It’s been two days since the team left for Taem, and it’s felt like two years.
Bea printed her most recent issue of the Harbinger yesterday, in which she insisted on reporting that I’m back east and planning something, despite my objections. It led to another search on the Order’s part, and they were unbiased in their efforts. Despite Garrett’s position, the house was stormed. Harvey, Emma, and I sat huddled in the basement, afraid an exhale might give us away. The place was tossed, but the Order was too busy tipping furniture and pulling bookcases away from the walls to examine the wall-to-wall carpet beneath their feet. They never found the trapdoor.
Tonight, under the cover of a cloudy sky, Bea disappears with her brothers for one of September’s underground meetings. Even Emma tags along, but it’s deemed unsafe for me to leave the house. When I’m spotted tomorrow, it will be on purpose. Until then, we’re not taking unnecessary risks. Understandable, but the house is starting to feel like a prison. After a final round of Rock, Paper, Scissors with Aiden, I leave him in Rusty’s company and visit Harvey.
“We’re heading home tomorrow night,” he says when I enter the basement. “You ready?”
“Taem’s not my home, Harvey.”
I pull up a chair and watch him for a while. He’s been spending every waking hour staring at a screen since the team left, and I have no clue what he’s even looking at anymore. The virus is set and done, in Clipper’s hands and somewhere much farther east.
“What have you been doing down here? I thought your work was done.”
“It is. I’m just reading.”
“Why?”
He squints, leans closer to the screen. “It’s fascinating.”
I run my thumb along the edge of the wooden desk, flinching when it catches on a splinter. Harvey’s eyes move back and forth behind his glasses, occasionally narrowing, sometimes glinting. Like the code is a thing he respects, a person he’s in awe of.
“Are you absolutely positive this is going to work?”
“No,” he says plainly.
“What?” I sit bolt upright. “In the meetings you said—”
“It should work. I really think it will. But I also thought the Forgeries would keep people safe and that Frank would use them for good. At least initially.” He takes his glasses off and turns to me. This is a thing Harvey does. When the glasses come off it means a speech and deep thinking. Unless he rubs his eyes, which means he’s in desperate need of sleep.
“Science is a powerful thing, Gray, a wonderful thing,” he says. Deep thinking it is. “But when it is used to serve one man, rather than the masses, that’s when it fails. It becomes personal. Technological advancement should benefit many and benefit them equally. If one person rises to the top, if he or she benefits substantially more than everyone else, well, that’s a step in the wrong direction.
“I think the fail-safe will work, I really do, but I don’t know for sure. Just as I didn’t know how to make an F-GenX until it was finished and functioning. If I knew things for certain, we wouldn’t be in this mess.”
He sounds so much like the real Harvey, so passionate and rational. The last time I saw that man, he was a projection in the night that lit up Taem’s dome.
“How’d you die, Harvey? Do you remember?”
“I have memories of sitting in Frank’s office with you,” he says. “Then medics visiting me in a guarded room to fix my shoulder. They injected me with something and it all goes cloudy after that. The next memory I have is opening my eyes to the sound of Mozart. As for the moments in between . . .” He bites his bottom lip, sits back in the chair. “I’m not sure how he—how I—died. Taem papers reported I took a bullet when fighting broke out in the square.”
I remember something Bo said about Harvey getting hit by cross fire that day. I truly hope it was that fast.
“We never should have left you.”
“I was dead.”
“We should have checked.”
“And maybe we wouldn’t be here right now if you had. Maybe you’d be dead, too. Or maybe the vaccine wouldn’t have made it back to the Rebels. Life is too complex to go examining all the ifs. Worry about the here and now, and the fork you’re approaching. Focus on those decisions.”
He puts his glasses back on, turns to the screen. I examine his profile.
“Bree still doesn’t believe you’re you,” I say.
Eying me over the rim of his glasses, he says, “Guess I’ll just have to prove her wrong.”
TWENTY-EIGHT
EVEN THOUGH THE NEXT DAY passes at a torturous pace, night finally, inevitably falls.
“Remember, you are truly cut off until you make contact with Sammy,” September says. “Garrett can relay anything that might go down in the transfer, but it’s a dead zone between here and Taem.”
I’m well aware of this, but let September have her moment. It sets her at ease, all this orchestrating of plans. I pull on my jacket and backpack. Harvey has my gun, which, if everything unfolds as planned, will make sense once the Order takes us into custody.
The round of good-byes is quick, nothing but curt handshakes. Not even Emma lingers over her words.
“See you sometime,” she says to me. Aiden leans against her hip, one hand in Rusty’s mangy mane.
“Let’s hope so,” I respond. She gives me a half smile, but it seems forced.
A moment later, I’m stepping into the crisp evening with Harvey. It is nothing short of marvelous to breathe in fresh air again. To feel the wind on my face. I am not made for indoors.
My stomach is twisting as we make our way to the port. Tethered boats sway on the choppy water, the starry sky reflecting off the vastness of the Gulf.
We meet Garrett at the docks as planned. The stiff cuff of his Order uniform scratches at my wrist when we shake.
“Time to make all Bea’s lies mean something,” he whispers. “You guys ready?”
I nod. “Ready as we’ll ever be.”