Viral Nation (24 page)

“No one comes here,” Christopher told him.

“We did.”

“Yeah, well,” Christopher said. “You ain’t exactly code red.”

When they reached the fifteenth floor, West made it half a dozen
steps before a door flew open and Bridget barreled into the hallway, then stopped with one hand on the wall and took a breath before walking toward him with Clover and Mango at her heels.

“You made it back,” she said.

He nodded, thinking,
This time
. The Dinosaur was not a long-term solution. Not for any of them. Not even the Foster City kids. He didn’t know how to even start talking about that.

“You have to go to the bar,” West said.

Clover almost laughed. Not because any of this was funny, but because the miserably uncomfortable mass of fear and anxiety building in her chest had to come out somehow. “And if I do? You think my name isn’t flagged?”

“Your name flagged won’t mean the same thing as mine. I get executed. You go to Foster City. And don’t forget that you’re a Messenger. You miss your dose and the Company notices.”

“I don’t want to be the reason you’re arrested,” Clover said.

“I don’t want to be the reason you’re dead.”

“At least you’re acknowledging how stupid and dangerous it is to stop dosing!”

“I’ll take her,” Jude said. They were sitting in his room, Clover, West, Bridget, and him. Clover’s dose was due in an hour.

“If I go, I might lead them back here. We did this so you wouldn’t end up in front of a firing squad, remember?”

“So your big plan is for both of you to catch the virus and die here?” Jude turned to Bridget. “You agree with them?”

Bridget shook her head, her blond hair brushing her shoulders. “It’s no use, Clover. You have to go.”

“You don’t get a vote,” Clover said.

“The guard is probably already looking for West and me. You don’t go, and you’ll have the whole Company looking for you as a
deserter. It’ll be worse than telling them you don’t know where West is if someone asks you.”

“Damn it.” She hated that Bridget was right. That West had been right that morning. But they were, both of them. If she was going to be arrested for questioning during her dosing, they wouldn’t be sitting here. It would have shown up in the database, and she and West would have been taken a long time ago. Somehow, they’d managed to screw up the information the Company still believed to be true.

After much discussion, Clover left Mango at the
Dinosaur. She wanted him safe if the guard showed up at the bar while she was dosing. Jude walked with her toward the bar where he and the others were dosed. She didn’t get to a place of comfort with people easily. She liked Jude, though.

She’d gone to the same suppressant bar since she was a baby, except for yesterday. And now today. It was weird not to recognize her neighbors sitting on the stools along the two long bars. Or the Caramel-Camel Man or the dosers behind the bars.

Just like at her regular bar, the dosers here didn’t make eye contact. She signed in with the woman at the door, then sat at the bar. When the doser came, she felt the pressure at her port. The sting was the same as always, like lava flowing against the curve of her skull. And then it was done. No guard, even though she was sure at each step in the process they would come.

“You’re worried about West,” Jude said as they walked back to the Dinosaur.

“Of course I am. He’s my brother.”

“I’ve been thinking. What if—”

Clover slowed to a stop. “What if what?”

“What if I give you some suppressant? In the future.”

“How would you do that?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you can get suppressant in two years, why can’t you get it now?”

“I’m not saying I can get it then. I’m saying—what if we agree that I will, if I can.”

“It’s not like you can pick it up in the Bazaar.”

“But if I have two years; if
we
have two years, we can come up with a way. And if I bring it to you—in the future, like the zine—we can give it to West without him going to a bar.”

Clover started to pedal slowly toward the Dinosaur. “I’m supposed to go on another mission tomorrow.”

“We could decide on somewhere I can leave it for you.”

“West won’t like it.”

“I suggest we don’t tell him.”

“I don’t lie very well.” Not that she wouldn’t want to lie. West would hate this idea. A lot. But when she tried to lie, especially to her brother, it never worked. Transparent, he called her. Just to piss her off.

“Not telling isn’t the same as lying. And it’s for his own good.”

Clover ran through her memory of the routes to the launch site, off the
Veronica
to the van, to the pickup box. “There’s a building. A small, brick building near the launch site. It almost butts up against the mountain. If you leave it there, between the building and the mountain, I think I could get it without being seen.”

Jude held up his right hand, lightly fisted with his pinky finger crooked toward her. “If I can, I will.”

Clover hooked her finger into his and made her first pinky promise.

Neither West nor Bridget got sick while Clover was
gone to the suppressant bar. Bridget stayed with him in their room that night, and Clover slept on the second bed they’d finally moved into Jude’s room. Clover was relieved to find her brother and Bridget still well in the morning.

