The Q Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Text copyright © 2022 by Amy Tintera

  Cover art copyright © 2022 by Robert Ball

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Crown Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  Crown and the colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available upon request.

  ISBN 978-0-593-48617-7 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-593-48618-4 (lib. bdg.) — ISBN 978-0-593-48619-1 (ebook)

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1: Radio Quarantine with Hadley Lopez

  Chapter 2: Lennon

  Chapter 3: Maisie

  Chapter 4: Lennon

  Chapter 5: Maisie

  Chapter 6: Lennon

  Chapter 7: Maisie

  Chapter 8: Lennon

  Chapter 9: Maisie

  Chapter 10: Lennon

  Chapter 11: Maisie

  Chapter 12: Lennon

  Chapter 13: Maisie

  Chapter 14: Lennon

  Chapter 15: Maisie

  Chapter 16: Lennon

  Chapter 17: Maisie

  Chapter 18: Lennon

  Chapter 19: Maisie

  Chapter 20: Lennon

  Chapter 21: Maisie

  Chapter 22: Lennon

  Chapter 23: Maisie

  Chapter 24: Lennon

  Chapter 25: Maisie

  Chapter 26: Lennon

  Chapter 27: Maisie

  Chapter 28: Lennon

  Chapter 29: Maisie

  Chapter 30: Lennon

  Chapter 31: Maisie

  Chapter 32: Lennon

  Chapter 33: Maisie

  Chapter 34: Lennon

  Chapter 35: Maisie

  Chapter 36: Lennon

  Chapter 37: Maisie

  Chapter 38: Lennon

  Chapter 39: Maisie

  Chapter 40: Lennon

  Chapter 41: Maisie

  Chapter 42: Lennon

  Chapter 43: Maisie

  Chapter 44: Lennon

  Chapter 45: Maisie

  Chapter 46: Lennon

  Chapter 47: Maisie

  Chapter 48: Lennon

  Chapter 49: Maisie

  Chapter 50: Lennon

  Chapter 51: Maisie

  Chapter 52: Lennon

  Chapter 53: Weekly Update with Maisie Rojas

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  RADIO QUARANTINE WITH HADLEY LOPEZ

  Special Joint US/Quarantine Zone Broadcast

  HI, KIDS, THIS is Maisie Rojas, coming to you live from the Q.

  That’s right, I’m inside the quarantine zone right now. I was born here, actually, eighteen years ago, when all of you were just a twinkle in your parents’ eyes.

  Hadley Lopez was kind enough to let me jump on her program today, so don’t worry, all you Q listeners. Your girl will be back shortly.

  I’m here today because schools in the good ol’ US of A are trying a new thing this year, letting some of us inside the Q record a segment for you guys as part of your history lessons. Which is cool, I guess. I mean, I always thought school was boring as hell, but maybe I can spice things up a bit for you. And for those of you in the Q, we thought we’d broadcast this to you live, just for fun. If you don’t like it, turn it off! I don’t care.

  So! They want me to tell you a little about the history of the Q, from my perspective. I told them it was probably a bad idea to let me do this, but here we are. No one can say I didn’t warn you.

  All right, they told me to start at the beginning, which I think you all already know, but whatever. They said they want to hear my version of events. So here we go.

  There was a virus, and it was bad. Death, sadness, et cetera.

  I’m probably supposed to tell you some science stuff here, but I slept through those classes. You have the internet out there, don’t you? You can look it up.

  Anyway, this virus started in Austin, Texas, which I hear was a pretty nice place back in the day. It quickly spread to Houston and Dallas and some other places I forgot. The US government, which had dealt with two major pandemics in the past twenty years, was like, “Yo, we got this, we got this.”

  They built a massive quarantine zone around Austin and started shuttling all the sick people over there. Everyone without symptoms went to a separate quarantine zone.

  Problem was, a lot of people couldn’t get out of the Austin quarantine zone, even if they weren’t sick yet. Some people, like my parents, didn’t have a car and couldn’t catch one of the buses because there weren’t nearly enough. You had to, like, fight to the death to get on one of those buses, and my parents weren’t about that life.

  Your history classes will probably teach you that it was just the unlucky people or the stupid ones who stuck around and caught the virus, but that’s a load of shit. It was mostly just the poor people.

  Wait, Hadley is holding up a piece of paper telling me I can’t say “shit.” Well, fu…dge. I’ll try to clean up the language, kids.

