7.
I hadn’t pegged him for a crier. His eyes were always so bright, so full of life, like he lived for trouble.
Ty had been that way too, except she lived for the water, the adventure of being herself—of finding herself. The day the black-hearted men came to take her, my mother tried to stop them. But a single taser blast caused her to sleep the rest of the week away. She missed my birthday and everything. Not that she would’ve done anything to celebrate, but still.
I’d hugged Ty and she’d wiped my tears, promising to visit. She whispered that she’d see me again, and hey, we’d walk around the lake and laugh at how we cried like babies when she left. She only came home once. Then the dark-skinned government guy told us she’d died working on a new piece of tech that backfired.
After that, he’d had to use his submission tactics on me, or I might have killed him. That’s when the real trouble had started.
As I watched Jag’s shoulders heave, I felt the same mix of anger and grief as when Ty left. Finally I knelt on the bed and placed my hand on his back. I patted awkwardly, hoping that was protocol for when someone is sobbing their eyes out.
“Hey.” Pat, pat. “It’s okay. We’ll bust out of here before they tag us.” Pat, pat, pat. I felt lame.
He pushed himself up and wiped his hand across his face. He avoided looking directly at me. “Do you really think you can get us out of here?”
Of course I couldn’t. Didn’t he remember my last pathetic attempt? I hadn’t even made it out of the bathroom. But his lovely eyes, not so cold anymore, the perfectly curved arch of his mouth . . .
I’d tell him whatever it took to make him stop crying. “Sure,” I lied. “We’ll go tonight.”
He threw his arms around me and pulled me down onto the bed with him. His laugh filled my soul, and I wanted nothing more than to feel that sound reverberating in his chest. So I laid my cheek against his breastbone as the last echo faded away. Startled by his embrace as well as my own actions, I withdrew quickly and lay on the floor, refusing to meet his eyes.
I warned you not to touch him.
I jerked at the sound of the voice, hitting my elbow on the wall behind me. Once again, I was in direct opposition of the rules. Because I craved the human touch. I always had. I shook away my traitorous thoughts.
“Sorry,” Jag said, his fingers trailing along my shoulder. “Didn’t mean to freak you out.”
“It’s okay. I—I don’t know.”
“Do I scare you?” He leaned over the side of the bed.
“Course not.”
He smiled, making my heart skip a beat. “Nice.” He said that a lot. It was like his shrugging thing.
“How come you’ve been here for six weeks?”
“Rehab,” he said. “They tried transmissions, but I wouldn’t wear the comm. So they tried counseling with one of your Goodie mind doctors. That didn’t really work either. They don’t want me to be here, but they thought it might be better than letting me go back to the Badlands. I didn’t think they’d send me to Freedom.”
“Where is Freedom?”
“Back east. Vi,” his voice dropped to a whisper, “we can’t go there. We’ll never come out. Thane . . . well, we just can’t go there.”
I waited for more of an explanation, but he clammed up.
“Because we’re Free Thinkers,” I said, as if stating a fact. Baldie had called me that at the first trial. That’s why Jag and I were in the same cell and why I felt such a strong connection to him. “Why won’t we survive in Freedom?”
In the dim artificial light, his eyes reflected fear. “That’s where the Association is.”
“Yeah, so?”
“They’re the good guys,” he said.
“Like—”
“Like, really good guys,” Jag repeated. Which meant they’d be pretty bad for me.
“Who’s Thane Myers?” I asked.
“Nobody,” Jag answered, the lie written in all three syllables.
“He’s controlling everything,” I whispered. The guards. The Greenies, maybe even Jag. I’d heard his name enough to know.
“Forget about Thane,” Jag said, his voice oddly powerful. “Let’s figure out how to get out of here.”
I rolled away, trying to think of how a Goodie could get out of prison.
Then it hit me.
Be bad.
We didn’t go that night. I promised Jag we’d try after showers in the morning, buying myself some time by telling him I had something to check in the bathroom. Really, I just needed to think of something a Baddie would do.
