The Torturer's Daughter

by Zoe Cannon

  His words hung in the air, coloring the silence that grew between them as they both realized what he had said.

  No lies this time. Nothing getting in the way of the truth.

  Jake was a dissident.

  What would you do if someone admitted to having contact with a dissident group? She wasn’t sure if the voice in her mind was her mom’s or her own.

  I’d report him, of course.

  Jake and his family hadn’t been arrested by accident. They hadn’t just said the wrong things in front of the wrong people, either. They had actively worked against the government. And even after Internal had let him go, Jake had been in contact with dissidents, and hadn’t reported them. That alone meant he wasn’t as harmless as Internal thought, wasn’t harmless enough to be released. Becca tried to make herself see that, to make herself understand that he and his family had deserved everything that had happened. That turning him in, now that she knew he’d had contact with the group just like his sister, was the only right thing to do.

  She couldn’t.

  He stood, trembling. “You’re going to turn me in now.” He said it flatly, like it was an undisputed fact.

  “No,” she said, and felt herself hit bottom. “I won’t.”

  “I can’t let that happen.” He took a step toward her. “I told my dad I would protect him.”

  “I won’t turn you in,” she repeated, backing away. The sound of her heartbeat filled her ears.

  He kept advancing on her. “Why should I believe you?”

  She had thought it would be difficult to say the words. Instead they fell from her mouth easily, almost eagerly. “Because I’m a dissident too.”

  He crossed the final distance to her.

  And wrapped his arms around her as she collapsed in silent tears.

  Chapter Eleven

  “You may think dissidents don’t care about schools,” said Mr. Adams as he shut the classroom door. “After all, why would a bunch of kids matter to them? But if you think that, you’re wrong.”

  The Citizenship classroom smelled like chalk and sweat. The breeze coming through the window wasn’t enough to dispel the stale air. Around Becca, her classmates fidgeted at their desks—except for Heather, who was already scribbling down notes.

  Failing to report dissidents is a crime, warned the poster that hung beside the blackboard. Becca squirmed until she remembered no one could see how she had changed.

  “I don’t know how many of you remember what happened eight years ago,” Mr. Adams continued. “Internal discovered that across the country, dissidents had infiltrated the school system by becoming teachers and were using their influence to pass their ideology on to their students.”

  Becca did remember that. Her third-grade teacher had disappeared, and for the rest of the year they’d had a series of incompetent substitutes, from the one who kept forgetting the times tables to the one who burst into tears when someone threw a wadded-up piece of paper at her. Now, of course, Becca knew the truth. Internal had almost certainly manufactured the supposed dissident conspiracy. Had Becca’s teacher even been a dissident, or had Internal started arresting innocent people?

  She turned the thought around in her mind for a moment, waiting for the accusing voice. It didn’t come.

  Dissident. The word didn’t scare her anymore.

  “Yesterday, Internal learned that the same thing has started happening again. In more than a hundred schools—including many elementary schools—dissidents have been teaching anti-government sentiments to their students, and in some cases even recruiting students into dissident groups.”

  How many people had Internal framed to make this conspiracy look real? How many false confessions had they gotten? Anger boiled up in her again, but this time, it felt good. It felt honest. She wasn’t using it to block out the truth anymore.

  She mouthed the word, testing it out. Dissident.

  A smile threatened at the corners of her lips. She forced her face to stay neutral, knowing how it would look if she smiled at the mention of a dissident conspiracy.

  “These dissidents saw schools as places full of young impressionable minds. They looked at people like you and saw potential recruits, naïve kids whose minds they could poison with their lies.”

  No, that was how Internal saw them. That was why they had classes like this in the first place—to get them to believe whatever Internal wanted them to believe. Becca twitched her legs, suddenly restless. Now that she understood, how could she keep sitting here as though nothing had changed?

  “But they underestimated you.” The teacher struck the chalk against the blackboard for emphasis, leaving a single white dot. “Do you know who brought this conspiracy to Internal’s attention? It was the students in the schools that had been infiltrated.”

  There hadn’t even been a conspiracy. It was all a lie.

  Next to Becca, some boy she didn’t know spun his pencil on his desk. Over by the window, Laine passed a note to another girl, who covered her mouth to hide her giggles. Somebody scraped his chair back and forth along the floor. The clock above the door ticked out the seconds until the final bell.

  Just like yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that.

  Mr. Adams stopped in the middle of his speech about watching other teachers for signs of dissident sympathies. “Becca? Are you paying attention?”

  Becca brought her gaze back to the front of the room. “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “What’s the first thing you should do if you suspect a teacher of having dissident sympathies?”

  Hope that they do. Hope that they really can convince everybody here of the truth. “Report them.”

  “What if you’re not sure whether a teacher is a dissident or not?”

  “Report them. Internal will be able to figure it out better than I can.” The same answer she would have given yesterday. And the day before. And the day before that.

  Mr. Adams, satisfied, nodded and returned to his lecture.

  The clock ticked away another few seconds.

