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Chapter Two

We take security at the ARK very seriously. How could we not? The financial ramifications of our work are nothing compared to our work preserving the genetic diversity necessary for humanity to continue to evolve.

—Tiberius “Tibbs” Hoyt
President and CEO of the
American Reproduction Knowledge Initiative
January 1, 2058

(i)

In the Scheutz’s parlor, sofas lined one wall and dining room chairs lined the other, leaving an open aisle between the two sides. The Regios shoved me into one of the chairs.

Across from me, Sharlotte gave me a long stare, and I returned it. She had my same straw-colored hair, a round face like our mother, but with Wren’s exotic dark eyes, which they both got from Daddy. All of Sharlotte’s pretty languished in her dark-lashed, nighttime eyes.

We didn’t dare speak. Regios and their guns surrounded us. They watched their leader as she paced back and forth in an angry silence. Dark-skinned, shaved head, the woman walked on thick legs, sturdy and strong. Eyes the color of wet pine searched our faces—the twelve of us from the Weller party and the eight of the Scheutz family.

Nikki Breeze and Tenisha Keys, two of our employees, sat close together, hands brushing. I’d learned they were gillian, as in same sex love. They took comfort being close to one another, but subtly, ’cause of the New Morality. Sweat painted their dark faces.

Not sure how I felt about them and that gillian love. I’d heard enough sermons on that kind of sinfulness to make me wonder.

The Regios had left Pilate in his bed, but Petal sat crumpled on a couch. Her eyes were sunken blue jewels lost in the ink around her eyes. She looked pale and as fragile as ever, though she was our last warrior still standing.

Finally, the woman in charge spoke. “I am Praetor Gianna Edger. I am looking for a boy.”

That word, praetor, seemed familiar. I couldn’t place it though, and I couldn’t Google it either. My tablet was long gone and would’ve been destroyed by the Yellowstone electromagnetic field anyway.

“We told you,” Sharlotte said. “Not a lot of boys out here on account of the Sterility Epidemic. We ain’t seen none. Any males this far into the Juniper are either killed by the Psycho Princess or sold by June Mai Angel.”

All of that was true. The medical community couldn’t figure out the problem, but only one out of ten births resulted in a boy. Of those males born, ninety percent were sterile. Worldwide. The first cases of the Sterility Epidemic were reported after the Yellowstone Knockout, but both geophysicists and geneticists agreed that the one hadn’t caused the other.

Edger shifted her gaze to Jenny Bell. She echoed my sister, “We told you, the closest boys are in Sterling.”

“This boy.” She thrust a picture into Jenny Bell’s face.

“We’ve not seen him. We’ve not seen any boys out here.”

“Pass the picture around,” Edger said. “I will interview you all alone, youngest to oldest. Who here is the youngest?”

A couple of Jenny Bell’s daughters raised their hands, trembling. One was single digits; one was middle school age. Who was the next oldest?

Maybe Crete, otherwise known as Lucretia Macaby, who sat trembling. Tears stained her face. From my conversation with Jenny Bell, I figured the Scheutz’s were in the dark about Micaiah. But Crete knew. And she looked about to crack right there and spill her guts all over her shoes.

If she did that, I knew what would happen, they’d torture us until I told them about the crawl space above the attic, half hidden by the hutch.

“I’m fifteen,” one of the Scheutz girls said.

“I’m seventeen,” another said. She glanced over at the oldest sister, who looked remarkably like Pilate. Couldn’t say I was surprised.

“I’m sixteen,” Crete said. She started sobbing, eyes closed, shoulders shuddering.

“Me, too,” I threw in. Dang, but I couldn’t remember Crete’s birthday.

Edger’s dark eyes reached into me. I didn’t know if it would be better to bow before that gaze, or to meet it.

I met it and didn’t look away. Maybe it was the Vicodin, or maybe I channeled Wren, but I was going to show her we had nothing to hide.

Only we did. We had everything to hide. And somehow, she knew it.

“Legate Baxter, get birthdays,” Edger said, turned, and stalked up the stairs.

Baxter marched over to Crete. “When were you born?”

I ripped Crete apart with my eyes. I needed to talk to Edger first. She needed to know we were going to keep Micaiah a secret.

“November 17, 2041,” Crete whispered.

No, Crete had a summer birthday. I never remembered eating a cupcake in her honor during our time in elementary school. Good, I was glad she was lying ’cause she’d have to do a lot more of it.

Baxter pounded over to me. I guess she was a legate, which was another word that itched at my brain.

“You?”

“October 7, 2041,” I said. The truth.

