“Someone you knew?”
“Quite well. I had my suspicions so I confronted him first.”
“You were the enterprising young detective?”
“When I accused him of stealing from the town’s rations, he laughed and tried to bargain with me. He even asked for a kiss. ‘A Valentine’s treat,’ he called it. Then he offered to share the food with me and my grandmother. He told me he’d be my sugar daddy and I’d be his sugar baby.”
“What did the town do about the guard and the farmer?”
“Execution by hanging that same night.”
Kirk’s eyebrows shot high. “Quick country justice?”
“He was a neighbor I’d known all my life. His name was Clayton Dobbs.”
“How do you feel about his death now?”
“My dog’s name was Quentin. He was a cocker spaniel. I can’t imagine he had much meat on his bones but it was an emergency situation. When peril pays a visit, anything goes to keep it out of your house. Dobbs himself once told me that. I loved Quentin much more than I cared for that farmer. My only regret is that I got to Mr. Dobbs and the stolen rations too late to save my dog.”
“So you saved the town but it must have come at a high cost to you.”
“I don’t regret it. Hobbs had a huge old oak tree in his backyard. You could still see the tree house he’d built in that tree from when he was a kid. Still had a rope ladder and a tire swing. We used the rope from the swing to hang him and his co-conspirator. Same tree, too.”
“God!”
I fixed Kirk with a piercing stare. “I would have hanged him just for asking for his Valentine’s treat.”
Kirk had been flushed before, his cheeks pink. When I left to see to Eye, he looked a little pale.
I doubted I had to worry about locking the door to my room after that.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
For the next week, we stayed inside the narrow house. It was determined that the tick did not carry Lyme disease. However, Eye was still shaken at what she’d witnessed at Gate 15. I wasn’t sure if we were ordered to remain indoors as a punishment or to give the girl time to recover.
Staying inside didn’t really matter. The weather had turned ugly. Each night I went to my window to check the phase of the moon. Black clouds roiled over the city, issuing a near-constant downpour.
In addition to my duties assisting Wanda, I skipped rope with Eye in the underground garage. She knew songs to sing as we skipped that I’d never heard before.
The door to the Security Center stood a few feet away. I tried to get a sense of when the shift changes happened but the AWE guard’s on-duty hours seemed staggered. Most of them came and went through the front door. I only saw Evelyn enter through the door in the garage and she always kept her key card on her belt.
When Eye grew tired of playing in the garage, we worked on expanding her vocabulary. A dry reading of the dictionary did not capture the girl’s attention. However, when I made it a competitive exercise with a game of Scrabble, she was willing to play for an hour or two at a time.
Kirk called these sessions with his daughter English lessons. “It’s a pity you aren’t British. If you could mimic the accent, you’d be perfect.”
“Perhaps you could hire a dialogue coach for Eye,” I suggested.
“We had a maid from Trinidad when I was a boy. Wonderful accent! She went back to Trinidad. She should have stayed here. I suppose she’s underwater now.”
I couldn’t manage a proper English accent. I couldn’t really understand why the Select Few were anglophiles, either. The sun had long since set on that empire.
Kirk explained, “When a lot of people, especially Yankees, hear the Southern accent, they automatically deduct forty IQ points from the speaker. I went to a meeting to purchase a shipyard up in Halifax. I could buy and sell everyone in that conference room twenty times over. When I spoke, I had the feeling they wanted to check under the table to see if I was wearing shoes.”
Eye watched videos to learn how to sound like a proper English noble from a previous century. I still thought it was silly but Evelyn valued those lessons on par with knowing not to drink from the finger bowl.
As torrential rain poured, Eye and I curled up on the couch in her room as if we were sisters. That afternoon, we played Boggle and worked on crossword puzzles together. We looked up words we didn’t know and Eye repeated each word several times, perfecting her adopted accent.
Evelyn appeared in the doorway wearing a bathrobe. I’d sensed she’d been in the hallway listening.
Eye chuckled as she played with the British pronunciation of aluminum. She drew out the vowels. “Aluminium. A-loo-min-ee-um! Aa-looooo-min-eeee-um!”
“Well, aren’t you two cozy! Eye, why don’t you take a break from giggling with Kismet and work on your languages. If you think an English accent is difficult, try conjugating some Portuguese verbs, hm?”
Reluctantly, Eye left to get to work as I put the Boggle pieces away.
“She enjoys you.”
“I enjoy her company, too.”
“You know, I tried your trick to get rid of the migraines.”
“Oh? And?”
“Didn’t work, not the first time. However, I looked into it and the next time I felt the pain coming on, I did as you suggested right away. No headache! Thank you for that. Wanda says you’re useful, too.”
“I’m surprised to hear that. I never feel like I can do anything right when we’re in the kitchen. Or if I do, it’s not fast enough.”
“Wanda may be crusty but she knows what she’s doing. You’ll learn a lot from her. If you don’t learn how to make her polenta before she dies, Kirk will fire you.”
“I’ll do my best.”
“I’m sure you will. Wanda is getting old and arthritic. I think you should cover some of her more physical duties. She’ll give you an access card and show you all that’s required to clean our house next door. Think you can handle this new level of trust and responsibility?”
I nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”
She lingered at the door and asked, “Have you gotten over the culture shock of being inside New Atlanta yet?”
“I’m not sure what you mean.”
“There’s a big difference between living out there and living here. I have tried to protect Eye from certain realities, perhaps too long. After what she saw at Gate 15, she came to me bawling one night, worried that the commoners were going to break through and actually eat her. Can you imagine?”
I could imagine that, actually. Like many thoughts, I kept it to myself.
“Eat the rich. Hmph! And then what? Mob rule? Every flock needs a shepherd and that is the Select Few. These insurrectionists say we’re only throwing them crumbs but at least they’re getting that much.”
That little.
“Somewhere along the way, people lost their ambition. They don’t have what it takes to be of value or service and expect to be catered to. They contribute nothing so they are nothing. Bunch of malcontents and childish nihilists, they are!”
Nothing childish about nihilism, I thought. I’d played dead in a ditch and stolen from corpses. I knew despair. Those who have never known a crisis could not understand the impulse to give up on hope.
Evelyn put herself at the top. Having found herself at a great height, she was eager to break the ladder before anyone could come up behind her.
“The trouble with commoners is,” Evelyn went on in her fake English accent, “they don’t understand us or how the world works. It’s much harder being among the Select Few than they can ever imagine. There are forces out there who would bring our wall down if they could. Given half a chance, they’d stage a repeat of the French Revolution, complete with guillotines. Did you know that Marie Antoinette never actually said ‘Let them eat cake?’”
“I was not aware of that.”
“It was propaganda put out by those who would destroy the upper class. Hundreds of years may pass but nothing’s changed. It�
��s just rumors and lies disseminated by seditionists bent on dividing us.”
Dividing us? I thought. You’re the ones with the big wall!
“We shoulder the burden of noblesse oblige and no one’s grateful.”
I sat there, listening to Evelyn rant and picturing hundreds of dead people in a ditch.
“The president and his sycophants catered to the ordinary people’s whims. Our nation became a tinderbox. The politicians ruined everything. The Select had to step in. A beneficent dictatorship became necessary.”
Beneficence? Is that what we had?
She shrugged. “No matter. As it is told in Corinthians, ‘Even if our gospel be veiled, it is only veiled to those who are perishing.’”
Listening to Evelyn’s rationalization of how the corporatists killed democracy, I was reminded of my mother cursing the Select Few.
“They’re bringing the militia groups into the military!” Mama exclaimed. “Can you believe this? Well-regulated, my ass! These are the same fools who had a hand in blowing me up! I guess they finally found a way to make being in a bohunk militia pay.”
“So I gather you don’t approve?”
“I’m not joking, Kismet. Cops used to be called peace officers. We militarized them and now the CSS act like an occupying force in enemy territory. The Select call them centurions — not what centurion used to mean, by the way. Now we have as much war at home as we did in the Sandbox.”
Mama and I were still in Bermuda then. I wish we’d stayed there. My mother was bitter, but she was safe.
She sat staring at the prosthesis where her leg used to be. “Love or hate us, it’s all the same. The people who put us on a pedestal and the ones who spit on the uniform both think we’re a monolith. I’ve served with geniuses and idiots, racists, sexists, heroes and cowards. Civvies don’t see us as people. To them, we’re either weapons or tools. As soon as we’re no longer useful, we’re as forgotten as a broken toy.”
She didn’t know then that the army would call her back into service despite her injury. That’s the irony. She wasn’t a broken toy. She was a lemon that had been juiced. The powers that be were determined to squeeze just a little more out of her. If she didn’t comply, she’d lose her citizenship and the prosthesis along with it.
“Once upon a time,” Mama told me, “people believed most other folks were good people. When we started to distrust each other, that’s when the rot began to set in. We couldn’t trust politicians and we didn’t trust each other. Later, one in six people thought the military should take over the government. The elite rejected that but overcorrected. Corporations are running and ruining everything. Your generation calls it the Slow Apocalypse. It’s not some grand conspiracy. Nobody’s smart enough to engineer that. I’ll tell you what it is. It’s the law of unintended consequences come a callin’.”
I dared to look Evelyn directly in the eyes for a moment. She smiled as she met my gaze. When she spoke about the inferiority of the poor and embraced her prosperity gospel, she believed every word she spoke. The rationalizations we give ourselves to escape the consequences of sin are powerful. She wasn’t an evil mastermind controlling the gears that turned the world. Evelyn was an unintended consequence.
Me, too, I thought.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
I sat at a picnic table in the arboretum, halfway between Gates 12 and 13. The clouds had broken and shafts of sunlight slipped through the trees. I wondered where my sister was and what she was doing. I supposed I could never know the details of all her duties. I was running out of time to get into AWE’s Security Center and I had yet to find a way in. Time was running out.
An old man wearing the brown apron of a workman sat down at the table across from me. His large brown mustache reminded me of pictures I’d seen of walruses.
I said hello but he did not reply. He only stared at me as if he was attempting to guess my weight.
“Is there something wrong?”
“Fallen in love with luxury, have you?” he asked.
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Why aren’t you at work?”
