Anna circled a hand in front of her face. “See me not laughing.”
At least Camden laughed.
“Here we go,” Orlando crowed as the toy hovercopter sailed over the top of the Titan. “Fifty feet across and we’re —” Loud popping cut off his words.
My dial cut to black and I looked toward the wall. “What happened?”
Along the far side of the ramparts, gun turrets swiveled toward the West, all taking aim at the sputtering hovercopter.
“Get down!” Camden dropped into a crouch as more shots rang out. Anna and I hunkered next to him, but Orlando took off for the door to the stairwell.
“It’s okay,” I whispered. “There’s no way for them to know where the ’copter came from.” Just then a spotlight swooped across the roof of the next building, scouring the shadows as it arced toward us. “Oh, crap. Run!”
Anna and I bolted with Camden at our heels. We dove through the door to the stairwell. Two minutes later, we slipped into the zoo that was Orlando’s living room, acting like we’d been there all along.
Anna and Camden collapsed on the couch laughing. I couldn’t — not with my heart still lodged in my throat. The loud music and press of bodies weren’t helping. There had to be at least twenty-five kids inside the apartment, all face to face and breathing on each other. Some were even kissing. No, not just kissing. Old-fashioned kissing. Actually swapping spit. I couldn’t dig out my hand sanitizer fast enough. Had they slept through every health class we’d ever taken, starting in kindergarten?
A pack of guys charged past me howling like wolves, carrying a laughing girl. “Not on the couch,” Orlando shouted just as they tumbled the girl onto it, shoes and all.
Between the noise and Anna’s vest doubling as a tourniquet, I couldn’t even breathe my way into a zen state. I reached for the top snap, and then noticed Orlando watching me. We’d spent a lot of time online this week, planning our failed venture, but he’d thrown in a couple of cheesy compliments too. Now that we were together for real, I didn’t want him getting the wrong idea. I left the vest snapped and plucked up my dial. With a touch, I deleted the brief recording of the wall — aka incriminating evidence — and then hit record and made a show of filming the party.
I wound my way through the crowd and onto the balcony to see what was happening on the wall. Nothing much. The guards were back in position. They must have found the broken toy and decided it wasn’t worth investigating further. At least, I hoped that’s what they’d decided.
For once I was grateful for the bars that enclosed high-rise balconies. Usually they made me feel like a caged bird, but tonight that cage was helping to keep me from the guards’ view. Our parents liked to call the bars trellises and said that they’d been installed to support climbing vines. Who were they kidding? We knew the cages were yet another safety measure. Were kids really falling off balconies right and left before the plague? Doubtful. But there was no reasoning with a nation of trauma survivors.
“Sorry about your camera.” Orlando joined me by the finely wrought bars.
“That’s okay. It was an old one. I figured it —”
He angled in for a kiss, his mouth on mine before I could think to sidestep him. Now, with the bars at my back and him leaning into me, it was too late. No matter how gently I pushed him off or squirmed away, it would end up awkward and awful. I didn’t want to hurt his feelings; I just didn’t want him exhaling on my cheek or — suddenly his kiss turned wet as he tried to push his tongue into my mouth.
I wrenched my face aside, ducked under his arm, and stepped free.
“What’s wrong?” he asked, sounding more confused than hurt.
I dragged a hand across my lips before facing him. “Sorry,” I said, trying for a light tone. “Reality overload.”
Orlando’s brows drew together, creasing his pale skin. “But all week you —” A siren cut off his words. We stared wide-eyed at each other for a second and then whirled to peer through the balcony cage.
Anna skidded out of the apartment. “Are the line guards coming for us?”
“No way,” Orlando said, though his voice quavered.
The siren screamed closer and then cut off abruptly. The flashing lights lit up the street below. They were not atop a fire truck or police car but a gray van, which meant only one thing….
Orlando slumped against the bars in relief. “It’s a biohaz wagon.”
Six biohazard agents in white jumpsuits burst out of the van and pushed through the building’s gate. Biohaz agents spent their time rounding up serious threats to public health, like contaminated meat and quarantine breakers. They wouldn’t waste their time on a toy hovercopter. The line guards might; the jumpsuits, not a chance.
After a sidelong glance at me, Orlando clearly decided not to pick up the conversation where we’d left off. “Call me if they haul someone out,” he said as he headed back into the apartment. “Their faces crack me up. They never see it coming.”
Anna threw her hands up. “Well, there goes my night.” At my blank look, she added, “My parents.”
Right. Like the rest of the exodus generation, Anna’s parents were massively overprotective. My dad was paranoid too, but he traveled a lot for work, so he couldn’t keep me under constant surveillance. Instead, he signed me up for survival skills classes. As if knowing how to make a basket out of bark would keep me alive if there was another outbreak.
“The jumpsuits are probably after a fetch,” I said, feeling a twitch of excitement. Almost no one fetched stuff anymore, even though plenty of people would pay top dollar to have a beloved item retrieved from the East. But these days you had to be desperate or demented to risk sneaking across the quarantine line. “Biohaz agents hunt down felons. Nobody you would have come in contact with.”
“Are you using logic?” Anna demanded.
“Oh, right.” I smiled. “Silly me.”
She glared at the people gathering on the sidewalk. Many had taken out their dials to report the big event to friends or record the poor quarantine breaker’s walk of shame.
“I may as well leave now,” she grouched. “This is going to hit the Web before the jumpsuits even get the guy in the van.”
And once his face got plastered across the news outlets, anyone who’d ever crossed his path would storm into an ER and demand a blood test. “I’ll go too,” I told her. “I need to get home and feed the gang.”
She gave me a faint smile. “Your pets can go an hour without you. Stay. One of us should get to live a little.”
A voice from inside the living room shouted, “Turn down the music! Someone’s banging on the door.”
They sure were. So loudly we could hear it out on the balcony. The music shut off abruptly.
“Hey, who said —” Orlando’s shout was obliterated by the bang of the door opening, followed by a girl’s scream.
“Don’t move!” ordered a male voice.
Anna and I exchanged an alarmed look and rushed into the living room.
“I said, nobody move!” Agents in paper-thin jumpsuits and disposable face masks fanned out across the room. Only their eyes were visible. Not that we needed to see more to know that they meant business.
When Anna slipped an arm through mine, I shot her a sympathetic look. Knowing her parents, they weren’t going to let her out of their apartment for the next year after this.
“It was just a toy hovercopter,” Orlando said weakly. “We didn’t —”
A jumpsuit stopped in front of him. “Is this your home?”
Orlando’s nod was barely perceptible.
“We’re here to collect Delaney Park McEvoy,” the jumpsuit said. “Point her out.”
My vision blurred into a single white smear at the end of a long tunnel. Delaney Park McEvoy — me. They’d come for me. But why? I’d never been anywhere. Biohaz squads rounded up line crossers and criminals, not a homebody who spent her Saturday nights editing shorts about the local animal shelter.