The woman struggles to sit. When she finally manages to stay upright, the male Instructor looks back to where the other one is still watching and laughs. “She’s fine. See?” He drops the canteen to the ground. The cap pops off when it lands with a thud beside the woman. Water sloshes onto the still-damp ground and I have to fight the urge to dart forward and snatch it as the woman on the ground picks up the canteen and places the opening to her lips.
“We might as well get them all water since they’ve stopped, anyway,” he yells. “They’ll reach the quota faster if they aren’t falling down on the job.”
When the female Instructor nods I want to shout with relief.
“You have five minutes to walk to that tent, get water from the cooler, and return to work. I’d suggest you don’t waste it.” He glances over his shoulder, then slides his attention to me. “You can help her up,” he says quietly. “But she needs to walk to the tent on her own. And she still has to get herself back to the dining hall. Do you understand?”
No. Not really, but I pretend I do and nod. Satisfied, the male Instructor steps off his Segway, takes the canteen and shouts for the others to hurry. Once he’s gone, I squat beside the woman.
Liz and the sunburned man walk by us and head toward the canopy where water waits.
“Thank you,” the woman whispers with a smile when I help her ease to her knees.
The fallen woman’s gratitude makes me cringe because I’m aware of every heartbeat—every second that it takes for her to clutch my arm and teeter to her feet. I want to be a nice person. She has every reason to move slowly and it isn’t taking all that long. Not really. But if she doesn’t let go of my arm in another ten seconds, I am not sure I will be able to keep myself from yanking away so I don’t miss out on getting a drink, even if it means sending her back to the ground.
Just because I want to be nice doesn’t mean that I am.
But she doesn’t have to know that, because she lets go of my arm and gives me several shaky nods. “Go get water. You need it.”
Ugh. Well, I can’t just leave her now without feeling like a complete jerk. “You need water, too.”
“I’ll catch my breath first.” She takes a hesitant step forward. Sways. I put my hand on her shoulder to steady her. “You go before the time is up. You’ve done enough. Please.”
I’m torn. Finally, I offer a compromise. “I’ll go get water. Then, when we start tasseling again, I’ll work faster so you don’t have to do as much.”
She pats my arm and glances down the row. The female Instructor is approaching—not on her Segway, but with long, determined strides as she reaches into a long dark gray bag that is hanging from her shoulder. I freeze when she pulls her hand out of the bag and is holding a black handgun.
“Go. Go now.” The woman gives me a shove. When I turn, the female Instructor has her gun raised. I start walking as she runs and brace myself for when the gun swings to me. It doesn’t. Instead, she rushes past, shoves the older woman back to the ground, and keeps running.
“I don’t see him!” the female Instructor screams as she scans the field. I glance back at the canopy where Liz and the sunburned man are huddled in the shade, holding their water while the other Instructor waves his arms and shouts.
An alarm whoops. People yell above the sirens. Through the stalks I see another Instructor zooming on his machine deeper into the field and I realize what’s wrong. The fifth member of our work group—the man who told the Instructors it was too early to take the tassels from the corn—has disappeared. When the older woman fell to the ground, the man must have spotted his opening. With the Instructors’ attention on us he took the opportunity to escape.
At least a dozen heads bob over the shoulder-high corn as the Instructors race down the rows. How long a head start does he have? If he can get away, then maybe . . .
The crack of a gunshot echoes over the sirens. Another.
The alarm stops.
The cornstalks whisper in the breeze.
“I got him,” calls a voice in the distance, and I expel the hope I was harboring with my breath.
I get water from the cooler under the canopy and slowly drink the entire bottle. Five minutes is long over, but our male Instructor doesn’t stop me when I reach for a second bottle and drain it. When I’m done, I don’t wait for his orders—I walk back to the spot where I was standing when the woman collapsed and, without being instructed, I return to work.
Six Instructors carry the man’s body through the corn. He must have found a spot he thought he could hide in, because he hadn’t gotten very far. Either that or he wasn’t very fast.
I’m true to my word and pull tassels faster than before so our Instructors won’t notice the older woman’s pace has slowed until it is almost nonexistent. I work while trying not to think about the man who attempted to escape. But as much as I try, I can’t keep the echo of the gunshots from replaying over and over in my head.
I don’t know what time it is when a horn sounds and the Instructors shout that we are done for the day. The older woman is still upright when we begin the walk back to the dorms. She moves slowly, but she is moving. She’s stronger than she looks.
“He shouldn’t have tried to escape,” I hear someone whisper as we make our way along the dirt path beside the fields toward the buildings in the distance.
A sunburned stoop-shouldered man in front of me adds, “They warned him. They warned all of us.”
As if that made what happened okay?
“No one knows his name,” I say, looking down at my hands that are red and raw and covered with at least a dozen small, thin cuts lined with dried blood.
“That would make him real,” Liz answers quietly, before picking up her pace—as if she can move faster than the memory.
