Viral Nation (18 page)

“I’m sure we can figure out some way to make this okay,” she said. “If you really write those articles in two years, we have to, right?”

There were two with West’s name on them. One talked about calorie crops and how the Company restricted them to keep the citizens of the cities under its thumb. The other was about using honey as an antibiotic.

That last one caught her eye, because she’d just started reading about beekeeping. Maybe that meant something. Clover couldn’t figure out what, and her brain was starting to throb from trying.

They pulled into their yard and put their bikes inside the garage.

“What are we going to do, West?” Clover asked quietly as they made their way to the front door.

“I don’t know.”

“But, West—”

“I don’t know!” He opened the door and tossed his pack in the hall. It slid across the wood floor and smacked into the leg of a table, knocking a stack of Clover’s books over. “I need to think.”

“But they’re going to—” West stopped short and Clover plowed into his back. “Hey!”

“Shut up,” he whispered.

“We have to talk about this.” She tried to move around him, but he shifted his weight to block her. She saw around his shoulder, though, into the living room. “Oh.”

Their father stood there, tall and lean, an older, colder version of West. He held a book he’d taken from the low, overstuffed shelf that ran along one wall, under the big windows that looked out over the backyard. The book was a novel. A mystery that belonged to him.

He didn’t look at the book, though. He looked at West. “There you are.”

“What are you doing here?”

Clover pushed her way around her brother. “Hi, Dad.”

“Hi, baby.” He didn’t make eye contact with her. He never did. As much as West looked like him, she looked like their mother.
They would have made a perfect storybook family, Clover had often thought. Jane was just over five feet tall, like Clover, with black hair and green eyes.

Clover had cut her waist-length hair when she was ten, leaving herself with an inch-long stubble, in an effort to stop reminding her father that she was the reason her mother was dead. It didn’t work.

It startled her to realize that their father had been crying. His eyes were puffy and bloodshot. He looked old and tired. “West, I—”

“You know. How do you know already?”

Clover froze, her legs and arms going stiff and unmovable, while James sank into a chair, still holding the book in one hand.

“You think I’m going to kill that girl?” West’s voice cracked over the word
kill
.

“The database is never wrong.” That was what the newspaper said every time it reported an averted crime. Said it with resolve, though. With pride. Their father said it like the words hurt him.

“They didn’t run your name yet,” Clover said to her brother. “They couldn’t have. Not yet.”

West exhaled slowly. “Did they really send my own father to bring me in?”

James shook his head, his gaze fixed on the floor between his knees. “I heard you had an interview. I ran your name myself.”

“Why would you do that?” Clover asked. It was illegal, and totally unnecessary. Then she remembered the dispatch and struggled to take another breath, like oxygen had thickened to syrup in her lungs.

“You thought you’d find something.” Even Clover could hear the anger and bitterness in West’s tone. She looked at her father, and he must have heard it, too, because he looked wounded. “You ran my name, because you thought you might find something like this.”

James shook his head.

“Don’t lie to me!” West slammed the heel of one hand into the wall.

The thud reverberated through Clover, and she caught her breath as tears started to fall down her cheeks. She felt hot. Almost feverish. “West.”

“I’m sorry,” he said, under his breath. “I’m sorry.”

“I came to warn you,” James said. “I came to help you.”

“You shouldn’t have done it. If you get caught, Clover—”

“Where have you been?” Clover asked, cutting her brother off. She didn’t want to hear the end of his sentence. Irritation prickled her too-hot skin like she’d fallen into a cactus. “If you were here, this wouldn’t be happening!”

James finally looked at her. “You know I can’t be here.”

“You can!”

He looked back at his son. “I came to warn you, West. No one else knows. Not yet, anyway.”

“How long?” West asked.

“A few days.”

“What if he doesn’t go to the interview?” Clover asked, even though she knew better.

“You know it doesn’t matter,” West said quietly.

The discs that Messengers like Clover brought back from the future were analyzed. The information gleaned from them was put into a computerized database. The database. Even if West’s name wasn’t specifically searched for, a week before Bridget’s death date, it would come up anyway. Bridget would be put under protection by the guard until West was arrested.

That meant they had until Tuesday. Two days. West would never make it to his interview. Clover wondered if anyone had ever had advance notice of a dispatch before.

“You have to stay with her, Dad.”

A lump of ice slid from Clover’s throat to her stomach, sending a shiver through her even though she still felt too hot.

“She’ll be fine in Foster City.” He looked at Clover again. The
whites of his eyes were shot through with red. They looked wet, too, like he was about to cry. That shook her, more than anything else that had happened since she saw Jude in the future.

“She’ll be eaten alive there, and you know it.”

“It’s not that bad,” James said. “Hundreds of kids—”

“I’m not going there.” She had a job; she could take care of herself if it came to that. But it wouldn’t. It couldn’t. “And West isn’t going to kill anyone.”

“It doesn’t matter,” West and James said together.

“Yes, it does!”

“Clover, he’ll be accused and there is proof.”

“Proof? Bridget Kingston is probably sitting on her own front porch right this minute!”

