With the Enemy (5 page)

“It’s weird to think people felt like they had to buy all this stuff just to have a good time,” Louisa says, sitting down on her sleeping bag and toweling her hair with her spare T-shirt. “From what I remember before the War and the way my parents describe things, life was pretty great.”

“Look at this,” Rosie says, holding up a satin ribbon that has
SWEET SIXTEEN PRINCESS
written on it in glitter. She fingers the lettering. “Can you imagine?”

We all shake our heads. That sash certainly wouldn’t
go with the military uniform we’ll all be wearing on our sixteenth birthdays.

Ryan’s eyes get big. “This store must have been out of business for a
long
time. The mandatory enlistment age was lowered to fifteen, what, four years ago?”

“Five,” Alonso corrects him.

Sometimes when I think about what it must have been like before the War, I can’t understand why it happened. I mean, even with the superstorms, people got to have jobs they chose, and kids didn’t have to enlist in the army. I would give anything to be able to stay in school until my
eighteenth
birthday; people in those days could go to school until they were in their
twenties
. How much they must have known. How many questions they had gotten the answers to.

I feel a pang of envy for the girl who would have gotten to be a sweet sixteen princess. I wonder if she knew how lucky she was.

I pull myself out of my thoughts as Louisa says, “I think my favorite holiday is my birthday. My parents always take the day off from work and we do something as a
family.” She touches the place where her missing locket would be.

“Mine’s Thanksgiving.” Ryan rubs his stomach. “No question. I love soysausage stuffing.”

“What about you, Rosie?” Louisa asks. “What’s your favorite holiday? The first day of hunting season?”

“Halloween,” Rosie answers right off.

“Yeah, the candy is awesome,” Ryan agrees.

“Not because of the candy.” She gives a casual shrug of one shoulder, says “I like dressing up,” and glares around the circle at us as if defying us to find anything wrong with that.

I almost choke to keep from laughing, and Louisa is pressing her lips together so hard she’s turning pink. It’s hard to imagine no-nonsense Rosie having fun putting on a costume.

“What?” Rosie demands.

“Nothing,” I say really fast because I don’t want her to hurt me. “It’s just a surprise.”

She studies me to make sure I’m not making fun of her, then switches to studying the end of her ponytail.

“I’m the same thing every year. And don’t even ask because I’m not telling.”

“No fair!” Louisa cries.

Drew says, “Is it a ninja warrior? Because I could see you rocking that.”

“No.” Rosie keeps looking at her ponytail but I can see that she’s smiling.

“My favorite is the Fourth of July,” Drew says. “It’s the one day my mom always takes off, and we have a barbecue. No one in the world makes better barbecue poultofu than my mother. It’s” — he pantomimes licking his fingers — “ambrosia.”

“Is it me, or do boys only think about food?” Rosie asks Louisa and me.

“They only think about food,” Louisa confirms, then turns to Alonso. She’s taken her hair out of its rubber band and is running her fingers through it, and she looks really pretty. “Let me guess. You like Easter because of the chocoveg bunnies.”

He gives her a really cute smile and says, like he’s sorry to disappoint her, “Yeah, I don’t really do the whole
holiday thing.” His tone is easy, but his posture is rigid and he seems very uncomfortable.

I feel bad that we teased him. “I agree,” I say. “Holidays are just corporate fabrications designed to sedate us so we don’t see how horrible the world is.”

Alonso turns and gives me a smile, too. “I knew someone would understand.” I’m pretty sure that’s not why he got so tense, but I’m not going to pry.

Plus, the way he is looking at me is making me feel — odd. But if this is what Louisa meant about him looking at me in some special way, I know she’s wrong because it’s nothing like the way he looked at her.

Ryan gives a big fake stretch and says, “Whew, somehow after that relaxing day of hanging around doing nothing and that huge delicious meal, I’m beat. I think I’ll turn in.”

“You sure you don’t want to hit a few discos?” Alonso asks.

