Despite my distance from the nearest gate, the shouts seemed to arc over New Atlanta. Soon, the rise and fall of civil defense sirens competed with the march of the Resistance. I had no doubt which side would prevail. If Mama were here, she’d say, “The people with more firepower. That’s the way to bet.”
I heard gunfire.
I returned to my narrow cot, pulled the sheet over my head, squeezed my eyes tight, and covered my ears. It was not enough to block out the screams.
Chapter Twenty-One
I awoke to someone tapping on the trapdoor. Gravity felt stronger than usual as I forced myself to sit up. Bleary and still tired after a fitful night’s sleep, I called, “Who is it?”
“It’s Eye!”
I hurried to unlock the trapdoor. When I looked down the ladder, I found my new charge standing in the hallway holding a bowl of oatmeal.
“I brought you breakfast,” she said. “I told Wanda we should give you a welcome breakfast and she agreed as long as I got you up and going. She’s worried you’re lazy.”
I rubbed the sleep from my eyes. “Thanks. C’mon up.”
Balancing the bowl in one hand, she climbed the ladder. “Get any sleep?”
“Probably doesn’t look like I did.”
“The sirens kept me up for a while, too. Rebels tried to rush Gate 15 last night.”
“Is that what happened? How do you know? Did they get through?”
“Mother gets all the news first.” Eye seemed very proud of that fact. “Don’t worry. They didn’t get within a hundred feet of the gate before the parrots hit them with sound cannons. They were driven back.”
I’d heard about such crowd control techniques from the propapundits. Sound cannons were supposed to be non-lethal means to pacify “riotous elements.” However, not all the noise from the previous night was entirely benign. “I thought I heard gunshots.”
The girl shrugged. “I’ve heard that lots of times. The sound cannons can’t be everywhere. Mother says when that happens, it’s the parrots firing over the heads of the crowd to scare them away.”
Several refugees who’d run north through Campbellford told a different story. Not all the Select’s strategies were non-lethal. The crowd control devices they used could blind or burst eardrums. I wondered how much truth Evelyn Rossi shared with her daughter.
“I want to thank you again for yesterday,” Eye said. “Those men scared me.”
“Me, too.”
“But you came to the rescue.”
I shrugged. “Had to. Whatever they had planned, it was going wrong. You stepped up for me, too. I think I was more scared of the CSS.”
She waved that away. “The escaped prisoners were scary but the guards are there to protect us. They’re our friends.”
“Sure.” I ate my oatmeal while Eye poked through Tanya Dunford’s clothes to find something for me to wear.
Eye was a slight girl but moved with the confidence of someone older.
“Eye, did Tanya tell you why she took you outside the wall?”
“It started with a bad book,” she said. “I didn’t know it had been banned. If I did, I would have gotten in big trouble.”
“What book?”
Eye tiptoed over to the trapdoor and checked to see if we could be overheard. Satisfied we were alone, she came back and whispered. “I never read it but Tanya had and she told me about it. I thought it was okay because she said it was about religion.” Eye glanced over her shoulder nervously. “Tanya said that I was like the prince at the beginning of the story.”
“I don’t understand.”
“There once was a prince whose mother, the queen, died. It was prophesied that the prince wouldn’t just rule his kingdom. He’d rule the world. Thing is, after his wife died, the king kind of lost his mind with grief. He wanted to protect his son from all the bad things in the world so the king decreed that all the sick and old people had to leave the city. All the prince ever saw were young, happy and healthy people. Tanya said that the prince was looking for enlightenment so he could be a good ruler someday. To learn what life was really like, the prince had to go outside the castle walls. Tanya said that if I was going to take over for Mother when I come of age, I should see what it’s like outside the Circle.”
“I see. So your mom didn’t know you were going out?”
The girl rolled her eyes. “Of course not. I thought it was going to be an adventure but we barely got outside the gate and I hardly saw anything. Tanya got fired for taking me. Wanda almost lost her job, too, but I told Mother and Father that Wanda didn’t know.”
That was interesting. “So Wanda did know?” I asked.
Her eyes went wide with surprise as she realized she’d said too much. I waved away her concerns. “Forget I asked. You don’t have to tell me anything.”
“Mother had a long talk with me about the city. She says she understands and that I will be able to go out someday, but not anytime soon.”
“So you still want to see Atlanta?”
“Are you kidding? Just knowing you can’t go anywhere makes the Circle feel like prison.”
Eye’s position within the Select Few would be the envy of anyone I’d ever known but curiosity is a powerful force. As much as I wanted to see how the Select lived, Eye wanted to go slumming.
“I’m surprised your mother is okay with you going outside the walls anytime in the future.”
“Mother says that to understand how bad things are, I will have to see it with my own eyes. Tanya’s mistake was not asking first. And we took Father’s car. No wonder we got the prisoners’ attention.”
“What do you want to see when you go?”
“Oh, you know, how common people live, what they do, what it’s like out there. The poor will always be with us but I wonder if that’s true. If things are as bad as I hear, how will they keep living?”
I noticed how casually Eye had thrown out the edict that “the poor will always be with us.” I wondered if she knew the full quote.
