He took a seat on Dex’s bottom bunk the next time they were both awake. “I’m not in here for anything. I might have heard a few things here and there, but they took me without any kind of due cause. I was studying genetics at the university, and they arrested me right out of the lab one night.”
What was this, an attempt at trust? A gesture of friendship?
“They don’t need a reason anymore,” Dex whispered back. “My guess is they’re just prepping to make it easier to ship us all off to those new camps.”
Exander shook his head. “It isn’t camps, man. I heard they’re dumping the failsafes somewhere else. A huge pit, down in Tennessee. Five hundred feet deep. The NRO is planning a staged attack that will look like God’s Army all over again, then martial law. Then they’ll send us down to the pit on trains.”
Neither Sheila Willy nor Blitz the bouncer had mentioned such a rumor. “I heard the same thing about martial law,” Dex said. “But where did you hear about the dumping pit?”
“One of the guards,” Exander replied. “A few of them took me to the interrogation room . . . to do their thing . . . but there were a few others in the hallway when I passed by. They were talking about how funny it was that the failsafes thought they were going to survive Mandate 43. That it was all a joke to begin with. One of them mentioned the trains, and the other mentioned the pit.”
Dex grimaced. “I had a chance to escape and join the Opposition. But I didn’t.”
At this, Exander shook his head. “Dude, don’t buy it. Don’t buy any of it.”
“Buy what?”
“The Opposition, man! It’s a farce! It’s all a farce!” The volume of Exander’s voice was rising. Dex shot him a warning glance, gesturing with his eyes to the ceiling’s intercom. The man continued shaking his head, but his whispers returned to normal. “No, man. Don’t join up with that. I bet you a million bucks it’s all part of the NRO’s plan.”
“Trust me on this, man,” Dex said under his breath. “It’s real, and it’s big.”
“What do you actually know?”
Dex examined the white wall on the other side of the cell to search for blemishes on it, as had become his new hobby. It gave him time to think. Perhaps he had been too hasty in sharing information with Exander. They knew nothing about each other except for the bits and pieces already shared, and the intelligent choice would be to cease this conversation immediately. Still, would the Bio Police really go to such lengths to glean information from him? Throw one of their own into this atrocious white cell, make him shower naked under cold water with Dex, then wait for him to weasel out a scrap of trust? Dex no longer trusted his intelligence, just his gut. His gut told him Exander was a good man. Yet he had to think about Grace and his child. If they had escaped, their survival could now depend on whether the Opposition continued to thrive. If Exander was a plant from the Bio Police, he would already know the Opposition was real.
“I don’t know you or trust you,” Dex said. “Until we’re on those trains, riding to our deaths, I’m not going to give you any details.”
“Fair enough,” Exander replied. “I was thinking the same thing about you, when they first threw you in. It would be easy enough for you to fake getting gang banged if you were one of them, you know? I mean, you’d have done it before. But then I realized I had no information they wanted, so they probably wouldn’t have planted you here to spy on me. So, I’ll trust you, and you can decide how trustworthy I am whenever you want.”
So, Dex learned about Exander. A student of genetics at the University of Minnesota, he was an academic at heart, working toward his fourth degree with loaned funds from Prism Bank, which catered to heterosterile and failsafe students whose education by law could no longer be funded by the government. His interest in genetics was a smokescreen of sorts, and he had only just started a new round of schooling in September as a way to defer his loan payback for the first three degrees. He had been in the university system with ambiguous aspirations to “become somebody” for so long that reality had actually hidden itself in his mind: he was a failsafe, and not a well-connected one. Finding a job that would remunerate enough for him to repay the hundred and twenty thousand dollars he owed Prism Bank would be next to impossible. Just one big break was what he wanted. One degree that could open the door to a more fruitful existence. He knew deep down it was wishful thinking, he told Dex, but what did it matter? When rumors had surfaced that failsafes were on their way out of society in some way or another, he had waited for the bank to catch up and force him to pay for his previous schooling. Up until four weeks ago, it still had not happened.
