Reaping

by Makansi, K.

  “Me too,” she whispers, but doesn’t say anything further, perhaps realizing how much her words hurt me, how much I would give to undo what I did to her and Soren last year. But I keep those memories close, just like Soren, to remind myself of the dangers of ignorance.

  As if reading my thoughts, Remy absentmindedly puts her fingers into her pocket and pulls out the compass, turning as she does so that her back is against the walls of the ditch we’re waiting in. Muddy water trickles around our feet, ready to feed into the river soon. I’m thankful for my waterproof boots. Remy opens the broken compass and turns it aimlessly.

  “I used to think we were all like this compass,” she says. “Directionless.”

  I stare at her hands, unsure what to say. I watch her open and close the gold face, tilting it to look at it from a different angle.

  “But my grandfather always said the real compass wasn’t in your hands but in your heart. I never knew what he meant, because how do you know which way to go without something to show you north?” She lets out a little breath and gnaws at her lip for a moment. “But now I think I know. Your internal compass never breaks. You just have to trust it to point you in the right direction.”

  “And sometimes you have to recalibrate,” I add. I close my eyes and think of my mother and father, desperately in need of a change in direction. When did torture become government policy? I want to ask my father. When did murder become a solution to a problem? I can picture my mother’s pursed lips, the gathering storm in her dark brown eyes. I’m sorry, Vale, she said to me, that night at the Solstice party, but it was for the best.

  “It’s here,” Chan-Yu says, and I notice it too: the low, gentle hum of a vehicle.

  “What’s here?” Linnea demands, her face anxious. Chan-Yu just stares at her.

  “The truck,” Soren responds in his place.

  Chan-Yu slings his pack over his shoulder and hops up over the edge of the ditch. I follow him with my eyes. Sure enough, a hovertruck with a cargo hold big enough for all six of us has backed up to us. Chan-Yu opens the rear portal and swings in without waiting for the rest of us.

  We follow him, staying low and looking around anxiously. A compost truck or a wayward drone could arrive at any minute. I’m the last one in the rear. The last thing I see before I close the doors behind us and am swallowed by total darkness is Chan-Yu rapping on the barrier between the cargo hold and the driver’s seat.

  A few seconds of silence and we start to move, gliding smoothly through the air.

  “Umm,” Linnea says. “Can we get a light?”

  As if by magic, a light comes on above us. Soren and Linnea blink and cover their eyes. I squint, but my eyes adjust quickly.

  “Can she hear us up there?” Soren asks. “That seems dangerous, doesn’t it? We have to go through a checkpoint when we cross the bridge.”

  “Yes,” Chan-Yu agrees, not answering the real question.

  “So, what happens then?” Linnea demands.

  “She’ll turn off the speaker,” Chan-Yu responds.

  “Is it the same person it was last time?” Remy asks. “Sela?”

  “No. Sela has disappeared. She might be dead. We don’t know.”

  “What?!” Remy and Soren exclaim simultaneously.

  “When did this happen? How? Why didn’t you tell us?” Remy demands.

  “After she helped transport us to the port last year, she and everyone else who crossed that checkpoint that night was investigated. Sela’s background didn’t check out, understandably, as it had all been forged. She had never attended school in the Sector, and although an entry had been created for her in the Personhood database, it wasn’t as thorough or detailed as the one created for me and others higher in the ranks of the Sector.” Chan-Yu sighs. His displays of emotion are rare, and even when he does give some indication of his feelings, they’re minimal at best. “We don’t really know what happened after that. Her entry in the database was deleted. All trace of her vanished.”

  Remy and Soren, clearly more shocked by this news than the rest of us, gape at Chan-Yu.

  “Who was Sela?” Miah asks, somewhat timidly.

  “She helped us escape last year,” Soren responds. “She drove a truck similar to this one. She took us through the city and to the port where we got on the ship across the lake.”

  There’s a long silence as we contemplate yet another crime in the Sector’s name. I feel the truck tilt upwards and I know we’re going over the bridge. And then down. We’re in Okaria now, I realize. Home. I am thankful there are no windows to look out, to see the city full of idyllic memories of childhood, memories that mask the truth of this place. A place too perfect to be real.

