Vivian Apple Needs a Miracle (4 page)

“Hey, little sis—want to meet my boyfriend?”

Winnie leads us along the cliff's perimeter and down a sloping, sandy path overgrown with wildflowers. The man who waved makes his way to us, pausing periodically to consult in murmurs with one of the shadowy figures.

“Oh, baby,” Harp mutters when we can see his face. He's extremely good-looking—tall, graceful, golden-skinned, with dark eyes and black hair cropped close to his head, a disarming smattering of freckles across his nose.

“Vivian, Harp,” Winnie says, once he's reached us. “This is Diego, Amanda's second-in-command. Diego, this is Vivian Apple—Mara's daughter—and Harp.”

Diego steps forward and stares at me for an uncomfortable moment. “Yeah, I see it. You guys have the same eyes, pretty much. You probably think they're brown, right?”

“Uh . . . yes?”

“So does your sister. They're actually a gorgeous green. Hints of brown, sure, but definitely green. I don't know why either of you insists on calling them brown—false modesty? Genuine stupidity? And
you're
trying to hide them beneath your hair.” Diego glances at the bangs falling into my eyes, and, flustered, I push them back.

“Oh, for God's sake, D.,” mutters Winnie, but I see her mouth twitch.

“I'm sorry you're colorblind, Win,” he says, moving to sling an arm across her shoulders. “I'm sorry you'll never be able to fly a plane, which I know is your lifelong dream.”

Winnie laughs. They're so easy and happy together; they're good-looking and dangerous and impressively grown-up. Just being near them makes me feel so alone. I want Peter. I want to know where he is; I want him here. I want to stop the awful loop of possibilities that has played in my brain all day: Peter running scared through the wilds of Point Reyes; Peter beaten and bloody, the Three Angels closing in; Peter dead.

I have to distract myself. I nod at Diego and ask Winnie, “Does Mom know about him?”

She looks amused. “No, Mara doesn't know I'm in a relationship with a man planning a violent coup against the Church of America. Somehow, it hasn't come up. Sorry, love.” Winnie turns to Diego, affecting a pitying look. “The fact is, I'm ashamed of you.”

Diego smiles. “I've never been good with parents.”

“In fact,” Winnie continues, glancing back at me, “Mara knows nothing about my involvement with this. As far as she's concerned, I'm only a saintly social worker, finding suitable homes for the poor left-behind babies. Which, in a way, I am! But what she doesn't realize is that I'm finding the kids secular homes, where they'll be safe from the Church. I doubt Mara would be
thrilled
if she knew, so next time you see her, please don't mention it.”

I feel something constrict inside me. “Yeah, I don't think that will be an issue.”

“No?”

I don't want to talk about it, but Harp explains. “When we saw ourselves on the feed, we went to your apartment. But Mrs. Apple was a real see-you-next-Tuesday to me, and then—”

“We fought. She wouldn't let Harp in.” I'm amazed at how cold and controlled my own voice sounds. “I wasn't going to stay there if she wouldn't let Harp in.”

The laughter drains from Winnie's face. “I wondered why you were out on the street. Why you weren't inside. I didn't realize—Viv. That sucks. I'm really sorry.”

She reaches to touch my hand. But her skin is cold from the wind, and I struggle to feel comforted by it. I know it's like she's throwing me a rope; she's attempting to pull me onto safe, dry land. Maybe she really wants to be my sister. And I want to accept the gesture, to let her in. That would be the nice thing to do, the right thing to do. All I have to do is speak, or smile, and we'll be on track. But I just can't. I think of the hard look in my mother's eyes the moment before I ran. I'll work alongside Winnie; I'll be as friendly as I can be. But I never want anyone who claims to love me to look at me like that again.

After a long moment, Diego clears his throat. “So . . . a million dollars, huh? That's hardly standard practice. What exactly did you do?”

“They found the compound Mara mentioned this morning,” Winnie replies when I don't answer. “North of here; they're not sure where. They broke in and the Church chased them out.”

Diego's eyebrows rise. “And?”

