by K. Makansi
This is why the Watchmen enforce curfews most nights starting at 02h00. This is why the Dieticians encourage recreational drug use among all citizens, and why they put time-release sleeping drugs into the Mealpaks of the most prominent researchers, politicians, and students. In Okaria, the smarter you are, the better you sleep. I never knew a night of insomnia until I left the Sector.
I haven’t had a MealPak in years, but somehow, now that I’m back in Okaria, I feel the difference between day and night more acutely. During the day I feel myself reaching for the old Remy Alexander, aspiring artist, proud of my beautiful city and my place in it. At night, old Remy is but a spectre, clinging to memories that grow hazier with each passing moment. I am grounded in the shadows, renewed in the darkness. I reinhabit my true self. In the night, old Remy loses her way and new Remy finds hers.
It’s edging close to curfew when I see them. I turn a corner and see three figures walking abreast on the sidewalk ahead of me, two men and a woman. Yesterday, Meera sent a message saying she could meet me at the apartment at midnight. She has something important for me. But what? A message from Vale? Something from Bunqu? News from the Resistance? I couldn’t stay in watching the clock tick the minutes away, so I headed out for a walk. Now, I feel the ragged edges of Okaria’s multiple personalities all around me.
“Eli wasn’t crazy,” a tall, slender man with close-cropped hair says, a hint of defiance in his voice. Their conversation becomes more distinct as I fall in behind them, pacing my steps to theirs. “I knew him. I mean, he was crazy, but not like that.”
“By the harvest, Shia, let it go,” the woman responds.
“You don’t get it, though—”
“No, you don’t get it,” she interrupts. “The massacre is old news. They got the guys who organized it, those crazy Outsider bastards. They’re dead, and the Outsiders have been disappearing into the Wilds ever since.”
I suppress a laugh. Oh, if only you knew how wrong you are!
“I had classes with him, Fen,” the voice I know as Shia says stubbornly. “He might have been a firestarter, but he wasn’t insane.”
“Crazy enough to go off the grid.” This voice is new. It comes from the man on the left, wearing a stiff green jacket that looks like one of the OAC’s uniforms. I can’t get close enough to see if it has the golden wheat stalk, the OAC’s symbol, emblazoned on his shoulder. I decide to keep my distance, just in case.
“Just like your old celebrity crush, Linnea Heilmann?” Shia asks. “You think she’s crazy, too? You heard what she said the other night on that broadcast.”
They round a corner onto one of the wide-open boulevards of the city. They’re headed in the opposite direction I need to go to meet Meera, but I can’t leave them. Not when this Shia sounds like he’s asking the right questions. I fall back a little, trying to stay just within earshot without them catching on to the fact that I’m tailing them.
“Come on, Shia, you think that was really Linnea?” Fen, the skeptic. “She was so poorly lit they could have been filming that thing from underwater. I bet they just found someone who looked like her and—”
“Part of it was true, though,” the third man says. “Linnea definitely didn’t take a communications job with the OAC. I never once saw her at headquarters.”
“See!” Shia says, turning around excitedly to walk backwards, and now I get a glimpse of his face. He sports a close-trimmed beard and tightly-wound curls. A stubby nose, narrow chin, and wide eyes, even wider now as he watches his friends. “Thank you, Jeong! What if she really did leave, and go into the Wilds trying to kill Remy—”
“And what if she did?” Jeong says, suddenly hostile. “Remy Alexander’s a traitor to Okaria. The Orleáns have every authority to send somebody to take her out.”
“Then why did Linnea back out of the job?” Shia asks, leaning in and talking more quietly, as if this was his trump card, the point he’d been waiting to make all night. Never mind the better question, I think: who the hell thought Linnea Heilmann would make a good assassin?
After a few seconds, when neither of his friends respond, he continues, in an urgent murmur: “Look, all I’m saying is, the whole thing is suspicious. Think about it—”
“That’s your problem, Shia, you’re always thinking,” Fen interrupts. “You need to lighten up.”
