The Testaments

by Margaret Atwood

I was in bed with the duvet pulled up to my nose. “Where?” I said.

  “Curiosity got the cat in trouble. Let’s go.”

  We went down the big staircase, but instead of going outside we went into one of the downstairs apartments. Ada had a key.

  The apartment was like the one upstairs: furnished with new things, nothing personal. It looked lived in, but just barely. There was a duvet on the bed, identical to the one upstairs. In the bedroom was a black backpack. There was a toothbrush in the bathroom, but nothing in the cabinet. I know because I looked. Melanie used to say that 90 percent of people looked in other people’s bathroom cabinets, so you should never keep your secrets in there. Now I was wondering where she actually did keep her secrets, because she must have had a lot of them.

  “Who lives here?” I asked Ada.

  “Garth,” she said. “He’ll be our transport. Now, quiet as mice.”

  “What are we waiting for?” I asked. “When’s something going to happen?”

  “Wait long enough and you won’t be disappointed,” said Ada. “Something will happen. Only you might not like what it is.”

  31

  When I woke up, it was dark and a man was there. He was maybe twenty-five, tall and thin. He was wearing black jeans, a black T-shirt, no logo. “Garth, this is Daisy,” Ada said. I said hi.

  He looked at me with interest and said, “Baby Nicole?”

  I said, “Please don’t call me that.”

  He said, “Right. I’m not supposed to say the name.”

  “We good to go?” Ada said.

  “Far as I know,” said Garth. “She should cover up. So should you.”

  “With what?” said Ada. “Didn’t bring my Gilead veil. We’ll get in the back. Best we can do.”

  The van we’d come in was gone, and there was a different one—a delivery van that said SPEEDY DRAIN SNAKING, with a picture of a cute snake coming out of a drain. Ada and I climbed into the back. It held some plumbing tools but also a mattress, which was where we sat. It was dark and stuffy in there, but we were moving along quite fast as far as I could tell.

  * * *

  —

  “How did I get smuggled out of Gilead?” I asked Ada after a while. “When I was Baby Nicole?”

  “No harm in telling you that,” she said. “That network was blown years ago, Gilead shut down the route; it’s wall-to-wall sniffer dogs now.”

  “Because of me?” I said.

  “Not everything is because of you. Anyway this is what happened. Your mother gave you to some trusted friends; they took you north up the highway, then through the woods into Vermont.”

  “Were you one of the trusted friends?”

  “We said we were deer-hunting. I used to be a guide around there, I knew people. We had you in a backpack; we gave you a pill so you wouldn’t scream.”

  “You drugged a baby. You could’ve killed me,” I said indignantly.

  “But we didn’t,” said Ada. “We took you over the mountains, then down into Canada at Three Rivers. Trois-Rivières. That was a prime people-smuggling route back in the day.”

  “Back in what day?”

  “Oh, around 1740,” she said. “They used to catch girls from New England, hold them hostage, trade them for money or else marry them off. Once the girls had kids, they wouldn’t want to go back. That’s how I got my mixed heritage.”

  “Mixed like what?”

  “Part stealer, part stolen,” she said. “I’m ambidextrous.”

  I thought about that, sitting in the dark among the plumbing supplies. “So where is she now? My mother?”

  “Sealed document,” said Ada. “The less people who know that, the better.”

  “She just walked off and left me?”

  “She was up to her neck in it,” said Ada. “You’re lucky you’re alive. She’s lucky too, they’ve tried to kill her twice that we know of. They’ve never forgotten how she outsmarted them about Baby Nicole.”

  “What about my father?”

  “Same story. He’s so deep underground he needs a breathing tube.”

  “I guess she doesn’t remember me,” I said dolefully. “She doesn’t give a fuck.”

  “Nobody is any authority on the fucks other people give,” said Ada. “She stayed away from you for your own good. She didn’t want to put you at risk. But she’s kept up with you as much as she could, under the circumstances.”

