Four hours later, I have a headache and eyestrain and little else. Kate might be right about the existence of Erasers, but what I’ve read frightens me more than it lends any sort of hope.
I log her at once, telling her to come to the library. When she arrives, I lead her into a sunny but deserted corner of the second floor.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said yesterday,” I tell her. I don’t speak the actual word. I’m a little afraid to say it out loud.
“About Erasers?” she asks, either not noticing or not caring that I wince at her use of the word.
I nod. “I found a lot of articles by the heralds about Concordia’s ‘underground society’, the Erased.” I look around before saying the word aloud, and I make silly quote marks with my fingers. “None of it sounds very promising. For one thing, if you erase and stay on Concordia, you pretty much have to fend for yourself in the wild. No electricity, no running water, no food, shelter or clothing except whatever you can rig for yourself.”
This information in particular dashes my hopes. I’ve been camping with my parents enough to know that I hate roughing it. I hate toileting in the bushes, building fires, and I especially dislike hunting and cleaning my own kills. I’ve done all of it before. Never willingly. To think of doing it every day for the rest of my life or until something changes in terms of the Agreement, well, no. Just…no.
Kate, too, looks hesitant now. Disappointed. She asks, “What about slivving to another world? Can you do that if you’re erased?”
“Yeah.” My head bobs as my eyes rove the room, looking for people, cameras, or anything that looks like a speaker or a microphone. “Most of the articles mentioned that with nothing to trigger the melds, an Erased could theoretically sliv if they knew the correct codes to operate a given launch plate and the correct codes for their destination. When a person slivs with permission, the information is pre-loaded on their Idix. But with the Erased, they somehow have to find the right codes, which change daily.”
“Sounds tricky,” Kate frowns. “I don’t think launch codes would be all that available, do you?”
“Probably not,” I agree. “And you’d also have to get past countless infrared and regular cameras. The bad thing is that the meld readers track Idix information. If someone is watching the feed from a particular infrared and notices that it’s picking up a heat signature—a person—but the nearest meld reader doesn’t show a corresponding Idix, guardians are dispatched to track and capture them using images from the regular cameras.”
“So, basically,” Kate snorts, “if you can reach a launch plate and punch in the right codes before the guardians catch up to you, you’re home free.”
“Yep,” I laugh sarcastically. “The articles gave some pretty crappy statistics, too.”
“Like what?”
“Like, the only way to figure how many people erase is to track the number of mysterious disappearances—people who suddenly don’t turn up for function, aren’t discovered dead somewhere, and whose Idixes show no slivving activity.” I sigh. “During a ten year period there were only forty-two possible erasures. Only five cases might have been successful slivs. Something like twenty-seven people were captured at launch sites by guardians and disposed of, and only ten disappearances were never solved.”
“Yikes,” Kate replies glumly, shaking her head. “Fifteen people in ten years. Those don’t strike me as great odds.”
“Me, neither. And what’s even worse is a lot of the articles give even higher numbers of botched erasures. Most of the people claiming to be Erasers are just frauds,” I shrug, “low functioners who want to up their standard of living. They can’t do anything about their housing level, but they can get luxuries they can’t afford on their own allotments by claiming to be Erasers. They extort huge amounts of valuable stuff, stuff that resells well, and then they leave the victims fully or partially traceable. The damage to their Idix can’t be repaired, and the second they pass a reader, they’re caught. If you try to get erased and you choose the wrong person to do it, the next thing you know, a guardian’s at your meld. And it’s not like you can go to the guardians first to report the Eraser. You’re just as guilty of violating the standards as they are.”
“Oh, man,” Kate looks like she lost her last friend. “And then you get disposed of, right?”
I nod glumly. “Yeah. I mean, you’re not exactly innocent since you were trying to erase. The only thing I really don’t understand after reading all of this is what standard it violates.”
“Theft?” Kate asks, eyebrows raised.
