Breaking Point

“The guard on rounds found her. Lucky for you, she’d refused to talk, but they had a whole team waiting to question me when I got back. I said you were dead, completed, just like Jennings.” His expression turned sour. “The gatekeeper didn’t agree.”

The gate guard at the back of the complex had let me out to deliver the body—Chase’s body—to the crematorium, just as I’d done the days before. He would have seen Tucker follow me, then return alone.

“And they decided to kick you out, but not report me missing for another month? Let me guess, they wanted to give me a head start,” I said.

Tucker scoffed. “You think they wanted the region to know someone—a girl, no less—escaped the holding cells? How do you think that makes them look? At least now they can build you up as accessory to a serial killer.”

I had no retort. Tucker’s story was actually possible. And now it made sense why I’d been listed with the other four suspects. The MM wanted me dead, and linking me to the sniper made me appear dangerous, reckless. Capable of escape. They could justify admitting I bettered them if I was a hardened criminal.

“But… he’s a murderer,” I stammered.

“Do you think he’s the first person here to be called that?” Wallace was wild-eyed now, and shaking. “Do you think I’m so different?”

Every voice was silent. Every eye on Wallace. Even mine, which had torn away from Tucker’s petulant form.

Wallace had killed people. Maybe Article violators. Maybe people just like my mother. And others—Riggins, Houston, Lincoln—they might have, too. Not Sean, Rebecca had told me, but he had taken girls at the reform school down to the shack. Girls like Rosa Montoya, who’d ridden beside me on the bus. Who’d turned hollow after the torture Sean and the guards had inflicted upon her.

I’d lived here for weeks feeling safer than I had since my mother’s arrest, avoiding the most obvious fact in the world: I didn’t talk about my past, and neither did they.

It isn’t so bad, I told myself, even though I trembled with this new reality. They’d done bad things; they weren’t bad people. Hadn’t Chase been just inches away from that cliff as well? And he’d come back to me, redeemed himself. As had Wallace, and these others, too.

But not Tucker. Tucker Morris could never be good.

He was sulking now, but that was just pretend. He was trying to pull me in with his tattered street clothes and his dirty face. With his fake discharge that Billy had supposedly seen on the FBR mainframe and his anger, like I’d ruined his precious career. I wouldn’t fall for it.

“It’s him or us—both of us—Wallace. Make your choice,” I said firmly, but my thoughts begged him to see reason, to believe us about Tucker and to begin a full-scale evacuation.

“I should go,” said Tucker. “I’ll go… I don’t know. I’ll go somewhere.”

“You’re staying,” Wallace told him.

I felt my knees shake for the first time.

Wallace had chosen. For the resistance, I told myself, nothing personal. But it felt personal. He’d hooked me with that family talk, and like a sucker, I’d bought it. As though it could fill the void within me. I had to tell myself three times to move before I finally did.

“Can I get our things, please?”

Wallace’s face twisted. “Someone get their bag. Just what they came in with.” He turned back in to the supply room.

A minute later Billy appeared, our backpack in hand. He didn’t look up at me. Better that way. I hated losing friends.

Sean swore a lot, but couldn’t leave while information about Rebecca was on the line. Riggins tried to reason with Wallace. In the end it was Lincoln and Houston that escorted us downstairs, past the smoke-filled lobby. Past John the landlord, who unknowingly reminded us to bring back a pack of smokes. And then we were outside on the street in the unfriendly morning light, exposed to whomever challenged us, barred from the only place that had felt like home in a long time.

CHAPTER 8

CHASE and I made it to the Red Cross Camp just before noon. We didn’t have any other options. The safest place was a crowd. The biggest crowd was the Square, and we weren’t about to risk that place again.

We crossed Cumberland outside the tall wrought-iron entranceway to World’s Fair Park, the location of the camp. Suspended above the white circus tent patched with blue tarps was an enormous copper globe—the sunsphere, a structure that Billy had told me was built for the World’s Fair in the early 1980s. Now, half the panels were missing, and it served as a marker that temporary relief—not the actual Red Cross, they’d gone under during the War, but the Sisters of Salvation—waited below.

Chase motioned me through a long line and I followed him in shock, reeling from my latest encounter with my mother’s killer. From letting him go again.

What lies was Sean being fed? All Tucker had told Sean was that Rebecca had been in the holding cells a very short time before being transferred to Chicago. But what if he’d seen her? What would he have done to her?

And how could Wallace be so stupid? He’d always put his home, his family, first… yet here he was, letting the most dangerous person I’d ever met sneak past his defenses.

I told myself not to think about it. He’d kicked us out and that was that. Adapt. Move on. Get over it. It wasn’t like we were going to stay there forever anyway. We’d have to find a way to meet Sean and figure out what evil scheme Tucker was devising.

Chase stopped suddenly and snagged my elbow. He jerked me away into a crowd of people waiting for the medical clinic to open.

“What is it?” I asked.

“Soldiers.” My mind immediately shot to Tucker, but no, Tucker wasn’t here. Tucker was with the resistance.

Chase carved an exit, not forcefully enough to cause a fight, but definitely with purpose. I kept my eyes on his heels, half skipping so I didn’t step on them. When I ventured a glance over my shoulder, I saw that there were soldiers swarming the entire compound.

Across the street, where we’d been standing five minutes earlier, another patrol team started picking through the huddled groups of vagrants. One officer had a clipboard and was showing photos to a feeble old man who leaned against a half-collapsed bus shelter. Above, on every rooftop roamed a soldier with a shotgun.

We would have been safer hiding out in some dark alley.

“Come on,” Chase said. “We’ve got to keep moving. Let’s go inside; people are thinning out here.”

The Red Cross Camp was comprised of over a hundred cots, shoved into even rows and covered by drooping canvas tents. There were no walls, no privacy, no heat in the winter or fans in the summer. It was fenced off by removable chain-link partitions, which boasted cracks large enough for any thief to sneak through. The sign-in station at the front was manned by a Sister of Salvation, and behind her, attached to a metal pole was a sign: 4 HOURS ONLY.

Below it, on a large plywood board, were five photographs. The five suspects wanted in conjunction with the sniper murders.

“Chase,” I whispered. He squinted across the distance.

Despite this, he made his way toward the entrance, where a line of twenty or so people waited to get a four-hour bunk. A warning within me screamed that this was wrong. We couldn’t go inside and pin ourselves down; I would be recognized.

“Stay in line,” he said, and headed toward the sign-in station. I saw him glance quickly at the board. His back straightened, and that was enough to say he’d seen my photo. He leaned forward to talk to a Sister at the desk who