by James, Bella
Simon brushed his fingers over Livy's wrist, over and over, a clear warning not to react, to give nothing away on her newly chosen Alpha face. Soon enough they'd be given their work assignments. Until then they would continue to live in the student dorms. That meant a kind of freedom inherent in being able to sneak out and find each other. Once they were within the Alpha ranks, they'd have some freedom of a different sort, accepted as adults and able to converse if not freely, at least together.
On her other side, Julia took her free hand and held on as if her life depended on it. Livy thought she wasn't the only one holding her breath.
The second offense was read out. A Gamma accused of running away from the pleasure palace to which she had been assigned. She had made a run for the edges of the city, where the dome opened into borderlands to the Void. If she'd had a plan, no one knew what it was. Only to get beyond the walls of the city and the reach of the Centurion.
If such a thing were possible.
The judges didn't read her name. Gammas were interchangeable in the aristocracy's point of view. Her name was unimportant to them.
It was important to Livy, Simon and Julia.
Julia couldn't hold back a small cry. "That's Viola!"
On her other side, Simon tightened his grip on her hand. Livy didn't know if it was a response to Julia's exclamation or to the sight of Viola, already thoroughly broken, her head hanging, her long hair in its beautiful cut and color, hanging limp around her face. She still wore the tiny, revealing shift of the pleasure workers, a light green with a high neck, split sleeves, and a tiny skirt that just brushed the tops of her thighs. Two Centurions dragged her forward. Viola wasn't walking on her own. If they'd released her, she would have fallen.
The judges studied her. Livy felt nauseated watching them look her over as if she were nothing more than meat.
Running from the pleasure domes was close to treason. The pleasure workers served the community and if the aristocracy saw irony in the fact that they only served the ruling classes, or if they even understood that having a ruling class meant the belief in their community was already false, none of them ever gave any indication.
"For the crime of running, and because of the nature of the youth and the fact of her young age, and because it is a first infraction, the judges show leniency."
Livy did not let out the breath she held.
"She is to be secured to the post on the stage and whipped until she loses consciousness."
The three friends in the crowd jolted forward, hands linked, their mouths open, unable to suppress their horror. Moments later their faces were as impassive as they could make them. The square was full of citizens who lived the glorified life of Arcadia. These were not workers toiling in villages under the burning sun and during frozen winters, nor were they Betas, sworn to a life of labor and providing for the aristocracy. They were privileged Alphas and they were not going to upset their life of ease, even if they did find the proceedings repellant.
There was no sign that most of the crowd did.
Then again, Viola's friends, unable to lift a hand, showed no evidence of repulsion and panic either. If Viola had looked into the crowd, she would have seen nothing more than a sea of faces upturned to watch her receive her punishment.
It was the work of instants for Viola's guards to affix her wrists to the manacles hanging from the already bloodied flogging post. Her shift was torn down the back, the sides of it pulled away from her thin form, and the flogger stepped into place, readying his whip.
Livy turned her face away. Very quietly, Simon said, "Don't look away."
It was all she could do to turn her head back, and watch as Viola shuddered and screamed under the barrage of strikes. More than a dozen opened her back, leaving her flesh torn and bloody. By the time the flogger stopped, she hung limp in the chains. The guards simply released her wrist and carried her from the stage.
"What's going to happen to her?" Livy wondered.
Julia said, "She'll have bed rest until she's healed. And she'll be returned to the palaces."
There was no time to say more. The third of the accused of the day was led onto the stage, and the accusations read. The man was a rebel, one of the mostly faceless factions working within the villages to win support for a rebellion against the Plutarch. Even while they watched, frozen in place, the man was pilloried and questioned. He already had a broken cheekbone from the look of it and two broken hands, his eyes were both blackened and his mouth swollen, but he found the strength to laugh when his captors demanded answers and when they tortured him and this time Livy didn't need Simon to tell her not to look away. This was a show of loyalty to the Plutarch. She could show no revulsion. But she could direct her vision just above what was happening and let her gaze relax and turn inward, until the bloody business on stage was a blur and she watched her family working in the field, watched them laughing together and harvesting the food that would be their own through the winter, watched her mother cultivating her herbal garden, allowed by law because she took the pressure off the government medical workers and none of them seemed to notice she grew food between the medicinal flowers so that in the depths of winter they didn't starve. As for community, Livy's mother turned away no one but the guards. When the Plutarch's minions came calling, Livy's household was as sadly broke as any other in an Agara winter.
When the screaming stopped, when the sounds of the blade finished, Livy couldn't avoid the sight of the traitor's head on a stake, being taken to the walls outside the seat of government.
A fire formed in her then, an anxious feeling like she couldn't move fast enough to do the things she couldn't yet identify but knew she had to do.
She, Livy, had to do.
Her father's words as he spilled the shiny new bullets from their molds rang in her ears: These are freedom.