  Right, so we have this quarantine zone with all the sick people, and it’s a real bummer in there, because it turns out that the virus has a 40 percent mortality rate.

  On the upside, the president of the United States has become a damn hero for containing the virus before it spread outside of Texas and killed half the world’s population. Good for him, I guess.

  Meanwhile, the 60 percent who lived and were still in the Q were like, “Hey, are we getting out of here or what?”

  Spoiler alert: they did not get out.

  Because, bad news—this virus does not provide long-term immunity to people who get infected with it. Which meant everyone inside the Q kept getting sick, over and over, and no one could develop an effective vaccine because the virus kept mutating. On the plus side, the mortality rate kept getting better, so people weren’t dropping dead left and right anymore.

  People started to try to escape the Q, which did not go great for them. President Howard was like, “Yo, that’s not cool,” and built a huge-ass wall around the whole Q to keep us all in.

  He said it made people feel safer while they worked on a vaccine. Dude had to do something—it was an election year!

  He won, by t
he way.

  Inside, everything went to hell. Laws didn’t apply anymore. All the military and law enforcement we had in here peaced out and stopped showing up for work. Which, fair enough, considering they hadn’t been paid for like a year.

  Eventually, the Q seceded from the US and we figured things out ourselves. Now the Q is ruled by two gangs—or families, as we usually refer to ourselves—the Spencers up north and the Lopez family down south. The Spencers are jerks and the Lopezes are geniuses who figured out the artificial organs that are keeping all our asses alive.

  Oh wait, now Hadley is telling me to stop because she thinks I’ve broken too many of their arbitrary rules.

  Well, for all of you still listening up here in the Q, I will end this history lesson because history is boring as shit.

  Let’s get to the good stuff.

  LENNON

  THIS WAS NOT the first time Lennon Pierce had been kidnapped.

  The first time was fifteen years earlier. He had no memory of it, but when he was four years old, he apparently wandered away from his parents at the farmers market. A woman had given him a cookie, scooped him up, and made a beeline for the parking lot.

  His mom saw the kidnapper just in time, started screaming, and chased the woman down. According to his parents, he’d been completely unfazed by the whole thing. He was happily eating his cookie when his mom snatched him back from the stranger.

  Later, the would-be kidnapper claimed she didn’t know that the young boy was the son of a congressman. She’d just thought he was cute.

  She never gave much more of an explanation than that, which had always baffled Lennon. Impulse-kidnapping a small child just because you liked his chubby cheeks didn’t make a whole lot of sense.

  This was not an impulse kidnapping. He’d glimpsed the bodies of his two secret service agents before the kidnappers had tied a blindfold over his eyes.

  He was in some deep shit this time.

  He’d lost track of how long he’d been in the van. For a while, he’d been able to see hints of sun from the bottom edge of his blindfold, if he tilted his head up. It had been a relief, because there’d been nothing but darkness since they grabbed him from a gas station.

  But now it was dark again, and he could have sworn he’d been on this bumpy ride for at least two days. But that couldn’t be right.

  His hands were cuffed behind his back. Everything ached. His wrists, where the cuffs dug in; his back; his ass, from sitting on the hard floor. They could have at least let him sit on a seat. Maybe this vehicle didn’t have them.

  His stomach rumbled. They’d given him a few sips of water but no food, and he felt weak. He’d considered running, the first day. Or fighting back, when he got the chance. Now he was pretty sure that would not go so well.

  The vehicle screeched to a stop so suddenly that he toppled over onto his side. He stayed there, listening to the sounds of two doors slamming shut.

  Another door opened. Someone grabbed his ankle. He heard a snap as they cut off the plastic tie.

  “Get out,” a male voice said. Southern accent. They’d taken him from Georgia, but Lennon had no way to know if the accent was local to the area. He was from Los Angeles. Everyone down here sounded the same to him.

  Fucking Georgia. He’d told his dad that his time was better spent in one of the Rust Belt states, but the senator had insisted.

  Georgia’s going to turn our way, I just know it, his dad had said, overly optimistic as usual.

  Actually, maybe it would now. Nothing drummed up sympathy for a candidate like having their only son kidnapped.

  Lennon briefly wondered—hopefully—if maybe his dad’s campaign had done this. A sympathy kidnapping! Not a bad idea, come to think of it.

  No, his dad’s campaign manager would have come up with a much posher kidnapping. They would have locked him up in a nice apartment. There would have been food, at least. Cal Franklin would absolutely kidnap someone to win an election, but he’d do so with a smile and a bottle of champagne.

