Free Children of the Underground by Trevor Shane Page B

identification on her before the fire. She’d had enough experience being forced to stand up and run without having time to gather her things that she learned to always keep everything within reach at all times. Sleeping with empty pockets or without her hand curled around the strap of a duffel bag were luxuries Addy had nearly forgotten. Evan had never learned those lessons. He grew up innocent, free from the running and the paranoia. Unlike Addy, when Addy and Evan ran from the burning house, Evan left everything behind. Addy prayed that Evan’s cell phone and ID melted into the ground as the house burned down. Addy hoped that Evan could still have what she knew she would never have: the chance to disappear into the world without having to be afraid of every stranger he walked near for the rest of his life. His only chance was to remain anonymous. If they found his wallet, that chance was lost. He would be a marked man, just like the rest of them.
    Sitting on the beach, Addy checked her e-mail on her phone. She’d checked it a few times already during the car ride up to Santa Barbara. When Evan found out that Addy still had her phone, he could barely contain his excitement. He saw the phone and assumed that Addy could simply call for help. The phone, Evan thought, would be their savoir. What Addy knew that Evan didn’t understand was that it doesn’t help to be connected to a world you don’t belong to. People in Addy’s world didn’t give each other their phone numbers. They didn’t text each other about how their days were going. It was too dangerous. Everything was monitored. Everything was tapped. Addy knew that her phone would not be their savoir. It was only a tool. They would have to save themselves.
    Addy looked down at her phone. She still didn’t have any messages. She didn’t expect to. Addy was almost certain that everyone in the world who knew how to contact her had died in the raid. She didn’t know how to contact anyone that she knew was still alive either. She kept checking her e-mail anyway, hoping for a miracle. Since her e-mail was still empty and Evan still asleep, Addy took the opportunity to see if she could find any clues about what had happened the night before in Los Angeles. She didn’t want to look while Evan was awake. She wanted to see if she could find anything first. She was used to scanning the news for coded language about the War. She was good at deciphering the misinformation and the cover-ups. It was like a cipher. What Addy expected to find was a story buried deep beneath the headlines about an electrical fire in a small house in central L.A. or a freak accident at a meth lab. The information she’d found before had always been buried. She always had to dig. She didn’t think this story would be different. She never expected to see Evan’s picture on the top of every Web site she went to looking for news.
    She read. The headlines were all a derivation of the same thing:
TERRORIST GROUPS RAIDED
or
DEADLY TERRORIST GROUP STING.
Addy’s worst fears were confirmed. Their house wasn’t the only one that had been raided. Three separate SWAT team raids had taken place across Los Angeles. The raids were coordinated. At least twenty-eight people were killed. It didn’t mention how many were taken into custody. Addy felt sick. The queasiness in her stomach grew with each word. It wasn’t the facts—the three raids, that it was an actual SWAT team, even the twenty-eight dead—that frightened Addy the most. What scared her the most was the simple fact that the story was everywhere in big, bold letters. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. The War wasn’t supposed to be out in the open like this. Nothing was hidden. Nothing had been covered up. Either the raids had nothing to do with the War—and Addy knew that wasn’t possible—or someone wasn’t playing fair anymore. Addy kept clicking