“So, now I’m in jail,” he said. “Probably on my way to that dumping pit, and I don’t have to care anymore.”
And there had been a woman in his life. Nina, her name had been. She was a bombshell redhead with a big heart, perfect material for motherhood, if the world had been a different place. Exander and Nina had been living together in a small apartment on the university campus, in one of the old buildings built before the Bio Wars. They had been nearing their fourth anniversary when a head-on automobile collision on Washington Avenue took Nina’s life. The other driver had been high on hard methamphetamines, and the coincidence of it was that he had been one of Exander’s professors, off for the weekend and taking a break from grading assignments.
“Professor Rudy Howard. Genetic Re-Engineering and Social Change 1. He actually was a pretty balanced teacher, for a fag. Objective, and all that.” Nina had now been dead for eight months, and there was an emptiness in Exander’s expression that made it clear he was still broken over it. When he continued, tears filled his eyes. “And you want to hear the worst thing? My whole life was turned upside down when Nina died, and nobody really cared. There was nothing legal or familial about our relationship, you know? One of the guys in my class had a husband die around the same time, and people made him dinners every night for two weeks. To help him grieve, or whatever. I even made him a veggie lasagna. He was the only one who did that for me after Nina died, oddly enough. The rest of the people couldn’t really get themselves to care, because she was a woman. What we had wasn’t real to them. You know how it is.”
“I’m sorry,” Dex said, honestly feeling it. He had experienced similar reactions when Diana disappeared.
“How about you? Did you love the woman who was having your kid?”
Dex rested a hand on his knee and examined his skin. After a week of imprisonment and hunger, it looked sallow and loose. Old, even.
“I could have. I think. But it doesn’t matter anymore, unless I somehow get out of here.”
“I don’t know about you, but if I could get out, I’d light on out to the Unrecoverable Territories. Search for a place to live off the land. Mexico, maybe. Somewhere warm. Somewhere the obstructer bombs didn’t wipe out completely, where there’d be fresh soil to plant food and stuff. There’s so much empty space in the world now, just waiting to be repopulated, if they can ever clean up. Places like New York, though? I think a meteor would have to wipe us out to ever make a dent in those ruins.” Exander chuckled, then turned to Dex. “Where would you go?”
Dex thought back to Sheila Willy’s monologue during their venture underneath Sterile Me Susan’s, about the Cliff House owned by Frederik Carnevale. The nagging possibility that Exander was a plant by the Bio Police was dwindling in his mind, but even so, mentioning the Cliff House now could lead to its ruin, if it truly existed. If Grace had made it there, he did not want to risk it.
“I’d find her,” was all he could say.
“If she’s with the Opposition, I’d be worried, man. They’re sour. It’s a gut feeling, and I’ve never had a gut feeling that was wrong. I just don’t think they could keep under the radar if they weren’t somehow part of the NRO’s plan. It’d be the perfect ruse. Like a funnel to weed out all the serious dissenters.”
Against Dex’s will, Exander’s logic crawled under his skin. He looked back to the white wall and sear
ched for imperfections, hoping his cellmate’s paranoia was a mere symptom of anger, grief, or madness.
CHAPTER 29 (HER)
NONE OF THE WOMEN at the Cliff House were yet so pregnant that hiding it would be impossible during their trip to New Zealand. In the second week of January, they suffered the final step in preparation for the journey: new TruthChips in their wrists, which would provide and register the women and any accompanying failsafes with new homosexual identities in the TruthChip Corporation’s database. The company, operating under the New Rainbow Order’s Department of Identification, was responsible for the manufacturing and implementation of identification chips worldwide. Grace’s new name was to be Claire Elizabeth Austen. One of the nurses explained to her that TruthChip provided empty chips in bulk to every engineering facility on the planet, and each came with an activation code to create a new record in the automated database.
“It won’t be foolproof, in the off chance their digital trackers pick up on odd registration patterns of new individuals,” the nurse told Grace. “That said, we haven’t had a problem with chip replacement yet. It’s a big database, something the NRO takes for granted. They’re still too busy recovering from the Bio Wars and planning for the future to monitor vestigial technology like TruthChips.”
