Brave New Love (25 page)

“And what about his parents?” Emily asked. She insisted the baby was a boy, though we had no way of knowing. Are they in trouble, too . . . for going through the black
market?”

“I don’t know,” I replied. The Foundlings had let Emily choose which of their applicants would receive her baby. She’d picked the Bruckners, who, unlike most of the other
waiting parents were not members of the Opposition. (Unless you’re in the Party, it’s almost impossible to be approved for adoption through the normal channels.) This appealed to my
sister, who figured a baby’s life was hard enough without making it some kind of political statement. It was the most rational thing I’d ever heard her say.

I wondered where the Bruckners were now. If they, too, were being questioned. If they would even be able to take the baby. There was too much I didn’t know.

I stroked Emily’s hair, pushing it back behind her ear and she caught my finger with her own. She curled her finger over her temple, our little salute, but it did nothing to ease my
nerves. Finally her breathing softened and I knew she’d gone to sleep. That’s Emily. She can sleep through everything. Because she’s got me.

“Sakasaka,” I whispered into her hair. But it wasn’t.

As soon as I was sure she was out I left the tent. Scott was stirring up the fire. “Everything okay?” he asked.

I shrugged. “Did you set up a latrine or anything?”

He gestured south. “Over there. There’s a red flag—can’t miss it.”

I grabbed a flashlight and took off into the woods, but I bypassed the latrine. Thirty paces, fifty, seventy-five . . . This was far enough. I shoved my fist in my mouth and screamed. I kicked
at the fallen leaves. I grabbed a fallen stick and beat the hell out of a tree trunk.

We were so close. So, so close. And now it was all ruined. All those months, all those lies. The disgusting stench of the peanut butter jars, the way none of my clothes fit anymore, the pop
quizzes Emily had failed on my behalf, the sleepless nights, the constant stress. The sound of Emily weeping in the darkness on her side of the bedroom. I’d done everything I could to save
her, and it wasn’t enough.

The stick broke, so I let it fall to the ground and started in on the trunk with my hands. The bark scraped my knuckles and the wood bruised the heels of my palms but I didn’t care.
Nothing mattered anymore. Nothing.

Two hands grabbed me from behind, trapping my arms to my sides. I screamed again, but this time in terror.

“Shush,” said Scott in my ear.

I wriggled out of his grasp and whirled away in a rush of leaves and whimpers. “What’s the point?” I cried. “What was the point of all this?”

His voice remained infuriatingly calm. “To keep your sister out of WOMB, I thought.”

And fail, anyway. “Maybe they’re right. Maybe it’s where she belongs. We wouldn’t be freezing in a tent in the woods right now if we’d just followed the
rules.”

“That’s what they want you to think,” he said. “They were the ones that forced us into this. That took away all your other options. WOMB says Emily can’t take care
of herself—but they don’t even give her a chance. If Emily had been able to, she would have gotten health care. She wouldn’t have been sneaking around.”

“Why not? Emily did plenty of sneaking around before she got pregnant.” I shoved my hands in my pockets so I wouldn’t punch anything else. So I wouldn’t punch
him.
“I gave up everything. My grades, my body, my freaking
pee
. I didn’t do anything wrong, and I’m the one on the run now! All because she couldn’t manage to keep her
zipper up.”

I heard him shuffle toward me through the leaves. “I know. You’ve made a huge sacrifice . . .”

“Do you know that Emily hardly spoke to me for the four months she was dating Robbie?” I said, as if Scott would care. “It’s like I didn’t even exist to her
anymore.” Tears spilled over my cheeks, but even then I didn’t stop. “I didn’t even matter. And then, the second he vanished, all of a sudden she loved me again. Because I
was the only one who could help her. So selfish. So, so selfish.” And so unlike her, which was what hurt the most. “I hate her,” I hissed. “She belongs in WOMB.” The
second the words escaped my lips, I wished for them back.

“No,” Scott said firmly. “You don’t. You love her. You love her so much that—” he got real quiet. “My sister went to WOMB.” He paused again, as if
even now he wasn’t sure he wanted to tell me. “Eight years ago. Gwen was fifteen, I was ten. My folks thought they were doing the right thing, just like the announcements say. Just like
the law says. She went in at three months, when they caught her. But she never came out.”

