First Girl

by Julie Aitcheson

  “You have something there,” Gabi said instead, pointing at the spot on her forehead.

  “Oh. Thanks.” Nurse Mehta licked the tip of her finger and rubbed at the red patch. “I was running a little late. Not used to working the night shift yet.”

  “What is it from?”

  “Kumkum. It’s an old Hindu tradition—a mark you make after doing a prayer ritual called a puja.”

  “Hindu?”

  “My grandparents used to be Hindu, before they converted during the early days of the Gathering In. We used to do puja as a family back when it was still “don’t ask, don’t tell” about practicing at home. Now it’s just me.” Nurse Mehta frowned at the red stain on her finger. “I guess I shouldn’t have told you that, should I?”

  Gabi didn’t know much about the old religions, just the basics taught in school so that everyone understood what an all-embracing melting pot the Unitas Fellowship was.

  “Is that the one where you worship elephants and snakes?” Gabi asked, trying to remember the specifics from her corrected textbook. There was a silence, during which Gabi was sure she had said something very wrong.

  “Elephants and snakes?” Nurse Mehta echoed. “Not exactly. Hindus believe that all things are aspects of God, that the world is this huge net woven through with gems, and every gem in it, including elephants and snakes, are part of God. It’s all God. Does that make sense?”

  “Sure,” Gabi said, though she was pretty sure no one in the fellowship would agree that the Tribes were God.

  “Maybe better not to repeat any of that,” Nurse Mehta added, her flippant tone sounding forced. “It’s ancient history, right? Not worth mentioning. We’re all fellows now.” Gabi nodded. She knew all about keeping secrets. Nurse Mehta frowned at the rows of floor numbers in front of her. “So here’s the thing. I’m not sure I can actually take you to see your dad.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, I don’t know what floor he’s on for one thing. He usually ends his rounds on the Returned wards, checking in with their progress and praying with them after he talks to the docs, but I don’t know if he would be there yet.”

  Gabi scrambled for a response. She hadn’t devised a plan beyond step one: find her father, and step two: confront him with Noel’s story. Nurse Mehta punched a button for the twelfth floor, and they started to rise. “I’ve got to clock in, so you can come with me, and we’ll page him from there. He doesn’t usually come to Twelfth on his Monday visits, but I’m sure he wouldn’t mind the detour. How does that sound?”

  Gabi knew that once they got off the elevator, there was an extremely good chance Officer Katz would be lying in wait to corral her back to the lobby. She jabbed the button for the ninth floor. “Can we make a stop first? Aren’t there Returned on Ninth? Maybe he’s there.”

  “Um, new patients, yeah,” Nurse Mehta said with a furrowed brow. “But he wouldn’t go there. They’re too out of it to be very interactive.” The doors rolled open onto the somnolent atmosphere of Ninth. “I really don’t think—”

  But Gabi was already out in the hallway, peering around the corner toward the nurses’ station. In another instant, she was back inside, jamming the Door Close button. From her vantage point she’d had a clear view to the doors of D Wing, just as they’d slid shut behind the backs of her father and Messenger Nystrom. Gabi was sobbing by the time the elevator doors closed.

  “What is it?” Nurse Mehta asked. Gabi had no words. The doors slid open on Twelfth, and Nurse Mehta put an arm around Gabi’s shoulders, urging her into the hall. “Come on. Let’s get you to the nurses’ lounge. We have way better snack rations than the waiting room, and we can chat while I get changed, okay?” Nurse Mehta diverted the concerned looks of the departing day-shift nurses with a shake of her head as she herded Gabi to the lounge and gave her a glass of water from the filter.

  “Now,” she said as she shoved her coat inside her locker. “Why don’t you tell me what that was all about?”

  The words raged behind Gabi’s lips, but she knew that now more than ever, the truth was hers to bear.

  “I saw my father.”

