by Amanda Witt
“Hope you like to climb,” Warden Karl said. “Don’t get dizzy.”
The metal grillwork stairs curved in a spiral, going up and up. I put one hand on the cinderblock wall to keep my balance. Through little slit-like windows I caught glimpses of the moon, the night sky. The stairwell was colder than the rest of the building, and the damp cut to my bones; the metal stairs creaked, sometimes alarmingly. Our footsteps echoed, trailing behind us, tracing our progress.
Finally we reached the top. Warden Karl pushed through a door and then we were there, in the highest room of the watchtower. The Opticon.
The circular room had a table, a few comfortable-looking chairs, and telescopes spaced at regular intervals around the windows. In the middle of the room stood a desk with a row of twelve screens that cycled from one scene to another. Views from the cameras. The ones that Meritt hadn’t disabled.
One of the screens was showing the cafeteria, empty. Another was on the city circle, also empty. There was the children’s dormitory, with rows of cribs and cots and sleeping children. There was one of the boys’ dormitories, and the boys were moving about, climbing into their bunks, talking. I wondered whether this dorm had been the source of the disturbance, and whether it was Meritt’s, but the screen changed before I could focus on any faces.
A warden wearing earphones sat in front of these screens, glancing at them occasionally, adjusting a dial, but mostly sipping something and playing cards. Solitaire. He looked over at us and slipped his earphones off.
“Hey, Zee,” Warden Karl said. “Picked up a curfew-breaker. Gotta keep her here ’til the all clear. You want to get some air, I’ll cover for you.”
The dubious expression on Zee’s face said this wasn’t protocol, but he stood up and stretched. “Great,” he said.
From then on I would picture that warden, that particular man, any time I saw the signs screwed into the walls beneath the cameras, the signs that said, “We Watch Because We Care.”
Zee pushed open the door and left. Maybe I should have been alarmed; Warden Karl could have been up to something, could have been setting me up for more trouble.
But it was hard to think about that at the moment. I was actually in the Opticon. Meritt was the only living person I knew, besides the wardens, who was allowed up there, and that was only because he was the one who maintained the delicate surveillance equipment now that Lonna was dead. So I couldn’t worry about why I was there; I was too amazed that I was.
Warden Karl gave a short laugh. “Have you taken root?” he said.
So I went and stood near the center of the room and, there, turned slowly in a circle. I was in the middle of a circular tower in the middle of a circular city in the middle of the only land in all the world, for all we knew—our circular island. This was almost worth getting arrested.
From the base of the watchtower the streets stretched out like the spokes of a wheel, lit with blue streetlights. Smaller cross streets ringed us in blue concentric circles. It was beautiful.
I’d always known Optica was carefully organized, but seeing it like this—from a bird’s eye view—emphasized the precision of its design. From somewhere beneath my feet the bright white spotlights stretched out, pointing long white fingers toward the edges of the city, probing, moving on. Here and there pairs of tiny yellow eyes—headlights—moved along a blue line. Patrol cars, same as the one that had caught me.
There were some small white lights to the south, in the areas of the adult houses, but mostly the city lay wrapped in darkness. I squinted in the direction of the homes, toward the lights that had nothing to do with surveillance. At this late hour, someone ill, I thought, or suffering from insomnia. Old men playing cards and drinking apple whiskey.
A sudden noise made me jump. Warden Karl had turned the sound up at the monitors. I heard a baby crying, then men’s voices talking urgently, their words indistinguishable.
The warden didn’t seem interested in my movements, so I went to the windows and walked all the way around the watchtower, beginning with the western side, my side. There were the children’s dormitories, the girls’ dormitories, the school, the infirmary, the cafeteria. If I squinted in the dim light I could make out the beekeeper's domain and the orchards, past the cannery and the other buildings. Most of my life had been spent in this quarter of the city.
Moving counter-clockwise along the windows, I came to the south quarter—the laundry, the genetic counseling building, the research center, the adult quarters with hundreds of houses, tiny but far more private than the dormitories.
Only the street that ran due south from the tower had a corresponding wall, which is why Meritt and I usually went that way on our runs; the wall gave us a little protection from the watchful eyes of the wardens. Sometimes we ventured through the other streets, but only on moonless nights, and only when we were feeling especially brave. On those other streets, we were completely exposed.
Beyond the lights of the adult houses, the outer city wall circled darkly around, its geometric precision contrasting with the pale moonlit wasteland of scraggly grass where Rafe had been arrested.
Beyond the wasteland lay the dark ominous woods, and beyond them lay the rumor of the sea. In the farthest distance I thought I could see it shining in the moonlight, moving like a living thing.
At least I wanted it to be the sea, rolling and dancing; perhaps it was only a low lying cloud catching the moonlight. I had dreamed of the sea often but had never seen it. It was freedom, I thought. It went on so far and so wide that no one could monitor it, no one could watch every wave. It was too big even for the Watchers.
I looked back at the warden. He was still standing at the row of monitors, watching images flash across the screens. Someone laughed loudly, without humor.
