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  Wade laughed at Faith’s determination to see the bright side of a plan that had been doomed from the start, and it was all he could do not to keep up the debate.

  They’d come close enough to the far end of the hall for Faith to see something sitting on the floor in the murky light. She couldn’t tell what it was until they’d arrived right next to it.

  “Where’d you get that thing?”

  “I built it!” Wade said, sounding more excited than Faith had ever heard him before.

  “Why?” Faith asked.

  Wade pointed down the endless hallway.

  “Because I wanted to put this exceptionally empty hall to some good use.”

  A four-wheeled contraption that could be laughingly called a go-cart sat on the floor. There were wheels and axles and two makeshift seats to sit on, one behind the other. The steering wheel was two sizes too big for the rest of the cart and looked like it had been pulled off a 1950s pickup truck. There was clearly nothing to propel the object down the hall. No engine or pedals. As silly as this thing was, Faith was oddly excited to get inside and ride.

  “How many girls have you brought in here to ride in your jalopy?”

  Wade presented her with his most smoldering look, and before he could answer, Faith was laughing. The truth was, she didn’t really want him to address the question. “You push; I’ll go first,” she said, hoping her willingness to play along would impress him. Maybe he had brought other girls here; but for this one moment, he was all hers, and she was determined to make the most of it.

  “Hang on a second; I need to prepare it for launch.”

  “Launch?”

  Wade didn’t answer, but as he went to work, Faith began to realize how the cart really worked. She watched as Wade attached two long bungee cords, one to each side. The other ends of the cords were tied to doorknobs on either side of the hallway.

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “Done it a hundred times and only crashed twice,” Wade said as he pulled off his shoes and threw them in a metal box welded to the frame. He took out a set of tennis shoes and quickly slipped them on, then began pushing the cart from the front end.

  “Glued Velcro to the bottom of these babies. Pretty cool, right?”

  Faith was thinking that if Liz were here, they’d both be debating who was the bigger geek: Hawk or Wade. He’d installed a strip of Velcro tape down the middle of the floor so he wouldn’t slide around, and with each step he took, Faith could hear his shoes ripping away. She was terrified he’d let go and the cart would careen out of control, running her over and killing her in the process. There was nowhere to hide, so instead she ran and jumped over the cord on one side and watched as she stood pinned against the back of the hallway.

  “Wade, I don’t think I’m going to do this. I just don’t see it happening.”

  He was getting close to the wall, and Faith was having a hard time not focusing on how powerful he was. He was really leaning into the effort, the muscles in his legs and arms tightening with every step he took. When he reached the wall, there was a clicking sound, and he let go.

  “Don’t!” Faith yelled as he stood there, hands on his hips, catching his breath. She expected the cart to blow right over him and break his legs; but it stayed firm, the cords at its sides as tight as a high wire. Wade leaned down and plucked the cord like a guitar string, and a murky, echoing sound filled the hall.

  “No worries, she’s locked and loaded.”

  “You’re crazy if you think I’m getting in that thing.”

  “Suit yourself. But you don’t know what you’re missing.”

  Wade jumped over the cord on the right side and took out his Tablet, snapping it from small to large. There were windows high up on the back wall, and as Wade walked toward Faith, the golden light moved across his face. He turned and gazed down the long, darkened hallway, then tapped something into his Tablet. A long line of tiny lights lit up along each side, which made the corridor look like a runway for an airplane.

  “You really know how to impress a girl,” Faith said. As goofy and dangerous as it all was, it was also pretty romantic.

  “I do try,” Wade offered. “And I promise, it’s totally safe. Fast, but safe. I’ve had thirty-seven crash-free launches in a row.”

  Faith found herself short of breath. Was she really considering this madness? She imagined one of the wheels falling off, the way it would feel when she hit the first locker. She would die in a hallway go-cart accident. It would take weeks for them to find her dead body; and when they did, they’d all say what an idiot she was. But then she imagined Wade sitting in the front seat, her arms wrapped around him like the two of them were on a motorcycle riding into the sunset, and she lost all hope of ever getting out of the building without first being flung down the tunnel of love.

