The Watch (The Red Series Book 1)

by Amanda Witt

  “And in normal situations, fine. If it makes them happy to act all mysterious, whatever. But this is not a normal situation.”

  A field worker gathering pumpkins shouted something to his fellow workers, and when Farrell Dean glanced over his shoulder I noticed the uncharacteristic tension in his jaw. He wasn’t like this. He was always calm, always steady, always good humored, always understated.

  Apparently the sight of the workers reminded him we were visible, because he turned back and braced his arms on either side of me again, and this time I stood still.

  “The Watchers aren’t just going to sit there and watch us starve,” I said. “They must have some sort of plan.”

  “We’ll see.” He sounded as if he meant it.

  “How? How will we see?”

  He hesitated.

  “It’s Rafe,” I said, and as I spoke I grew certain. “He’s up to something.”

  Farrell Dean didn’t answer, but he didn’t have to. I knew I was right.

  “I was there when they arrested him,” I said, trying to ignore the cold finger of fear sliding down my spine. “What’s going on?”

  Farrell Dean shifted, but he didn’t look away. “There’s not much to tell. Not yet. We’re still gathering information.”

  “We as in who? You and Rafe? And Meritt?” What he was saying finally hit me. “You’re spying on the Watchers.”

  “Shhh.” He threw me a warning look, glanced over his shoulder, then leaned in close. “Have you ever thought about how many products we have that we can’t account for?” He spoke very quietly, his mouth against my ear. “Cigarettes, eyeglasses, pencils. How’d we get those? We don’t mine graphite.”

  I had asked a nanny mother about this years ago, and the answer had seemed plausible enough at the time. The Watchers knew how to manufacture each of those things, she’d said, but they had the city do so only in spurts, stockpiling enough for years and years, mothballing the tools until they were needed again. Fleetingly, I wondered why they hadn’t kick-started the manufacture of cough medicine, given we were running short, but I was distracted by a sudden wave of guilt.

  “Agriculture,” I said. “We should have been working harder.” It was my fault. We couldn’t help the wet spring, but maybe we could have done more to make up the difference this summer.

  “Yeah, you’re a real slacker, Red.” Farrell Dean pulled back a bit and looked at me. Though his tone was teasing, his eyes were grave. “The problem runs deeper than a bad season and your lazy workers.”

  “The time of the ashes?”

  My supervising farmer liked to complain about how much worse the crops had been since the months of drifting ash. He thought it had messed up the soil pH, made it hard for the plants to take in nutrients.

  Farrell Dean shrugged. “The time of the ashes put them out of their depth. That’s how Rafe put it. They were fine as long as we could follow Plan A. Plan B—well, the Watchers don’t seem to have one of those.”

  He was suggesting the unthinkable.

  The city commissioners had always guided us—we knew no other way—and even if we did, how could we go against them? They had wardens, and stunners, and guns.

  And—

  “What about the Guardians?” I said.

  Despite what the scarred warden had told me, I half-hoped Farrell Dean would tell me not to be silly, not to mistake bedtime bogeymen stories for reality. If he said it, I’d believe him. I’d trust him over the creepy warden any day.

  But Farrell Dean nodded. “They’re a problem,” he said. “Still, we don’t have a choice.”

  “This is crazy,” I said, and sheltered there behind the tractor shed, blocked from view by Farrell Dean, I felt suddenly conspicuous. The Guardians—what if they could see and hear me, like the wardens but exponentially increased? I didn’t want to go against the Watchers; I really didn’t want to go against the Guardians.

  “Surely we can hang on until spring.” My voice sounded thin to my own ears.

  Farrell Dean looked me straight in the eye. “We’re starving,” he said, and his voice was steady, which frightened me more than if he’d been dramatic. “If we don’t take control away from the Watchers, some of us won’t make it to spring.”

  Some of us. The wind rose and stirred my hair; the workers from B gathered gourds. The sky above was bright and blue, oblivious to the hungry winter that was coming.

  When Farrell Dean stepped away from me, cold rushed in and settled right down into my bones.

