Breaking Point (Article 5 #2)(18)

“EMBER? Ember!”

I raced toward my mother’s voice, near the front of the house. I’d followed the two soldiers to her bedroom, where they had opened her dresser drawers and were rifling through her clothes.

“Mom!” We collided; my arms locked around her waist, and I buried my tears in her blouse. She shifted me to the side as the soldiers came into view.

“What’s going on?” she demanded.

“Routine inspection, ma’am,” said the first soldier. His navy uniform still had the press lines across the shoulders, like he’d just pulled it out of a package.

“How dare you come into my house when my daughter is home alone!”

He passed a nervous look to his partner, who stepped forward. There was something familiar about him, something I couldn’t place. “According to the Reformation Act we don’t need your permission, ma’am. Besides, if you need child care, the Church of America provides services, free of cost.”

I detached from her side, arms bolting down. I was eleven, I didn’t need a babysitter.

My mother’s face was positively livid. “Don’t tell me how to raise—”

“Now,” continued the soldier. “Is there someone I can talk to? Your husband, maybe? When will he be home?”

I’d never seen her speechless before. The soldiers looked at each other, and the first made a note on the clipboard he was carrying.

“Very well,” said the familiar one. “You’re out of compliance with the Moral Statutes on seventeen counts today. Since it’s the first time we’re just going to issue a warning, but next time, it’ll be a citation for each one. Do you understand what that means?”

I kept staring at him. His features were too sharp, his hair too golden. His eyes were emerald, and hypnotizing, like a snake’s.

“What’s he talking about?” I asked. But I remembered the assembly we’d had last week at school, when a soldier, older than these two, had come to talk to us about the Federal Bureau of Reformation and the Moral Statutes. “New Rules,” he’d called them. “For a better tomorrow.”

I’d told my mother about the new rules, and she’d laughed. That bitter laugh, like when she’d lost her job. Like all of this was some kind of sick joke, one that would never actually be real. I knew right then that I’d have to pay more attention to them, for both of us.

“Of course, we could always make a deal,” said the soldier with the green eyes. He leaned forward and reached for my face, thumb trailing gently down my damp cheek. My gaze lowered to his gold name badge, where MORRIS was typed out in perfect black letters.

I know you. I should have been afraid, but I was so mesmerized by his touch that I didn’t feel his fingers slip around my throat until it was too late.

*

I WOKE like a shot, gasping and writhing, ripped from the nightmare by a hand closing around my ankle, evoking another wave of panic. The thin, shredded blanket tightened around my waist. I scrambled back until my head cracked against the wall and I blinked back stars.

“Ember.” The familiarity of Chase’s voice tempted me to lower my guard. “Easy. It’s okay. It was just a dream.”

A dream? I couldn’t trust it. I could still feel that oppressing weight, pinning me in place. I could feel the voice within me, drawing my tongue against my teeth to scream.

It was the last sound I’d heard before Tucker Morris’s fingers tightened around my throat.

I was sitting on the upper corner of the bed, knees locked into my chest. Without the candlelight I could only see a slight differentiation of shadows from where Chase sat on the opposite edge of the mattress.

He flipped on the flashlight, laying it at my feet like a peace offering. In its glow I could see the room clearly. The lumpy, bare mattress and the old chair where he slept. Our shoes and backpack ready by the door. The crumbling drywall wearing away to reveal the wooden bones of my sanctuary.

Tomorrow I’d step outside the front door for the first time in a month, and I might not come back.

“It’s okay to be scared.” It was as if he’d read my mind.

“I’m not,” I lied. I don’t even know why I bothered.

“All right,” he said slowly. “I’m just saying that if you were, it would be okay.”

I rested my chin on my knees, longing for the familiarity of my own bed. The smooth feel of my own sheets and the perfect weight of my blankets. I missed home.

“Why’d he turn me in and not you?” I whispered.

“I don’t know,” he answered with a sigh. “But he wouldn’t have if it didn’t benefit him somehow. I’m just surprised he waited this long.”

It did seem strange that someone would sit on this kind of information for a month before talking.

“How would it help him to fess up that I escaped on his watch?” I wondered aloud. Maybe someone had found out, pressured Tucker to talk. My mind flashed to the civilian woman who’d worked at the detention facility—Delilah. She’d been the only other person to know we’d left, but I doubted she had leaked the information. She was too afraid of Tucker to say anything that might get him in trouble, like the fact that we’d escaped on his shift.

Chase shook his head. “I can’t figure it out.”