  I reach up to my ear, feeling at the tiny artificial fibers that have practically become a part of me. Demeter, are you there? I want to activate my C-Link, to remember one of the best things this place gave me. But Chan-Yu catches my eye and shakes his head, a tiny gesture that almost looks like an involuntary twitch. I know better. If I activate Demeter now, she’ll immediately pop up on the C-Link database. The most important people in Okaria will know immediately: Vale has returned. I can’t activate her until we’re hooked up securely, to transmit information in one direction only.

  Demeter will have to wait.

  We ride in silence until the truck begins to slow.

  “Checkpoint?” Linnea asks, hesitation in her voice. Chan-Yu just nods.

  I am silent, thinking of Sela, a woman I’ve never met, a woman who gave up everything to help save the lives of two people she had never met either. Now I wonder if we’re putting another life in danger.

  We hear voices outside, but just barely. I can’t catch any of the words. I grit my teeth and hope we make it through without incident. The voices stop and the truck starts moving again. I let out a long, deep breath, and glance at Chan-Yu. Thank you.

  Our destination, now that we’re past the checkpoint, is a second-floor flat in a middle-class neighborhood on the outskirts of the area known as La Citron, where another of Chan-Yu’s inside contacts has arranged for us to stay. We tried to get a basement flat that would be better hidden from any passing drones snapping photos, but since we had to bump up our departure date, there were none available. It’s still a mystery to us how the Outsiders communicate with their contacts in the city, as it’s clear they aren’t working via electronic signals. And they won’t tell us, either. It was one of the conditions for their cooperation, that we never know how they communicate.

  Chan-Yu pulls a small black pouch that reveals a wide array of what looks like paint. It’s not, though— it’s makeup. “Come here, Linnea,” he commands, and she obligingly scoots over to where he’s sitting. To my great surprise, Soren pulls a similar pouch out of his pack and turns to Miah.

  “What are you doing?” I demand, staring at him. “I thought Chan-Yu was in charge of disguises.”

  “Osprey’s been teaching me some of her tricks,” he says, grinning wickedly. “I’m going to make you the ugliest motherfucker on the planet, Vale. Just you wait.”

  Remy laughs.

  “Just as long as you don’t make me look old,” Linnea says to Chan-Yu.

  For once, a glimpse of a smile.

  As we glide, Chan-Yu deftly paints Linnea’s face and sprinkles a powdered dye into her hair. In five minutes, she looks nothing like what she did before: her high cheekbones have been smoothed into the rest of her face, there are gaunt hollows around her mouth, and her eyes, normally wide pools of blue, have been hooded by thick eyebrows and dark eyelids. Her pale, luminous skin completely hidden under a darker skin complexion, and her hair, normally golden blond, is now a brown chestnut color.

  “It’ll wash right out,” Soren assures her, looking at her astonished face as she pulls at the tendrils of her hair.

  “I can’t do anything about your eyes,” Chan-Yu says. “That’ll be your biggest giveaway, so try not to look anyone dead in the eye if you can help it.”

  Miah hasn�
�t been done as skillfully. It’s obvious Soren doesn’t quite have Chan-Yu’s skill or experience, but he certainly doesn’t look anything like himself. His beard and hair have been dyed light brown, a color similar to Linnea’s, and he looks like he’s aged fifteen years with wrinkles around his mouth and at the corners of his eyes.

  Chan-Yu pulls Remy over and in a few minutes, she’s turned a whole different color. Normally her skin is the color of rich brown soil that I always want to dig my fingers into. Now she’s almost black, the color of Jahnu’s skin, and I think she’s almost more beautiful. Soren unfortunately takes over my own makeup, and I try to ignore his snickering and not look him in the eye as he ‘accidentally’ jabs me in the face with the brush a few times.

  “Oh my God, Vale,” Miah exclaims. “Soren wasn’t kidding. You look like a swamp creature.”

