by Kyle Andrews
“If you want to come.”
Rose stopped walking and said, “I am nobody's sidekick. I was talking about your dog.”
“Ammo?” Justin looked around the area for the dog, but he was nowhere to be found. It wasn't uncommon for some of the kids to take Ammo to play for the afternoon, if their parents wouldn't allow them to have dogs of their own. More people probably knew Ammo by name than they did Justin.
Turning back to Rose, he said, “I'll go without him. But if you happen to see him around, could you drop him off with Libby?”
“Joint custody?” Rose joked.
Justin shook his head and walked off, this time leaving Rose behind.
4
Justin was running as fast as he could by the time he reached the factory where Amanda worked. Business hours had already ended and workers were pouring out of the building, heading off in every direction and blending into a crowd of other workers from other buildings.
If Amanda had been there, he could have already missed her. But the odds of her being there were slim. He had tried looking for her in the past and as far as he could tell, she wasn't working there anymore.
He pushed his way through the sea of sweaty, dirty, tired and angry employees, breathing through his mouth to avoid the smell.
The building was outdated, with some of the windows boarded over when broken glass couldn't be replaced. It looked abandoned—and probably should have been—but those who worked there weren't so lucky.
Most of the automated systems in the factory had broken down years earlier. Some had been replaced by human workers, while others had been poorly repaired. Working beside them could be dangerous.
Fighting his way against the current, Justin entered the building and looked around for a desk or counter where a supervisor would be stationed. He saw a desk, but no supervisor. Employees were filing out of the building, stamping time cards as they went and placing their cards into slots along the wall, organized alphabetically according to last name.
He wanted to walk right over to the slots and look for Amanda's name. If her card was in there, it might have her contact information. Phone number. Address. At the very least, it would tell him if she was still working at the factory. But there was no way for him to get to the slots right away. Too many employees were desperate to go home, and none of them would think twice about yelling at the kid who didn't belong there. Any attention drawn to him would be bad. As far as he knew, nobody at HAND knew who he was when he helped Libby run, and there hadn't been any indication that they were looking for him. That could easily change if he started poking his nose where it didn't belong.
While he waited, Justin scanned the slots from a distance and found the 'W' section. Since Amanda didn't have the same last name as her daughter, this was where he would find her card.
He knew where he was going. When the time came, he could get to that slot and look through it in a matter of seconds. All he needed now was an opportunity.
He looked at the faces of the people who were passing by him. Most of them didn't care who he was or why he was there. One or two looked at him as though they wanted to beat him to a pulp. He wasn't sure why, except that they knew he didn't belong.
A lot of the people were holding their hands, massaging them or wrapping them with dirty towels. He could see blood soaking through a couple of those towels. The employees were forced to work without gloves, apparently. He didn't envy them. Then again, there weren't many people who could be envied in his world. Everyone was assigned against their will. Everyone was a slave to the system. If they refused to comply, they were denied food and shelter. Refuse a little bit longer, and they were shipped off to be reprogrammed.
Hanging on the wall, there was an old poster from the Workforce Department. It showed a happy citizen, doing his part for society as the sun shined behind him. It was a bright and hopeful picture, hung in a dreary, oppressive building.
A man walked out of a back room and sat down at the desk. He was a thin, sickly looking man who was missing three fingers on his left hand. He didn't look any happier to be there than the other employees as he started shuffling through files on his desk.
Justin walked to the man and stood, waiting for the man to look up before he started to speak. To do otherwise would be rude. But the man didn't look up. He didn't care who Justin was or why he was there.
Realizing that there would be no right time to speak, Justin said, “Excuse me, sir.”
The man didn't look up. He just continued going about his business.
“I'm looking for Amanda Welles. She works here... Or, she did work here. I'm not sure if she still does,” Justin told the man, hoping for more of a response, but not getting it.
His instinct was to just walk away, but he fought the urge and leaned on the desk, putting his hands over two of the folders that the man was working with. It was a bit more forceful than he normally preferred to be, but Rose was right. He needed to assert himself more often.
“Sir, I know you're busy and you want to go home. I'm sorry for bothering you, but it's extremely important that I speak with her,” he said to the man.
Finally, the man looked up at Justin. His eyes were gray and somehow empty, as though the soul behind them was slowly withering. When he spoke, his voice was gravelly and he had a thick northeastern accent. He said, “I don't know who you're talking about.”
“Amanda Welles. She's worked here for years,” Justin explained.
The man at the desk looked past Justin, to the line of workers who were making their way out the door. He said, “Their cards know their names. I just know their numbers. Everyone's a number. 5518. 5272. 5541. Now if you know her number, I might be able to help you. If not, I have work to do.”
Finding the conversation pointless, Justin turned back to the slots and waited for the moment when he could slip through the line and and grab the stack of 'W' cards.
He waited a few moments before an older woman attempted to stamp her card and couldn't quite see the proper way to slide it into the machine. It was a brief delay, but it gave Justin enough time to slip in and slip out without holding anyone up.
