The guard didn’t answer—just marched away.
“Oh, God, Becca!” I exclaimed, and grabbed her in a hug. After a moment, she brought her arms up and hugged me back. She felt bony, and it was like hugging a stranger. “I miss
ed you so much!” I said. “I looked for you everywhere! I never stopped looking.”
When we pulled back, the other kids were staring at us.
“There’s two of you,” the small girl whispered.
“Yeah. The before and the after,” one of the guys said wryly.
“This is my twin sister, Cassie,” Becca said quietly. “Cass, this is Merry. And this is Vijay, and this is Diego.”
I didn’t know what to say. We were just kids, locked in a prison together. This was a nightmare I could never have predicted, and I had no idea how to act. But I nodded at them, and they nodded back.
“Why are we here?” I asked Becca. “What happened to you?”
She shrugged and sat down on a narrow bunk. “Got taken,” she said. “Like everyone else.”
This is Becca, I told myself. This really is Becca. It’s just… a completely different Becca. I didn’t know what she’d been through to make her like this; she was serious, calmer, and just so… not Ridiculous.
“You’ve been here since you disappeared?” I asked.
She nodded. “What about you? Where did they get you? At home?”
“No.” I had to gather my thoughts for a minute. “You disappeared, so I went all over looking for you. I talked to Taylor, that guy you played chicken with, out on the boundary road.”
Becca looked surprised.
“Then Nathaniel showed me the Outsider hangout. I didn’t know you were an Outsider,” I said wryly. “And then one night he cut the wire on the boundary fence and we went down the road till we found the truck—my truck.” I couldn’t seem to work up any anger about that now. “Then someone killed Mr. Harrison. I mean, first I hit him with my backpack and knocked him out, and then someone shot him.”
Becca’s eyebrows rose farther on her forehead. “You… hit him…”
I nodded and took a breath. “Yeah. Then today—today?—maybe today I got kicked out of school. I’m expelled. Plus they took away my vocation. So I got the moped and Pa’s rifle, and drove through the gates down the boundary road to the truck—to where you had been last.”
Becca’s mouth was hanging open and her eyes were wide.
“Suddenly I was surrounded, don’t know by who. I took off across the brush and drove down into a gully. Then I was in a ditch, and one of the cars crashed right over me, and then the second one was chasing me, and it was dark, and I hit a tree trunk head-on. ’Fraid the moped is totaled,” I admitted. “I flew up out of the ditch and almost got run over by an all-wheeler. Anyway, I still had Pa’s rifle, so I aimed at them, but then in the end I couldn’t shoot ’em, so I fired over their heads. But then they shot me with a plastic bullet and knocked me out. And that’s gonna hurt until I die. When I woke up I had a black hood over my head, and they brought me here, and now here I am.”
Four pairs of eyes stared at me like I was a two-headed calf.
“You…” Becca began, shaking her head in wonder. “You hit Harrison, and you found Taylor, cut the fence, and met the Outsiders, and you got expelled, and you left the cell and got chased and fired at them…”
“Over their heads,” I pointed out.
“I thought you said she was the good one,” the guy named Diego said.
55
BECCA
“SHE IS,” I SAID, STARING at my sister. “She’s the good one, the careful one. Careful Cassie.”
Cassie looked surprised. “Well, you’re the ridiculous one!” she said. “Ridiculous Rebecca! Only now, you’re…”
“Sounds like you’re not so careful anymore,” I told her. “Like, rob any banks while you were at it?”
“No! Of course not.” Cassie looked embarrassed.