That settled it. I’d be the first of the Wellers to be interrogated. Aunt Bea would go last. She was a large Mexican woman, not like Aunt Bea in that old black and white video, but big and wide, smiling, with gaps in her teeth. She served as our cook, and I’d grown up eating her homemade tortillas and green chili.

She gave a laugh when she said her birthday. “Do you also want to know how much I weigh?”

A few of us let out a whispery snicker. Baxter frowned like she was close to hauling poor Aunt Bea out to a firing squad. They had the guns for it.

“Are you really fifty-five, Bea? I thought you were my age,” Dolly Day Cornpone chirped. She was one of our hired hands, and I was surprised she was only forty. I figured she’d be far older than both Jenny Bell and Aunt Bea. Dolly Day had been running cattle for a decade or more, and you could see every bad night on her wrinkled face. She liked to drink and didn’t much care for baths, so she was stinky and boozy and had a big mouth.

Crete might cave, but I also had my doubts about Dolly Day. She’d given us trouble before.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “This’ll go quick. We don’t know a thing.” The picture of Micaiah came to me, and I gave it a long look, and it was Micah Hoyt all right, a color photograph of him in a city somewhere. I lifted up the picture. “If we did see someone as good-looking as this guy, I’m sure we’d have remembered it.”

More nervous chuckles.

“No talking,” Baxter snapped. “Absolutely no talking.”

“Will you shoot us?” I asked. “I’ve already been shot, you know. June Mai Angel and her soldiers attacked us to get our cattle, and I took two bullets getting away from them. So did Pilate upstairs. And how come you’re only interrogating us girls? You sexist?” Wren wasn’t around, so someone needed to be a smart aleck.

Baxter slapped me. She did a good job of it. My head rocked back, my cheek stung, but prolly didn’t sting as much as it would’ve ’cause of the Vicodin in my belly.

“No. Talking.” She emphasized each word.

“Good thing we ain’t seen the boy,” I said back. “Seems to me you wouldn’t leave anyone alive here if we had.”

She slapped me again, harder. Stars exploded, shaking my vision. Then she hit me a third time.

I leaned forward and forced tears out of my eyes. I let them fall on the picture.

I’ll give you my tears, Micaiah. I’ll give you my blood if it comes to that. For your quest. For you. No matter what.

I handed the picture on down the line. Sharlotte caught my eye and we both nodded, but only slightly, secretively. I’d given us all a basic story. June Mai shot us up. We didn’t know about any boy. And even if we did, we had to keep him a secret or we’d be killed.

My sister and I were risking our lives to protect the boy we both loved. It filled me with an odd combination of pride and guilt. We were going to save him, but then what?

How could I tell Sharlotte that Micaiah wanted me and not her? Then again, I’d made it clear, if he couldn’t be completely honest with me, I couldn’t be with him. Not romantically. But that was going to be a hard promise to keep.

I did love him. Loved him deep.

The first three Scheutz girls were interviewed first. Then came my turn.

(ii)

The Regios herded me up the stairs to the attic. They’d cleared a space, found a desk, and put me in front of it in an old folding chair. The trapdoor looked horribly exposed under the hutch. So far, they hadn’t moved the boxes, or they’d have seen the scratches. Dang.

Two soldiers stood by the top of the staircase with their rifles over their chests. Edger sat behind the desk on an office chair. On the top of the desk rested a black-handled Betty knife and 9 mm Smith & Wesson full automatic pistol with an extended clip. Lots of bullets in there.

Edger had the sleeves of her shirt rolled up to reveal a strip of EMAT on her left arm. Emergency Medical Adhesive Tape. What kind of drug was she giving herself? Had she been wounded?

A terrible thought struck me. What if she’d been at the office building fight? What if she knew all about us and this was some kind of tricky piece of horrific theater?

No. Couldn’t be. I’d stick with the story I’d told the crew downstairs.

“Sit.” She barked.

I sat.

She turned the gun so the barrel pointed at me. Theatrics. I thought of how Wren had tried to intimidate my principal back in Cleveland. If only Wren had been there, but she was gone.

More guilt. Another rock for me to swallow.

“Talk.” A single word from Edger. Renee Vixx hadn’t been chatty either, but at least Edger seemed human enough—harsh and sharp, but human. The one Vixx sister we’d fought had been a snake wearing a human suit.

“What’s a Praetor?” I asked. Still couldn’t remember where I’d heard that before. Knew I wouldn’t get an answer, but I had to try.

“Have you seen the boy in the picture?”

“No.”

