by J B Cantwell
“Hello, Riley Taylor!” the system boomed as she made for the exit. “May I help you? Let me show you how you would look in our fall collection …”
Then, the system quieted as she left the store.
I felt as if my feet were glued to the floor. I was now her, and she me. Out here, I was exposed. This was no hidden transfer of information like it had been the day before. As soon as I left the tiny dressing room, I would be Amanda Richardson.
I took a deep breath and opened the door, the two shirts I’d hung up on the hook forgotten.
“Hello, Amanda Richardson! May I help you? Let me show you how you would look in our fall collection …”
I tried not to make a sound as I exited, but in my haste I brushed against a rack of blouses and knocked a few of them onto the floor. I paused, unsure of what to do, and wanting desperately to leave, to get somewhere safe. To get to the Stilts.
I left the shirts and burst out into the mall.
Be discreet. Take your time. Don’t call attention to yourself. Nobody else is running away in here.
But the advertisements continued calling out to me all the way to the exit door, rattling my nerves.
“Amanda Richardson, we are sorry to see you go. We hope next time you will be able to stay longer.”
Longer? A shiver went through me as I realized that the time I’d spent in the mall had been tracked by the high-tech advertising system. Would it look suspicious, having only been there for half an hour? Was Hannah out there again today, stealthily slipping away every time I turned my head?
No, she would follow Amanda, I felt sure of it. The only saving grace I might have was that Amanda knew the underside of the city better than Hannah ever could. She would dash toward a station and make her way through one of the many tunnels that the resistance had painstakingly carved out over the years. Then, she would wipe her chip, making my digital signature all but disappear.
I did as her note had instructed and headed for the 81st Street station. I walked more slowly this time, relatively sure that Hannah would not follow.
It had been a year since I’d seen this city, with its high rises and clean streets, and I felt confused by it. Before, it had been a place I wanted desperately to be. To be the woman in that video my lens would play for me over and over again. To be rich. Carefree. Satisfied and full of pride at my accomplishments. I wanted to be that woman, with her lemon yellow hair and perfect, white clothes. Clean. Purified.
I briefly considered pulling up the Service’s recruitment video, to watch it again for the first time in a year. But I didn’t do it. I knew now the farce that the video played for me. For everyone.
I kept walking, keeping my head up, confident, as if I belonged there in that white city. If I had chosen to slump and bolt between officers, I would have been more conspicuous, even in my fatigues, which I now wore. The clothes I had bought before were ruined. But that was just as it should have been. I was no rich woman. I was nobody at all.
But still, I held my head up high. Still, I chose to fight the invisible, underground fight of the Volunteers. I walked up Park Avenue as if I had a purpose there, as if the people of this place cared about my accomplishments.
I walked tall.
Chapter Seven
But I didn’t count on the second person on my trail.
I made my way toward the meeting point Amanda had given me, but soon enough I found him, another shadow, watching, waiting.
I briefly considered running, but quickly shot that idea down. Running would be nuts. He would surely follow, and even though my thigh bone was now permanently healed, I felt sure that his long legs would outstrip me in a foot race.
So I took my time. I stopped at every store, tried on their digital dresses as Amanda Richardson, pretended that I had no reason to run, no reason to hide. I twirled around right there on the sidewalk, watching the dresses on the viewscreen mirror follow my form as I moved. Just two thousand credits for some, four thousand for others.
If Owen was right, if there was no chance I could ever win this game the Service had laid out for us all, then my observations were pointless. I would never know this kind of money. They would let me live until the end of my third year as I waited patiently for my prize. And then what? I wondered what would happen at the end of my term. Would I be picked off, just as Lydia had been? Just as so many others had been? Or would I be allowed to live, having earned my reward?
The idea of my impending death was enough to let all the wind out of my sails. I was in danger now, I knew. That man following me was still out there, lurking somewhere behind me. I wondered how far he would go to catch me. A simple pair of handcuffs and my efforts to join the Volunteers would be over. I would be questioned, beaten, maybe, forced to give as much information about the resisting citizens as I could.
And then they would kill me.
For a moment, I turned to head back to the barracks. But then I realized that my digital signature was still that of Amanda’s. I wouldn’t be able to get back into the building, much less rest there. Hide there.
My only choice was to meet Jonathan as planned. To get back my chip’s information as quickly as I could.
I didn’t try to lose him, my shadow. Instead I methodically made my way through Central Park to the station on 81st Street. I would meet Jonathan and try to figure out where to go from there.
The park was dead. Years of acid rain and poor management had turned the place brown and wild, the vast lawns now dirt fields. Those plants that were hardy snaked their way up the gates, the benches. Most of the trees were dry. Brittle trunks of wood stuck up out of the ground, a memory. And there wasn’t a single person on the path across to the west side.
Those with time to spare spent it high up in the sky. I stopped and looked up at the towering skyscrapers on the east side. Somewhere up there the elite lounged.
But not down here.
I moved on.
