Viral Nation (17 page)

They made it to the Dinosaur without any broken bones. West pushed and pulled against several doors until he found one he could force open. He reached for her hand, and for once she didn’t mind at all. He held a crank-powered flashlight in the other and flicked it on as they entered the pitch-black space.

The flashlight made a weak, yellowish circle in the perfect dark that was so thick and complete, it seemed to actually suck in the light. It felt like they were walking into the giant mouth of some hungry beast that might eat them whole.

“I’m not going in there,” she whispered, and yanked her hand back.

“This was your idea,” West answered, in a matching whisper. “It’ll be okay.”

She wasn’t so sure. But West went in, still holding her hand so that their arms stretched between them. Him inside and her out. She didn’t want to be left behind, so she went after him, tripped over a step up into the lobby of the casino, and would have landed on her face if West hadn’t caught her.

She walked closer to her brother than she would have normally, the hand he’d been holding tightened around a fistful of the back of his T-shirt, as they made their slow way out of the lobby and passed dead slot machines and moved toward the big pit of game
tables in the center of the casino. Clover had only a bare-bones idea of how a casino was laid out, from old newspaper photographs and books that she’d seen in the library. West went to the Bazaar every week and seemed to know what he was doing.

As far as Clover could tell in the dim light, it was as if the Dinosaur were just waiting for someone to send it some juice and let the players stream in. The machines stood in rows, like soldiers. A few times, she nearly tripped on the high stools set at each machine, but West kept her upright and it wasn’t as bad to walk through the yawning dark as Clover feared.

Getting to the fifteenth floor was going to take some effort, though. Without energy, the elevators were dead, empty crates. West found a wall and started to follow it, looking for a door that would open to stairs.

Clover had looked at pictures of the Dinosaur in its glory days, but she couldn’t bring up any memory of seeing a diagram of stairways. She wished now that she’d come across an exit map or…and then she remembered. There was a framed map of stairways and emergency exits mounted on the wall next to the elevator in the Company building.

“Go back to the elevators,” she said.

“They aren’t going to work.”

She sighed, because how stupid did he think she was? And then she pulled him back to where they’d passed a hallway with four elevators a few minutes before.

Just like at the Waverly-Stead building, there was a framed map over the call buttons. “See,” she said as West directed their light to the map.

“Okay. I see.” He studied the map for a minute, then moved her to the side and said, “Hang on.”

He drove the butt of their flashlight into the glass. Clover jumped and covered her ears; the sharp noise echoed around her brain.

“What’s wrong with you?”

West took the map gingerly out of the frame. “We need this. The stairs are just over here.”

“You could have warned me at least.”

The stairwell, when they finally found it, was narrow and painted white. The light reflected and bounced around it, making the flashlight far more effective here. West folded the map and put it in his pocket, then started up.

“Wait, West,” she said as she looked into the darkness above. “What if guards are waiting for us?”

West hesitated, too. “Do you think he’d work with the guard?”

A thousand scenarios had rushed through her head since Jude had handed her the zine. In two years, he would be only halfway through his Academy training. It was possible, she thought, that just like she was snapped out of the Academy and put into the Mariner program, he was put early into the guard. Maybe that was what they did with Foster City kids and she just didn’t know it.

But then she remembered that he’d kissed her. Like it wasn’t the first time. He knew how to get around her instinct to pull away from being touched. He knew her. And he knew her well.

“No,” she finally said. “Let’s go.”

The first few floors, Clover’s heart jerked at each landing, sure the door would open and guards would be there ready to arrest them both. By the tenth floor, she didn’t care. It took all of her energy to take one stair after the other. There were two dozen to each floor, twelve and then a ninety-degree turn with a small landing before twelve more and a big door to the next floor.

“You okay?” West asked her at the landing on the fourteenth floor.

“Yeah, you?”

He grunted and they climbed the last flight.

They stopped in front of the door marked with the number
15
painted in red. It was hard for Clover to imagine a time when there were enough people to fill hotels like this. She thought all the residents of Reno could probably fit inside the Dinosaur with room to spare.

She reached for the door and West grabbed her forearm. “What do you think you’re doing? You can’t just rush in there. We need a plan.”

“We can’t just stand here.”

West put his back against the door.

“Just give me a second. I need to think.”

“If we’re doing this, let’s just do it,” she answered. “What is there to think about?”

“I don’t know. What if—”

The door opened and West fell backward into the hall, pushing Clover away from him at the same time. She cried out and stumbled back until the edge of the metal step behind her bit her calves and forced her to sit down hard on the third stair.

“West!”

He steadied himself and stepped back through the doorway to her. As soon as he was out of the doorway, she saw Jude standing there, looking as scared as she felt.

“What are you doing here?” Jude asked. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“Neither should you,” she said.

“What are you doing here?” he asked again.

“You invited us.” West pulled Clover up by the arm and pushed her ahead of him out of the stairwell.

“Wait, where are you going?” Jude held the door open. “Just leave before you get us all in trouble.”

“Jude,” Clover said. “I have to show you something.”

“Just leave. Please.”

“We can’t leave,” West said.

Jude was afraid of someone. No.
For
someone. He stood between them and the hallway, keeping them from moving away from the door, in the same protective way West stood between her and Jude.

