“Perfect.” I hadn’t dared hope for gloves. We had neoprene gloves from the lab and I’d been hoping they’d be warm enough. “Any chance you can get a second pair of gloves?”
“It might take a coupla days, but I’ll see what I can do. It won’t be cheap, though.”
“It’s not all I need.” I sucked in a breath. I rushed through the next bit. “I need sleeping bags. Two if you can find them.” Joe’s eyebrows shot up, but I kept talking. Hell, go big or go home, right? “And a lighter.”
I think I expected him to argue then. I’d known all along that he would probably figure out what was up—after all, Joe wasn’t an idiot—and I’d already decided playing dumb was the best defense. I’d expected him to warn me off, to remind me what had happened to all the kids who had tried and failed, but instead, he just studied me.
“It’s because your eighteenth birthday is coming up, isn’t it?”
“I . . .” My voice quavered and I cleared my throat. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
He frowned. “You’re not going to just, you know, wait it out? See what happens after you turn eighteen?”
“It can’t be anything good,” I argued.
We’d been brought to the Farm because the Ticks seemed to prefer the blood of teenagers. Something about the mix of hormones was what the newscasters had said in the Before. Our parents had been reassured that we’d be free to leave once the government got the Ticks under control. We’d been told that sometime after we turned eighteen, our hormones would even out and we’d be sent home.
“You don’t think people go home?” Joe asked, but I could tell by his tone of voice that he didn’t really believe it, either.
“Haven’t you noticed? Once a Green’s testing rate goes up, they’re allotted a larger ration of food. If they were just sending Greens home, they wouldn’t care how well fed we were.” I leaned closer and dropped my voice. “They’re fattening people up before they send them to be slaughtered.”
“Yeah, but if you get caught . . .”
I thought of the girl who was tethered to the post outside the fence right now. Sometime tonight, the Ticks would come for her. They’d rip her heart from her chest and drink her blood straight from her aorta. That would happen to us, too, if we got sent to the Dean’s office.
I could feel my lower lip start to tremble so I clenched my jaw and swallowed. “Yeah. I know. But I can’t wait around to be slaughtered, either. We have to at least try.”
“You don’t have to do this.” His tone was serious. “You could get pregnant. That would protect you.”
“Yeah. For nine months. After that, who knows what happens. And have you thought about those babies? What happens to them?”
“I don’t . . . I don’t know.” Joe’s skin suddenly looked a sickly green in the dim light of the store.
“Exactly. No one knows. And like I said, who knows what’s going to happen to the Breeders once their babies are born anyway?” The scorn in my voice barely concealed the fear beneath it.
Yeah, I acted all self-righteous about the Collabs and Breeders. The Collabs worked for the Dean to keep the rest of us in line. They were bad enough. The Breeders, girls who got pregnant on purpose just because the Ticks didn’t like the taste of all those pregnancy hormones? Even the idea was repulsive.
But who knows, if it had been just me, I might have ditched the last shreds of my morality and bred like a freakin’ bunny. But that wouldn’t protect Mel. “Besides, Mel couldn’t . . . She doesn’t like it when I touch her. She couldn’t be a Breeder.”
Joe’s gaze was suddenly glued to an empty spot on the counter. “Yeah, I guess not,” he said in a limp voice. He looked like he couldn’t decide if he wanted to throw up or burst into tears.
He’d always been such a genuinely nice guy—sensitive, too—and I could tell the thought of what happened to Breeders really bugged him.
“Hey, don’t worry about Mel and me.” My need to reassure him surprised me. “I’ve got it figured out.”
His gaze shot to mine. Hopeful, almost. “You do?”
“Yeah, I—” I stopped just short of telling him that Mel had figured out how to get off the Farm. “We’re going to be okay.”
I hoped to God I was telling him the truth. I knew our plan wasn’t foolproof, but I hoped it was good enough.
Months ago, Mel had noticed that the Collabs turned off part of the fence every night. They couldn’t keep the fence along the river electrified because at night the nutria scurried up the cliff from the river. They’d gnaw on the fences, shorting out the whole system and making the entire Farm reek of seared animal flesh. Which meant the stretch of chain link on the north side of campus was the only weakness in the Farm’s security.
If we could make it through and if we could swim across the Red River, we’d be in Oklahoma. It was a lot of ifs.
