Viral Nation (22 page)

He thought about it, instead of jumping to deny that he’d do such a thing. Clover wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. “I don’t have any reason to believe I would.”

“Promise me, right now, that you won’t give me this zine in two years unless it’s true.”

Would it matter, if he did promise? He’d already given her the zine. The reason the Company was so uptight about travelers not speaking to anyone from the future was that once something was done, it couldn’t be undone. Even if Jude had given her the zine as a trick of some kind, and she changed his mind now, it was too late. She couldn’t unread the zine.

“You got my word,” he said, then made a cross over his heart with his right index finger.

They were stuck in a time loop. Living in a present perpetrated by the future. “This is giving me a headache. I don’t know how much we should depend on the zine,” Clover said.

“What? You’re the one who brought it to us.”

“I know, but—”

The door opened again, and West came in with a calmer, but still visibly upset, Bridget. They sat next to each other on the edge of Jude’s bed.

“Bridget can already dose with the rest of you. Clover can keep
our regular time for now. I’m going to stop taking the suppressant.” West put a hand up to stop her when Clover started to protest. “Everything will work out.”

“How can you know that?” Clover asked. “How can you possibly know that?”

“I don’t. We need to figure out why Langston Bennett tried to do whatever he was going to do to Bridget.”

“None of this makes any sense, West. You should have already been arrested,” Clover said. “They should have taken you weeks ago, before you could kidnap Bridget. And if Mr. Bennett planned to hurt Bridget, he should have been arrested already, too.”

“Obviously there are things we don’t know yet.” West took Bridget’s hand again. Whatever else was going on, they were getting along just fine. “There’s still the possibility that Bennett being there was a coincidence.”

“Is there any doubt in your mind that the man who came into your house wanted to hurt you?” Jude asked Bridget.

Bridget snapped her mouth closed and tears spilled down her flushed cheeks.

“Is there?” Clover asked.

“No.”

Clover couldn’t have cared less about why Langston Bennett was at the Kingston Estate, except that she and her brother had been sucked into the aftermath. And now West’s big plan was to commit suicide for Bridget. She brought the topic back around to what was really important. “You have to be dosed, West.”

“I agree,” Bridget said.

West sat back in his chair. “I’d rather die here than on the firing line.”

“I’d rather you keep breathing,” Clover said. “And keep all your skin.”

“She’s right.” Jude scratched his temple, contemplating West.
“I mean, how the hell would we get your carcass down all those stairs?”

Bridget let loose a strangled sob that Clover might have thought was silly, if she didn’t have a matching one caught in her throat.

Jude grimaced and muttered, “Sorry. But you can’t die up here. If that’s the real plan, it does suck.”

“I need to get to the library.” Clover couldn’t keep thinking about questions that had no rational answer. “There has to be some information, somewhere. I need to get on the nets.”

“I have a wireless laptop,” Jude said. When the room went silent, he added, “I liberated it from my house father when I left Foster City.”

“Liberated?” Bridget asked.

“Stole,” West said.

“He took enough from me. It was the least he could give.” Jude went to his dresser, opened a bottom drawer, and pulled out a laptop computer. It was old and clunky, and if it worked, Clover would be duly impressed.

“You can connect to the nets on that thing?” she asked.

“Yes.”

Not long after the walls went up, wireless Internet was banned. Computers had to be plugged directly into the nets, at a library or through a sanctioned home connection for the few who had energy to waste on that sort of thing.

The new modems gave limited access. For safety. Censorship, so that the Bad Times wouldn’t ever come back. It was one more thing that Clover had not only never questioned, but never even considered questioning. Until today.

Clover moved closer to the computer. “What was he doing with it?”

“You don’t want to know,” Jude said, and then, “Trust me,” when Clover started to say she did.

“How do you get power here?” Clover asked instead.

“No one has used the Dinosaur, even for storage, since the virus. They didn’t do much to turn off the electricity. All we had to do was hit the breakers until we found one that gives us a little juice where we want it.”

“Unbelievable.” Mango settled back on the floor under the table, now that Clover was totally focused on the laptop and no longer rocking. “Show me.”

Jude opened the computer and touched a button in the upper left corner of the keyboard until the screen lit bright blue. A few minutes later, Jude had the computer connected to the nets. Wirelessly.

“Are you sure they don’t have some way to track when someone is connected like this?” West asked Jude.

“My house father spent all his time on this thing and they never came after him.” Jude slid out of the way and let Clover sit in front of the computer. “There’s no way they knew what he was doing on it.”

“How do you know?” Bridget asked.

“Because if they did, I wouldn’t have had to live with him for four years.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.” Jude sat near Clover and watched her as she went into the classified ads.

“Look at this one,” Clover said. “This guy in Iowa wants to trade his Whole New Life for a kidney. How sad is that?”

“‘We must adjust to changing times and still hold to unchanging principles,’” West read from over her shoulder. “Jimmy Carter. What’s with the presidential quotes? Didn’t you see one the other day, Clover?”

A small communication box opened in the center of the screen before she could answer.

Hello, Clover.

The words, black letters on a white field, popped up one by one. No one spoke. Clover asked Jude, “How did you do that?”

“Me? I didn’t do anything.”

“Well someone did.”

“Hey! Don’t answer,” West said when Clover put her fingers on the keyboard. “It must be the guard. Jesus, how did they find us?”

Don’t panic, West, you aren’t in trouble
, whoever was typing on the other end put into the box.
Well, not yet anyway.