It was a minor surgery that would require not just removal of the old chip and placement of the new one but also expedited flesh rejuvenation. The latter was an hour-long process involving micro-electroshock therapy in the skin cells surrounding the slit at the new chip’s insertion point. This would ignite accelerated cell renewal and healing, but the therapy had to be precise, which required near-artistic skill on the part of the operator so the wound would not over-heal with obvious scarring. Any sign of unnatural dermal growth around the chip site would be an immediate signal that a person’s TruthChip had been replaced—a key characteristic of anybody who did not want to be found and a red flag for the police. Passing as regular homosexuals would, at the very least, allow them to travel, unless for some reason the government’s staged attack happened sooner than Albert Redmond was expecting.
“I HAVE IT ON GOOD AUTHORITY that Operation 69 is still on schedule,” Redmond told the Cliff House populous during a meeting in the cafeteria on the thirteenth of January. “It will take place on February fourth in multiple locations: Chicago, Sydney, Salzburg, Minneapolis, and possibly more. We have precious little time. Now, part of the NRO’s plan is to empty all the jails just prior to or during the attack, so that it goes completely unnoticed by the panicked citizens. They have built a brand-new infrastructure of magnetic levitation trains beneath all major North American cities, which are connected to the cities’ respective Bio Police detention centers far underground. The trains run east, into the Unrecoverable Territories, to locations already constructed by the NRO. During the attack, they’ll usher out all the current prisoners to make room for later, when they’ll call all heterosteriles, failsafes, and carriers in for the social assessments. The social assessments will lead to detainment, then removal. It will happen similarly on all populated continents.”
Whispers fluttered throughout the cafeteria.
“Now quiet, people, quiet,” Redmond continued. “I don’t have a lot of time here tonight, so let me finish quickly: I think we’ve gathered all the Bozarth specimens we can. Thus far, of the eight thousand women Bozarth engineered to be fertile, 7,647 are still alive. Of those, 2,803 of them have achieved pregnancy, and 2,156 of them have been identified and recruited to New Zealand, some of them with their male companions. The Opposition has also been fortunate enough to recruit a number of other fertile couples from territories around the globe. We have enough heterosexual women and men to rebuild the world. On January twenty-ninth, you forty-three individuals will be the last to join them.”
The thought tingled on the back of Grace’s neck. She glanced around to look for Sheila, who seemed to have skipped the meeting. Indeed, the woman was nowhere to be seen.
In the two and a half weeks they had been at the Cliff House, thirteen more pregnant women and four accompanying failsafes had arrived for relocation to New Zealand. As Marvel put it during dinner following Redmond’s speech, “There are enough people here for us to say ‘fuck the Opposition’ and do it ourselves!”
Except Marvel’s free-spirited nature led to a problem, which Grace heard about two days later. While sneaking around and exploring during a bout of sleeplessness the night after the meeting, the girl had witnessed something alarming: Sheila Willy, in the communications room, discussing the Opposition’s counterstrike with a mohawked man on one of the desk coms. They had been using blatant phrases like “nuclear,” “wipe out society,” and “reclaiming the fucking planet,” and from what Marvel gathered, the man had been speaking from the Mount Tasman facility in New Zealand. Sheila had not seen her, but the man on the com had, through the camera. “Someone’s behind you,” he said, causing Marvel to spin around and run to the stairs, back toward the bedrooms.
Shaking, she relayed the story to Grace during breakfast. Grace tried to remain calm, but the thought of such a widespread attack left her feeling numb.
She spent the next two days brooding. If the counterstrike Dr. Kovak had mentioned was to be nuclear, on a grand scale, everyone she knew would die. People she loved, regardless of their sexual orientation. Even the fringe acquaintances who had colored the tapestry of Grace’s life, like Mr. Dietrich at his grocery store sample station, screamed in her imagination, all dying in an unfathomable inferno. If Grace was to be part of this Opposition, if she chose to save both her life and the life of her child, their blood would be on her hands forever—if not directly, then by association and a blind eye. What was the moral slant then, really? Who better to save, herself and her unborn child, or the rest of her family? Would she even have a chance to save anyone?
