to be embarrassed by it, I remembered they couldn’t see me.
Behind the thin barrier of dark glass, I was invisible.
The window was warm as I pressed the tips of my fingers to it, hoping the workers could see them through the tint like five small stars. Eventually, though, just like everyone else, the workers disappeared with distance.
Setting America Back on the Right Route! had been one of Mel’s first publicity projects for the interim government established and monitored by the United Nations, back when she was still fairly junior in the White House communications office. It was a way to advertise new infrastructure jobs while also promising that roads would stop buckling under people’s wheels, that the gas ration would, eventually, be coming to an end, and that deadly bridge collapses like the one in Wisconsin wouldn’t happen anymore—not with reinforcements from new American steel. The proof of its success ran on newscasts every night: the unemployment rate was falling as steadily as the birth rate was beginning to rise.
Numbers were simple, real symbols that people could latch onto, holding them up like trophies. But there was no way they could capture the feeling of the last few years, that all-encompassing sensation that life was rolling out in front of us again, swelling to fill those empty spaces the lost children had left behind.
The same populations that had shifted to the big cities in desperate search of work were now slowly making their way back to the small towns and suburbs they had abandoned. Restaurants opened. Cars pulled in and out of gas stations on their assigned days. Trucks cruised down the highways that had been patched and knitted together again. People walked through newly landscaped parks. Movie theaters began to shift away from showing old films to showing new ones.
They arrived tentatively, slowly—like the first few people on an otherwise empty dance floor, waiting to see if anyone else would rejoin them in search of fun.
Almost five years ago, when we’d driven these same highways, the towns and cities we’d slipped in and out of had practically ached with their emptiness. Parks, homes, businesses, schools: everything had been hollowed out and recast in miserable, dirt-stained gray. Neglected or abandoned like memories left to fade into nothing.
Somehow, the government had managed to shock a pulse back into the country. It fluttered and raced in moments of darkness and frustration, but mostly held steady. Mostly.
The truth was, it had less to do with me than it did the others working day in and day out. I hadn’t been allowed to do much of anything until I finished the new mandatory school requirements. President Cruz had said it was important for other Psi to see me do it, to demonstrate there were no exceptions. But it had been agonizing to wait and wait and wait, doing the homework of simple math problems Chubs had taught me years ago in the back of a beat-up minivan, studying history that felt like it had happened to a completely different country, and memorizing the new Psi laws.
And the whole time, Chubs and Vida had been allowed to do real, meaningful work. They’d moved from one closed door to the next, disappearing into meetings and missions, until I was sure I’d lose track of them completely, or be locked out forever.
But it was only a matter of time before I caught up to them. As long as I kept pulling my weight and proving myself useful, going wherever the government sent me, saying the words they wanted me to say, I’d keep moving forward, too. And someone had clearly seen my potential, because Mel had been reassigned to me, and we’d been traveling together ever since.
“How did I know they’d be back out in full force now that the reparations package has been announced?” Agent Martinez said. “I swear, people are never happy.”
After four years of trying, Chubs and the Psi Council finally got a plan for reparations and Psi memorials through the interim Congress. All families affected by IAAN could apply to reclaim their homes and receive debt forgiveness. Banks had foreclosed upon most of them during the financial crisis sparked by a bombing at the old Capitol in DC, which had only worsened with the deaths of millions of children and the loss of jobs as businesses closed.
Watching the final deal go up for vote, seeing it pass, had filled me with a renewed sense of purpose and hope. I’d cried at the final