They turn onto a smaller street, off the boulevard, and start to cross a bridge over one of the Sector’s many waterways. I lag behind for a moment, hoping they won’t notice me, but the three seem oblivious to my presence.
“Maybe if you thought for a half-second instead of drinking all goddamn day, Fen, you’d be worried too. All these people leaving—think about them all! From Dr. Rhinehouse to the Alexander family after Tai was killed, to Elijah Tawfiq, to Soren Skaarsgard—what the hell ever happened to him, did you ever think of that? And now Linnea appears on the Sector broadcast to tell us all not to believe—”
“You three are out past curfew,” a voice rings out, loud and clear. I snap to attention. The voice is coming from ahead, at the base of a bridge over one of the city’s canals. I step back, duck down, and press myself flat into a shadowed wall, hoping the silhouettes of the three ahead of me will give me cover.
“No, we’re not,” Fen says, nonplussed. “We’ve got a full ten minutes before curfew starts, and our flat is just down the street.” She waves her arm at an apartment building in the distance.
“Besides,” Jeong says, “I’m OAC-exempt. Curfew doesn’t apply to me. What the hell is going on here?”
I stick my head out, risking my cover, trying to find out what sparked Jeong’s question. Looking between Jeong and Fen I take in the scene: a man in a Watchman’s uniform has a young boy—too young—pressed against the wall, his wrists pinned above his head, their two bodies pressed together in a way that brings bile to my tongue and has me leaning forward on the balls of my feet, my knife suddenly resting in the palm of my hand.
“None of your business,” the Watchman says. The boy’s eyes are wide, staring at the three friends in front of me, and I don’t need any microexpression technology to tell me what is plainly written on his face: terror, disgust, fear. And then something else as his eyes slide past Shia, Fen, and Jeong and meet mine. Recognition. He knows who I am. And then I recognize him, too: the boy who replaced Meera for my food drop last week. My stomach plummets into my boots. He’s an Outsider! The Watchman’s caught an Outsider!
“Looks like it is our business,” Shia says, pulling out his plasma and scribbling in a few symbols. “I don’t know what’s going on here, but I’d back away from that boy, unless you want a patrol drone ready to report you in about ten seconds.”
“Any patrol drone would take my side in this encounter,” the Watchman spits. “This is an Outsider disguised as a Sector courtesan.” In the dark, it’s hard to tell, but he’s right: the child is wearing the deep purple robes of the courtesan class, a select cadre of citizens trained to entertain. “A thief, I’m sure, or a part of a smuggling ring. It’s my job to arrest and deport these criminals.”
“It’s your job, is it?” Shia begins, but Jeong claps a hand on his friend’s shoulder and whispers something in his ear, now trying to pull him away. I guess the fact that the kid is an Outsider convinced Jeong not to bother. Fen, too, is backing off. I crouch, staying hidden, ready to defend the boy alone if I have to. But Shia isn’t ready to give up.
“No, I’m not leaving. I’m taking down your badge number. I don’t care who this kid is. Whatever you were doing with him a moment ago was both improper for an on-duty Officer of the Watch and illegal without the boy’s consent and—”
Shia stops mid-sentence, throwing his hands up, and Fen lets out a startled yelp. The Watchman has pulled his Bolt from its holster and is waving it dangerously in the air.
“If you knew what was good for you, you’d have listened to me the first time. Go home. This is none of your business.”
“Okay, okay,” Jeong says, gra
bbing Shia’s arm and pulling him away, down the street, giving the Watchman and his prey a wide berth. I duck back into the shadows, wishing I had my heat-cloaking gear, hoping this Watchman isn’t actually on duty and doesn’t have his mission contacts in. “We’re leaving. Happy?”
“I work in Personhood,” Fen says smartly over her shoulder as they walk away. “You can bet I’ll be looking you up in the database and reporting you for misconduct first thing tomorrow morning.”
Good for you, I think, but tomorrow morning isn’t going to help this kid tonight.
