Children of the Uprising by Trevor Shane Page B

“I’ll text you if anything happens.”
    â€œOkay.” Evan hung up first. Christopher listened to the dead air for a minute or two and then went back to join Addy and Max.

Fifteen
    They were all supposed to change their look. Addy chose to dye her hair red. She didn’t go for just any red, though. Her hair became the color of a burning ember. Her head seemed to glow like the tip of a lit candle. Christopher and Max could barely move when they watched her come out of the bathroom. It wasn’t only her hair color that changed; so much else seemed to change with it. Everything about Addy looked different. She looked stronger and more dangerous, and that was all Christopher would let himself think for now.
    â€œJesus, Addy,” Max said when he could speak again. “They told us to try to look inconspicuous.”
    â€œNo, they didn’t,” Addy replied. “They told us to look different. I looked inconspicuous before. That’s what they told me to change.”
    The order had come in the day before. The three of them were at their fourth stop, if you counted the night they spent in Palm Beach. They’d been staying with random people. Max would be sent their destination and they’d go. Each of their hosts treated Christopher like he was an exotic animal, like he was either the first or the last of his kind. So he was excited when they were finally given the order to make a stop without a host. Then they were also ordered to change their appearance and Christopher wasn’t so excited anymore. Now he was nervous. He figured it meant that somebody had spotted them or maybe one of their hosts had turned on them.
    Max had gone first. They’d already talked about what each of them should do before sending Addy off to the store to get the supplies that they would need to make it happen. Addy came back with hair clippers, bleach, and two different colors of hair dye, one for men and one for women. She gave Max the hair clippers and gave Christopher the men’s hair dye. The box he had in his hands said DARK BLOND on the label. He had trouble wrapping his head around what the words meant.
    â€œWe’ll have to bleach it first,” Addy said as Christopher looked down at the box. “We’ll have to take your natural, darker color out before we can put the new color in.” Christopher didn’t say anything to her. He just stared at the picture of the smiling man on the box.
    â€œWho’s going first?” Addy polled the room.
    â€œI’ll go,” Max said, pulling the clippers from their box. Max hadn’t shaved his face since they left Palm Beach. The clippers weren’t for his face, though.
    Max walked into the bathroom. They were somewhere in Kentucky, all three of them sharing a room in a weird medieval-themed hotel near the Cincinnati airport. Max left the bathroom door open so Addy and Christopher could watch him sacrifice his hair for the cause. Max plugged the clippers into the wall socket and turned them on to test them. They buzzed with eagerness. They made the sound of a lawn mower as they cut the hair on Max’s head down to little more than scruff.
    Christopher and Addy watched in silence. Christopher kept thinking about Maria’s journal. He remembered the details about how she took out a knife and carved off her hair one bunch at a time, how she went back two or three times to make her hair shorter, how the front was easier to control than the back, how much she seemed to change after she cut her hair like that. It was how much she seemed to change that Christopher remembered the most.
    It didn’t take long for Max to shave his head. After seven quick passes with the clippers, all he had left to do was tidy up. He asked Addy to help him at the end, to make sure he didn’t miss any spots. His hair was piled up on the bathroom floor like the pelt of a small, dead animal. Max looked at Christopher. “What do you