With the Enemy
Authors: Eva Gray
G
et back there and put your wrists in the air,” the soldier barks. She moves toward us with the ID scanner.
“But —”
“LINE UP AND SHUT UP!” she shouts. “Get your bracelets where I can see them.”
This is it. The end. Through her teeth Rosie whispers, “Take the others and go. I’ll create a —”
I see a flash of yellow out of the corner of my eye like a scarf. I hear a
whooooooooosh
and the area fills with smoke.
I can’t see a thing but someone grabs my hand and Rosie’s voice in my ear says “Run” and I do.
We run together, tripping, directly into the cloud of acrid smoke. My lungs are burning and my eyes are stinging and I can barely keep them open.
When the smoke begins to thin, I see that Louisa is holding Rosie’s other hand. But Alonso, Drew, and Ryan have vanished.
TOMORROW
GIRLS
With the Enemy
Sometimes if you can’t think of an answer, it’s because the
answer is unthinkable
.
M
y vision is blurry. I don’t know if it’s from tears or from the shimmering of the diesel fuel hovering over the hot pavement.
She’s gone. I can’t believe Maddie is gone.
I have spent a lot of my life playing “What’s the worst that could happen?” in my head. Given that I am growing up in the middle of a war, I have some pretty good scenarios — total annihilation and starvation, obviously. But there’s SO MUCH stuff before that (think snakes and spiders just to start with). Mostly, none of it ever came true.
Until now.
Five minutes ago, I thought finding out that my fancy boarding school was controlled by a ruthless enemy
organization called the Alliance, and then being on the run from them with no food, no identity bracelet, and no money, was The Worst Thing that Could Happen Ever.
But then the masked assailants with the eyes of stone-cold killers drove an unmarked black truck into the parking lot of the mall my friends and I had been hiding in. They plucked one of my friends up like a bird of prey grabbing a helpless field mouse and roared off with her, totally raising The Worst bar.
Which is a lesson: never start thinking of The Worst because there is always something Worse out there.
The moment of Maddie Frye’s kidnapping will be imprinted on every one of my senses forever. The scent of diesel exhaust hanging in the warm air. The knee-melting rumble of the engine ringing in my ears. The dry-mouthed horror of watching Drew throw his body in front of the speeding vehicle in a vain effort to stop it. The feel of my braids whipping against my cheek as my head spun around to follow the zigzag path of the truck.
The wild, terrified expression in Louisa’s big blue eyes and the hysterical tone in her voice as she turns to me
now and says, “We have to find her.” She grabs the edges of my red down vest with the heart-shaped quilting my mother insisted on. “We have to figure out where she is. Evelyn, where is she?”
Louisa Ballinger is Maddie’s first, official best friend from home. The two of them were best friends for years before we were all sent to Country Manor School; in fact, they pretended to be sisters so that Maddie would be accepted, since CMS was only for the children of the rich and elite. (I pointed out to my parents that this smacked of evil intentions but they did that thing where they simultaneously roll their eyes and ignore me.)
In the past Louisa hasn’t always been the biggest fan of my Ask Now, Be Prepared Later philosophy, so it is kind of surprising that she’s turning to me at this moment. But I’m glad.
“I don’t kno —” I begin.
“You always know,” she interrupts, shaking me with all her athlete’s strength. “You are always thinking of things. Think of something. Think. You have to.
Please
.”
“I will,” I say. “I promise.”
I have capital
N
capital
O
business saying anything like that. I only say it because it seems like the right thing to do. And I guess it is, because Louisa stops looking quite so panicked. When Ryan comes over to her, she even manages a tiny smile.
Now what?
I glance at Rosie Chavez for guidance. Up to now she’s been our unofficial leader and has done an amazing job. But the brown eyes that meet mine, usually fierce and alive, are empty. Like she is not really there. Even the gold band holding her dark ponytail seems to have lost its glint.
I guess she is blaming herself for what happened to Maddie. Rosie was sleeping at the time, but only because she’d been working so hard to make sure we all survived. Without her, Maddie, Louisa, and I never would have made it away from the girls’ section of CMS. Even when we were joined by Drew, Alonso, and Ryan, who’d escaped from the boys’ section (which meant three more people to hide, not to mention feed, and boys eat a lot), she managed to keep us going. We got through the woods, out of an Alliance prison camp, and to where we
are now, which by my calculations is about twenty-five miles from our homes in Chicago.
“This isn’t your fault,” I say to Rosie.
