Viral Nation (13 page)

Their father would have sent her to Foster City. “I know that.”

“But you constantly underestimate me, just the way he does.” She sat back in her chair and crossed her arms over her chest. “I can take care of myself.”

“No. You can’t.”

“I’m not a baby, West! I’m a Messenger now.”

“You’re sixteen. It doesn’t matter what you’re capable of; they won’t let you stay here alone. You’ll be sent to live in Foster City, even if you do have a job.”

“Why would I have to go to Foster City?”

West opened his mouth to tell her about his application, but the words wouldn’t come out. This was a nightmare.

“I don’t know what the big deal is,” Clover said.

West closed his eyes and forced a slow, deep breath. “You don’t understand.”

“Yes, I do.”

“No, you don’t!” He went to the kitchen drawer where he’d stashed his Company folder and pulled it out.

“What is it?”

Christ. This was a flat-out tragedy. “I have an interview with the Company.”

“Since when?”

“Since the day you got your acceptance letter.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“I don’t know. I should have.” Mango hadn’t left Clover’s side. Not to eat or drink. Not to curl up in his favorite chair. He picked up on the tension in the room and stayed on duty. “Are they going to let you keep Mango with you?”

“Yes. The Academy wouldn’t. And they were going to make me room with Heather Sweeney! She’s—”

“I know who she is.” A spoiled officer’s daughter who made a career out of torturing Clover.

“Maybe this is for the best,” Clover said. “I mean, the Mariner track. I never even considered it. And it was so cool, West. I got to ride in the
Veronica
, and I had to read a fortune cookie, and—”

He held a hand up to stop her. “You’ll end up in Foster City while I’m in training.”

She hadn’t thought about that. It showed on her face. “I can stay home. Bennett said I could.”

“He doesn’t know that I’m headed for training. And you can’t stay here alone, even if you were allowed to. How will you eat? The food is in the Bazaar. Remember the Bazaar? It wouldn’t matter if they gave your ration tickets directly to you; you aren’t old enough to collect on them.”

She couldn’t even if she were old enough. He doubted she’d make it through the door and into the chaos inside. He didn’t say that. Or that there was no way he’d let her go there, even if her sensory issues didn’t stop her.

“Mr. Kingston wouldn’t let me into the Academy. And they didn’t exactly ask me if I wanted to be a Messenger. Drafted, remember?”

A meltdown was imminent. West felt it. Mango felt it, too. The dog pressed his weight against Clover’s legs and the top of his head against her hand, trying to calm her.

“We’ll work this out,” West said.

She shifted her weight from her left foot to her right and did the thing with her hands she did sometimes when she was upset, rubbing her knuckles together like she thought she might light a fire with them. “When do you go to training?”

“September seventh.”

“The day after school starts.” Clover’s face crumbled, and tears fell down her cheeks.

“Oh, hell. Don’t cry, Clover. Come on.”

West came around the table and knelt next to her. He waited until she leaned against him, then wrapped his arms around her. It was rare that Clover allowed herself to be touched, but when she was in this space she needed it. She sobbed against his shoulder. “I really wanted to go to the Academy, you know?”

“We’ll change Kingston’s mind. We’ll go to the Academy tomorrow.
If the Mariners want you, they’ll still want you in four years. They’d be stupid not to.”

“He won’t change his mind.”

He had to, West thought. The alternatives—Clover in Foster City or him waiting two more years to join the Company—were unthinkable. He still hadn’t wrapped his head around the idea that his little sister had somehow been conscripted into the Company ranks.

“Why don’t you go for a run while I make supper?”

“Okay,” she said. As quickly as her meltdown had come, it was over. “I had a ham sandwich at the Academy before they kicked me out. I wanted to bring you one, but I had to eat it instead.”

“Was it good?”

“Really good. Maybe you can get us a ham next week.”

“I have to ask you to leave,” Kingston said.

West concentrated on not letting his irritation show. He and Clover sat in Kingston’s office in matching reddish leather chairs. Kingston had some kind of little man, big desk complex. He looked absurd sitting behind the outsized oak monstrosity.

“All we want is an explanation,” West said.

“I have told you, and I told Clover when I sent her to the Company, sometimes someone looks like a perfect candidate for the Academy on paper but in reality is not a good fit.”

“She’s smarter than any three students here put together.”

Clover looked tiny in her chair, holding herself stiff and very controlled. She looked at her knees and gripped her hands together in her lap. She didn’t move. Not even when Kingston said, “I’m sure that’s not true. But even if it were, it doesn’t matter. She is not right for the Academy.”

Her attempt to control her behavior only highlighted how different she really was from other girls her age.

“She’s exactly right for the Academy. Or aren’t you in the business of training the best minds in Reno anymore?”

“Please, don’t make me send for the guard.”

Clover stood up. Her green eyes were red-rimmed, but no tears fell. “I want to go home.”

West scrubbed his hand through his hair and finally stood, too. “You’re making a mistake, Mr. Kingston. A huge mistake.”

Kingston didn’t answer, except to raise one shoulder as if to say
maybe
.

“I can’t believe he didn’t budge an inch,” West said after they’d left the campus and made their way down Virginia Street and up California Avenue back home on their bicycles. “Not a damn inch.”

“Did you really expect him to?”

Maybe he shouldn’t have, but he did. In what world did it make sense that Clover was pulled out of school and dumped into the Mariner track before she was even old enough to feed herself? “We’ll appeal.”

“I’ll be as old as you before it’s even looked at,” Clover said.

God, he hated that she was right. “Maybe Bennett can help.”

