by Amanda Witt
“Candles are meant to burn,” the Voice said smoothly. “People are not.”
And Cook Ronnie was shot.
Chapter 14
When the dazed crowd broke up, I found myself moving in the direction of the slaughterhouse, my body shaking but my feet moving steadily and away from the flow of people. I wasn’t going out into the wasteland, not after hearing that voice calling my name, but I could hide in the slaughterhouse doorway beneath the broken camera and have some privacy.
I couldn’t face going back to the dormitory just then, back to a room full of frightened girls, and I still had plenty of time before curfew. These days most of the girls were sound asleep by curfew, hiding under the covers, escaping the only way we knew. Maybe I’d risk staying out late and hope Wanda didn’t stay up to notice.
The cold sharp pellets of rain were still falling, but I didn’t care. Why were they doubling up on executions? Poor Opal—burning was a terrible way to die, the worst. And Petey was so young.
He hadn’t stolen any boots, of course he hadn’t. Why would anyone steal something he couldn’t wear without getting caught? The Watchers were lying, making excuses to do horrible things to us. But why? It made no sense.
I stepped around the beginnings of a puddle, still hearing the distant noise of the city meeting behind me.
Petey had been so brave. Judd would be feeling terrible right now, mourning his friend, wishing he’d stepped up and saved Petey. He’d probably also be feeling glad to still be alive, and that would make him feel even worse. Would he go straight back to his dorm? I supposed he would; there was nowhere else for him to go. Surely someone there would take care of him—Farrell Dean, if he’d turned up yet. Or maybe Ezzie.
The rain went from stinging to a downpour. By the time I reached the slaughterhouse my clothes were drenched and my hair streaming. It suited my mood, cold and grieving, helpless and alone.
And I thought I’d be alone, there at the slaughterhouse. No one besides Meritt and me came there this time of day, and I hadn’t seen him alone for what felt like forever. But when I arrived Meritt was there, a lanky, immediately recognizable shadow leaning against the slaughterhouse door.
Farrell Dean was always nudging me, rumpling my hair, throwing an arm around my shoulders, but Meritt hardly ever did more than touch my sleeve or tug at the end of my braid. That night, though, he reached out without a word and pulled me to him. He was wet from the rain but his body still felt warm, and I stood there, my face against his chest, feeling his arms around me, feeling him breathe, and gradually I stopped shaking.
Meritt released me then, but he still didn’t move away. He kept one arm around my shoulders and we huddled in the darkness in the doorway, sheltered from the rain, our faces close together, and I didn’t say a word about Petey and Judd. Instead I told Meritt about going to Rafe’s house, about seeing the map and remembering the words “lost child.”
“Rafe wanted us to see that map,” I said at the end. “That’s his message.”
Meritt’s arm around my shoulders loosened. “You did good,” he said, and his voice in the darkness sounded oddly relieved.
“What, you expected me to screw things up?”
“Of course not. I’m glad nothing happened to you, that’s all. I don’t like you being out alone. It isn’t safe.”
I gave a short harsh laugh. “Nothing’s safe,” I said, thinking of Petey falling, of Judd’s horrified face.
“True. But some things are less safe than others.”
Waving that off, I went back to my discovery. “So what do you think those circles on the map are? One’s right outside the wall, close to where we usually stand.”
“I don’t know.” Meritt removed his arm from my shoulders. “Let’s go look. Show me where it is.”
But I hesitated, thinking about being out in the wasteland in the dark, remembering the voice in the woods. “Do you think that’s safe?”
Meritt looked down at me, and in the darkness I saw the flash of his crooked grin. “Nothing’s safe,” he said, echoing my own words.
It would have been natural, then, to tell him about my recent experience in the woods, about the voice that called my name, but somehow it was too much on top of the horrors of the evening. I didn’t want to talk about it. Especially because it edged too close to my dream that we could run away together, Meritt and I. It meant we could have no escape.