She stares not at me but through me, not fluttering an eyelid. I’m not sure she can even hear.
Drew, our second-best leader, is standing with his forehead resting against the siding of the mall. His arms are crossed over his chest, his eyes are pressed shut behind his silver-framed glasses, and his jaw is tight. Alonso, hand over his mouth and dark hair falling over his eyes, looks like a statue called Boy in Shock.
This isn’t good. Someone needs to do something. And I realize that maybe this time the someone is me.
“We should go back inside, at least for now,” I say, struggling to sound how I think Rosie would sound. “Regroup.” My official tone and the leader-y lingo feel a little foreign to me. While it’s true that I talk a lot, usually people just laugh or sigh or say, “Does anyone beside Miss Posner have a question?” or “Evelyn, darling, please not tonight; your mother has a headache.” I’m not used to people actually
listening
.
But, astonishingly, they do. And even stranger is the way Alonso approaches me and, pushing his hair out of his eyes, says, “Is it okay if I take a second out here?” As though I’m actually in charge.
“Um, sure,” I tell him, and follow the others as they drift back toward the abandoned mall.
I notice that Ryan’s blue eyes keep darting to Louisa, to make sure she’s okay, and I’m grateful to him. Drew keeps his head bowed, his posture mirroring Rosie’s stooped shoulders as he walks next to her.
When we first got to the mall, I remember taking in its soaring ceiling, wide-open space, and the tracery of vines clinging to the walls. I thought it was almost mystical, like an abandoned pagan temple.
Now it feels like a dusty crypt.
We scale the silent escalators to the second floor and head past the Tie Palace and Apollo Tans, back to the corner where we’d been sitting before Maddie was taken.
Rosie leans against one of the planters that still holds dried-out vines from when the mall was one of the Shopping Wonders of the World (according to the
promotional poster I saw on the floor of the Dido Wedding Salon). Ryan perches on a bench next to Louisa, his red hair almost brown with matted dust. Drew sits next to the wall, his face unreadable. I’ve never seen him so … disengaged. I wonder if it’s because he’d been out searching for food with Maddie right before she was taken, and now he’s feeling guilty, too.
Great.
As my gaze shifts I realize everyone is looking at me expectantly.
My knees feel like they’re made of Jell-O, and I sink more than sit down on the floor. For possibly the first time in my life, my mind is completely blank. It is like it has been bleached clean by shock. The idea that Maddie is gone is both impossible and agonizing. Because even though Maddie and I had only known each other a short time, she had been my best friend at CMS. Maybe my best friend ever.
My parents hold hands under the breakfast table. They think I don’t notice, but I do. I’m not sure they’re even totally aware of it; it’s like they love each other so much they can’t help touching each other.
They love me, too, of course, and they are great parents. But sometimes the intensity of their feelings for each other makes me feel like an outsider.
That’s why, even though I suspected CMS was a little sinister, I was excited to go to boarding school. I was looking forward to making friends and being part of a group. Having people want to have breakfast with
me
. Being included.
As bad as CMS was — not the facilities, which were very nice, but the unfortunate part about it being a covert enemy-training facility — I felt like I belonged. And the best part was Maddie.
Is
Maddie, I correct myself. She’s going to be fine. We’re going to find her and rescue her.
I pull a rubber band out of my backpack and wrestle my braids into a ponytail. I force my brain to work. Okay. Maddie has been taken. We don’t know by whom. We don’t know where. This is hopeless. We know nothing.
Nothing
.
“That’s it,” I say aloud. “Nothing.”
Everyone looks at me like they wish they had
something handy to throw at my head (and Alonso probably would have, too, but he’s not back yet).
I explain myself quickly. “There were no markings on the car that took Maddie, right? Nothing written on it?”
Ryan sits forward, his blue eyes beginning to sparkle with interest. Louisa’s head tilts to one side. Rosie glances up from the inspection she’s been making of the ends of her hair. Drew frowns like he is running a play-by-play through his mind. He’d been the closest to the vehicle. He says, “None visible.”
I nod. “Exactly. And since the economy fizzled, how many official vehicles have you seen without
something
written on them?”
Ryan gives a low whistle. “You’re right. In my neighborhood, the police are sponsored by Peaceful Night sleeping pills and the siren sounds kind of like a lullaby.”
“You’re lucky,” Drew says. His voice sounds oddly strained, tight. “Near my old house they drive around in cars that are painted to look like bathroom tile with the Plumber’s Pal slogan, ‘We send scum down the drain,’ and the siren makes a toilet-flushing noise. I heard
Wrinkle Away made a bid to sponsor the presidential limo.”