“You kids go on without me,” Ryan tells him. “I want to get plenty of sleep for my early golf date.”

We’re all laughing at them as we tuck our packs under our sleeping bags to use for pillows. I’ve just settled into
mine when Louisa says, “Evelyn, how far do you think we are from Chicago?”

I mentally review the map. “Four hours.”

Rosie yawns. “If the slowpoke boys can keep up.”

“Oh, them’s fighting words,” Drew says. “You better get a lot of sleep, miss, because you have a race on your hands.”

One by one our flashlights go out and we get quiet. The space is filled with the sound of us shifting in our sleeping bags and the rain pouring down outside. Above me the spiky fronds of the fake palm tree stir gently in the wind that comes through the gap in the door planking.

As I lie there I think about my favorite holiday. It’s not a holiday as much as the memory of a special day when I was much younger, back before the War started. Both my parents took off work and we went ice-skating outside. It snowed a little and the trees looked like they were frosted, and afterward they took me for real hot chocolate at a fancy restaurant and I sat between them and felt completely safe. Completely at home.

Four hours from Chicago, I’d said. And we are. But not four hours from home.

T
he store is silent when my eyes open, and only the slightest hints of daylight filter inside.

Everyone else is still asleep but my mind has been restless all night, like a hamster in an old vid clip running endlessly on a wheel. Over and over, I see myself repeating back Troy’s words,
What big lie
? then Troy’s face filling with disappointment and him saying,
No
, I told you,
not lie —

I told you
.

Told me what?

I slip out of my sleeping bag, carefully lift my backpack, and go toward the front of the store. There’s a bit more light there, and a counter I can spread out on.

I pull the papers we found in the prison camp from
my bag and smooth them out. There are five different documents, each about four pages long, and one that is much longer. I start with the shorter ones, flipping through them to see if there’s any mention of the Phoenix or a reform school in Chicago.

There isn’t.

I start on the longer one, but immediately shift gears. The document is titled “Root Operations,” and it takes me only a minute of skimming to realize what I have. This is a list of Alliance cells, or “branches,” as it calls them, around the United States.

It’s single-spaced, printed two columns per page. It is fifty-three pages long.

I can’t believe it. I
don’t want to
believe it.

The city of Chicago alone takes up more than a page, with more than forty branches listed. They are listed by neighborhood — Bucktown Branch, Chinatown Branch, Humboldt Park Branch — but there are no addresses. The cells could be anywhere in those neighborhoods. Probably in plain sight.

And Maddie could be in any one of them.

Or could have been.

Troy’s voice comes uninvited into my head again:

They shriek when you do it, like you’re stealing their souls
.

I shake it away and try to force my mind back to studying the Alliance papers.

How did you get out
?

Shoot. It was the only way. They never even thought of it
.

I try humming but nothing —

I won’t let them take me back!

— drowns out his voice.

I put down the papers and fish in my pack for my compass and the map of Chicago and Environs I found in the bookstore in the abandoned mall. The map is old, from eight years ago, and half the markings on it are obsolete. There are no more amusement parks or post offices or general points of interest. But the major roads haven’t changed, and they’re the important part. They are what we need to avoid.

Out here where there aren’t many people or many buildings, not having our ID bracelets has been inconvenient but not impossible. But in Chicago it will be trickier. If
we get spotted without our IDs, we’ll be picked up and taken immediately to prison, and straightening that out would cost time we don’t have.

Time Maddie doesn’t have.

So we are going to have to be careful. Very careful.

My eyes slide down the map from central Chicago south to where my house is. It would be an additional three hours’ walking to get there. Maybe once I’ve figured out where Maddie is —

I hear footsteps behind me and turn to see Alonso loping toward me. “I brought you breakfast,” he says, and opens his palm to reveal a handful of chalky, anemic-looking, heart-shaped candies.

“Where did you find those?” I ask.