From what I remembered of my grandmother’s reading of the Bible, Jesus scolded his disciple because he knew he would soon die. The gist was that Jesus was saying the apostle could concern himself with caring for the poor anytime but the Son of God didn’t have much time left on Earth. I remembered the passage so well because I managed to annoy Grammy by debating her. “That sucks,” I told my grandmother. “We’re poor. There’s no way out? I’ve got a better interpretation,” I said. “Here’s what Jesus should have said — ”
“Kismet, don’t test me or God,” Grammy warned. “Don’t be tellin’ me what my Jesus shoulda said.”
“He should have said the poor will always be with us, as in ‘on our side.’ When things go bad, the poor have to stick together. The Select Few have money. Our only power comes from looking out for each other, like when Mr. Dobbs broke his leg and we brought him food. The whole town looked out for him.”
Dobbs had not repaid our kindness. Instead, he almost killed us all. Not all poor people stuck together.
“I have a bunch of friends who go to boarding school in Switzerland,” Eye said, seemingly out of nowhere. “They live like everyone here, but without walls. The Swiss banished all their poor. Those girls might never see anything interesting.”
As if desperation was a museum exhibit to be looked at and then forgotten. I wasn’t sure if it was freedom she craved so much as poverty tourism. I finished my cold oatmeal in silence.
But perhaps I wasn’t so different. I was curious about the Select Few. I wanted to know how it felt to be free from fear. Inside the Circle, there were still plenty of dangers but the cot was better than concrete and I’d never starve. I could let Kirk and Evelyn Rossi worry about the money and all I had to do was take care of their child.
When I looked at Eye, a princess safe in her castle and destined to be a queen, I kept my thoughts to myself. I nodded at everything she said, agreeable and compliant. And for that, I began to hate myself a little more than usual.
>
I had to complete my mission before the full moon and I had no idea how to accomplish the feat. In the meantime, I would enjoy the benefits of living inside the Circle while Tanya was out there somewhere, probably sleeping on a hard floor and suffering from an empty stomach.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Eye was to take me on a tour of the neighborhood but first I had to complete several chores. Wanda handed me a red apron with white pinstripes and told me what to do. The kitchen dishes had to be washed and dried and the toilets needed to be scrubbed. Eye, Wanda and I lived in the narrow house. Evelyn and Kirk Rossi ate in the house but all their living and working was done elsewhere, places I was not yet authorized to go.
As I went about my work, Eye had her studies. I passed her several times through the morning. Her eyes were fixed on a screen and she wore headphones. Curious, I glanced over her shoulder. In the first hour, she studied Portuguese. The next time I looked, I heard her repeating phrases on the screen. I was pretty sure the soft sounds she made were Mandarin.
I was sweeping the kitchen floor around noon when Wanda offered me a protein shake. The taste was supposed to mimic chocolate, a flavor I only dimly remembered from early childhood. The glue-like mixture tasted more like brown chalk.
Eye appeared at the kitchen door. “I’m finished studying. Let’s go!”
I looked to Wanda for permission but that was the wrong move. She sneered, “Go on, then. Don’t look to me. You have your orders from the little one. Take the grand tour! Just be back in time to help me prepare dinner for the family. I’ll show you how to make the polenta for when I’m dead.”
I began to take the apron off but Wanda stopped me. “Whenever you’re down here or go outside, we wear the apron.”
I was about to protest because of the heat but thought better of it. After we were out of Wanda’s earshot, I asked if she was sick.
“The ‘for when I’m dead’ thing?” Eye smiled. “Nah, she’s not dying for anything except sympathy. Wanda’s been talking like she’s about to die any second for as long as I can remember. She says it’s best to be prepared to die. Wanda doesn’t like surprises.”
We took a left out of the narrow house and my gaze fell on the houses next door. Two guards in blue uniforms and white gloves walked up the ramp to the big house on the far side. They paused at the front door and keyed in entry codes. The house was fairly unremarkable except for the heavy bars on the windows over steel shutters. Peering closer, I thought I saw what might have been gun ports.
“Best not to stare at the Security Center, Kismet,” Eye whispered. “They have cameras.”
I wheeled around. “Sorry, of course. Just … everything’s so new to me, that’s all.”
“I’ll tell you a secret. A lot of people here own a bunch of buildings. There really aren’t many Select Few. “
“The few aren’t many,” I said. “Makes sense.”
“Well, I mean, especially since the massacre.”
Heat rose in my cheeks and my breath caught in my throat. “Massacre?”
“Father says a bunch of the tech bros fled to their doomsday bunkers in Switzerland. Some went solo to compounds in Alaska. I’m talking about the sinking of the Apollo’s Lyre.”
Everyone knew about the Lyre. Several years previously, a massive cruise ship reserved for billionaires went down in a storm. Some people on Twitter could not contain their glee. It was rumored those indiscreet members of the Resistance were jailed.
Grammy told me that app used to be for everyone and was once helpful with organizing protest marches. After the sinking of Apollo’s Lyre, anyone could still join Twitter but only approved members with blue checkmarks were allowed to tweet. Some poor folks still managed to afford to watch the rich talk about their love of life and their fabulous lives. I couldn’t guess why they would bother. We couldn’t relate to them, only envy them. Every day, ordinary people were reminded of their ordinariness, spectators to a game we could never play.