“Sunday is my day off.”
“Like it at the Rossis’ place, do you? A cook, three meals, a nice place to sleep, the easy life?”
“I don’t know who you think I am but you obviously don’t know me. My life isn’t easy.”
He looked up, through the glass at the sky. “Can’t quite see the moon from here. How long, do you suppose, before the full moon is upon us again?”
“Not long.”
“Lotta people watching for that full moon. The folks in the refugee camp just south of the Circle are hoping to get better shelter. It’s not time yet but I thought I should check in on you to see how you’re doing.”
“You don’t know me and I don’t know you.”
“I know, I know. Army brat. You traveled around a lot. Spent some time at a rehab hospital in Bermuda looking after your mother. You’re Kismet. Your sister’s name is Susan but you call her Sissy. You’ve called her Sissy since you were little and she used to call you Kissy.”
“How do you know all that?”
“You know how. That which is already known need not be spoken.”
“I’m doing what I can.”
“Are you? We know people. People are watching, folks you know nothing about.”
“What do you want, mister?”
“Assurance that the little people have not been forgotten.”
At that, rough hands grabbed my apron from behind and hauled back so hard I began to choke as the cloth cut into my neck. I couldn’t see my attacker’s face. All I could see was that he, too, wore a laborer’s apron. From a sitting position, I wasn’t prepared to defend myself. I kicked and struggled as the air left me and the coarse fabric of my apron burned my throat. I reached up and behind me and jabbed with my thumb.
The first time, I hit him in the nose. No effect. However, my failed attempt helped me navigate for the next strike. This time, I poked my thumb in his eye. I twisted as his grip loosened. As I began to stand, the first man struck me across the face with something hard and I fell to the ground, coughing and gasping.
Dazed, I began to stand and a younger man, holding a hand to his eye, placed his boot on my chest. He pinned me. The older man bent over and I watched his lips form a few parting words beneath his walrus mustache. “Don’t forget why you’re there. Full moon’s comin’ fast.”
As I struggled to my feet, I was surprised to glimpse an AWE officer standing by the nearest exit to the street below. She stood frozen as my attackers ran past her. She stared at me for a moment before turning to leave in the same direction as the two men. Then she locked the exit door behind her so I would have no hope of following any of them.
Angry and confused, I wandered back to the narrow house, holding my left cheek the whole way. It felt like half my face was about to fall off. The Rossis’ house would never feel like a home to me but I was glad to retreat there.
Kirk was on his way out when he met me at the front door. As soon as he saw me, his face fell. “What happened?”
There was no point lying. “I was attacked.”
“Come into the office and sit down. I’ll get you a towel and some ice.”
The skin was not broken, just a bruise along the cheekbone and some swelling. Kirk was surprisingly tender as he applied a cold facecloth to my wound. I ran my tongue over my teeth. None felt loose.
“Shall I call the doctor?”
I declined his offer. “Thanks, but it’s more hurt pride than pain.”
“Did they … take anything? Touch you?”
“No, nothing like that. Just bullies is all.”
“As soon as Mrs. Rossi gets back from church, I’ll get her to pull the surveillance recordings. We’ll find whoever did this.”
“I have a strong feeling that any cams in the area were disabled.”
“How could that be?”
Once again, I’d said too much to
bother lying to him. “An AWE officer saw the whole thing. She didn’t move a muscle to help and she locked an exit door behind the guys who did this.”
“How could this happen inside the Circle? And why?”
I just shrugged.
Kirk steadied himself as he walked behind his desk and it struck me again how frail he was. He plopped down in his plush leather chair heavily and stared at me with a look I could not decipher.
“I should go,” I said.
“No, stay a few minutes and keep the cold on your cheek. I am genuinely worried about our security if this can happen here. I’d expect that outside the wall but here …” He trailed off for a moment into deep thought.
“They were dressed as workmen. Maybe they weren’t even that. Just snuck in a gate.”
“Or maybe they are still within our community,” Kirk said. “People would be surprised how many commoners and climbers we already have within the Circle. And now traitors, it seems.”
“How can that be?”
“I have to have people to run things. Originally, there were only 40 families who truly met our standards. We built hastily but with an eye to expansion of our number. After the Lyre sank, we accepted more high-end millionaires to invest — ”
“Really, only 40? But New Atlanta is so big!”
“We had to accommodate the AWE garrison and the officers’ families. To make the project attractive, our retreat had to be more than a doomsday bunker. To create New Atlanta, we had to put the wall around part of Old Atlanta. For the shops, the greenhouses, the engineers, the warehouses …everyone who works here, we had to make concessions. Contractors and their families had to be brought inside. Everyone wanted to save a grandmother.”
“How did you choose Atlanta in the first place?”
“Originally, the plan was to build a remote community from scratch in South Dakota. Atlanta had the infrastructure we could use: the sewers, the rail hub and the water purification plant. So we built our walled retreat here.
“Since then, I’ve had people sit in that same chair try to convince me every one of their cousins would be useful to me. I have a pilot for my helicopter and a pilot for my jet and I had to allow both their families inside to secure their loyalty. To accommodate future expansion, there are many buildings within the Circle that stand empty.”
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