My chest hurt, thinking about all this. I’d been a bad sister. I hadn’t meant to be. But I’d been so caught up with being good for the cell that I hadn’t even noticed I’d let Becca down.
Now it was almost dark, and I was out by the boundary gate.
“You shouldn’t be here.” Nathaniel Allen crossed his arms over his chest, long legs supporting the moped he sat on.
“Look who’s talking,” I retorted, and raised my ma’s field glasses to peer into the distance.
“You’re too close to the Boundary,” he pointed out unnecessarily.
“Oh, really? Is that what all the barbed wire is about?” I scanned the horizon, peering as far down the boundary road as I could. I’d been good for so long. All my life. Even extra good, like I had to make up for my ma and my pa. But being good wouldn’t help me find Becca. If I wanted to find my sister, I was going to have to start breaking rules.
I lowered the glasses with a sigh. All I could see from here was bare dirt, rocks, and tire treads.
“And you’re loaded for bear,” Nathaniel observed, gesturing to my pa’s hunting rifle. “What are you even looking for?”
I knew now that he wasn’t my enemy. He was just extremely closely related to my enemy. But that wasn’t his fault.
“A guy named Taylor told me that he and Becca had been playing chicken out on the boundary road, the night she disappeared,” I told him. Nathaniel looked convincingly shocked. “In my truck, I might add. So I’ve been searching along the boundary, hoping to at least find my truck—and maybe some clues about what happened to Becca.”
“Jeez,” Nathaniel said. “I had no idea she was doing stuff like that.”
I frowned at him. “Why would you have any idea of anything she was doing?”
He gave me a too-patient look that I’d seen him use on teachers. It made me want to sock him in the jaw. “Becca was an Outsider. We told you.”
My eyes narrowed. “Yeah, you told me, but hang on: she hated you. And you were an asshole to her at school. I saw you.”
Nathaniel grinned, and I blinked at how different it made him look. “That was so fun,” he said. “We had to keep our cover up. It was hard to be such a prick without falling over laughing.”
I digested this information. “I bet. Anyway, what—”
“Oops, one sec,” he said, and held up a finger. A small radio was duct-taped to his moped, and now he fiddled with its dial until he got a clear signal. “Time for the daily rant.”
It was 6:00, when the main edition of Cell News aired.
“There has been more bad citizen activity from the Outsiders,” our newscaster announced. “Provost Allen is here with encouraging words. Provost?”
“What is happening to our community?” the Provost asked. “What are we?”
Voices in the background cried, “Stronger United!”
The Provost went on, “Exactly! Our cell works, and is the best cell ever, because we are united. We are one. We support each other. So what is happening with these so-called Outsiders? Their very name means they’re outside of being united! They are not of us! They are choosing to not participate in our cell! Do we have the time for that? Do we have the space for that? Do we have the resources for that?”
The voices in the background cried, “No!”
“If you’re not with us,” said the Provost, “then you’re against us!”
The crowd in the news station booed.
“My friends, we must hunt them down,” said the Provost. “We must discover who these Outsiders are, and we must put them outside of our cell—our happy, united cell.”
“Yes!” cried the people.
“Oh, my God!” I said, and ripped the little radio off his moped. “I can’t listen to this!” With the right arm that won our middle-school baseball championship, I heaved the radio as far out into the boundary as I could.
“Hey!” Nathaniel said. “That was my radio!”
I raised my pa’s rifle to my shoulder and took aim. Bam! “Now it’s dust,” I said, and lowered the gun.