The Watch (The Red Series Book 1)

by Amanda Witt

  “Poor lovely Rosella,” the balding warden said sadly. “She was a friend of mine, once upon a time.”

  I turned to look at him, the metal chair creaking ominously as I moved. “You actually knew her?” She had died a long time ago.

  He nodded. “I knew her,” he said, running a hand over his short beard. He was watching me closely, his face weary. “The Guardians haven’t been as active lately,” he said. “There’s a reason for that. People my age—Rosella’s age—learned not to cross them. You young ones ought to learn from our mistakes. Don’t think the woods are safe just because you don’t personally know anyone who ran into trouble out there.”

  The scarred warden snorted. “Out there. You don’t have to go into the woods to run into the Guardians. Hey—turn around. Look at me.”

  I did as he said.

  “You’re old enough to remember Chet, aren’t you?”

  I did remember Chet. I’d only been eight or nine when he died, but I remembered him because he had bullied some of the older children who let me tag along after them. Once he’d locked Cline in the dark food preservation cellar for fourteen hours, and another time, he’d stolen Meritt’s shoes. Meritt got put in isolation for two days for not keeping up with his belongings.

  There were other incidents, too, and one morning the butchers found Chet hanging from his feet in the slaughterhouse in a row of cattle carcasses. He was fifteen.

  “Anyone could have done that,” I said diffidently. “Chet wasn’t well liked.”

  “He wasn’t well-liked by the Guardians, that’s for sure.” The scarred warden’s expression turned smug. “You want to know how I know it was them?”

  Reluctantly, I nodded.

  “I saw them come in at the northwest gap just before dark that night. Two of them.”

  I leaned forward. “What did they look?” I said. “Regular people?”

  For a moment I thought he was going to refuse to tell me, but apparently the desire to show off won out. “Could be, but I doubt it,” he said. “They were bigger than normal. Faster, too. I lost them in the blackberry fields, and I don’t lose regular people.”

  Behind me the other warden shifted. “First I’ve heard of this,” he said mildly. “Did you report it?”

  “Sure. Got told to keep my head down and my mouth shut. Come daylight, the kid was dead. Come evening, I’d been made a warden.”

  His pale eyes glinted as he turned back to me. “So like I said, you’d best be careful, wandering around at night, talking as if the commissioners are liars. The Watchers.”

  The shiver that ran through me wasn’t faked.

  The scarred warden smiled. “Where did you get lost?”

  The change in subject threw me off balance.

  “I . . . I got turned around in the orchard,” I said after a moment. “I came out of it where I wasn’t expecting to be. Somewhere in the adult housing section. And then I knew it was getting close to curfew, and so I ran, and I saw some old men and tried to ask where I was but they were drunk and threw a bottle at me. Then I found you.”

  He was watching me with a funny gleam in his eye. I didn’t know why. Everything I’d said made perfect sense, I thought. The orchard was confusing, row upon row of ancient twisted apple trees, no landmarks to keep things straight. Someone could easily get lost in there. Sure, it was well past curfew, but I could easily have lost track of time when I was lost. And I’d nicely accounted for the old men seeing me.

  The scarred warden tipped back in his chair, rocked gently on the back legs.

  “Lost in the adult housing section,” he said, and smiled as if he knew a secret joke.

  Behind me, the older warden got up without a word and left the room.

  Chapter 3

  I didn’t know what was going on.

  The scarred warden pulled out his cigarette and lit it again. He didn’t say anything; he only smoked, and watched me, and rocked his chair, and tapped ash off onto the metal table, and smoked some more.

  Again the smoke scratched at my throat. The room grew full of hazy gray curls that were thickest up by the ceiling, moving like living things groping blindly for a way out. There was a narrow window high up on the wall, but it was shut.

  Except for that window, and the door, the gray cinderblock walls were bare and uniform all about. There wasn’t anything for me to look at, and I didn’t want to stare at the warden staring at me.