He points a thumb over his shoulder. “Valentine’s Day section. They’re called ‘conversation hearts.’ There are two dozen boxes still sealed up. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner. And wait until you try them. They look better than they taste.”

“Didn’t we decide this place closed five years ago? These are ancient.”

“You mean aged.” He flips through the candies in his hand, mumbling, “No, no. Nope.”

I stand up to get a better look but he pulls his hand out of my line of vision. “What are you doing?”

“Composing. But I can’t find — aha!” He puts four candies down on the counter next to me.

sugar. sweet. so fine. clod9.

“It’s a poem. See how the last part rhymes? I admit it’s not my best work, but it’s still early in the day.”

He made me a poem. “‘Clod nine’?” I read.

“I think that’s supposed to be
cloud
nine. Typos seem to be an issue with these conversation hearts. The poem I did for Ryan was called ‘he baby.’ “

He made Ryan a poem, too. Probably he made one for everyone already and mine is last.

I put
sugar
in my mouth and bite down. “This tastes like chalk.”

“Wait a second. That’s when it opens up and — Yes, I can tell by the expression on your face. Chalk and bleach, right?”

“These are gross.”

“These are the only food we have.”

“I love them.”

He tumbles a half dozen more hearts onto the counter next to me. “What’s this?” he asks, picking up the Root Organization document.

“As far as I can tell, those are outposts of the Alliance in the US. I want to figure out where they are.”

He flips through it. “This is crazy. There are hundreds.” I watch his eyes move over the Chicago section, taking it in quickly. “I always knew Edgewater was a stronghold for evil,” he says. “That’s where my grandparents live. Albany Park Branch, Austin Branch, Beverly Branch. They’re everywhere.”

“But no addresses. And even if we get in, I keep thinking of what Troy said, about shooting being the only way to get out.”

“First we have to find the places.” He reads a little longer, then puts the list down. “Why is the Alliance obsessed with trees? Root, branches, like that?”

I shrug. “I have no idea.”

Alonso leans over, running his finger down the list, saying the names aloud. “It’s just so unbelievable. Coleman Branch. My aunt lives in Coleman. I wonder if she’d like to know she has an Alliance cell as a neighbor.”

“Apparently we all do,” I say.

“Douglass Branch. Pullman Branch. Lincoln Park Branch.”

As he says each name, my eyes slide to the place on the map, and I feel another prick of homesickness. It is awful to think that our country is already so deeply infiltrated.

Alonso leans down on his forearms on the counter next to me. “It could be because I’m feeling poetic, but since the Alliance seems to like to use tree imagery, what if we’re wrong about what Troy meant when he said, ‘Shoot’? What if he meant a tree shoot?”

“You mean, like, he used a baby tree to escape?” I ask.

“Maybe. Or something about new growth, a new start, or —” He stands up fast, shaking his head. “Never mind; that’s stupid,” he says, shoving a handful of candies in his mouth at once.

I think back to that moment with Troy.

Look for the big lie —

What big lie
?

No
, I told you,
not lie —

I’m staring at the map, like I’m seeing it for the first time. “It’s not stupid,” I say slowly. “It’s — You figured it out.”

Alonso begins coughing. White powder comes out of his mouth and gets on his hands. “What?”

“You’re right.” My brain is clicking through ideas.

Rosie and Louisa join us then, sucking on the candies. Louisa shifts her candy from one side of her mouth to the other. “What did he figure out?”

“Read me the last three again,” I say to Alonso.

“Douglass. Pullman. Lincoln Park.” He coughs again. “How did I figure it out? What do those have to do with saplings?”

“Nothing. It was what you said about us being wrong about the kind of shoot. When I asked how they escaped, Troy didn’t say ‘shoot,’ S-H-O-O-T. He said ‘chute,’ C-H-U-T-E.”

Nobody seems as excited about this as I am.

