The Farm (3 page)

Hand trembling, I set the pills on the counter. My fingers seemed to clench of their own accord and I had to force myself to release the box and nudge it across the counter toward Joe. When he just stared blankly at it, I reached over and flicked it open. The box fanned open to reveal three separate compartments, each containing a foil packet of twenty-one tiny pink pills and seven white ones.

Joe frowned as he stared at it. “Dude.” He drew the word out and then looked up at me. “Is that what I think it is?”

“Yes.”

“I thought they were all gone.”

“These were overlooked.”

When the Collabs had first been recruited out of the ranks of Greens, their first task had been to destroy all forms of birth control.

“Whoa.” His gaze darted to mine, suddenly far more serious than he normally was. “Does anyone else know you have these?”

I thought of the guy out on the quad who hadn’t just seen them, but had held them in his hand. I imagined I could still feel the heat of his palm on the plastic. “No,” I lied.

“Don’t let anyone else see them.” He reached out a hand, a sort of reverence on his face. But instead of touching the pills, like I expected, he shoved them across the counter toward me. “Put them away. If someone came in now . .
 
.”

As if I needed to be told that.

I shoved the pills deep into my pocket. Even though I felt better having them so close, I still felt jumpy, too aware of them now, and I found myself looking over my shoulder at the door to Joe’s even though I would have heard it open. “But they’ll be enough? For the things I need?”

Joe sort of shook his head. “Man, I don’t know.” He ran a hand through his long, stringy hair.

“But they’re valuable, right?”

That was what I was banking on. When the Collabs first searched campus, they ignored all kinds of crazy stuff in the science building, but they confiscated all the birth control pills. Maybe they were just too stupid to know what words like “pyrophoric” meant. Or maybe progesterone was more dangerous.

“Sure. But I’m not sure they’re worth the trouble. This kind of thing . . . Man, it’s—”

Then he broke off abruptly, as if he’d either just thought of something or maybe decided not to tell me something.

“It’s what?”

“Nothing.”

“What?” I pressed. “You were about to say something. It’s what?”

He leaned forward across the counter, dropping his voice. “It’s the kind of thing people would trade.”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling stupid. “That’s why I’m here, right?”

“Sure. Yeah.” He answered quickly, though I could tell that wasn’t what he’d meant. “Right.”

That was classic CYA if I’d ever seen it. “No,” I said, puzzling it through. “You didn’t mean trade with you. So trade with who? The Collabs?” I kept my eyes glued to his face, but the flicker of acknowledgment didn’t come quickly enough. “With the Dean’s office?” I asked, not believing for a second that might actually be who he meant. But there it was in his eyes. That subconscious you-nailed-it look.

“They do that?” I had heard rumors, very vague rumors, of that sort of thing.

Joe said nothing, his expression tight and unnaturally still like he’d given away far too much already.

I didn’t think I was going to get any more from him, but I asked anyway. “But no one in the Dean’s office would need these.” I tapped the top of the box. “These have no value to them. Why would they . . .” That’s when it hit me. “They wouldn’t want the pills. They’d want info about who had them. They’d reward someone willing to betray other Greens.” Disgust settled low in my belly. “Who would do that?” Before Joe could even open his mouth, I snapped, “Okay, I know. That sounded stupid.”

“Not stupid,” Joe said. “Just naive. You and Mel, you’ve been, like, completely isolated. You don’t know how bad it is. And something like this? This could buy someone a trip off the Farm.”

“Seriously?” And for that flicker of a second, I considered it. Could I somehow buy Mel’s freedom by turning myself in? It sounded so easy. I’d be completely absolved of the responsibility of taking care of her. It was a nice fantasy, even if it wasn’t a solution.

Because, of course, I wouldn’t trust Mel’s safety with anyone else, least of all the Dean. He was worse than the Collabs.

“Will you get me the stuff I need?” I asked, because I couldn’t think any more about the politics on the Farm or the many ways people could betray one another.

“Yeah. Sure. I can get it,” he said, only a trace of stoner dude left in his voice.

Joe’s sudden new gravity only ratcheted up my tension. I patted the box in my pocket. The pills rested right on top of that sick feeling of dread that knotted in my belly.

“How much for the shiv?” I asked abruptly.

Joe looked from the lump in my pocket back up to my eyes. Then he gave a sad little half smile as he pulled it from behind the CDs and slid it across the counter. “I’ll throw it in for free. Try to lie low for a couple of days, okay?”