  How would the pretend me act? Some girl who was telling the truth but couldn’t help but be a little nervous that she was in the prison—what would she do?

  She’d fidget. Just a little.

  That was easy enough. I busied myself combing my tangled hair with my fingers, working through the knots the wind had made. I worked at it for three minutes, four, maybe longer. It felt like a long time.

  “We’re told to watch you,” the scarred warden said suddenly, setting his chair down hard. “But we didn’t need telling. That hair makes us watch.” His voice dropped to a raspy whisper. “I bet you like that.”

  Was he crazy? I didn’t want to be watched. No one did. Nothing good ever came of attracting attention, so we all tried to make ourselves as inconspicuous as possible.

  “No,” the warden said. He got up and came around the table to stand over me. “Stop looking at the door. Look at me.”

  He was so close I had to crane my neck back to see his face. The light behind his head cast a halo. When he shifted I was blinded by the glare.

  “That hair,” he said. “You’re a freak. You know that?”

  I nodded. I knew.

  He shifted and blocked the light, and the room seemed dark because my eyes hadn’t adjusted, and just as they did he shifted again and blinded me again. He could give me a headache, doing this.

  This time when my eyes adjusted he was examining me like a bug under a microscope. I didn’t know where to look and kept focusing on the scar cutting through his upper lip, puckered and mean.

  After a moment he leaned a hip against the table, smoking, gazing down at me, getting too comfortable and still standing too close, looming over me. I was small even for a girl—I was a runt, like he’d said—and I was sitting and he was standing, and he reminded me of the bulls in the cattle yard, the ridiculously muscled shoulders, the flat bull-like eyes.

  I wanted the other warden to come back. I didn’t want to be alone with this one. He scared me.

  But I shouldn’t let him know that. Rafe said that some animals could smell fear, that it told them you were prey. He said some animals waited to see if you’d run from them, and if you ran they knew you were prey and then they’d chase you.

  I couldn’t be prey. I had to stand my ground, had to be calm, had to push back—not hard enough to get slapped down, just hard enough to not get eaten alive.

  So I did the only calming thing I could think to do; I started braiding my hair. I combed it with my fingers and divided it into three bunches, and I wove them together tightly and neatly.

  The warden stood there—too close—watching me, smoking his celebratory cigarette, looming over me, but he didn’t order me to look at him. He let me braid my hair, and the familiar motions steadied me. I wasn’t prey. I was an unfortunate girl who had gotten lost, and who soon would go home to her dorm.

  “I checked to see who your parents were.”

  Surprised, I almost dropped the braid.

  The warden cocked his head, blew smoke out of pursed lips. “I searched the records. You want me to tell you what I found?”

  I knew he wouldn’t. But of course I wanted to know—we all wanted to know. Some people could guess, could match features and coloring and hope that they were looking at an older sibling, an aunt or an uncle, maybe even a parent. Not me. I’d never seen anyone who looked remotely like me.

  “Do you want me to tell you?” the warden said again. He was toying with me, but all the same I had to answer.

  “Yes,” I said. “I would love for you to tell me.”

  The w
arden dropped the nub of cigarette on the floor, ground it out, and crossed his arms over his chest. “I can’t.”

  Wouldn’t, he meant. No surprise there. I fished a piece of string out of my pocket and tied the end of my braid.

  “I can’t tell you who your parents are,” he repeated. “Even the genetic counselors can’t tell you. You know why that is?”

  “Because they’re not allowed.”

  “Wrong.” He smirked at me. “They can’t tell you because they don’t know.”

  He was trying to get a rise out me, trying to unsettle me, but he failed because I knew for a fact he was lying. The genetic counselors knew everything about our genetic backgrounds. That was their job, and it was an important one because on a small island like this, we had to be careful. Inbreeding could weaken us; an unfortunate convergence of genetic flaws could destroy us.

