I just stared at him for a long moment, my mind spinning as I ticked through all the people I was now responsible for. First Mel. Then Carter. Now Joe and McKenna Wells. If we did make it out, it would be like a damn parade.
I glanced over at Mel, hoping for a second opinion on the matter. But she kept seesawing her Slinky and didn’t look any more enthusiastic about it than I felt. She said nothing, but started humming faintly, just so I could barely hear it. Maybe I was wrong, but to me, it sounded like the theme to Jeopardy. Very helpful.
“It’s probably not yours,” I said. Most of the Breeders slept with a lot of guys, trying to get pregnant; mostly with Collabs, but some slept with Greens, too.
“But it might be.”
There wasn’t hope in his voice. More like a flat resignation.
Which was probably about how I sounded when I finally said, “Okay. You can come. Both of you. I’m not dragging McKenna’s ass halfway across the country by myself.”
CHAPTER NINE
Mel
Carter always brings Dubble Bubble, which is pink without being noisy, and tastes like math.
Lily’s music is more melodious when he’s near. It always has been. Not that she’d notice. Silly Lily.
At first I think Carter was what was missing, that having him here will make the plan work. Maybe he can play the piano solo that makes the song so memorable, but then we lost him. The crowd was so loud. A riot of random noise that became a riot of fear I couldn’t control. Then Carter was gone and the music unraveled. The melody exploding like champagne flutes in high C.
The clock is ticking now, faster than the metronome.
Joe, who came and dropped his bombshell. He’s both more and less than what he seems. Playing one song, singing another, with the drumbeat out of time.
What wasn’t right before is worse now. Even if I could have gotten Rachmaninoff to play, this is too soon. It would be wrong even if it wasn’t for Joe.
Now we’re stuck with Joe and his Bombshell.
Joe leaves and Lily packs, packs, packs. Waiting for him to come back. Waiting for Carter. Going to meet Joe. And her.
I try to tell Lily how wrong it all is. How the plan doesn’t sing. The best I can do is Yankee Doodle Dandy. Which doesn’t help. And might not even have been Benedict Arnold’s war. Math and bubbles were always my strong suit, not history, traitors, and macaroni.
Not that it matters. Lily isn’t listening. Silly Lily. Or silly Mel, since I’m the one trying to make her understand. When the bags are packed and Carter’s still gone, I’m the one who asks.
Red rover, red rover, let Lily come over.
CHAPTER TEN
Lily
The three chimes echoed through the frosty night air announcing that final curfew was ten minutes off. Joe and McKenna were nowhere to be seen. Mel and I had waited as long as we could. The plan had been to meet them beside the north wall of the gymnasium where we now sat. When Joe had left to go collect McKenna, he’d sworn he only needed twenty minutes to get her and meet us there. Then we would all leave together. That had been thirty minutes ago.
The thought sent a bead of sweat trickling down my spine, despite the icy wind that beat against the thin denim of my jacket, straight through my many layers of clothes. Mel’s humming didn’t help. It was some relentlessly cheerful tune I didn’t have room in my brain to try to place.
I’d given her the Valium right before leaving the room. Was that why she seemed so upbeat? The good news: she calmly followed me without complaint. The bad news: the song was grating my already frayed nerves.
The second set of chimes followed thirty seconds after the first. Joe and McKenna weren’t going to show. Less than an hour ago, Joe had been desperate to get off the Farm, but now, nothing. Something must have happened to them. I’d already given up Carter for lost.
I stood, pulling Mel to her feet. “We gotta go.”
For once, Mel seemed to understand exactly what I was saying. She stuck close to my side, not pulling away when I wrapped a hand around her biceps. Not even stumbling as we ducked out of the shadow of the gymnasium and crossed a bare, moonlit swath of grass toward the nine-foot-high chain-link fence that surrounded the football field, cutting it off from the rest of the Farm. There was another fence on the other side of the football field. We’d deal with that one when we got to it.
I hated how screwed up our plan had gotten. In a perfect world, we would have left the Farm just before dawn, when the fence was still off but the Ticks were already back at their nests for the day. I didn’t know where they went when the sun was up, but I knew they were nocturnal and we never saw or heard them then. Leaving at dawn would give us all day to find a working car.
This new plan scared me. Leaving at night was dangerous. Getting to a car would be harder. Even though I’d spotted several in the deserted side streets near campus, I just assumed if there were cars near the Farm, there would also be ones on the other side of the river. Could I get one started? Maybe. Showing me how to hot-wire a car had been my crazy uncle Rodney’s idea of great postgame Thanksgiving Day fun, much to my mother’s dismay. But that had been several years ago. Sure, I’d looked it up in the Farm’s library last month to review, but watching, reading, and doing were very different things. When the time came, would I remember how?