Instead, he told me stories about the Badlands and how he hadn’t been to school in three years. He said everyone got to choose their clothes. Long sleeves or short. Blue or red or purple. Didn’t matter. No hats, unless you wanted to wear one for “fashion purposes.” (I didn’t even know what that meant.) I couldn’t fathom that kind of freedom. Every morning my closet spat out a pair of blue jeans and a drab long-sleeved shirt.
Jag told me that most people are happy being bad because they don’t know any different. He only knew because he came to the Goodgrounds on a regular basis. He knew the tech we had—saw how the Badlands could benefit from our purification systems and comforts of life.
I couldn’t argue. It felt totally unfair—except for the brainwashing part. I could leave the links and transmissions behind pretty easily.
I wondered if I’d ever been happy being good. I mean, I didn’t know any different either—at least not until I stopped plugging in. When I mentioned it to Jag, he said, “It’s just a control tactic, Vi, to make you believe one thing over another.”
I knew that, I did. But a lifetime of labels is hard to overcome. Maybe I just needed a new label, one that was neither good nor bad. Because Jag seemed good enough to me, no matter where he’d been born. In fact, he was the complete opposite of everything I’d been raised to believe about Baddies. Disease-ridden, losers, undeserving of help—just plain bad people.
Nothing about Jag meshed with what I’d believed about the Baddies. I harbored such negative feelings for them. Because I blamed them for Dad’s long absence.
But now . . . yeah, now nothing made sense.
Finally Jag slid the pencil into the spiral binding of his notebook and shoved it under his pillow. I sat next to him, staring through the bars into the corridor. How could I get us out of here? I swallowed my doubt, determined not to give in yet. I would think of something.
Jag threaded his fingers through mine and leaned toward me. The tension drained from my body as I enjoyed the same comfortable silence I’d only experienced with Zenn. I forced the thought of Zenn away. Tagged and sentenced to the Association, my past life was just that—in the past. I only wished it didn’t make me feel so empty.
“You do smell like a guy,” Jag whispered, his voice soft in my ear. His breath trickled down my spine. His fingers filled the spaces between mine perfectly.
“Shut up,” I managed to say, but my voice sounded breathless. Surely he noticed the effect he had on me. I wasn’t that good at hiding it. We’d only been living in the microscopic cell together for two days, but I felt a connection with Jag somewhere inside—somewhere I hadn’t known existed until I met him.
I slid off the bed and settled onto the floor, my hip bone grinding painfully into the unyielding cement. Jag leaned over the side of the bed. “Vi?”
“Yeah?”
“I’ll help you.” His hand rested on my shoulder as I fell asleep.
For the first time in, like, forever, I might have been able to sleep all night, but the whirring Mechs roused me before it was light. Jag didn’t stir, even amidst the creepy Mech-chatter—unusual for his light sleeping habits.
The Mechs (three of them) escorted me to an elevator (totally old tech) and we rode to level one (at least I’d fallen asleep with my shoes on). I couldn’t have managed a descender right then, so I was thankful. The doors opened into a room flooded with the whitest of lights. I squinted as the advanced tech-buzz assaulted my senses. Way more than cloudy vision, this was like going blind because someone was hacking with a sharp object from inside my head.
Several white-coated people loomed over me because I’d fallen to my knees. Something snapped in my brain, but by the time I realized what was happening, I couldn’t react. They bound me at the ankle and wrist, strapped me to a stretcher, and wheeled me under even brighter lights.
They were tagging me.
“Don’t move,” a doctor said through a face mask. “This won’t hurt if you stay still. Otherwise, I promise it will hurt.”
Not afraid of trouble but terrified of pain, I stayed still. The damn transmissions had made me a chicken by the age of six.
Cold hands unstrapped my left wrist and drew a line around it with a black marker. The ink absorbed my flesh. That doctor was the foulest liar on the planet. Because the surgery skin boiled away a one-inch strip of skin. And that hurts.