  So the genetic counselors knew lineage. They knew that and much, much more—predisposition to hereditary diseases, presence or absence of various genetic markers, everything. One of the genetic counselors, Roy, had explained it all to Meritt once. It was amazing, what they could know about us from their records and our blood samples.

  So I wasn’t impressed by this attempt to unnerve me. In fact it made me feel calmer, to think that this was the best the scarred warden could do. Pointedly I studied my fingernails, my expression bored. I was not prey; I was a tired bored girl, waiting to be allowed to go home.

  “You don’t know who my parents are,” I said. “That doesn’t mean the genetic counselors don’t know.”

  Slowly, mockingly, the Warden shook his head. “There’s no record of anyone with your color hair—ever—and there’s no record of your birth.”

  My mouth went suddenly dry.

  The warden smiled at me. It was not a pleasant smile. “That got your attention,” he said. “And yeah, you heard me right. There is no record of your birth. You aren’t in the books. Officially, as far as the genetic records go, you don’t exist.”

  How could I not be in the books? They were comprehensive, exhaustively comprehensive. This made no sense.

  Maybe he was lying. Yes—that was it. He was searching for a new way to frighten me.

  “I didn’t know why you weren’t in the records,” the warden said. He pushed away from the table and walked a few steps, turned around, walked back. “I’ve been wondering about that. But now I get it. Something’s wrong with you, right? The time of the ashes, all that black soot—it killed the normal ones, but not you. You’re a mutant. A runt with freaky hair. But you were all we had, right? So the genetic counselors couldn’t euthanize you.”

  I was staring at him now, horribly fascinated. I wanted to believe he was lying to me, but I just wasn’t sure. If he was lying, he sure was caught up in the lie.

  “For all the genetic counselors knew, you were all we were ever going to get,” he said. “For all they knew, you could have been the last baby ever born. For all they knew, you were the one whose mutation made you immune to the ashes, whose blood could save the rest of us. So they had to keep you. We were in a fertility crisis. They couldn’t risk eliminating the newest breeder, especially a breeder who had survived the ashes.”

  He stopped pacing and looked at me as if to assess my interest. He had my complete attention, and I couldn’t pretend otherwise.

  “So they had to keep you,” he said, and now he was looking pleased with himself. “They had to keep you, but at the same time, they didn’t want to be blamed for however you turned out. Because who could say what sort of mutant you would turn into as you developed, right? So they had to keep you, but you were also a big risk. And no one wanted to be on record as okaying your existence. No one wanted to be on record as planning you or keeping you.”

  He stood right in front of me, looking down at me, his hands on his hips. “So they didn’t write you down. And they keep a close watch on you, just in case. Because who knows what the mutant will do? Who knows what the mutant will become?”

  He wasn’t lying—at least he seemed to think he was telling the truth, was congratulating himself for sorting all this out. But he could be wrong.

  I risked a question of my own. “But the wardens don’t watch me more than they watch other people, do they?”

  I made a gesture indicating that I meant all the wardens, not just him in particular, because he obviously had been watching me especially. He had been asking questions about me, checking the records, thinking about me. It made my skin crawl. “There are cameras everywhere. Everyone is watched. It’s not just me.”

  He gave a short humorless bark of laughter. “Everyone’s watched, sure. But not like you. Where you go, who you talk to, what you say, what you do. Your birth isn’t in the books, but all your days are written in them.”

  Maybe he was making that up—psychological torture, that sort of thing. I looked at him, trying to decide whether he was lying or telling the truth, and I saw that he was thinking about something else, that something new was flickering in his flat eyes.

  “What is it?” I said warily.

  “You’re an unrecorded mutant, but they didn’t rule you out of the breeding program.”

  “So I must be a harmless mutation.” I tried to sound casual and unconcerned, but I managed only to sound breathless. I certainly couldn’t look at him any longer. Trying to act nonchalant, I straightened the hem of my shirt, fastened a button that had come undone on one wrist. From the corner of my eye I could see that the warden was still watching me. He uncrossed his arms and shifted closer still, standing right up against me. His black pants brushed my arm.