  “On Ninth? Are you sure? That’s odd. I guess they still need the Word like everybody else, even when they’re off in dreamland. Why didn’t you go talk to him?” Nurse Mehta shimmied out of her bulky sweater and leggings, her nurse’s uniform slung over the open door of her locker. Gabi had never seen a live, nearly nude adult female before. Nurse Mehta was a honey-tinged brown and lean, but nothing sharp poked out like it did on Gabi. There was a plush curve to the woman’s belly, and the fullness of her breasts was still evident beneath her utilitarian sports bra. Nurse Mehta looked like ripened fruit, and Gabi averted her eyes, flushed with confusing warmth despite her upset.

  “He didn’t see me,” Gabi mumbled. “He was going into D Wing.”

  “Oh, that was probably just an orderly getting supplies. They’re going to renovate it to expand Pediatrics now that the Witnesses are bringing back more orphans, but they haven’t started tithing for that project yet. We’ve still got to upgrade the plumbing in the whole building first.”

  “It was my dad,” Gabi said. “I’m sure of it. Him and Messenger Nystrom.” How badly she wanted Nurse Mehta to catch on to the urgent plea in her voice—that something very wrong was happening here. Something that needed to be stopped.

  “Well, that’s exciting,” the nurse murmured distractedly as she adjusted the nametag on her uniform so the pin wouldn’t poke her when she pulled it on. “They’re probably making plans for the renovation. Goodness knows we need the space.” These last words were muffled as she pulled the tunic over her head, then tugged it down over her shoulders and hips. “Do you want to wait for him here? I can call down and let him know.”

  There was no point in staying. Her father was on D Wing, and there could only be one reason. He knew about the gruesome operations, and he wasn’t stopping them. Gabi considered telling Nurse Mehta for a split second but discarded the idea when she recalled the fear that had flashed across the young woman’s face when she admitted to private worship. If Gabi’s father and Messenger Nystrom knew what Yancy and Gearhart were up to, then the horrors of D Wing were authorized at the highest level. Anyone who attempted to interfere with the council could be excommunicated. In the old days before the Gathering In, excommunication would have meant exile from spiritual community—a hardship, to be sure, but nothing like the death sentence it was now. Even if Gabi could find someone who was willing to risk excommunication to help her, she could never live with the guilt of knowing that by doing so she had condemned them to death.

  “I’ll just go home,” Gabi said, though home and the last bit of comfort she’d associated with it had evaporated when she saw Sam disappear into D Wing. There was no longer any need to confront him about whether or not she was adopted. The moment she realized Sam knew about the doctors’ experiments, she had become an orphan just the same.

  THE PITIFUL carrots were still on the cutting board, looking even more like wrinkled fingers. The remnants of Mathew’s dinner—crumbs of bread, a smear of margarine, and the yellowed ruffles of withered parsley that had been his weak attempt at a serving of vegetables, sat in the sink. The note Gabi had left her brother explaining that she’d gone to see their father and asking him to finish making the soup was transparent where he’d picked it up with greasy fingers. Christian rock music vibrated the closed door of Mathew’s room, though no one was in the house to challenge his privacy. When he answered her knock, Mathew was panting and sweaty.

  “What are you doing?” she demanded. He’d withdrawn from her the moment Messenger Nystrom showed up at their door with the news of Gram’s death, and still hadn’t come back. He hadn’t even finished making the soup. Didn’t he know how much she needed him?

  “What are you doing?” he shot back, taking in her many layers. “Why did you go to see Dad?”

  “Can you turn that down?” Gabi shouted. As he moved to lower the volume
, she saw a towel spread on the floor with his free weights lined up beside it. “You’re working out after tutorial? Aren’t you exhausted?” She walked over to one of the weights and tried to lift it, but only managed to hoist one beveled end off the carpet before dropping it back onto the floor with a thunk.

  “Yeah, so? I’m testing for the Witness teams at the end of this semester, and I want to be ready. I’ve spent too much time slacking off as it is. Here, you’re doing it wrong.” Mathew picked the weight up off the rug, straightened, and braced his elbow against his body. “You’ve got to use your knees when you’re lifting something heavy from the ground, or you’ll hurt your back. Keep your elbow in tight and your wrist locked when you curl so you don’t strain it. Here, you try. Maybe use two hands.” Mathew never made fun of Gabi for being weak, even when they were kids. Instead he played up how perceptive she was and encouraged her to try new things. At least that much hadn’t changed.

