Children of the Underground (9 page)

Michael didn't need to think about it. “Take us back to D.C.,” he repeated. “You've got nothing for me here.”

“I'm sorry to hear that,” Clara said, standing up. I stood up too. “Good luck to the two of you,” Clara said. She reached her hand out to me. I shook it. Her grip was fierce. She shook Michael's hand too. “Marcus and Dorothy will show you out,” Clara said, her voice sounding slightly defeated. She motioned toward the man and woman standing by the door.

Marcus opened the door. “Take them back in the van,” Clara said as Michael and I walked out. “You'll have to hood them.” Marcus nodded. Clara sat back down at her desk, took out another piece of paper, and began working again before we were even out the door. We were already forgotten. She had already moved on.

Marcus and Dorothy escorted us outside the ranch. Two other people were assigned to drive us back. Dorothy gave me a hug before we left. “Good luck,” she whispered in my ear.

They put canvas hoods over each of our heads before letting us into the van. We understood the risk that we posed to them now, so we bowed our heads as they hooded us. I had a million questions for Michael, but they would have to wait until we were alone again. Having already fulfilled his promise to me, I just had to hope that Michael would let that happen.

Twelve

Addy and Evan were lying next to each other in the darkness. Addy believed in the power of the darkness. It covered them. It kept them safe. Addy knew all too well that if you stood in the light while everything around you was dark, then you were blind while everyone else could see. If you turned off the light, at least everyone else was blind too.

Evan lay on his back and lifted his hand into the dark air in front of him. He splayed his fingers wide apart and slowly moved his hand closer and closer to his face. He was trying to see how close to his face he'd have to bring his own hand before he could see it. He saw a shadow when his hand was about six inches away. The shadow didn't get any clearer until Evan's hand was nearly touching the tip of his nose. The darkness was thicker than any Evan could remember.

They were making their way east. That was the plan. That's all that Evan knew. They'd been traveling for most of the day, hitching rides, never taking any one ride for much more than a hundred miles. To Evan, the whole concept seemed antiquated and silly. He felt like he was in an old black-and-white movie with actors wearing white T-shirts tucked into their jeans and cigarette packs rolled up in the sleeves. Addy told Evan that she thought it was the safest way for them to travel, that trains, planes, even buses were little more than glorified mousetraps. Once on one, Addy said, there was no way for them to escape. “How is a stranger's car any different?” Evan had asked.

“We'll take rides only from people driving alone,” Addy answered.

“And how does that help us escape?” Evan asked.

“There's two of us and one of them,” Addy answered. “And I've seen what you can do when you're cornered.” Simultaneous rushes of pride and disgust ran through Evan's body when Addy said the words. It was like a chill running down his spine.

Evan wasn't sure how far they'd made it that first day. They'd caught four separate rides. He knew that they were somewhere in Arizona. He'd seen the signs when they crossed the border from California, but never any signs informing them that they were leaving. “What if someone recognizes me?” Evan had asked Addy between the first and second ride. They didn't have much time for idle conversation. Addy hadn't had any time to tell Evan more about the Underground. She didn't have time to tell Evan about her plan. All she had time to tell him was that they had to run because he'd been marked. Addy made sure that she found the time to tell Evan that his picture and real name were the lead stories on all the news feeds. She wanted to light another fire under him so that he'd be ready for anything. She wanted to find out what else he was capable of.

“If someone recognizes you,” Addy answered Evan's question, “then we'll know that they've been paying too close attention.”

It wasn't until they were lying together in the darkness in the shell of an old, abandoned trailer that they had a slow moment to talk. Evan had been thinking all day about the question Addy had asked him that morning. “Have you ever heard of the Underground?” She hadn't elaborated at the time after Evan said no. Instead, she changed the subject. Later in the day, when he'd pressed her for details about what the Underground was and what it had to do with him, she simply said, “I'll tell you later.” It was later.

“Are you going to tell me about the Underground?” Evan asked Addy as they stared straight ahead of each other into the nothingness.

“I think they can help us,” Addy responded. Evan heard her voice as if it was unmoored, as if it was floating through to him from far away.

“Who are they?” Evan asked.

“The Underground are former fighters in the War that have banded together to try to help others escape. No one knows how long the Underground has been around. Some people say that it's almost as old as the War itself.”

Evan was confused. “Escape what?”

“Escape the War,” Addy answered. “As long as the War has existed, there have been people who wanted nothing to do with it, who didn't want to fight. Sometimes people call them the nonbelievers. Some of the nonbelievers tried to run away, some got killed, and some banded together to try to help others like them.”

