He shrugged his shoulders, indicating Quinn should follow him over to a table; she barely remembered to say, “We are the people, and the people are we” when she approached the guard behind the desk. She realized she had forgotten to say it when she had encountered the first guards. She hoped that saying it now would not raise suspicions.
Quinn handed her card to the guard station at the ID Station, and he grabbed it and scanned it. Another red light. She could barely breathe. She somehow got out the explanation again about dropping the card and asked the guard if they would be so kind as to either clean the ID Card for her or enter the information manually. She figured they would clean it; she knew they were a bunch of clean freaks around here. The guard took out a little spray bottle of cleaning solution and cleaned the entire card, not just the mag strip. Then he took a lint cloth out and ran that over the ID. Finally, he ran it through an ultralight blue light and rescanned it. All the while, never smiling or saying anything to Quinn.
The light finally turned green, and she said a silent prayer of thanks and then walked deeper into the building as the guards waved her on.
Damn, she thought. Since she had taken so long to get cleared, Davis was gone. She scanned the foyer of the Pod several times to no avail.
Quinn decided to focus on the positive. She was thankful she had stumbled upon that corpse a few days ago and pilfered her ID Card, showing her new name of “Clark” and “Class One.” She felt terrible for Clark, whoever she was, but it wasn’t as if Quinn could do anything for her. She might as well use her ID to benefit the cause. Clark unknowingly set the plan in motion that they had been working so hard on. Part of that plan included Quinn passing herself off as a Class One Citizen. Besides that, she already had two misconduct alerts on her personal ID Card. It was now sitting in a steel case underground. The IDs were pretty indestructible and had GPS locator devices, but between the steel and depth underground, it would not be located. However, if she didn’t pass herself off as Clark and they found out who she was, not only could it jeopardize the others, but one more misconduct, and she was toast.
You were only allowed two misconduct alerts. Each time, you went through lengthy and painful “reprogramming.” Her first misconduct was sheer stupidity. She was dumb enough to say within earshot of a burly Security Patrol that she wished President Everett would burn in hell since he’d put them all in hell. That got her two months in the reprogramming center—better known as the Everett Center—and knocked her down to a Class Two Citizen—a “Potential Troublemaker” citizen. One of the worst things about being Class Two was the Pods. Much dirtier and more crowded than Class One, and a limited supply of food and water. It was quite common to miss a meal or two and not get a bed for the night when you had to live in the Class Two Pods.
Quinn’s second misconduct alert was about a year after she got out of the reprogramming center the first time. A drone scanned her, and Quinn had not yet learned to rid her thoughts of negativity toward the government. She had not yet learned to hide her mistrust for the President. She didn’t even remember her specific feeling of disgruntlement that day, but it got her a red light and held her immobilized until a security caravan came and collected her. That got her three months in the Everett Center and demoted to a Class Three Citizen—“Trouble Maker” citizen. Those Pods were even worse. You were lucky to get a blanket in a dirty corner, much less food. Overcrowded with sick people, sometimes with mental illness, which the government always claimed to have eliminated. But mental illness and sickness still existed, all right. It was just hidden in odd corners of the country, where there was less overall population and more security. Being Class Three also came with a strict reprimand: One more misconduct, and it was a death sentence. No lawyers. No trial. No judge or jury. Just an automatic firing squad in your immediate future.
Quinn had heard stories from her friends in the bunker, all the terrible tales. She even heard that just getting sick was enough to get you misconduct alerts because they assumed you didn’t get your vaccination when you were supposed to. Ana, one of her friends, told Quinn about her parents, Camila, her mom, and Jose, her father. Jose had some kind of terminal illness—cancer, from what Ana could deduce from the books she had read. It didn’t take long for him to become a Class Three Citizen once he got ill. Camila did not want to leave him, especially since she knew the end was near for him. They ran into the woods to try and fend for themselves while Camila attempted to find a way to care for Jose. Because Camila and Ana repeatedly did not check into any Pods, they were automatically knocked down to Class Two and then Three themselves. They had to take the utmost care not to get caught, but they were starving, so one night, Camila tried to break into a storage unit holding nutrition biscuits. Camila was caught and dragged into the city square and shot right through the head. Ana saw the whole thing; she was only ten at the time. Ana never knew what became of her dad; he probably starved to death, she assumed. Since, typically, they did not execute children, Ana got dragged off to the Everett Center for Children. She received, in her words, “all the pro-Everett programming one could want” until