“Don’t look so shocked,” West said. “I’m going to write an article for that zine in two years. I’m not going anywhere.”

Clover looked him over, just to be sure. He looked a little flushed, but there were no sores. Bridget had her arm through his and her cheek on his shoulder. She looked okay, too. “If the zine is right, which it might not be.”

“Geena wrote that the suppressant doesn’t work the way we think it does. I might not even get sick.”

Clover looked at Jude, who lifted his chin a little but didn’t say anything about the plan they’d hatched the day before. She wasn’t risking her brother’s life on something Geena had written. Between the two of them, she and Jude would figure out a way to hide the suppressant on the other end of the portal.

“I have a mission this morning,” she said to West. “Try not to die while I’m gone. Also, you might want to stop hanging all over him, Bridget. If he does get sick, he’ll be contagious.”

“She’ll be fine. And I’ll try,” West said. They’d already exhausted all conversation about whether she should go on her mission the night before. If she went AWOL, it would only make things worse. Much worse. The fact that she didn’t have an article in the zine lived in the back of her mind, where it poked at her and reminded her that as far as she knew she’d be dead sometime in the next two years.

Clover half turned and said to Jude, standing behind her, “I have to go.”

Jude stood up and handed the zine, which he’d been reading through again, to West, who said, “Clover—”

“I’m going.” Clover stopped her brother before he could do or say something that would tip over her carefully balanced emotions. “I’ll be fine.”

West closed his hand around her upper arm. She kissed his cheek, then pulled away from him and knelt to hug Mango. She wasn’t taking him for the same reasons she’d left him behind when she went to the bar. If this went badly, she didn’t want him caught up in it. It was hard enough trying to figure out how she was going to manage without Mango, without having to worry about him being taken from her permanently.

Jude followed her out of the room.

“Don’t let him die,” Clover said as she hefted her pack. She hadn’t spent more than a workday away from her brother in her whole life. “Don’t you dare let him die.”

“I won’t.”

“You have to remember the hiding spot for two years.”

“I’m sure you won’t let me forget.”

Clover stopped, a few steps down from Jude, between the thirteenth
and fourteenth floors. “This could be a mistake. We might be setting ourselves up for a…I don’t know, a major time loop. Or something even worse.”

“Like what?”

“
I don’t know.
That’s the point.”

“What do you want to do?”

“This has never been about what
I
want.” Before she started down again, she added, “Take care of my dog.”

When Clover arrived at the Mariner offices, she spent
a few minutes pacing in front of the main entrance before she finally made herself go through into the cool, sterile lobby. The same receptionist who had been there on her first day smiled at her.

“Hello, Miss Donovan,” she said.

“I’m…it’s a workday for me.”

“Yes, of course. I have you on my list. Have a good mission.”

Clover ran her sandpaper tongue over her bottom lip and hurried toward the elevators. Through the nerve-racking wait for the doors to open and close and the ride seven stories up, she could not stop thinking about Bennett in Bridget’s house. It made a strange kind of sense that maybe Bennett had placed the arrest warrant for West when he was surprised in his efforts to do something bad to Bridget, although it made Clover’s head hurt to think about how it could have happened. Or why West was allowed to take Bridget away from her house at all. Or why no one seemed to be looking very hard for Bridget.

Her theory was that Bennett had come to do something bad to Bridget and was surprised by finding West in the house. Because Jude had warned them about West’s arrest early through the zine, whatever information the guard had about West and Bridget had changed.

Clover shook her head to clear away the complicated thoughts that cluttered it. She opened her closet and reached in for the jumpsuit. West couldn’t die, she decided as she took it off its hanger. That was all she had to think about right now.

She went into the bathroom and took a hot shower, dressed in her new uniform and her boots, and went back downstairs to meet the trainer who would take Leanne’s place until her leg healed. Clover half expected Bennett instead, there to demand she produce her brother the moment the elevator door opened, so she shouldn’t have been surprised to see him leaning against the receptionist’s desk. But she was. Her heart stuttered, then restarted painfully.

He straightened when he saw her walking toward him and met her halfway. “Ready for your mission today?”

“What are you doing here?” She should have answered that she was ready for her mission and asked about his weekend, but she thought of it too late.

“We weren’t able to free up a trainer for you today. You did an excellent job on your own. Are you up for another solo run?” Bennett looked around. “
Really
solo this time, it looks like. Where’s our Mango?”

“I decided to leave him at home. How was your weekend?”