I propped myself on one elbow. “I think—I think that town was guarded not because of what was there, but because it was there. It was being guarded because it was a not-cell. Maybe the United doesn’t want anyone to know that not-cells ever existed, or still exist, anywhere.”
Bunny nodded slowly. “Yeah—I bet you’re right. There sure wasn’t anything else there.”
“It makes sense,” Nate said.
I lay back down and looked up at the clouds turning orange from the rising sun. This same sun shone down on the camp where my sister was, where Tim was. It shone down on the Crazy House. It shone on Cell B-97-4275, where my dad’s ashes were. I wondered if I would ever see home again.
29
CASSIE
I SET THE JOURNAL ASIDE for later and took more things out of the suitcase. Tim sat beside me as I unfolded a wall poster. It wasn’t for seeds or tractors; it was a photograph of a pretty teenage boy holding a microphone. He was lit by spotlights and had the words PETEY SALVEZ LIVE SAN FRANCISCO, AUGUST 11, 2027 printed on him.
“A musician? A singer?” I guessed. “But who’s San Francisco? Oh, look—schoolbooks!”
They looked like they were for maybe grade five? There was a science text, a math text, and a book on reading comprehension. “See what you can make of this,” I said, handing him the reading book.
Finally I rested my back against a stack of boxes and broke the tiny lock on the journal. The first page said, Do not read! None of your business!
The page after that said, For my eyes only! Stay out! This means you!
“No way to keep me out now,” I told Tim, and he smirked. The following pages were covered in childish, loopy handwriting, and I dove in, hoping that this kid’s journal would somehow hold the key to the past. But it wasn’t exciting—just weird. It was all fantasy stuff or some kind of pretend life. Like, Julie said she was going to see her aunt in New York on a plane, which clearly would never happen, a regular person on a plane. And what was New York, anyway? What happened to Old York?
“This kid has a wild imagination,” I told him. “She says that she and her family went to the beach, which, okay, maybe their cell is on a coast. But she says it took seven hours to drive there!”
“No cell is that big,” he agreed. “They’re all pretty much alike. You could get across ours in half an hour.”
“Exactly,” I said. “She made up some crazy stuff, like her mom quit work to stay home with the kids. Quit work. To stay home.”
“Was she sick?”
“She doesn’t say.” I let out a deep breath, frustrated. I was bored, he was bored, he was actually boring, and most likely none of this stuff was going to give us one single useful bit of information. I threw the journal back into the suitcase and replaced the other things. I was making room for the schoolbooks when my hand brushed the suitcase lining and I heard a crinkle.
I ran my fingers over the lining, then peered closely at it. “Tim! This has been resewn!”
I grabbed my knife and slit thro
ugh the tiny stitches holding the pink satin in place. “There’s something in here!” Soon I reached the edges of some paper, which I fished out.
He watched over my shoulder. I drew in a breath—it was a map.
“I bet that’s the whole United,” he said.
I looked at all the markings. “It says… United States. United States? What states? States of what?”
“The boundary lines are wrong,” he said as I smoothed it out on the floor. “I bet she made all this up—part of her make-believe life.”
The map had big lines crisscrossing everything, separating the United into six large sections: A, B, C, D, E, and F. But they were clearly handwritten.
“What do those other words say?” he asked, pointing.
I read, unsure of the pronunciation, “Cal-i-forn-ya. Or-ah-gon. Mon-tan-a. Flor-i-da, down here.” Tracing the map with my finger, I found where my cell probably was, in an area called Neb-rask-a. I had no idea where we were now, relative to home or this map.
On the margin a note was scrawled in pencil—the writing was recognizable as an older version of the journal’s script.
“What’s that say?” he asked, and I turned the map to see better.
“It says, ‘It’s not just rumors—the deportations have started. Tell Murtaugh to mobilize!—JW,’” I made out. Deportations? Rumors?