As he grabbed the cards and stepped back to flip through them, a man in line yelled “Hey! What do you think you're doing?”
Justin didn't look up from the cards as he replied, “Quality control check. Keep on moving, sir.”
“You don't work here,” the man replied. “If someone misses their credits because of you...”
“They won't sir. I promise,” Justin said, looking up to smile politely at the man.
The man who was yelling at him sounded much more intimidating than he was. He sounded gruff and strong, but he was actually a tall, thin man who looked as though he could use a sandwich. In fact, looking around the place, Justin noticed that most of the people there were thinner than they should have been. They were worn and tired.
He lived a more privileged life than a lot of people in the city. Because he was being groomed for work in HAND, or with the police, Justin was allowed to have more food, and food of better quality. That was even before any Freedom food was factored in. Justin could go to sleep at night without hunger pains in his stomach, and he never forgot that blessing.
Walking the streets always reminded him of what he had and others didn't. He still had long days at school, but he was afforded free time to do other things. Once adults were assigned and sent off to live their lives, their free time quickly faded. They were worked to exhaustion and denied proper nutrition.
He turned his eyes back to the cards. As he finished flipping through them, he heard a woman whispering to a coworker, saying, “I know someone who lived down there. They saw it right in front of their own building, with their own eyes. The Powers kid was saying that they never wanted to hurt anyone. He said that they weren't Hate. He called them 'Freedom'.”
Justin's breath caught in his chest as soon as he heard the name of his own movement. To hear it spoken of so openly never happened, an
d to experience it now made him feel exposed. Every person there was suddenly aware of Freedom. What did that mean?
“Freedom?” the woman's friend whispered back. “If they're so nice, why did they go around bombing half the city that day? Why kill six people?”
Smoke bombs. Meant to get him and Libby out of Marti's building. The news played it up as a terrorist attack, complete with manufactured casualties.
“All I know is, the person I know said that what they said on the news wasn't what he saw happen in person. I don't know anything else.”
“Do you believe that story?”
“I...” the woman started to answer before a moment of hesitation. Justin could feel her looking around the place without ever looking up to confirm that she was doing it. “No. Of course I don't. I'm just saying what I heard from my friend.”
“What's your friend's name?”
Another moment of silence, during which Justin's stomach turned. He took a deep breath, wishing that the conversation would end there.
“Burt. Burt Lansing.”
“You should call it in.”
“I...”
“You wouldn't want someone else to call it in instead, would you?”
The women moved through the line and out the door. Justin couldn't hear what was said next, but he imagined that the woman's friend would soon be visited by HAND officers, wanting to know why he was spreading such stories around town. He was disgusted, and yet there was a spark of something else buried beneath that disgust. He couldn't quite put his finger on what that other feeling was, but it seemed important.
He never came across Amanda's name in the stack of cards. Either she wasn't out of the building yet, or she no longer worked there. If he spent much more time looking around that place, he might draw even more unwanted attention to himself. The best course of action was to observe the door from someplace else.
Justin walked outside and crossed the street with a group of employees that had just gotten off of work. They were silent as they walked, but he could feel the tension surrounding them. Everyone in the city was ready to snap by the time work let out. If they were lucky, they would get a little bit of rest before another day started and a new pile of stress was dumped on their shoulders.
Once he reached the other side of the street, Justin sat down on the steps of an empty building where he could keep an eye on the factory and look for Amanda. It was nearly dark. Buses passed him by, carrying those people who were willing to spend their credits on such things. Mostly old people who couldn't walk long distances, even if they wanted to. They would be forced to give up what little they had, just to keep their place in the system.
As he watched all those people, Justin tried to picture a better world. He tried to imagine what those worn down faces in front of him would look like if they'd ever been allowed to hope for a brighter future. Hope went a long way. Just the idea that someday, somehow, your entire life could change for the better made it that much easier to get up in the morning. To be denied that hope and to live each day knowing that this was as good as it would ever get was like a slow and torturous death.
Somewhere in the crowd, a woman laughed. Justin looked from face to face, trying to find that person, but he never saw who it was. Maybe there was hope somewhere out there after all.
“See, now I know why I'm here. The question is, why are you?”
The voice was barely familiar to Justin. It was only when he looked up and saw the dark haired teenager in front of him that Justin recognized Libby's boyfriend, Sim. He was staring at Justin, waiting for an answer.
5
She still wasn't sure what to think. When she was first brought into the Garden, Libby thought that she was on the path to understanding something new about the world. She thought that she was coming someplace safer. She thought that she would find people that she could trust and she would be able to let her guard down. That didn't happen.
Her door wasn't locked, but she felt like a prisoner. When she walked through the Garden, she could feel eyes on her. Half of the people there blamed her for Collin Powers being captured. The other half were clinging to the hope that Uly's death meant something and that she was important to the understanding of his death. When she didn't have anything to offer them, aside from the shocking revelation that he was having a test performed at the hospital, they didn't know what to make of her.
