by Zoe Cannon
Necessary Sacrifices
Zoe Cannon
Copyright © 2013 Zoe Cannon
http://www.zoecannon.com
Kindle Edition
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 444 Castro Street, Suite 900, Mountain View, California, 94041, USA.
Cover Art:
Daniel Dunca (Dundanim) / Bigstock.com
Cover Design:
Zoe Cannon
This book is a work of fiction. Names, places, characters, and events are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons living or dead is entirely coincidental.
Table of Contents
Part One
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Part Two
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Part Three
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Part One
Chapter One
“Please… please, I swear.” The dissident’s voice, weak from all the screaming, sounded like skin against sandpaper. “I swear I don’t know anything.”
Becca tried not to look at the man’s face as she paused the video. Tried not to see the despair in his eyes. It was easier to ignore it now than it used to be, at least. Just like it was easier to only half-see the damage the interrogator had done. She typed out the dissident’s words, added them to the lengthening list of denials. The transcript was ten pages long already—ten pages of questions and pleas and nothing. It would have been longer if she had typed out the screams.
He would break soon. He had to break soon. She glanced at her watch. Twenty minutes, half an hour at most, before Jameson would stop waiting for her. Twenty minutes to find what she needed, or she would lose her chance, and another dissident would have died for nothing. She hovered her cursor over the play button.
Micah rolled his chair around the partition that separated her cubicle from his. “Are you doing anything important?”
Just trying to save a few lives, that’s all. Becca half-turned to face him. “Trying to finish up this transcript before lunch.” She didn’t remove her headset from her ears, or her hands from her keyboard. Maybe Micah would take the hint.
He pulled his chair a little closer. “Hey, are you okay?”
She forced herself not to freeze. What subtle sound had he heard in her voice to trigger his concern? What brief hint of emotion had flashed across her face? She couldn’t afford these mistakes. Every word, every gesture, every sound counted. Everything could be used against her.
She kept her face locked into her best bland expression. “It’s this dissident. He just won’t break. I’m getting tired of typing up the same denials a hundred different ways.” She watched him for his reaction, every muscle aching with restrained tension.
The suspicion she was waiting for didn’t appear in his eyes. He didn’t draw back; his face showed no signs of sudden realization. “I know what you mean. How many ways can they say they don’t know anything before they finally admit that they do?”
“They always break eventually.” Neutral tone to match her neutral face. Making sure each word stayed carefully casual. Keeping the mask up was second nature by now, but she couldn’t allow herself to get sloppy about it the way she had a minute ago, the way she always seemed to when Micah was around. One slip was all it would take. “I think he’s close.” She turned back to the screen.
Micah leaned in closer and shuddered. “God. You’d think he’d have broken long before now.”
Becca took a glance at the paused image, and immediately wished she hadn’t. She forced herself not to turn away. This is what will happen to you if you screw up. “He probably thinks he’ll beat us if he holds out long enough. He doesn’t understand that it only ever ends one way.”
“It’s always better when they confess right away. Otherwise it gets…” He gestured toward Becca’s screen. “It can be hard to watch sometimes, you know?” He paused. “Well, maybe not for you. You’re probably used to this kind of thing, with your mom and all.”
She shook her head convulsively. “I’m not. I hate it as much as you do.” She spoke more sharply than she had intended, expelling the words like gunshots. She clamped her lips shut before she could say more. This was a dangerous edge to walk. Talking to Micah always did this to her, always brought the secrets suicidally close to the surface. One more reason not to do it. “At least this one should be done soon. I hope.” She took another glance at her watch. Eighteen minutes.
“I had one the other day that took two straight weeks,” said Micah. “The interrogator must have been in there with him twelve hours a day, every day. By the end he was…” His voice trailed off.
Becca’s mind skittered away from the images Micah’s words evoked. “It’s awful.” She hadn’t meant to say that. How did Micah do this? How did these casual conversations tease truth from her as easily as any interrogator?
And why did she keep letting him get close enough to do it?
Micah was quiet a moment before straightening in his chair. “But it’s necessary.” His words rang with quiet conviction. “Not just necessary. Important. It’s easy to see it as, you know—as torture—but that’s shortsighted. Our society, the way everything fits together, is…” He visibly struggled for words. “It sounds cheesy to say this, but… it’s beautiful. It’s like we’re all part of the same body, all working together to create something larger than ourselves. To keep that larger body healthy and help it grow into something more than it is. The dissidents… they’re like a virus trying to destroy what the rest of us are working to build. The only way to keep society healthy is to destroy them as thoroughly as we can, or the virus will keep on spreading. Getting rid of it is painful, but it’s a good pain, like burning out an infection.” He shrugged, a faint flush coloring his cheeks. “That’s how I see it, anyway.”
