Rebel Nation Page 9

  “You have to decide,” Leanne said.

  “I said yes, didn’t I?”

  “So you’re in?”

  James went back to the window. Back to the picture of Jane under the umbrella. She smiled at him, like they had a secret. They did, of course. She was already pregnant with West. They hadn’t told anyone yet. For a few weeks, he was just theirs. “Yeah. I’m in.”

  “Like I said, Bennett plans to call Clover back to the messenger program today.”

  He exhaled slowly. He hadn’t seen Clover as much as he would have liked since she came back in August. Really, only twice. He told himself that he would have taken care of her, if she hadn’t gone directly to the Academy dorms. It was a lie that he didn’t like to examine very closely. “She’s with her brother.”

  “Yes. Among others. There’s a problem, though.”

  “What problem?”

  Leanne held out her cup and James poured another shot into it, then poured himself one as well. “Bridget Kingston is still in the city. She knows where the ranch is. It won’t be long before Bennett talks to her.”

  James pictured the pretty, blond, privileged girl he’d met when he visited Clover in her dorm on campus. “She won’t hold up.”

  “Not for long, no. I don’t think so.”

  James swallowed his whiskey and felt it burn its way into his belly. “So what now?”

  “Now you and I do what we can to give West time to move the kids out of the ranch, and then we leave the city.”

  “Shit.”

  “We can’t stay. Tell me you get that.”

  James sat on the floor next to her, still holding the half-full bottle in one hand. He got it. Once Bennett found out that Clover was gone again, there would be no more pretending that West was dead. And no matter what James did, his life was on the edge of chaos. He might save his job, but only if he turned his kids in. It had been a long time since he was anything even vaguely resembling the kind of father he thought he’d be when he took that picture of Jane, barely pregnant. “Shit.”

  “I agree.”

  “So what’s the plan?”

  “We talk to Bridget and Isaiah—”

  “Isaiah Finch? What does he have to do with this?”

  “He knows about the ranch. Not where it is, but that it’s there. We’re going to talk to them both, try to get them to leave the city. If they won’t, then we do what we can to put Bennett off for a while. A day at least. Tell him Clover is sick, maybe. If that came from you, it might work.”

  James had the oddly disjointed feeling of being separated from his body. For sixteen years, he’d focused entirely on making the city safe, trying to do some good that might balance Jane’s death. The cocoon he’d built around himself, that insulated him from his grief and guilt, was cracking and breaking away. Underneath, he felt raw and exposed. And not nearly drunk enough. He unscrewed the bottle top and took a long pull straight from it.

  “And then we get out of Reno,” Leanne said. “We go join the rebellion.”

  “Still mostly my kids, huh?”

  “It’s growing.”

  . . . I had rather be on my farm than be emperor of the world . . .

  —GEORGE WASHINGTON,

  RESPONSE TO NEWSPAPER CRITICISMS OF HIS PRESIDENCY, AS QUOTED IN THE ALUMNI REGISTER OF THE UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, 1925

  Clover sat in a corner of the couch in the big house with Mango at her feet. She watched the door while Jude told Christopher, Marta, and Phire about the city. Their voices floated over her while she waited for West to come back.

  The other kids were asleep. She’d thought it might take a while for them to settle down, but it didn’t. Even the older ones crashed almost immediately. It was like their systems were on overload, rebooting. She was glad. If there were two dozen kids crammed into the house right now, all asking questions at the same time, she’d probably have to leave. Her nerves were so on edge, she could practically feel each one firing off like the Fourth of July.

  “Waverly already set up Virginia City,” Christopher said, and grabbed Clover’s attention back from the door. “It’s all in his notes. There’s food, another biodiesel setup, suppressant, everything.”

  “Why would he do that?” Clover asked. “Did he tell himself something was going to happen here?”

  It was possible. Waverly had driven himself halfway to insane making dive after dive through the portal he’d discovered sixteen years ago. He left notes for his past self to find. Sometimes they made sense and sometimes they showed the extent of the holes staying too long in the future had created in his memory.

  Christopher shrugged. “If he did, it’s not in our notes. It’s a shame you can’t—”

  “Let me see the notes,” Jude said, cutting off Christopher before he could wish that Clover could dive through the portal like Ned Waverly had.

  Christopher handed over two composition books held together with a rubber band. They had pieces of paper sticking out, marking pages. Suddenly, Clover couldn’t sit still anymore. She stood up and bounced on the toes of her mother’s old red Converse low-tops.

  “I’m running,” she said. Mango lifted his head and wagged his stumpy tail. She took his lead from a nail by the door.

  “Clover.” Jude stood up, too, holding the bundle of notebooks at his side.

  “I have to. Don’t worry, I won’t go far.”

  “I’ll go with you.” He pushed the notebooks back into Christopher’s hands and stepped around the coffee table toward her.

  Part of her wanted his company, but she put a hand out to stop him. “I’ll stay right out front. I just need to be alone for a few minutes.”

  Then she left before he could argue. It was not quite cold outside, but a little too cool to be totally comfortable. She didn’t bother with stretching, even though she knew she should have. Her muscles were tight, like they’d all been shortened by two inches, and she just needed to move. She kept Mango’s lead in her hand and started jogging away from the house.