“We discovered the remains of a gun battle in an office complex in what used to be Broomfield. Many of our soldiers were killed. Do you know anything about that?”

I knew everything about it. I’d been there.

“Look,” I said, “we ran into June Mai Angel’s girls in Denver. We got shot up and ran away north. I passed out in a mall, prolly in Boulder, and I woke up here. That’s all I know.”

“You are Cavatica Weller. You are on a cattle drive to Nevada to save your ranch in Burlington. Is that correct?”

I nodded. The stink of my own sweat assaulted my senses.

“The boy we are looking for was shot down in a zeppelin by Strasburg, in the Colorado territory. Your cattle drive went through Strasburg, is that correct?”

“Along I-70, yeah, but we didn’t see any boy or see any zeppelin crash.”

She stared, unblinking. “In Strasburg we found empty shell casings. We found .45 caliber shells. We found .338 Ostrobothnia magnums. We found twelve-gauge shotgun shells and we found the remnants of twenty-millimeter grenades. Similar ammunition was used in Broomfield, at the office complex. The evidence is clear. Your team used your guns in Strasburg and you used them in Broomfield. Where is the boy?”

Every word she said pounded a steel spike into my spine. She was close to sniffing us out, and she knew it. I kept myself steady. Everything depended on it.

“Where are the guns?” I asked. “If we have .45s, shotguns, and whatever that other thing you said, well, you’d find us packing them. But I don’t think we have any of those. We have MG21s, sure. It was standard issue in the Sino so there are a ton of those around. And my sister has an old M16 that might fire twenty-millimeter grenades, but I’m not sure. I don’t know much about guns.”

If I was going to lie, might as well lie big.

Edger got really quiet. My body vibrated in the silence. Thank God Micaiah had thought for us to hide the guns. He was there, only a few meters above me, listening. Or maybe he’d found a way out and run off. That was hard to think on.

I closed my eyes. “I ain’t feeling too well,” I murmured. “I don’t know about a boy or any kind of gun battle with you people. We’re just on our way to Nevada. We stopped over at the Scheutz’s since they knew our Mama. That’s all I know. I guess if you’re gonna beat on me, you better get to it.”

Silence.

I waited.

Edger spoke. “It seems convenient that we find you and the man, both injured from a gun battle, and recently.”

I shrugged. “Welcome to the Juniper. It’s a hard place.”

More silence. I thought I heard something shift in the attic above us, but it might’ve been my imagination. I prayed it was.

“We will continue to question you,” Edger said. “We do not believe you are innocent.”

Soldiers took me toward the steps.

Before I could stop myself, I glanced over at the hutch. Long scratches marred the floor, only partially covered by a cardboard box. They looked fresh. We were in trouble.

Back in the yellow room, I lay on the bed, facing the wall, wondering what Crete was telling Edger. Or Dolly Day. Some of our people, like Tenisha Keys and Nikki Breeze were family, but others we’d hired. Would they give up Micaiah out of fear? Or what if Edger started offering huge sums of money?

Or what if Edger noticed the marks on the floor? One glance up, she’d see the trapdoor, and all of our lies would be exposed.

My worried mind fought my exhausted body until, finally, my brain gave in and I slept. I woke up hours later.

The guard was gone. The light dimmed in the window, getting ready for dark. Cooking noises drifted up from downstairs, the tap of spoons on pans, shuffling sounds of dishes, and the slam of cupboard doors. Those familiar sounds made me ache for when I’d listen to Aunt Bea or Mama cooking on our ranch in Burlington. But my childhood was gone, gone forever.

I sat up in bed.

“Good,” a voice said. “You’re awake.”

My sister Sharlotte rocked herself in the chair in the corner. “You and me have to talk,” she said quietly.

We had plenty to talk about, but I knew we’d circle around until we landed on one topic in particular.

Micaiah.

I wasn’t going to talk with Sharlotte about Micaiah, not about who he was, where he was, and not about his feelings for me. Sharlotte had been hurt enough.

The highways through the Juniper are paved with good intentions. All of them lead straight to hell.

(iii)

Sharlotte leaned forward in the rocking chair. Afternoon light lit up the dust in the air, but her cowgirl hat shadowed her eyes.

“Where’s Edger and the other Regios?” I asked from my bed.

“Outside. They’ve created a perimeter. We are all confined to the house, while they wait for the Vixxes to come. So far, I think everyone told them the same story.”

I let out a long breath. “I was worried about Crete and Dolly Day.”

“So far, so good,” Sharlotte said. “But we’re not out of this yet. We’re going to be taken in for questioning again and again even before the Vixxes get here. Only a matter of time before one of us starts singing like a spring robin.”