His words, his belief, made her ache. She wanted to see the beauty he described, wanted to see something when she looked at her world besides a sickness impossible to recover from, a machine of destruction too powerful to stop. Not so long ago, she could have seen it. Before she had learned about the false confessions, the lies that kept the regime running smoothly. Before she had met dissidents for herself and seen what they really were. Who they really were.
“That’s why I’m hoping to go into interrogation,” Micah continued. “It won’t be easy. I know that. But it’s something I believe in.”
“You have to work for what you believe in,” Becca said quietly. “No matter how hard it is. My mother taught me that.” Too dangerous to keep talking in this direction. Too close to that razor edge. She broke eye contact. “Have you had your evaluation yet?” she asked, pitching her voice just loud enough to let him know the moment of connection was over.
He sh
ook his head. “I keep hearing it’s supposed to happen around the three-month mark, though, so it should be any day now. Vivian had hers at six weeks, but she’s over in Investigation. It might work differently there.” He gave her a half-smile, but worry lurked behind it. “Of course, for all I know, the evaluator won’t think I’m cut out for interrogation, and I’ll be assigned to transcription for the rest of my life. My parents say they can’t see me as an interrogator, and my dad worked as an evaluator for twenty years.”
She made a noise of sympathy, while inwardly the familiar resentment began to bubble through her veins. Micah’s evaluation could get him stuck transcribing dissidents’ confessions for the rest of his working life. Becca’s could get her sent down there with them.
She cast an involuntary glance toward the floor. Three stories below her feet, the office ended and the prison began. Although she knew it was her imagination—the cells were thoroughly soundproofed—sometimes she thought she could hear the screams.
“How about you?” Micah’s question cut through her thoughts. “Have you had yours?”
She shook her head. “Not yet. Any day now, though.” And she wasn’t ready. Jameson had prepared her as best he could, but evaluators didn’t just determine the best placement for Internal workers; they were also responsible for spotting any signs of latent dissident sympathies. Even people who had never considered themselves dissidents could end up down on the underground levels for execution.
The fact that her mom had gotten her this job meant she had bypassed the initial evaluation, the one everyone else went through along with the standard job interview. The one designed to identify possible dissident infiltrators. The one that almost certainly would have ended with her locked in a cell. But the placement evaluation posed almost as much of a threat—no matter what else they did, evaluators were trained, first and foremost, to find people like her—and she didn’t have a way out of that one.
“Where are you hoping to end up?” asked Micah.
Alive. “Interrogation analysis. I don’t think I’d be good at interrogation—I’d rather do something behind the scenes.” But despite Jameson’s lessons in how to make the evaluation come out the way she wanted, there was always the possibility that the evaluator would see her last name and place her in interrogator training out of reflex. If that happened, she would say to hell with her convictions and go off to college somewhere far away from Processing 117. Study… something. Whatever she had been interested in before the resistance. Find a job someplace where the only people looking for dissidents were the Monitors paid to report on their fellow citizens.
“You’d be a good interrogator. I’m sure of it.” Micah reached a hand out toward her, then pulled it back.
“Because of my mother?” She kept the frustration out of her voice. It wasn’t as if he would be the first one to think it. Everyone here probably expected her to go into interrogation.
He shook his head. “Because you’d do great wherever they put you.”
Silence hung between them for a moment.
Micah spoke first. “I’ve been meaning to ask you something.” He shifted in his seat. “A bunch of us from high school have been getting together for dinner on Thursdays. I know you mostly kept to yourself back then, but I’m sure the others wouldn’t mind if you showed up. You’d remember them—they were in the Monitors with us. We’re meeting at Lucky’s tonight, if you want to come.”
Right. Go have dinner with the people she had spent her senior year trying to avoid. Go relive her high school memories of loneliness and knife-edge fear and the sick guilt of reporting on her fellow students for the Monitors.
Not that things were any different now, really. She was still alone. Still afraid. Still working for the enemy.
Becca sculpted her face into an expression of regret. “I don’t think I can make it.”
Micah’s face fell. “Oh. Well, that’s okay. I just thought I’d let you know.”
Becca looked at her watch, then looked again, hoping she had read it wrong. She hadn’t. Five more minutes had disappeared while she wasn’t looking. Five minutes, and now she had just over ten more—twenty if Jameson was feeling patient—to get what she needed and get to the park.
