by Amanda Witt
Then I heard it again. It was still quiet, but this time perfectly distinct.
“Red!”
Who would be outside the city in the middle of the night, calling my name? There was only one possibility.
“Meritt?” I called, very quietly.
“Red!”
My blood froze. The voice was louder this time, and much closer, and it sure wasn’t Meritt. It wasn’t any voice I knew. It was guttural, half-choking on my name.
I flung myself toward the wasteland, toward the safety of the city, stumbling over the tufted wasteland grass, urging myself not to fall, and the voice cried out again, louder, nearer still, calling my name pleadingly, so close I was afraid to look back, afraid I’d see it reaching out to grab me, and then I reached the gap in the wall and hurtled inside, not pausing to check for wardens or spotlights, not caring if they caught me. I hit the pavement of the city and kept running, skidding around the corner of the slaughterhouse, smelling blood and death and fear, hoping the wall would stop my pursuer, hoping he wouldn’t follow me into the city and chase me down and kill me in the street and paint pictures on the slaughterhouse wall with my blood.
Behind me the voice cried out once more, distantly and in tones of despair, “Red.”
Chapter 12
“Family of Optica,” the Voice said, and Judd, standing next to me, spoke the rest with him. “There are cancers among you.”
“Shhhhh.” I glanced warily around at the rows of faces. Judd’s father might be a warden—might, if we’d guessed right—but that wouldn’t protect Judd, not these days.
He glared at me for shushing him but stayed quiet during the rest of the lecture, while the wardens led Stuart, a butcher who’d recently lost an arm in an accident with the sausage grinder, into the spotlit center of the circle. Then wardens brought out an elderly man and stood him a few feet away from Stuart.
It was Louie.
I must have gasped. “Shh,” Judd said, and in the reflected glow of the spotlight his face was unnaturally pale and pinched.
The wardens set a heavy bag of grain on the ground near Louie, and a bucket of water on the ground near Butcher Stuart. The Voice didn’t give us its introductory lecture. It didn’t ask the men any questions. It didn’t explain to us what the men had done wrong.
Instead, a warden lit a match and touched it to the bag of grain. Then, unbelievably, he reached out and lit the sleeve of Louie’s shirt.
A cry, hastily muted, went up from the crowd. Butcher Stuart didn’t hesitate. With his one good arm he grabbed the bucket and flung the water over Louie. Before our lungs could release our collective sigh of relief, the Voice spoke.
“Butcher Stuart has failed the test,” it said. “Cities do not survive on sentimentality.”
As the last word echoed over the stunned crowd, a shot rang out. Stuart fell.
In the circle, Louie ran a disbelieving hand across his eyes. Then he knelt, slowly and awkwardly, beside Stuart’s body and touched his neck, feeling for a pulse. When his shoulders sagged, we knew he’d found none. I thought he’d get up then—I was afraid he’d stand up and the warden would shoot him next—but Louie stayed on his knees. Clasping his hands together in front of his chest, he bent his head. His lips moved.
Then the spotlight cut out and all was black.
After a long paralyzed moment, when the lights didn’t come on and the Voice didn’t speak, people began moving silently, leaving the circle. Beside me Judd was craning around, peering into the darkness. Then he leaned toward me and breathed noisily in my ear. He was only twelve, but already he was taller than I was.
“Have you seen Petey?” he said.
I shook my head.
“Stuart was Petey’s dad,” Judd whispered. “We think.”
* * * *
Late that night, afraid but determined, I made my way through the streets to Rafe’s house, avoiding the live cameras, staying in the shadows, trying not to think of all the ways I could get caught. I was in danger from the girls in my dorm, if any woke and found me gone; in danger from the cameras winking at me from the walls; in danger from patrol cars; from the scarred warden; and from Zee, the warden in the tower, peering at me through the telescopes, following the pointing finger of the spotlight.
Unless Zee was busy drinking hot milk and whisky, playing Solitaire.
That thought made me angry. He sometimes watched and sometimes didn’t, so even when I had privacy, I didn’t know that I did. I’d never know whether there were watchers in the tower, or if they were only in my mind.
The adult houses near Rafe’s were all dark, all quiet. His house was on the end of a row, so though it was crowded on three sides with other small dark houses, to the west were only the bee fields and then the orchards. That would have been helpful to Rafe, I thought. It would have made it easier to slip out unnoticed.
I stood against the western wall of his house a long time, watching for wardens, but the street remained quiet. In the narrow strip of sky between the eaves of two houses I could see only a single bright star, and a rhyme one of the nanny mothers had taught us came back to me—“Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight.” It wasn’t the first star I’d seen that night, and besides, stars were burning balls of gas that couldn’t grant wishes. Still I said the rhyme in my mind and added, “Please, star. Please help me remember what Rafe said.”
The door to Rafe’s house swung open at my touch; I crept inside and stood very still, ready to run, holding the door just barely ajar. I had to be as careful as possible, though I didn’t think anyone else had been assigned to this house yet, and it didn’t feel like anyone else was breathing in the darkness. The room felt hollow.
