But the last thing I hear is the surgeon’s voice. “I have a significant interest in you, Will. We’ll be seeing a lot of each other.”
•
The night I was born, Ma came home from work and found my mother dead. Ma heard some weak crying and found me, wrapped in an old T-shirt and tucked into the top drawer of my mother’s bedside table. On top of me was the note: “Baby Name Will.” I had that note for years, covered in plastic and tucked into my underwear drawer, and I took it wherever we moved.
Ma knew it was all over when she saw my mother’s body and me and that note. When my mother was sent to a Preincubation Center at seven years old, Ma had told her to be strong, to live out her time and wait for the day when she would be free. But my mother had somehow done the unthinkable: at thirteen, she had broken out of the Incubator and come home, pregnant, to be with Ma. Everything was lost. Ma knew that when the Corp caught up with them—which they would—they’d send both of them to the Rator. Ma never said much about that time, but she did mention that she would never understand why my mother had run away—not when there was no hope that running away would lead to anything but death.
Ma had planned to keep both my mother and me secret—in hiding—until she could get some fake IDs and smuggle us from Zone C into an outer zone. Ma thought she’d hide her daughter and keep her safe forever; that hopefully the baby would be a boy, and Ma would smuggle him into a work unit. But then I was born, and I was a Breeder, and my mother wrecked Ma’s plan by killing herself.
Ma held me. She packed a large backpack with clothes, tins of food, and a thick envelope full of cash. She went out to the shed and got a can of old petrol—it was so old she had to prize the lid open with a knife. She took the petrol and went upstairs to the front bedroom, where my mother’s body lay on the bed. She wanted to burn it all down, to remove any signs that my mother had been in the house, that a baby had been born—to remove all records relating to my mother, and to Ma herself. Ma took a pocketknife and stabbed her own wrist, digging out the chip. In that chip lay all the units that Ma had painstakingly built up herself. She threw it on the bed. Then she looked for the last time at her daughter, who was still very beautiful and very young.
Ma settled me in the crook of her arm. Then she took the can and, starting in the front bedroom, she poured petrol over her daughter and the bed and the documents, and then the carpet and furniture. As she came out of the bedroom, she heard sirens in the distance. Somebody had already tipped off the CSOs. It would be a crime for neighbors to try to hide trouble, and whoever snitched would have earned a lot of units for it.
Ma took a lighter out of her pocket and then bent down and lit the edge of the pool of petrol. She watched the whoosh of flames shoot up the hallway. Then, with sirens screeching in front of the house and me wailing in her arms, she jumped out the second-floor rear window into the yard below; she curled around me so that I was fine, but she broke her leg badly when she landed. With only a backpack of belongings, she spent weeks smuggling me to the edge of the Corp, to Zone F, where she slowly set up a new life. She never contacted her family or friends again. They must have assumed she’d been sent to the Rator.
•
I wake up screaming. Fire pain shooting through the center of my body, tearing me apart.
Searing light.
I feel the shackles loosen and then a figure leans over me and I see the bright eyes of the surgeon.
“No. Leave her shackled. I’ll do a C-section,” she says.
The pain is unspeakable. Then a cold sting in my wrist and everything goes blank.
•
She. A voice at the end of my bed says, “She is seven pounds, two ounces. She is healthy.”
I don’t want to think about it but it’s hard when they call her . . . she.
They ask if I want to see her. They hold up a bundle at me—a soft rainbow blanket I can’t fully see inside. A tiny bundle with some dark hair sticking out at the top. I say no. I tell them to take her away from me. I’m given more drugs, and I feel myself fading again. I’m aware enough to feel myself being lifted and carried to an Incubator van. I want to see outside the house—it would be my first time seeing Zone A—but I’m already woozy. I only see clear skies and some tall stone buildings, thick with beautiful trees, before there’s total darkness.
•
I’m back in my cell.
My face is still sore and bruised from where I ran into the wall. My spine aches. I don’t fucking care. I don’t have a body. They’ve taken off the hand shackles but the leg shackles remain.
I hear rustling next door.
“Hey,” I whisper, toward the gap in the wall.
“Hey back,” says a voice. Except it isn’t Mary. This Breeder’s voice isn’t full of tears: it’s strong and angry and it’s a low, full-bodied voice, completely different from Mary’s high, weak one.
“You’re new here?” I say.
“Nope.”
“Where’s Mary?”
“The Rator.”
•
In the middle of the night I’m shaken awake by two orange suits who take off the leg shackles and then drag me out of my cell. I’m taken down the hall, then a door bangs open that leads to some cold concrete stairs. I glance at the pistols and batons in their belts and wonder if this is how I’m going to die—getting raped and then murdered by orange suits in a stinking fire escape—and to be honest, I’m not that bothered by the idea. I stumble as they pull me roughly down, down the flights. But when we hit the bottom floor, one of them pushes open another heavy door, and I’m out into the starry night for the first time in almost a year.
A woman is standing there, tall and strong, with short, white hair and high cheekbones. She looks like she must be in her early thirties. She holds out her hand, and I shake it. She takes off her mask. I look around the exit for the security camera, and she watches me—I find it, winking from the eastern corner.