  By the time she reached the gate and turned toward the cluster of buildings, her muscles were loosening. The slow, steady one-two-one-two pattern of her feet against the packed dirt helped organize her thoughts. She ran up to the main house and around behind it, making a loop, and was halfway back to the gate when she saw someone standing against the side of the first building watching her. Tim, the boy from the Dinosaur. She slowed and stopped.

  “What are you doing out here?” she asked. “Jude said you were all asleep.”

  He tapped his right temple. “Can’t shut it down, you know?”

  She nodded. She knew all right. Tim reached down and petted Mango, who licked his palm once. She wanted to take his lead off. He didn’t need to work here, not like he did in the city, but she was afraid that he’d run off into the woods and get lost or meet up with a bear.

  “Do you like to run?” she asked.

  Tim shrugged one shoulder. She looked at him for another few seconds, then jogged away. She couldn’t think of anything else to say to him. After a few minutes, she heard him come up behind her. They ran together, without talking, three times around her loop. The third time she came back up from the gate, she saw Jude standing on the front porch. He raised one hand in a wave to both of them.

  When she made her final turn toward the house, the van’s headlights were at the gate. She stopped Mango, and Tim stopped, too. West was home.

  —

  “She got back through, into the city,” West said. “That’s all I know for sure.”

  “You think she’s okay, though?” Clover twisted and untwisted the drawstring that ran around the edge of her jacket’s hood. Anything could have happened to Leanne. Her prosthetic could have gotten caught in the rocks, or the current could have been too much. The guard could have found her out after curfew. Anything. “West.”

 
“She says she’ll be on the train Wednesday.” West’s voice sounded foreign to her. “If she is, then she’ll travel with Clover and Jude as far as Denver.”

  He hated that idea. Clover could feel it radiating off him. She didn’t bother to say anything, though, because there wasn’t anything to say. They needed that book, and it had to be in the Thomas Jefferson wing of the Library of Congress. She went over the reasons why again. Waverly had told her that it was where all the information was, everything they needed to know about the Company, about Jon Stead, about the suppressant, and he gave her a fake Thomas Jefferson quote as a clue.

  “Meantime, we have to leave the ranch.”

  Tim said, “But we just got here.”

  West looked at a loss for words for a minute. “What’s your name?”

  “Tim.”

  “Tim. I know you just got here. But we don’t have a choice. No one wants to leave. This is our home.”

  Jude held up one of the notebooks that Christopher had given him earlier. “Looks like Waverly has us all set up in Virginia City. Maybe it won’t be so bad.”

  “Yeah,” Phire said. “Well, you weren’t here the last few months getting this place set up. Are you sure we have to leave, West? Maybe we don’t.”

  “We do. Bridget—” He bit off her name. “Bridget knows where we are. Bennett will talk to her as soon as he realizes that Clover has left the city again.”

  “Maybe I should go back,” Clover said. She was really just thinking out loud more than making a serious suggestion. Now that she was here, out of the city, she didn’t really want to go back.

  Jude and West both said, “No.”

  She looked at the ceiling and shook her head.

  “If she went back, we wouldn’t have to leave?” Tim asked.

  West made a sound in the back of his throat that reminded Clover of Mango when he was about to bark. Jude spoke up before that could happen. “Why don’t you go get some sleep, Tim?”

  Tim gave a sharp kind of half laugh. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  West opened his mouth, and Clover recognized the look on his face, but Jude cut him off again with a question. “Have you guys checked out Virginia City?”

  “No,” West said. “We barely have time to breathe around here.”

  “So we trust what Waverly wrote, right?” Jude looked at each of them. “What choice do we have?”

  “We can stay,” Phire said. “Take our chances.”

  “No, we can’t.” West rubbed a hand through his dark hair, making it stand on end. “It’s not fair to Bridget to expect her to not talk about the ranch when she’s questioned.”

  “Not fair? We wouldn’t even be talking about this if she hadn’t—”

  “That’s enough.” West’s voice came out low and menacing.

  Phire sighed and kept his mouth closed.

  “So we leave tomorrow,” Jude said “We have two vehicles?”

  “I know where a third one is,” Christopher said. “We didn’t need it, so we left it in the driveway of a house a mile or so from here. But it runs; I put some of our fuel in it just in case.”

  “Okay,” West said. “So tomorrow you get that car. We load as much of what we can take from here, and all of the people—”

  “And Mango,” Clover said.

  “And Mango, into the cars. Let’s get up there and see what Waverly did for us.”

  “We could ask him, you know,” Clover said.

  That stopped everyone in their tracks. “What are you talking about?” Phire asked, and then he must have figured it out. “Oh.”

  “If someone waits by the dock, they’ll see him come up through the portal. He was diving two years ago.”

  West ran a hand through his hair once again. “I don’t think we can risk it.”