He had disappeared, my follower. I wanted desperately to look behind me with every step I took, my beating heart screaming at me to run. I forced myself to breathe, to take it slow. There weren’t any police officers out here, though I was sure there was plenty of surveillance. I cursed myself for waiting this long to cross over to the west side. I should have cut over on 59th where the city was still bustling. Too late now.
It took me ages to make it to the other side, but I finally crossed the entire park and found the entrance to the 81st Street station. An old sign in front of a large building read Museum of Natural History, but no one stood on the steps, and the windows were boarded up. I guessed there wasn’t really a market for natural history these days, with everybody but the elite just barely scraping by. And those living in the high towers had more pressing issues to contend with, like where to get their hair done and how much champagne was too much on any given day.
At least that’s how I thought of them.
I bolted down the stairs to the station as fast as I dared until I made it to the train platform below. I stopped as everything went black; there was no power underground here, that would have been seen as a waste. Instead, I heard the soft clicking sound of a headlamp being turned on. I stared into it, but was blinded by its glare.
“Jonathan?”
“Where have you been?” he answered, moving toward me. He held out another headlamp for me to use. I put it on, and a moment later he was bathed in the light from it.
“I was being followed,” I said, defensive.
“Yes. By Amanda. That was planned on already. Kiyah was called away on a different mission.”
“No, it wasn’t Amanda. It was someone else. A man. He started trailing me after Amanda and I traded chip information.”
Jonathan’s face grew alarmed.
“What did he look like?”
“I don’t know, really. He seemed tall, but I only glanced at him from a distance. I couldn’t very well turn around and confront him. I’m not even Riley Taylor to his eyes. Maybe it was Amanda he was tryi
ng to follow.”
He thought about this for a moment. Then sighed deeply.
“Well, I guess we don’t have much choice. If he saw you enter the station then it’s already too late. Owen won’t be happy.”
I bristled. “I was just doing what you told me to do, and I had already been running from Amanda.”
“Yeah, and you should have run from your follower, too. Now we might have to shut this entrance to the Stilts down. If anyone finds out about this tunnel—”
“I couldn’t have run from him. I’m not like you. I’ve only been to Manhattan twice in my life. I don’t know my way around, and I’m guessing you guys have a bunch of hiding places between your tunnels.”
Jonathan huffed.
I crossed my arms, irritated. “I would have been caught before I’d even gotten here, arrested, I’m sure. Anyway, there’s a chance that I did lose him.”
It was a lie. There was no way he couldn’t have known where I’d gone. I’d been walking out in the open for fifteen minutes.
“Then you should have let yourself be caught,” he snarled. “Now our cover might be completely blown.”
My stomach felt suddenly heavy as I recognized the truth. If I wasn’t willing to let myself be caught as a Volunteer, then what use was I, really? Instead, I’d chosen to protect my own life in exchange for everyone else’s safety, in exchange for the entire mission of the Volunteers.
“Come over here,” he demanded, holding out one of the metal wands to take away Amanda’s signature from my chip. As it rested against my head, I watched my digital world disappear again.
He knelt down. “We’ll leave this here. It will just look like Amanda is standing around near the station. It’s the best we can do right now. We can put the profile back into your chip when the meeting is over.”
He beckoned me to follow him deeper into the station. The occasional squeak of a rat met my ears, and my skin prickled with nerves.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To building twenty-two. That’s where you’ll learn the schematics of the buildings we want you to get to.”
“How did they make this tunnel, anyway?” I asked, unable to contain my curiosity. It was so much larger and drier than the one we’d gone through the day before.
He sighed. “When the floods started to get to be too much, the city started filling in the subway tunnels. This one, though, had a direct line to one of the buildings in the Stilts, an old waterway that was one of the first to use pumps to eject the water out of the tunnels. When it didn’t work well enough, they walled it in with concrete. That was back before the Manhattan Wall was even considered. In any case, this tunnel remained, forgotten. Over the years the Volunteers have filled in the rest of the holes, enabling us to use the dedicated staircase at the end of this tunnel to climb into one of the buildings. Building twenty-two.”
I was amazed that the water here was no deeper than what I’d sloshed through on the streets of Brooklyn. I wondered how deep underground we were, imagining what it must have been like working down here, fighting against the ocean tides.
For some reason, this tunnel made me even more nervous than the skinny, claustrophobic one the day before. I imagined the water that had once flooded this place with a shiver.
Luckily, the feeling didn’t last long, because up ahead a shaft of light slowly became visible. It was the staircase to the building Jonathan had mentioned. Building twenty-two.
We climbed up several flights of stairs until we hit the fourth. Jonathan opened the door, and as far as I could tell, the entire floor was empty. Looking out the window, I saw that we were just above the waterline.
“What are we doing here?” I asked. “Can’t you be seen by the patrol boats so close to the water?”
“Now you’re thinking. No, the glass on the outside is like a giant mirror. They can’t see inside unless we use artificial light.”
He turned, staring around the room. Then, he pointed to a small desk hiding behind one of the structural beams in the center of the room.
“There.” He walked away from the doorway, beckoning me to follow him.