Chapter 9
That night they were taken back to the dorms only long enough for the new Alphas to dress in formal clothes. Not all of them, only a fraction, the very highest ranking of the Blues, the youth with the best test scores.
And the most beauty. Boys and girls, less than fifty of them, returned to the dorms to find invitations in gold lettering on creamy paper, inviting them to a feast of state at the palace of the Plutarch.
On Livy's bed there was laid out a lavish ivory and gold dress with thin straps to hold it around her neck and a plunging neckline. Though it would reach her feet, even be too long if there weren't incredibly high-heeled sandals to be worn with it, it was even more revealing somehow than the dress Viola had worn as a pleasure worker. When she put it on, Livy found it flowed on her like water, barely concealing anything. She felt strangely naked in it, and yet, beautiful.
She saw it in Simon's eyes when she emerged from her room. They didn't touch or speak, didn't complain as the rows of males and females matched up to take each others arms and board the bus that would take them to the palace separated Simon and Livy. But she saw the look on his face and it made her flush with pleasure.
The Plutarch's realm was opulent. Everywhere Livy looked there was some new excess, from the gold woven into fabric of the draperies to the marble mined in the Void at the cost of how many Beta lives? The women wore shoes so much higher than Livy's they could barely walk in them and they talked and flirted, with each other if there was no man to compliment them, and every word from their mouth was vapid self-praise or ignorant blather. Livy quickly tired of them and when seated at the long, snowy white, elegant table, she listened to the men around her – who were just as substance-free.
Dinner was served, piping hot lamb pies, greens that were fresh and flavorful and not wilted, potatoes in their jackets and a desert that looked so creamy and sweet, Livy couldn't help wondering if enjoying it would make her complicit in whatever was happening here.
The Plutarch, when they joined him, was a handsome, cultured man of forty-two, strong and virile and intelligent. He listened to the students, laughed with them and complimented their
accomplishments in coming so far that they were invited to dine with the ruler of the world.
Livy found this one more insipid comment in a night full of them. As if the only reward that could be bestowed upon them was to be in his presence.
When his attention turned to her, she'd heard so much from other students already, especially the beautiful girls who were allowed the longest conversations and who no matter how intelligent, merely simpered and complimented, that she lost her temper and asked outright, "Yes, I do have a question," and didn't offer an honorific. The table had begun to still. Everyone seemed to sense something coming. Looking into the Plutarch's blue eyes, Livy said, "I want to know about this afternoon. About Viola's capture and punishment. Surely it seems too horrific a punishment for what she did. She's sixteen. You put her into a brothel. Why wouldn't she run?"
The horrified hush at the table was broken by the sound of the world leader laughing. He seemed honestly delighted with Livy's effrontery and his delight was the signal for all the guests to laugh.
Livy didn't.
And she didn't get an answer.
The only thing he said to her was, "Such spirit."
The meal was long. When Livy's turn came back again the Plutarch waited for her to speak, seeming almost delighted by the chance, but all Livy asked was what kind of fruit had been used in the dessert, and the ruler said he didn't know but he'd have one of the kitchen Betas tell her before she left.
Not long after, he rose, causing everyone to rise precipitously, and bid them a goodnight, reminding them of the trials coming up and that during this, his mate would be found, so the Plutarchracy could continue.
If his eye seemed to linger on Livy when he said this, surely it was only her imagination.
On the buses going back to the dorms, the guards seemed as exhausted as the students. No one was required to sit anywhere in particular and so Simon and Livy and Julia sat together.
"That was foolish," Simon said.
"You're insane," Julia said.
"I found out something that way," Livy said, but when pressed, even she wasn't sure what it was.
The night before the trials Livy couldn't sleep. There was no Julia to talk with, no Simon to disappear with. From this night through the end of the trials they'd be held in separate rooms. How enormous must the Institute be to provide for all of the students that way? If Livy had ever ventured out without Simon she'd have been lost so completely maybe even the Centurions would never have found her.
Her dinner was brought to her. No coffee tonight, only water to wash down the uninspiring bread, meat and potatoes. Perhaps the Betas were refusing to work? Or maybe she was being prepared for a life among them. Her heart began to pound. But she didn't really believe that. From what little she'd seen of the world, she belonged as an Alpha. She had the intelligence. Thanks to Simon she had the physical ability.
She was meant to be among the elite.
Livy stood. She wasn't eating this. She'd seen what the aristocracy ate. She'd seen what high blue level students and Alphas ate. Those were her peers, not the helpless yellows like the students who became Betas.
She paced in her room. After a while, anxiety drove her to pushups, sit ups, running in place, reviewing the takedowns and balance techniques Simon had taught her. When she wore herself out that way, she mentally reviewed the history her grandfather had taught her, comparing it to the revisionist history the Institute had taught her. Word for word, the two stories matched up. It was where the emphasis fell that differed.