Perhaps outsiders watched the rich at play in a sort of ritual of self-torture, flagellating themselves with treasures they will never possess. Maybe they told themselves they would, one day, be on the inside of that very exclusive club.
I did not share any of these thoughts with Eye. I was just the help and, by her mother’s lights, my employment was tenuous.
“They said it was a tidal wave that took down the ship,” Eye said. “That’s not what people think around here. Mother thinks it was sabotage. Apollo’s Lyre had a roller coaster on it! As Mother says, surely a boat with a roller coaster could handle some inclement weather. Father says it was a massacre, too, but it worked to our advantage. He says the sinking spurred funding for the Circle. Father had a piece of the contract for the construction of the wall.”
Never let a good tragedy go to waste, I thought.
We passed the Rossi’s other property on the near side of the narrow house. With its pink stucco, it reminded me of luxurious Spanish villas I’d seen in pictures. However, there were no windows on the first floor. I saw no doors. It was a pink stucco bunker. “Do you spend any time in your parents’ house?”
“These three homes all belong to my father but I know what you mean. I go into the pink house on special occasions or when I’m invited to dinner. Wanda goes in more than I do, just to deliver food to their kitchen for Mother to reheat. She works a lot of long hours in the Security Center. She says it’s just tidier if I stay with you and Wanda. When the time comes, Wanda will show you how to clean the hot tub and the pool out back. Tanya did that stuff.”
“How long was Tanya here?”
“A few months, I think.”
“You must miss her.”
“Yeah, but Wanda says I shouldn’t. Mother’s pretty stressed about her.”
“I’m sorry you lost your friend.”
“Mother says we aren’t supposed to be friends with commoners.” Eye looked me up and down and I sensed she was wondering how much she should reveal. “We were friends, though,” she added. “It’s inevitable.”
Her statement might have been obnoxious, but she was right. I laughed and so did she.
“Besides, if we were never supposed to be friends,” I said, “how would your parents have ever gotten together?”
Eye put on a very arch English accent. “I want you to stick around so, please, never say anything about that. Mother does not appreciate being reminded of her humble origins.”
“Okay, I can’t take it anymore. What’s with the British accent.”
“It’s the style,” Eye said. “The Select are trying to get closer to their origins.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Oh, you know.” The girl waved my query away like a pesky gnat. “Things were simpler when we were colonizers.”
I bit my lip. As we walked on I thought, It’s a good thing you’re so cute, kid.
Eye studied my face. “You remind me of Tanya, only better. She flouted the rules. You just don’t know any better yet. Like Mother says, good training takes time.”
I worried about the seeds that had already been planted in the girl’s mind. There was so much she seemed to take for granted, ideas she accepted as known and carved in granite. Were I to stay in the Circle long, I wasn’t sure I’d find her so adorable. I could befriend her as a child. If she became an adult who wrote others off as commoners, we couldn’t be friends.
I accepted what my family told me, too. The seeds sown in me had been nourished well. My opinions about how people should treat one another were pretty much full-grown. For instance, Grammy would say, “Gratitude typically only lasts as long as it takes to express it. After that, it’s screw you!”
I didn’t blame Eye for accepting what she’d been taught. We all believe what we’re told when we’re young. Without more information, how could Eye end up any different from her mother? And who could resist becoming an entitled princess among American royalty?
Evelyn had grown up a commoner but ambition, perhaps love,
had made her turn on her class. Why not? Who wouldn’t change places with any member of the Select Few?
If the children were our future, we were doomed.
Chapter Twenty-Three
I walked with my charge through narrow, winding streets that looked like pictures from Old Europe. Every foot of space saved inside the Circle had saved the Select Few on their concrete wall budget.
“Do you miss those friends who went off to Switzerland?” I asked.
“Mother says it’s better that I stay here. Getting an education abroad sounds good but things are going to get worse before they get better. If I’m going to lead someday, I should see things as they are. Too many people spend all their time getting mad about the past or are terrified of the future. That’s what Mother says.”
It was true that we spent a lot of time not being in the present. However, those who were mad about the past had plenty of good reasons to be angry. Anyone who wasn’t terrified about the future counted themselves among the Select Few.
As if reading my mind, Eye added, “People call the people inside the Circle ’the Select.’ Father says they call us that because they’re jealous. He says there’s a reason we are supposed to think of ourselves as the Select Few. There aren’t many of us because, in any profession anywhere, there are the people who are at the top and then there’s everyone else. Do you think that’s true. Kismet?”
This felt like dangerous territory. “Do I think what’s true?”
“That we deserve to be here?”
“You’re here so what does it matter what I think? Why do you ask?”
“I keep thinking about all those people who rioted last night. We have stuff they don’t. I can understand why that would make them jealous, but sometimes I wonder if there’s more to it. I’ve been jealous of other girls, but I never went outside their house at night to shout mean things.”
Sensing my reluctance, the girl encouraged me. “You can tell me anything. I just want to know more about what it’s like out there.”
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