“It’s not premeditated,” James said quietly. As if that mattered. “You hit her with a marble mantel clock. The database says it’s a crime of passion.”

Passion? “He barely even knows her. Where would he even get a marble mantel clock?”

“It belongs to her father. She’s killed in her own living room a week from Tuesday.”

“West wouldn’t be in the Kingston Estate. What would be—”

“It’s okay, Clover,” West said.

She flapped her hands hard enough to make her wrists ache and rocked back and forth from foot to foot. Poor Mango circled around her, trying to get her attention so he could do his job and calm her. “No, it’s not.”

James stood up, returned the book to its shelf, and picked up a framed picture of himself and their mother. “Hide until the date has passed.”

“He can’t hide.” Clover’s stomach ached. “He needs the suppressant.”

James looked at her like she was breaking his heart. Then she
realized she was thumping her forehead with the heel of her hand and forced herself to stop.

“I have to get back,” James said. “Hide, West. At least long enough for her death date to pass. I’m not sure how much good it will do, but it’s something.”

“He’ll get sick,” Clover said. “The virus will come back. They won’t let him back in if he’s sick. Do you want him to die? Do you?”

West caught her by the arms before she could launch herself at her father with her fists flying, and when she started to panic, Mango pressed his heavy body against her legs. She yanked away from both of them and threw herself at her father, making him look at her. “You can stop this!”

“No. I can’t.” He looked from her to West. “I can’t. I wish I could.”

He handed the photograph to West, kissed Clover on top of her head, and then he was gone.

“You shouldn’t have yelled at him,” West said. Clover
sat in a corner of the sofa, curled into a ball, her arms wrapped around her drawn-up legs. West hated when she was like this, on the verge of getting lost inside herself.

“He doesn’t even care,” she said against her knees.

“There isn’t anything he can do.”

“He could try! How does he know what he can do if he doesn’t even try?”

James had given him a heads-up, and even that was more than West expected. More than James should have done, because West was pretty sure that running his own son’s name through the database was a crime that came with severe punishment. Interfering with the justice system was a capital offense. Their father risked leaving Clover with no one.

West sometimes wished he could either love their father fully or really hate him, like Clover did in turn. James had never recovered from their mother’s death. He’d loved her in a way that West wasn’t sure he’d ever have the chance to love a woman. She loved him back, too. Anyone could see it in the pictures of the two of them together and read it in the letters Clover kept in her trunk.

He couldn’t bring himself to blame their father for leaving them. Maybe because he had a few shreds of memory of his parents together. Clover’s looks and his scars were too much for James to live with. Besides, the Company wouldn’t accept dependent children as an excuse not to accept a promotion.

“I have to get out of here,” West said. “I have to—”

“What? You have to what?”

“I have to
go
. What else can I do?”

“You’ll be killed.” Clover looked scared. Really scared.

“I’m going to be killed anyway.”

“The virus will come back without the suppressant.”

“What else can I do? You tell me, you’re the genius.”

Clover rocked, her small body tightening around itself. West was tempted to try that himself, to see if it would ease some of the sharp tension that was squeezing the life out of him. Someone was going to kill Bridget. It wasn’t him, but that meant it could be just about anyone else. He might survive if he hid, but she wouldn’t.

West sat next to Clover and she went limp, sliding into his arms. Almost catatonic. He and Mango both worked to calm her. She used to do this when she was a little girl, collapse into a shell of herself when their father left. As if her body couldn’t contain her grief.

Mango pushed his weight against Clover and West spoke softly to her, not really saying anything, until she could sit up on her own again.

“We have to save her,” Clover said. She looked up at him and
echoed his earlier thought: “It’s the only way. If you hide, she’ll die anyway and you’ll be blamed regardless.”

“How can I save her? I don’t even know how I’m going to save myself.”

“Think about it. You can’t be executed for a crime that doesn’t happen.”

“You know better.” Murderers were executed in the city every year. Not many, because violent crime had become rare. But they all had one thing in common. None of them had ever actually killed anyone. They were executed before it could happen.

“
Someone
kills her, West. If it isn’t you, then who? If we can find out—”

“It won’t matter.”

“It’ll keep her alive.”

West picked up the picture of their parents from the sofa next to him. They stood together on a beach, sometime before he was born. Jane was beautiful, laughing, her dark hair caught in the wind. She smiled up at James, his arms wrapped around her waist.

They looked so happy.

Maybe West wouldn’t ever have the chance to look at a girl that way. But if he could keep himself and Bridget alive long enough, maybe he’d get to find out what it was like.

West waited until Kingston pulled out of his long
driveway in the small white car with the Reno Academy logo on the doors. It took another minute to gather his courage, and then he went up the walk and knocked.

Bridget answered, wearing a pair of fitted black pants, rolled to midcalf, and the same kind of white T-shirt West wore to work every day. She’d knotted it at her side so that it hugged her body. She was barefoot and had her dark blond hair pulled back in a
loose, low ponytail. Flour dusted her hands and arms and clothes, and she’d wiped her cheek with some as well. The smell of baking bread filled his nose.