Rebel Nation by Shaunta Grimes Page A

Clover rocked back against the couch arm. She’d done it so many times before that she’d worn a groove where her body fit perfectly. Mango wiggled in closer to her and leaned his heavy body against her legs. “Stop it. Stop it.”
    â€œClover,” Jude said, softly. “Look at me.”
    She opened her eyes, but covered her ears with her hands. Her breaths came hard, like stones falling down her throat. Leanne was warning Jude. She knew his name when they’d seen her on the street. “He’s going to kill you.”
    Jude waited until she lowered her hands. “I’m not going to die. I’m teaching them how to protect themselves, that’s all.”
    â€œI’m not planning on dying, either,” Leanne said, firmly. “Certainly not by execution. Now that I know, it changes everything.”
    â€œYou might get killed for helping me get away from Bennett.” Just a few weeks ago, Clover would have been upset at the idea of leaving school. It was all she’d wanted, what she’d worked for as long as she could remember. Suddenly none of that mattered. She hadn’t come back to the city to sit in classes that didn’t mean anything—nothing at all—to her anymore. “And he’ll figure it out. He’ll realize, eventually, that Jude is my friend and that he’s the one helping those kids.”
    â€œLike I said, now that we know”—Leanne looked at Clover, then Jude—“it changes everything. I don’t know if I’ll be executed. Maybe I won’t get caught, if I know it’s supposed to happen. I’ll be more careful. I’ll do something differently than I would have otherwise. And the two of you can change things, too.”
    â€œWhat exactly do you think we should do?” Jude asked.
    â€œLeave. Get back out of the city.”
    Clover felt Jude tense beside her, and said, “That won’t be so easy a second time. It wasn’t that easy the first time.”
    Leanne pulled her hair back from her face and used a rubber band from around her wrist to secure it in a messy bun at the back of her neck. She was fidgety, which Clover translated into nervous. “I have an idea for getting the two of you out of the city.”
    â€œI should go to work for Bennett.” Clover lifted a hand when Jude opened his mouth. “No, I’m serious. This is what we came back for, to do something important. Sitting in those stupid classes—”
    â€œShut up,” Jude said. “Just stop.”
    An awkward silence filled the room while Clover and Jude looked at each other.
    â€œWhat’s your idea?” Jude asked Leanne, without looking away from Clover.
    â€œI don’t know how you got out before.” She waited again. That was starting to get to Clover, and she wondered if Isaiah had done the same thing to Bridget. “But I do know you’re not going to get through the gates again. Not now.”
    â€œWe figured that much out already,” Jude said.
    â€œThe wall crosses over the river, almost like a bridge.”
    As soon as Leanne said it, Clover saw the place where the wall bridged the river. Not just the concrete stretching from bank to bank, but the water rushing under it, frothy and white where the current crashed over the rocks. “You want us to go under the wall?”
    â€œCan you think of another way?”
    She tried. She pressed her forehead to her knees and rocked back against the couch, and brought up everything in her mental files about the wall. The shape of it, curved like a giant C so that it bulged outside and went concave inside, made climbing it impossible. The only door was the gate, which they’d already breached once. They’d never make it through that way again. Bennett wouldn’t allow it. “Not off the top of my head. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. We aren’t going.”
    â€œWe are going,” Jude said.