  She was a dissident… and it didn’t mean a thing.

  * * *

  For the rest of the week, Becca sat in class like always, and stayed quiet like always. She and Jake ate together at lunch and talked about nothing, their secret hovering unspoken in the background. She sat at home alone over the weekend, hoping her mom wouldn’t get back from 117 before she went to bed, then fighting nausea as she remembered just what her mom was doing at work all day. She paced back and forth in her room; it did nothing to dispel her growing restlessness. At school on Monday, her teachers kept telling her to pay attention.

  Monday night after dinner, she watched executions, listened to the dissidents recite their meaningless confessions. Tuesday and Wednesday she left the TV off. She could still hear them.

  On Thursday, two teachers disappeared.

  They probably hadn’t even been dissidents. Or if they were, they hadn’t been part of this giant conspiracy like everyone was saying.

  What did it matter? Knowing the truth hadn’t let Becca save them.

  * * *

  “Thanks for inviting me over,” said Heather as she walked into Becca’s room. “I’ve missed you. It feels like I haven’t been here in ages.”

  No hint that she remembered their argument. It was as if it had never happened. Becca paced from the door to the bed and back again. “I need to talk to you.”

  Heather fingered her Monitor pin. “Is it about what happened at school? The teachers who were arrested?”

  For the first time in a week, Becca felt something approximating hope. Maybe she was going to be able to do this after all. Maybe it would even be easier than she had thought. She couldn’t save those teachers, or anyone else in 117, or the dissidents on TV, but maybe she could save Heather.

  “I was hoping you’d come to me,” said Heather.

  “You were?” Maybe her attempts to get Heather to acknowledge what they had found hadn’t been futile after all. Maybe Heathe
r had finally realized what a mistake this Monitor thing was.

  Heather nodded. “And I think you should do it.”

  Becca blinked.

  “It’s worth it,” Heather assured her. “I finally feel like I’m doing something useful. Something important. And with everything that’s going on, we need all the help we can get.”

  It took a couple of seconds for Heather’s meaning to sink in. “You want me to join the Monitors.”

  Heather looked perplexed. “Isn’t that what you wanted to talk to me about?”

  “No.” Becca started pacing again. Touch the door, pass Heather, touch the bed. Pass Heather again. She forced herself to stop, to restrain her restless energy. “I wanted to talk to you about your parents.”

  Heather’s face darkened. “They’re gone. They got what they deserved. What is there to talk about?”

  “I remember what you said last time we talked.” Becca drummed her fingers on her desk. “You told me you’re only doing all this because otherwise you wouldn’t be able to deal with what happened to them. But you’re helping the people who killed them. It doesn’t make any sense.”

  Heather frowned. “What are you talking about? I never said anything like that.”

  Denying everything just like Becca’s dad. What stories did Heather tell herself to help her forget why she had really joined the Monitors? Did she try to make herself believe she had always hated her parents? Did she tell herself that what happened to them was for the best because it made her understand what was really important?

  Becca kept going. She couldn’t give up now. “Do you really think this is what they would want?” Her voice grew louder and higher until the last word turned into a hysterical shout. She clamped her lips shut. She didn’t want to yell at Heather. She just had to do something. It was hard enough to watch the executions go on exactly like they had before she knew the truth, to see people disappear and know that her new understanding did nothing to help them. She couldn’t keep watching Heather slip away too.

  “Why does it matter what they would want?” While Becca struggled to keep from pacing, Heather held herself like a statue. Every muscle was tensed, as if she thought she might have to bolt at any second.

  Becca was fighting a battle she couldn’t win. The old Heather was gone. It was too late to save her from what she had become.

  But it was the only battle she could fight.

  She took a deep breath. Calmed her voice. “Wouldn’t it make more sense to try and do something to fight the people who killed them, instead of turning into one of them?”

  Like what? There was nothing Heather could do. Nothing Becca could do.

  “Becca… you’re scaring me.” Heather started to take a step toward her, then stopped. “That dissident stuff you were saying last week was bad enough. I figured I must have misunderstood or something. I mean, I know you. You’re not a dissident. But now… what are you saying? Fighting Internal? Fighting the government? What’s happening to you?”

  Becca saw her own helpless frustration reflected in Heather’s eyes.

  “Please tell me you’re not saying what it sounds like you’re saying.” Heather looked down at her Monitor pin. “I don’t want to have to turn you in.”

  If Becca dropped this, if she let Heather slip away, she would be giving up not just her best friend, but her only chance of saving somebody from Internal.

  If she kept going, Heather might turn her in.

  No. Heather wouldn’t turn her in. Heather was her best friend.

  Heather was a Monitor now.

  “I didn’t mean it.” Becca looked down at the floor. “I don’t even know what I was saying.”

  She could almost feel a disturbance in the air as her last chance to save Heather, her last chance to save anyone, slipped away.