Meritt was watching me, or at least his face was turned toward me in the dark. “Is there something you’re not telling me?” he said. “You’ve never been particularly afraid of the wasteland before. And I’ll be with you, just like always.”
I half shrugged and looked away. “It’s just . . . what if someone’s out there? Watching us from the woods? Meri says something has been coming into the city lately, killing chickens. Something that isn’t an animal.”
For a long moment Meritt was silent. He turned his face toward the pouring rain and leaned one shoulder against the door, tilting his body toward me.
“The woods are dangerous,” he said. “I’m not going to tell you otherwise. You wouldn’t believe me if I did.” He pushed off the wall and took hold of my shoulders, turning me so we stood face to face me. “But I can promise you this: As long as you’re with me, you’re safe. Nobody’s going to hurt you if you’re with me. I won’t let them.”
He meant well, and part of me felt comforted. Most of me, though, was old enough to know he was making a promise he couldn’t possibly keep. He just wanted to find one of those circles, and would tell me anything to get me to show him the spot.
But it was true enough that we needed to find those circles, if we were to ever understand Rafe’s dying message, his plan. And even if Meritt couldn’t keep his word, I couldn’t help but be a little touched by his uncharacteristically firm reassurance. He wanted to protect me; he wouldn’t risk me needlessly. That, I believed.
I shot a silent I told you so Farrell Dean’s way.
“All right,” I said to Meritt. “Let’s go.”
Slipping out of the slaughterhouse doorway into the cold rain, we covered the short distance to the wall and the opening onto the eastern wasteland in a few seconds.
Outside, the woods rose up, dark and deep. I kept one hand on the wall’s rough surface as I walked a few paces south, trying to picture Rafe’s map in my mind, wondering whether he’d been precise about distances.
“Somewhere right in here,” I said finally, uncertainly. “I guess.”
But I hadn’t been able to tell, from Rafe’s map, how high up on the wall the circles were supposed to be. For a long moment we stood side by side, gazing at the wall. It seemed like an impossible job, to find something we’d never noticed before, and find it in the dark, in the rain.
Without a word, Meritt started at the top of the wall. I started at the bottom, and we patted and stroked and felt along the rough wet cinderblocks until our hands touched. Then we moved over a couple of feet and did it all again. It was tedious work, and cold, with the rain running in our eyes and down the backs of our collars, and every now and then—despite Meritt’s promise—I couldn’t resist glancing over my shoulder at the woods.
“Meritt,” I said after awhile. “Have you seen Farrell Dean today?”
Above me he paused, then started moving again. “No,” he said cautiously.
“Why do you say it like that?”
“Maybe because last time I saw Farrell Dean, he threw a punch at me.”
It was my turn to pause. “Why’d he do that?”
Meritt nudged me with his knee. “Because I’m reckless and selfish and take stupid risks, and one day I’ll get you in trouble and then I’ll regret it but it’ll be too late, et cetera, et cetera. Same thing he’s always saying. He just punctuated it with a punch this time.”
I didn’t know what to say. They shouldn’t be fighting each other, not with Rafe gone, not when they were working together against the Watchers. I didn’t want to be the cause of trouble, but
then the problem wasn’t me, was it? It was Farrell Dean.
“It’s no big deal,” Meritt said, sounding cheerful. “Farrell Dean’s feeling tense and he needed to take it out on somebody. Now me—when I need to hit somebody, I go for Harding, or maybe even Cline. That’s like bringing a building down on top of you. You don’t worry about anything but survival after that.”
“So you haven’t seen him at all today.”
He turned away from the wall. “No,” he said. “What’s up?”
“He said he needed to talk to me—” I didn’t want to mention that he wanted to talk about Meritt, and I sure didn’t want to mention that he’d almost gotten crossways with a warden on my account—“but then he never came to the field.”
Meritt lost interest. “Don’t start worrying yet,” he said, turning back to his search. “Things come up, especially for him—he’s a good mechanic, and some people kick up a fuss if they get sent someone else.”