  I kept my eyes straight ahead, facing the empty chair across the table from me, trying to keep my breathing slow and easy.

  “You realize that you’re in over your head,” he said softly. “Things are happening that you don’t know about. Tonight was a bad night to be out after curfew.”

  He liked scaring me, and I was scared, and I couldn’t fake not being scared, not anymore.

  “Prison’s not easy,” he said. “The wardens sometimes forget you’re there until you die and start to stink. Other times, you wish they had forgotten you. Does that scare you?”

  I nodded.

  “Good.”

  He bent over and looked me straight in the eye. I could smell the tobacco on his breath. “I can keep you safe,” he said softly. “I can keep them from forgetting you. Or remembering you. But you’ll have to make it worth my while.”

  My throat closed up.

  “I could even cut you loose tonight,” he said. “Lose the paperwork. Make this end right here. But you’ll have to give me something in return.”

  I tried to speak, had to stop and swallow. “I don’t have anything to give you,” I said, and I didn’t—none of us had personal belongings. At least we weren’t supposed to.

  The warden reached out and moved my braid, circling my neck with his hand. It felt hot and damp against my skin. “You have a lunch break,” he said, pressing his thumb into the hollow at the front of my throat. “I can feel your pulse. I can stop your pulse, if I want to. Or, at noon tomorrow—”

  The door opened with a bang. I almost jumped out of my skin. At the same instant the scarred warden straightened up and stepped away from me. He drifted casually across the room as the bald warden came in and set a white ceramic mug on the table in front of me.

  “Warm milk with honey,” the bald warden said, sitting down behind the table. Then he spoke to the scarred warden. “We can’t take her back yet. There’s been another disturbance.”

  The scarred warden didn’t answer, and the older warden looked from him to me, then back again.

  “There a problem?” he said.

  The scarred warden shook his head. His expression was closed off, remote.

  “It’s going to be awhile,” the older warden said. “E’s locked down.”

  Area E.

  The boys’ dormitories. Meritt’s section.

  The older warden nudged the war
m milk closer to me, nodded that I should drink.

  Though my throat felt tight with anxiety I managed to sip the warm drink. The scarred warden leaned against a wall and watched me. The bald warden watched him.

  “One of us had better get back on patrol,” the bald warden said.

  I didn’t want to be left alone with the warden who wanted me to go somewhere, do something, at noon tomorrow. All I wanted to do at noon tomorrow was eat lunch.

  After a moment the scarred warden spoke. “Children’s dormitories are next,” he said. “You can do them, Karl. Visit awhile with Nancy if you like. I’ll hang around and keep an eye on this one.”

  Warden Karl seemed to consider, stroking his short beard. Finally he answered the other warden. “Nah,” he said, “Not this time. My knees hurt. It’s this weather. Old bones.”

  The scarred warden didn’t answer.

  “Go on,” Warden Karl said, and now I heard from his tone that he was the one in charge.

  The scarred warden gave a curt nod and pushed away from the wall. At the door he paused.

  “Hey freak,” he said, and waited until I turned to look at him. He pointed two fingers at his own eyes, and then at me.

  “I’ll be seeing you,” he said.

  Chapter 4

  Afterwards, that night grew increasingly surreal. Partly it was my own exhaustion and fear, but partly it was the bald warden’s doing.

  “Come on,” he said, once the scarred warden had departed. Then without another word he led me out the door and down the long grim hallway.

  What lay behind the closed and bolted doors? I listened hard as we walked, hoping to hear Rafe’s voice. Surely he must be here by now, somewhere here in the prison with me. I thought I might hear someone questioning him as I’d been questioned, but I heard only the click of the warden’s heels on the tile floor. My own bare feet were silent.

  At the far end of the hall we arrived at a door that led into a stairwell.