“How do they help them escape?”

“They take them away. They teach them how to hide. They teach them how to run. The Underground has connections and networks all over the world. I think they can help us, Evan. I think that they can keep us safe.”

“How do you know about them? How are we supposed to find them?”

“I used to work for them,” Addy said. Her voice made it sound almost like she was confessing a sin.

“You used to work for them, but you left. What happened?” Evan asked, even though he probably could have guessed. Addy didn't seem like the type to find value in running. Evan understood. Running didn't make much sense to him either.

“I didn't want to do it anymore,” Addy told him. “I didn't want to just teach people how to hide. I wanted to make it so people didn't even have to hide anymore. You can't believe in things halfway, Evan. If we were right to try to help people escape from the War, then we're even more right to fight to end it.”

A quiet moment passed between them while Evan thought. “So, you left the Underground because you didn't think that they were doing enough. You left it to become a rebel,” Evan said into empty space. Evan didn't come up with the word
rebel
on his own. He'd heard Addy and the others use it.

“I guess you could put it that way. I wasn't alone, though,” Addy said. “A lot of people like me left the Underground to try to fight against the War. You met some of them. We thought we were finally ready to fight back.”

Evan took another moment. He inhaled the darkness. “But you said the Underground's been around for almost as long as the War. Why now? After all this time, why are people trying to fight back now?”

“It didn't start all of a sudden. The rumblings began about seventeen years ago. Something inspired more and more people to start leaving the War. Something caught hold.” Addy paused, choosing her words carefully, trying to decide what to reveal to Evan and what to hold back. “When people left the War, they ran to the Underground, but the flood of people was too much for the Underground to handle. They couldn't hide them all. People started getting caught, and not just one person here and one there. A lot of people were caught and killed. The leaders of the War thought that would be the end of it, but every time they caught and killed someone whose only crime was trying to run away, everyone else who'd ever thought about running got angrier and more righteous. It took years before there seemed to be enough people to try to fight, enough of us to make a difference. We'd grown sick of listening to faceless voices ordering us around, telling us to kill. And the alternative, spending our lives hiding, cowering in fear, didn't seem much better. We thought we could end the War.” She shook her head. She'd been so naive. “The unrest has been building for almost seventeen years. It's a wasteland out there, Evan. You probably don't even see it. You guys outside of the War don't seem to see anything even though you're surrounded by it, but it's a wasteland. We were just waiting for a spark to light the fire.”

Evan wanted to put all the pieces that Addy was giving him together, but could do little more than try to figure out how he fit into the puzzle. He'd absorbed so much new information over the past few weeks that he could cling only to what seemed the most urgent and necessary for his own survival. He didn't have the endurance to try to guess what had happened seventeen years ago to start the unrest, let alone what had happened more recently to spark the fire. He focused on what was practical. “So why should we go to the Underground now?” Evan asked.

“You saw what happens when we fight them,” Addy answered. “The two sides of the War work together and they fight back twice as hard. They have more people, more power, more weapons. That SWAT team wasn't part of the War, Evan. They broke all the rules. They went outside the War to try to stop us. Your picture should never have been in the news. I know how to hide people from the War. I don't know how to hide people from the rest of the world. We need help from the Underground. We need time to regroup.”

Evan stared straight ahead of him and tried to think about everything. He thought about what his life would be like if he had to spend the rest of it in hiding. He thought about the person he wanted to be and whether that person was the type of person who runs or the type of person who fights. He thought about why he'd come to California in the first place. He tried not to think of the sound of the screams of the people he heard die in the fire, or the sounds of the bullets hitting the bodies. He tried not to think about his lost friend. “Once we regroup,” Evan said after thinking and not thinking about everything, “are we going to fight again?”

Addy didn't know how to answer that question. Instead, she shifted her body in the darkness. Even before she moved, Addy's body was close to Evan's. Evan heard Addy move and then felt one of her hands press against his chest. Slowly, Addy slid her hand up toward Evan's neck. She used Evan's body to guide her, even though she couldn't see. When Addy's hand made it to Evan's neck, she knew even without being able to see where she needed to aim. Addy leaned into Evan, pressing her chest against his, and kissed him hard on the lips. It wasn't the first time they'd kissed. While their lips were still pressed together, Evan's hands fumbled over Addy's body. It wouldn't be the first time they had sex either. The first time was before the fire. It was before Evan and Addy and the others had attacked the intelligence cell. It was before Addy knew how brave and strong Evan could be. At the time, Addy thought Evan was a goofy, guileless boy. She seduced him the first time on a lark. She did it because she thought he was cute in an innocent sort of way. She did it because it made her feel powerful. She did it because what the fuck?

