inDIVISIBLE (19 page)

T pushed aside the objects and cocked his head, his dark eyes like stones, the way they always turned when he had something to tell me that he thought I might not like.

“Your father found more, the schematics of the building—he was a genius, really—and he realized that there were hidden rooms, fortified rooms, and unmarked shipments going to these rooms.”

I couldn’t tell where he was heading with the story so I just waited,
my skin tingling the way it had each time part of my reality had crashed over me during the last few days.

“He created an access badge that allowed him into any room in the building and he explored. He found a fortress in the building, Brynn, a military bunker with enough ammunition and fortification to hold off an army, along with the food needed to sustain thousands of soldiers.
”

“In the middle of Section Seven, in the City Center?”
I asked.

T nodded. “
Right across the street from the city park where babies crawl in the grass and children catch butterflies.”

“Why?”

“Security.”

“Against unarmed people? Against the students who stop there between classes for lunch? Against young lovers?” My throat caught as I remembered T and I in the shade of the
picnic tree, playing the role convincingly.

“Yes,” T said.

The thought of a fortress in the middle of the City Center sent shocks through my limbs and I folded my arms tightly over my chest to still the tremors.

“
There are nine sections in what used to be the U.S.,” T said. “Two more in Mexico and a few in Canada. Each section is controlled by the Alliance officials in City Centers.” He showed me the map, traced the borders that had separated the countries only a generation before. I knew them, had seen them in history class as the teachers celebrated how opening up the borders had created more commerce, more power. “Each City Center is equipped with the manpower and firepower to stop an army.”

“Because there’s such a
huge
threat to the Alliance, I can see that,” I spit. “They
should
be worried about us, a bunch of sheep following their lead so we don’t get cut off of their special programs …”

“Shhh,”
T said.

“I don’t want to shhh
,” I complained in a whisper. “I want to
do
something.”

T scrubbed his face, clearly exasperated, but when he dropped his hands, he smiled. “That’s the point—your father found a way to do something about it.”

“Finally,” I mumbled, leaning forward, my arms still tight around my torso to keep out the chill that rocked my heart.

“
All fourteen of the men killed during that ‘terrorist’ attack were working together. They’d sneak a few supplies out every day, give it to a courier who would make the occasional drop at the shed—possibly Cray. Someone must have followed him one day and set out to discover who else was involved.”

             
I picked a flashlight from the pile of supplies and turned it over in my hand, the handle a rough metal, finished in a crisscross design for grip. The One United insignia was stamped into the grip just as I’d suspected, like everything else.
Did any of us actually own anything?

I tapped the flashlight against my thigh repeatedly, relishing the sting.
“I think if people are so convinced, they should at least be allowed to leave, you know? They should be able to move away where they won’t bother anyone and make their own communities.”

Nonsense, I knew, but when T began speaking again, I realized that nothing would ever surprise me again.

He pushed the map toward me and pointed at several dots to the south. “That’s what these are—communities of people who’ve fled One United. They’re not protected by the Alliance. They don’t get healthcare. They technically don’t exist. But, the Alliance allows them to live that way so they don’t instill unrest in the rest of the population. These people don’t want to change things. They don’t want to fight. They just want to live in the wilderness in peace.”

He pointed to the mountains. “The people up here want to fix the system. These are the ones the Alliance wants to destroy. These are the
type of people the Alliance has deemed us to be.”

I brought the flashlight down hard enough to
make me wince, and T took it from me, placing it back in the pack before handing me a water bottle. The coolness against my fingers triggered my thirst, and the water sloshed down the front of my shirt as I gulped. I swiped my mouth with the back of my hand when I finished. Recapping the bottle, I passed it back to T, who smirked at me while his eyes trailed down the moisture that ran nearly to my belly button. I turned away and stalked back to the opening, determined to get some air on my shirt to dry it, hoping that in the process my cheeks would cool and return to their natural color. T and I had been traveling together, had slept beside one another, so why was I feeling so self-conscious now? I swiped my tongue across my bottom lip and remembered how his lips had felt on mine before shaking the image from my head and shoving my hands into my pockets.

“We have two choices,” T said.

I turned back around to face him, fairly certain I no longer blushed. “Okay?”

T leaned back on his hands and crossed his ankles, legs stretched in front of him. “
We’re closer to the southern communities than we are to the rendezvous points in the mountains. We could blend into those communities, make a life for ourselves, date … like we wanted to do in the beginning … remember our safe haven?”

“Date?” I laughed.

“Want normal or crazy?” he asked.

I wanted to date … but … “I don’t think I’ve ever been normal, T.”

“Me neither.”

I
leaned against the stone wall, watching him fold the map, placing it carefully with the notebooks in the hidden zipper at the back of the pack. “Besides, I can’t settle for anything but real freedom,” I said.  “Living in those squatter towns … it would only be a matter of time before the Alliance stepped in.”

T set the backpack aside and stretched his legs in front of him, crossed at the ankles.
“Your father mentions you a lot in his books,” he said.

I pushed from the wall and stroll
ed toward him, not sure I was ready to hear my father’s sentiments. “What’s he say?”

“Beware my daughter Brynn. She’s headstrong and
temperamental and utterly beautiful—”

“Lia
r,” I laughed, “except maybe the beautiful part. I think he may have said that.”

“He did,” T winked.

“So what now?” I asked.

“I need your answer. North or south?”