I wait until the sounds of their footsteps have faded, and check to see that the coast is clear. The Watchman, his Bolt pointed at the boy’s head, grabs his wrists and twists them behind his back, pushing him into the pillar at the base of the bridge. The boy lets out a little mew of pain.
“Shut up,” the Watchman mutters. “Filthy Outsider.” He starts to pull him away from the bridge, toward a darkened alley. His movements are jerky, though, and I know he’s rattled.
I step from the shadows.
“Let him go,” I say evenly, announcing my presence. My feet are spread in a fighting stance; my knife hangs lightly from my fingertips. The knife is for show, though. I don’t think I can get in a good throw before the officer fires, if he decides to fire.
The Watchman jumps and spins around, turns toward me, his Bolt pointed my direction. But his hand is shaking. “Who are you to tell me what to do?”
I make eye contact with the boy.
“You’re hurting him,” I say.
“What’s it to you?”
“I don’t like bullies.”
“I don’t care what you like. You best be on your way like those other three.”
“Those other three weren’t armed. Let him go.”
“Since Sector citizens aren’t allowed to own weapons, you must be an Outsider, too.” He waves the Bolt at me. “So why don’t you come along? Only problem is you’re not as pretty as he is.”
I’ll take that as a compliment, I think.
I take a step forward, betting heavily on scaring the shit out of him before he panics and pulls the trigger. If he fires his Bolt, his weapon will immediately call for backup drones and signal other nearby Watchmen.
“Ah, but I am a Sector citizen, and I am armed. And I will report you for attempting to violate an underage courtesan, Outsider or not, and for pointing your Bolt and threatening other citizens. You’ll be looking at suspension and a pay cut at the very least.”
He looks me up and down. “You’re going to report me? Who do you think you are?”
“Rank and file Watchmen like you”—I say it with a haughty sneer—“are not privy to all the SDF operations happening around the Sector.”
“What are you talking about?” Doubt creeps into his voice.
I give him the most disgusted look I can manage. It’s not hard. “Your disregard for the law compromised my operations and put citizens at risk. Leave the boy to me.”
He tightens his grip on his Bolt. “What organization are you with?”
Thinking fast, I reply, “Sector Guardians.”
“Prove it,” he pulls a retinal scanner from his belt and holds it in front of me, dropping the boy’s arm.
The boy acts like he’s going to run and then, in a flurry of motion, he pivots, plows one foot into the officer’s groin, bends and rips the Bolt from the man’s hand. As the officer keels over into a fetal position, the boy thwacks him on the side of the neck with the butt of the weapon. The man goes still.
“Follow me,” the boy says with an unnerving calm. We run down the same alley where the Watchman was about to drag him. Together we make it about a kilometer, before he stops.
“Thanks,” he says. “I need to get home now.” He turns away, heading down a side street.
“Wait!” I reach out to keep him from darting off. “How did you learn to do that?”
“To fight like that?”
“Yeah.”
“One of my moms taught me, before I came to the Sector. Groin shot. Pressure point. Disarm. Incapacitate. If necessary dim mak. Death touch.”
“Your moms?”
“When my mom died, all of the Outsiders became my parents. The mom who taught me to fight is Soo-Sun.” He stares at me. “You know her.”
Yes, I think. I do. I don’t know how he knows this, but like everything with the Outsiders, I don’t ask too many questions.
“How did he catch you, if you’re such a good fighter?” I ask.
The boy just shrugs. “He was bigger and stronger, and he surprised me.”
I admire his honesty. True strength comes from knowing your weaknesses. Something my grandfather used to say.
“Thank you for helping me.” He turns to leave.
“One more thing.” He stops and turns back to me. “What’s your name?”
“Heron,” he says, and something clicks in my mind. I realize why he looks so familiar.
“You’re related to Osprey, aren’t you?”
He smiles faintly, looking almost ghostlike in the ephemeral Okarian night. He turns and slips away. Did I just meet Osprey’s brother?
As I head home to meet Meera, I think: I need to find Shia.