  Chapter 7

  By suppertime the city’s uneasiness was palpable. In the crowded cafeteria, anxiety rose around me like smoke, filling my lungs, choking me. Several times I heard “city meeting” and, once, “reprisals.” The word lodged painfully in my mind, sharp and hard like a shard of glass. I looked up and down the tightly packed rows of Optica gray and couldn’t see a single face that was smiling, a single person who didn’t look worried or tense.

  The line for food was still quite long, so I went to stand by the conveyor belt, watching for any trays with leftover scraps, more out of old habit than from any real hope that the trays would be anything but scoured clean.

  After a dozen or so bare ones passed by, I returned to the back of the line and waited and tried not to think about the fact that the cafeteria’s dangling bare bulbs looked just like the ones in the interrogation room, tried not to think about the warden with the scar. Instead I focused on what Farrell Dean had told me and tried to study the cafeteria with a fresh eye.

  The water marks on the ceiling were getting worse. The roof needed to be repaired—had needed it for awhile, judging by the layered patterns of stains. Routine maintenance took backseat to routine emergencies—a broken pipe spewing water, an electrical outage threatening to compromise food storage, a fence disintegrating so that cattle wandered the city streets. The roof would be repaired when rain dripped into our supper, and the yellowing walls would go right on waiting for a new coat of paint. Farrell Dean was right; Optica was declining. It wasn’t hard to notice really, just hard to want to notice.

  A little boy picked his nose and then wiped his hand on the longsuffering wall beside the children’s tables. The square floor tiles were crumbling around their edges. The metal serving table was dented and scratched. Unusable metal folding chairs leaned in a great precarious stack against the back wall.

  By the time I collected my food tray I was thoroughly depressed, and apparently it showed, because one of the cooks—Alice, a woman with a calm air about her—caught my eye and nodded deliberately, reassuringly. “Everything seems worse on an empty stomach,” she said. I tried to smile at her, but my face didn’t want to obey.

  I made my way up one aisle and down another, looking for Meritt or at least for a place to sit, listening for Rafe’s name. But the muttered bits of conversation I caught were all on the same topic—the mysterious impending city meeting. All we knew was we were to gather at the city circle at eight that night and every night thereafter, until further notice.

  A warden sitting across from Cynda got up and walked away, and I slid into the empty seat. Waiting for food, jostling for a chair, that was normal. What wasn’t normal was the people gathered in little knots all around the cafeteria, ignoring the cameras and talking openly about why the city meeting had been called. A few men huddled together at a nearby table, gesturing angrily. I strained to hear what they were saying, but the hum of the room blurred everyone’s words.

  Cynda leaned across our table and clasped one of my hands in both of hers, her long fair hair falling forward over her shoulder in delicate curls. “Ignore them,” she said. “There’s no point in worrying. It doesn’t help.”

  Another warden passed nearby, eyeing her. She gave my hand one more squeeze and then let go. “Good evening, warden,” she said. “Will I be seeing you tonight after the meeting?”

  The warden froze, his ears turning pink, and without answering moved away. She gave me a conspiratorial wink, and then resumed eating in he
r quick neat way. I took a bite as well, but the meal—I can’t even remember now what it was, soup probably, or a thin stew—was tasteless in my mouth.

  Across the room two girls began giggling and couldn’t stop; when their laughter became tinged with hysteria a dorm mother touched them on the shoulders and led them outside. The loudspeaker announced that Physician Neil was needed at the infirmary. A group of nannies directed children to their tables, reminding the smaller ones to hold their trays level.

  Someone stumbled behind me, bumping my chair as he passed. It was Farrell Dean, surreptitiously dropping a beautiful piece of cheese on my plate. Cynda smiled knowingly at him and fluttered her fingers in a wave. He nodded a greeting to her, and though he smiled, I saw in his eyes his worries about the coming winter.

