by Amanda Witt
“I didn’t get you out of all of it,” I said, and let the implicit question hang in the air. Meritt met my gaze but I couldn’t decipher his expression. He could make his gray eyes as blank as slate.
When he didn’t speak, I tried again. “How did she know you were going to be there?”
“She didn’t.”
“Someone knew,” I said. “At least, someone knew Rafe was going to be there. The wardens were waiting for him. Meritt—why didn’t they arrest both of you?”
Meritt shook his head. He started to say something, then stopped, his lips pressed tightly together.
“I can take a hint.” I braced my hands on the rough grass, started to get up. “If you don’t want to talk to me, I don’t want to be here.”
Meritt reached out and grabbed my sleeve again, pulling me back down.
“I always want to talk to you,” he said. “Sometimes I can’t, that’s all.”
“Won’t, you mean.”
“Shouldn’t. Or can’t, because you won’t stop arguing long enough to listen.” His grin flashed and then was gone, and he began speaking quickly, the way he sometimes did, so quickly and in such a low voice that I had to listen hard to keep up.
“I knew there might be trouble the other night. There always might be trouble when we’re out, you know that, it’s just the way things are—but not that, never that. I had no reason to think the wardens were that sort of threat, no reason to think Rafe would get killed. The Watchers don’t do things that way. Or they didn’t. A healthy man is a valuable resource, not something I’d expect them to waste.”
He still had hold of my sleeve, but he was looking out at the dark trees, not at me. The fading light washed his face of color, deepened the darkness of his near-black hair and brows. Light and shadow, a study in contrasts. My Meritt.
“I wouldn’t have taken you with me if I’d known what was going to happen, and I was glad I was way ahead of you, glad you stopped in time and didn’t get caught. I was thinking about that, about you, hoping you’d have the sense to stay out of sight.”
He shot me a quick glance and I knew he was thinking of how, at the city meeting, I’d failed to do just that. “So I was distracted, and it took a minute to catch on that the warden was stalling me. She didn’t want me out in the wasteland when Rafe got arrested. She didn’t want the other wardens to see me. That was when I knew something really bad was going on—” he met my eyes again, looked away. “Otherwise she’d have let me take whatever I had coming. Flogging, a few days in prison, whatever. And then she said—”
He broke off abruptly and dropped my sleeve, still turned toward me, but with his gaze fixed somewhere over my shoulder. This was quintessential Meritt, quite capable of vanishing to chase some mental rabbit trail, right in the middle of his own sentence.
“Go on,” I said after a moment. “Tell me what she said.”
He looked at me, his eyes unreadable. “Just that someone like me could get in a lot of trouble unless he had connections.”
I thought about this. “What did she mean, ‘someone like you’?”
He shrugged. “You know, reckless, taking risks, that sort of thing.”
I started to press him for her exact words, but I didn’t have the heart. I’d felt sick when I saw the blonde warden waiting for him, reaching for him, and nothing he had said made me feel any better. If the wardens, the Watchers, took the best of everything, why not this, too?
Meritt apparently guessed my thoughts. “When exactly did you take off?”
“Just after the kissing started.”
He didn’t look away. “Then you saw that it stopped as soon as it started. I ended it.”
“Maybe she doesn’t think it’s ended.”
“What are you implying?” he said sharply. “I told you: I ended it.”
I got up, and this time he didn’t stop me. The tufts of grass felt rough under my bare feet. “I’m not implying anything. I’m saying, straight out, that wardens have done this exact sort of thing before.”
“What sort of thing?”
It was a trick he had, a way of avoiding unpleasant conversations. Lots of times it worked, when the other person—me—felt uncomfortable saying out loud something awkward or frightening. Well, I was uncomfortable, and I was frightened, and I wasn’t going to spell out what wardens too often did. But I wasn’t going to let the matter drop, either. Not this time.
So I gave him a pointed look. “You know exactly what I mean,” I said. “Do you really want me to get explicit?”