Yeah, it was. And when the Vixxes came? Edger might not have the stomach to torture us, but I’d stared into the rattlesnake eyes of Micaiah’s aunts, and I knew they’d have no problem chopping off our fingers to get us to talk.

“What about our headcount?” I asked.

“We let them loose on the open range. Jenny Bell says there’s still enough barbed wire left in the country so they can’t get far. And since it’s spring, and after that snowstorm, there’s enough for them to drink. Our cattle are fine. Wish we could say the same for ourselves.”

“Do our people know about the Vixxes?” I asked.

Sharlotte shook her head. “I got the full story from Petal, but we both agreed … it’s best that our people think it was June Mai’s girls that shot y’all up.”

“Good.”

My sister went on. “We had three AZ3s, but I had Nikki and Tenisha bury them. Along with the extra ammo Petal and Pilate had for their guns. Wren kept her own stash with her, and we don’t have any other .45s with us. Thank God. Our boy knew exactly how to keep it all a secret.”

Of course he did.

We sat in a heavy quiet for a long time.

She finally spoke. “I need to know about you and Micaiah.”

My insides twisted. What could I say?

Sharlotte took off her hat and held it in her hands. “I need to know where he is and how much you know.”

I was going to play dumb on that. The less anyone knew about Micaiah the better.

My mind raced to find words, but my head was full of cotton from the long sleep and the medication.

“I know you have feelings for him,” Sharlotte said. “Wren told me she found you and him kissing in the mini-van during that first attack. And then after you found us at the mall, he was real distant toward me. While you were unconscious, he barely said two words to me. Something changed and it has everything to do with your time alone together.” Her next words came out like a whip crack. “That’s fine.”

No, it wasn’t. Not by the tone of her voice.

She paused, then said forcefully, “But now is not the time for romance. He came in to get Petal and Pilate’s guns. Did he come in here?”

I shook my head. The lie strangled me. I wondered if Micaiah felt like that when he played around with the truth. “I don’t know where he is,” I said softly.

“He’s gone then,” Sharlotte said.

“I’m sorry. I know how you felt about him, as well. I saw it.”

Sharlotte had to unclamp her jaws to speak “You saw it, and still, first thing you did was run off with him. But then you’re used to always getting what you want.”

“Not now.” I couldn’t get a deep breath. “We can’t fight about him now. He’s gone.”

Sharlotte’s grip on her hat turned into a white-knuckled vise. “Of course he’s gone. We were both stupid, so stupid to think a rich boy would ever let himself love girls like us; Juniper girls, not worth a dime. Now he’s gone and we’re in a mess.”

“I didn’t run off with him.” An oily anger was wanting to slide down into me, but I fought it. “There was the attack, and the stampede, and I didn’t plan any of it. I was going to let you have him.”

“You were going to,” my sister said, “but you didn’t. ’Cause you’re selfish. Tell me the truth. It don’t matter, now, but you kissed him, didn’t you? Even after you saw how much he liked me, you kissed him and you loved him, didn’t you? And he loved you back.”

“No. He was yours.” My own words surprised me, but when you start lying, stopping can be a problem.

“Don’t lie to me!” Sharlotte snapped like a bear trap. “He told you this big story about being on some kind of quest, about getting him to Nevada so he can tell us the truth and give us six million dollars. And you believed every word.”

“That’s right,” I hissed, the anger taking over. “You did, too, or else you’d have told Edger about him. So don’t be a hypocrite. And don’t you call me a liar. Let’s just drop it. It’s done. He’s gone, and we have to figure a way out of this.”

Sharlotte’s own rage forced her to her feet. “There is no way out. We were doomed to fail from the start. All ’cause Mama died at the worst possible time. And here we are, paying for her mistakes. All her many mistakes. Power coming back on in the Juniper. Stupid. Mistake one. Borrowing money from Howerter. Another stupid mistake. Then she sends you to that expensive school, and then she signed paper for us to get our headcount to Nevada when it can’t be done. All mistakes. So let the Vixxes come and murder us all. It don’t matter. When I’m dead, I’ll really tell Mama how stupid she was.”

The optimism she’d had in the Boulder mall was gone, and she paraded her despair around like she was proud of it.

I huffed in fury, but I kept my voice low. “You take that back. Mama wasn’t stupid. It wasn’t her fault she died.”

Sharlotte came over and leaned into my face. “Tell me the truth. We might die, but I want to know it for sure. I want the truth about you and Micaiah.”

