This wasn’t the first time the Dean had ordered Greens staked out at dusk as punishment. But I’d never seen them. Not like that. Even though there must have been fifty feet between me and those Greens, I felt like I was standing face-to-face with them.
And I remembered all too vividly the incident that had gotten them there. It was yesterday at second meal. The three guys had ganged up on the girl. I remembered her panicked cries. “I’m not a breeder!” she kept saying. She hadn’t done anything except try to defend herself. But she was out there, chained to the light post just like the guys were.
She looked so young. So vulnerable. She had long dark hair, just like Mel and I. All doped up like she was, her expression was distant and dreamy, like Mel’s was sometimes. That could be Mel out there. If I wasn’t with her, all the time, that would be Mel out there.
In that moment, my pace slowed. The crowd flowed past me like the water of the nearby Red River rushing around a rock. The stream of people jostled against me before someone bumped into me hard enough that I broke free of my imagination and stumbled forward a step or two before tumbling down on one knee.
The packet of pills fell out of my pocket as I landed. The pain ricocheting up my leg was nothing compared to my panic as the blue plastic box tumbled to the ground. It landed beside my hand, but before I could grab it, a flip-flop-clad foot kicked it beyond my reach. I saw it disappear into the scuffle of feet. The most valuable thing we owned: gone.
I scrambled rabbitlike after the blue box, launching myself forward to catch it before someone else kicked it beyond my reach. When I saw it a few feet way, I threw myself toward it, but a hand reached down and snatched it off the ground mere seconds before I could grab it.
My heart leapt into my throat, panic making me breathless, even as I felt someone helping me to my feet.
“These must be yours.”
I didn’t even glance at the guy holding the pills out to me. I wrenched them from his hand, quickly flipping the box over to make sure it was unharmed, even though it had only been out of my possession for a minute. “Thanks,” I muttered, hoping he would just walk away.
“Must be pretty important to you,” he said, even as I saw him turning to walk away out of the corner of my eye. “You should keep track of your stuff.”
I shoved my hand deep into my pocket, still clenching the pills. Relief made me light-headed. Or maybe the Collab who had taken my weekly donation had just taken too much off the top. They did that sometimes, if your blood was particularly “clean” that day. Lately they’d been doing it more often. My head spun when I jerked it up to look for the guy who’d handed the pills back to me. He was impossible to miss, the gray of his hoodie standing out in a sea of scarlet sweatshirts. Among the thousands of Greens making their way to third meal, only a few weren’t wearing the colors of the college that the Farm had once been. Mindlessly my eyes followed his progress toward the dining hall.
Why had he handed the pills back to me? Had he not recognized them? Maybe a guy wouldn’t have. Thank God.
I clenched my hand around the rigid plastic tightly enough for the edges to bite into the skin of my palm. But I had it. Thank God, I still had the box. When I looked again, the guy in the gray sweatshirt was gone, disappeared into the crowd of Greens.
CHAPTER TWO
Lily
Stoner Joe’s had once been a college convenience store tucked into the basement of the dining hall. I’d known Joe since we were both kids and I could trust him. He was a good guy, even if Greens, Collabs, and Breeders all shopped in his store. It was like accorded neutral territory. The Collabs could have shut the place down, but for whatever reason, they let us have it. Left us this one small seed of independence. Maybe they knew we’d be happy with it. Maybe it was just too much trouble to squash every bit of spirit.
The wind picked up as I headed down the steps into the shelter of the alcove and let myself into the store, which was unusually dark for this time of day. Before I had a chance to wonder where Joe was, I felt something cold and sharp press against the side of my neck.
“Holy crap!” I gasped.
The hand holding the blade to my throat slackened and then fell away from my skin altogether. “Lily?”
“Yeah!” I said, accusation in my voice. “What the hell, Joe?” I didn’t want to piss him off, but . . . “Seriously. What the hell?”
“Sorry. I’ve been, like, way tense lately.”
My eyes had begun to adjust to the dim lighting and I could see his sheepish smile. “Obviously. What’s with the new security measures?”
I eyed the knife in his hand. It had a long stainless steel handle and a flat face that ended in a sharp, angled blade. If I had to guess, I’d say Joe had repurposed a spatula from the kitchen that shared his building.
“Dark times, Lil. Dark times.” Joe nodded gravely, and as he spoke, his voice fell back into its normal cadence, like there was a silent dude at the end of every sentence. He extended his hand and clasped mine briefly before giving me a little fist bump. “What can I get you today?”