It backfired. Meritt was nobody’s fool, and he knew me well.
He got to his feet, his eyes like ice, the way they got when he was very angry. “Has a warden been messing with you?”
This was not the way the conversation needed to go. Meritt wasn’t exactly what I’d call the chivalrous sort, but if he knew the scarred warden had threatened me, there was a good chance he’d decide to do something about it—if for no other reason than that messing with me was, indirectly, messing with him. And I didn’t want him getting hurt because of me.
So I rolled my eyes. “Please,” I said. “You’re the one who was kissing a warden.”
Meritt’s expression turned neutral.
I pressed my advantage. “Over-age wardens have done it before,” I said, making myself think only about the blonde, and not about the scarred warden. “You know that. It happens all the time. They do a favor for someone under nineteen and then cash it in.”
Involvement with someone under nineteen was less risky for the wardens. If the warden tried it on someone over nineteen, someone who had already been assigned, then the warden got two years in prison. But if the target was under nineteen and unassigned, the warden got a slap on the wrist, a “documented reprimand.”
I drove the point home. “You’re not nineteen yet,” I said. “You’ve got, what, almost five months left? That’s plenty of time for an over-age warden to get whatever she wants.”
“I’m not a relief worker,” Meritt said irritably. “And ‘over-age’ makes it sound like she’s got one foot in the grave. She’s, what, twenty-eight, thirty?”
“That’s past the female breeding age,” I said. “She’s been sterilized. And don’t say ‘relief worker’ like it’s a dirty word. They didn’t choose the job. They got assigned, just like you did.”
He didn’t answer. Now he was doing that thing I hated, staring over the top of my head, making me feel two feet tall and invisible. At least he wasn’t quizzing me about the scarred warden—though perversely, part of me wished he hadn’t been so easily distracted. It made me feel frighteningly alone with that problem.
It also made me sure that I was right about the blonde.
“You might as well face facts,” I said, giving up any effort at sounding calm. “Wardens take the best of everything. And that’s you, Meritt.”
He waved that off impatiently, threw me one scalding look, and then, jamming his hands in his pockets, turned away. He moved fast. In a heartbeat he was out of reach, stalking away from me, down the wasteland.
All the anger drained out of me. I stood there alone, shivering and tired, watching him stride away, and told myself I deserved it for being an idiot. I’d been so happy Meritt wasn’t still locked up, and now he was angry, and it was almost time for the city meeting, and there was no telling when we’d find time to meet again. Why had I picked a fight? Meritt could have been killed, like Rafe. So what did it matter if a pretty warden kissed him? What would it even matter if he’d enjoyed it? It was quite possible she had saved his life.
Kisses didn’t matter. This was Optica. Nothing important could be allowed to matter.
Far down the wasteland, Meritt stopped, his back to me. After a long moment he turned and came back, angry stride easing into an amble, his eyes fixed on the ground in front of him, his hands still in his pockets. I stood quietly, leaning against the wall and watching him, tall and angular and loose-limbed. After the long gray day the sun had decided
to peek out just in time to set, and now it filtered through the trees and brushed him with warmth, his hair, his skin. For a heartbeat I let myself imagine a world where I could have the colors I wanted, where practicality and consistency didn’t mean everything had to be neutral tones, where red hair wasn’t freakish, where we were allowed to choose where we worked, who we loved, whose children we bore.
Meritt lifted his eyes and looked straight into mine, and his expression changed.
“Don’t, Red,” he said softly, stepping close. He cupped my face with one hand and ran his thumb across my cheek. “Don’t cry.”
I hadn’t realized I was.
Chapter 10
Eight o’clock.
We stood in the concentric circles of the city circle, a field of gray dotted here and there with black-clothed wardens. Five people stood in the middle of the circle, their backs to one another, facing out. We couldn’t tell who they were; the angle of the floodlights reduced them to silhouettes. The rest of us were fully exposed, our faces washed pale in the glare of the artificial light.