Evan was different this time. She could feel it in her body. Evan slid one hand under the waistband of her pants. He was more confident this time. Their lips separated for a moment as Addy gasped and bit down on her lower lip. Addy reached down too, searching through the darkness for the button to Evan's pants. Addy was still in control but not like she had been the first time. Nothing was the same as the first time. This time, Addy seduced Evan because he had saved her life. This time, Addy seduced him because of how quickly he had accepted his fate as a wanted man. This time, she seduced him because Evan's strength and instincts excited her. This time, she seduced him because, after everything that had happened, he was still willing to fight. Both times she wanted him. Addy'd spent most of her life trying to be brave enough to go after what she wanted.

Evan knew that Addy had taken advantage of him the first time. He had been afraid but he had his reasons for not objecting, reasons that went beyond the obvious facts that he was an eighteen-year-old boy and she was a beautiful twenty-two-year-old woman. Evan let Addy take advantage of him the first time because Evan had never in his life met someone as alive as Addy. God, was she alive.

The darkness surrounded Addy and Evan. Inside the darkness, they could feel each other's skin and hear each other's breath. They were on the run from the world, hiding in an abandoned trailer in the middle of nowhere. In all their lives, neither of them had ever felt more isolated, and neither of them had ever felt less alone.

Thirteen

The light stung my eyes. They pulled off our hoods while the van was still moving. If I craned my neck, I could make out the tip of the Washington Monument over the driver's head. We were back in D.C. I recognized the man who took off our hoods. He was the man who threw me in the trunk a day earlier.

“Where are you taking us?” I asked the man.

“Back to the park,” the man said without looking at me, “where we found you. Unless there's somewhere else we should drop you off.”

“You can take us back to our car,” Michael said to the man. “We're parked just off Sixteenth Street.”

“Are the two of you still traveling together,” the man asked, staring at me with steely gray eyes, “or do you want to be dropped off somewhere else, ma'am?” I looked over at Michael, unsure how to answer him.

“Just take us to the car,” Michael answered. “We'll figure out where we're going from there.”

The man with the gray eyes looked at me again. I nodded to show consent. “Whatever you say,” the man said. Then he told the driver where to go. I looked at the driver's eyes in the rearview mirror. I didn't recognize him. I wonder how many of them there are in the Underground. I've always wondered how many people are fighting the War. Now I also have to wonder how many people are against it. The deeper I go, the more questions I have and the fewer answers I get.

I looked over at Michael, trying to will him to look at me, hoping that he would give me some sort of sign that we were still in this together. He didn't. He alternated staring at the floor and out the front windshield. I hated him for not looking at me. I had an urge to kick him in his shin. I remembered a warning he had given me during the drive up from Florida. “After this, after we find these people, I'm gone. You need to start having your own plans for everything. Even when you have a plan, things don't go right half the time; without a plan you're completely fucked.” The problem was that he was my plan. I needed him.

We pulled up behind the rental car. They knew where it was. At first nobody moved. Then the gray-eyed man turned back to us one more time. “Are you sure this is what you want?” he asked.

“I don't think I was given a choice,” I responded.

“I wasn't talking to you,” the gray-eyed man said. He looked at Michael, giving him one more chance to run away—one more chance to leave the hate and the violence and the death forever.

Michael stared back into those gray eyes. “I'm sure that I want you to let me out of this van.”

“You're the boss,” the gray-eyed man replied. He motioned to the driver, who got out of the van and opened the back doors. Light and air rushed in. “You're free to go,” the gray-eyed man said to us, motioning toward the open doors. “The only rule now is,” he said as Michael and I stood up, “don't mention us to anyone.” He was focusing on Michael. They knew as well as I did that I had no one to tell.

“I'm a pariah,” Michael answered with a shrug. “Who's going to listen to me anyway?” I followed Michael onto the street. The driver held out a hand to help me down. When I was back on solid ground, he let go of my hand and got back into the van without saying a word.

“We'll be watching you,” the gray-eyed man said to us before reaching out to close the back doors. I couldn't tell if he meant that as a favor or a threat. My head was swirling. The gray-eyed man got back in the van and they drove away, leaving Michael and me alone on the side of the road. It suddenly dawned on me how clever their system with the postcards was. The only way anyone could find them was if they came looking first.

Michael started walking toward the passenger's side of the car. Until then, he'd always driven. He threw me the car keys. “What's going on?” I asked, confused and scared.