  “What, has he given me boils? People aren’t going to think I’m sick, are they?” I ask worriedly as Soren and Miah laugh. “I don’t want to call attention to myself.” I glance at Remy, but she’s not even looking at me. Chan-Yu’s still working on her.

  “Oh no,” Miah says. “They won’t think you’re sick. They won’t even think you’re human. They’ll think you’re some mutated creature spawned in one of the compost bins.”

  Even Remy laughs. I wish desperately I could see what Soren’s done. Remy finally turns to look at me.

  “Oh, it’s not that bad,” she laughs. “You do look pretty ugly, though.”

  Finally, after Chan-Yu and Soren have quickly traded makeup jobs on each other, the hovercar slows and finally stops. The light above us blinks on and off. In a flash, Chan-Yu, who now looks softer and rounder and maybe even a little bloated, is on his feet.

  “Wait here. When I come back, everyone get out as quickly as possible. This truck isn’t cleared for human transport. If we’re seen, we’ll be flagged immediately.” He walks gingerly past us and opens the door just wide enough for him to get out, then shuts it behind him. We wait in silence, clutching our packs, ready to move, for no more than twenty seconds before he opens the door again.

  “Out.”

  Wordlessly, we follow his lead. The truck has left us in a narrow back alley, right by the residential compost bins. As soon as the door is shut behind us, the truck glides away, humming quietly.

  “Remy, let’s go.”

  Only two people are legally allowed to live in this flat, so we needed two of our team to represent us when we were trying to get in. As we were planning the mission, we decided Remy was the least likely of the girls to be recognized. As famous as Remy is, Linnea’s image is probably burnt into the minds of every single Okarian citizen in the Sector from all her time on television. And Miah, Soren, and I are all faces that have seen too much press coverage over the past six years. So Chan-Yu and Remy will be the first to enter the building, to register with the security desk. They’re posing as a young, lower-class married couple from a factory town, borrowing a friend’s apartment for a honeymoon in Okaria. They’ll register, tap into the security feed and temporarily disable the internal monitoring and camera system while the rest of us come in the back.

  We duck into the building’s electrical mainframe housing. Although most buildings are hooked up to the central Okarian grid, each one has its own distributed generation system that taps either a combination of hydro, wind, solar, or plant-based generation. Each building is its own ecosystem. Power is generated from water flowing through toilets, showers, and hydroponics systems that make up the plant-based power gen; there are small wind turbines and arrays of solar harvesters on every roof and many of the external walls. All the power is centralized, stored, processed, and maintained in the electrical mainframe.

  It’s a tense moment when Soren rigs the palm scanner to open the door for us, and it swings open. Both of us have our Bolts up and ready, in case of an unexpected visitor. Thankfully, the room is empty. Mainframes are usually monitored remotely by a centralized system in the Sector’s Infrastructure department, but sometimes they send men to do routine maintenance. We have to be prepared.

  We wait anxiously for twenty minutes while Remy and Chan-Yu take care of everything in the building. Finally, there’s a knock at the door and when Soren opens it, Remy’s face appears. I wouldn’t have recognized her if I hadn’t seen her in the car. I try to reconcile this Remy with the one I know so well, the one who’s been at my side for six months and who haunted me for three years before that. But when she breaks out into a smile as our eyes meet, and beckons us to follow her, I realize I don’t need any reconciliation. She’s still the same Remy Alexander I’m deeply, crazily, madly in love with.

  We stand, grab our bags, and follow her lead quietly out the door.

  “Chan-Yu’s in the security room,” she says. “He’s taking care of the monitoring system. We’re clear.” She glances quickly up at the security drone, a device no more than a quarter of a meter in length, which is bobbling, dazed, in the air. She quickly pushes open the door to the emergency exit stairwell, and we follow her up to room 2L on the second floor.

  Inside, Chan-Yu’s pack is already open and almost empty, and he’s already begun setting up the makeshift computer system for transmitting information back to the Resistance. He’s drawn the shades and disabled the in-room network system so that we can set up our own. Soren and Miah immediately lay down their packs and join him, adding the equipment they’ve been carrying to his.