“No way,” I say. “I never even read that rumor. Is that why the president decided —”
Louisa breaks in then, speaking in this strange, faraway voice, her gaze unfixed. “The last army tank I saw was sponsored by Seedie’s Sweets. I couldn’t figure out why they would sponsor a tank, but then Maddie said maybe because they were
dangerously
delicious and —” She stops in mid-sentence. Her gaze focuses on us now and it is full of pain. “You guys didn’t know but she — she could be really funny like that. Oh no.” Tears fill her eyes and instinctively I put my arm around her. The boys act like there’s suddenly something really interesting to look at in the other direction.
“All right,” I go on. “So the truck that took Maddie had no logos on it. Either it belonged to some private company or some supersecret government organization —”
“Or an organization that isn’t supposed to be here. Like the Alliance,” Rosie finishes for me. The way she is looking at me is new. Instead of “Oh, seriously, please,” her expression seems to say, “Nice work. Tell me more.”
Color starts to flood back into Louisa’s face and she wipes her eyes. “Wait. If it’s the Alliance, that means they are probably taking her back to that prison we saw.” She plants her feet and starts to stand. “The one near the border. We should go.”
I really don’t want to have to be the one to remind her it has taken us a day and a half riding in the back of a truck to get from there to here. Not to mention we don’t even know where the prison is.
“It might,” I say, stalling, “but —”
“Chicago,” a voice pants from below us. We all rush to the edge of the balcony.
Alonso is standing on the ground floor, bent over with his hands on his knees. He looks up and smiles this kind of mischievous smile he has. Not that I’ve really noticed.
“The transport that took Maddie? It headed in the direction of Chicago. I found fresh tire marks on the road.”
I look at Rosie, expecting her to shoulder her pack and lead the way like she always has. But Maddie’s kidnapping has really shaken her. I have to get her to snap out of it.
“Rosie, do you think we have everything we need to make it to Chicago?” I ask.
“Everything except Maddie,” she says. Apparently snapping out isn’t going to be happening right this second.
“And food,” Ryan adds.
Everyone is looking at me, like I should know what to do.
So I do the only thing I can think of: I pull on my pack, pick up my compass, say, “Chicago, here we come,” and start walking. “We’ll look for food as we go.”
Except for occasional “You okay?” “Mm-hmm”–type exchanges, we spend the next four hours walking in silence, which isn’t my natural habitat. (Of course, neither is Outside. Until recently my idea of being in nature was to sit next to a window. With a sweater on.)
Above us the sky hunches over the barren landscape like an old man over a checkerboard, gray, wary, and slightly unkempt. The air is warm, thick, and dusty. In the distance I can make out sharp veins of lightning as the afternoon electrical storm looks for anchors on the cars and towers of Chicago.
These mini-typhoons usually last only an hour, but they’ve started happening a lot this time of year, and only around the city. At least once a month there’s a story on the NewsServ about a typhoo-tourist who came from some faraway place and ended up fried to a tofurkey crisp by the storm. From my room at home I often watch the storms weaving tissues of light around buildings and cars and anything metal. According to Mr. Larson, our housekeeper, the view of them from the attic is “dazzling,” but I’m not crazy about heights so I’ve never been up there. Mr. Larson is convinced the storms are generated by the government to keep people off the streets and make them easier to control. He says all the stories about typhoo-tourists getting zapped are planted and that no one has ever seen a body and that the storms are actually harmless. He promised one day we’ll sneak out together and go out in one.
I picture Mr. Larson, leaning against the counter in our big, green and white kitchen, reading aloud from the NewsServ, glasses perched on the end of his nose and the vest of his suit unbuttoned. Meanwhile, Mr. Peña,
our cook, gets dinner ready. My chest feels a little tight and I wish I had more nails to bite.
I glance at my compass to check our direction. As Louisa’s deep sigh reminds me, I’ve checked it approximately a hundred times already, but I just want to be sure.
We’re now about fourteen miles from Chicago, but we could be hundreds considering how unpopulated it is out here. There’s nothing, not a house, or a store, or a bush with berries on it, which is bad since we haven’t eaten in hours, but good since we are trying to avoid being seen.
Although I’m not completely convinced it’s working, this whole not-being-seen thing. Twice I could have sworn I saw eyes glittering between the branches on either side of us. I’m tempted to ask the others if they’ve noticed anything, but I don’t want to seem (even more) paranoid.