  A few tables away Petey, an eleven-year-old, tipped his chair too far back and crashed to the floor. His best friend, Judd, howled with nervous laughter, torn between helping Petey and leaving him to sort himself out alone. An old man as weathered and tough as a strap of leather got up from a nearby table—old Louie, one of my favorite people. He bent and untangled Petey from the chair, stood him on his feet, and dusted him off. A laundress glowered at them all, then said something to Judd that made his fists clench at his sides. Petey put a hand on his arm and Judd knocked it away, then turned and stalked out of the room, leaving his tray on the table.

  The murmur of conversations rose by fits and starts until the dull roar of it pounded in my brain like an angry inescapable heartbeat. A woman sitting three down from me put her head in her arms and began to cry.

  The clock on the wall said 7:30.

  * * * *

  A little before eight, we gathered as ordered at the circle. Its western rim lay at the base of the watchtower, where a thin path led from the base of the tower down to the center of the circle, cutting through the tiered steps around it. Hundreds of people filed in and stood on the steps, each face shadowy but recognizable in the reflected glow of the blue streetlights. I scanned the crowd, searching for Meritt—he was usually pretty easy to spot—but I didn’t see him anywhere. Maybe he was still in isolation. Since he wasn’t around I worked my way down and found a place in the front row, on the lowest level; tiers or not, I couldn’t see over any adults standing in front of me, and nothing made me feel more helpless and claustrophobic than standing in a crowd seeing nothing but people’s backs.

  The city circle was crowded now. It had to be close to eight o’clock, and still there was no sign of Meritt. I was looking around again, just in case, when the door at the base of the watchtower opened and Rafe came out, alone. He stopped for a moment, blinking as if his eyes were adjusting to the shadowy blue lights. One side of his face looked swollen, though from that distance, in that light, I couldn’t tell for sure. Otherwise, he seemed unharmed.

  Relief brought a smile to my lips and I started to go to him, but I’d only taken a step or two when he caught sight of me and frowned. Bewildered, I stopped in my tracks. Rafe gave a slight shake of his head, and when he began walking I thought he was coming to stand with me, that he’d been telling me not to come to him but to wait. And sure enough he walked toward me, cutting straight through the center of the circle. But before he reached me he stopped. He stopped in the center of the circle, and he stayed there.

  Someone nudged in beside me, making room where there had been none. It was Farrell Dean. He didn’t look at me. His eyes were fixed on Rafe, standing there alone.

  Then the spotlight came on. Around the circle every face was cast into darkness as the bright spotlight made the blue streetlights seem like nothing. For a split second I could see only that bright white light, and then my eyes adjusted, and again I saw Rafe. Everyone saw him. He was pinned in the beam.

  Much as I wanted to, I couldn’t escape the logical conclusion: Rafe was in serious trouble.

  But the Watchers had announced the city meeting before Rafe had been arrested. How could they have known he’d be out, that he’d do something and get caught? They must have picked at random from the current crop of prisoners. I hoped that was it—I hoped they weren’t angry with Rafe in particular.

  At exactly eight o’clock the spotlight flashed once. The crowd, which had been murmuring quietly, fell silent.

  “City of Optica.” A man’s voice boomed through the tower loudspeakers, resonant and compelling. That would be one of the seven Watchers. He might have actually been in the tower, or with all their technological gear, he could have been speaking to us from their compound a mile away. “Citizens of Optica,” he said. “Friends. There are cancers among you.”

  The voice stopped. The spotlight cut off.

  In the darkness the silence stretched and held.

  I began to shiver, more from nerves than from cold. Beside me Farrell Dean shifted until our shoulders touched. Gratefully I leaned into him. For a long time we stood in the dark, in silence—I don’t know how long, but it felt like forever. Across the way a baby began to cry and was hurriedly shushed.

  The spotlight flicked back on, shifted away from Rafe, began scanning the crowd. It lingered now on one face, now on another. Farrell Dean stood steady beside me, but I took a small step away from him, suddenly afraid that I’d get him in trouble somehow.

  Then I was glad I’d moved, because the light paused briefly on Farrell Dean’s face and then came to rest on mine. There it stayed, longer than it had stayed on anyone else. I could feel its heat, or maybe it was the heat of the panic flooding through me. My heart began to race; I felt my cheeks grow flushed. The wind kicked up and my hair shifted, dancing strange-colored in the spotlight, and the scarred warden’s words echoed in my mind: I was watched—I, the anomaly, the freak.