  “This is so Titanic,” Faith said as she settled into the backseat. “You know, that scene in the old movie where they sit in the car and fog up the windows?”

  “Too bad we don’t have any windows. I’ll work on that.”

  Faith imagined all the broken glass in a high-speed crash and thought better of the idea.

  “It’s okay; I like the open air. Keep it this way.”

  Wade Quinn sat in front of her, and she realized how wide and strong his back was. Tall people were misleading that way. It was easy to focus on their height and forget about how much it took to fill in the endless space along their spines.

  “You’re going to want to hold on for this,” Wade said, inviting her to wrap her arms all the way around his chest and hold on. Her hands were shaking so badly it was embarrassing, but she couldn’t stop. The crazy energy of the moment was pulsing through every part of her. Wade fished around under his shirt, trying to get a hold of something; but Faith had closed her eyes and leaned the side of her face into his wide back. She didn’t see when he pulled out a necklace on a thin gold chain. She didn’t see as he looked at the plastic beads strung on the chain and typed the code into his Tablet. The Wire Code would only work once, Wade knew, and later he would take off the beads and melt them down over a flame so they couldn’t be traced back to him.

  “Listen, Faith. I know you’re nervous and all. This will make it easier, and a lot more fun.”

  Faith didn’t have any idea what Wade was talking about, but she lifted her head, feeling his blond hair slide across her face. He leaned to one side and looked at her, holding his Tablet where she could see.

  “What’s that?” she asked; but before she could get an answer, Faith Daniels was looking into Wade’s Tablet, consuming her first Wire Code. The screen was jittery and filled with strange light. Her consciousness shifted; all her senses were heightened. She could smell Wade’s cologne full but distant; she could taste his lips and feel her tongue sliding along his slick teeth. Were they kissing? She thought they were, but then the cart was moving, and her senses burst awake with colors and light. They were careening down the narrow hallway at forty miles per hour. Faith was in love with this moment, out of control and not caring, pulling Wade close, her hands around his chest as he laughed loudly and happily. She lifted her head off Wade’s back and tried to peer around his shoulder. It looked like they had left the ground, but that couldn’t be right. If she was flying then she was flying; that was fine with her. She took Wade’s head in her hands, spun his face around, and kissed him. The wind tangled their hair together, and she let her hand slip down to his neck.

  “Hold that thought,” Wade said, pulling away and smiling as he quickly turned forward. There was a sharp movement to one side like they’d nearly crashed into a wall, and Faith laughed, reeling back in her seat and holding on to Wade with one hand as if he were a bull she was riding into a rodeo ring. Wade applied some brake, and the cart slowed, then stopped ten feet shy of the concrete wall at the end of the corridor.

  “Let’s do it again!” Faith yelled. It was all she wanted in the world. She wanted to be shot down an empty hallway on bungee cords and kiss unti
l the sun went down, but that dream was not to be. “Don’t move, Faith,” Wade said. “No matter what happens, stay right where you are. Understand?”

  Wade was whispering to her, staring her in the face like all hell was about to break loose. It scared her, so she leaned in and kissed him again, searching for something to take away the terror that was welling up in her mind. The terror came from a sound they both heard. It was a known sound in the outside world, a sound designed to make people cut a path for the approaching menace.

  Ping. Ping. Ping.

  You could always hear the Drifters coming. They didn’t want to encounter anyone they didn’t need to and preferred to be left alone. It was part of their code, their cultish reasoning. They would never succumb to the States, no matter the cost, and this had turned them secretive about their business. They reminded Faith of the Hell’s Angels, an old motorcycle gang she’d read about that had long since vanished off the face of the earth. The State hadn’t exactly banned weapons on the outside, but the only weapons that remained were leftovers from an earlier, more violent age. And Faith had the feeling they dressed as they did not only to hide weapons, but also to send a message: We are here to stay. We’re not going inside the State. Ever. They traveled in packs of ten or twenty, lived off the land, were thought to be violent and dangerous.