“You're going to drive me to the train station,” he said. I clutched the keys into my palm so hard that they dug into my skin.

“What?” I said, still not willing to believe that Michael was leaving me.

“Get in the car,” Michael ordered. I unlocked the car and got in. Michael climbed in next to me. We closed our doors, shutting off the sounds from the world. It was quiet. No one could hear us now.

“Where are you going?” I figured he owed me that much.

He didn't. “You don't need to know that. Just drop me off at the train station. You can keep the car. It's not in my real name anyway. Tell me where you're going and I'll try to stay in touch with you.”

“That's not fair,” I said, almost stumbling on my words. “How come I have to tell you where I'm going but you don't have to tell me where you're going?” Michael grabbed the keys from my hand. He pushed the keys into the ignition and turned them. The engine revved on.

“Because you don't want to know where I'm going,” Michael answered. “Drive.” My hands began to shake. I knew how to get to the train station. I'd basically memorized the city when trying to decipher the postcards.

We drove for a few minutes in silence before I found the courage to speak again. “I have nowhere to go, Michael,” I said as I turned the car around and headed back downtown.

“Don't tell
me
that you have nowhere to go. You've got plenty of places to go,” Michael answered. “You've got a family in Canada. You can lead a normal life. Go there.” I kept driving, afraid to do anything else. I decided that I wasn't going to the train station, though. The traffic thinned out and we drove for a few minutes along the reservoir before Michael got suspicious. “Where are we?” Michael asked when he realized that we weren't headed to the train station.

“I'm not letting you run from me that easily,” I said. I pulled the car into the parking lot for the FDR Memorial. “Do you have any idea how long I've been looking for you?”

“Yeah,” Michael answered. “A couple of months.”

I stopped the car. I stared at Michael so that he could feel the rage in my eyes. “No, not just a couple of months. I've been looking for you for almost my son's entire life, you bastard. You're not leaving me like this.”

“I have to,” Michael said. He grabbed his duffel bag from the backseat and stepped out of the car. I jumped out after him before he could run away.

“Why?” I shouted.

He walked back to me until his face was only a few inches from mine. “Because I'm going back. I'm reenlisting.”

I couldn't believe what I was hearing. “After all of that?” I yelled. “After Clara told you that everything you've been force-fed about this War is bullshit, you're going back? Why would you want to go back to the War now?”

When Michael spoke, his voice was a few decibels quieter than mine. “First of all, just because Clara said something is bullshit doesn't mean it's bullshit. Second, weren't you listening when they told you that they weren't going to help you find your son?” What did he mean,
weren't you listening
? I wanted to slap him. I nodded instead. “Then why the fuck would you give two shits about what Clara said?” I had no answer. Michael was looking at me now, acknowledging me the way I wanted him to do so badly when we were back in the van. I wasn't sure I wanted it anymore. His eyes were on fire. “One thing, Maria,” Michael said, lifting a finger for emphasis. “They said one thing back there that matters. They said that to find your son, you're going to have to find someone who might know where they keep that information.”

“So?” I said, utterly confused. What did that have to do with Michael reenlisting in the War?

“You read Joe's journal, Maria,” Michael said, looking around us to make sure that no one else could hear him. “You know that I wasn't a high flyer in the War. I've only ever had two things going for me. One, I'm good at killing people. And two, I have friends who know how to play the game and who might know something.”

It finally dawned on me what Michael was saying. “Jared? Are you saying that you're going to try to help me by finding Jared?” Michael nodded. “That's insane. I don't care if he was your friend. He said he was Joe's friend too and then he killed him. He's the one who took Christopher in the first place!”

Michael grabbed my shoulders. “Keep your voice down,” he ordered. “I warned you that you wouldn't want to know where I'm going, but you don't have a lot of options. Let me take care of this. Go home. I'll find you when I know something.” For a moment, I was tempted by the idea of running away and leaving my fate in someone else's hands. If it was only my future that was at risk, I might have done it.

I looked at Michael. He was going to help me. Even if his plan was crazy, at least he was going to help me. I wasn't alone. “Why do you think he'll help us?”

“If I reenlist, he'll find me. I don't know if he'll tell me anything, but I know he'll come find me.”

“How can you know that?”

“Because he's my friend.” Michael's voice was soft. I could see in his eyes that he knew what I thought about referring to Jared as a friend. “I wouldn't expect you to understand.”

“But why Jared?” I asked.

“Because after those people refused to help us, he's the only friend I've got.”

“Are you sure Jared will know something?”

“I've never known him not to.”