  Chan-Yu and I try to pitch in, but soon we realize that we’re in the presence of two technical experts. While Soren and Miah get our communications and computer system set up, Remy, Linnea, and I set up camp. Chan-Yu’s friend has apparently left his little kitchen well stocked for five people for a week, but obviously none of us counted on Miah. I finally get an accidental glimpse of my face in the bathroom mirror and pull back, appalled.

  “Holy shit,” I say, as loudly as I dare. “I look awful.” There are huge bags under my hollow eyes and wrinkle lines in my cheeks. My nose looks squashed and broken, and he’s somehow managed to take all color out of my face. “I have to hand it to you, Soren,” I call to him. “I am ugly as hell.”

  He looks up from his work and sends me a neutral look. “I think I captured the real you,” he says, then returns his focus to the makeshift computer.

  “Vale,” Miah calls to me, about a half-hour later. “I think you’re good to go if you want to try to connect to your C-Link.” My heart screeches to a stop in my chest.

  I’ve been wanting so badly to hear Demeter’s voice, my greatest ally in the search for truth.

  Almost involuntarily, I press my fingers up to my ear, feeling to make sure the C-Link is still there even though I’m positive it is. I drop the blankets I was arranging on the floor for a sleeping space and walk over to where they’re working. They’ve set up a working computer station, complete with a holograph display and a glass control panel.

  “I’m not totally sure about this,” Miah continues, “but I think I’ve got the connection set up so that you can access your C-Link without disclosing our location. You should be able to download information from the database and interact with your C-Link without relaying information back into the database.” He pauses. “I think.”

  “You better be a lot more sure than ‘I think,’” Remy says, echoing my sentiments. As much as I want to talk to Demeter, I definitely don’t want everyone in the C-Link database to know she’s been reactivated.

  “I’m sure,” Soren cuts in. “I’ve programmed in a series of diversionary firewalls so we can’t be pinged from the outside. None of the information about this operating station will be disclosed to any network other than the general Okaria network. But you’ll have to interface with your C-Link manually, via the computer.”

  I nod. That’s not so different from what I did last year, when I was hacking into my mother’s computer in her private lab. I sit at the little computer station and flip on my C-Link. I type in a series of commands that bring up a dialogue box to
the C-Link registered to Valerian Orleán. My first step, of course, will be to ask Demeter to transfer her data into a remote storage location and engineer a copy of herself outside of the C-Link database, so that in the future, I won’t need a firewall to talk with her.

  “You’re sure about this?” I ask Soren one more time. His eyes are hard and uncertain, searching me.

  “I’m sure of what I’ve done,” he responds quietly. “I’m less sure about letting you do this. But go ahead. There’s only one way I’ll find out if you really are on our side.”

  He may never trust me. But, strangely, I trust him. I can do this.

  Demeter? Are you there?

  My fingers are almost shaking as I type the words. Remy creeps up behind me, no doubt out of curiosity as much as anything else. She rests a hand on my shoulder, flower-petal light yet comforting and warm. I hold my breath and wait.

  Nothing.

  “Is she responding?” Remy asks after a second, even though we both can see that she isn’t. “Maybe she’s warming up,” she offers.

  But then I hear her voice in my ear.

  Demeter: “Vale. So nice to hear from you.”

  I jump in my seat and everyone turns to me with questioning faces.

  Demeter, I type, my breath quickening, both in anticipation but also in fear. Why is she talking to me? Have we accidentally alerted the C-Link database to our presence? My fingers fly over the keyboard. We shouldn’t be talking. What’s going on?

  Demeter: Don’t worry, everything is okay. Shortly before you left Okaria, I anticipated that your return might not be as safe as either of us would like. While you were away I created a ghost copy of myself in a completely invisible network to ensure we could access the Sector’s databases securely—and secretly—upon your return. Just now, I was connecting your C-Link hardware to the new network.

  My head spins, marveling at her. She protected me … without me asking anything of her. I lean back in my chair and take a deep breath.

  “I’m sorry it took so long,” I say, out loud.