Page 6

VALE

At first there’s only 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 still people 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’s staying here with us,” she drawls, “and you can drive to your worksite now. Without him.”

“He’s…he’s on the crew,” I say stupidly .

She sighs. “I know he’s on your crew.” She exchanges an eye roll with the other women. “This man is displaying signs of extreme anxiety. He may be a danger to himself or others. We need to detain him for questioning.”

Questioning. That doesn’t sound good. I make a rough guess about how long until he cracks and tells them everything. Judging from the wild eyes, I’d guess we have ten minutes from when they start grilling him. I can only hope they hold him for a while first.

I do some quick recalculating of the plan while I shrug.

We’ll have to leave him. With a submissive nod to the soldiers, I close the doors of the van carefully and move back to the driver’s seat.

“Give me one more minute,” the guard says to me and walks with the two soldiers leading the man over into a building at the side of the road.

I open the com to the back.

“Everything okay back there?” I ask.

“No,” one of them mutters. There’s a couple of affirmative grunts.

“Is that it? Is he gonna give us up?” a man asks, and it’s Zeph, the guy who was at the courthouse with Amity.

“They’ll probably throw him in a holding cell and let us head out,” I tell them. “We’ll be on our way in a minute.”

“What are they going to do to him?” Zeph asks.

“If he stays calm? Maybe deport him. If he mentions the Forge? He’ll be put in a detention camp.”

Mark squirms in his seat beside me, no doubt aware of how many things can go wrong at this point.

“Everybody breathe.” I don’t want to scare them, but I feel I have to say it. “If something happens and they take you, hold out as long as you can to let us get some distance from the border.” I glance through the glass and there’s nervous nodding.

“Yeah,” one man says.

The door opens and the PS guard walks slowly back to the road, chatting into her SafeGuard. She doesn’t look at all concerned, which is a good sign. She climbs into the booth and gives me a bored wave, not bothering to make eye contact.

Letting a breath out, I start the car and slowly pull away from the curve.

“Okay, we’re okay,” Mark says softly next to me. He looks in the mirror, watching the checkpoint shrink behind us as I ease us back onto the highway and gather speed as slowly as I can stand.

“Okay,” I say into the com, and I hear a rustle and sighs of relief from the back. “We’ll be between territories for a couple of hours and I’ll let you know when we cross into the Midwest. We’ll stop once we’re inside.”

I glance over at Mark and back to the road. He’s unlocking the glove compartment.

A few minutes later he’s got his SafeGuard off. Thinking about the man back at the border, I pull off the highway to take back roads. When we stop he gets the SafeGuard off me and all the new recruits.

Their faces, looking at their bare wrists, show wonder and relief. Every single one of them has a pale circle around their wrist where the device has been for the last eight years, replaced with an updated model and bigger size each year .

I see a couple of them shake their wrists, gaze continually drawn back to the empty stretch of skin.

I flex my wrist as well, glad to be free of it. I don’t even wear an e-watch at home; I can’t stand the feeling of having something strapped to my wrist.

I remember when I got my first SafeGuard, the pride and happiness on my mom’s face. Phones were confiscated along with weapons, but the SafeGuard would let her know where I was and let her communicate with me. It would help her keep me safe at all times.

If only they had been as concerned with keeping her safe, she’d still be with me today. The anger rises, crawling up into my chest and my throat.

“Back in the van,” I snap at the guys, who look a little confused at my bad mood while they are all grinning at their empty wrists.

I climb in and slam the door.

I do what I can for the Forge, but no matter how many men we get out of the PS, no matter what my father’s plans are to retake what is rightfully ours, none of it can do what I want more than anything in the world. None of it will get my mother back.