“Don’t worry about that,” she says. “I have an arrangement.” One of the orange suits hands me a mask, and then he and the other suit move around the corner, where they can still see us.
“I’m Cate Cormack,” she says. It’s the low, deep voice from the cell next to me. “We don’t have long. I wanted to speak to you in person.”
I nod.
“Will, I’m not going to cushion this. I know you’ve met with the surgeon. I know she’s planning to take you out of the Incubator. I don’t know why, but this obviously means that you’re a security threat to us.”
“But . . .”
She holds up her hand. “Don’t explain. Will, you’re a threat but also an opportunity for us. It’s time for you to choose a side.”
I’m afraid of Cate, but also interested. How is it that she knows so much?
“I’m the leader of the Response,” Cate says, as if she’s reading my mind. “May we all have Goodspeed.” Cate makes the sign across her forehead, lips, and heart. It’s the same sign that Ma used to make, when she was worried or when there was danger.
“You need to know that some of the orange suits are Responders too,” she says. “Westie boys and men are also disposable to the Corp. Just in a different way from girls. And so they’re my eyes and ears.”
I think of all the guys I’ve seen sent to the Rator for not making their ever-increasing quotas, and I nod.
From where they stand, the orange men both make a sign across their foreheads, then across their lips and their hearts.
Cate lights a cigarette and hands one to me, and we lean against the cold wall and smoke. I’m looking up at the stars and smoking, and it’s a small point of happiness.
Then Cate breaks this moment. “I know you’ve just had your first live birth, Will.”
I look away.
“You shouldn’t be ashamed,” she says. “These people did the same to me—pumped me full of hormones, imp
regnated me against my will.”
I nod, but my face burns. Cate reaches over and touches my shoulder. It’s the first time anyone has touched me gently in almost a year and I can’t help it—I start to cry.
“Will, I’ve had nineteen births, eleven living. I was smuggled in here by Breeder runners when I was nine. They started me on puberty drugs immediately—illegally young, of course, breaking even their own laws.”
She sighs. “Can you imagine that, Will? I was just a skinny little nine-year-old. Can you imagine the souls of the people who do this to kids?”
I look away. If Cate finds out I was a Breeder runner, there’ll be no end to my hell.
“It’s time to stop being sad, and to be angry.”
“I am angry.”
Cate looks at me closely. “Will. I know everything that happens in this place. I know you were taken to Zone A to be with the surgeon but I don’t know why. I know you tried to kill yourself . . . I’ve never known her to take a suicide to Zone A before.”
“I don’t know why either. She just said she wanted a live birth.”
Cate seems like somebody who is good at reading people—I can see her trying to decide about me.
“I also looked into your history, Will. I can’t find anything before two aliases somebody made for you—Adam van Glusser and Keats Tyrell. Why did you have aliases? Were you involved in the Response?”
She looks so serious; I feel like laughing.
I shake my head.
“Then what?”
I hesitate. I’ve never told anyone my story. Not even Alex. It’s been hammered into me since before I could talk—Don’t tell anyone about yourself. It’s too dangerous. But then something occurs to me. “If you have access to information, is it possible for you to find out about people?”
“That depends. Which people?”
I tell her the full names of Ma and Alex. It feels so good to say them out loud.
“And who are they to you?”
“My grandmother. And my girlfriend.”
She grinds her cigarette into the ground with her boot. “First, tell me all about yourself.”
I take a breath. Of all the strange things that are happening, telling my story feels like the most bizarre. I’m not used to talking about myself. “Ma hid me because my mother—a Breeder—ran away from the Incubator and killed herself. That’s why we had aliases. First, I was Will Grover, and then I was Stephen Elliott.”
Cate’s face is keen with interest. “What was your mother’s name?”
“Her real name? I don’t know.”
She looks at me with hostility. “I honestly don’t,” I tell her. “Ma never told me her own real name either. For safety reasons.”
“So your grandmother hid you from the Corp and arranged the aliases?”
“Yeah. Then, when I was older, I lived as a Crystal boy. We had to move a lot, when people got close to finding out, which led to more aliases. My grandmother and me—we were each other’s entire family.”
Cate nods. There are stories about people like me, the Crystal boys, out there among the Westies—even outside the Corporation, beyond the Wall, they know it’s an option. She looks at me steadily, still evaluating me.
“Are you sure you didn’t grow up in the Response?”
“No, I know nothing about the Response,” I say.
I can see Cate decide to trust me, a little. “I know Alex Winterson,” she says. “She’s here in the Incubator, on one of the upper floors, after having a stillbirth.”
It feels so sudden—to hear Alex’s name spoken by someone else for the first time in over a year; to know she exists outside my mind.
“Is she okay?” I ask.
She shrugs. “Yes.”
I can hardly breathe. “Can I see her?”
“If you do something for me, I could arrange for you to see Alex.”
“I’ll do anything,” I say, without hesitation.
“I want you to join the Response. I want your loyalty.”