We kept searching. The rain stopped, and that was good, but somehow without the rain I felt colder. I was shivering hard, trying to stop my teeth from chattering, when Meritt gave a quiet exclamation.
“What?” I said. “Did you find it?”
“Yeah, but I don’t know what it is. It’s smooth. I think it’s a metal panel. It’s small—just a square inch or so.”
I stood beside him as he poked and prodded. Whatever it was, it was quite high on the wall, well beyond my reach.
“It opened,” he said. “The panel slid back.” He tapped gently. “Underneath it feels like glass.” Keeping his hand on the mysterious thing, he turned toward me.
“Red,” he said softly. “It’s a camera lens.”
I stared at him. Had someone been watching us groping around tonight? But no—the cover had been closed.
Meritt pulled a small screwdriver out of his pants pocket and turned back toward the wall.
“What are you doing?” I hissed, alarmed.
“Taking it out,” he said. “It’s dead.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s not wired to anything.” He pried the camera out and pushed the cover back over the gap.
Holding it up, he turned it this way and that. “It’s no use,” he said. “Too dark.” Carefully he tucked it in his shirt pocket and returned the screwdriver to its place, then turned to me. In the darkness I could just make out his grin.
“Let’s go see Rafe’s map,” he said.
“Now?”
“No time like the present.”
* * * *
The streets were eerily silent. We saw no headlights, nor any indication that wardens were patrolling.
“Why should they bother?” Meritt said when I mentioned the unusual stillness. “They think we’re all cowering in our beds.”
I shook out of my head the night’s gruesome city meetings—Petey falling, blood pooling around his head, Judd’s roar of anguish and anger, the laundress going up in shrieking flames—and focused on the present moment.
“This might not be safe,” I said in a whisper as Meritt reached for the door to Rafe’s house. “Rafe thought someone was watching him in here. Do you know anything about that?”
Meritt stared at me, his face blank in the blue streetlights. His hair was still wet, plastered to his head, and it made the bones of his face stand out starkly. It gave him that unfamiliar look again, beautiful but strange, and for a moment I stared at him as blankly as he was staring at me.
“Cameras in the adult houses,” I said, reminding myself as much as him. “Wardens and Watchers?”
He shook his head. “No,” he said, pushing open the door. “No cameras in the adult houses. I’m sure of it.”
I’d left the candle and a couple of matches under Rafe’s bed. Now I lit the candle and pointed Meritt to the map on the wall.
“I remember this,” he said, going to stand in front of it. “But as a kid I didn’t realize how detailed it was. Everything’s exactly proportional. It must have taken him forever.”
Carefully Meritt lifted the map down from the wall and over to the table. As he went to lay it flat, something pattered out, landed with tiny plinks on the floor.
I fell to my hands and knees, groped along the cold concrete.
“What is it?” Meritt said.
“The thing that got him killed.” I held out my hand, palm up. Three tiny white pills. “Painkillers.”
Meritt took one, held it up in the candlelight. “Not exactly,” he said, his gray eyes sparkling. “Sedatives.”
I gave him a look, but he didn’t notice. “Why did Rafe have these?” I said.
Meritt didn’t answer. He sat down at the table, took the other two pills out of my hand, and with infinite care wrapped all three in a small piece of paper and tucked it into his pocket.
“You wouldn’t have those pills if it weren’t for me,” I said, getting to my feet. “Tell me what’s going on.”
He looked up at me. “I’d rather you trusted me on this,” he said.
“And I’d rather you trusted me. I thought we were friends.”
Meritt leaned forward and pulled the map toward him. “You’re my best friend, and you know it,” he said. “Show me the other circles—”
“Then why don’t you trust me?”
Meritt didn’t even look away from the map. “I do trust you. But you have to trust me, too.”
I didn’t answer.
After a long moment Meritt sighed and looked at me. I didn’t say anything, and neither did he. He tipped his chair off its front legs and began rocking it up and down.