The trek back to the dining hall seems twice as long as it did this morning. No one is moving quickly. Several subjects stumble as they walk. Two collapse on the dirt and don’t make an attempt to get back to their feet. We are ordered to step around them. I’m glad to see the woman from my group makes it to the dorms. When we arrive our barcodes are scanned. We are given a change of clothing and thirty minutes to shower before we are to go to dinner. Thirty minutes exactly.
How do they expect us to tell the time when there aren’t any clocks?
When it is my turn to shower, I don’t care that the water is barely warm or that the soap is rough and stings my palms. I’m grateful for both.
Grateful.
I actually felt grateful. Just for a second, but still. How insane is that?
Once we start filing into the dining hall there is no more talk of the man who died. There is barely talk at all as the screens flicker and the music blares. I don’t know what is most horrific, I think, walking single file to the table we are directed to—a man being murdered for wanting to leave this place, the way others blamed him for his own death, or the way they are quick to act as if it never happened.
They should all know better.
Wallace sits at another table. He subtly raises his hand when he sees me. Even though I still don’t know what I think of him, I do the same. Then I try to mimic the others by looking up at the screens while I wait for food. Like the Instructors want me to do.
“How long does it take?” I ask Liz.
“What?”
“To act as if any of this is normal?”
“It’s never normal. We just know it’s the way things are here.” Liz glances around and leans close. “I overheard the Instructors on duty. This isn’t going to be the normal for much longer. Recruiters are coming.”
“Recruiters?” I repeat.
Heads swivel toward us.
“Do you know how to be quiet?” Liz hisses. She shakes her head and waits for the others to direct their attention back to the screens or to whatever conversations they were having. Then she says, “Recruiters are in charge of choosing who works at which areas in the farm. They move us from here to our permanent level of Great Americ
an Farming in order to make room for the next group of subjects to arrive.”
“We’re going to be moved?” I whisper as we rise for Instructor Burnett.
She nods.
“How long?” I ask as the oath appears on the screen.
“What?” Liz asks, with her eyes directed forward.
“How long until the Recruiters arrive?”
“Tomorrow. The day after. Soon.”
An Instructor slams a rod on our table. I jerk my eyes to Instructor Burnett and pretend to pay attention as my mind races.
Being moved means I’ll end up deeper into the farm—farther away from the boundaries. Farther from where Atlas is likely to be waiting. With only two days of battery life left before the tracker stops signaling. Maybe if I’m lucky, Rose’s father will try to intercede, but if he couldn’t save his son, I don’t think he will be able to save me. The only thing I am certain of is that I can’t let the Recruiters move me deeper into the farm. I have to be out of here by the time the Recruiters come if my mission is going to have any chance of success.
We finish our less-than-satisfying dinner and trudge back to the dorms. I shift under the covers, reposition the GPS recorder in my right sock, and retie my shoe. Then I pretend to sleep in my bunk while I wait for the lights to go out. When it does, the singing starts. Then the weeping. Then finally, silence.
In the quiet, I ease myself over the edge of the bed, lower myself onto the floor, and weave through the bunks to the bathroom.
There are no mirrors here. Maybe they don’t want us looking at ourselves. If we did we might remember our humanity. We might wonder how the country we love could put us in a place like this. Or maybe they don’t want to risk someone breaking the glass and using it as a weapon or a tool.
The bathroom stall doors, however, are dented silver metal, which offers a reflection of sorts. So I sit on the last toilet and lift my hair to examine the ear cuff, because there has to be a way to remove it without triggering its poison.
The barcode still turns my stomach. I embrace the anger as I run my fingers along the device to see if I can figure out how to get it off. The rectangular barcode is embedded to a kind of disc. That disc sits atop the plastic piece, which is wrapped around my ear. There is another disc on the other side. I can only assume the front and back discs are held together by some kind of snap or pin, but no matter what I try, I can’t get my fingernails under the seam to pull them apart.
Did the man trying to escape today figure out a way to remove the device or did he just plan on tearing it off his ear and hoping for the best? I hear the sound of someone else shuffling into the bathroom. The faucet runs as I consider my dilemma. The device doesn’t have an easy way for me to remove it, but it also doesn’t appear high-tech. For it to have a trigger that dispenses a poison when it passes through some kind of electronic fence like Instructor Burnett described, wouldn’t it have to be more . . . sophisticated?
Trust, but verify.
The words I first read weeks ago—painted by my mother’s hand in a secret room for the Stewards—pop into my head. Then, the idea of verifying anything I was told about my country was completely foreign. Now I should know better than to just believe what I was told. If the government needs this farm to succeed in order for the country to thrive, would they really outfit everyone with a device that could accidentally kill workers if it malfunctioned?
Maybe.
Or maybe the reason so many Instructors hunted down the man who disappeared into the cornfield is because they had to. Because if he made it to the boundary he could escape—and live.
Do I want to risk my life on the chance that they lied about the capabilities of the devices?
I don’t have an answer to that question when I look at the reflection of the device one last time. Shaking my head, I push open the door, step out of the stall, and nod at the woman who is still at the faucet washing her hands. I look down at my own hands as I head back into the dorm.