“Theft of what?” I counter. “And yet you’ll be disposed without the benefit of Tribunal. The only thing that will be done is they’ll check your Idix. If it is messed up in any way and they can’t verify that it’s some kind of natural wear and tear, poof! Disposal!” I snap my fingers.
Kate sighs. “I guess Assimilation it is,” she says.
As much as I hate it, I agree. Disposal is what we’re trying to avoid in the first place, after all.
The next day, after Assimilation, Strega logs me before I make it back to Ritter’s. He forgot about a caretaker’s seminar he’d signed up to attend months ago. He’s almost done for the day, but he’s six hours away by slide. When he gets back into our area, it will be very late. He asks whether I have any new injuries he should know about.
I sigh. I always have some new injury, and even if it’s similar to an injury he’s already treated, he insists on addressing it as if it’s never happened before. Since he’ll be back before the latest round will heal, I can’t feed him any of the white lies I consider.
In his eyes, with my split lip, the bruise on my cheek, and the tenderness in my abdomen where Marco’s foot landed today, I am not fine. Not by Strega’s standards.
I reply with the truth, and he logs back,
I’ve authorized cling packs for your cheek and abdomen, antiseptic for your lip, and a mild painkiller for bedtime. Please take care of yourself. I’ll check on you tomorrow.
I can’t help but smile. He says that all the time…please take care of yourself. Usually he means to stay out of trouble at Assimilation, but tonight there’s a double meaning. He literally needs me to take care of myself. Fine by me. I’m a little relieved, actually. His concern, at times, is more exhausting than the day itself.
I try so hard to avoid injury, given how dismayed he is each evening when I reach the keeping. I almost wish he could spend a day with me at Assimilation just so he could see how many injuries I avoid compared to the ones I take. He only gets to see my failures, not my triumphs.
I’m surprised by the fact that the keeping is quiet when I arrive. Empty. After my showdown with Strega over ignoring the MedQuick and the ScanX, Ritter’s kept close watch on me. During my downward spiral, he’d been functioning late, leaving me on my own quite a bit. Strega must have reamed him out, because he’s always here when I finish Assimilation for the day.
I wander into the office to see if he’s put a note on the desk. I check my logger. Nothing. I pull up the scape, intending to check for a message there. Concordia’s version of email is video or text captures from the loggers. Again, nothing. No blip of Ritter grinning, telling me he’ll be late.
I notice, though, that there are scape screens Ritter has minimized, the same as we do at home. I cringe at that word, home.
Attero, I remind myself. Part of Assimilation is about thinking of Concordia as home and referring to one’s former world by its Concordian name. I’m not doing very well at this.
My heart stops as I enlarge the screens and some of the same research I’ve already done pops up. Erasure research.
I blink as other screens I hadn’t seen open begin to pop up. Profiles. People whose names I ran across, myself. People who claim to be Erasers. These are on the guardian’s scape. They are photos and profiles of criminals. Fugitives.
Cold seeps into me.
Oh, God.
Oh, no.
I desper
ately log Ritter, asking, Where are you?!
I can’t log Strega. Hours away by slide, all it will do is make him feel helpless and worried. I have no idea what it would do to his function level if he left the seminar early. His level is very high, but I’ve learned in Assimilation you don’t necessarily just drop one level at a time. You can lose several at once, depending on the severity of your functional transgressions. I don’t know what ditching a seminar might cost him.
Ritter, meanwhile, has stopped leaving me any access to his function information. He used to have the herald functioners’ page readily available, but he’s recently put a password on it. I don’t know if he knew I’d been looking at it and didn’t like the intrusion or if he just wanted to keep me from worrying about anything but my Assimilation.
I begin to pace the keeping, wondering if it is too late, if he’s already tried to contact people from the guardian profiles. I feel sick as I realize how stupid they are to post those profiles. It’s like a directory! Worse, if they aren’t Erasers so much as scam artists, it’s a little like entrapment, isn’t it?