  Just when I grew convinced it was something more than that—that somehow they knew I’d been near the wasteland when Rafe was arrested—the spotlight moved on, over row upon row of gray uniforms, over terrified or carefully blank faces, moving faster and faster around and around the circle, licking here and there as if it were tasting us. I began to feel sick. I had a horrible feeling Meritt was there, somewhere, and it would stop on him, that he and I would both be ordered to join Rafe in the center of the circle.

  But when the manic spotlight finally stopped, it stopped on Rafe.

  The voice spoke again, hushed and menacing: “There are cancers among you,” it repeated. “Those who would take what belongs to all of you and abuse it, horde it, use it for themselves alone. Those who would by their words and deeds promote disunity, discord, and ultimately death. Did you think we wouldn’t know? Did you think we wouldn’t see?”

  The light gave Rafe’s gray clothes a faint blue tint; it caught at the silver strands in his dark hair and emphasized the lines on his face, making him look older than his forty some-odd years. But though he looked tired and grim, he did not look afraid.

  “Instructor Rafe,” said the voice. “You are a thief.”

  Rafe’s dark eyes gave no sign that he’d heard the accusation, gave no sign, for that matter, that he was standing at the center of the entire city’s attention. He stared straight ahead—straight, as it happened, at me.

  “You have stolen painkillers,” the voice said. “A small crime, you might say. Small pills, so easily slipped into a pocket. But value is not determined by size. Those painkillers will not be there, family of Optica, when you need them. They will not be there when you break an arm working in the field to feed Instructor Rafe. They will not be there when you go into labor to bear a child for the Family of Optica. They will not be there when a cook burns her hands, or when a mechanic loses a limb.”

  I felt warm breath in my ear. Farrell Dean murmured, “He makes it sound like Rafe ate buckets of the things.”

  The voice stopped and I was afraid that somehow it had heard Farrell Dean, that the spotlight would spring up again and pin us in its glare, but when the words resumed they continued in their former track.

  “You have been tested and found wanting,” it said. “You, R
afe, are a cancerous cell in our body.”

  They would flog him and lock him away in prison. I wouldn’t see him for ages. When he came out he would be pale from lack of sun, thin, his muscles shrunken from inactivity. That was what happened when someone seriously displeased the Watchers: you were put away, and when you came back, you were never the same.

  “But perhaps—” the voice was silky now, persuasive, offering hope. “Perhaps the blame is not entirely yours. Perhaps someone else was involved.”

  Instructor Rafe’s gaze flickered. It was the slightest of movements, almost imperceptible, but I saw it.

  “Perhaps you didn’t steal the pills,” the voice said. “Perhaps someone gave them to you. Who was it, Rafe? One of the physicians?”

  Instructor Rafe shook his head, and I could have sworn the tension around his eyes eased. “No,” he said, his voice loud and firm. “There was no one. I only bear the blame.”

  As he spoke, three black-clothed wardens marched through the prison door and out to the center of the circle. One was carrying handcuffs. He gestured to Rafe—I think he was telling him to turn around—but Rafe stared past him blankly and didn’t move. The other two wardens carried handguns.

  Guns?

  Not stunners, but real guns. I registered this fact as the Voice again spoke: “Cancer Rafe, your sentence is death.”

  The crowd inhaled sharply and then everything happened very fast. Rafe moved. He swung at the nearest warden and brought him down hard, the man’s head hitting the pavement with a sickening crack. The fallen warden convulsed once and lay still as Rafe turned toward two other wardens rushing in, and I was rushing forward too, not realizing I was moving until I was almost there, but just before I reached Rafe an arm went around my throat, choking me, pulling me back. Rafe’s fist flashed out. The pressure on my throat vanished and everyone was shouting and the warden who had grabbed me was clutching at his own throat, and Rafe looked me in the face and yelled something over the chaos and shoved me away, toward the rows of people on the steps.