  I was pleased by this, though I didn’t want to give up my anger. “How? Did she come to our house?”

  “No,” said Ada. “She wouldn’t risk making you a target. But Melanie and Neil sent her pictures of you.”

  “They never took any pictures of me,” I said. “It was a thing they had—no pictures.”

  “They took lots of pictures,” said Ada. “At night. When you were asleep.” That was creepy, and I said so.

  “Creepy is as creepy does,” said Ada.

  “So they sent these pictures to her? How? If it was so secret, weren’t they afraid—”

  “By courier,” said Ada.

  “Everyone knows those courier services leak like a sieve.”

  “I didn’t say courier service, I said courier.”

  I thought a minute. “Oh,” I said. “You took them to her?”

  “Not took, not directly. I got them to her. Your mother really liked those pictures,” she said. “Mothers always like pictures of their kids. She’d look at them and then burn them, so no matter what, Gilead wouldn’t ever see them.”

  * * *

  —

  After maybe an hour we ended up at a wholesale carpet outlet in Etobicoke. It had a logo of a flying carpet, and it was called Carpitz.

  Carpitz was a genuine carpet wholesaler out front, with a showroom and a lot of carpets on display, but in back, behind the storage area, there was a cramped room with half a dozen cubicles along the sides. Some of them had sleeping bags or duvets in them. A man in shorts was sleeping in one, sprawled on his back.

  There was a central area with some desks and chairs and computers, and a battered sofa over against the wall. There were some maps on the walls: North America, New England, California. A couple of other men and three women were busy at the computers; they were dressed like the people you see outside in the summer drinking iced lattes. They glanced over at us, then went back to what they were doing.

  Elijah was sitting on the sofa. He got up and came over and asked if I was all right. I said I was fine, and could I have a drink of water please, because all of a sudden I was very thirsty.

  Ada said, “We haven’t eaten lately. I’ll go.”

  “You should both stay here,” said Garth. He went out towards the front of the building.

  “Nobody here knows who you are, except Garth,” Elijah said to me in a low voice. “They don’t know you’re Baby Nicole.”

  “We’re keeping it that way,” said Ada. “Loose lips sink ships.”

  Garth brought us a paper bag with some wilted croissant breakfast sandwiches in it, and four takeouts of terrible coffee. We went into one of the cubicles and sat down on some used-furniture office chairs, and Elijah turned on the small flatscreen that was in there so we could watch the news while we were eating.

  The Clothes Hound was still on the news, but nobody had been arrested. One expert blamed terrorists, which was vague because there were a lot of different kinds. Another said “outside agents.” The Canadian government said they were exploring all avenues, and Ada said their favourite avenue was the waste bin. Gilead made an official statement saying they knew nothing about the bombing. There was a protest outside the Gilead Consulate in Toronto, but it wasn’t well attended: Melanie and Neil weren’t famous, and they weren’t politicians.

  I didn’t know whether to be sad or angry. Melanie and Neil being murdered made me angry, and so did reme
mbering nice things they’d done when they were alive. But things that should have made me angry, such as why Gilead was being allowed to get away with it, only made me sad.

  Aunt Adrianna was back in the news—the Pearl Girls missionary found hanging from a doorknob in a condo. Suicide had been ruled out, the police said, and foul play was suspected. The Gilead Embassy in Ottawa had lodged a formal complaint, stating that the Mayday terrorist organization had committed this homicide and the Canadian authorities were covering up for them, and it was time for the entire illegal Mayday operation to be rooted out and brought to justice.

  There was nothing on the news about me being missing. Shouldn’t my school have reported it? I asked.

  “Elijah fixed it,” Ada said. “He knows people at the school, that’s how we got you into it. Kept you out of the spotlight. It was safer.”

  32

  I slept in my clothes that night, on one of the mattresses. In the morning, Elijah called a meeting of the four of us.