“We need to fight,” I replied. “Besides, we have all of my father’s research. It won’t help the southern communities, but it might help in the fight.”

T
threw the backpack over his shoulders and started toward me. “He said you’d say that too.”

“Right.” I fell into step beside him as we left the shadowed crevice, venturing into the
ravine—the stream widening as we climbed deeper into the hillside. The right side of the ravine turned to stone, forcing us into a narrow, slot canyon. Gazing up at the wavy, bulging walls, I wondered how we’d gotten there and how something so beautiful had been neglected from public hiking routes.

T trailed his hand over the rock. “Brynn,” he whispered, fingers dipping into some letters etched into the stone. “Looks like we aren’t the first to come this way.”

“S plus J,” I read.

“I bet this used to be open to the public,” he said. “Look at all the other names in the rock.”

Names, dates and curse words filled the canyon wall, and I paused. “Do you think the vandalism is why they shut it down?”

T shrugged and picked up his step. The water dropped deep and clear, slower moving in the canyon and we walked along the right side
of the bank to keep our feet as dry as possible. Getting them wet in the mountains wasn’t smart, especially when the temperatures dipped so drastically.

The shade alone affected the temperature more than I realized it would
, and I folded my arms across my chest to fight off my sudden chills.

T walked silently for a long time before he said, “Your father knew you better than you realized.”

I ran my filthy hands through my knotted hair, removing sticks that had entangled in it during our flight the day before. “Why do you say that?”

“Why else would he have created a password only you would guess on his work computer? Why else would he have left those files up and that picture of your mother?”

Tears pressed against the backs of my eyes but I sniffed them back, refusing to show my weakness. Maybe later, when we sat on the beach again and played our flirting games. But not now—I tried a different subject, taking my mind from my father and returning it to our task.

“
Do you think they’re doing anything right—the Alliance?” I asked. “I mean, so many people are so loyal … there’s got to be a reason why.”

T
snapped a dead twig from a tree and broke it between his fingers. He broke it again and again until it was too small to break then threw it into the water. “Do you really need to wonder about their loyalty?”

I bit my
bottom lip, afraid I already knew—the answer so obvious and yet so distant my entire life. The Alliance had stolen our freedom to be ourselves, to voice our opinions, to make our own decisions—yet nobody had made a dent in their plans, because the few people who had the power to do so were silenced.

A rock rolled beneath my foot and it echoed in the canyon. I placed my next step softer, directly in the center of a rock.
“How do they control us so easily?”

T
stopped and listened to the roaring sound filling the canyon walls now. That meant we were about to encounter a waterfall, and I hoped there would be a way around it or we’d be backtracking right into the hands of the Alliance. T shoved his hands into his pockets and shifted his weight. “Fear. They control us with fear of terrorism, fear of pandemics, fear of travel, fear of ourselves.”

“Ourselves?” I asked.

T leaned back against the canyon wall. “They want us to believe we can’t make the best decisions for ourselves so they make them for us, but who do those decisions really benefit?”

“The Alliance.”

“They tell you what school to go to, dictate what you learn, where you get employed ...”

“So we don’t waste our potential,” I recited as I’d learned in elementary school, but I no longer believed it.

T squeezed my hand. “How many times were you really encouraged to reach your potential?”

I laughed, but it held no humor. “Are you kidding? Show your potential and you end up a lab rat or worse.”

“Exactly,” he said, standing again. “One United demands mediocrity because a nation of underachievers is easier to control than a society that excels.”

“Because when we excel we’re thi
nking for ourselves,” I mumbled. T continued up the canyon. The roaring became so loud we would have had to shout over it. We remained silent instead, afraid our voices would carry downstream to alert the officers.

We rounded a corner and
encountered a waterfall at least twenty feet high. It filled most of the canyon except for a sloped section of rock a couple of feet wide on one side. The water sprayed through the canyon, soaking the rock we needed to climb if we wanted to continue ahead. “What do you think?” I asked.

T stepped up onto the narrow ledge, easing closer to the falls as the
rock sloped upward. “It’s slippery.”

As I stepped up behind him, the tiny tendrils of moss swaying in the water were obvious
, and I knew that one wrong step and I’d be flat on my back or worse. T took my hand and braced me as I inched along. As it became too steep to climb, he squatted down and webbed his fingers together to form a step. I placed one foot on his hands and he heaved me upward, standing as I straightened my leg. I teetered and grasped for the rock that had nearly turned to cliff, groping for a handhold anywhere.

The rock jutted just above my hand and I stretched, fingertips gripping the rock. T holl
ered for me to hold on while he worked my feet up to his shoulders, giving me the extra inches to haul my body up to a plateau a few feet shy of the top.

I dropped to my knees, turned around and reached down for T. He already scrambled up the wall, his feet finding cracks I couldn’t see until he landed next to me and swung up the last bit of rock to stand atop the falls.

He reached down and hauled me up beside him, pulling me to his side as we moved away from the slippery rocks encased in moss. The canyon walls opened up at the top, the ground easing in both directions—dotted in wildflowers and scrub oak.

“We need to hydrate here before we refill the bottles,” he said, slinging his pack from his shoulders to retrieve our drinking water.

We each drained a bottle before T crouched and dipped them under the mountain stream.              I glanced behind us, searching the canyon for any sign of security. “Sometimes,” I ventured, still getting used to the idea that I could speak freely now, “I think living in ignorance is easier.”