  “But if we can warn him,” Marta said, her voice rising an octave. “He can warn us and—”

  Clover shook her head. She’d already run the idea that they might still save Geena through her head a thousand times. In the end, there was only one clear answer. “If there were any way that we could undo what happened to Geena and Waverly, it would be done already. They would be here.”

  She waited for that to sink in. If they found the past version of Waverly any time before he died—anytime in the next eighteen months or so—and there was a way for him to save himself and Geena, they would never have died in the first place. The two of them would be here with them right now.

  “I think—I don’t know, I think death is too heavy for a time loop. It can’t be undone. It breaks the link or something,” Clover said. “But if we can find those notes . . .”

  “Screw your notes,” Marta said softly, and walked outside. Christopher followed her.

  “Maybe after we get settled, Clover,” West said. “But not now. It’s too dangerous to be so close to the docks.”

  Clover disagreed but didn’t argue. She could hear Marta crying just outside the door.

  They spent the next half hour making a list of the essentials. A few days’ food and fresh water, blankets, enough suppressant for all of the people who’d just left the city.

  “I think three syringes each is enough for now,” West said. “Just in case we get delayed coming back.”

  Clover was suddenly so tired she could barely keep her eyes open. Her brother’s voice, as he gave out jobs and soothed worries, washed over her, and she finally just let them close. When she woke up in her own bed the next morning, she wasn’t sure how she got there.

  —

  They had plenty of biodiesel. Frank had brought them oil regularly, and Waverly already had a good stock of it. They’d been careful with the generator. Christopher was able to fill all three tanks full. They figured that would get them back and forth to Virginia City twice, once to bring everyone up, and once to come back for leftover supplies. They could fill the tanks completely before they headed back for good.

  It was important, Clover decided, that Tim was at the meeting the night before. So far, the new kids from Foster City stayed together and looked to him and Jude for leadership. They didn’t trust West yet. They didn’t know him.

  There was so much chatter while they loaded up the cars that Clover wanted to stuff her fingers in her ears to block it out. Everyone was talking about what Virginia City might be like, trying to remember anything they’d ever heard about it. It was about forty miles away, and Clover was not looking forward to being in a car with so many of these kids for the time it took to drive that distance.

  “You can drive the small car,” West said, reading her mind. “Take Mango and Jude with you. We’ll load it up with supplies. Me and Christopher can bring the rest of the kids in the van and the station wagon.”

  She nodded, relief filling her belly. Despite the chaos of so many new people, they had the vehicles packed by lunchtime. Marta had killed three of the older chickens and poached them in broth with potatoes all morning. The meat was tough, but Clover watched the Foster City kids devour the stew like they’d never seen food before.

  Clover fed the chickens and goats, leaving enough food to get them through a couple of days. Her car was loaded with glass jars filled with fruits and vegetables, padded with blankets and towels. She’d also collected some of their most important books, just in case, and put Waverly’s notebooks in the trunk.

  She was excited to drive again. Her fingers itched to turn the ignition and feel the engine come alive. Mango sat in the backseat and Jude climbed into the passenger seat.

  “I thought we’d get to spend more time here,” Jude said.

  “I didn’t think we’d be leaving at all.” She looked over at him and saw that he’d known. Somehow he’d realized that eventually they’d have to leave the ranch. And it made him sad. “Virginia City might be fun. I’ve seen pictures.”

  “What the hell is wrong with B
ridget?”

  Good question. When Clover had realized that Bridget and Isaiah had left, she’d felt sick. Did they go back to the Academy? Had they already gone to Bridget’s father, or maybe Bennett? If they went to Bennett, then Clover didn’t even want to think about what was going to happen to Leanne.

  West had made Christopher arrange the cars so that the van was first in line to leave the ranch. Then the car, with Clover behind the wheel, and finally Christopher in the station wagon. There was literally no way for her to convince her brother that she was a better driver than either of them, and that she didn’t need to be sandwiched between them like something breakable.

  The biggest worry was running into vehicles from the city, headed to and from Lake Tahoe, where the Veronica was docked. Clover had spent most of an hour early that morning setting a course using a map that West had found in Waverly’s papers. They’d have to go around to the west and make a big loop to avoid the highway.

  “I really hope that Sacramento is as closed off as Reno is,” she said as she put the car into gear and drove toward the gate, following West in the van.

  “Why wouldn’t it be?” Jude asked.

  She just shook her head. So many variables. And if they were caught, they’d be like fat flies in a spiderweb. “There could be patrols. Or for all we know, there’s a Mariner division out of Sacramento and we’ll run right into them on their way to the lake. Or—”

  Jude reached out and put a hand firmly on her upper thigh. Her leg twitched, making her foot come off the gas pedal for a second, and then settled down. “We’re going to be okay.”

  “How do you know?” she asked.

  “I know because Waverly knew. He wrote us notes—”

  “He can’t have known this, Jude. He’s dead. How could he leave himself notes about something that happened after he died?” She’d been thinking a lot about Waverly the last several hours. Didn’t he notice, two years before he died, that the notes he was leaving for himself on the other side of the time portal stopped? “Do you think that he knew he was going to die?”

  Jude moved his hand on her leg, sliding his palm firmly toward her knee. “I don’t know.”