“Family of Optica,” said the voice, the same one as before. “There are cancers among you.”
The voice paused. The lights stayed on, but the silence went on too, and despite the crowded square, that silence felt empty. It made me want to yell out.
Cline was standing beside me tonight, his nose swollen and discolored from the fight at the boys’ dormitory. He was big and solid, built like a brick wall, a match for the bulls he worked with at the cattle yard. But though he was there beside me I felt exposed and alone.
The voice spoke again, now 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.”
A tense ripple spread through the crowd as the spotlight shifted. We were now in darkness, and the five in the center blinked in the sudden glare as the spotlights turned on them. One woman—a very beautiful woman—and four men.
“Seamstress Lavinia,” said the voice. “Step forward.”
The woman took one step forward, two. Her jaw was clenched, but she held her head high. Her hair, long and dark, flowed over her shoulders like a cape.
“Mechanic Dane, Engineer Win, Butcher Ross, Shoemaker Larry.”
The men stood still as their names were called.
“Seamstress Lavinia has been released from the breeding program and is free now to choose her companions. If you’d like to compete for her affections, step forward.”
Despite myself I turned toward Cline. “But—” Sharply he shook his head, his eyes fixed on the tableau in front of us. He was right. Of course I shouldn’t speak. But what did the Voice expect the men to do? If they stepped forward, they’d be confessing to quarreling, to disrupting the Family.
The men clearly knew this. They stayed put, their feet firmly planted, their hands clasped behind their backs. Or were their hands tied?
“What? Not one of you wishes to compete for Lavinia?” The voice laughed without humor.
The men stood still. The butcher, a heavy-jowled man, was facing me, and in the light of the spotlight something glistened on his cheek.
“Seamstress Lavinia,” said the voice. “You have been tested and found lacking.”
This time five wardens in black uniforms came out. One stood in front of each man, and one went to Lavinia. He didn’t do anything; he simply stood behind her.
“Your beauty has been the cause of dissention and strife,” said the voice. “It has betrayed the City of Optica. Your sentence is death.”
Lavinia turned and walked straight at the warden. He took a step back and she brushed past him, striding toward the edge of the circle with her head held high. For a heartbeat it felt, amazingly, as if they might let her go.
A shot rang out from somewhere outside of the circle, and Lavinia fell, her long hair pouring across the gray pavement like oil.
For a moment, no one moved. The echo of the shot hung in the silence. Then three of the four men yelled and leapt forward toward Lavinia, the butcher vomited all over a warden, and the crowd shouted, swayed, and began to break rank. “So ends the second city meeting,” said the Voice over the chaos, and the spotlight went dark.
* * * *
Afterwards the dormitory was in a state—girls crying, girls staring blankly at the gray walls, girls trying to be practical or comforting. The dorm mother had not put in an appearance, which wasn’t surprising. We’d seen less and less of her lately.
“Lavinia had three babies,” my bunkmate Kari said, so quietly that most of the room didn’t hear her. “That’s a record. You’d think it would buy her some mercy.” Kari worked in the postnatal ward. She meant that three babies was a record since the time of the ashes. Optica still hadn’t fully recovered from it, apparently, because pregnancies were few and far between, and many of the babies didn’t survive to term.
I saw her point. Why Lavinia? As far as I knew she was just a pretty woman, pretty and quiet.
“Who was her breeding partner?” Meri asked.
“Butcher Ross,” Cynda said. “But what does that matter? They’d both been released from the program.”
“It matters because the Watchers killed her,” I said, my voice rising. “Everything about Lavinia matters because they killed her.”
Apparently I sounded like I was about to lose it, because all eyes in the room turned in my direction, and Cynda wrapped her arms around me, making little shushing noises. I didn’t want to be confined—I was angry, not weepy—and I elbowed out of her grasp as Liza climbed up onto a top bunk from an angle, so the camera couldn’t see her, and with a pencil gouged behind it at the wires. She didn’t just twist them; she ripped them right out, her frizzy hair bouncing in time with her efforts.