  “Things could be better,” said Elijah. “We may have to get out of this place pretty soon. The Canadian government’s under a lot of pressure from Gilead to crack down on Mayday. Gilead’s got a bigger army and they’re trigger-happy.”

  “Cavemen, the Canadians,” said Ada. “Sneeze and they fall over.”

  “Worse, we’ve heard Gilead could target Carpitz next.”

  “We know this how?”

  “Our inside source,” said Elijah, “but we got that before The Clothes Hound was burgled. We’ve lost contact with him or her, and with most of our rescue-line people inside Gilead. We don’t know what’s happened to them.”

  “So where can we put her?” said Garth, nodding at me. “Out of reach?”

  “What about where my mother is?” I asked. “You said they tried to kill her and failed, so she must be safe, or safer than here. I could go there.”

  “Safer is a matter of time, for her,” said Elijah.

  “Then how about another country?”

  “A couple of years ago we could have got you out through Saint-Pierre,” said Elijah, “but the French have closed that down. And after the refugee riots England’s a no-go, Italy’s the same, Germany—the smaller European ones. None of them want trouble with Gilead. Not to mention outrage from their own people, the mood being what it is. Even New Zealand’s shut the door.”

  “Some of them say they welcome woman fugitives from Gilead, but you wouldn’t last a day in most of them, you’d be sex-trafficked,” said Ada. “And forget South America, too many dictators. California’s hard to get into because of the war, and the Republic of Texas is nervous. They fought Gilead to a standstill, but they don’t want to be invaded. They’re avoiding provocations.”

  “So I might as well give up because they’ll kill me sooner or later?” I didn’t really think that, but it’s how I felt right then.

  “Oh no,” said Ada. “They don’t want to kill you.”

  “Killing Baby Nicole would be a very bad look for them. They’ll want you in Gilead, alive and smiling,” said Elijah. “Though we no longer have any real way of knowing what they want.”

  I thought about this. “You used to have a way?”

  “Our source in Gilead,” said Ada.

  “Someone in Gilead was helping you?” I asked.

  “We don’t know who. They’d warn us of raids, tell us when a route was blocked, send us maps. The information’s always been accurate.”

  “But they didn’t warn Melanie and Neil,” I said.

  “They didn’t appear to have total access to the inner workings of the Eyes,” said Elijah. “So whoever they are, they aren’t top of the food chain. A lesser functionary, we are guessing. But risking their life.”

  “Why would they?” I asked.

  “No idea, but it’s not for money,” said Elijah.

  According to Elijah, the source used microdots, which were an old technology—so old that Gilead hadn’t thought of looking for them. You made them with a special camera, and they were so small they were almost invisible: Neil had read them with a viewer fitted inside a fountain pen. Gilead was very thorough in its searches of anything crossing the border, but Mayday had used the Pearl Girls brochures as their courier system. “It was foolproof for a time,” Elijah said. “Our source would photograph the documents for Mayday and stick them on the Baby Nicole brochures. The Pearl Girls could be counted on to visit The Clothes Hound: Melanie was on their list of possible converts to the cause, since she always accepted the brochures. Neil had a microdot camera, so he’d glue the return messages onto the same brochures, and then Melanie would return them to the Pearl Girls. They had orders to take any extra brochures back to Gilead for use in other countries.”

  “But the dots can’t work anymore,” said Ada. “Neil and Melanie are dead, Gilead found their camera. Now they’ve arrested everyone on the Upstate New York escape route. Bunch of Quakers, a few smugglers, two hunting guides. Stand by for a mass hanging.”

  I was feeling more and more hopeless. Gilead had all the power. They’d killed Melanie and Neil, they would track down my unknown mother and kill her too, they would wipe out Mayday. They would get hold of me somehow and drag me into Gilead, where the women might as well be house cats and everyone was a religious maniac.

  “What can we do?” I asked. “It sounds like there’s nothing.”

  “I’m coming to that,” said Elijah. “As it turns out, there may be a chance. A faint hope, you could say.”

  “Faint hopes are better than none,” said Ada.