  Ping. Ping. Ping.

  Faith heard the sound again. She understood what it was: someone in the group was tapping a Coin against an empty tin can. But in her current condition, the sound had a bottomless echo that lurched closer like a demon. The fun and games had passed; the Wire Code had turned dark and menacing.

  She would later try to remember what had happened and conclude that she had entered into some kind of twisted nightmare. She saw them appear in the corridor from behind a door, where they must have been staying as they passed through the area. It was scary to think they’d settled in on school grounds, but it made some sense. No one would have thought to look for Drifters at a high school. Faith remembered the tattered eagle emblazoned on their long trench coats, their tangled hair, the sawed-off shotgun barrels pointing at the floor. Those were their trademarks.

  There was a lot of screaming in the hallway, but if she had been in her right mind, she would have understood that the screams had been mostly her own. She screamed because the Drifters were being thrown down the hallway like rag dolls. They were bouncing off lockers and breaking through the square sections of glass in doorways. Her senses zeroed in on one Drifter who appeared to be a woman. She was slamming into one wall of lockers, then she was slamming into the lockers on the other side of the hallway with lightning speed; back and forth, faster and faster, her body destroyed before Faith’s eyes.

  Three hours later she awoke from a deep sleep in her own bed. She was breathing heavily, a bead of sweat running down her exposed collarbone. Something moved in the room; but it was dark, and she couldn’t see what it was. Faith felt a deep sadness welling up inside her, but she couldn’t understand why. The last thing she could remember about the events of that night was the exposed forearm of a man, a Drifter fallen and silent on the cold floor in front of her. And on that arm, looking up at her, was the tattered eagle on the branch, the tattooed symbol of the Drifters. It was the image of a powerful bird lost in a broken world, ever defiant against a coming evil.

  She felt the tears running down her cheeks and cried silently. After a time, so heavy and tired, she floated back into a deep sleep and didn’t wake again until the next morning.

  If Faith had turned to her right and looked out her window, she would have seen that someone was watching her, wondering why she was so sad, hoping there was enough time to make things right.

  Chapter 6

  How Do You Say Good-bye?

  Liz’s obsessive hand-holding started after Noah left for the Western State. She had always been an unusually tactile sort of person. She loved the way things felt in her hands more than the way things tasted or smelled or looked. Smelling a rose, for Liz, was nothing compared to the sheer bliss of removing one of its bloodred petals and rubbing its velvety surface between her thumb and finger. To taste an apple was fine; but to feel its cool, slick skin against the side of her face as it glided back and forth, that was the really sweet part of an apple for Liz Brinn.

  Before meeting Noah she had long since made her dating decisions based on the way the other person felt in her hands. She would succumb to an invitation to go for a walk or watch a movie and find herself wondering from the very beginning what it would feel like to run her hand along the knuckles of the fresh, new hand that had arrived in her hemisphere.

  “I read palms,” Liz would say within ten minutes of meeting a guy. “I’m really good at it. Wanna see?”

  She had come to find this lie particularly useful given her curiosities, if not devastating for her reputation. By sophomore year she was jokingly referred to as a mystical witch creature from the Black Forest who could transform into a unicorn, a sphinx, or a boy-eating monster.

  It was inevitable that her long search would finally lead to Noah Logan, who was in possession of a pair of hands that were softer than a baby’s bottom. Liz couldn’t stop touching Noah’s hands morning, noon, and night. It was his best feature; but he also had touchable, wispy brown hair and a striking smile. She’d wander the halls of school, searching for those hands so she could feel them soft against her skin. Sometimes when they kissed, he touched the exposed part of her lower back with his fingers, and she would shiver, delighted at the electric energy he produced. He had the dreamiest sleepy eyes, always asking her to his room, where she could feel his touch all over her body as much as she wanted.