“Okay,” West said after they’d spent a solid sixty seconds just staring at the blinking cursor. “What the hell is this?”

Jude pointed at the keyboard. “Ask who they are.”

Who are you?
Clover typed. Her heart beat like a trapped bird.

Ned Waverly.

Waverly-Stead Ned Waverly? “Ned Waverly?” she asked the screen, which of course couldn’t hear her.

Bridget leaned in closer. “Isn’t he dead?”

West shook his head. “Dead or alive, that isn’t
Ned Waverly
. Come on.”

Prove it
, Clover typed.

Your brother is considering giving up his suppressant shots because you gave him an article that said they were the Company’s way of keeping you under control, and he’s afraid of being arrested if he goes to a bar. Little Geena wrote it.

West stood up. His chair teetered on its back legs and then crashed back into place as he grabbed Jude’s arm and ripped him out of his seat next to Clover. “Is this some kind of joke?”

“That’s what I’d like to know.” Jude didn’t break eye contact or struggle against West’s hold on him.

“Stop it!” Clover pulled on West’s other arm. “What’s wrong with you, West? Let him go!”

West looked at her, and then Bridget, and finally released Jude.

Clover sat back down and typed:
How do you know that?

You told me all about it in another time line. Is Jude okay? Your brother doesn’t know his own strength.

Clover looked over at Jude, who glared at West but was otherwise unhurt. Then she typed:
What do you want from us?

I need to talk to you.

So talk.

Not now. Bridget is about to faint. I’ll contact you six p.m. the day after tomorrow.

West, Jude, and Clover all turned to Bridget just in time for West to catch her as she slumped into the predicted swoon.

Waverly’s showing up on Jude’s computer put an end to the
night. West, Clover, and Bridget crowded into the bedroom adjoining Jude’s on the fifteenth floor of the Dinosaur. West made a pallet on the floor, even though Jude offered to bring another bed into his room.

The next morning, West rolled over and opened his eyes to find Bridget looking down at him.

“Morning,” he said.

“If you don’t go, I don’t go.” She’d been awake awhile, he thought, thinking about this.

“You have to.”

She sat up, cross-legged on the mattress. “They’re at least as likely to be looking for me as they are for you. In fact, if they’re looking for you, they’re probably looking for Clover, too.”

“Clover has to be dosed. She’s a Messenger. The minute she doesn’t show up somewhere she’s supposed to be, the entire guard starts looking for her.” They would search for her even harder than they’d search for a guy who hadn’t killed anyone yet.

Bridget’s hair was a mess, she had dark circles under her blue eyes, and her hands shook in her lap, but she stiffened her spine and said, “So you and I skip it.”

West rolled over to his back and stared at the ceiling. “How can I send Clover to do something I’m too scared to do myself?”

“This isn’t about fear.”

He sat up. She was right. It would be harder to convince Clover. West could already hear her stubborn response, but in the end, he’d have to win this one, whether he wanted to or not. She’d have to take her chances that night at a suppressant bar. And he had to let her go.

“I’m worried about you,” Clover said while they waited
for Jude and the others to return. It wasn’t like her to waste much time on worry she didn’t think was necessary, so he believed her.

“Try not to be,” he said. “It won’t do any good.”

“What am I going to do if the article is wrong and you die?”

“We have to trust something,” he said.

He’d never questioned the execution of future criminals until he faced the same fate. In fact he was glad that capital crimes were firmly a thing of the past.

His whole life, he’d been taught that the current system was right. His father was an executioner, for God’s sake. The tight hold on crime kept them safe, didn’t it? It was brutal, but necessary. And never wrong.

Because of the portal in Lake Tahoe, it was never wrong.

Either the justice system was fatally flawed, or he was going to kill Bridget.

“We’re going to figure this out, Clover.” He sat at the table with her and picked at a small bowl of strawberries Emmy had brought
to them before everyone left. They grew them in big tin cans on the balconies. Ingenious, really.

“Aren’t you scared?”

Terrified. He’d lived through the virus when he was a little boy; he wasn’t looking forward to it reconstituting in his body. He didn’t have to catch it, because he already had it lying dormant in his cells. If the zine was wrong, he’d get sick. His skin would decompose off his living body. And if he couldn’t figure out a way to save himself, he’d die a miserable, excruciatingly painful death instead of a quicker one in front of a firing squad.

Bridget had never contracted the virus during the Bad Times. Maybe she’d have a chance of staying healthy. But only, of course, if he stayed away from her so that she didn’t catch it from him. If he got sick, she’d have to go home so she could be dosed and live.

Trying to figure this mess out was making his head hurt.

“What do you think about Waverly?” he asked, needing to change the subject.

“It’s unreal. Like the president popping up to say hello.”

Waverly and Stead were on a level with the president. Revered, distant even here in the Company’s capital city, and working for the good of the people. Waverly wasn’t associated with the Company that bore his name anymore, but West, like everyone he knew, was in awe of the man.

Waverly had saved his life, after all.

Clover bit into a strawberry and closed her eyes. “How are they eating like this?”

They were too young to pick up rations. The guards at the Bazaar checked ID at the elevators. It might be possible for them to get through the front door, but those elevators were guarded like they were the entrance to the kingdom’s gold.

West guessed they were.

Maybe they somehow got in through one of the locked stairwells.
More likely, they were stealing what they had to, without taking enough to get caught.