  The source had been promising to deliver a very big document cache to Mayday, said Elijah. Whatever this cache contained would blow Gilead sky-high, or so the source claimed. But he or she hadn’t finished assembling it before The Clothes Hound was robbed and the link was broken.

  The source had contrived a fallback plan, however, which he or she had shared with Mayday several microdots ago. A young woman claiming to have been converted to the faith of Gilead by the Pearl Girls missionaries could enter Gilead easily—many had done so. And the best young woman to transfer the cache—indeed, the only young woman acceptable to the source—would be Baby Nicole. The source did not doubt that Mayday knew where she was.

  The source had made it clear: no Baby Nicole, no document cache; and if no document cache, then Gilead would continue as it was. Mayday’s time would run out, and Melanie’s and Neil’s deaths would have been for nothing. Not to mention my mother’s life. But if Gilead were to crumble, it would all be different.

  “Why only me?”

  “The source was firm on that point. Said you’re the best chance. For one thing, if you get caught they won’t dare kill you. They’ve made too much of an icon out of Baby Nicole.”

  “I can’t destroy Gilead,” I said. “I’m just a person.”

  “Not alone, of course not,” said Elijah. “But you’d be transporting the ammunition.”

  “I don’t think I can,” I said. “I couldn’t be a convert. They’d never believe me.”

  “We’ll train you,” said Elijah. “Praying and self-defence.” It sounded like some sort of TV skit.

  “Self-defence?” I said. “Against who?”

  “Remember the Pearl Girl found dead in the condo?” said Ada. “She was working for our source.”

  “Mayday didn’t kill her,” said Elijah. “It was the other Pearl Girl, her partner. Adrianna must’ve been trying to block the partner’s suspicions about the whereabouts of Baby Nicole. There must’ve been a fight. Which Adrianna lost.”

  “There’s a lot of people dying,” I said. “The Quakers, and Neil and Melanie, and that Pearl Girl.”

  “Gilead’s not shy about killing,” said Ada. “They’re fanatics.” She said they were supposed to be dedicated to virtuous godly living, but you could believe you were living virtuously and also murder peopl
e if you were a fanatic. Fanatics thought that murdering people was virtuous, or murdering certain people. I knew that because we’d done fanatics in school.

  33

  I somehow agreed to go to Gilead without ever definitely agreeing. I’d said I’d think about it, and then the next morning everyone acted as if I’d said yes, and Elijah said how brave I was and what a difference I would make, and that I would bring hope to a lot of trapped people; so then I more or less couldn’t go back on it. Anyway, I felt that I owed Neil and Melanie, and the other dead people. If I was the only person the so-called source would accept, then I would have to try.

  Ada and Elijah said they wanted to prepare me as much as they could in the short time they had. They set up a little gym in one of the cubicles, with a punching bag, a skipping rope, and a leather medicine ball. Garth did that part of the training. At first he didn’t talk to me much except about what we were doing: the skipping, the punching, tossing the ball back and forth. But after a while he did thaw a little. He told me he was from the Republic of Texas. They’d declared independence at the beginning of Gilead, and Gilead resented that; there had been a war, which had ended in a draw and a new border.

  So right now Texas was officially neutral, and any actions against Gilead by its citizens were illegal. Not that Canada wasn’t neutral too, he said, but it was neutral in a sloppier way. Sloppier was his word, not mine, and I found it insulting until he said that Canada was sloppy in a good way. So he and some of his friends had come to Canada to join the Mayday Lincoln Brigade, for foreign freedom fighters. He’d been too young to be in the actual Gilead War with Texas, he’d only been seven. But his two older brothers had been killed in it, and a cousin of his had been grabbed and taken into Gilead, and they hadn’t heard from her since.

  I was adding in my head to figure out exactly how old he was. Older than me, but not too much older. Did he think of me as more than an assignment? Why was I even spending time on that? I needed to concentrate on what I was supposed to be doing.