  Noah had a gentle personality that matched the hands, something Liz found unbelievably attractive. Everything about Noah was tender, from the way he touched her to all the words that he spoke. She was so completely head over heels for this boy that it nearly killed her when he was suddenly gone. It was like a violent storm had blown through and carried Noah up into the sky and far away. He simply vanished one day. That was the way it happened when people went to one of the States. It was like they’d never existed to begin with, and it usually happened without warning.

  His departure, so sudden and final, broke something inside of Liz Brinn. She wasn’t the same after he left. She was fragile, the softness she loved having turned against her in the end. Faith was the only friend who remained, and Liz needed her to fill the emotional emptiness. And so they held hands a lot. Once or twice Liz’s feelings had gotten confused, and she wondered if what she’d really wanted all along was the softness of another girl; but it always passed like a soft breeze. She liked boys; this much she was sure of. She simply liked them best if they were soft, and there would never be another boy who could measure up to Noah Logan in that department. “Why do you think he didn’t say good-bye?” Liz had asked Faith many times, often while they walked aimlessly.

  “Maybe he didn’t want to say anything that might hurt you. He was funny that way. It wasn’t in him to hurt people.”

  This made sense to Liz; but it revealed a possible cowardice in the person she had chosen, and this bothered her.

  “I think it was just sudden. He didn’t have time to tell me or he would have.”

  “You’re right. It happens that way if the parents decide to go. First they shut down the Tablets, then the white van arrives.”

  Unmarked white vans with no windows drove around the outside day and night. They were drones—no one drove them—powered by solar cells atop their roofs, ever waiting for someone to summon them. All a person had to do was contact one of the States, say they were ready to leave the outside world, and wait. A white van would arrive, sometimes within minutes, to whisk them away to a new life.

  White vans were easy to spot but eerily quiet because they were all electric. Liz had nearly been killed once when she’d walked in front of one while staring at her Tablet. The van swerved and missed Liz, but it ran over the Tablet. Four hours later the Table
t had repaired itself, or been “reengineered.” That was one of the amazing things about Tablets. Not only could they stretch and snap into different sizes, they could regenerate. Like a cut finger, a broken Tablet could heal itself. Hawk had said it best: “It’s a simple matter of biomechanics and technology converging. What’s not to understand?”

  Liz held on to Faith’s view of things, that the white van had found Noah’s family so fast there had been no time for good-byes, because any other version of events was too heartbreaking to bear. And it really did go down that way sometimes. Liz had seen it happen more than once. At first she thought it was terrible the way her friends would leave without a word, not even a final farewell in the form of a Tablet message. It wasn’t until this had happened twice that her mother told her not to worry.

  “This is the way it works, Lizzy. There’s a lot of talk about leaving or staying, but when the decision is made and a family makes that call, the Tablets get shut off. A few minutes later they’re picked up. It’s exciting, sort of. And they’re not gone forever. They’ve only moved away. Remember that.”

  Liz seized on this important piece of information as well. It was one of the most persuasive reasons to leave the old world behind: Noah was inside the Western State, waiting for her. And not just Noah; everyone was in there having the time of their lives, and they were communicating about it. They had Tablets, but they were tied into the G12, a network no one on the outside had access to. She had a fantasy that Noah was sending out distress signals, trying to find her, waiting for her impending arrival like his life depended on it.

  Seeing Faith talk to someone like Wade Quinn made Liz wonder how long it would be before her best friend had her heart broken. How long did Faith think someone like Wade was going to last outside? What was he even doing out here so late in the game? Liz knew, better than anyone, that it wouldn’t be long. Once Wade went to the Field Games in the Western State, he’d never come back. It was a virtual guarantee. What was Faith thinking getting into a relationship with a guy like that? He was a short-timer with only one thing on his mind.