When I was as certain as I could be that I was alone, I pulled the door quietly shut and, after a moment’s thought, swung the bar down to lock it. If someone tried the door and found it barred they’d instantly know that someone was inside, but if I didn’t bar it, anyone could walk right in.
I’d never been in any of the houses before, and I wasn’t sure what to expect. In the dark, I felt my way around, avoiding the shadowy shapes of furniture, the deeper darkness of the walls.
Exploring didn’t take long. The tiny house consisted of only two rooms, the main one where I’d come in, and a small bathroom.
Some of the window shades were open. I pulled them down, and found a towel to cover the gap where one shade wasn’t quite long enough to completely block the window. I was afraid to turn on the overhead lights, and I had no flashlight, of course—only wardens had those—but I had managed to pocket a candle from the emergency supply in the dormitory storeroom, and now I lit it, carefully shielding the flame with my hand, keeping even its small light away from the windows.
The main room contained a couch, a double bed with a gray blanket, and a small table with two chairs. A stack of books and papers sat on the table, and I went straight over. If Rafe had left a message, that seemed like a possible hiding place—tucked in a book, buried in lesson plans.
The top book was a history of Optica. It was an important book, because our history had passed out of living memory some fifty years before, after some sort of electrical storm had caused widespread illness and amnesia. I wasn’t surprised to see the book here. Rafe had been particularly interested in our missing past and had spent a lot of time talking to the old people, asking questions, trying to help them remember what had happened. He’d even spent time in prison for that. The wardens said he was unsettling people.
The books beneath the history were less interesting, though still important—we didn’t have many books, and the ones we had were passed around among the handful of instructors. There was a book of mathematical proofs and explanations, and a book about logic and logical fallacies. Neither had any notes stuck between the pages.
Next I fanned through the stacks of papers, releasing the familiar smell of the schoolroom, of chalk and paper and sweaty children.
All the papers were written in Rafe’s own hand, in the decisive and efficient half-cursive, half-print that I’d seen a million times on the blackboard. At first I thought all the papers were lesson plans; then I realized that a few of them, without warning, turned personal.
“What is it that makes me want privacy?” he’d written on the bottom of a grammar lesson. “How can I even imagine it? My students imagine that we adults have privacy, but wardens knock at my door at all hours. They come in, they run their hands under the sheets, they check the bottoms of the chairs, and then they vanish again—until the next day, or the next hour. And even when they aren’t here, they know things they couldn’t know unless they were here, which means they could be watching even now, as I write this. They snatch my thoughts out of the very air. Do they watch everyone as closely as they watch me? They are everywhere and nowhere.”
Hastily I let the pages fall, hiding those words. Watching now? I hoped not. Meritt had never said anything about cameras in the adult houses.
But maybe Meritt didn’t know everything.
And yet Meritt probably did know everything about surveillance; he maintained it all.
But I hadn’t warned him that I was coming here. If he’d known, maybe he would have warned me that there were cameras.
After sitting there frozen in panic for who knows how long, I had a marginally helpful thought: There was no point in worrying now. If I’d been seen, I’d been seen.
Again I looked down at the pages in my hands. I would take Rafe’s words away with me—not to read, but to destroy. They were private, weren’t they? One of the only privacies Rafe had ever had. Even if wardens had already been here, even if they’d already read these pages, destroying them would be my gift to Rafe. That’s what I would do.
But now I had to concentrate on why I was here. I stood in the center of the main room and considered. If Rafe had left a message, maybe it wouldn’t be in a book or under the mattress. He knew wardens searched such places. So he’d hide his message in a way that they wouldn’t understand. He’d make it so that even if they saw it, they wouldn’t know what they saw.
The question, of course, was whether I would.
Rafe had been fond of me, enough that I had even dared to wonder, against all the evidence of our very different appearances, if maybe I really was his daughter. Progenitors had more information than children did—they at least knew how old their children were, and sometimes they knew the gender, if the mother managed to catch a glimpse in the delivery room—so finally, in a fit of courage, I’d asked him.
He had looked at me for a long time. “Lonna’s pregnancies were well before your time,” he’d said finally.
“And you were never assigned to anyone else?”
“No,” he said. “But if it’s any comfort, Red, I wish you were mine. I’d be glad to claim you.”
Yes, Rafe cared about me. I had no doubt about that. But he’d never told me about what he was doing, about the spying and the hiding of food and the mysterious stealing of painkillers. So if there was a hidden message, it probably wasn’t intended for me. I might look right at it, and not recognize it for what it was.
Pushing away that discouraging thought, I set to work. Not expecting to find anything, I flipped up the mattress, felt among Rafe’s clothes, his towels, his bedding, looked under the bottoms of the chairs in case Rafe had written something there. I felt like a warden, but I kept looking anyway.
I found absolutely nothing. I saw nothing that seemed odd or out of place.
Where else could I look?
There were three things on the wall: a calendar, a sketch of Lonna, and a map of Optica that Rafe had used to teach us geography.
The calendar was heavily marked, but nothing on it seemed significant—notes about when and where the moon rose and set; comments about the tide; and, of course, his plans for what he intended to teach each day at school. One day in April was marked, simply, Lonna. It was, I thought, the day she died. It had been some sort of electrical accident at work. She’d still been training Meritt, but he hadn’t been with her when it happened. He and Rafe had found her afterwards. She had died alone.