“Those locations you’re reading, the Alliance branches? They’re —” I spread my fingers over the locations on the map where there are little printed symbols corresponding with every one of the names he’s said. I glance up at Alonso to make sure he’s paying attention. But instead of the map, his eyes are on me, and they are big, and he has some candy powder on his cheek and he’s looking at me like he really cares what I’m going to say and the words dry up in my throat.

“What are they?” Rosie demands. “Those places?”

“Libraries,” I say, still looking at Alonso. “They’re all libraries. After they were closed, the Alliance must have taken them over. Helen and Troy escaped through the book chute.” I lift my hand off the map. “Um, thanks. That was a really smart idea.”

Alonso does this closed-lip smile, then lowers his eyes half-shut, taps himself on the chest, and says, “Quietly brilliant.” He turns to me. “But the real brilliant one is you. I just mumbled a little. You’re the one who figured everything out.”

“Yeah, Evelyn, that is pretty amazing,” Rosie agrees.

My knees feel a little wobbly. This is Louisa’s fault. If she hadn’t said that she thought Alonso looked at me a certain way, then I wouldn’t have wondered if he looked at me that way and I wouldn’t have been looking at him looking or —

And anyway it’s still not the way he looks at her when she says to him, “Of course we knew Evelyn was a genius but here we thought you were just a pretty face.”

He laughs. Only a little. But more than he needs to, I think.

I don’t have time for this, I remind myself. We need to find Maddie.

“All the libraries are marked on the map, and one of them must be Helen and Troy’s school. Since they were taken away in a Rover the same way Maddie was, it could be where she’s being held, too,” I say.

Rosie scans the map, picking out the little book symbol that means library. “But there are dozens. How will we find the right one?”

“Before they all closed, the libraries had an internal
network to help you borrow material from different branches,” I say. “If the Alliance has kept the same system, then if we can get into any library’s computer system, we can access the whole network.”

If
they have …
then
we can.
But if not
? my brain asks. What
then
? A wave of panic washes over me.

“Hey, look what we found in the beach shack!” Ryan comes bounding over like a happy puppy. He is clutching what looks like a very old cell phone in each hand. Drew follows him at a slower pace.

“Have you been looting a museum?” Alonso asks. “Those things have to be ten years old. They’re probably only 8G. They won’t even connect to a network.”

“Yeah, yeah, and we don’t have a calling plan,” Ryan says. “I know. But we were thinking we could —”

Louisa grabs them from Ryan. “Mod them into two-way communicators.” She slides the backs of the phones off. “Oh, sure. Then we could break into teams and search for Maddie faster.” Her eyes move to me. “We need some wire and batteries. Oh, and that staple remover from yesterday.”

I’m not the only one gaping.

Louisa glances around as if perplexed why we’re staring at her. “Maddie’s dad trained in communication in the army. He taught Maddie and me how to do it when we were little. We were too small to have our own phones but he gave us some old ones and showed us how to make them talk to each other. It’s easy.”

“I have batteries,” I finally say. “But I’m not sure about the wire.”

“I bet there’s some in that card we found last night,” Alonso says. “The one that played a song.”

I point behind me. “Right. I think that’s still in aisle two, Grandparent Extortion.”

Louisa takes the staple remover and my bag of batteries. “Good. I’ll need another set of hands.”

“I’ll help you,” Alonso offers. It doesn’t bother me at all. In fact, I mostly feel sorry for him because his is a love that is doomed to fail, considering that Louisa blushes whenever she’s near Ryan.

I think Alonso smiles at me as he goes by but I’m too busy looking at the map to notice.

Rosie bends over it next to me. She draws a curvy line down with her finger, using side roads to avoid the main highway, jiggling through the northern suburbs of Chicago. She says, “I think this is our best route. How about you, Evelyn?”

I slip my compass into my pocket. “Looks great,” I tell her. It’s really good having her back.

Once the cell phones are wired, we pack up, say good-bye to the Santa hamster and the leprechauns, and head back out.

We’re two hours into our walk when we realize we’ve made a horrible mistake.