“You are going to be in so much trouble,” Wanda said gleefully.
“Try it, Wanda,” Shawna said. “Tattle on Liza, and ten of us will testify that you’re the one who sabotaged the camera.” Around the room, a dozen or so heads nodded. Shawna was a live-and-let live sort of person, and often ended up acting as the peacekeeper of the dorm.
Wanda said nothing, but the look in her eye told me Shawna had moved to the top of her hate list. Just under me, that is.
“Go ahead,” Liza said to me, settling down cross-legged on the top bunk. “What were you saying about Lavinia?”
I collected my thoughts. “The Watchers were trying to make those men turn on Lavinia,” I said. “And they tried to make Rafe turn in whoever was helping him.”
Cynda shrugged, as if to say she didn’t follow my point, so I went on. “They say the city meetings are to punish us for disunity, but it’s almost like they’re designed to create disunity, to turn us against each other.”
Bizarrely, Lea, the youngest girl in my dorm, began to laugh. “Lavinia was going to get shot no matter what the men did,” she said, and tears began streaming down her cheeks. “They couldn’t make matters worse. They couldn’t make matters better. They couldn’t make matters worse.” She might have gone right on seesawing between better and worse, but she was sobbing and laughing at the same time now, gasping out her words.
With no warning Cynda hauled back and slapped her. “Get a grip on yourself, Lea,” she said. “Take a deep breath and hold it.”
Lea looked stunned, but managed to do as Cynda said.
“One deep breath. Now another. I have to go to work soon, and I can’t leave you hysterical.”
A circle of girls formed around Lea, all attempting to comfort her, patting her shoulder, offering her water, saying soothing things. It soon became clear, though, that the attention wasn’t helping. Maybe Cynda ought to slap her again. Or I could. I couldn’t think of any comforting words, that was for sure, and anyway I had no interest in playing nursemaid.
Liza didn’t either. She threw Lea an exasperated look and then, bizarrely, beg
an to clap—not like she was applauding, but slowly and loudly until everyone was staring at her. Everyone—even Lea—turned toward her. Liza wasn’t particularly pretty, with too-large hands and feet, a beaky nose, and that sandy-colored frizzy hair; but she was smart and decisive, and when she had something to say, she made sure people listened.
“Red hit the nail on the head,” she said, when she saw that she had our full attention. “The Watchers want the people in the city meeting to turn on each other. They want us to sell each other, sacrifice each other, do whatever it takes to stay alive.”
Shawna was nodding, and Meri looked thoughtful. Before they could say anything, though, Wanda jumped in.
“That’s not true,” she said. “The Watchers are showing us where we’re weak. That way we can become stronger.”
Liza snorted. “Look at how people have been acting since Rafe got killed. Avoiding each other, whispering about each other. Afraid of each other. And now, with Lavinia, it’ll be ten times worse.” She nodded decisively. “Something’s definitely hinky.”
“Hinky?” Meri said sarcastically, stretching out on her bunk. “Where do you get that idea? We had a terrible spring, something’s killing our chickens, we’re running out food, and the Watchers’ solution is to kill a woman for being beautiful. All very logical.”
“We’re running out of food?” Lea moaned.
“No, we are not,” Cynda murmured soothingly. “She’s just giving an example. A what if.”
“What if the Watchers are completely illogical,” I said. “What if there’s no rhyme or reason behind the things they do.”
“Wanda,” Shawna put in. “If anyone gets in trouble for anything that’s said tonight, we’ll know who to blame.”
Wanda glowered at her. “Red can get in plenty of trouble without any help from me,” she said.
“Unfortunately, that’s true,” Cynda said, throwing an apologetic look my way. “You really ought to be more careful.”
Wanda perked up at this unexpected ally. “Exactly. Red disrupted the first city meeting, and that definitely breaks the rules about orderly assembly.”