“Mel and I always do.” I wrapped my hand around the handle of the shiv and the cool metal against my palm made me tremble.

He nodded. “Come back in two days. I’ll have your stuff then.” He looked at my pocket again. As I walked toward the door, he added, “And be careful. You and Mel are more memorable than you think. Two girls living alone in one of the academic buildings. A lot of people know where to find you.”

Once I was outside of Stoner Joe’s, I climbed a few steps until I was able to peek over the wall of the alcove. I could hear Greens around the corner. They wouldn’t notice me, huddled in the shadows.

I pulled the pills from my pocket, slipped my hand under my sweatshirt, and wedged the packet into my bra. Then I slipped the handle on the shiv through one of my belt loops. I turned the sharp edge away so it didn’t rub against my stomach before tugging the waistband of my sweatshirt low on my hips to hide the weapon.

I was trembling before I even made it up the stairs and out of the alcove. The wind had died down and for the first time in weeks, the sun peeked through the clouds, but its warmth didn’t seep through the fleece of my hoodie. Or past the frigid blanket of fear that had surrounded me.

The quad was mostly empty now, with only a few Greens scuttling between buildings. I felt as vulnerable as they looked, the hairs on the back of my neck prickling with that being-watched feeling.

I glanced over my shoulder back at Joe’s, wondering if he’d followed me out. He hadn’t, but I
was
being watched. A guy in a gray sweatshirt stood at the top stairs of the dining hall. With the sun at his back as he looked out across the quad, I couldn’t distinguish any of his features. Then he stilled, his gaze aimed toward me, and I was sure he was the guy who’d picked up the pills earlier.

I shivered in the sun and picked up my pace, praying that Mel and I weren’t in serious trouble. Most Greens stuck to the dormitories. It wasn’t a rule or anything, just common sense. Greens were like those penguins you saw on nature shows, huddled on the packed ice, waiting for the ones on the edges to get knocked into the water and picked off by the elephant seals. Greens did everything together. Only a few had squatted other places. If Joe was right and these pills in my pocket were enough to buy someone’s freedom, then our little closet in the science building wasn’t safe anymore. The guy in the gray sweatshirt could easily find us. Thank God our bags were packed and by the door. Mel and I could evacuate as soon as I got back to the room. I didn’t know yet where we would go. All I knew was I wanted to still be alive in two days so that I could keep that appointment with Joe.

CHAPTER THREE

Mel

Most days Lily is the steady drumbeat. The rhythm of my heart. The repeating melody of the music in my head. But not today.

Today she is a cacophony of dissonant notes. Just wrong. A jumbled mess. Can’t listen.

She’s out of rhythm. Trying to rush. Tempo’s all wrong. There’s no music in her today, only words. Talk, talk, talk, talk.

That’s Lily. Never has a thought she doesn’t say aloud. Makes her feel like the smart one. The normal one.

As if I count less because I don’t jabber. Because I listen to the music instead of talking over it.

I know I’m a burden. How twitchy it makes her, being the rhythm. Being the steady one. Twitchy and nervous. A rat-a-tat
-
tat.

But we’re not ready. If we go now, we’ll be caught. Caught like Trickster’s bunnies. She thinks I don’t know what happens to those rabbits snared out by the fence. But I know. Their music is so loud sometimes I can’t think. I block out their noise when I can.

I know we’re not ready. Can’t make Lily hear it. All she hears is the clock. Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock. She doesn’t listen. All she does is talk.

Talk, talk. Talk, talk. Tick tock, tick tock. Talk, talk. Talk, talk.

I try to listen for the both of us, but I can’t hear over all her noise. I hold on to Slink and try to block out the noise, but even Slink doesn’t help. Freedom sounds like Paganini, but the pianist is sitting on his hands. The orchestra is too tinny and too loud by itself. Lily never understands that all the instruments have to play together to make music. Otherwise it’s just noise, noise, noise.

By myself, I tap my head against the wall. Alone should be a blessing, but I’m haunted by the plan. My plan, Lily’s plan, the plan. It’s not about what’s missing, it’s what’s out of rhythm.

I try to make the pianist play, try to hear why our plan won’t work, but the white noise of the room is in my ears, blocking out the music. All these things Lily has cluttered our room with.