And I had no idea what we’d find there, but we would head north. Uncle Rodney lived over in Arkansas near the Ozark Mountains. He was a crazy survivalist type. I figured a guy like that was either one of the first to go or the last to fall. For all I knew, things would be just as bad there as things were in Texas, but at least we’d be moving toward Canada, in the direction of freedom. One of the last reports I remember from the Before was the stunning news that Canada was shutting down the border. Terrified that the plague affecting so many Americans would spread to their own population, the Canadian government had set up roadblocks and was stationing military all along the border. What had previously been the world’s longest undefended border was now a no-man’s-land.
Canada was our best hope. And if we were going that far, in the winter, Mel needed that warm coat. And whatever else we could find.
I looked Joe square in the eyes and all but begged him to help. “What do you say? Can you do it?”
He studied my face. “Yeah, you and Mel were always so smart. If anyone could get off the Farm it would be you.” He nodded slowly, like he’d reached some sort of decision. “You don’t have enough credits for all that stuff. You know that, right?”
I started pulling things from my bag to trade. “Two bottles of shampoo, both of them mostly full. A bottle of conditioner.”
He looked unimpressed.
I moved on to the things I’d been hoarding for months. “Two toothbrushes and a tube of toothpaste. New in their packages.”
He considered and I could see in his frown that he wanted it to be enough, even though we both knew it wasn’t. He blew out a breath. “Those will cover the coat and gloves.”
“What about the sleeping bags? And the lighter?” I asked, because maybe it would be safer, for all of us, if I didn’t have to show him that last thing I had to trade.
Joe just shook his head. “If it was stuff I just had in the store, maybe. But I’ll have to go looking for what you need. Ask around. Attract attention. That’s a lot of risk.”
“But you could do it?”
“Yeah. Sure. Anything for a price, right? I know a guy in Baker Hall whose ‘roommate’”—Joe made air quotes to indicate that by “roommate” he really meant the college student who had lived in the dorm room back in the Before—“was into camping and stuff like that. I could get all kinds of things from him.”
“So you could get the sleeping bags and the lighter?” I pressed. “If I had the right thing to trade? If I had something really valuable?”
“Sure, man. I can get anything.”
I reached into my pocket then and pulled out the plastic box of pills. I had three prized possessions. The first was a pair of gardening shears I found in an unlocked maintenance closet seven weeks ago. The second was a single capsule of Valium. In the Before, I used to carry a couple with me all the time, just in case Mel freaked out completely. I had one pill left. The third was the contents of this box.
Hand trembling, I set the pills on the counter. My fingers seemed to clench of their own accord and I had to force myself to release the box and nudge it across the counter toward Joe. When he just stared blankly at it, I reached over and flicked it open. The box fanned open to reveal three separate compartments, each containing a foil packet of twenty-one tiny pink pills and seven white ones.
Joe frowned as he stared at it. “Dude.” He drew the word out and then looked up at me. “Is that what I think it is?”
“Yes.”
“I thought they were all gone.”
“These were overlooked.”
When the Collabs had first been recruited out of the ranks of Greens, their first task had been to destroy all forms of birth control.
“Whoa.” His gaze darted to mine, suddenly far more serious than he normally was. “Does anyone else know you have these?”
I thought of the guy out on the quad who hadn’t just seen them, but had held them in his hand. I imagined I could still feel the heat of his palm on the plastic. “No,” I lied.
“Don’t let anyone else see them.” He reached out a hand, a sort of reverence on his face. But instead of touching the pills, like I expected, he shoved them across the counter toward me. “Put them away. If someone came in now . . .”
As if I needed to be told that.
I shoved the pills deep into my pocket. Even though I felt better having them so close, I still felt jumpy, too aware of them now, and I found myself looking over my shoulder at the door to Joe’s even though I would have heard it open. “But they’ll be enough? For the things I need?”
Joe sort of shook his head. “Man, I don’t know.” He ran a hand through his long, stringy hair.
“But they’re valuable, right?”
That was what I was banking on. When the Collabs first searched campus, they ignored all kinds of crazy stuff in the science building, but they confiscated all the birth control pills. Maybe they were just too stupid to know what words like “pyrophoric” meant. Or maybe progesterone was more dangerous.