He would change a lot in the next two years. More, even, than she had realized when she saw him at the pickup box. Physically, of course. But there was also a confidence about him then that hadn’t fully developed yet in this time line.

“We’re friends,” she said. “Well, we will be friends.”

His jaw relaxed as his eyes moved from West to Clover. “Where’s your dog?”

“He’s at home.”

“What do you have to show me?”

She pulled the flyer with West’s picture on it out of her pack and handed it to Jude.

He held his flashlight on it so he could see, and then looked back at them. “Is this supposed to make me feel better?”

“You gave it to me.”

“What? I didn’t—”

“Two years from now.”

It took another minute. Clover stayed where she was and watched him think it out.

“Okay,” he finally said, and let them into the hallway.

West followed Jude as he led them down the long dark
hallway. He had Clover by one hand and his flashlight in the other, adding to Jude’s to illuminate the crayon blue carpet and dirty yellow walls. He stopped at a door marked 1534 and knocked on it three times in quick succession.

A girl opened the door. She was about Clover’s size, but West thought she was no older than fourteen. She looked from Jude to West.

“Jude? What’re you bringing in here?”

Jude got her to let them in. Sunlight filled the room through an open window. Inside another girl, identical to the first, sat on one of two huge beds.

“Clover and…” Jude looked to West.

“West.”

Jude pointed to one girl and then the other. “Geena, Marta.”

“Are you crazy, bringing these hoodies in here?” Marta asked. She shot a look at West and Clover that dripped hostility.

“I might be,” Jude said. “They’re friends. I think.”

Marta shrugged her narrow shoulders and went to stand by the window. The twins were not as young as West first thought. Once he’d heard the one girl speak and gotten a good look at them, he adjusted his assessment of their age closer to Clover’s. While his sister inherited her small stature from their mother, West got the impression that Geena and Marta were stunted somehow. Their too-large heads were perfectly round and both covered in a fine fuzz of brown hair, like the crew cuts his dad used to give him. It was as if their heads had kept on growing, expecting their bodies to catch up.

“They really friends of yours, Jude?” Geena asked.

“I think so,” Jude answered. “Gather everyone in my room. I’ll be right there.”

“You live here?” Clover asked. Marta gave her a narrow-eyed glance before following her sister out into the hallway. “How can you live here? How do you eat? What about water? Power? I thought you were from Foster City.”

“Clover,” West said.

“Sorry.”

“It’s okay,” Jude said. But he didn’t answer any of her questions.

“Look,” West said to Jude. “We don’t mean you, or them, any harm.”

“How did you know I was here?”

She pulled the zine out of her pack. “You gave this to me.”

Jude reached for it and Clover pulled it back. He lifted his eyebrows, and she hesitated just another second before thrusting it at him.

“I want that back,” she said.

He took it from her and asked, “What happened to you the other day anyway? You just disappeared.”

“I was drafted,” Clover said.

“Drafted? What do you mean, drafted?”

“I’m a Messenger. Don’t ask,” she said when he opened his mouth. “I don’t know why. It just happened. Something about my test scores. And Kingston said I wasn’t a good fit for the Academy after all.”

“He put me in the engineering track,” Jude said with some pride in his voice. Deserved pride. The engineering track was one of the most difficult to get into. He’d work, after graduation, building things or designing them. Or helping to run the complicated systems that gave them fresh water and electric power.

“Really?” she asked. She inflected wrong, her question sounding incredulous instead of interested, and West saw her wince as soon as the word hit her own ears. Her face colored, and she added, “I’m impressed.”

Jude thumbed through the zine, changing the subject. “I didn’t give this to you. What is it anyway?”

“We aren’t sure,” West answered. “It looks like you’re going to write it, or some of it, a couple of years from now. And me, too.”

“Huh.” Jude went back to the front of the zine and looked more closely at the pages. Finally he pointed with his chin toward West’s dispatch flyer, sitting on top of the dresser. “And that?”

“It was inside. And damned good question.” He pointed to the zine. “How am I going to write that, if I’m executed in a couple of weeks?”

“So who you mean to off?”

“What?”

“Who are you planning to kill?” Jude said, more slowly. “Bridget Kingston. She related to the headmaster?”

Jude was considerably smaller than West and three years younger, but he had a way of holding himself that made West think they were more evenly matched than anyone might think.

“I don’t plan to kill anyone.” West took the zine from Jude, flipped to the back pages, and handed it back, his finger on the small picture of Bridget. “Especially not the headmaster’s daughter.”

Jude studied the newspaper article pasted over the last pages of the zine, then looked from Clover to West. “You have to go.”

Jude’s lack of curiosity baffled Clover. He’d sent
for her, or would send for her, and he didn’t even want to know why.

Now she and West rode home in silence. Clover’s fear for her brother was a lump of ice in the pit of her stomach. Maybe she wasn’t great at reading people, but she knew West wouldn’t kill anyone. But that didn’t matter. No one would listen to her, and if they did, they wouldn’t care what she had to say.

She watched West riding ahead of her. If they didn’t think of something, and fast, he would be dead by the end of the next month.

Clover was able to call up anything she’d ever read or seen, because her brain filed it all away as pictures. She could flip through them, make connections between them, figure things out. She had no point of reference for what the dispatch flyer and newspaper article suggested. Her brother a murderer. Her brother writing subversive articles.

Her name not showing up in the zine at all.