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5

VALE

At first there’sonly the quiet murmur of voices. I glance over at Mark, but he shrugs. He’s sweating and his face looks a little shiny.

“Should we go back there?” he asks in a low voice.

My eyes flick to the road, the signage, and the guard booth while I think.

“Hang on a minute,” I tell him.

So we sit, and it’s hotter now in the late morning. The sun is strong. I can feel it through the windshield. The air inside the front of the van is starting to get a little stifling.

We’re so close to the border. We’re almost out of here. Every time I come down I know there’s a chance I could get caught and taken to one of the camps in Western Maryland where they hold men.

The description we got from the last man to come from those camps still lives in my brain, impossible to forget.

The PS emptied the jails after the Integration and pretended everything was solved. But there were stillpeople they didn’t want…couldn’t stand to have in their perfect little world. Men were stuck in home detention, or put on depo trains and shipped up to New England.

And there were men like me. Men they don’t trust, with good reason. From the start they were setting up camps in old state parks in the mountains around Frederick. If a guy did something wrong he might get stuck at home with an ankle monitor. But if he fought back, raised arms against the PS, that was a different punishment. That got you stuck in their “reeducation centers.”

The man described all sorts of things a pretty PS girl like Amity Bloome knows nothing about: shackles, deprivation, interrogation, forced medication, and endless hours of therapy and reeducation.

Here’s the thing—very few men come out. Are they dying in there? Is the PS shipping them to the Southwest? We don’t know of men being let out and back into the PS. A couple of men escaped, mostly guys who had outdoor skills and could pick up the old Appalachian Trail and follow it up and out of Greater Maryland.

“Vale,” Mark says under his breath, and I look up, seeing another PS soldier with a face scanner coming out of a building and walking toward the van.

“Alright, let’s go” I mutter and open my door, climbing down as Mark follows on his side. I slow my movements down, slump a little. Try to remember I’m a sleepy WPA leader who doesn’t want to be late to his call time.

I mosey around the van to where they’ve pulled one man out. His eyes, dark, are wide and wild. The new soldier holds the face scanner, waiting for it to power up.

“Hi,” I say, looking around at the women.

I glance into the van where the men clutch their tools, staring at the floor. I see some knuckles whitening and hope the PS soldiers haven’t noticed.

“Hi,” the guard from the booth says shortly, flicking on the screen of her SafeGuard. She doesn’t seem inclined to tell me what’s going on.

“Uuuuh….” I draw it out. “We’re supposed to be there tonight.”

“I’m sure safety is your top priority,” she snaps, still staring at her wrist.

I wait silently.

“Look up,” the woman with the face scanner says, and the man raises his head, still looking nervous as hell.

Dude, chill out, I think silently. Our freedom’s on the line and this guy is losing it, not looking very dependable.

“We’ll have to detain this man, Mr.—” She grabs his wrist to look at his SafeGuard without permission, “Blackwall.”

Anger ripples up my spine at their treatment of him, but I let it wash through me and drain away. I can’t be influenced by that right now.

“How long will it take?” I ask.

They laugh. It’s pretty funny, I guess, sending a man to a detention camp. The soldier with the weapons finally looks me in the face.

“You guys can go,” she says, without answering my question. I force my face into confusion.

She slows down like she’s talking to a child and points. “He’sstaying here with us,” she drawls, “andyoucan drive to your worksite now. Without him.”