Once there was a Great War, Grandfather Bane said, a war that destroyed the world. There were no survivors. It was too long ago. After the war had ended and the fires had died, a great ruler arose from the ashes of a great city, the man who would bring peace and order to the world and rebuild it better than it once was. Legends say the man was a soldier in the Great War. Legends say he was a pacifist who refused to fight. Legends say he was in one of the governments of the Before Times world.
It doesn't matter. He rose and he was followed and under his rule the citizens were assigned to homes in Pastoreum, Tundrus, Oceanus, The Void and the great city of Arcadia. Every citizen had a place in this new world and after a time, every citizen's place was assigned by the new world government. It was necessary that everyone contributed to the good of the society, the community, because in the new world, the damage caused by exposure to the radiation and poisonous debris of the Great War caused women to become infertile or give birth to monsters, who were driven underground where they were meant to die off but lived on the scraps and refuse of the aristocracy. The provinces of Tundrus, Oceanus, Pastoreum and the few inhabited parts of the Void owe fealty to Arcadia. They are cared for by the capital city that keeps them safe from dangers that might come and because of this, they work in benefit of the capital city. They are villagers, serfs, beholden. They owe their very lives to the Plutarch.
When there came time to manage the growing population, the Plutarch took matters into his own hand, creating a method of identifying the positions for the citizens of the world's communities. They were formed into the Alphas who became Aristocracy, the Betas who became the world's workers, keeping the lights on and the trains running, the buses in good order and the domed city of Arcadia from dying out. There were the Gammas, genetically and mentally inferior, assigned the pleasure palaces where they were forced to submit to the darkest and most corrupt desires of the ruling classes.
The Plutarch was human. He lived and died. In order to keep the miracles he had enacted in the world he had created, he became a generational ruler, always finding the most beautiful, brilliant, talented of the women of the generation at the time he himself was between forty and forty years old. Once every forty years or so, the Culling takes place, the sixteen year olds of every province taken to Arcadia for testing, for genetic testing, for mental and physical testing, for loyalty testing, and those who pass know their place, they fit into society where they're needed, and they are happy.
Community is happiness. Community is joy. Community is important.
Community protects and serves.
Your place in the community is to serve.
That hadn't been her grandfather's story. That was the history as she'd been taught in Arcadia amongst the vapid conversations of courtesans and the styles of the rich and the poverty of the workers.
Even if she wanted to refute it, Livy had seen it work. She'd seen peace in Arcadia. She'd seen a society, a community that functioned. She'd seen more food than she'd ever seen in her life.
She was an Alpha. She deserved to be an Alpha.
This was her right.
But as she waited for the testers to arrive with their cameras that would fit over her eye and track the movement, with their mics that would attach to her throat so the slightest hesitation or verbal vibration would record, Livy remembered her grandfather's story.
Grandfather Bane told Livy about a world that was free. Where people made their own decisions for good or evil. There was plenty of evil in the world and there were plenty of mistakes. Religions had far more power than they did now, making people feel one way or another, and they killed each other over ideologies.
How did that differ from today when they killed each other over a scrap of food in the depths of winter after spending the entire spring, summer and fall growing food that should have sustained them but was taken by a small, small faction of the world's population?
He told her that the ideologies and political beliefs of men and women not that different from the Plutarch had led to the bombs that fell, the war that devastated the world and the pollution that drifted into the air and sickened generations. That there were monsters born to women who were still fertile, and that most women weren't, that was no lie. Her Grandfather had told her that.
But there had been wonders. In the country where he'd lived, which had its own government and every province had its own government and the people governed themselves and if they didn't always agr
ee and didn't always get what they wanted, still the had a chance to be heard without being beheaded as traitors.
It had been a hard life, but not as hard as the lives they lived now. There had been wars, but there had been no tax that stripped children from their parents.
"Wars did," Livy said.
Instead of answering her directly, he'd called her wise, then lapsed into a coughing spell that left him unable to finish the story.
Livy could guess how it went anyway. When the people were hurting and dying and trying to recover from the wars, the first Plutarch rose. Both stories said that. But the Arcadian version said he saved the world.
The province version said he enslaved it.
Livy wavered between two worlds.
She deserved to be an Alpha. Her parents were no worse off now than they'd been with her there. She missed them, but maybe she could even find a way to send help. If not for the entire community, then for her family. And if not for her entire family, maybe she could bring Grandfather Bane to Arcadia where the best doctors and surgeons practiced.
She deserved to be an Alpha. She could change more, help more, if she numbered among the ruling class.
She deserved to be an Alpha.
Because she'd seen opulence, elegance and excess – and she wanted it for herself.
One line from her grandfather's version of the history wouldn't leave her mind, though.
Those people, in the wake of the wars, sick, starving, dying – they still had one thing we don't have with all our peace and the Plutarch caring for us.
She'd looked up at him with starry eyes, a child up too late and tired. "What was that, Grandfather?"