Everything has its own pitch if you listen for it. Most people don’t. Lily doesn’t listen for the rustling of a box of neoprene gloves or the steady hum of the eighteen microscopes. The high-pitched glassy squeal of the beakers and petri dishes. All of this stuff makes too much noise. I can’t hear the music. If I could, I’d know what’s missing.

So I sort the things. Everything comes off the shelves. The big black book screamed beside the pink backpack. It slides into silence when I move it beside the twenty-four-roll box of paper towels. The pink backpack, so jittery, quiets once I empty it and place it beside the quilt. I do this, making sense of the chaos. If I can just isolate the melody—hear our escape plan—I’ll know what’s wrong.

If I can’t make the piano play, the rhapsody won’t work. Lily might blame herself, but it’ll be both of us who die.

Time is not on our side. Tick tock. Tick tock. Tick tock.

Tick. Tick. Tick.

CHAPTER FOUR

Lily

I don’t go anywhere these days without an escape route, but today was the first day I felt like I needed it. Today’s plan: get back to Mel, grab the bags, and . . . wait? I didn’t know yet if the guy in the gray sweatshirt had reported us. So did we leave the safety of the science building on the chance that he had or did we wait and see? Hiding in the dorms was out of the question. We might head over to the gymnasium on the north side of campus and hide there until morning, but there were some jocks who hadn’t become Collabs and they lived in the gym. I shuddered to think what it would take to convince them to let us stay there overnight. So far on the Farm, I hadn’t traded
that
. But as I walked up the six flights of stairs to the science lab, I knew that I would if I had to.

But if we made it through the night, then what? If the guy in gray reported us to the Collabs, we wouldn’t be safe anywhere on campus. We sure couldn’t head down to the dining hall for meals. The Collabs would grab us when they scanned our chips on the way in.

We had only one thing in our favor: everything we needed was packed and waiting beside the door. We could be out of the building in minutes. I didn’t yet know if we needed to run, but if the Collabs showed up, I wanted to be ready to.

When I got back to the room, I had to tap out
“
Mary Had a Little Lamb” five times before she’d open the door. Already nervous, my anxiety shot up with each rap of my knuckles. By the time the door swung open, I was frantic. And then I saw what Mel had done while I was gone.

My eyes scanned from shelf to shelf. At first, I didn’t even understand. Everything looked different. Things weren’t where they were supposed to be. My emergency backpack wasn’t by the door, nor was Mel’s pink bag. She loved that bag, partly because it was actually hers. She’d brought it with her when she’d come to the Farm. She’d carried it for three years and another just like it for five years before that. It was bright pink, with cheerful flowers in sherbety colors. Right now it was packed with emergency provisions for Mel. Extra clothes. Half of what little food we had. And of course the tiny stuffed flying squirrel Mel had carried with her since she was five. My bag was gone.

Everything else—the carefully distributed chaos of all the lab equipment—was . . . organized. My heart rate jumped. Every item in the room had been rearranged by color. Suddenly I couldn’t breathe. Every lungful was a struggle.

Mel stood in the center of the room, the ladder-back chair clenched in her hands. She gnawed on her lip as she rocked.

Heart pounding, I looked from her to the contents of the shelves, as panic crawled up out of my stomach. I raced to one of the shelves, a blazing burst of pink and red across the top of the room. The pink backpack was just beyond my reach. I jumped up, trying to snag the strap and pull it down. Once, twice. I caught it on the fourth jump and it tumbled off the shelf, pulling a cross-sectioned model of a human heart with it. It crashed to the floor, snapping off the stand and breaking open the heart itself to reveal the interior of the chambers. I felt it like a crack to my own heart, a painful slash across my chest that cut off my air. The backpack was empty, its weight almost nothing.

I ripped open the zipper as my gaze searched the shelves. There was a neatly folded pair of bikini underwear on the green shelf. I grabbed them and crammed them inside. Our obscenely cheerful pink quilt was on the top shelf, too. Snagging it sent a model kidney tumbling to the ground. The dull gray neoprene gloves were on the bottom shelf. I dropped to my knees and with shaking hands shoved pair after pair into the bag. Too many. I stood, leaving the overstuffed bag on the floor, and kept looking. I found the hollowed-out
CRC Handbook of Chemistry and Physics
. Its thick spine and worn blue cover made it easy to find, but the gardening shears I kept hidden inside were gone. After that, I ran through the list of other things that had been in the backpack, pulling them off the shelves with one hand and clutching them to my chest with the other. First aid kits—white shelf. Spare socks—black, blue, white, yellow shelves. Bags of corn chips—orange shelf. The map—

Oh, God. The map.