“No problem.”
“And another thing: They tell me you have quick hands.”
“Yes.”
“I need you to get something from the surgeon’s place for me.”
“How do you know I’ll be going there again?”
She raises her eyebrows at me—she’s no fool. Which means I need to be extra careful around her. “I think it’s fair to assume,” she says.
“What do you need?”
“Just a package,” she says tersely, meaning back off.
I nod—I make it enthusiastic. The truth is, I really will do anything to see Alex. “I’ll do it,” I tell her. “If it’s small enough for me to smuggle out on my body, some tape would be helpful, maybe some elastic band or fabric?”
“I’ll get those things for you,” Cate says. “In the meantime, let me find the information about your grandmother,” she says.
•
Sometimes, we ran Breeders who were under twelve years old across the Wall, and we took them straight to the Incubator. The Gray Corps affiliates got paid and their security chips were forged and that was that. The Breeders who were too small to pass as twelve, we took to one of the Corp’s Preincubation Centers. It is also where orphans and foster kids are taken, as well as juvenile delinquents or anyone found on the wrong side of a zone. Some Breeders in these centers are as young as six years old. Rob normally did those drop-offs by himself, but I went with him once. We only had one Breeder to deliver, a small, bright kid named Lucky, who was eight years old. She shook my hand before I loaded her in the back of the SUV, and again when I brought her outside into the warm night air. Since there was only her, Rob stayed in the car while I went up to the door of the large brick veneer house in Zone B. I knocked on the door and a young Breeder answered.
She smiled at me. “Are you bringing us a new friend?” she asked. An adult appeared behind her, a stern-looking Shadow of fifty or so. I hesitated and looked at the Shadow for a sign of how to respond.
The Shadow nodded at me.
“Yes,” I said to the young Breeder. “I am.” Lucky solemnly shook my hand a final time and was taken away. The Shadow gave me a wad of cash and closed the door in my face without further comment.
When Rob dropped me back to the Gray Zone that morning, I didn’t feel like going to the diner, so I walked to the end of the street and climbed over the splintered, white fence to the reservoir. The moon was holding just over the dam, at the bottom of a white sky. The wind was up. I kept walking, straight into the Waster hunting ground—I didn’t care. The reservoir was thick with overgrown wattle trees and weeds. It was a rocky, dark place, its trails marked faint and uneven. There was only one proper path, a wide fire track—the others were merely slight indentations, worn down mostly by the Wasters. At the end of the track there was a fork. I took the path to the right, which led down to the water—there were dead cigarettes and condoms strewn about, and food wrappers.
It was a clear, bright night. I could see stars. I took my mask off and could breathe. I lay down across a large rock and looked up at the sky. So many stars! Some of them were satellites, the Book Shadow had told me—human-made machines that had been launched into space in the time Before, broken now but circling the planet forever. I heard the crunching of footsteps across the rubbish and the undergrowth. Then a face above me: Alex.
“Hey!” she said. “I waited at our table for ages.” She looked around. “You’re the one always banging on about me not going out to get raped and murdered.”
Then she looked at me, really looked at me. Shit. Shit. She reached down and touched my face, and I closed my eyes. I held her hand there and she said, “Hey.”
I pushed her, and she pushed me back and we were laughing and then, and then she leaned in and we were kissing, and she was laughing again.
“Y
ou should see your face!” She leaned in and we were kissing again.
I nudged her away, and I was trying to tell her. And she gave me a look and said, “Shut up, Will. Like I don’t know.”
How much would Alex hate me if she knew I was a Breeder runner all those months we were together? If she knew about all those innocent kids I put away?
•
This is what I want. I want to be in the water with you. It’s October and the water’s late warmth presses against us. We’re on boards, facing the ocean. The ocean, the ocean. There’s a wave coming.
We talked about it—how in a different world, where the oceans weren’t burnt, the lands weren’t barren, where we could walk around freely, it might happen. In that world, two girls are walking down a beach, hand-in-hand, laughing. They’re walking under a clear blue sky, breathing clean air, and they have their whole lives ahead of them. They can swim and surf all day, their skin growing hot under the sun. They can smell the fresh salt in the air and they watch the men and women throwing lines on the shore, catching fat rainbow fish. The girls will buy one of those fish and cook it on a fire under the stars.
Is there a world out there, beyond the badlands, where this is possible? If Alex is right, and the Response has made contact with other cities, maybe there is still a place like this, somewhere. Or maybe we could work to build one. In another world, we’d have our lives ahead of us. We’d have choices. We’d be able to hold hands and walk into that future together.
But not in this world.
•
I’m woken in the night by an orange suit who hands me a mobile phone, some tape, and some pieces of elastic. He says, “You can do what you need to do now—our man is watching.” He nods at the camera. “Cate’s moved cells again.”
“How will I get the package from the surgeon’s?”
“We have someone on her staff. They’ll make contact once you’re there.”
I take off my hoodie and use the tape and elastic to set up small pockets, close to my body, then put the hoodie back on. The orange suit nods and leaves.
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