  * * *

  Becca stared at the TV, only half-seeing it. She didn’t even know what she was watching. She should go to bed, she knew; it was probably after midnight by now. But last night she’d had another nightmare about Anna, and she could still feel the dream lurking in her subconscious, ready to torment her again tonight. If she managed to sleep. She knew the restlessness would return as soon as she got into bed, and she’d toss and turn and end up pacing her room at three in the morning.

  The apartment door opened.

  Becca should have gone to bed when she’d had the chance. That would have made eight straight days of not having to look at or talk to her mom.

  “I’m glad to see you,” her mom mumbled as she sank down onto the couch. “It’s been, what, a week?”

  “Something like that.” Becca tried to focus on the TV. An Enforcer raced down a city street in pursuit of… Becca didn’t know. Something important.

  “It’s good to see a friendly face. It feels like it’s been a hundred years since I’ve seen someone who doesn’t want to kill me.”

  Becca kept her face blank. She didn’t think she could manage friendly. “I was just going to bed.”

  “If it’s because of me, you don’t need to worry about it. I don’t care how late you stay up. If it were a problem, your grades wouldn’t be so high.” She sank deeper into the couch. “Sleep does sound tempting, though.”

  “Maybe we should both go to bed.” Now the Enforcer was handing a struggling dissident over to a woman who looked kind of like Heather. Becca flicked off the TV.

  Her mom let out a groan and closed her eyes. “You wouldn’t believe what this week has been like. I swear every impossible dissident was arrested on the same day, and they all got assigned to me.”

  “It’s late,” Becca said, standing up. “And I have a test tomorrow.”

  Her mom used to rant about work to her all the time. How had she never thought before about what it meant? How had she never imagined who the dissidents her mom complained about were, and what her mom was doing to them?

  Back then, they had just been dissidents. That was the difference. Only dissidents; barely even human.

  Back then, Becca hadn’t been one of them.

  “Just when I was finally getting somewhere with one of them—which took the better part of four days while I fell behind on everything else—Public Relations swooped in and snatched him up for execution.” She let out her breath in frustration. “He had connections we’ve been waiting a year to find, but did that matter to them? No, all that mattered was that they needed someone young to balance out the age range in their latest batch of executions.”

  Becca wondered how suspicious it would look if she ran to her room and locked the door.

  “I would gladly have given them the man who came in with him. That one would say he was innocent if he had been arrested with dissident pamphlets in one hand and a bomb in the other. But no, he’s too old, and now the directors want me to get enough useful information out of him to make up for losing the other one.”

  What if she threw the remote at the TV and smashed it? How suspicious would that look?

  “Then there’s the whole teacher thing.” She massaged her temples as she spoke. “One good thing about you going through my files—at least I can talk to you about these things now.”

  What if she threw the remote at her mom’s head?

  “Every teacher who says something suspicious in class—and the sheer number of dissident teachers we’ve found is enough to make me want to pull you out of school—now has to be used for this project. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were something local, but we have to coordinate with processing centers across the country. We got a great confession from one of the teachers—all he needed was a little prompting and he came up with the entire thing himself—but it contradicted something Processing 103 had used, so we couldn’t use any of it.”

  Becca’s breathing grew louder in her ears. Her hands twitched with the effort of keeping them still. She had to move. She had to do something.

  “And Public Relations keeps changing what they want. First they wanted to emphasize the heroism of the students who reported the dissi
dent teachers. Then they decided it would be better to place more emphasis on the students who had already been corrupted, and show the damage that had been done, so Enforcement focused their attention on high-school-age dissidents. Now Public Relations isn’t sure whether they want to go in that direction after all, so we’re left with these extra dissidents and nothing to use them for—but we can’t execute them, in case the geniuses in Public Relations change their minds again.”

  “Stop it! I don’t want to hear about this!” Becca hadn’t meant to start yelling. She hadn’t even meant to open her mouth.

  Her mom, about to say something else, stopped with her mouth half-open.

  “I don’t want to know what you’re doing in that place. I don’t want to think about it.” Shut up, she told herself. Shut up, shut up, shut up. But she kept going, as though her mouth had disconnected itself from her brain. “I want you to be who you used to be, not some… torturer.” The word fell heavily from her lips. Her dad had used it, in one of the last fights before he had moved out.

  “Becca—” her mom started.

  The image of Jake clutching the chains of the swing, bruises around his neck, flashed in front of her eyes. Her mom had done that to him, by doing much worse to the rest of his family. “I don’t care what those people said!” she screamed, while the rational part of her brain looked on in horror. “I don’t care what they did! If they’re working against the government, let them! Maybe if they took over, people wouldn’t disappear for no reason!”

  In the silence, Becca’s heartbeat echoed so loudly that she couldn’t imagine how her mom didn’t hear it.

  Her mom stared at her with wide wounded eyes, betrayed eyes, as though Becca had stabbed her in the gut.

  There would be no talking her way out of it this time. It was too late for that.

  Maybe too late for anything.

  How long now before she ended up in 117?

  Between protecting Becca from Internal and protecting society from another dissident, which would her mom choose?