Everything tumbled from my arms to land at my feet. Where would she have put it? White? No. A glance told me the white shelf was nearly empty. And it hadn’t been white anyway, had it? The cover had a picture of a road snaking up the side of a mountain. What sound would the map have made for her? The quiet brown for the mountain? Or the thrumming of the blacktop road? Or whistling wind in the blue sky? Or . . . there’d been a car, hadn’t there? What color had the car been? Loud red, like classic rock? Or sunshine yellow, like Vivaldi?

But my mind was racing too fast, spinning out of control, and I couldn’t remember. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t plan.

Shit.

The pink backpack tipped forward, spilling stuff all over the floor.

I bit back a scream of frustration, tried to hide my reaction from Mel. But there she was, blissfully humming Rachmaninoff. Like she thought this was romantic or something.

Dad used to call her a musical savant.
Can’t you see what an amazing gift it is?
he’d say.
She’s an indigo child.

That crap used to drive Mom crazy. I’d never quite been sure how I felt about it. Now I knew. At this particular moment, when she’d wrecked all our plans, her autism was
not
an amazing gift. It was a curse. My curse.

“Lil-lee,” Mel said, in the odd singsongy way she had. “Lil-lee? Lil
-
lee?”

I swallowed my tears along with my scream and made myself look at her. She held her Slinky cupped in her hands and silent. Like she knew I was one
sllluuunk
away from tearing the thing from her and tossing it out the window. The muscles in my arms clenched and I fought the impulse to sweep everything off the shelves. To throw things and destroy. To stomp on beakers and crush things with rocks.

Instead, I forced a deep breath, then I took her hand lightly in mine. “Listen, Mel. I’m going out again.” She tried to jerk away. “Just for a minute. I’ll be right outside. You don’t even have to lock the door.”

She frowned and bobbed her head some more. “Tick tock. Tick tock.”

“No,” I assured her. “I won’t be gone long.”

I didn’t wait for her to answer. She wouldn’t. And even if she did, she wouldn’t understand. Plus, I didn’t want her to know how badly I’d screwed up. I couldn’t even blame her. This was just what she did. I knew this about her and I should have planned for it.

I palmed a geode from the brown shelf on my way out the door. I rounded the rows of waist-high lab counters with their black fire slate tops and crossed to the corner farthest away from the closet. Beside the door leading out into the hall, I dropped to my knees. With seven rows of lab tables between us, she couldn’t see me. Not that she would look. Nothing I did really mattered to her. It was all noise in the background.

Hands trembling, I whipped the hoodie off and let it fall to the floor. Then I lifted the rock above my head and slammed it down onto the floor. The sound was muffled a bit by the thick fleece.
If only I’d brought the travel backpack with me when I’d gone out.
I pounded the floor again.
If only I’d been more careful with the pills.
I brought the rock down again.
If only I’d seen the Green who handed me the pills.
Again.
If only . . .
Again.
If only . . .

So many
if only
s made my arms ache. All that was left of my frustration was the burn of tears pressing against the backs of my eyes.

I let the rock fall onto the sweatshirt one final time. My body crumpled over it. I pressed my forehead to the rough outer shell of the geode, my chest heaving with regrets.

God, I wanted to be strong enough to do this all on my own. To take this latest disaster in stride, but—

There was a noise in the hall, so soft I barely heard it over my ragged breathing, but I stilled instantly. I crouched there on the floor, bent over the rock, holding my breath as I listened. And tried to remember what exactly that sound was.

Something I knew well, even though I hadn’t heard it in months. A sort of mechanical swoosh, as unfamiliar to me now as the turning of a key in a car ignition or the chime over the door at the yogurt shop where I had worked after school.

I sucked in a breath. Elevator doors. I’d heard elevator doors opening. Someone had come up to the seventh floor. Someone not afraid of getting stuck in an elevator if one of the blackouts rolled across campus. Or someone too lazy to walk up the stairs, which described pretty much all the Collabs.

I thought instantly of the guy in the gray sweatshirt.
No.

Had he really been that fast? I’d been counting on it taking longer for him to find a Collab and cut some kind of deal.