I looked her full in the eyes, and all my promises to spare her went right out the window. I wanted to hurt her. I wanted the truth to cut her throat for what she’d said about our dead mother. “Micaiah and I kissed, and he loves me, and he’s just playing you ’cause you’re in charge and he was afraid you’d let Wren sell him, or that you’d send him away to die. But all that changed, didn’t it? Now, you don’t care about the Regios, our cattle drive, or anything. All you want is revenge for not getting him.”

Sharlotte raised a fist. If I hadn’t been lying in a bed, she would’ve clocked me. Instead, she whirled around and made for the door.

“That’s right,” I said, “that’s what you do, right? You turn your back on me and run ’cause you can’t deal with things.”

Sharlotte stopped and talked to me over her shoulder, in a voice, dangerously quiet. “I can’t deal with things? I can’t?”

Uh oh, I’d said the wrong thing.

Rage trembled through her body. “Who dealt with Mama while you and Wren were gone? Who got us on the road? Who has had to make the hard decisions, over and over? Me. Over and over. Even now. Everyone is looking at me to get us out of this mess, and I ain’t got a clue.”

I was speechless.

Sharlotte turned to face me full on. Her face was stony—eyes, cheeks, mouth rock hard. “We were fools to think Micaiah cared about either one of us. He played us both, and now he’s run off. Well, good. A liar-boy like that isn’t worth our love.”

An awful lump filled my throat. Micaiah did play fast and easy with the truth. All along, I hadn’t known if he was the apple, promising forbidden knowledge, or the snake in the garden, full of evil lies. When I was with him, I believed him. When he was gone, I had my doubts. Which is how it all works when the truth has been stomped under foot and lays like a worm in the dirt.

She saw my confusion. “Yeah, that’s right. I’m sure his kisses were sweet, but he’s gone and his six-million-dollar reward is gone with him. Good. Prolly just another lie, anyway.”

Sharlotte’s mouth twisted smaller. “And maybe we won’t be able to escape, but maybe dying here wouldn’t be so bad.” Her anger was leaving now, but the sorrow that remained hurt my heart.

Her hand snaked into the pocket of her New Morality dress, fiddling with what was inside. I heard paper rustle.

“What do you have in your pocket, Shar?”

Instead of answering, she hit me with a non sequitur. “Jenny Bell’s daughters … the older ones look like Pilate? Like her oldest, Zenobia, she looks exactly like Pilate.”

“Is ignoring my questions like a hobby for you?” I asked it lightly, as a joke.

“It doesn’t matter,” Sharlotte said. “What I have doesn’t matter, not in the long run, I don’t think.”

Instead of leaving, she sat down. Surprised me.

We sat for a long time, not talking. Why hadn’t she left?

Sharlotte took in a deep breath and asked, “Do you know why you care so much about the ranch?”

“Why?”

“You got to leave it,” she said, “and leaving things makes them special. Whenever I think about our ranch, I feel cold and hollow, hateful. We need to pay off our loans to Howerter, and it makes financial sense to keep the land, but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to live there again. I’m sorry I got mean. You’re right. Fighting about Micaiah doesn’t make sense now.”

“I’m sorry too, Shar. About everything.” About all my lies of omission and commission. Of what I had done and what I’d failed to do. Me purposefully trying to hurt her. Not telling her about Micaiah in the attic.

Sharlotte sniffled and took a handkerchief out of the pocket of her New Morality dress and blew her nose. “Here we are, trapped in this house, and I’m coming down with a cold. Doesn’t feel fair.”

She smiled at me. Kind of shy and embarrassed.

I smiled back, glad she could forgive me. She took my hand. Another surprise. Who was this new girl? What was happening to my sister?

“So, Cavvy, what are we going to do?”

“Wait, Shar, and pray for a miracle.”

“I can wait,” she said. “Don’t have much of a choice there. But I’m too empty to pray. Losing Mama made me lose myself, I think. I feel so empty inside. Empty. Lost. So hollow that when the wind blows, it blows right through me, and I’m left cold.” She patted my leg, then got up and left the room. Her pretty, tragic words stayed.

I wondered about Micaiah. We’d have to do something to save him. And then what? How would Sharlotte and I deal with having the boy back with us?

I didn’t know.

We ate a silent meal in the parlor that night, all twenty of us, barely talking. We could see the fires of the Regios outside. Every window showed the guards around us, waiting for the Vixxes to come.

Then the real interrogations would start. And the torture.

We had to get out of there. I didn’t have a plan, but I was hoping that Micaiah did. I planned on asking him later that night.

If he was still in the attic.

If I could move the hutch without waking up the entire house.



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