That was what I was afraid of. That’s what you heard about the WOMB girls. I never knew anyone who had been in WOMB. No one did. Where did they go after the babies were born? Why
didn’t they come home?

I reached for him, but I couldn’t find him in the darkness. There was no light pollution from screenglow here, no buzz from the casting towers. Nothing but the wind, and our voices, and
the terrible words we could finally say.

“My parents tried for ages to find out what had happened to her, and they got so many different stories. She’d been transferred to a facility across the country. She’d decided
to become a WOMB agent and changed her name to hide her shame. She had applied for and been granted emancipation and didn’t want to have anything to do with my parents, who’d not raised
her well enough to teach her the importance of abstinence. She’d run away from the facility and was on the lam. She had . . . died in childbirth. They hired detectives, they hired lawyers,
but they couldn’t get a straight answer. They never found out what happened to the baby, either.”

That’s why I couldn’t let Emily go to WOMB. I couldn’t risk losing her. Not again.

“That’s how they hooked up with the Foundlings. We’ve been working for them ever since.” Scott was close now. So close I could hear his breath, could feel his heat.
“We don’t know what happened to Gwen. But we can try to make sure it doesn’t happen to Emily.”

“Yeah, but now what?” I whispered. I turned toward what I knew was his face in the blackness. “You’re crazy to be helping us. You had advanced warning. You could have run
away.”

“No, I couldn’t.”

“Yes, you could,” I insisted. “I don’t even know your last name. If WOMB picked us up, even if we ratted, they never would have found you.”

“No,” he repeated. “
I couldn’t.
”

The forest itself went silent for a moment, his words sweeping away everything—the wind, the rustle of the leaves, the sound of our breath and the rush of blood in my veins. My hands found
his in the darkness, and it didn’t matter that neither of us could see a thing, because I knew that Scott had never needed his eyes to see me anyway. I could be packing twenty extra pounds, I
could be dressed just like my sister—our own mother sometimes couldn’t tell us apart—but Scott always knew who was who.

“I didn’t come for Emily today,” he said, bending his head close to mine. “I came for you.”

•  •  •

Even if you follow all the steps perfectly, you might be surprised where they end up leading you. I could tell you about every step of the next month. I could tell you about
that first night, sitting in front of the fire, with Scott’s hand, so warm and reassuring, wrapped around mine. I could tell you how I didn’t sleep that night—not from worry over
whether or not the police would find us (which I should have)—but because my heart was beating too hard in my chest to relax. I could tell you about days spent trying to find a safe house, or
keep Emily healthy, or stay one step ahead of the police. I could tell you how careful I was to stay focused on the tasks at hand, how I never lost my head, how Scott kept Emily calm, how he kept
us moving forward, how we both said that the other was the one holding it all together.

Instead I’ll tell you how we were both wrong.

Scott was late returning from a scouting trip. We’d been squatting for a week at a lakeside vacation cabin. It was winter and the family who owned the place would never come back just to
take in the mud flats and the mist. I thought Emily was napping and I was sitting by the window near the driveway, letting tea go cold in my hands as I waited for Scott to return.

But then I saw Emily, trudging up the road, her pregnant waddle unmistakable even at this distance. She looked ready to burst out of her too-small coat. There was no way we could have hidden it
now. Even if I gained more weight, I couldn’t make myself look like her.

I met her at the door, fuming. “What are you doing out there!” I cried. “Were you down by the main road? What if someone saw you?”

“Relax, sis.” Emily was puffing a little. She was almost always out of breath these days. “We can just switch again. I’ll hide if anyone comes up to the house. One fat
chick’s as good as the next in this weather.”

“Our face is all over the casts these days,” I said. “It’s too dangerous for us to go out.”

“Exactly,” said Emily. She brushed past me and inside, where she started to undo her scarf and coat. “We didn’t do all this to hide and we can’t keep
running.”

“Who says?” I replied.

“The baby says.” She turned to me. “I’m not going to be pregnant forever.”

“We’ll figure it out.”

“I did figure it out,” she said. “I contacted the Bruckners. They still want the baby.”