Finally he spoke. “The other night, when you got picked up? If you’d known why I was meeting Rafe, would you have been able to play innocent as well as you did?”
“I would never give you away,” I said, and my words caught hard in my throat. “Not ever.”
Meritt looked alarmed. “Don’t cry,” he said, and his chair legs thumped hard on the floor. Reaching out, he took me by the arm and pulled me down onto his knee. “I know you wouldn’t give me away. Not intentionally. But you might give away that you weren’t giving me away, and then we’d both be in danger, not just me, but you too. Sometimes ignorance is the best defense.”
As he spoke he collected my wet hair at the base of my neck, his hand warm on my skin. I wanted to lean into him; I wanted to be held.
Instead I pulled my hair out of his hand and stood up.
“Tell me what’s going on,” I said. “If you won’t tell me, then the next time I find something out, I’ll deal with it on my own. Or I’ll tell Farrell Dean. In any case, I won’t be coming to you.”
Meritt’s expression hardened. “Farrell Dean,” he said. “So that’s what this is about.”
“No. This is about us. You and me. This is about you treating me like a child.”
Meritt shook his head, looking irritated.
“You are,” I said. “Rafe trusted me—he told me where to find those sedatives.”
“Because he had no choice,” Meritt said. “You were the one who happened to be there when he got the chance to speak.”
“Happened to be there? I went to him, Meritt. I tried to save his life.” The memory brought tears to my eyes. “Why can’t you take me seriously?”
Because I was small and young and looked younger than I was, because I had stupid freaky red hair—but I didn’t say any of that. It sounded whiney, even to me. Someone who deserved to be taken seriously wouldn’t list the reasons why she might not be.
Meritt’s expression softened, but he didn’t pull his punches. “Don’t delude yourself,” he said. “Rafe and Farrell Dean wanted to keep you in the dark—they were in complete agreement about that—and I was the one who disagreed. Who’s been sneaking out with you three or four nights a week for, what—two years now? Me, that’s who. So you’ve got no business being mad at me. If you can’t be mad at Rafe because he’s dead, then save your indignation for Farrell Dean.”
“I don’t care about Farrell
Dean,” I said. “I – .”
Meritt met my gaze but didn’t say anything.
My face grew hot. We had never spoken of what was between us.
“I thought you were different,” I said finally, and my voice broke on the words.
A faint flush rose on Meritt’s cheeks, but the uncompromising expression in his gray eyes didn’t waver. He wasn’t going to tell me. He was going to take my information and share it with Farrell Dean and tall-older-Meri and who knew what others, and leave me out.
Speechless with frustration, my chest tight with distress, I turned away and headed for the door. I didn’t walk slowly. I didn’t hesitate. I wasn’t bluffing.
What it did mean, that I was walking away from Meritt? I didn’t know. He was my best friend. I loved him. I couldn’t even remember how it felt to not to love him.
But something terrible was happening in Optica, and if there was a solution, I wouldn’t be left out. Not without a protest. Not when he was endangering himself.
My hand was on the doorknob when he spoke.
“They were for me.”
I turned, surprised.
“Yeah,” Meritt said, running a hand through his hair. “That’s right. Rafe got the sedatives for me.”
“You’re not sick.” I was too startled to move away from the door.
Meritt looked startled too, and then regretful, and then something else. “Not like you mean,” he said slowly. “It’s not a physical illness . . .”
“Stop it, Meritt. You aren’t sick in any way at all.”
“It was worth a shot,” he said with a shrug, flashing me a grin that quickly vanished. “No, don’t get mad again, Red. Listen—here’s how it’s been. For the past few months I’ve been working on rigging the connection to the compound so I can spy on the Watchers from the tower. It took awhile because I could only work on it when I got called to the compound, and then only for a minute or two at a time, when the wardens weren’t hanging around. So I brought Farrell Dean in and coached him through it so that when he got called out there he could do some of the work, and then I’d pick up where he left off next time I got called, and so forth and so on. You see?”