Everyone but Dad, Linda, and the heteros would have turned me in to the NRO, eventually, she thought.
But the innocents? It was not in Grace’s nature to become complacent with a situation and absolve herself from doing everything possible to ensure justice. Yet society had tipped the scales too far to regain its ethics without drastic intervention. The bigger picture had now rendered true justice ambiguous. She could try warning her dad and Linda, but they might then try to save their own loved ones, potentially exposing the Opposition and overturning its attempt to save humanity. Then, everyone would lose.
ON THE SEVENTEENTH OF JANUARY, eighteen days before the government’s supposed staged attack was set to occur, Sheila Willy left the Cliff House to return the rental car to Stuart. It was a meeting she had arranged without telling Grace. Sheila had become far more reclusive as the days passed, and Grace was surprised when the woman sought her out to say goodbye. She was leaving to meet Stuart in Duluth, she said. There, he would exchange the rental car with his own, so Sheila could return to the Cliff House. When Grace asked her about the counterstrike, the woman simply wrapped her in a hug. “I don’t know, honey. I just don’t know. And I also don’t know why you of all people have my heart tied up in a knot, but you do. Maybe because you’re so goddamned innocent. But we’ll talk about it all later. When I get back.”
At this, Sheila sniffed, and Grace realized she was crying. She broke the hug. “You have my dad’s com number, right?”
“Yep, I got it. I’ll let him know you’re safe. Tootles, girl.” The lightheartedness in Sheila’s tone did not match her teary eyes.
After she left for Duluth, she did not return.
Grace crossed paths with Dr. Kovak the next morning and asked if he knew where Sheila was. He replied with a shrug, saying he had not seen her. Panic began to squirm in Grace’s chest. Something was wrong.
When Sheila failed to return that afternoon, Grace decided it was time to make a trip to the communications room and try contacting her dad. So be it if he learned secrets of the Opposition. If he had met with Sheila, he might know where she was. If he had not, it would mean Grace had befriend
ed Sheila under false pretext. She could not shrug off the feeling that it had all been a trap, and she had been stupid enough to take the bait.
During dinner, Marvel informed Grace that the doors between floors inside the cliff remained unlocked. “It’s not like this place is a prison,” she said. Even so, the girl did not know how strictly the coms were monitored, and she urged Grace to make any possible calls on voice mode to avoid showing anybody where she was. It was worth a try, so Grace went upstairs at 1:00 a.m. If she knew her dad, he would be sleeping next to his com, waiting in agony for a call.
The communications room was empty, but as she had feared, access to the message coms was password protected.
But luck intervened.
Just as she was about to give up guessing possible eight-digit key codes, somebody knocked on the glass from outside. Almost falling out of her seat in shock, Grace turned around, sure her face was flaming with guilt.
Standing in the hallway was the flighty Dr. Kovak. He sauntered into the communications room with an intoxicated wobble, accompanied by the smell of rum. Grace supposed even Opposition doctors needed to kick back and relax once in a while.
“Ms. Jarvis, isn’t it?” he slurred. “What are you doing up here?”
“Just trying to call my dad on a scrambled address,” she replied. Then, in an attempt to mislead him without lying outright, she said, “Mr. Redmond didn’t tell me you had to have a key code.”
Dr. Kovak frowned for a moment, looking confused, then shrugged. “It’s a precaution, but if Al said you could do it, here you go.” The man leaned over and punched in a code. Grace tried to memorize it, but his fingers moved in a blur. “Just be careful what you say,” he said with a cough, which finished with half a burp. “I’ve got to go to bed.”
He toddled out of the room.
She wasted no time, and her dad picked up on the second ring.
“This is Stuart.”
Hearing his voice was like sun hitting a shadow. He sounded alert but unrested, as if he had indeed been waiting up with hopes for a call. It was a shame Grace had so little time. “Dad, it’s me,” she started, trying to fend off tears. “I don’t think I’m supposed to be calling you.”
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