Kristen Simmons: Three

A deep breath to summon patience, and I squatted beside her.

“Let me see your arms.”

She kept them locked to her body, gaze still pinned in the direction Sean had taken off. Her lower lip quivered.

I rubbed at the tightness in my chest. “He’s just worried about you.”

“He hates me,” she said, so quietly I almost missed it.

I grabbed her crutches, needing something to busy my hands. Rebecca didn’t have to say it, but I knew she blamed us for her misery. I told myself for the hundredth time that she was better off with us than the FBR, that we wouldn’t cart her around or put her on display to dissuade citizens from corruption. But seeing her sitting in a mud puddle, arms bright with sores, not even attempting to shield her face from the rain, I couldn’t help but doubt myself.

That didn’t mean I was going to let her quit.

“Get up,” I told her. “Enough with the pity party.”

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me. Get up.”

She balked, and when I didn’t back down she snatched the crutches from my grasp. Barely a wince came from her lips as she fastened the braces around her forearms.

“That’s not exactly easy in case you haven’t noticed,” she said.

I knew it wasn’t. I knew it was killing her and I ached to fix it, but I also knew if she was going to survive out here she couldn’t give up.

I fought the sympathy eating away at my insides and cocked an eyebrow. “Neither is sneaking out of a locked facility every night to fool around with a guard.”

Her ice blue gaze widened. “Ember…”

“You have to go back to the mini-mart.” I shifted. “Sean will take you.…”

“ Ember .” She pointed to the trash bag I’d set on the ground beside us. “The radio!”

The red light was flashing green—the mouth of the bag had opened when I’d set it down and now the box sent a pale jade reflection onto the black plastic. Instantly, I snatched up the whole package, flooded with the need to answer, but knowing I couldn’t. The rain would ruin the machine.

“Come on.” I only took a second to weigh the consequences, and then sprinted toward the nearest house with the radio latched tightly to my chest, unwilling to miss this first connection with Tucker’s team. As far as we knew, they were the only ones who could tell the posts what had happened to the safe house.

Once under the shelter of the stone entranceway, I hurriedly removed the silver box from the bag then set it on the dirty cement. Beads of water gathered on the top of the metal and I tried in vain to wipe them away with my wet shirtsleeve.

Rebecca arrived, huffing. Unaccustomed to moving that fast with crutches, she bumped into the wall, but held on before falling.

“Do you know how to use that thing?”

“Yes.” In theory. I wished one of the others were here; even though Chase had walked me through the steps I’d never actually used a CB radio before.

“Then answer! Hurry! You’re going to miss it!”

“Keep a lookout,” I told her.

I unhooked the black handheld microphone, untangling the coiled cord from around the handle. The light stopped flashing.

“No.” I made sure the knob was dialed to the frequency we’d agreed to use and pressed the button labeled RECEIVE TRANSMISSION, praying I wasn’t too late.

“Hello?” I tried. “Are you there? Hello?”

“What happened?” Rebecca asked.

“Come on.” I pressed the button to accept the call again. Again. “Please be there.”

“Take your time, why don’t you,” came the muffled voice of my mother’s killer.

I sat back on the damp pavement, exhaling in one hard breath. A deep scowl had etched into Rebecca’s face.

“Well it took you long enough to call.” My throat tightened, as it always did when I spoke to Tucker Morris. “Everything going all right?”

“Yeah.” He hesitated. “So far so good. Sorry I couldn’t call earlier. Had some trouble getting a connection.”

There was heaviness in his tone, telling me that something bad had happened. We couldn’t discuss it over the open radio. Even though this was an old frequency the MM didn’t use anymore, it wasn’t secure. They could always be listening.

“So how is it out there?” I doubted much had changed in the few days we’d been away from the cities, but if anything big had happened, we wouldn’t have known. Our CB radio wasn’t strong enough to eavesdrop on any FBR frequencies, and there wasn’t a news station reporting close enough to pick up a signal. It was easy to feel disconnected out here in the Red Zone.

“Oh, you know,” he said. “No one wants to starve in peace and quiet. They’ve all got to moan and groan about it.”

“Then maybe they should come with you,” I said. Join the resistance. Stop complaining and do something.

“Ha,” he said dryly. “Then what would they have to whine about?”

The truth was few people fought the MM because they were scared. It took something big—something like reform school, and losing your mother—to push through the fear to anger. That was when you could fight back.

“We went through this place yesterday, though that was different,” Tucker continued. “They had a sign at the front of the street that said, get this, it was a ‘compliant neighborhood.’ It was like they were proud of it or something. The place looked good—what we saw of it anyway. Nice-looking houses. We even saw a bunch of little kids in school uniforms.”

A compliant neighborhood? I wanted to gag. I wondered if they were bigots or just liars. How could a community embrace the Statutes? It baffled me, got under my skin. If everyone knew the MM was executing people for violations to their precious moral rules, they wouldn’t be so quick to boast their pride. Unless they were scared of course.

I changed the subject. “How are the others? Tired of driving?” The carriers used aliases, but I wouldn’t risk saying even those aloud.

“Fine. They’re just … visiting with old friends. We should get to Grandma’s house tomorrow. We already crossed over the river.” He snorted. “Now we just have to get through the woods.”

Over the river and through the woods, to grandmother’s house we go.

I smirked at his chosen code name for the first post and sagged against the wall. They’d made it over the Red Zone border. At least that much was going right. Rebecca, who’d turned to watch the street, glanced back over her shoulder.

“My mom used to sing that song,” I said. She’d loved the holidays. For a moment, I could smell the pungent pine air fresheners she would spray around Christmastime to make the house smell “festive.”

I didn’t know what I was thinking, bringing her up now. If not for him, she’d still be here.

“Mine too,” he said.

I wrapped the coiled cord absently around my finger, picturing a woman singing to a young boy. It was tough to imagine that someone had loved Tucker like my mother had loved me. I wondered if she was alive. If she was proud of him. If she could forgive everything he’d done because he was her son. I stared at the radio, wishing I’d missed the call after all, but somehow unable to end it at the same time.

“What about you?” he asked. “Find what you were looking for?”

The concern in his tone took me by surprise.

“Not yet,” I said, stifling the sudden urge to tell him I was beginning to think we were wasting our time. “We’re going to keep looking.”

He was quiet for a while.

“I’ll call back tonight around curfew. We should be at Grandma’s by then.”

Curfew was at dusk. He was farther west than us, but it should have been around the same time.

“We’ll be here.” I clicked the button one more time. “Be careful.”