As we approached, a young woman stepped out from behind the beam. She had the same seriousness in her face that Owen had, making her look like someone much older. She stepped forward and put out her hand.
“I’m Jane.”
I took her hand, shaking it awkwardly.
“Riley.”
“Yes, I know. I’ve been waiting for you.” She turned to Jonathan. “Any problems?”
“Possibly. A follower. She says she might’ve shaken him.”
Jane frowned.
“Well, she’s here now. We might as well make the most of it. Come on over here and have a seat.”
She walked over to the desk where two chairs were waiting. Across the folding table several schematics were laid out, maps of different buildings. The blue lines and unusual language piqued my interest, and I sat down beside her.
“These are the maps of the holding stations. Throughout the east, in the only three cities that remain, New York, D.C., and Philadelphia, people are followed, monitored by their chip implants. There are three buildings here that we want to focus our attention on, one that holds the data for each of those cities.”
She rifled through some pages and took out a map to one of the buildings.
“These buildings hold thousands and thousands of super computers. The data they store is everything you’ve ever searched for on your lens, every video you’ve watched, and every step you’ve ever taken. All of that is stored in these three buildings. There are more of course, farther west. Each dry city has its own system. But we don’t want to bite off more than we can chew. This is a new rodeo for us.”
I stared down at the schematic, then up at Jonathan. He had his arms crossed as he watched over our shoulders. He raised his eyebrows at me, then tilted his head back toward the desk.
“So, what …? Am I supposed to do something here? I thought I was learning to make bombs.”
Jane looked up, eyes twinkling. “You are, indeed. But there will be time for you at the end of your second year, a break like the one you’re on now. By then, you’ll have the knowledge you need to build EMP devices. That stands for Electro Magnetic Pulse. They are bombs that target electronics. We’ll wipe the slates clean.”
I frowned. “How am I supposed to make and detonate one of these, or even get to the location? I don’t get it. Where will I get the materials? I’m guessing I won’t be able to just walk out of the facility with something as large as a bomb. And besides, won’t they be on my tail the entire time?”
“That’s possible, yes. But it’s a chance we have to take. At the very least, you can get us the plans to make the devices before you’re discovered.”
“Before I’m discovered?”
Jonathan scoffed.
“Well, yes.” Jane straightened up and narrowed her eyes at me. “Does it surprise you that you’ll be in danger? You know, all of us are, every minute of every day. The difference is that you’ll have a specific mission. You’ll have an opportunity to help us in ways we’ve never had help before. Is that a problem?”
I thought about it for a moment. I remembered the sinking feeling I’d gotten when I realized that I was expected to leave Alex, gravely wounded, on the battlefield. The idea was sickening. In fact, most of my experiences in the Service so far were sickening.
“No. It’s not a problem,” I decided, straightening up, myself. “Does the government know what you’re trying to do?”
Jane shrugged. “Maybe. But probably not. For years they’ve been guarding the buildings within the city walls, thinking that New York City itself would be a probable target for the Volunteers, or anyone else, to focus on. We’ve let them believe that. We’ve even leaked the schematics of some of the remaining buildings in Manhattan, trying to keep them off our scent.
“But this whole time we’ve actually been focusing on something much, much diff
erent. An EMP anywhere near the site of one of these secure buildings would be catastrophic for the government. In a single event, everyone’s chips would be wiped out. It would be a blank slate for all of us to start over again. And nobody would have to die.”
She began pacing the floor. “I mean, can you imagine if nobody could use your past against you? If everything you’d ever done had been completely private?”
Private? The idea had never even occurred to me. Yes, the freedom I had felt when I was with the Fighters had been glorious for a scant few days. But I had never really thought about it once I’d returned back to the Service, soon re-implanted with the newest version of chip available. I knew I was being tracked, of course. I knew I was in constant danger.
But a life without my lens, completely untethered? It would be much more than just not having access to the internet from inside my own mind. That system would shut down if things went as Jane was planning. What was more important were the designations. No longer would people be able to look at each other, to judge each other based on their designated colors. Where before we’d been made to fear the Oranges and Reds, now that information would be unavailable. The thought made me squirm in my seat, no matter how open-minded I may have become.
Because what would I do if I saw a Red walking up the street toward me? Or following me? Oranges were one thing, Reds were another entirely. The only way for them to improve their designations was to serve a tour in the military. Or the burning plants. Each was as deadly as the other.
I’d been, we all had been, raised to fear anyone we saw who wasn’t a Green. It was a deep disfunction that ran like a current through the population. But, if I was honest with myself, a Green could be just as dangerous as any Red. Hannah had proven that. It was starting to dawn on me that our designations were more of a curse than a cure, breeding mistrust into every citizen. It seemed like with every breath I took, I was moving farther and farther away from the beliefs I’d been instilled with and closer and closer to those of the Volunteers. Theirs was a message of hope, of freedom. In many ways I had led a privileged existence, something that had never occurred to me before now. Nobody ran away from, or even questioned, a Green.