Winnie looks at me. I can tell she still suspects me to have more information than I'm letting on, but she doesn't seem to want Diego to know it. He gives me an appraising look, then turns it on Harp, who I see bristle. “And
what?”
she snaps.

“The Church has about ten dozen secret compounds,” Diego explains, “so why would they be so public about wanting to find a couple of girls who stumbled over one?”

“Who knows?” Harp sounds breezy—she is, I note gratefully, a better liar than I am, even if she doesn't understand why I lied in the first place. “They also worship a text that claims Jesus can travel through space and time in a powder-blue convertible, so I've personally stopped looking for logic in their actions.”

Diego's expression gets stony. Like Winnie, he's unconvinced. “You do realize how weak the Church of America looks, hunting you down like this? How fallible? They're willing to let every Believer know that the weakest possible entities—children,
female
children—pose a threat to them. If it means finding you, they're willing to look destructible. They wouldn't take the risk if the only thing they're looking to hide is a compound.”

Harp looks at me, and though her expression stays blank, I know the mere fact of her looking has tipped our hand. I continue to keep my mouth shut. Diego moves toward me, taking my right forearm into his hand—when I try to pull away, he holds on tight.

“What happened here, Vivian?”

I look down. The pain hasn't subsided since the man on the street grabbed my hand, but in the excitement it's somehow become just another fact about my otherwise hunted, threatened, dangerous body. I notice how swollen my hand has become. I look up at Diego and see something I didn't notice before—an undercurrent of danger. A silent, reluctant message that he's someone I do not want to cross.

“You know something.” He keeps his voice low. “You can tell me what you know or not, but I don't like lies, Vivian. If you're going to lie, I'm going to have my people fix up your hand and then I'm going to send you on your way. I'll think of you fondly—I'll worry about you—but I won't be lied to.”

I shiver. I don't like how quickly Diego has shifted from playful to threatening; I don't like the way he used his strength to overpower me. I didn't like the tone in his voice when he called us
female children
.

“What we know,” I tell him, “is all we have at this point. If I tell you, you have to understand that it's part of an exchange. Not a gift.”

Diego lets go of my arm. “Hard to understand the terms of the exchange without knowing the information. What if I promise you something big and you give me nothing?”

Harp laughs. “It's not nothing. You better believe it's not nothing.”

“They asked for us alive,” I say loudly, trying to make myself heard over the crash of the nearby ocean and the blood pounding in my ears. “But if they get their hands on us, we won't stay that way. If you want to know what we know, I need you to swear to me you can keep Harp and me safe. That you'll do everything in your power to keep us hidden from the Church of America. If you can't guarantee that, we're leaving and taking our information with us.” I squirm uncomfortably—Diego has fixed me with a wide, unreadable grin. “What? Why the fuck are you smiling?”

“Because you're so like Winnie, it's actually spooky. You both clearly possess the take-no-shit gene.” He sizes me up for a long moment. Then he puts out his hand. I force myself to pause before I put out my left hand to take it.

“Vivian Apple,” Diego says. “I swear to—not God. What should I swear to?”

“The universe,” I supply without hesitation.

“The universe,” he echoes seriously. “Vivian Apple, I swear to the universe that I'll keep you safe. I'm going to keep you safe because you're young and innocent”—I scoff at this, but he ignores me—“and you deserve to be safe. I'm going to keep you safe because I think we want the same thing, which is to finish the Church of America once and for all. But do you know the main reason why I'm going to keep you safe?”

“What?”

“Because I love your sister.” Diego lets his eyes wander away from mine, over to Winnie's face. He continues to hold tight to my hand. “And I have a feeling she wants me to.”

Beside me, Harp snorts. “Oh God, we
get
it,” I hear her say. But Diego's words have a potent effect. I've never been someone's sister before, and it seems as though being Winnie Conroy's is a particularly valuable identity if it buys me the protection I need, if I can use it to find Peter, if I can use it to hurt the people who have hurt me. I glance at Winnie and see she's watching me closely. I turn back to Diego.

