Article 5

relegated to the stranger’s side of the table with Chase.

I hated that Patrick hadn’t taken us straight to Lewisburg. His earlier friendliness had washed away, and he now gave off the distinct impression that he regretted asking us inside.

And to think I’d banked on just such kindness when I’d tried to run away.

We gathered around the table, and Ronnie gave the slowest rendition of Johnny Appleseed I had ever heard. The tension thickened. Finally we were eating, focused on something other than each other. I had hardly swallowed the first bite of pot roast before jamming the loaded fork back into my mouth. I told myself to eat as much as I could; we didn’t know when we’d get the chance at another hot meal.

I let Chase do most of the talking: He was more skilled at lying than I was. He embellished on his story about his family relations in Lewisburg, never saying enough to draw suspicion. I was impressed at how much he talked. He hadn’t said that much to me in the last week.

While they were focused on him, I snuck a bread roll into my pocket for later.

As the conversation turned to Ronnie, the signs of Chase’s exhaustion became more obvious; his eyes seemed to focus on nothing, he hunched over his bowl. How much had he slept in the last few days? Last night, barely any. The night before we’d been on the run. Before that, who knew?

And tonight he wouldn’t sleep, either. Our next minute alone would be spent deciding to stay the night or sneak out. Either way, there’d be no relaxing.

The mood remained uneasy for the rest of dinner. Unless Ronnie was telling some story, no one spoke. I began to feel more trapped by the second. The threat of a curfew violation and the morning’s ride to Lewisburg were the only things holding me to my seat.

In response to the strain, Mary Jane turned on a countertop radio, and I joined her in the kitchen while she washed dishes. The crackling sound reminded me of the MM radio in Chase’s bag. I hoped for music but was not so lucky.

The newscast had already begun. The reporter, a woman named Felicity Bridewell, clipped the ends of her words with an annoying sense of self-importance. She was talking about an increase of crime in the Red Zones and the FBR’s decree to boost their presence at the borders.

I remembered the highway patrolman with a shiver.

The men’s voices in the other room paused, and I knew Chase was listening now, too. I stood by in anxious silence, my mouth dry.

“… investigating the murder of another FBR officer in Virginia earlier today. Authorities have determined this to be the second victim of whom they are now referring to as the Virginia Sniper. No witnesses have yet come forward….”

A sniper killing FBR officers… was this linked to the stolen uniform truck in Tennessee? I felt an odd tingling in my chest. It wasn’t right to wish for violence, but people were fighting back, and that made me feel hopeful.

Before my mother was taken, I’d accepted how ingrained the MM was in our lives. I didn’t like it, but the truth was that not everything they did was bad. The Reformation Act had instituted soup kitchens and mortgage freezes, things we might have died without. But since the overhaul, my views had begun to refocus. It now seemed blatantly obvious that those programs were just leverage, making us dependent on the very machine that oppressed us. The schism between the government and the people had never felt wider.

The MM had taken away my life. I couldn’t go back to school; I couldn’t go home. I might never see Beth or Ryan again. For the first time since the War, I envisioned what things would be like with no MM. With no Red Zones and curfews. No reform schools and Statutes. And I realized I could survive, because Chase and I were doing it right now.

I shook my head to clear it. I was the one who held things together, not the person who stirred up trouble. Joining a resistance was crazy. Irresponsible. And it didn’t even matter—not when I had to find my mother.

“…execution-style killing in Harrisonburg, Virginia. The deceased is an unidentified Caucasian male in his mid-forties.” A pause and the shuffle of paper. “We’re now receiving word that the Federal Bureau of Reformation has linked this death to the Virginia Sniper. Again, this constitutes the third serial murder in a chain throughout the state of Virginia. As always, citizens are strongly encouraged to stay out of evacuated areas and observe the Moral Statutes.”

I gripped my hands together so that they didn’t shake.

The MM was blaming their own kill on the resistance—on this sniper, whoever he was.

Mary Jane was babbling about how dangerous the country was becoming and how thankful she was for the FBR. I wanted to scream the truth at her but knew I couldn’t. I froze completely when the radio snagged my attention again.

“…Jennings, who defected from the FBR earlier this week, should be approached with caution as he may be armed and dangerous. Any information on the whereabouts of this criminal can be called in on the crisis line. That concludes the nightly news. This is Felicity Bridewell.”

I’d missed the story! What had been said? Mary Jane had talked over most of the report!

I couldn’t look at her; she’d see the truth right on my face. And if we ran now, the Loftons would know we were guilty. So I fixed my eyes on the window, staring at the tear tracks down the glass left by the earlier rain, and I nearly screamed when Chase’s hand came to rest on the small of my back.

“Dinner was great, wasn’t it Elizabeth?” he said with a hollow smile, interrupting my panic. I knew it was for show, but the touch comforted me enough to maintain my role.

“Delicious,” I said. The muscles in my legs were already working.

The next minutes seemed to pass in a fog. The next thing I knew, Chase and I were standing in a guest bedroom across the hall from Ronnie’s room. An Amish quilt covered one wall; the intricate pattern of colored squares made my eyes cross.

Chase shoved open the window, but it was reinforced by steel bars. Keeping out thieves. Keeping in criminals.

I swallowed a deep breath.

“I don’t think they know,” I said unsteadily. Chase shook his head, grave now that his acting stint was finished. “Maybe Patrick didn’t hear me say your name outside.”

“He was a little preoccupied.” Chase closed the window delicately, a line furrowed between his brows. He transferred his weight from foot to foot.

“What do we do?” I asked. “I don’t want to wait until the morning.”

“They’ve got a van in the front of the house, and there’s the bike, but we can’t risk the roads after curfew.” His tone was heavy. “We’ll hike out after they go to sleep.”

Which meant we were prisoners until the family went to bed.

* * *

WHILE Chase washed up, I tiptoed through the hallway, curious when I didn’t hear Mary Jane or Ronnie. Bedtime reading, I guessed. That seemed like a normal thing to do. In fact Patrick, who was still in the living room, was doing the same. His feet were up, and he was wearing glasses now. I swallowed some resentment, remembering home, and how my mother and I used to read on the couch after curfew.

My heart rate slowed. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Not that I could tell.

When I slipped back into the guest room I found Chase sitting on the edge of the bed, elbows on his knees, face in his hands. He was so still, I thought he might be asleep.

I watched him just for a moment, unable to draw my eyes away.

He seemed to have become distracted in the midst of changing. He still wore his jeans and his boots, but his clean shirt lay untouched beside him on the bed. The lights worked on account of the generator, but he’d lit a candle to combat the shadows instead, and the hard lines of his jaw and neck were accentuated in the flickering flame. From this angle, I now noticed several raised scars on his back that I hadn’t seen in the house on Rudy Lane. They angered me, those scars, cut at a diagonal like the swipe of a claw. I wanted to know who had hurt him like that. I wanted to protect him. If such a thing was even possible. I felt sort of powerful thinking it might be.

Still, his scars, combined with the serpentine wound now visible without the bandage covering his shoulder, made him all the more dangerous.

He was, to me, terrifyingly beautiful.

All the nerves that had been crackling inside of me seemed to transform and redirect toward Chase. My body