With a few keystrokes, I pull up one of the profiles Ritter has marked. Cordelai Tinnit. She is a solemn brunette with a deep scar running down from her right eyebrow to the corner of her mouth. Her eyes are steely blue and intense, her lips pursed in a tight line. She looks very serious, very dangerous.
I pull another. Galeon Braithewaite. He’s so mean looking I get a chill down my spine. Flat, flinty eyes so dark they look black in the photo. I can’t see any pupils. Unlike Cordelai, he’s unblemished. His skin is so perfect he looks a little unreal.
The last one Ritter has flagged is Mueller Bench, who looks nothing like the other two. His face is open, friendly, trusting. There’s none of the hardness I can see in both of the others. Cordelai and Galeon have seen—and probably done—things. Bad, dark things. You can see it all over them. But Mueller looks like everything has always been unicorns and rainbows.
I don’t trust any of them.
I wait for Ritter as the hours pass. Once I tire of pacing, I retrieve the cling packs Strega ordered from the MedQuick and sit on the sofa, obsessively checking my logger while half-heartedly watching another of Ritter’s herald colleagues interview Janat about the continued closure of the launches.
I answer logs from Mina and Melayne, which ask the same thing they always ask: When can we see you?
I log back, promising I will find time over the weekend to get together with each of them. There’s no time off of Assimilation for the weekends, but the schedule is much lighter, allowing for more free time. Maybe I can invite Melayne to come with me to Flash. Kill two visits at once.
I wake on the sofa. Ritter must have come home at some point, because there’s a blanket over me. Sometimes I sleep on the sofa on purpose just for the snuggly feel of a blanket. I still can’t get used to the way the rifts maintain perfect temperature balance so that using a blanket is uncomfortably hot.
I toss aside the blanket, though, and move quickly to Ritter’s unit. It’s empty. Without blankets, there’s no way to tell if he slept on his rift. I search the desk, my logger, and even the servette board for a note. Nothing.
I log Strega. Have you seen Ritter? Talked to him?
A few minutes later, as I am pacing in front of the ScanX, he logs back. No. I stopped by before function to check on you. He must have left already.
Tears spring to my eyes. The blanket must have been Strega’s doing. I hadn’t noticed before, but now I realize that there were no spent cling packs on me when I woke up. I go back and search the sofa and the floor for them. But they hadn’t fallen off anywhere once the cold wore off. Ritter wouldn’t have collected them even if he’d been in the keeping. He just doesn’t think about things like that.
Ignoring the ScanX, I check the time. There’s just enough before Assimilation, if I hurry.
All the way to the caretaker’s function hall, I promise myself I will be calm. I will approach Ritter’s disappearance rationally, assuming nothing.
I lie to myself quite a lot, without meaning to.
Strega’s concerned when I burst into his quarters at the function hall. These are the private offices, closed to the general public, used for completing ward records and medical research. Wards are not seen here, and the caretakers are seldom disturbed even by their own peers.
If just my presence in his quarters worries him, my tears alarm him even more.
“What’s wrong, Davinney?” He searches me up and down, probably looking for blood. “Are you hurt? Sick?”
“He’s going to get himself erased!” I blurt, my words tumbling over themselves like haphazardly thrown dice. “There’s all sorts of research on his computer, including profiles of known Erasers from the guardian scape.”
Funny how I am so vehemently opposed to this, to losing Ritter, whom I’ve only known for about two months. I guess being stuck on Concordia has me clinging stubbornly to what friends I have.
Strega predictably pulls out the alpha inducers. Though I know they’ll calm me when I don’t want to be calm, I let him press them to my temples. I let him and his devices reassure me.
“Maybe it’s for an article. He is a herald,” Strega points out.
“But I don’t think he came home last night,” I say, forgetting to use my Concordia words.
Strega frowns. He checks his logger and dashes off a quick, sharp message, which he shows me. Ritter, Davinney is worrying herself sick in my quarters when she should be focused on Assimilation. Are you alive?