“Frick wasn't raptured. He's alive,” I say. “So is Adam Taggart.”

He flinches. Winnie gasps, then looks to Harp as if for confirmation. Harp tosses her messy hair and grins.

“Those dudes are alive as
fuck,
” she exclaims. “Breathing, blinking—the whole deal.”

“But that's . . .” Winnie shakes her head, letting it sink in. “You actually
saw
them? They were just there, hanging out in the forest?”

“They're being held there,” I say. “The corporation is keeping them under surveillance. They're both insane. Frick didn't know what he was saying, but he told us the Rapture was faked. The Church of America summoned a couple hundred Believers to the compound and killed them. They told Frick it was sacrifice. While we were there, he got a message from three people we didn't recognize. He said they were angels, that they had orchestrated the whole thing. We think, basically, that Frick predicted the Rapture, and once people started to believe, the corporation made money. They had to make the Rapture happen to keep people believing. So they did.”

Winnie seems speechless. She raises a hand to her mouth. Diego's brow is furrowed.

“There are three thousand people missing,” he says, like he's trying to think it through. “If a few hundred went to the compound, where did the rest go?”

“That we don't know,” I tell him. “We have no idea where to begin looking for them.”

They stare at us for a moment I fear will go on forever, before they finally turn to each other. To my surprise, Winnie laughs.

“I mean, we
knew
it, right?” She runs a hand through her long red-blond hair. Her eyes look a bit wild. “It's not like all those people could just be
gone.
But that it all happened an hour away? Frick's been that close the whole time? That's just unbelievable to me.”

Diego rubs his jaw. “Where is the compound?”

“Point Reyes. But we stumbled onto it. I don't know if we'd be able to find it again.”

“Don't worry about that. We'll take care of that.” Then he grins again. “Not to criticize, Vivian, but you undersold that information. For that information, I would have protected you and your best friend and your dog and basically everybody you've ever met in your entire life. That information, my friend, is everything.”

I smile weakly. But I'm beginning to feel a growing ache near the base of my spine, the result of keeping my posture so rigid. The effort of keeping my guard up has worn me down. Diego nods toward Cliff House and says, “Let's get that hand looked at.” He leads the three of us up the steps, and I feel a gnawing revulsion, a shuddery feeling deep in my bones, at the thought of anybody touching me for any reason at all.

Inside Cliff House, the lights are off.

I think at first there must be some kind of problem—a power outage, or something more sinister—but Diego ushers us forward, explaining that they keep the lights off at night to avoid notice from passing ships. As my eyes adjust, I see the huge windows lining the back wall, overlooking the dark horizon. Amanda's militia has converted what seems like a former restaurant into something between a command center and a home—to our right is a balcony, looking down on a space crowded with beds, and to our left is a section functioning as an office, with desks and laptops. I notice people dressed like soldiers moving around, dark shadows holding flashlights they point at the floor. I don't know what I expected the nucleus of this billion-dollar operation to look like, but this is not it.

Diego leads Harp and me over to a woman with short salt-and-pepper hair and thick horn-rimmed glasses. Her name is Frankie; she was a doctor before she joined Amanda's army. Diego briefly explains the situation—even in the dark, I see her go pale at his quick description of the faked Rapture; he tells her there will be a strategy meeting in ten minutes. Then he wanders away with Winnie, speaking in murmurs I can only just make out: “. . . tonight? Do we have enough intel?” “Research . . . ask Suzy . . . can't be that hard, if they did it.”

Frankie leads me behind a bar left over from the building's previous function; the shelves underneath are piled with medical supplies. She lifts my arm and tests my fingers until I inhale sharply through my teeth in pain.

“Well, you certainly did a number on these guys,” she says cheerfully. “Luckily, it seems like a sprain rather than a break. What happened? Did you fall on it?”

“She punched Beaton Frick's face last night,” Harp bursts out proudly.

Frankie gives me an appreciative look. “Badass.” She gets me to relax my fingers, then places a thick wad of gauze beneath them and tapes them together. “Well, I'm sure it hurts, but you were smart not to go to the hospital.”