“He seemed pretty excited to have me at the Company. He’s the one who kept telling me I was drafted.”

“This doesn’t make sense. Mariners are trained at the Academy. If they wanted you there, why would they take you right out of primary school?”

“I don’t know,” Clover said. “Kingston was going to put me in research, anyway. He said so, before he decided I didn’t belong at the Academy at all. I wasn’t headed for the Mariners.”

West sat quietly for a minute while Clover ate salad greens and tomatoes from their garden, tossed in a little of their precious oil and some vinegar she had made herself from a recipe she’d found
at the library and juice pressed from Mrs. Finch’s apples. “So, I’ll cancel my training.”

“You can’t.” She didn’t even pause as she brought her fork to her mouth. They couldn’t afford to lose their appetites just because they were upset.

“Yes, I can. It’s only two more years. No, less than that. Once you’re eighteen, you won’t need a guardian.”

“You’ve wanted this your whole life.”

“What am I supposed to do, Clover? Do you want to go to Foster City?”

“We’ll find Dad,” she said. “He’ll know what to do.”

Sure he would. “He’d have you in Foster City before you even knew what hit you.”

“Maybe it’s not as bad as it seems. I have to go to the Waverly-Stead building tomorrow for a driving lesson,” Clover said. “I’ll try to find out what happens in situations like this. They can’t really have employees living in Foster City.”

They were going to teach her to drive? West heard Bridget’s voice telling him to be careful. He needed to find a way to talk to her. Clover took another bite and chewed slowly. West could practically see her wheels turning.

“Turn the wheel the way you want the van to go. That’s
it. Now, sharper.”

Clover pulled the steering wheel harder to the left and the van made a tight turn.

“You’re a natural,” Leanne said. “It took me forever to learn.”

Clover’s cheeks actually ached from smiling so hard. She turned the wheel to the right and the van followed in a wider, spiraling turn. “It’s pretty fun.”

Two deep dimples formed when Leanne smiled back at Clover. “Ready to try the street?”

The van’s engine rumbled under Clover when she gave it a little gas. She loved how she could hold a picture in her head of the way the wheel turned the axis, which turned the tires. She didn’t fully understand how stepping on the gas pedal or brake worked, but she would find out. She could hardly wait to get to the library on Wednesday.

Driving was like running, only more. More free. More fast. More everything.

Clover turned onto the street and then sped down back roads, staying away from the main avenue with all its bicycles. Leanne lowered the passenger window and wind blew through Clover’s hair and over her face. She didn’t dare look away from the road to see whether Mango, who was sitting in the space between the front seats, was enjoying himself. She bet he was.

“You really like this, don’t you?” Leanne asked.

“I love it. Who wouldn’t?”

“I remember when people still drove personal cars. Can you imagine hundreds of other cars all flying around you?”

“I’ve seen it in movies.”

“Not the same at all.”

Clover had spent the last half hour trying to figure out how to ask Leanne about kids working for the Company. Finally, she blurted it out. “What happens to kids who get drafted but don’t have a guardian at home?”

Leanne shot her a look. “The Company doesn’t
draft
kids. Who wouldn’t want on the Mariner track?”

Clover imagined that some people might not, but for some reason it seemed best not to say so. Instead, she filed away Leanne’s insistence that what had happened to Clover didn’t happen to anyone and said, “I wish we could pick up my brother.”

Leanne shook her head. “Bennett would kill us both.”

The rule was no unauthorized passengers. Still, West would love this. She tried to remember every detail to tell him later.

He’d like Leanne, too, she thought. Clover wondered how long it would take to grow her hair out long enough to put it in two pigtails like her trainer’s. She couldn’t wait to get home and tell West everything.

Only, when she and Mango met West later at the suppressant bar, he didn’t even ask about driving or Leanne.

“Don’t you want to know?” she finally asked him.

“Know what?”

“About driving! About what Leanne said. What’s wrong with you?”

“How was it?” West asked.

“The driving was amazing.” She still felt the miles racing under her. They’d stayed inside the city walls, but after a few hours, Clover could drive forward and backward, make turns, and park. “I wish you could have been there.”

“Yeah.”

West didn’t even look at her. Maybe she’d said something wrong. It was hard to tell, sometimes. “I didn’t even get sick this time,” she said.

“That’s great, Clover.”

The suppressant bar was about a half mile from their house. West and Clover went there at five o’clock every afternoon, without exception. It didn’t matter if she had the flu, or homework, or if it was five degrees outside with two feet of snow on the ground.

The room had two long, waist-high counters that divided it into thirds. A tall, bald man with skin the color of the caramel candies Mrs. Finch sometimes made them stood at the registration station just inside the door.

Years ago, the word
caramel
had crossed with
camel
in her head and Clover imagined the thick muscle at the back of the man’s neck growing into a water-filled camel hump.

West elbowed her, and she pulled her ID card from her pocket and handed it over. The caramel-camel man looked at it, then at her and back at the card. Without a word, he found her name on the computer in front of him and checked it off.

Being dosed was clinical and very impersonal. Despite seeing him nearly every day for as long as she could remember, Clover didn’t know Caramel-Camel Man’s name. He had never spoken to her.

Their doser tonight was a woman with a riot of dark curly hair
held back from her face with a wide pink headband. A couple dozen other people sat at stools along either counter. Some of them talked to each other while they waited for their doses.

This was the worst part of Clover’s day, but she’d been doing it since she was an infant, and if she’d ever complained, she couldn’t remember it. The suppressant kept her healthy. It saved her brother and kept him alive. It kept the virus from coming back and killing them all. The suppressant was their miracle.