Before she could answer, there was a cough from the backseat. I twisted around despite the pain in my neck and chest. Curled up there in a protective little ball was another kid, about my age, or maybe a year younger. That other kid. Max—Matthew—whatever—from the Infirmary, and he was looking far better than I felt as he slept on.
“We just left Harvey, West Virginia,” Cate said. “That’s where we met with some friends that helped me switch cars and remove Martin back there from the medical trunk we had to smuggle him out in.”
“Wait . . .”
“Oh, don’t worry,” Cate said quickly. “We made sure it had air holes.”
Like that was my biggest concern?
“They just let you take it out to the car?” I asked. “Without even checking it?”
She glanced at me again, and I was proud of the look of surprise there. “The doctors at Thurmond use those trunks to transport medical waste. The camp controllers started forcing the doctors to dump the waste themselves when the budget got cut. Sarah and I had duty for this week.”
“Sarah?” I interrupted. “Dr. Rogers?”
She hesitated a split second before nodding.
“Why did you tie her up—why did she—why are you helping us?”
She answered my question with one of her own.
“Have you ever heard of the Children’s League?”
“Bits and pieces,” I said. And only in whispers. If the rumors were true, they were an antigovernment group. They were the ones the younger kids—the later arrivals to Thurmond—claimed were trying to take down the camp system. The ones that supposedly hid kids so they couldn’t be taken. I had always assumed they were our generation’s version of a fairy tale. Nothing that good could ever be true.
“We,” Cate said, letting that word sink in before continuing, “are an organization dedicated to helping children affected by the government’s new laws. John Alban—have you heard of him? He was formerly an intelligence adviser to Gray.”
“He started the Children’s League?”
She nodded. “After his daughter died and he realized what was going to happen to the kids who survived, he left D.C. and tried to expose all of the testing that was happening at the camps. The New York Times, the Post, you name it—none of them would run the story, because, by then, things were bad enough that Gray had them under his thumb for ‘national security’ reasons, and the smaller papers folded along with the economy.”
“So . . .” I was trying to wrap my mind around this, wondering if I had misheard her. “So he created the Children’s League to . . . help us?”
Cate’s face lit up in a smile. “Yes, that’s exactly right.”
Then why did you help only me?
The question sprang up like a lone weed; ugly, and deeply rooted. I rubbed a hand over my face, trying to clear the rumblings in my brain, but I couldn’t tear it out. There was a strange feeling rising in my chest that followed—like something heavy was trying to work its way up from my center. It might have been a scream.
“What about the others?” I didn’t recognize my own voice.
“The others? You mean the other children?” Cate’s eyes were focused only on the road in front of us. “They can wait. Their situation wasn’t as pressing as yours was. When the time is right, I’m sure we’ll go back for them, but in the meantime, don’t worry. They’ll live.”
I recoiled almost instantly at her tone more than her words. The way she said that—they’ll live—was so dismissive, I half expected to see a hand come up into the air to wave me off. Don’t worry. Don’t worry at the way they’ve been mistreated, don’t worry about their punishments, don’t worry about the guns constantly trained on their backs. God, I wanted to throw up.
I had left them behind, all of them. I had left Sam, even after I promised we’d get out together. After everything she had done to protect me, I had just left her there. . . .
“Oh—no, Ruby. I’m sorry, I didn’t even realize how that would sound,” she said, turning back and forth between me and the road. “I just meant . . . I don’t even know what I’m saying. I was there for weeks, and I still can’t begin to imagine what it must have been like. I shouldn’t act like I know what you went through.”
“I just—I left them,” I told her, and it didn’t matter that my voice was breaking, or that my hands had come up to clutch my elbows to keep from grabbing her. “Why did you only take me? Why couldn’t you save the others? Why?”
“I told you before,” she said softly. “It had to be you. They would have killed you otherwise. The others aren’t in danger.”
“They’re always in danger,” I said, and wondered if she had stepped a single foot beyond the Infirmary. How could she not have seen? How could she not have heard it, felt it, breathed it in? The air at Thurmond was so coated in fear that you could taste it like vomit at the back of your throat.
It had taken me less than a day in that place to see that hatred and terror came in circles, and that they fed off each other. The PSFs hated us, so they had to make us fear them. And we feared them, which only made us hate them even more. There was an unspoken understanding that we were at Thurmond because of each other. Without the PSFs there would be no camp, but without the Psi freaks there would be no need for PSFs.
So whose fault was it? Everyone’s? No one’s? Ours?
“You should have just left me—you should have taken someone else, someone who was better—they’ll be punished because of this, I know it. They’ll hurt them, and it’s my fault for going, for leaving them behind.” I knew I wasn’t making sense, but I couldn’t seem to connect my thoughts to my tongue. That feeling, the heart-swallowing guilt, the sadness that took hold and never let itself be shaken free—how did you tell someone that? How did you put that into words?
Cate’s lips parted, but no sound came out for several moments. She took a firm hold of the wheel and guided the car over to the side of the road. Her foot came off the gas and she allowed the car to roll to a hesitant stop. When the wheels finally ceased spinning, I reached for the door handle, a spike of total and complete grief cutting through me.
“What are you doing?” Cate asked.
She had pulled over because she wanted me to get out, hadn’t she? I would have done the same thing if our situations had been flipped. I understood.
I leaned back away from her arm as she reached over, but instead of pushing the door open, she slammed it shut and let her fingers linger over my shoulder. I cringed, pressing back against the seat as hard as I could, trying to avoid her touch. This was the worst I’d felt in years—my head was humming, a sure sign I was dangerously close to losing control of it. If she had any thoughts about hugging me, or stroking my arm, or anything my mom would have done, my reaction was more than enough to convince her not to try.
“Listen to me very carefully,” she said, and it didn’t seem to matter to her that at any moment a car or a PSF could come charging up the road. She waited until I was looking her in the eye. “The most important thing you ever did was learn how to survive. Do not let anyone make you feel like you shouldn’t have—like you deserved to be in that camp. You are important, and you matter. You matter to me, you matter to the League, and you matter to the future—” Her voice caught. “I will never hurt you, or yell at you, or let you go hungry. I will protect you for the rest of my life. I will never fully understand what you’ve been through, but I will always listen when you need to get something out. Do you understand?”