I lift my eyebrows. Strega studies me for a moment before checking the clock. I have to go soon if I’m going to make it to Assimilation on time.
“Even if he’s looking into erasing over this suicide theory of his,” Strega says, “he’d never go through with it. Not when—”
“Not when what?”
Strega looks pained. “Not when you stood for him the way you did.”
I don’t see the connection.
“You saved his life, Davinney. Very few people in your position stand for their violators.”
“He didn’t take me on purpose,” I shrug.
Strega nods. “He won’t do anything to put you at risk. If he plans to erase, he won’t try it until you’ve assimilated.” His words, however, are spoken glumly. His logger chirps. My heart stops. Strega meets my eyes. “He’s fine. He was up against a deadline and fell asleep at the function hall. He’s sorry he worried you.”
Relief rushes over me like a wave, but when I glance at the clock again, I tense up.
“I have to go. I’ll see you later?” I hadn’t actually meant for it to sound like a question, but it does.
“Of course,” Strega nods, giving me a small smile.
I am out the meld in a dead run to meet the slide.
15
RITTER LOGS ME just as we break from Assimilation for the day to tell me he’ll be late again. It’s possible he won’t make it back to the keeping at all. He promises this will be the last of his long nights for a little while.
I feel it in my gut. Despite his assurances, something is wrong. He’s up to something, into something he shouldn’t be. I know it. His lies make my heart ache. I can too easily picture us back at Tribunal, breathing into tubes. And this time, Janat’s voice says,
“Let the record show that Ritter Boone has violated the theft standard. He has spoken lies. He has stolen the truth.”
I shiver even though the day is mild.
Strega’s unhappy when I reach the keeping. Neither of us admits it to the other, but we both know Ritter is hiding something.
Instead of talking about Ritter, after doing his usual caretaking routine with me in the cleanse, Strega calmly goads me into the servette and puts me in front of the ScanX.
“You didn’t eat this morning,” he reminds me. “And I can see by today’s battle wounds that you burned up a lot of energy.”
He’s matter-of-fact about it, but he’s bothered by the turns t
his Assimilation is taking. When I showed up at the caretaker’s function hall, he was on the scape. Before he shut off the viewer, I could see he was paging through several different articles at once. One about the suicides, one about the launch closures, one about Assimilation, and one about the Agreement review.
He eats with me, using his profile in Ritter’s ScanX to select his meal. We don’t talk. I suspect that’s because other than my Assimilation and Ritter, there’s really nothing for Strega and I to talk about unless it’s the news, and the last thing Strega wants to do is agree that with the major headlines being the suicides and the launch closures, Ritter might just be right. They might be connected. It might all point back to the Tribunal.
Afterward we try to watch some mindless show on the viewer. Television isn’t really so different than on Attero. Just like on Attero, it is a source of information, entertainment, and escape.
I’m only half watching the program when I become aware that my left hand is resting palm up on Strega’s right knee and that his fingers are idly stroking my palm. Though I’ve had my Idix for a while now, he seems fascinated by it. My forearm is no longer smooth and unblemished. It now carries my identification, telling all my secrets now, and it’s clear by the way he stops before his fingers meet my wrist that he’s not sure he wants to know them.
After a few long moments, he sighs and drops his hand to his lap. My heart falls a little. I didn’t know I wanted his touch so much.
“It’s okay,” I say softly, still staring sightlessly at the viewer. “You can trace me.”
I can feel his eyes snap to my face. My own are still glued to the screen.
“You know about tracing?”
I nod. “Melayne tried to explain it to me after I walked in on her and Scuva in their servette.” I blush just remembering it. “And we’ve read about it in the Assimilation onboard.”
I remember Melayne’s description more than the clinical description I read at the onboard. Tracing is intimate, it lets someone look deep inside you, at the very core of who you are. It’s just a glimpse, and you can’t control what it is they see. So you have to trust them, because you’re essentially giving them the keys to your kingdom.
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