  He placed the weight in Gabi’s hands. The load pulled her off center, and she had to lean back to keep from toppling over. “Pull your shoulders back, bend your knees, and tuck your butt under. Good. Elbows in. Right, now just lift. Don’t swing it, that’s cheating.”

  This is ridiculous, Gabi thought. Everything is falling apart, and I’m toning my biceps? But the moment of closeness with Mathew was too comforting to pass up. Maybe his blind devotion to Unitas meant he couldn’t help her figure out what to do. Maybe he wasn’t even her real brother. But her father’s betrayal meant Mathew was all she had left. Gabi gripped the weight, her wrists buckling as she tried to lift it.

  “Don’t use your wrists, Gab, use your arms.” She tucked her wrists and raised the weight toward her chin with a grunt. Her neck strained, and the iron clanked against her collarbone as she got to the top of the curl, but the burn in her arms felt good. There was a heady quality to it, a rush that lifted her mood. “You did it, Gabs! Nice.” Gabi grinned at Mathew and squatted to lower the weight to the floor.

  “Thanks. That was kind of fun.” He punched her lightly on the shoulder.

  “You’re about to be consecrated, you know. You could sign up for my team.” Mathew wasn’t teasing her in a mean way, but it was a joke. Witnesses didn’t sign up. They were recruited and became part of a team only after they had passed a rigorous exam designed to ensure they could handle the hardships of working on the coast. The reminder that Mathew would be gone for months and exposed to untold dangers sobered her. Without Mathew, she would be truly alone, powerless against Bradley Fiske, and without a distraction from everything that was so hopelessly broken. If Mathew hadn’t been acting so brainwashed since Gram died, if she could somehow save him from excommunication in the event that he believed her and chose to act, she’d tell him everything in a heartbeat.

  “It’ll be fine,” Mathew reassured her, mistaking the cause of her silence as he folded the towel on his floor. “I’ll be back before you know it. Hey, tell you what. Why don’t you work out with me sometimes?”

  Gabi wouldn’t have believed herself capable of laughter just a moment before, but now she nearly doubled over with it. Work out with Mathew? What was she going to do, bench press drinking straws? “I’m serious!” he said, scooping up his weights and lining them back up against the wall by his desk. “It’s something we could do together, and it might help you beef up a little bit. You really scared me this weekend, Gab. I haven’t seen you that bad in a while.” Gabi stopped laughing. She knew Mathew worried about her, but as he’d gotten older he’d become better at hiding it. “I know you get a hard time at school and stuff. Can we just try? If you’re not into it, we can stop.”

  The idea, absurd as it was, intrigued Gabi. Maybe it was possible for her to get stronger. Then, an insane idea hit her. What if she did become a Witness? What if she could get herself recruited for a team and use its protection to venture outside the fellowship? How better to find someone to help her challenge the council without putting them at risk for excommunication?

  There were people out there, former fellows who had been excommunicated already or chose to leave the flock and risk the perils of the coasts rather than live according to the doctrine. Those people were regarded as criminals, worse than the Tribes because they had achieved salvation, then cast it aside. They left because they were overcome by the temptations of sin, or that’s what the doctrine taught. Gabi had always believed it, but now she realized the fellowship might not be a shelter from chaos but the cause of it. Though she was horrified by the experiments on D Wing, she still believed in the fellowship’s founding principles of peace, unity, and protection. Their meaning had simply become distorted to serve the ends of a powerful few. It cut her to the bone to think that even for someone as essentially good as her father, a little power was still too much. At the very least, joining a Witness team would get her out of Alder and away from the constant reminders that her father—no, Sam, wasn’t who she thought he was.

  “Yes.”

  “What?” Mathew said, having abandoned his argument in favor of fiddling with the dials on his shortwave radio.

  “Yes, I will work out with you. It could be fun.”