Willing myself to look, I saw my tissues, tendons, and bones. No blood spilled out, controlled with the surgery skin and a hemal-recycler one of the doctors dabbed on my wrist. The blood congealed into little globs that he shook off into a tray.
Gloved fingers snapped the tag around my wrist like a bracelet, securing it with a tiny knot next to the bumpy wrist bone. Blinking sensors and a long bar code took the place of my skin.
Permanent jewelry from hell.
“No one will see it,” she explained. “Only our tech. We don’t want to make your life completely miserable.”
“Too late,” I growled.
Another doctor approached with a long needle. That did it. I thrashed and kicked and cursed. Hands restrained me, and someone slapped on another silencer.
I squeezed my eyes shut and rolled my head to the side. My heartbeat strummed in my ears and mouth. The needle stabbed hot into my wrist and the regrowing skin itched as it covered the tag.
Five minutes, and I was marked for life.
I wondered how much of this tech my dad had invented. Probably all of it. He’d had to sign off on all new inventions before they were used on the general public.
The last time I’d seen him, he’d smiled. But it had been filled with sadness and had painted pinched lines around his eyes.
He’d gone into the forest a few nights before, but he wasn’t wearing his jacket when he’d hugged me good night. His long-sleeved shirt smelled like onions from dinner.
“Good-bye, V,” he said.
I hadn’t noticed that he’d said “good-bye” instead of “good night.” I remembered the next morning when I woke up—and he was gone.
I’d searched the house for his jacket. I was late for school because of it.
The jacket wasn’t there. I never did find it.
In fact, by the time I got home from school, the house had been purged of everything that belonged to my father.
But not my memory.
I could still see him if I closed my eyes and concentrated. His green eyes twinkled with sparks of gold. His trim brown hair. His ivory skin. His warm embrace that comforted me at night.
I heard him tell me he loved me. His voice was low and crackly, and filled with emotion.
A tear ran down my cheek. I made to wipe it with my tagged hand and winced at the flash of pain.
A doctor checked my wrist where the skin was still regrowing. He made a tiny note on a big electro-board and moved away. I turned my head toward the back wall.
An exit sign hung above a door radiating some severe tech energy. Jag’s haunted voice filled my head. “They’re the good guys.”
I couldn’t go to Freedom. Which meant I had to get to the Badlands. Somehow. Maybe I could find my dad.
He made his choice, the voice whispered, carrying a hint of empathy. Something I definitely didn’t want.
I didn’t care about choices right then. I didn’t need that stupid Thinker to feel sorry for me. I wanted to be left alone.
Shut up! I commanded. Get out of my head!
The voice didn’t return. At least I couldn’t hear it through the swirling desperation, ill-conceived hope, and anger coursing through my body.
Doctors checked my wrist every ten minutes, making notes. Finally one of them removed the silencer and said, “Look.”
My flesh had returned. I ran my fingers over it, feeling the miniscule knot that could’ve been part of my wrist bone. The techtricity in the tag sent a dull ache resonating up to my elbow. But whatever. I’d learned to live with the slight buzzing in my ears from the comm too.
“Learn your place, and we’ll never need to use that tag,” the middle Greenie said. I hadn’t recognized him without the Institute robes on—but his voice was ingrained in my brain. He pulled off his face mask and glared down at me.
“And you’re not to return to the Goodgrounds. Ever.”
“I don’t want to come back,” I spat, the last thread of hope that I’d marry Zenn drying up with my words. But I’d be okay. I always am.
“The boy now?” another doctor asked as I was escorted away.
“No, Thane wants to do it himself. Besides, that boy won’t be awake for a couple hours at least, and I’m beat. Let’s rest. Then we can—” The elevator doors slid shut, cutting off his voice.
Back in the cell upstairs, Jag still hadn’t woken. I lay on the floor and stared under his bed, the cement as hard as ever.
I clenched my teeth and growled, “No way in hell Thane—whoever he is—is tagging Jag.”