  “Out! Now!” the Southern accent yelled.

  Lennon struggled to sit up and then scooted forward until his legs hit air. He planted them on the ground and stood, slowly.

  “Can I have some more water?” he asked. They hadn’t gagged him. There probably wasn’t anyone around to hear him scream.

  “No. We’re almost there.”

  Where? He wasn’t stupid enough to actually expect an answer, so he didn’t ask.

  The blindfold was yanked off, and he blinked and squinted in the sudden light. It was morning, the sun rising directly in front of him.

  They were at an airplane hangar. A small plane sat not far away.

  Screw his hunger and weak limbs. He was not getting on a plane to be dropped off in some foreign country.

  He took off running.

  He made it three whole steps before one of the men dropped him flat on his ass.

  He gasped as he hit the ground. The bearded face of a man appeared above him as he rolled over.

  “Don’t be a pain in my ass and make me drag you to the plane,” he said. No Southern accent. This one could have been from anywhere in America.

  It seemed like a bad sign that they weren’t wearing masks. Lennon tried to memorize their faces.

  The other man roughly dragged Lennon to his feet. He screamed, and his voice cracked. If there were manliness awards for kidnap victims, he wasn’t getting one.

  He made the men drag him. He was nothing if not a pain in the ass.

  They wrestled him up the steps and into the small plane. There were only four seats, facing each other on either side. The bearded guy shoved him into one and strapped him in.

  “I’m not flying this thing until you put his blindfold back on,” a new male voice said.

  Well, at least someone had hope that he was going to get out of this situation one day.

  They tied the fabric around his eyes. Everything was dark again.

  * * *

  —

  They were up in the air. Lennon was trying to think how much fuel a plane like this could hold. How far could they make it? Did they have a way to get out of the country? The FAA didn’t just let people fly wherever they pleased.

  “Now,” the Southern accent said. He sounded nervous, for the first time. “He needs to get out now.”

  Get out? Of the plane? They were still in the air.

  Someone grabbed him and yanked him out of the seat. His handcuffs snapped off. His wrists screamed in relief.

  “You’ve skydived before, right?” another man asked. “I read in an article that you skydived. Real daredevil type.”

  His mouth was too dry to speak. “Uh…” He had skydived, once. Strapped to an instructor.

  They were attaching something to his back.

  “You just pull to open the parachute,” the Southern accent said. “Before you get too close to the ground.”

  There had been a lot more instructions than “before you get too close to the ground” when he had gone skydiving. He suddenly couldn’t remember a single one of them.

  Several hands pushed him forward.

  Wait. They hadn’t been in the air that long. At all.

  Wind whipped through his hair.

  Someone ripped off his blindfold again. He squinted against the wind. He was at the door of the plane, and he braced both hands on either side. He looked down at the world beneath him. They were flying pretty low to the ground.

  He’d seen an aerial view of this place before. The buildings, the homes clustered together.

  The quarantine zone in the middle of Texas.

  “No, no, no, no.” He tried desperately to move back into the plane. The men held him in place.

  “He needs to go now!” a voice shouted.

  “No!” he yelled again, frantic. He’d rather go
to a foreign country. Literally any country in the world. Throw a dart at a map and he’d go there.

  Hands roughly shoved him forward. His grip on the plane began to slip.

  “Don’t forget to pull the cord!” a voice yelled.

  They pushed him out.

  MAISIE

  JUST ONCE, MAISIE Rojas wanted people to run away in fear when they saw her coming.

  She’d yell after them, “Yeah, you better run!” and they’d cast a terrified glance over their shoulder and, of course, keep running. Because she was so terrifying.

  Instead, the two men standing in the empty loading dock smiled as she approached them.

  Joe spread his skinny arms wide like she might want to hug him. “Maisie!”

  For fuck’s sake.

  “I liked your broadcast yesterday,” he continued. “Very informative.”

  “Where is the truck?” She’d meant for the words to come out angry, but she just sounded worried. She’d never been very good at masking that particular emotion.

  Nathan scratched at his black-gray beard. “Well, it’s not here.”

  “Obviously,” she snapped.

  Hadley’s voice crackled from a radio in the corner. “Why do you think they didn’t want us to say fuck to the American children? Do the kids over there not know that word? Or are we not supposed to know about fuck? So many questions.” Maisie might have laughed, if not for the empty loading dock in front of her.