  Gabi couldn’t tell Mathew that she wanted to train to be a Witness, of course. Sure, it had been his idea, but he wasn’t serious about her making a team. No one of consecration age was less likely to be recruited to test for a Witness team than Gabi. It was expected of most junior fellows that they would at least attempt to serve before coming back to the branches for career training and domestic life, but no one had ever expected it of her. For people like Noel’s father, who had been a high-ranking Apostle, Witness work was a divine calling. For Gabi, Apostles might as well inhabit the uppermost reaches of Mount Olympus. That didn’t matter, though. She didn’t need to become an Apostle to escape the fellowship. She just needed to improve enough to get noticed by the recruiters, and if she couldn’t make a Witness team on her own merit, she had a secret weapon. She only prayed she would never have to use it.

  Chapter EIGHT

  GABI WORRIED that Sam would be suspicious of her workouts with Mathew, but in the end they could have converted their entire house into a home gym and he wouldn’t have noticed. Sam spent long hours at work, often not coming home until Gabi and Mathew were in bed. Though she took care to make sure her light was out by nine in a nod to Gram’s old routine, Gabi always stayed awake until she heard Sam’s car pull in. He usually spent a few minutes picking over the plate kept warm for him in the oven, then peeked in on her and Mathew before retreating to his room. Sometimes he didn’t stop in the kitchen at all, and he was growing thin, his pants bagging at the seat the way Gabi’s did. At breakfast, Sam was quiet and preoccupied, but he still made an effort to ask Gabi how she was feeling and check in with Mathew about his progress in tutorials. His eyes, which once crinkled easily with good humor, were now flat and dull like two tarnished coins.

  It was easier not to see Sam much. Gabi still loved him, but the feeling hurt. She yearned to tug off his glasses and clean the smudges for him the way she used to do, but the sting of betrayal and whatever kept Sam so silent made him unreachable, even when he was perched on the kitchen stool beside her. At night he would approach her bed, his body blocking the light from the hallway while Gabi pretended to be asleep. When he bent over and kissed her forehead, she fought the urge to flail at him with her fists until all the lies came out.

  When was the last time she had slept without waking with a scream trying to force its way through her lips or a cold sweat soaking her sheets? Marcus and Nicolas revisited her every night, lying still on concrete slabs, speaking to each other in parched voices, or turning to stare at Gabi in accusation. Then there were the dreams where the doctors came, when it was Gabi on the slab, arms and legs immobilized. Dr. Yancy carved away at her with a scalpel while Dr. Gearhart smoothed Gabi’s hair from her forehead, crooning bits of doctrine in her ear. On such nights, Gabi would wake up sobbing into her pillow and tiptoe down the hall to Gram’s room, ju
st as her grandmother had left it but for the suitcase, which was now hidden in Gabi’s closet under a pile of dirty laundry. Curling up in Gram’s bed on the bad nights and the suitcase’s secret presence fortified her.

  Gabi’s body was getting stronger as well. At first they kept to her brother’s room and worked on building Gabi’s strength with the weights. After the first day, which consisted of a few short sets of curls with three-pound weights followed by a few sit-ups and stretching, Gabi felt like she was in traction. When she woke up, she was so sore that she couldn’t even bend over the sink to brush her teeth. It got easier, though, as they kept with it, and the stash of hidden pills grew bigger. Gabi didn’t dare flush the medicine down the toilet, since flushes were metered and restricted by household according to the number of inhabitants, and she didn’t want the horrid stuff getting into the water supply. She hid them in Gram’s suitcase instead.

  The weather was still too harsh to do anything outside, though it showed signs of breaking soon—a reminder that Gabi didn’t have much time. After a week in the confines of Mathew’s room, the siblings grew bolder. Mathew set up an obstacle course all around the house, excluding their father’s room, Gram’s, and Gabi’s—because of all the books. There were things to climb under and over and stations with weights to lift or calisthenics to perform. Mathew would do it first to demonstrate, then Gabi would go. He had a knack for pushing her without going too far. When she got dizzy or her arms and legs gave out, Mathew would get her some water and let her rest on the couch while he set up the next exercise or did some reps on his own. Mathew’s belief that Gabi could do it, and his excitement when she reached some new goal, was infectious. If he ever wondered why she was suddenly so determined to get stronger, he never asked.