“You
what?
” I slammed the door, as if that could somehow keep us safe. “You contacted them? What if they’re cooperating with WOMB? You put us all in
danger!”

“We’re in danger already,” she replied. She sounded so
calm.
“We are, and what’s more, the baby is.” She cradled her stomach again. “I’ve
thought this through. We’ve been running for weeks. If I’m going to get caught, I’d rather not hand my baby over to WOMB, and if I’m going to have to remain on the run,
I’d rather my baby not grow up like that, either. Taking a chance on the Bruckners is our only option.”

I opened my mouth to complain, to scold, to disagree, but I couldn’t make myself speak. Emily had a point. While Scott and I were trying to figure out how to cover our own asses,
she’d been thinking about the one member of our party who couldn’t yet speak for himself.

“How do you know you can trust them?” I asked instead.

“I don’t.” She looked away out the window, and was quiet for a moment before going on. “Not about WOMB or us, I mean. But I know I can trust them about the baby. They
want this baby. They want it for themselves.” She turned to me. “And I want it for them, too.”

I looked at her, at the face I knew better than any other in the world. The person I’d loved best since before I was born. Everything I’d been taught to believe was that Emily
couldn’t take care of herself, that she didn’t know what was right, that she couldn’t be trusted, as she’d failed at the single thing it was paramount for a young woman to
do—guard her body.

But what if none of that was true? I’d always thought I was doing the right thing, but I’d never felt so right as I have since I started breaking the rules to keep Emily safe. And
now, even though all that rational, practical instinct I’ve always prided myself on said that Emily’s plan was dangerous, there was something greater, something stronger, that said that
Emily’s plan was
good.

I heard the crunch of gravel outside. Scott was coming back. Emily was still looking at me, waiting for my verdict. As if she needed it. After all, wasn’t this always about letting her do
what she wanted with her body, with this baby?

I opened my mouth to reassure her as Scott came through the door.

“There’s a new cast,” he said without preamble. “You aren’t going to believe it.”

•  •  •

Monitor Stricter was almost unrecognizable. Her hair was down and had been styled into a cascade of waves on her shoulders. Bright red lipstick had been dabbed across her
wrinkled pucker of a mouth. She looked ten years younger. And she was crying.

“I should have known something was wrong,” she said, dabbing at her eyes with a hanky. “She’s not usually like that.”

The interviewer wore a concerned expression and shook her head in sympathy. “How do you mean?”

“Well,” said Stricter. “I hate to say it, but Emily has always been so . . . charming. Charismatic, really. She could get anyone to believe her. She’s one of the most
well-liked girls in her class. Her sister is . . . not. Naturally, this would make it easy for Emily to manipulate her twin. The poor girl.”

The three of us stared at the screen in frank disbelief. For a moment, I wondered if there were something wrong with Scott’s tablet. Like his Prius, it was several generations old.

“Who knows how long they’d been forcing her to help them?”

“Forcing?” I spluttered. “Forcing
me?
”

The screen switched to a shot of my mother in a taped interview. “She’s always been such a good girl. Always followed the rules.” The cast proceeded to show evidence to back up
that statement—evidence that included my detention record versus Emily’s. Ironically, the one detention I did have on my record had been Emily’s fault.

“I just wish she’d felt safe talking to me,” Stricter was saying now, her eyes still watering with crocodile tears. “She was dropping hints the last time I saw her,
telling me about her sister—about herself, I now realize. If only I’d picked up on it.”

“They can’t be serious, can they?” I asked.

Scott snorted. “No, there’s an angle. Wait for it . . .”

“My poor girl,” they showed my mother saying. “Dragged into this. If only she’d just call me. It’s not too late to save all three of them.”

“They’re not talking about me, are they?” asked Scott.

“No,” Emily said. “They’re talking about the baby.”

I watched for a few more minutes as the programmers delineated their version of events. It was as elaborate a plot as any I could dream up . . . except they didn’t think I’d dreamt
it up. No, they believed my charismatic, manipulative sister was either convincing or coercing the staid, rule-following
me
into doing her dirty work. It cast Scott as a cruel seducer, as
Emily’s boyfriend, as the father of the baby.