I rocked forward onto the balls of my feet and stood, hardly daring to breathe. The door leading out into the hall was open. I crept one step and then another until I was tucked behind the open door. I couldn’t see much through the crack between the door and jamb, so I squeezed my eyes shut, listening, as I considered my options.

Even if there was just one Collab out there, we were screwed. Before Mel had reorganized the closet, I’d known exactly where the CRC handbook was, and with it, my only weapon: the gardening shears. But now?

My breath caught in my chest as the realization hit me. I had the shiv. Not for the first time I wondered: would I really kill someone if I had to? In the Before, I didn’t even like to kill bugs. And I’d puked the time our old Siamese cat, Trickster, had left a dead bunny on our porch. How could I kill a person? Could I do it to protect Mel? I drew in a shuddering breath, my heart thudding so loudly, I was sure he’d hear it.

Why not? Why not at least
try
to take out the Collab? If there was only one, then I had a shot. It was sure as hell better than waiting for him to go get reinforcements.

I could hear footsteps in the hall. Coming closer. Was it one guy or two?

I stood there for a torturous minute, listening to his steady footsteps. Each pause of his stride, punctuated by the sound of a knob turning and a door sliding open and shutting with an ominous click. Only one guy, I was almost certain. But these weren’t the sounds of casual exploring. This was a methodical search. He was looking for us.

And he would find me. Soon.

I’d carelessly left the door to this classroom open. It was a miracle he hadn’t noticed it already.

Wedged between the door and the wall, heart pounding, eyes squeezed shut, I reached down and slid the shiv free of my belt loop, my palm damp against the metal handle. Through the gap between the door and the doorjamb, I saw a flash of gray pass. Not the blue of a Collab’s uniform but the heathered gray of a sweatshirt. I pushed aside the doubt that flickered through me. Then he was there, striding past me into the classroom. He paused for only a moment before heading around the rows of lab desks toward the storage closet.

I launched myself at him before he could get too far into the room. Leaping onto his back, I slung one arm around his neck. He gave an oomph of surprise and stumbled back. I brought the shiv up to his neck, but hesitated. That moment of doubt cost me.

His hands reached up to claw at my arms. The shiv slipped and clattered to the ground at his feet. Panicked, I used my free hand to leverage the other arm, squeezing tight against his windpipe. For a second, I seemed to have the advantage. I didn’t have to kill him. I only needed him to pass out. Just long enough to get Mel out of the storage closet.

Then he reeled with a grunt and slammed my back against the wall. The air rushed out of my lungs and I swear I actually felt my bones shudder. Damn, he was big. Not just taller than me, but stronger.

He stumbled forward, reaching his arms over his head to wrench at my hair and tug at my shirt. Blunt fingernails raked against my neck, burning a trail of scratches across my skin. He ran forward a few steps and then back again, slamming me into the wall once more. This time I felt something hard dig into my spine. Maybe a light switch or the fire alarm.

I yelped as agony seared through my back. My grip loosened, but only for a second. He may have been a Green, but he wasn’t weak or anemic. Maybe his blood wasn’t “clean” enough and they hadn’t been taking as much from him. Nor was he fat and lazy the way so many of the Collabs were. I couldn’t afford to let him go. He was knocking the crap out of me now. I’d never be able to defend myself face-to-face.

I tried to remember anything from the self-defense class Mom had dragged me to when I was thirteen. Bits of it flashed through my mind along with things I’d figured out through trial and error here at the Farm. The eyes. I knew I could hurt him if I could just reach his eyes. But my grip on his throat was slipping already. Not daring to let go, I tightened my legs around his hips, clinging to him with every ounce of strength I still had. My only hope was to weaken him before he crushed my spine completely.

He staggered forward again and I could hear him gasping for breath, my arm strangling the sounds in his throat before they could escape. He was trying to talk. But I still didn’t let go. He staggered back a step, but he was weakening and this felt more like a pat on the back than the assault his previous body slams had been.

A second later, he teetered forward and fell to his knees, his forehead missing the corner of one of the lab desks by mere inches as he did a face plant on linoleum.

Slowly I pulled my arms out from under his heavy weight and pushed myself up. My legs still gripped his waist. I sat there a moment, sucking air into my lungs, straddling his back, too worn out to move, trying to think. His hood was still up. All I could see of him were his hands, which were large and strong. And, probably, had bits of my skin under the nails.

I shuddered at the thought. Clearly, back in the Before, I’d watched too many of those forensic shows on TV, if that was the one thing that went through my mind.