The next morning, after I wake from a long, deep sleep, I sip a mug of tea and press my fingers into the leaf for the millionth time.
Persephone has returned, and with her, Spring.
It’s code, of course. In the old mythology, Persephone, the daughter of Demeter, ancient goddess of the harvest, was fated to spend six months of each year in the realm of Hades, Lord of Death, as his queen. During this time, her mother Demeter was so sad that she caused all the plants and food crops to wither and die. But for the other six months, Persephone returned to the land of the living, and her mother celebrated, giving life back to the earth, and food back to the mortals who survived only by the grace of the harvest. The message from Bunqu tells me that Demeter and Vale have been successfully reunited.
I feel my way across the letters on the second leaf, the transcription of the words Vale wrote in response to my message in the book.
You have renewed my hope. Stay safe. Love always.
I read it again and again, a wide smile on my face. You have renewed my hope.
There is hope. I can feel it. I throw on my clothes for the day, paint my disguise on as best I can, and set out to find Shia.
First I go to the apartment complex Fen pointed to last night when indicating where the three of them lived. I buy a flower from a street vendor and put on my best shy, sweet expression as I approach the doorman.
“Excuse me,” I say. “I met a man named Shia the other day in Reunion Park and he asked for my courriel. I was so nervous I wrote it down wrong. He told me he lives here, but,” I blush and look away, “do you know where he works? I’d like to take him this flower. With my real courriel this time.”
“Désolé, mademoiselle,” the older man says, with a touch of charm, “I can’t tell you where he works. I can give you his flat number, though, if you want to leave your flower for him. Take it inside to the desk, and they will see that it is put in his box. He will get it when he returns.”
I nod demurely. “Would you mind?”
He writes it on a little v-scroll for me, and I thank him with a seedcoin and head inside. At the desk, I unroll the scroll, erase the 7W, and write: If you want to know more about LH and ET, meet me at the Pont du Rue Panet at 20h00. Watchmen aren’t the only ones telling lies. I tie the scroll to the flower and leave it with the woman at the desk who assures me, with an engaging smile, that she will make sure Shia gets it as soon as he walks in the door.
The Pont du Rue Panet is the same little bridge where we stumbled on the Watchman assaulting Heron last night. I hope Shia will make the connection.
I leave the flower and head out the back way, out to one of the city’s suburban parks, away from downtown. Today, after hearing from Vale and Bunqu, and with an engagement to keep later ton
ight, I have no desire to risk discovery.
Will Shia be brave enough to meet me?
The streets are empty, traces of light lingering in the sky as darkness falls later and later each evening. I draw in a deep breath as I watch a leaf swirl on the water’s surface, drifting lazily under the bridge. The air smells like spring time, like moist earth and promise. It’s well past eight and Shia still hasn’t shown, but I can’t bring myself to leave.
Instead of tapping my feet or anxiously watching the streets, as I might have once done, I try to channel my inner Chan-Yu. I focus my eyes on a point in the distance—a rocky swell where the water gathers and foams before running under the bridge at my feet. I immerse myself in the motion of the stream. The swirls and eddies. The rocks, rough in some places, smooth in others. The way the last light in the sky falls on the stones, giving them an otherworldly glow. I lose myself in the delicate sound, the endless energy, the rush and flow of the water carried forever downstream.
“Are you the one who left the flower?”
The voice catches me by surprise, but I don’t startle. I turn and see the tall man with tight curls and a nervous, piercing gaze. Shia.
“Yes.”
“Who are you?” he asks.
“Someone who can answer your questions.”
“What questions?
“I was here last night. I heard you talking to your friends, and I saw what happened with the Watchman.”
He looks me up and down. In his canvas jacket, polished loafers, and neatly trimmed beard, he looks the part of the Okarian elite. He is, I remind myself. He took classes with Eli. He’s not the kind of person who would normally associate with someone who looks like me—with my dirty brown hoodie, baggy pants, and scuffed boots. He raises a challenging eyebrow.