.”

  “It’s not that easy.”

  “Isn’t it?”

  The line went dead and Bennett slammed the receiver into its cradle, three times. Then he picked it up again and used the intercom to reach his secretary.

  Karen had been with him for ten years. She was older than dirt and sour to everyone who came into her line of vision, except for him. She was devoted to him.

  “Get Leanne Wood in my office, as soon as possible.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  . . . freedom is fragile if citizens are ignorant.

  —LYNDON B. JOHNSON,

  SPECIAL MESSAGE TO CONGRESS, JANUARY 12, 1965

  “Altitudes in the mountain west, including northern California, Nevada, Oregon, Washington, Utah, Idaho, and western Colorado, protected these states from the virus for longer than those at lower elevations.” The professor tapped the map with a finger, pointing out each state. “These states were less involved in the war than the Midwest, and less inclined to extreme weather conditions than the southern and eastern states and those farther north.”

  Clover Donovan resisted the urge to pull a book out of her pack to alleviate her overwhelming boredom. She had far more interesting and important things to study. She’d picked up a book about raising goats and one about managing fruit orchards from the Academy library the day before and they were both just inches from her fingers.

  She’d learned post-virus geography in primary school. So had every other student in this room. Why was she the only one who seemed bothered by that?

  “California is the one western state that suffered as badly as the other parts of the country during the Bad Times.” Clover threw her hand in the air. The professor looked right at her and continued talking. “Melting glaciers in Greenland have resulted in the flooding of—”

  “Hawaii is a western state,” Clover said, even though she wasn’t called on. “And Honolulu was moved to—”

  “Yes, it was. We’re talking about California now, though, and most of the southern part of that state, as well as parts of the Gulf Coast and much of the eastern seaboard, were flooded. Changing weather patterns have also caused increased storm activity in these areas, making them uninhabitable.”

  Clover put her arm in the air again and didn’t bother to wait to be ignored. “The earthquake didn’t help.”

  “I was getting there. A massive earthquake, two years after California’s residents were moved to Sacramento, caused even more damage.”

  “And Tropical Storm Emmanu—”

  “Clover. You don’t mind if I teach this class, do you?”

  Clover put her hand in her lap and her American history professor, Mr. Wendell, droned on.

  She sneaked a look at her friend Jude Degas. He was busy taking notes in a spiral notebook, but his mouth twitched in a half smile. Was this what she’d come back to the city for? She sighed, maybe too loudly because Mr. Wendell stopped talking and looked at her.

  “Am I boring you, Clover?”

  Mr. Wendell was young enough that he must have been educated at the Academy himself. Young enough that, in her opinion, he should have known how boring his lecture was without asking her.

  “Actually,” she said. Then she stopped herself from going on. His question was rhetorical. He didn’t want her to point out that no one was engaged in his lecture. Or how much worse they were made by his obvious need to distinguish himself from his students, who were only a few years
younger than him.

  Why did people ask questions they didn’t want answers to?

  Her bulldog, Mango, stirred under her desk. He had been her service dog since she was eleven years old and was pretty good at picking up on awkward situations far before she did. He lifted his jowly head and made a soft sound. Mr. Wendell turned his glare to Mango and then walked back to the front of the class.

  “Then, let’s continue, if you don’t mind. While northern California is home to the walled city of Sacramento, as well as the transplanted sister city of Honolulu, and is a rich agricultural resource for the whole country, the southern part of the state is no longer habitable.”

  Clover raised her hand again. Mr. Wendell stared at her, and when she didn’t lower it, said, “Yes, Miss Donovan?”

  “What about central California?” she said.

  “For various reasons, most of the state of California is no longer fit for habitation.”

  She had more questions. Why did it matter what was habitable and what wasn’t, when they all lived in the fifty cities anyway? But he started talking about the Gulf states before she could say any more. She pulled out a notebook and started making a list of things she wanted to talk to her brother about.

  She waited all week for Saturdays away from campus, at the Dinosaur with Jude, when they talked to West online. At least history was the last class of the day, and of the week, since it was Friday.

  As they left twenty minutes later, Jude scratched Mango behind the ears. “Two days of freedom,” he said. And he was right. That was just what it felt like.

  Heather Sweeney pushed past on her way out of the classroom, causing Clover to bump into Jude. He put an arm around her waist to keep them both from falling over. He took his hand back as soon as she arched away from it and said, “Jesus, Heather.”

  The girl looked over her shoulder as she reached her friends near the end of the hallway. “Like it’s my fault she’s always in the way?”

  Mango pressed into Clover’s legs. She was rocking, heel to toe, heel to toe, with Heather’s words spinning around her head.