I studied her picture on the wall. It was amazingly like her. Had Rafe drawn this himself, or had someone else drawn it for him? Sometimes we doodled in the sand in the schoolyard, but there wasn't enough paper for us to practice real drawing. Someone had, though. Someone could draw quite well.
The only thing left to examine was the map. Gently I reached out one hand and touched it, remembering sitting in school, listening to Rafe going on about the difficulties of mapmaking.
“When you’re in the middle of a forest, all the trees seem tall,” he’d said. “Distance is skewed by your own physicality, by whether you’re tired, lonely, energetic. In mapmaking, feelings count for nothing. It’s all measurements and geometry. It’s all brain, not heart. But even brains sometimes fall prey to illusion.”
He’d had us try to make our own miniature maps on our small chalkboards, then sent us out into the city in pairs. One partner was blindfolded and led about until thoroughly lost, then freed and told to find the way back to school using the little map.
Staring at Rafe’s map, there in the flickering candlelight, I remembered being blindfolded, feeling Meritt’s hand in mine, holding tight to my map with the other. We had walked a long time, but I hadn’t known whether we’d gone a long way, or whether he’d led me around in circles.
When he let go of my hand I stopped in my tracks, afraid he had run away and left me alone and lost in some distant part of the city. He was two years older, after all, and a boy. Sometimes he thought things were funny that I didn’t. So I stood there in the darkness, seeing only a strip of gray concrete beneath the edge of the blindfold, picturing myself searching for him down unfamiliar streets, lost and terrified.
It felt like forever to me, but it was probably only a few seconds before Meritt untied my blindfold, pulled it free, and revealed his big joke: the blood-filled slaughterhouse yard. He was hoping to make me shriek, but I was so relieved he hadn’t abandoned me that a bunch of cow blood didn’t seem like a big deal. I think I managed to impress Meritt a little, that day. He never knew how frightened I’d been. Only Rafe knew that.
He knew, because when the other kids left school that day, I stayed behind to talk to him. I didn’t have anything to say, not really, but I was always looking for some reason to prolong my time with him. That day, what I said was, “Will we have another Lost Child day, or was today the only one?”
Rafe had been taken aback—I think he’d forgotten I was so much younger than the other kids, more liable to be frightened by being turned loose in the city.
“Lost child,” he said, putting an arm around my shoulders and pulling me close. “Is that how you felt?”
And that was it.
That was it!
I took a deep breath, wanting to shout, wanting to tell someone. That was what Rafe had said just before he died: Lost child.
It was a message only I would understand. Nobody knew about that but the two of us, Rafe and me. What did he want me to remember about the Lost Child day?
I thought back to that incident, five years before. After I’d been unimpressed by the bloody slaughterhouse yard, I’d managed, with a good bit of winding and doubling back and sheer blind luck, to get us back to school. Then Meritt and I had switched places. I had blindfolded him, and wandered randomly around until we ended up at the blackberry fields.
Was there anything significant about either of those places? The slaughterhouse lay on the eastern wall, near the safer woods. It smelled metallic and salty, like blood. The camera was unreliable. I couldn’t see what any of that had to do with Rafe.
But the fields didn’t, either. As a farm worker I knew there was nothing there—just rows of aggressive blackberries with their sharp thorns that left stinging cuts on our faces and arms, their fruit that stained the bottoms of our feet purple. They grew so fast you could practic
ally see it happening; they were a blessing and a blight. They had nothing to do with Rafe.
Shutting my eyes, I imagined myself back into the Lost Child day. I was small, looking up at Rafe. His face was troubled because he’d intended it as a fun outing for us, but he could see that something in the experience had shaken me.
He had started to say something, then stopped, shaking his head. Then he took hold of my shoulders and pulled me into his arms. That didn’t happen very often, and I felt startled and pleased. Rafe’s shirt was rough under my cheek, like my own was rough on my back. He smelled like chalk dust and musty books and himself. He seemed very large and warm, and for once I felt completely wanted, completely safe from jeers and jostlings and accidental injuries that had been carefully planned.
When he spoke I heard his voice rumble in his chest, where my ear was. He said, “Red, remember this: You’re never a lost child if you have a map in your hands or in your head.”
And now I opened my eyes.
There on the wall of the empty home was the map Rafe had used to teach us geography. It was a large square of paper, carefully framed in wood. At the top it said, “A watched city is an orderly city.”
The motto struck me as odd, now, and I wondered whether Rafe had put it there as his own private joke, or maybe to make it look like he believed in everything that was Optica. Because he hadn’t. Even years ago, before the city began failing and Rafe began spying on the Watchers, years before when I was just a kid in school, Rafe had said things that made us ask questions.
Holding the candle up, I studied the meticulous portrayal of Optica. There was my dormitory. There were my fields, with the Watchers’ compound above them, and the wilderland beyond that. I found the watchtower in the middle, saw the circle beneath it, even the tiered steps carefully rendered in impossibly thin lines. Every street was drawn, every building, right down to every little house. Rafe—or whoever had made this map—had included every detail.