Could she blame them for feeling let down or betrayed? Not really, since she was right there with them. That first day, she truly thought that Uly was speaking directly to her when he said, 'It's in our blood.' She thought that maybe she was special and that the cure for the illness that had plagued humanity for over six decades could be found in her blood.
But apparently there was no illness. Apparently, the outbreaks that were reported on the news, the images of the dead that she had seen in her history lessons, and the lifetime of government-provided supplements to stave off the disease were nothing more than fabrications. The cure for that disease was simply the realization that she had been lied to every day since conception.
She wouldn't have believed it quite so readily if she hadn't felt the effects of going off of her supplements. Instead of illness and death, she felt as though a fog had been lifted in her head. She could suddenly see the entire world, when she'd barely been able to see her hand in front of her before. Metaphorically speaking, of course.
Where she stood now was someplace between the life she had, and the beliefs of the movement that she'd been living with for the past month. She didn't know how to trust them. She didn't share every one of their beliefs, so did that mean that she wasn't on their side? Did that mean that she supported the authorities and the current system? No. She couldn't go back to the way things were, but she wasn't sure where her new life would settle either, and she was scared to find out. What if it meant nothing? What if Uly's death was pointless? What if she was nothing important? What if those people were right to believe that they should have saved Collin Powers instead of her?
Her mind went around in circles for hours each day, always wondering and fearing, and none of it ever went anywhere. She was still in that room, lying on that bed, staring at the ceiling and driving herself crazy.
The door opened. For a second or two, Libby watched and waited to see who would come into her room and whether they would bring any news with them, but what she got was somehow more of a relief than that. Ammo walked through the door, panting heavily and wagging his tail so hard that he knocked a clock off of her nightstand as he made his way over to her.
Libby sat up and couldn't help but smile as Ammo put his head in her lap and demanded to be petted. She hadn't seen him in nearly two weeks, but Ammo was the one living being in the Garden that Libby never had any doubts about. He was exactly what he appeared to be: a big, goofy black lab.
He sat on the floor beside her bed, breathing his hot breath in her face, and Libby suddenly forgot that her world was a mess.
After a few moments, Rose walked into the room and closed the door behind her. She said, “I figured I'd let the dog warm up the audience before I came in.”
Rose was the woman who saved Libby's life. She defied orders and stole a HAND vehicle so that she could get Libby, Justin and Ammo out of Marti's apartment building. She was a very energetic woman, and Libby couldn't keep up with what she was saying half the time, but Rose appeared to be an ally. Maybe a friend, if such things still existed.
“Warm up the audience?”
“It's what they do for talk shows. Y'know, the ones where the audience isn't being held at gunpoint and forced to laugh on demand. They have someone come out and make jokes or whatever, to get the audience in the mood for laughs.”
“Do you plan on making me laugh?”
“Stranger things have happened.”
Rose looked around Libby's room, mostly at the knickknacks that Libby's roommates had sitting on shelves. Libby's area was empty, aside from the clock which was very possibly broken now.
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br /> As she looked, Rose brushed her hair behind her ear, revealing what appeared to be a diamond stud. Libby had first noticed it during their escape from HAND. Rose only had one, in her right ear. The other ear had no earring at all.
“I don't see many diamonds,” Libby told her, turning her attention back to Ammo.
“You've seen one before?”
“Not in person. Is it real?”
Rose shook her head and said, “It was a cheap imitation back in the day. Now it's a treasure, all on its own.”
“You only have one?”
“I have both,” Rose smiled. “I keep the other one locked up and tell myself that it's for my sister. They were our great-grandmother's. My grandmother had them stashed in an old trunk with a bunch of junk. I found them when she died.”
“Why not give it to your sister?”
“She's not a member of Freedom.”
“It's not illegal to own earrings.”
“Doesn't stop people from asking where you got them. That means drawing attention. Bad idea for someone in my line of work.”
“What is your line of work? Officially, I mean.”
“The government has taken it upon themselves to bestow upon me the ever-so-important duty of serving in section three.”
“Section three? Is that some sort of secret intelligence agency?”
“It's the three tables that I serve, in Julia's Restaurant.”
“I've passed by there.”
Smiling even wider, Rose said, “You should come in and try our fish platter. It'll only cost you three months worth of credits and your soul if you still have it.”
“I think I sold that one for a toothbrush when I was six.”
“How are you holding up?”
“Going on a month without anyone trying to kill me, so I guess it could be worse.”
“But it's not great.”
Ammo slowly climbed up onto the bed and plopped himself down, using Libby's pillow as his own. Libby rubbed his belly as she tried to think of a way to communicate what she wanted to say to Rose. Finally, she said, “I haven't really had much to do. Can't go anywhere. Can't talk to anyone. I mean, I know that I'm not locked up in this room, but I can't leave. Justin keeps telling me to just do it, but I can't. I don't know why.”