Pushing that concern aside, I focused on keeping Mel moving, hugging the fence until we’d reached a sprawling oak. The fence came within three or four feet of the trunk and the night was bright enough that the tree’s massive limbs offered some shadowy protection where they dipped close to the razor-wire-topped fence.
The stench of rotting garbage filled the air this close to the stadium. The Collabs dumped trash in the football stadium and the air seemed thick with the scent of their lazy neglect. But at least it overpowered the scent of death from the corpses left tethered beyond the Farm’s southern fence.
The lights on this end of campus had burned out long ago and the plump moon cast inky shadows across the weed-choked landscape. Something scuttled through the grass along the fence. Probably a rat. A shudder ran up my spine, but I shoved aside my revulsion.
I looked at Mel. “What do you say, Mel? Time to go?”
She didn’t look me in the eye, but muttered, “Red rover, red rover. Red rover, red rover.”
“Okay.” I squeezed her hand, suppressing my alarm at how icy her fingers felt. A norther was coming through. Like our timing wasn’t bad enough as it was. “Red rover.”
Yeah, we had the gloves and coat now, but I didn’t want her wearing them during our escape. They were both packed in the bottom of Mel’s pink bag. Maybe I was being paranoid, but it seemed too early for her to wear them anyway. Like maybe they would jinx us.
Mel’s mouth twisted into something that looked almost like a smile.
I tugged my collar up against the cold and then blew quickly on my fingers to warm them. Warning chimes rang in the distance, but I ignored them. I’d lost track of how many had rung. And it didn’t matter anyway. It was too late to turn back now. After flexing them a few times, I pulled my prized gardening shears out of my pocket. I just hoped I could use them to cut a hole in the chain-link fence big enough for Mel and me to slip through.
I hoped a lot of things. If we did get out, I prayed we wouldn’t run into any Ticks. We didn’t have much to fight them off with if we did. A few weeks ago, I’d thought about making modified Molotov cocktails to bring with us. After six months surrounded by chemistry textbooks and flammable chemicals, figuring out how to do it with what I had on hand was easy. I’d chickened out because I didn’t want Mel around anything that could blow up or burn her chemically.
Our mom used to have a saying: don’t give anything to Mel you wouldn’t hand to a toddler. So I’d scrapped the cocktails. Which left us defenseless, except for the gardening shears and the shiv. I tried to ignore the fact that both could kill Mel just as easily as they could a Tick.
We crouched low in the shadows and I got to work.
Most of the Farm was surrounded by two rows of twelve-foot-tall chain-link fences topped with razor wire. Here on the north side of campus, the abandoned football stadium overlooked the swollen Red River. There was an extra row of fencing between the stadium and the rest of campus. Beyond that, on the other side of the stadium, was the fence that was turned off each night. I started running through all those ifs in my head again. If we could get through this fence and the next. If we could swim across the river. If we could find a car. If we could make it to Uncle Rodney’s. If, if, if, if.
I clamped the blades of the pruning shears around one of the links and squeezed the handles, using all my strength to cut through the ifs. Finally I felt it yield to pressure then snap. One down.
Beside me, Mel rocked forward and back on her toes. “Red rover, red rover. Red rover, red rover.”
“Yeah, Mel,” I muttered, moving on to the next link. “Soon.”
By the time the long series of chimes signaled curfew, my arms were burning from exertion and sweat dripped down my temple, but I’d cut through a column of links about two feet tall. I wrapped my hands around the bottom corner, ignored the protests of my trembling muscles, and pulled upward, curling the edges of the fence apart.
As I stood back to survey my progress, I heard laughter coming from the other side of the athletic hall. Shit.
A beam from a flashlight moved across the ground. A Collab. And he was coming this way.
How long ago had the last bell chimed? I couldn’t remember. I’d been concentrating too hard on cutting through the fence. I shot one last glance at the chain link. The gap wasn’t big enough to fit through. And if the Collab saw it, we’d be totally screwed. I shoved the fence back in place as best I could, then I grabbed Mel’s hand and pulled her away from the hole in the fence.
I tucked the pruning shears in my back waistband and tugged my jacket over them. We’d only made it a few steps when the Collab called out.
“Hey, you there!”
I ignored him, keeping my shoulders hunched as I shifted course and headed for the relative safety of the quad. Maybe I could claim I hadn’t heard the curfew chimes.