“I really should get this done.” Neutral. No trace of tension in her voice. “I have to go to lunch soon.”
“Come grab lunch with me now,” Micah offered. “The dissident will still be there when you get back.” He looked at her screen again and winced. “You could probably use a break from that, anyway.”
She shook her head, already turning away. “Maybe later. I have to finish this. I’m sorry.” She calculated the minutes in her head. Did she have long enough? It all depended on how stubborn this dissident was. But she’d be cutting it close no matter what.
“Later, then.” The disappointment in Micah’s voice blended with the dissident’s wheezing sobs as she started the video up again.
The interrogator’s voice was as calm and cold as it had been at the start, when the dissident had been full of fury and empty threats. “I’m not sure what you’re hoping to accomplish by hiding the truth from me. When you were fifteen, your parents were arrested. Somehow you escaped the notice of Internal Defense. And now here you are, five years later, surprising exactly no one by becoming a dissident yourself.”
“I swear I never—” he burbled before cutting himself short with a wet cough.
Eleven minutes. Break already. Please just break. Typing frantically, Becca paused only for a few seconds to get caught up before continuing.
The interrogator’s voice softened fractionally. “It’s all right. You don’t have to deny it anymore. We already know. We have the evidence. The literature we found in your apartment. Signed statements from the friends you tried to recruit to your cause. We know everything—everything except the names of the people who helped keep you from attracting Internal’s attention after your parents’ arrest.”
The dissident just shook his head.
Nine minutes.
“It was a tough year for you, wasn’t it? All those fights at school. The reports of you saying things that bordered on treasonous. And then… nothing. But you never stopped believing in what your parents had taught you, did you? Otherwise we wouldn’t be here now. You never really stopped—somebody just showed you how to hide.”
The dissident was shaking so hard Becca thought he might fly apart, but he didn’t speak.
The interrogator reached for something. Becca quickly looked away. She kept her eyes fixed on her keyboard as the screaming started up again. She had to listen, but she didn’t have to watch.
Eight minutes.
Seven.
Six.
She could almost type it out by rote at this point—each attempt at persuasion from that cold voice, each ever-more-incoherent denial. The interrogations all started looking the same after a while. The interrogators used the same lines over and over, and the dissidents moved from defiance to despair in all the same ways. The only part that changed was what they said at the end when they finally gave in.
What would her interrogation look like, when it was her turn?
Five minutes.
Four.
The interrogator’s voice had gone dangerously soft now. The dissident had collapsed past the point of coherent speech. But he still hadn’t given in, and Becca had to leave. Her fingers struck the keys harder than necessary. She had to leave, and once she did, he would become just one more wasted life. One more person she couldn’t save. There wasn’t enough time, not enough…
She could almost see it happen, when he broke. When the last of the defiance finally drained out of him, leaving him a quivering husk. She knew before he opened his mouth that it was over.
He whispered the names so quietly that she had to replay that segment of the video three times to hear what he had said. Weak with relief, she committed them to memory as she typed them out, rolling them over and over in her mind until they had worn grooves de
ep enough to hold them in her thoughts for the next few minutes. That was all she needed.
If she left now, right now, she might still make it.
She stood slowly, schooling her body into the proper responses. I’m not in a hurry. I don’t have anywhere I need to be. I’m just on my way to lunch.
She strolled to the door as quickly as she thought she could get away with, through the rows of desks and cubicles and eyes, through a sea of hands busily recording atrocities. With each deliberate step, another second slipped away.
Three minutes.
Two.
One.
* * *
One of the first things Jameson had taught Becca was that technology would get her killed.
Internal poured money like water into their computer systems, and into their tendrils that reached across the internet, ubiquitous and inescapable. Phones weren’t any better—a careless phone conversation would get a dissident arrested within hours. Words on paper were safer, but notes could be intercepted; spoken words that vanished without a trace were safest of all.
So when Jameson and Becca needed to exchange information, they met face to face.
Becca pretended to study the bulletin board as she scanned the park for Jameson. The board was peppered with flyers for babysitting and music lessons, an ad announcing a sale at some propaganda-peddling bookstore called Future Perfect Books, and colorful posters offering warnings like When you protect dissidents, you’re betraying your country and Report dissident activity before it’s too late. Beyond it, people in business suits walked the circular track, trying to make the most of their lunch break by getting in a little exercise. Mothers pushing strollers ambled along the track at a more leisurely pace. At the other end of the park, kids too young for school shrieked as they chased each other in a circle around the jungle gym.
No sign of Jameson.
She couldn’t have gotten here too late. Not after all that. He had to be here.