I continued my circuit, moving around to the east side of the tower. This quarter of the city was where the boys’ dormitories were, and past them the industry buildings, the cattle pastures and, against the city wall, the slaughterhouse. If you walked out of the city from that direction, through the wasteland, through the dangerous woods, you reached the sea and the tidal traps and the docks where the fishermen cleaned their catches.
Supposedly the woods were somewhat safer in the east, at least in the morning when the sun was rising. Still, even there, no one went alone, no one left the path unless absolutely necessary, and no one lingered.
Then I reached the north. The clear swath of my fields spread across the middle distance. At the top of the fields lay the dark bulk of the city commissioners’ compound, separated from the rest of the city by wheat, corn, the kitchen gardens, the berry fields.
I touched one of the telescopes and looked back at the warden. He was watching me now, his expression impenetrable, but he nodded permission.
I looked through the lens and saw, straight below me, the pale arc of the city circle. Two wardens stood midway up the terraced steps; I could see the color of their hair, the way one rested his hand on his belt, on his stunner. I moved my face away from the telescope and the wardens became ants, tiny dark flecks.
A chill ran up my spine. Was this how the Watchers saw us?
Tomorrow night I’d be standing down there in the circle, at my first city meeting. We hadn’t had one years—never in my lifetime. At the last one, so the older people said, the city commissioners made everyone stand on the circle steps all night long, for more than twelve hours, not letting anyone take shelter when it began to rain, not letting anyone so much as sit down, until dawn finally broke and the first rays of sun touched the watchtower and it was time to start the day’s work. It was to remind us to pay attention, the commissioners said; the boiler in the Watcher compound hadn’t been properly maintained, and a pipe had exploded and badly burned someone—I didn’t know who—with scalding steam.
As far as I knew, nothing had gone wrong in the Watcher compound recently. But that didn’t mean the commissioners weren’t angry about something.
I tilted the telescope up and t
he Watcher compound jumped into clarity. The buildings were cinderblock, like all the other buildings in Optica, but more elaborately built, with ridges and ledges, and arches above the door. It looked like the compound had only small high windows, but I couldn’t tell for certain because there was a three-quarters-height privacy wall in front. I could understand the desire for privacy, but I wouldn’t want to live in a grim dark fortress.
Behind the Watcher compound I could see the city wall, smooth and unbroken, and then the tops of the trees in the wilderland, supposedly the most dangerous part of all the woods. The Guardians might roam in other parts of the woods, the stories said, but this was where they lived.
Wait. That was odd.
Maybe I wasn’t seeing what I thought I saw. It was quite far away, even with the telescope. I blinked hard, clearing my vision, and put my eye to the telescope again.
How strange.
In the rest of the city, all the streets that ran like spokes from the watchtower to the outer wall ended in gaps that opened onto the wasteland and the woods beyond. Those gaps came at precisely regular intervals—east, southeast, south, southwest, west, northwest. I’d always assumed there was a gap at the north end, too, inside the Watcher compound. Optica was tightly regulated, geometrically precise. Of course there were eight gaps, not seven, one at each main point of the compass.
But it wasn’t so. Through the telescope I could see that beyond the Watchers’ compound, there was no gap. There the wall was sealed, complete.
Behind me the warden cleared his throat. “That’s enough,” he said, and in his voice was a warning. “Time to go.”
I’d been staring too long at the Watchers.
Chapter 5
Someone grabbed my foot and shook it.
I sat up, blinking hard, feeling like I’d forgotten something urgent. Bright morning light filtered in through the high windows. I’d overslept, seriously overslept. All of the girls who worked days were already gone, and the only people in view were night workers—cleaning and kitchen workers already in bed, covers pulled up over their heads, relief workers trailing out of the showers carrying their special bags of cleansers and antibiotics, looking sleepy.
That included Cynda, who was standing at the foot of my bunk, toweling dry her honey-colored hair. “This is the second time I’ve woken you,” she said. “I thought you were awake the first time, so I went and showered. Now you’ve missed breakfast, and you’re about to be late to work.”
Not good. Being late to work was never good, but it was especially bad now that getting reported to the wardens might mean a private visit with the scarred one.
I slid down off the top bunk, leaving it a jumble of covers—Kari’s bunk below was neatly made, as always—and started for the door.
“Not like that!” Cynda said. “You look like you were up all night.”
I was undressed and to the shower room before Cynda had finished. I couldn’t risk questions or comments, not when it might make my less friendly roommates decide to lie awake and catch me sneaking in or sneaking out. Did Cynda actually know I’d been up, or was she just talking off the top of her head? I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t ever sure, and it wasn’t as if I could ask her.
The cold water hit me with a jolt and I shampooed and scrubbed frenetically, rinsed, toweled, and hurried back to my bunk to fish my one set of extra clothes out from under the bottom bed. I was starving, and doomed to a long ravenous morning.
Worse, I’d missed my best shot at getting information about Meritt. Almost everything useful I’d ever learned came from sitting on the edge of my bed looking sleepy and uninterested while the night workers traded gossip about conversations they’d had with various wardens the night before.