I’m almost to my bunk when a small group of women step out of the hallway that leads to the outdoor courtyard. I register Dana’s face in the green glow of the Exit sign and footsteps rushing toward me a second before a hand slaps over my mouth and I am grabbed from behind.
Fourteen
“Let me go!” I scream against the hand that is clamped over my mouth, but no one listens. Fingers dig into my arms. I thrash from side to side and kick as hard as I can. My foot connects with flesh. Someone yelps and I’m jerked off my feet and dragged back into the pitch-black hall.
“What’s going on?”
“What are you doing to her?”
“Stay out of this!”
“Let go of me!” I scream, when the hand holding my mouth slips. I bite down on the fingers that fight to silence me and writhe against the arms that pin mine.
The attack for no reason—the absence of light—the lack of help coming from the women in their beds who were awakened from the sounds of my struggles, add to the fear and my desperate fight to get away.
“Shut up!” Something cold and hard presses against my throat. “Shut the hell up right now.”
I freeze and blink against the blinding darkness, wishing I could at least see my attackers’ faces. I can’t see the weapon they are holding on me, either, but I imagine the worst and fight the urge to scream for help again. There are women down the hall in their beds who know this is happening. They haven’t come to my aid.
Liz. She has to know I am being held—terrified. More screams won’t move her or the others. They’ve made their choice. I’m on my own.
Nails dig into my ankles. The person holding my arms shifts grips and I remember something Atlas told me once when we were training. I allow my body to go completely limp. Suddenly, I’m dead weight.
“Crap!”
The person holding my arms loses her hold and drops me. My upper back cracks against the concrete floor. Pain sings through my shoulders as I roll onto my side and yank my legs from my attacker’s grip.
I’m free and now I’m glad for dark. I get to my feet, feel for the wall as they ask each other if anyone has found me, and with my fingers grazing the concrete as a guide—I run.
“She’s running toward the courtyard. Don’t let her get away.”
As if there is any chance that could happen.
I burst out of the pitch-black hallway into the courtyard that’s lit by the partial moon and impossibly bright stars. Under any other circumstances, I would stop everything and study the white crystal-like lights dotting the dusty black sky, but the footsteps pounding the concrete behind me keep me moving.
Hay crunches beneath my feet. No one is stationed in the balconies. No Instructors are watching. Nobody is here to stop whoever is running behind me.
The fire escape–style ladders I spot at the edge of the balconies are too high for me to jump up and reach them. The ground under the hay is concrete. The walls are stone. The fence is steel.
I’m trapped.
A woman appears at the entrance. Then two others.
“Over there!” A broad-shouldered woman points as another woman, one I recognize, appears beside her. Dana.
The four start toward me. Four of them. One of me.
I stumble back against the fence, glancing from side to side desperate to find any method of escape. One woman with a round face and thin, shoulder-length dark hair limps. She is hanging back a bit, but the other three advance with determined, terrifyingly deliberate steps.
“Dana,” I say, doing my best to keep my voice calm and even—as if soothing a growling animal. “Why are you doing this?”
“We know what you are.”
“What does that mean?” My back bumps up against the metal slats.
“What did you tell him?” Dana demands, moving toward me, hands balled into fists raised in front of her—poised to fight.
“Tell who? I honestly don’t have a clue what you are talking about.”
The broad-shouldered woman runs at me and
I dart to the side, only to have my path blocked by a dark-skinned woman with wide-rimmed glasses. With the fence behind me and the four closing in on all sides, I’m in serious trouble.
“You were talking to him,” snaps the broad-shouldered woman. “We saw you. Did you rat out Dana? Are they looking for the rest of us?”
“The rest of . . .” I look down the fence line to where the woman with glasses is creeping closer. Why do they think I would turn them in? For what? Unless . . . unless they are Stewards, too. “You’ve got this wrong. Wallace isn’t—”
Dana lunges. I duck, but not before her fist grazes my shoulder. I spin and shove her back into the broad-shouldered lady. I don’t want to hurt her. I don’t want to hurt any of them. We’re on the same side! I just have to figure out how to convince them of that.
The tall, broad-shouldered woman catches Dana. While Dana regains her balance, I back up against the fence again and say, “I didn’t tell Wallace anything. I listened to his story. He told me how he ended up here—a prisoner, like us. He started asking questions his bosses didn’t want him to ask. He’s proof people can change their minds if we tell them what’s happening.”
“You expect us to believe that?” Dana’s quiet, controlled voice is more terrifying than any scream. “We know there are people promising better treatment to snitches who give them information to use against our friends back home.”
“Maybe the Instructors have promised people things,” I say. It made sense. And maybe they are using other “subjects” to pass along the offers. Prisoners would trust others far more rapidly if they appeared to be in the same situation as themselves. “But I haven’t been promised anything.”
“If she talked, they would have already come for you,” the woman with the glasses says. “We don’t have much time. The one I bribed only promised to keep the other Instructors out of here until bed check.”
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