I didn’t ask what he meant by dark times. I didn’t like the idea that things might be even worse than I knew. Just one more reason Mel and I had to get out of the Farm.
“I’m here to trade,” I said.
“Whatcha need, whatcha got?” he asked, crossing to the counter that bisected the room. He set the shiv down and propped his hands on the scuffed glass top. I couldn’t tear my gaze from the weapon. It seemed so out of character. He must have noticed, because he surreptitiously nudged it to the edge of the counter, slipping it between two cardboard displays that had once held packs of gum but now contained old music CDs.
I pushed the shiv from my mind and mustered my courage.
This was it. Moment of truth and all that. Just as I had carefully planned, Joe and I were alone. But I choked. My laundry list of must-haves for the trip north suddenly seemed so . . . risky.
“I, um . . .” I let my words trail off as I shoved my hand in my pocket, relaxing infinitesimally as my fingers brushed plastic. The pills were still there. Still risky, still highly illegal, but still mine.
“What’s up, Lil?”
“I’ll look around,” I muttered, not quite meeting Joe’s gaze. “See what I can find.”
I didn’t linger by the shelves of grooming supplies. Mel and I managed to stay basically clean. It was mostly Breeders who bothered to trade for crap like that. Joe would have thought it strange if I’d looked there.
Listlessly I ran my forefinger down a stack of meticulously folded sweatshirts. Most were red and gold with the stylized kangaroo on the front, but a few sported the gray and blue of the Dallas Cowboys. I poked through them a bit, as if one of them would magically transform into the bulky winter coat I so desperately needed.
The food and snack shelf was looking a little bare. They fed us four mandatory meals a day. You might expect that given how overfed we were, no one would bother to trade for food. But Joe had told me once that the opposite was true. He did most of his business in food. That and the pharmaceuticals that had given him his start back in high school, back long before we were moved to the Farm for our “protection.”
The food Joe sold wasn’t so much about quantity. It was about selection. Freedom of choice. And, of course, nostalgia.
My fingers hovered a few inches above a can wrapped in dull silver paper.
Joe shuffled beside me, such the attentive shopkeep since the store was empty except for me. “Is today the day you’re finally going to buy those peas?”
I jerked my hand back to my pocket and looked up. “No.”
“Come on,” he coaxed. “You look at them every time you come in. Man, you must love peas.”
I’d never known that I loved them, until I couldn’t have them anymore.
“You should buy them,” he said softly. “I’ll give you a good deal, since you’re my friend. It’ll be like a”—he hesitated—“a present.”
He’d probably been about to say a birthday present. Or maybe that catch in his voice had been something else. Maybe he didn’t know how close Mel and I were to our eighteenth. To our doomsday.
I stuck my hand into my jeans pocket and fingered the tiny pebbles I always kept there. I blurted out, “I need a coat.”
“I just got in a couple of new hoodies the other day.” Joe rounded the shelf to a haphazard stack of clothes I hadn’t noticed.
I stopped him before he could pull any out. “No, I need a coat. Like the biggest, thickest coat you can get.” He just stared blankly at me, like he couldn’t understand why I’d be so desperate to trade for something like that. Here in Texas, even north Texas, there were only a few days a year when it got cold enough to need a big heavy coat. “It’s for Mel,” I explained.
“Oh, right.” He nodded sagely. “She has that thing about the cold.”
That thing was an unwillingness—or perhaps an inability—to tell others when she was cold. Me, I bitch endlessly when I’m cold. I break out my scarf when it’s sixty-five degrees. Mel, on the other hand, once stood out in the snow until she was hypothermic.
I still remember sitting by the door in our bedroom, my ear pressed to the crack in the door as I listened to our parents argue about it, because Dad had been in charge and he hadn’t noticed how cold she was. She’s not a normal child, our mother had said. You can’t trust her to take care of herself. You have to watch her all the time. When are you going to accept that?
Two weeks later, Dad had left and we were on our own, just the three of us. And now it was just Mel and me.
There were so many things I had to leave to chance. Mel getting cold wasn’t one of them. She wasn’t normal. Dad may never have accepted that, but I had. If I could have only one thing, it would be a coat.
“I saw Tad Jackson with a pretty big coat the other day,” Joe said. “Looked like the kind of thing one of the maintenance workers would have used. He had gloves, too.”