I tugged my clothes on over still-damp skin, felt a trickle of water running down my neck, and squeezed my wet hair out over the floor. Cynda—sitting on her bunk pinning her hair so it would make ringlets when it dried—raised an eyebrow. “You’d better be glad Wanda’s not here,” she said.
Wanda watched avidly for any excuse to report anyone—especially me—to the dorm mother. She wasn’t the only one who disliked me, or the only one who tried to curry favor by tattling, but of the twenty-three girls I shared a room with, she was the one who worried me most. If she ever caught me sneaking in or out at night, there would be no discussion, no chance for persuasion or bribery. She’d turn me over to the wardens in a heartbeat.
“Sorry,” I said to Cynda, mopping the floor hurriedly with my dirty shirt. Kicking it under the bed, I started for the door.
“You’ll never get your hair untangled if you let it dry like that,” Cynda said. “Catch.”
I turned and she tossed me her comb. It was carved wood, very pretty, and had all its teeth.
“Don’t lose it,” she said. “It was a gift. I’ll be in trouble if I can’t produce it next time he comes by.”
I took off down the hallway at a jog, trying to comb my hair as I went. I didn’t care about tangles—not today—but if the dorm mother saw me looking disheveled, she’d send me straight back to the room, and then I’d be later still.
I hurried down the inside stairs, pushed through the outside door and into the cool morning air, and started down the exterior stairs, yanking the comb through my hair and trying not to lose my balance. I was almost at the bottom when Estelle rounded the corner. She was one of my old people—that was what I called the handful of elderly people who had been kind to me when I was a lonely little girl, ignored or taunted by the older children.
“There you are!” she said. “I was worried when you didn’t come to breakfast.” Until she got too old, Estelle had been a cook, and she still kept an eye on things in the cafeteria.
“I overslept.” I was out of breath and the words came out wispily.
Estelle shook her head in disapproval. “You young ones shouldn’t have to choose between food and sleep. You’re growing so fast, you need plenty of both.”
Plenty of both. Now there was a joke. Portion size was based on consumer size—you had to grow on what they gave you before they gave you anything to grow on—so people with fast metabolisms were at a disadvantage.
“I have to go,” I said as I reached the sidewalk. “I’m going to be late to work.”
“Go on, then,” Estelle said, making a comfortable shooing motion. “Have a pleasant day.”
Tucking Cynda’s comb into my shirt pocket, I took off at a hard run. At the corner I glanced back. Estelle was standing where I’d left her. She waved merrily, but with her other hand she was tugging at the threadbare collar of her shirt, trying to cover her throat. That worried me—she was cold, and winter wasn’t here yet. The breeze was crisp but not unpleasant, not even for me with my wet hair and bare feet.
There was nothing I could do for her, though, so I put her out of my mind and kept running. It was hard to run hungry, and I knew running would make me hungrier still, but I so didn’t want to be late. If the warden watching the cameras didn’t notice my tardiness, any number of field workers would be happy to report me.
I reached the street that led to my fields and then had to pause to keep from getting run over by a big work truck rumbling past, its loose tailgate rattling. Four or five mechanics were sitting in the back.
If I’d thought of it in time I could have waved the driver down and maybe, if he was feeling magnanimous, hitched a ride. Now all I could do was keep running down the road behind the truck, breathing its dust, feeling faint with hunger and fear of being late, while the guys in the truck bed watched me with varying degrees of indifference and mockery.
One of them—Farrell Dean, a friend of Meritt’s and by extension a friend of mine—dangled a hand casually over the side. He was holding a wrench, and when the truck hit a rough spot he dropped it. He stood up, unsteady in the rocking truck bed, and banged on the top of the cab.
The driver didn’t stop, but he slowed considerably. Farrell Dean jumped out and jogged back to pick up the fallen tool.
Just when I was about to give up hope, Farrell Dean stuck out a hand. I grabbed it and my shoulder jerked and my feet left the ground, and then he pulled me up and my feet found the bumper. I clung there, panting hard, holding on to the tailgate that was already warm with the morning sun, and the men clapped and hooted and booed, and Farrell Dean kept a steadying hand on my arm.
“Throw her back!” one of them advised.
“No way,” another said. “She’s a field worker. We need all of those we can get.”
Then the truck passed a tractor shed, where two men were arguing and waving shovels around threateningly, and the men lost interest in me.
I leaned in close to Farrell Dean and caught a faint whiff of motor oil, which probably meant he’d done someone a favor and repaired a machine before working hours. “Have you seen Meritt this morning?” I said.
He shook his head. “Not since last night. He’s in isolation.”
That was a relief. It meant that Meritt had made it safely back to the dorm, and isolation was small potatoes compared to prison.
I opened my mouth to ask more questions, but Farrell Dean frowned warningly at me, jerking his head toward the other men. He was almost nineteen, like Meritt, but more solidly built and not quite as tall, with hazel eyes, a tan from working outside all summer, and a thick shock of short gold-brown hair. His fingernails were always black under the edges because he was a mechanic and no matter how much he scrubbed, he couldn’t get them completely clean.
As we jolted along he shifted, leaning hard on the tailgate as if for balance, and in the process blocking me from the other men’s view.